Successors to the Western Front, Pt. 2: The Second Zhili-Fengtian War
The period from 1920 to 1928 was the height of the Warlord Era, in which China was wracked by civil conflicts between rival military factions. Some vied for control of the central government, while others sought to retain their autonomy in more far-flung provinces. It was only the Northern Expedition, which swept across the entire country and brought China under the Kuomintang’s unitary control, that the period finally ended.
From a military perspective, the civil war of 1924—called the Second Zhili-Fengtian War—was among the most interesting of the period. Although it lasted just two months, it mobilized several hundreds of thousands of men equipped with modern weaponry in two theaters separated by a thousand kilometers. Ultimately, the military outcome in both was decided more by betrayals by key figures than any battlefield developments, but the fighting gives us an interesting perspective on operational maneuver in post-World War I conflicts.
Beginnings of the Warlord Era
The Republic of China, founded on 1 January 1912, rested on two pillars: the ideological mobilization of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-Sen’s Nationalist movement, allied to the hard power of the military. Following the outbreak of revolution in 1911, Sun had managed to win over to his cause General Yuan Shikai, the most important military figure in contemporary China. Yuan was the commander-in-chief of the Beiyang Army, a modernized force established in the wake of several defeats at the hand of Western powers and the Japanese, intended to make good the humiliations of the Qing dynasty.
Instead it proved their downfall. The Beiyang leadership’s defection to the Nationalist cause persuaded Emperor Puyi to abdicate, and Yuan was rewarded for his services with the presidency of the new republic. Feeling his strength, he rapidly consolidated power in his own hands and surrounded himself with a coterie of loyal generals—this became known as the Beiyang government. In December 1915 he went so far as to declare the restoration of the Empire with himself as its head, but this proved wildly unpopular and he was persuaded to step down three months later. Three months after that, he died.
Yuan Shikai’s successors to the Beiyang government fought for dominance over the next twelve years, giving the Warlord Era its name. In the immediate aftermath, political power fell to Yuan’s ally Duan Qirui, who became Premier, and to Feng Guozhang, the Vice-President. Their rivalry soon splintered the Beiyang government, as factions formed around them, named after their home provinces: Duan’s was known as the Anhui clique, Feng’s as the Zhili clique. The two nevertheless managed to cooperate, with Anhui the senior partner, although this was marred by mutual distrust.
Anhui politicians swept the 1918 National Assembly elections, winning a three-quarters majority. Yet this unity did not encompass the entire country. The Nationalists had already split with the Beiyang leaders and set up their own government in the south at Guangzhou. Outer regions also maintained de facto independence, waging small-scale conflicts amongst themselves that displayed the worst abuses evoked by the term “warlordism”. Then in 1920, open war broke out within the governing coalition itself.
Feng had died the previous year, and his successor Cao Kun was bitter about being shut out of power by the Anhui. He gathered Zhili forces southwest of Beijing and formed an alliance with the military government of Manchuria—called the Fengtian clique—to attack Beijing from the opposite direction. The so-called Zhili-Anhui War lasted barely a week before Duan Qirui fled and the allies entered the capital. Although this was a military conquest, they maintained the fiction of constitutional legitimacy: they forced several high-ranking Anhui politicians to resign and held new elections the following year.
Power-sharing remained difficult, and the concord soon broke down. The two erstwhile allies went to war in April 1922, and was confined to the line running from Beijing to the port city Tianjin, just over 100 km to the southeast. The Fengtian were defeated within a week and retreated beyond Shanhaiguan, the coastal pass that marked the boundary of Manchuria. A few weeks later, a ceasefire was brokered.
The Zhili clique continued to obey the form, if not the spirit, of the republican constitution: in 1923, Cao Kun secured the presidency with prodigious bribes to assembly members. Although this further undermined the government’s legitimacy, it formalized his unofficial power, which rested on his military strength. Cao in turn relied on one man above all for that strength: Wu Peifu, the Jade Marshal. Wu had engineered the Zhili victories over the Anhui and Fengtian, winning him consideration as China’s best general. With the reins of the northern government firmly in the hands of this duo, the Zhili could bring about stability and gradually bring outlying provinces under their rule.
