Three Alls policy
삼광 작전
The scorched-earth campaigns the Japanese army waged against the Communist base areas of north China during the war. The name, “kill all, burn all, loot all”, is Chinese; the Japanese called them annihilation operations (jinmetsu sakusen). A reprisal for the Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940, they were sharply escalated by Yasuji Okamura, who took over the North China Area Army in July 1941. Through the razing of villages, massacre, forced labour, seizure of food and poison gas they killed millions of civilians.
In depth
The North China Area Army had been waging annihilation campaigns against guerrillas since late 1938, and Ryūkichi Tanaka formalised them in 1940. After the Hundred Regiments Offensive Yasuji Okamura doubled his forces and conducted five pacification campaigns in Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi, Henan and Chahar in 1941–1942; Imperial General Headquarters Order No. 575 of December 1941 directed him to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. To turn suspected guerrilla areas into “no-man’s-lands” the Japanese wiped out whole villages, killed young men or carried them off as forced labour, and destroyed grain and fields, using hunger as a weapon.
By Communist records the population of the base areas fell from 44 million to 25 million, and the Japanese historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta estimates that at least 2.47 million civilians died in the campaigns. Some historians call them genocidal in scale and intent. The drives went on until March 1945 but failed to pacify north China. Okamura was acquitted by the Shanghai war crimes tribunal after the war.