Japanese strategy The Three Alls Policy, titled
Jinmetsu Soto Sakusen amongst Japanese command, was implemented in full scale in the spring of 1941. General
Yasuji Okamura, who assumed command in the summer, divided the five provinces within
North China and
Central China (
Hebei,
Shandong,
Shaanxi,
Shanxi,
Chahar) into "pacified", "semi-pacified" and "unpacified" areas. The Japanese army also sought to concentrate the region's population into militarized encampments, whilst transforming the open countryside into “unpopulated zones" (
mujin chiku). Gavan McCormack wrote that these measures merit consideration as
genocide.
1941 Starting in 1941, the Japanese North China Army launched an "annihilation war" in
Shanxi and
Hebei Provinces. Japanese units massacred civilians, razed villages, and plundered food reserves. One Japanese colonel recorded in his diary that "around here, even these China women join the war", and that his orders were " that every person in this place must be killed". Japanese troops used public displays of violence to terrorize local civilians. In one instance on April 27, Japanese troops in Hebei gathered 16 civilians suspected of assisting the Eighth Route Army and publicly tortured them to death.Japanese forces also targeted the families of suspected guerrilla fighters. On May 4, 1941, having learned that the families of several Communist guerrillas lived in Liangou Village, Japanese troops massacred 80 women, children, and elderly civilians in a reprisal raid. On July 7 1941, General
Yasuji Okamura was appointed as the North China Area Army's new commander. On July 9, Okamura's predecessor and then acting commander Lieutenant-General
Hayao Tada issued the "Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region Pacification Plan"—a policy of wearing down and crushing Communist forces in the Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region through the destruction of their bases, seizure of resources, and breaking their self-sufficiency—which historian Eguchi Keiichi described as a Three Alls Operation. Okamura's strategies involved burning down villages, confiscating grain, and forcibly mobilizing peasants to construct collective hamlets. It also centered on the digging of vast trench lines and the building of thousands of miles of containment walls and moats, watchtowers and roads to prevent guerrillas from moving around. The Three Alls Policy targeted for destruction "enemies pretending to be local people" and "all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies." Consequently, Japanese soldiers routinely targeted and massacred young men in their raids, conscripting those who were not killed into
forced labour units. Having suffered losses from the campaign, the Chinese
Eighth Route Army retreated to the southwest of
Hebei Province. In their pursuit of the Communist guerrillas, Japanese forces killed thousands of civilians in multiple villages, in one instance dumping their corpses into the local wells. Starting in May 1942, General Okamura deployed three divisions and two mixed brigades, some 50,000 men, in a large "mopping-up operation" in
central Hebei. These troops killed tens of thousands of civilians, whilst deporting many more to Manchuria for slave labor. In one massacre, Japanese troops of the
110th Division killed over 1,000 civilians in the Beitong Village with chemical weapons. On June 14, 1942, Japanese troops massacred 167 civilians in Yebei Village, Hebei, and threw 9 children and infants to their deaths from high heights.The Japanese also demolished river
dikes to
instigate flooding.
1943—1945 Japanese scorched earth campaigns continued into 1943 and 1944, with continuous raids designed to sabotage harvests, loot supplies, and deprive the Chinese Communist forces of their resources. In southern Shanxi and northwest Hubei, Japanese forces raped and tortured local farmers and villagers, whilst deporting the survivors to Manchuria. They left corpses unburied and used
swords to kill victims.In one case on Hainan Island in December 1943, where Japanese forces had implemented similar destructive measures, Japanese forces forced ten young women and teenagers to the edge of their village and gang raped them. They stabbed a 14-year-old in the genitals until she died, cut the breasts off a 15-year-old, and cut open the stomach of a pregnant woman and ripped out the fetus.
Use of Chemical Weapons and Starvation NCAA forces also weaponized starvation against civilian populations. Japanese forces looted rural grain stores and burned whatever harvests they could not confiscate. They slaughtered livestock and destroyed village wells. Japanese troops also demolished river
dikes to instigate flooding and destroy agricultural systems. These measures created widespread food shortages and civilian suffering. Between 1937 and 1945, the seven Communist base regions affected by the Three Alls Policy lost 76,000,000 tons of grain and 55,000,000 heads of livestock, pigs, and sheep. Another 19,520,000 homes were burned down. In it, 500 men of the Japanese
110th Division "swept" Beitong, where local villagers had dug and hid in underground tunnels to avoid Japanese army operations. Japanese forces filled the tunnels with chemical weapons, tear gas, and smoke. Hundreds of villagers were gassed to death or asphyxiated, and those that escaped were gunned down or stabbed to death, including children as young as 10. Japanese troops raped women who had fled and then killed them. The village houses were burned down and the food looted. == Death toll ==