Renewed Tensions
Yet to speak even of the Zhili clique as a unitary actor is to overstate its centralization. The problems facing the administration in Beijing was the same as in any period of breakdown in the legitimacy of central authority: nominally loyal lieutenants held a great degree of latitude, making it difficult to conduct a coherent nationwide policy. Over summer 1924, the Zhili-aligned governor of Jiangsu Province, Qi Xieyuan, began asserting his claims to Shanghai. By legal rights, Jiangsu encompassed all the southern bank of the Yangtze between Nanjing and the sea, including Shanghai itself, but the city had come under the control of Zhejiang Province, which was governed by the remnants of the Anhui clique. Qi proposed to resolve the situation by force.
This was not in itself a problem to the Beiyang government—if anything, the absorption of China’s largest commercial city would only strengthen them. But it did risk the outbreak of a new war. Zhang Zuolin, leader of the Fengtian, had been receiving extensive support from the Japanese and was eager to avenge their loss of power, and this would give him the opportunity. A war for Shanghai could easily turn into a war for all of China.
In terms of manpower, the Zhili were the largest faction in China by far—they expected to be able to mobilize some 200,000 soldiers during the war—yet the Fengtian remained a threat. Manchuria was heavily industrialized, and their arsenal at Mukden produced about 200 artillery pieces, nearly 500,000 shells, and over 100 million rounds of rifle ammunition per year, as well as mortars, anti-tank weapons, and a variety of smaller artillery (the less efficient Zhili factories, by contrast, produced less than half that). Both sides also received help from outside powers: the Fengtian from the Japanese and most European countries, the Zhili from the Italians.
Then there was the matter of finances. The Beijing government’s claim to rule all of China also left it responsible for all outstanding debt, including that incurred by their deposed predecessors. They had trouble keeping up with interest payments as it was, and later on Wu Peifu would struggle to raise a loan to pay for an estimated 14 days of fighting. The Fengtian, by contrast, were responsible only for themselves: Manchuria’s industrial wealth and Japanese financing allowed them to set aside enough funds for roughly six months of mobilization (this is not to mention the financial resources the possessors of Shanghai could contribute).
In short, time would not be on Zhili’s side in a war lasting more than a few months. Although they possessed the greatest standing force, their strategic situation somewhat resembled Germany’s just ten years earlier: stuck between two dangerous neighbors, they needed a quick victory on one front in order to reconcentrate their forces on the other. Farther south, in Guangzhou, the KMT made rumblings about joining a war against Beijing—not too different from the threat that Italy’s entry into World War I posed to Germany. Nor was the conquest of Shanghai guaranteed to be a simple matter. Qi had twice invaded Zhejiang on his own initiative the previous summer, but failed in both attempts. If he should get bogged down in yet another, it would tie down a substantial part of Zhili’s strength.
The Curtain Opens: The Shanghai Theater
Nevertheless, Wu Peifu was convinced that Qi Xieyuan could win, and that such a victory would greatly bolster the Zhili cause. He agreed to lend the Jiangsu governor several divisions in support, and by late August over 100,000 soldiers had concentrated in and around Nanjing. The Anhui had about three-quarters this number around Shanghai. The two armies massed along the Nanjing-Shanghai rail line, facing off across the border of Zhejiang control about 50 km west of Shanghai itself.
The heavily-cultivated countryside around it was cut through with canals, irrigation ditches, and embankments, making off-track mobility difficult. Zhejiang forces exploited this by creating a defense-in-depth, positioning troops and ammunition at stations and waterways along the line. Far to the south, the Anhui also had two divisions of local troops guarding the mountainous border with Zhili-controlled Fujian Province. The difficult terrain, and the rail line running northeast to Shanghai, heavily favored the defenders.
From a military perspective, therefore, Shanghai’s defenses looked solid enough to hold out in the short term. The great question was whether the troops would stand and fight. The quality of professional soldiers in the Warlord Era was very uneven, and Anhui forces were particularly demoralized; the constant changes of fortune moreover made troops reluctant to unduly risk their lives in unending factional strife.
This question was answered on 3 September, when Qi launched his attack. It began with a thrust against Huangdu, the last rail station in Zhejian-controlled territory. The artillery bombardment opened at 1000, followed by an infantry attack that pushed the defenders back across a small river in front of Huangdu. The following day, Qi’s forces attacked Liuhezhen, a town on the Yangtze 30 km to the north. This attack could be supplied by water, and success would open up a fine road leading to Shanghai. Liuzhen was also protected by a small river, but this proved less of an obstacle and Jiangsu forces took the town that same day. They did not exploit their success fast enough, however, and Zhejiang reinforcements pushed them back across the river on 5 September.
