Three Alls policy
The Three Alls policy is a Chinese term for the Japanese scorched-earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three "alls" being "kill all, burn all, loot all".. This policy was designed as retaliation against the Chinese for the Communist-led Hundred Regiments Offensive in December 1940.
The policy targeted suspected guerrilla base areas and used extreme measures to eliminate their inhabitants in order to transform them into "unpopulated zones".
Japanese tactics included indiscriminate massacres, destroying entire villages, forced starvation, and the widespread deployment of poison gas against rural populations. Japanese forces also targeted young men to deny Communist forces potential recruits; those not killed immediately were conscripted into forced labour units. In addition, Japanese troops stripped the countryside of their food stores and razed crop fields, deliberately engineering food shortages to starve the civilian population into submission.
Japanese troops had already launched violent pacification measures since 1938 in Hebei, and Major General Ryūkichi Tanaka had formalized the campaigns in 1940. General Yasuji Okamura escalated these anti-partisan drives following the Hundred Regiments Offensive, with his forces doubling in size and conducting five pacification campaigns between 1941 and 1942 in Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi, Henan and Charhar. Pacification drives continued well into March of 1945, but they were ultimately unsuccessful in securing North China.
The Three Alls Policy killed millions of Chinese civilians. Chinese Communists recorded that the populations of their base areas dropped from 44,000,000 to 25,000,000. Some historians have characterized the Japanese campaigns as genocidal in their scale and intent.
Background
Japanese forces had already committed numerous atrocities in North China since their occupation of Manchuria, with one notable example being the 3,000 victims of the Pingdingshan massacre, where Japanese soldiers had machine-gunned civilians and razed the village to the ground, all on the suspicion that the town had been harboring resistance fighters.Prior Campaigns
The prototype of the Sankō Sakusen policies were the "annihilation campaigns" launched in late 1938 by the North China Area Army to stamp out the vigorous guerrilla resistance in Hebei province. Emperor Hirohito personally gave his approval in an order dated 2 December 1938.Major General Ryūkichi Tanaka had also initiated formal annihilation campaigns in 1940. These campaigns entailed devastating villages and massacring their populations.
In Shanxi Province, from September to December of 1940, Japanese forces targeted and destroyed villages in "mopping-up campaigns. They killed wounded guerrillas sheltering in towns, slaughtered herds of livestock and burned massive stockpiles of grain. They razed thousands of houses and massacred inhabitants with machine guns and grenades.
In one example, the Japanese killed 5,000 villagers in Qinyuan County in a two-week "mopping operation" in late October 1940. In one village, they sealed 129 inhabitants of Hanhong town into the village temple and burned them alive. In another, they raped 97 villagers before murdering them.
Since the Imperial Japanese Army always viewed the National Revolutionary Army and other Kuomintang-aligned forces as their main enemies in China, they tended to ignore the Chinese Communist forces. By mid-1940, the Communists controlled vast tracts of the Chinese countryside, ruling tens of millions of people.
The Hundred Regiments Offensive
In August 1940, the Communist Eighth Route Army launched the "Hundred Regiments Campaign", a large guerrilla offensive targeting bridges, railroads, mines, blockade houses and telephone lines in northern China that caused extensive damage. The scale of the campaign surprised Japanese commanders, as the Communists had rarely pursued formal military campaigns.In retaliation for the "100 Regiments" offensive, General Ryūkichi Tanaka, commanding North China Area Army devised a plan for the "total annihilation" of the Communist base areas so that "the enemy could never use them again."
Implementation in China, 1941-1945
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 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". Gavan McCormack wrote that these measures merit consideration as genocide. Journalist Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, described the measures implemented as a "massive terrorist campaign".
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 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.
In July 1941, General Yasuji Okamura assumed command of the North China Army. Okamura issued new orders on July 9, titled the "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.
From August 1941, the North China Army would identify regions to become a "no-man's-land", usually along railways or around mountains. They would then depopulate them through massacres or deportations. In one example, Japanese forces designated a region around Mount Wutai as a "no-man's-land", and drowned 342 villagers in a local river. In another, Japanese units massacred 1,411 villagers around Mount Lushan in Pingshan, Hubei.
These raids inflicted massive damage and property losses amongst the targeted civilian populations. In two districts alone, Japanese forces abducted 20,000 young men and conscripted them as slaves, looted 80,000 heads of livestock and chickens, and plundered or destroyed 30,000 tons of grain.
Imperial General Headquarters Order Number 575 authorized an escalation of the policy on 3 December 1941.
1942
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military began redeploying troops and resources from the North China Army for the broader war. However, the North China Army only intensified its "mopping-up operations" against regional Communist guerrillas. 1942 marked the greatest intensity of the Three Alls Policy and its campaigns.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 poison gas.
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. In July 1942, Japanese troops destroyed 128 dikes, causing flooding in every county of Hebei Province. The flooding impacted 6,752 villages, destroyed 400 square miles of farmland, and displaced 2,000,000 civilians.
Deported Chinese civilians were concentrated into "protected areas" where they were enslaved to build forts and pillboxes. Japanese soldiers also routinely sent photographs of beheadings and bayonetings back home to their families, and also recorded their atrocities in letters and diaries.