‘The Battle of Hengyang’ Review: The Fight the World Forgot
Hengyang was a serene location surrounded by hills and lotus ponds. The Japanese advance turned it into a war zone.
Sept. 18, 2026
For most Americans, the China-Burma-India combat theater was the least-understood of World War II. The region was a strategic backwater, with comparatively few Western names and little U.S. involvement to leave much of an imprint on the American memory.
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The Battle of Hengyang: Japan's Fateful Siege in World War II
Even in China, battles between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) army and the Japanese army have long been intentionally obscured, as Mao Zedong’s communists imposed a revisionist history in which communist revolutionaries became China’s wartime saviors. One of the fiercest battles between the KMT and Japan, little-known to Westerners or Chinese for the past 80 years, was the 47-day siege of Hengyang, in southern China.
Accounts of the Battle of Hengyang are scarce, particularly in English. Shifen Fox, whose father was killed during the siege, sets out to rescue its story in “The Battle of Hengyang.”
Ms. Fox’s story begins with a wedding. Against a backdrop of bloodshed and sorrow, she paints a vivid picture of the nuptials of Xu Shengxian, a cultured lieutenant colonel with a talent for poetry, and his bride, Hu Yaolan, an army nurse holding the rank of captain.
Volunteering for line duty, Xu was given command of a battalion in the KMT’s 16,000-strong 10th army. In 1944, on the eve of the lunar new year, the newlyweds moved to Hengyang, a city of 300,000 souls lying in the path of Japan’s planned military offensive, Operation Ichi-Go.
Ms. Fox, a scholar of comparative literature, pauses to evoke what was about to be lost. Hengyang was “a place of great natural beauty and serenity,” she writes. At the foot of Mt. Heng and reaching the banks of the Xiang River, the city’s “vast rice fields extend into lotus ponds with fish gliding in and out of the huge fanlike lotus leaves,” she adds. “At the foot of the hills, an enormous Buddhist temple stands quietly amid a grove of large camphor trees. . . . All through ancient times, poets and prose writers depicted the spectacle of large flocks of geese hovering over the peak of Huiyan in the winter moonlight, their honking piercing the chilly air and echoing above the Xiang River.”
That beauty would soon be trampled beneath the Japanese advance. After evacuating as many citizens as he could, the KMT’s 10th-army commander, Gen. Fang Xianjue, ordered the construction of massive defense works, blew a major bridge over the Xiang and prepared to make his stand. The KMT high command’s directive was for Fang to hold Hengyang for at least two weeks. “The 10th Army was determined to defend Hengyang to the death.”
Japan’s Lt. Gen. Yokoyama Isamu, commanding Japan’s 11th army, smashed into Hengyang on June 23 with more than a 2-to-1 troop advantage over the defenders. Yet in the battle’s first phase, Japan lost 16,000 soldiers, four times as many as Fang’s defenders suffered.
At the beginning of the battle, Ms. Fox writes, “Japanese soldiers always recovered the bodies of their comrades, either to bury them or collect the ashes after cremation. Gradually the living soldiers became overwhelmed by the sheer number of the dead, so they only cut off an arm and burned it. Not long after, an arm became a hand, then a middle finger, in the end nothing.”
The weight of the Japanese numbers eventually turned the tide. During a battle near a municipal hospital, Xu felt death was near. He “wrote a brief note to his new wife, now pregnant with their first child: ‘The battle is getting more merciless by the minute. I fear I may die this time. When I’m gone, find yourself a new love,’” Ms. Fox writes of her father. “Less than two hours later, Xu was hit in the head by an artillery shell and breathed his last.”
Xu’s fate was shared by nearly half of the 10th army’s soldiers. Five weeks into the battle, “almost all the mid-level officers were dead or severely wounded,” Ms. Fox writes. “Every day witnessed the promotion of sergeants or even corporals to company and battalion commanders.” After six weeks of fighting, the garrison surrendered. Some 2,300 able-bodied survivors, and around 7,500 wounded, were led into brutal captivity.
Hengyang proved a Pyrrhic victory. Japan’s 11th army lost many of its veteran soldiers and weapons, Ms. Fox notes. For the replacement soldiers, “five men had to share one Type 38 rifle,” she writes. “Scabbards for Type 30 bayonets were made of bamboo, and bamboo tubes were given in place of the standard metal canteens.” Disease plagued Japan’s stalled masses, and “death was like a ghost following” the 11th army. The empire’s signature advance for 1944, though not stopped, had been slowed, its spearheads blunted.
Ms. Fox constructs a clear, detailed and well-paced narrative of the siege. Drawn from Chinese, Japanese and English sources—including many published in Taiwan—her research is on a par with those of more-experienced American military historians. Letters, interviews and cultural explanations give her work depth and color beyond the usual battle narrative. Her descriptions of the Chinese viewpoint—during and for decades after the battle—makes “The Battle of Hengyang” essential reading for anyone looking to understand the Asian theater of World War II.
The battle’s afterlife is nearly as compelling as the battle itself. While newspapers at the time extravagantly compared the battle to Stalingrad, China’s communists under Mao ruthlessly suppressed the story after the war to ensure the Communist Party received all the credit for China’s salvation.
“Many former Nationalists . . . were forced to make confession after confession, detained, tortured, and pressured to the edge of survival,” Ms. Fox writes. “In such a political environment, no surviving veterans of Hengyang Battle dared to raise their heads.” She adds: “It was almost a universal story that the children of the Hengyang Battle fighters were not allowed to go to the university, or to join the Youth League or the Communist Party, or to hold any vital positions no matter how well they studied or worked simply because their fathers had served in Chiang Kai-shek’s military.”
Ms. Fox was named for the battle her father died in (“Xiangheng,” or “Hunan Hengyang”). Yet she would not learn of the battle, or her father’s part in it, until after 2005, when President Hu Jintao admitted the Nationalists’ contributions to the war against Japan. “Before that,” she writes, “my mother did not dare to speak about it.”
A mother’s silence furnishes the book with a powerful second theme. “The Battle of Hengyang” recovers a military struggle and a family history—and part of a nation’s past its rulers ordered its people to forget.
Mr. Jordan is the author of “Ike and Winston: World War, Cold War, and an Extraordinary Friendship.”
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Appeared in the September 19, 2026, print edition as 'The Fight the World Forgot'.