Anhui troops had proven that they would fight, and the familiar dynamics of the Western Front soon emerged. With a majority of his forces deployed along the nearly 50 km of this front, and facing comparable opposite numbers, troop densities probably averaged 1,000-2,000/km, much higher around Huangdu and Liuzhen—comparable to parts of the Western Front. Although Jiangsu troops held the advantage in artillery, enemy machine guns, dug into positions that took advantage of the natural defensibility of the ground, prevented Jiangsu troops from making any forward progress. Qi brought up more and more troops to effect a breakthrough: although they twice charged across the river and took Huangdu station, they could not hold the exposed position against counterattacks by fresh troops.
These failures, which brought Jiangsu heavy losses, persuaded the Anhui to risk a counterattack. The greater part of Qi’s troops, now massed in front of Huangdu, relied on a single rail line for supplies: a flank attack around Lake Tai could sever it. On 11 September, the Second Army advanced to the outskirts of Yixing, on the western side of the lake, which stood at the end of a good road running back toward the rail line. Downpours over the next two days drenched the countryside, delaying operations, but on 20 September the light forces guarding Yixing withdrew.
The Northern Theater
As the fighting in the south ground on through September, Zhili and Fengtian began mobilizing. Their territories were separated by the wide Yan mountains, an east-west-running range that extends from the area north of Beijing to the sea. Any army that controlled this substantial obstacle would be able to project force into the plains beyond. As a result of the last war, the Zhili held a wide swath of territory on the far side of the mountains, albeit with only light forces. Their control extended beyond Chaoyang, a town some 250 km west of Mukden. At the eastern end of the mountains, the Tianjin-Mukden line ran through a coastal pass called Shanhaiguan—this is where the Great Wall runs into the sea.
The Fengtian planned to win the race in both sectors. The 26,000-strong Second Army would seize Chaoyang, then advance southwest through the mountains along the road to Chengde and thence to the Gubeikou Pass, 100 km northeast of Beijing. Two other field armies, a combined 43,000, would rush through Shanhaiguan to Tianjin; both would then converge on Beijing from the northeast and southeast.
The Zhili concept of operations was rather more sophisticated. Wu Peifu realized that Shanhaiguan, as the one sector supplied by a major rail line, allowed the highest concentration of troops by both sides. He planned to merely contain the Fengtian advance there with the First Army, which would initially have 40,000 of the 130,000 immediately available troops, while the Second Army held Chaoyang. This would set the trap. The 25,000-strong Third Army, under the skillful general Feng Yuxiang, would march northeast through the Gubeikou Pass, east from Chengde, then descend upon the Fengtian rear behind Shanhaiguan. To secure the noose, an amphibious force would then land on the coast to the northeast, cutting the Fengtian line of communication with Mukden. If all went to plan, the main body of Fengtian soldiers would be destroyed in a stroke.
The war began on 15 September. Although the Zhili held positions on the far side of the Yan mountain range, the quicker Fengtian mobilization allowed them to turn this to their advantage. They attacked Chaoyang from three directions, and the city fell on 23 September. Fengtian forces continued to advance southwest over the next week, after which the focus of the fighting next shifted to Chifeng, another Zhili possession 150 km northwest of Chaoyang. Following a week of intense back-and-forth combat, it fell around 11 October, clearing the way for a two-pronged attack on the approaches to Chengde. They also captured Lengkou Pass, about 80 km west of Shanhaiguan, but their supply lines were too overextended to getting engaged on the plain below.
Zhili field forces had meanwhile been scrambling to reach the front. The bulk of these had to march through the difficult mountain roads leading northeast from Beijing. Advance elements were not scheduled to reach Gubeikou until 22 September, a day before Chaoyang fell, but did not even manage this. The government attempted to send reinforcements and supplies to the front via passes farther east, but inadequate transportation clogged the routes.
Around Shanhaiguan, things went more to Wu Peifu’s favor. Zhili forces reached the pass first, forming their lines along the Great Wall itself. The fighting began on 19 September, with initial Fengtian assaults supported by an aerial bombardment. Both sides rushed reinforcements forward, the Zhili managing to concentrate some 120,000 troops in the area by the end of the month.
The Fengtian offensive began in earnest on 29 September, but to no avail; a fresh attack on 7 October, following a 24-hour artillery bombardment and aerial attack, completely failed to break through the fortified Zhili lines.
