Hainan Island Operation

Hainan Island Operation
	Part of the Second World War
	; Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in trucks during the invasion of Hainan (Asahi Shinbun news photo)
Date	February 1939
Location	Hainan, China
Result	Japanese victory
Territorial; changes	Partial occupation of Hainan
Belligerents
Empire of Japan	China
Commanders and leaders
Kondo Nobutake	Yu Hanmou
Units involved
Imperial Japanese Navy	Republic of China Army
Strength
Elements of IJN 5th Fleet	25,000
Casualties and losses
Unknown	3,000 killed

The Hainan Island Operation (

Second World War to blockade

the Guangdong mainland and prevent it from communicating with the outside world and from receiving imports of much-needed arms and materials.

Background

Kwangchowan, a French-leased territory on the southern coast of China. The Hainan Island has an area of 33,920 square kilometres (13,100 sq mi), and had a population of 2,200,000 at the time. The island was guarded by the 152nd Division, approximately 25,000 strong, under the command of Yu Hanmou

, who was in charge of peace preservation in Guangdong Province.

The Japanese Navy, after the capture of Canton (

Special Naval Landing Forces with Army

elements supporting them.

Operation

Escorting a convoy, the

Kondo Nobutake entered and anchored in Tsinghai Bay on the northern shore of Hainan Island at midnight on 9 February 1939 and carried out a successful landing. In addition, Navy land combat units effected a landing at Haikou at 12:00 on 10 February. Thereafter, the Army and Navy forces acted in concert to mop up the northern zone. On 11 February, land combat units landed at Samah

(Sanya) at the southern extremity of Hainan Island and occupied the key positions of Yulin and Yai-Hsien. Thereafter, the units engaged in the occupation and subjugation of the entire island.

Retreat to Wuzhi mountain range

Facing crisis, Nationalist forces evacuated all remaining civilians from Haikou to Qionghai to the safe Wuzhi mountain range in central Hainan. However, they faced fierce opposition by the ethnic Li highlanders there. An ethnic Li called Wang Guoxing started an uprising but was brutally crushed, and, in revenge, the Nationalists killed 7,000 of Wang Guoxing's family members in his village.^[1]

The Communists under

guerrilla campaign against the Japanese occupation, the Japanese killed large numbers of Li in western Hainan (e.g. Sanya, Danzhou). Furthermore, numerous foreign slave labourers were also killed. There are mass graves of tens of thousands of Korean slave labourers in Sanya and throughout the island. Of the 100,000 slave labourers from Hong Kong, only 20,000 survived the war.^{[citation needed}

]

Partial occupation of Hainan

Later, Japanese-occupied parts of Hainan Island became a naval administrative district with Hainan Guard District Headquarters established at Samah. Strategically, the island was built as a forward air base as well as an advance base for blockading Chiang. At the same time, the iron and copper resources of the island were exploited. Partial control of certain areas of Hainan Island provided a base of operations for the invasion of

Burma

.

The occupation of some parts of Hainan lasted until the surrender of Japan in September 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in part by the Enola Gay, that killed approximately 226,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.^[2]