Decision in the South
By the second week of October, fortunes in the northern theater were decidedly mixed, but around Shanghai the situation had resolved itself firmly in Zhili’s favor. In the far south of Zhejiang Province, a small corps crossed over from Fujian and quickly drove back the two divisions along the border, inflicting a severe defeat on them on 16 September. Two days later, the entire Zhejiang Third Army, responsible for defending the southern front, defected to the Jiangsu, and that night some of them occupied the Zhejiang capital of Hangzhou. Loyalist forces fell back on Shanghai, where the political leadership hoped to hold out along a contracted perimeter. They could still receive supplies by sea, and could perhaps hold out on a more favorable outcome in the northern theater.
One operational consequence to the fall of Hangzhou was that it gave the advancing forces access to a rail line connected by rail to Shanghai, allowing the Jiangsu to more rapidly move provisions forward. This also negated Zhejiang forces’ one success, the capture of Yixing to the west of Lake Tai. It was still another 50 km from there to the rail line, and the Jiangsu defenders’ orderly withdrawal made the prospects of a further advance uncertain; desperately needed elsewhere, those forces at Yixing were pulled back to defend Shanghai’s southwestern approaches.
The Fujian forces would not reach Hangzhou for another few days, but on 22 September the forces on the main front resumed the offensive. They had brought up heavier artillery to the front, and that morning launched attacks all along the line. Fire control was poor, however, and the heavy guns failed to destroy enemy machine gun positions, which mowed down Jiangsu infantry in four separate assaults. By 24 September, however, Jiangsu troops were in position around Hangzhou, and both fronts undertook a grinding advance over the next three weeks.
The fighting was extremely difficult, with heavy losses on both sides. The main thrust made very slow progress, but on 9 October the southern grouping managed to capture a rail station anchoring Shanghai’s southwestern defenses. The defenders’ situation rapidly deteriorated over the next few days, and it became clear to all that the city could no longer be defended. Zhejiang leaders escaped by ship to Japan early on 13 October, and Jiangsu troops entered Shanghai the following day.
Maneuver by Sea and Land
Even before the fall of Shanghai, Wu Peifu had begun redirecting ammunition shipments to the north. Although part of his plan had been foiled by the Zhili collapse on the western front, he still hoped to win the war around Shanhaiguan. This would not be accomplished by a straightforward breakthrough: although Zhili forces were holding up in this sector, their inefficient transportation services created long delays for troops and supplies reaching the front, ruling out a rapid advance. The density of troops in this sector—nearly 80,000 in the immediate vicinity—made chaos inevitable.
Instead, Wu intended to proceed with the amphibious half of his planned double-envelopment. He had gathered a small flotilla of three cruisers, several smaller ships, and ten transports at Qinhuangdao, the supply base 15 km to the rear of Shanhaiguan. From there, they would transport a two-division-strong force to cut off the Fengtian forces at the front.
On 15 October, the marshal boarded a cruiser to reconnoiter the Manchurian coastline immediately to the north. When he returned several days later, however, events on the battlefield had made the situation critical. Unable to break through at Shanhaiguan, Fengtian turned their attention to Jiumenkou, a small mountain pass about 10 km to the north. The pass was held by a single division commanded by Cao Kun’s brother. The narrow ground was mined, with artillery registered along the approaches. As a final touch, a cavalry detachment was to lure the enemy deep into the killing ground (not too different from the classic Turkic feigned retreat).
At this point, the uneven quality of Beiyang forces made itself felt. The artillerists mistook the retreating cavalry for the enemy and opened fire, killing most of the friendly troopers while expending most of their ammunition. The enemy rushed through the gap and, although suffering heavy casualties from the mines, seized the far end of the pass on 8 October. From there, it was only 20 km due south to Qinhuangdao—its capture would completely cut off all forces engaged at the Great Wall. Desperate counterattacks slowed Fengtian progress, aided by a narrow-gauge line that connected Qinhuangdao to the coal mines west of the pass, and by 10 October the Zhili had managed to form a defensive line.
Nevertheless, the Fengtian continued to expand their foothold on the plain, taking advantage their positions on the high ground to press forward. Both sides continued to throw reinforcements into the western sector. Wu was forced to disembark his 30,000 allocated to the amphibious landing at Qinhuangdao, whence they were rushed forward to support a major counterattack on 19 October. The front, which had been confined to the narrow gap between the mountains and the sea, now extended over 20 km inland. Even accounting for casualties and troops that had been transferred to the western front, the overall density on either side was about 3,000/km—much higher than, say, the Sakarya Front of the Greco-Turkish War, and comparable to active sections of the Western Front.
Endgame
Ever so slowly, the situation began to tilt back in Zhili’s favor. Reinforcements began to flow north from the Shanghai theater, and the naval squadron assigned to protect the amphibious landing turned to bombarding enemy lines around Shanhaiguan. Inadvertently, the Zhili had drawn large concentrations of the Fengtian into open ground where they could best apply their material and numerical superiority. The Fengtian triumph of operational maneuver had stumbled in the face of the familiar dynamics of early 20th-century warfare. They now had to withdraw troops from their positions in the mountains to reinforce the eastern front, giving Wu Peifu the option to either grind them down by attrition or execute his original plan of a flanking attack.
At that point, the unpredictable factors of Chinese politics overruled the decisions of the battlefield. On 23 October, Feng Yuxiang, commander of the Zhili Third Army, marched into Beijing with a division and two brigades to take over the government administration, citing Cao Kun’s corruption and the destructiveness of the war as justification. He forced the president to dismiss Wu from command and to resign from office.
The coup had been long in the making. Already by late September, Feng, frustrated at the impossible supply situation in his sector, had made a tacit agreement with his fellow commanders and the Fengtian commanders immediately opposite not to attack. In the wake of subsequent defeats on the western front, Feng became disgusted with the Zhili leadership. At this point, he was approached by a representative of the Fengtian and Japanese, who together offered him 1.5 million yen to switch sides.
Even with the fall of Beijing, the Zhili cause was not completely doomed. Wu still commanded the vast majority of Zhili troops with more on their way from the south, and had built up adequate stockpiles in Tianjin and Qinhuangdao to supply them. Beijing itself was not of especial military importance, and Feng moreover commanded a relatively small number of troops. So long as Wu could keep fighting, he stood a good chance of turning things back around. Although the Japanese blocked him from shipping reinforcements to Tianjin (which was an international treaty port), he was able to transfer troops and supplies by rail, and sent a detachment 60 km up the Tianjin-Beijing line to construct defensive positions. Feng’s strength was limited, and Wu planned to outflank the rebel forces along the railway to retake the capital; with Beijing again under his control, he could turn his full energies back to the Shanhaiguan front.
The dramatic events of late October caused many other key figures to lose their nerve, however. The governments of several central provinces declared neutrality and refused to allow troops from the south to pass through their territory. Then, on 27 October, the general Zhang Zongchang (not to be confused with Fengtian commander-in-chief Zhang Zuolin) charged south from Lengkou Pass, cavalry in the lead, to attack the two Zhili divisions guarding the rail line. Already demoralized by so many setbacks and now facing attack from an unexpected direction, the defenders quickly broke, and the following day Zhang occupied a station midway between Shanhaiguan and Tianjin.
Cavalry had thus far played only a minor role in the war. The Fengtian were far superior in this arm, having brought many White Russian exiles and Japanese into their service. These were more suited to the more open terrain of the north, where they helped capture Chifeng, but had also participated in the capture of Jiumenkou and Lengkou passes. It was only at this point in the war that cavalry played a truly decisive role. Its ability to strike hard and fast at a decisive point completely disrupted Wu Peifu’s position.
The results were catastrophic for the Zhili. All the troops at Shanhaiguan, and a large proportion of the supplies, were completely cut off. The Fengtian attacked in strength and the entire pocket surrendered or fled—over 100,000 prisoners were taken in all. The Beijing front soon collapsed as well, and on 3 November Wu Peifu sailed with a few hundred loyal soldiers for the Yangtze. Just eleven days after Feng Yuxiang’s coup, the fighting was over.
Warfare in the Early 20th Century
The Jiangsu-Zhejiang War in the south and Zhili-Fengtian War in the north are often considered two separate wars, but in truth, one could not have happened without the other. Fighting around Shanghai gave the Fengtian the pretext and opportunity to go to war, while the Jiangsu leadership depended on Zhili support for their campaign. It is striking how closely they mirrored each other. In both cases, the losing side held things to a stalemate on the main front while suffering reverses on the mountainous second front. Then, following an abortive attempt to outflank the enemy and cut off their main line of communications, a betrayal by key officers led to the fall of the capital. Finally, after contracting their lines around a major port city, they fought on as the enemy converged along rail lines from two directions, until the leadership gave up and fled by sea.
Above all, it is striking how operational maneuvers in both theaters were subsumed to political machinations. Warlord factions made shifting alliances among themselves; the Japanese and to a lesser extent European powers directly interfered in the conflict, with money, materiel, and diplomatic activity; even the KMT, far to the south and aloof from the fighting, played a role in persuading Feng Yuxiang to defect. In short, the full story of the Second Zhili-Fengtian War far exceeds the synopsis of the campaigns given above.
Even this partial narrative reveals interesting things about warfare of the era, however. Both campaigns were governed by dynamics familiar from the Western Front: the combination of modern firepower and railbound logistics that created deadlocked fronts which could not easily be outflanked. Yet there were enough unique factors that operational maneuver did occasionally take place.
This bears comparison to the Greco-Turkish War, which had ended just two years earlier. In many ways, the two were very different. The Greco-Turkish War lasted three years (1919-22), while the two campaigns of the Second Zhili-Fengtian War lasted just two months (3 September to 3 November). The geographical scope of the war in China was also far vaster. The northern theater extended nearly 400 km north-south from Chifeng to Tianjin and 300 km east-west from Beijing to Shanhaiguan, while the southern theater stretched over 400 km from the northern edge to the Fujian border. The single front in Turkey, by contrast, only somewhat exceeded 100 km wide at its greatest extent.
Yet these differences are somewhat deceiving. Of the two most intense periods of fighting in Anatolia, the Sakarya campaign lasted just over three weeks and the 1922 Turkish counteroffensive two—on the same order of magnitude as both Chinese campaigns. The Shanhaiguan front only saw dense troop concentrations along a 25-km sector, while this was maybe 50 km in front of Shanghai, comparable to the Greek and Turkish offensives.
The differences are revealing too. In theory, Chinese field armies had far more room to conduct sweeping maneuvers. But they were restricted by mountainous terrain northeast of Beijing and southwest of Shanghai, where even a beaten combatant could hold the passes (barring a defection, that is). When a general could break through a pass, as Zhang Zongchang did at Lengkou, he was often reluctant to extend his lines of communication too far. On the one occasion when an attacker did press through a pass, namely at Jiumenkou, the presence of a single narrow-gauge rail line allowed the Zhili to form a new defensive line. Thus, there was a self-reinforcing logic to the nature of warfare at the time: combat mostly took place where it was easily supplied, which followed the major rail lines, resulting in high-intensity deadlocks on the plains that were difficult to break.
Indeed, rail lines were of the utmost importance to operational movement of the era. A defender, even when beaten, could almost always retreat in good provided he controlled the length of a line—a feat demonstrated repeatedly throughout the Chinese and Turkish wars. Without a rail line, by contrast, it was almost impossible for an offensive to succeed.
Variations on a Theme
None of this is the least bit surprising to a student of the First World War. Other, more distinctive, aspects of the Second Zhili-Fengtian War showcase altogether different dynamics. The absolute centrality of rail to all campaigns highlights the role of cavalry in particular. There were occasional uses of cavalry in an operationally decisive way during the Great War—Allenby’s deployment of it against an Ottoman army group headquarters in the Palestine Campaign comes to mind—but these scattered examples are overshadowed by the intensity of fighting on the main fronts.
In Turkish and Fengtian hands, by contrast, cavalry assumed a far more elevated role. The Turkish use of it was more deliberate: they used it as part of a complex plan in which most of the main Greek line was tied down by artillery bombardments and frontal attacks. Yet the effects were the same as Zhang Zongchang’s improvised solution: the cavalry cut across the rail lines, splitting the enemy army in two and preventing an orderly retreat. And in both cases, mounted units were able to operate far from the rail lines. The Turkish V Corps launched their attack over 40 km from their railhead, while Zhang, who had no railhead at all, seized the opportunity when the moment presented itself.
Secondly, for all that the logic of warfare was defined by technology, troop quality still mattered. This was evident in the Zhili-Fengtian War above all others of the period. The modernization programs over the previous decades had created several well-trained units—the Fengtian and Zhili especially had excellent front-line units—but many more were poorly trained, poorly led, and demoralized. Nowhere was this more apparent than at Jiumenkou, where, despite every advantage of weaponry and terrain, the defenders shredded a friendly unit then gave way to an enemy assault. The fighting around Shanghai presents another notable contrast: poor gunnery by Jiangsu artillery denied them a breakthrough, whereas well-emplaced and -employed machine guns allowed Zhejiang forces to hold out far longer than they had any right to.
Finally, among the casualties in the plains below Jiumenkou, the high percentage of bayonet wounds indicates a high degree of morale and low degree of weapons proficiency. In the final measure, this indicates that on balance, the ability to simply sustain the fight—i.e. the presence of rail and adequate manpower and supplies—was often more important than well-aimed firepower.
There is one last feature of note in the fighting in China: Wu Peifu’s attempted amphibious landing. World War One had its Gallipoli and its Operation Albion, but those were objectives in their own right; the landing behind Fengtian lines was more like an Anzio or Inchon, designed to directly support ground forces already engaged. It is impossible to say whether it would have succeeded, but there are good reasons to believe so. The Zhili had a long stretch of shoreline to land on, and the Fengtian did not have strong coastal defenses anywhere. The rail line ran close to the water, and the proximity of Qinhuangdao allowed the reinforcement of any initial lodgment. Even if the operation was not a wholehearted success, it would likely weaken Fengtian efforts elsewhere as they rushed to contain the crisis.
Around Shanghai, by contrast, there was no comparable attempt to land large numbers of troops, even though Jiangsu naval forces quickly gained control over the lower Yangtze. The rail line was much farther from the shore, and difficult ground would have left the landing forces exposed and vulnerable. The ultimate failure to proceed with the Shanhaiguan operation highlights another fundamental difficulty of amphibious landings: they sequester a substantial number of ground troops for an extended period. This nearly resulted in disaster in Korea thirty years later, when the troops earmarked for Inchon were pulled from a critical sector on the Pusan Perimeter; in Wu’s case, he had to scramble to redeploy his divisions in the face of a subsequent crisis. The prospects for amphibious landings may therefore be compared to cavalry of the same period: they had the potential to be operationally decisive, but only in a narrow set of circumstances.
Technology and War
By the end of 1914, once the lines in northern France had become settled, the Western Front was virtually doomed to be a difficult slog. This was a natural product of contemporary technology: rail that allowed heavy concentrations along fixed lines and weaponry that made those lines nigh-unbreakable. By the same measure, the radically different course of the Second World War was also a product of technology, which made breakthroughs and their exploitation much easier. The twin examples of the World Wars exert a gravitational influence on our understanding of military affairs: they tempt us to overlook just how contingent was the outbreak of two massive conflagrations at those precise times and circumstances. But for a few accidents of history, we might have a very different intuition of the natural evolution of warfare.
It is precisely for this reason that it is important to study other large conflicts of the period. Both the Second Zhili-Fengtian War and the Greco-Turkish War evince many of the familiar dynamics of the Western Front, yet also show how those dynamics do not necessarily govern the whole of a conflict: a number of different circumstances might disrupt them, make them moot, or preclude their emergence altogether. Taken together, these serve as warnings against extrapolating too much from technology alone. It goes without saying that the evolution of weaponry in the next major war will create very different dynamics from what we currently see in Ukraine; but it remains important to perceive clearly how much of the Ukraine War owes to unique circumstances, not technology.
The Second Zhili-Fengtian War is hardly known in the West today, forgotten amidst the tumult of post-1911 China. It was far more remarked upon at the time. Many contemporaries observed that it was the first truly modern war fought in China, of a scale, scope, and intensity unlike anything previously seen. The human and material costs sent tremors through Chinese society, the political fallout stirred popular movements that defined the next two decades. However thorough the Fengtian victory appeared, the Beiyang government had been fatally undermined; the KMT, which swept it away in the Northern Expedition, inherited a still more fragile nation. It is hard to contemplate just how different China might look today had the tide of the Second Zhili-Fengtian War gone differently. For these reasons too, not just the interest of military history, it is worth studying.
Further Reading:
The single best English-language account of the Second Zhili-Fengtian War is Arthur Waldron’s From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924-1925, which covers the military conflict itself and its wider political and economic context. Waldron shows that many contemporary observers were relatively optimistic about the prospects of China in 1924, and that the Zhili defeat set off a disastrous chain of events that was by no means inevitable.
For more on the military itself, there is The Chinese Army as a Military Force, written just after the war by Lawrence Impey, an eyewitness to much of the fighting in the north.
Although of little historical value, a Soviet film 1924-25: Modern Warfare in China recreates the fighting from the side of the Fengtian (especially interesting given the White Russian connection).