Armies stationed along the river and local units also had special missions and could not concentrate on making repairs. The most bizarre flooding of the Yellow River occurred in June, 1938. In the eyes of Nationalist leaders, not unlike other modern regimes of the twentieth-century world, “saving the nation” could justify unlimited sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.Throughout the war, the Nationalist government refused to take responsibility for the disasters caused by the Yellow River’s intentional diversion. Hesitant to abandon crops and fields, rural residents left their farms only reluctantly. Among these [affected areas], Weishi County has been flooded three times. Advancing at a steady rate of around 16 kilometers per day, floods spread into narrow, shallow beds of rivers and streams that flowed toward the Huai. At the same time, hydraulic engineering systems greedily consumed resources in a futile effort to keep the river in check. They tried to save tools, livestock, grain, and other belongings but there was not enough time to salvage everything. The point was nevertheless made, the breach had in the end given the Communists a huge boost in the North.Dutch, Steven I. Their advance on Zhengzhou was halted, but they The number of casualties in the flood remains disputed and estimates have been revised by the Chinese government and other researchers in the decades after the event. Courtesy of Qinfeng lao zhaopian guan, Kangzhan Zhongguo guoji tongxun zhaopian. The Japanese army could not fight a mechanized war in the mountains and hills that divided China’s occupied and unoccupied territories, nor could they function in the vast flooded area created by the Yellow River.Any immediate strategic benefits gained from the Nationalist gambit of turning the Yellow River into a weapon came at a tremendous price. Courtesy of Qinfeng lao zhaopian guan, Kangzhan Zhongguo guoji tongxun zhaopian. The major battles were over, though guerilla warfare continued. The river's pre-1938 bed had become a productive swath of farmland populated by 400,000 people; there were disputes around relocating and compensating these people, and whether to complete downstream dykes before sealing the breach.Muscolino, Micah S. (2014). In addition to presenting a graphic example of the immediate impact of military conflict, which has been the focus of most existing scholarship on the environmental history of warfare, the history of Henan’s Yellow River flood area illustrates the human capacity to restore the viability of war-damaged landscapes after war’s an end. In 1946 and 1947, tens of thousands of laborers supervised by UNRRA-CNRRA returned the river to its pre-1938 course. Over three hundred disaster victims and over three hundred draft animals have drowned, so one can imagine the severity of the disaster. The flooded areas became fertile recruiting grounds for the Chinese Communists, using their anger towards a shared enemy to bring them into their ranks. In a time of total war, when armies devoured or destroyed virtually all available resources, this cycle grew even more vicious.Source: British Pathé/Pathé Gazette, ‘Reharnessing The Yellow River,’ newsreel, 1946The huge amount of sediment deposited by the river added to the disaster, with the threat of flooding growing as siltation caused the river’s bed to rise. On several occasions prior to the twentieth century, imperial Chinese armies had intentionally diverted rivers to gain the upper hand against their military adversaries and as a strategic barrier against external aggression, doing little to relocate local populations or offer them relief.

After they were flooded, bandits and traitors have also pounded their bones and sucked out their marrow, extorting grain, draft animals, and property so that nearly all houses are empty and have no reserves. In Fugou more than 1,800 villages have been flooded, accounting for over ninety percent of the county’s total area. Their armed resistance ultimately failed and the dikes were rebuilt in 1946 and 1947 and Yellow River returned to its pre-1938 course. The Yellow River’s floodwaters inundated vast tracts of intensely cultivated land during the conflict, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing millions.

)Source: http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/27041.aspx Map courtesy of the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological SciencesThe many wartime documents related to the Yellow River flood detail the social trauma and dislocation that the floods caused. Huang He floods, (1887, 1931, 1938), series of devastating floods in China caused by the overflowing of the Huang He (Yellow River), the country’s second longest river.

It has been called the "largest act of environmental warfare in history". During the conflict known in China as the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance (1937-1945), the Chinese Nationalist military blasted the Yellow River dikes in Henan province in 1938 to forestall a Japanese advance.

After assessing the ecological consequences of these war-induced disasters, this presentation examines how local residents and state actors in Henan labored to transform devastated environments into productive agro-ecosystems during the late-1940s and early-1950s. Millions more who survived were displaced, injured, suffered from loss of property or jobs, or went with too little food. In June 1938, Chinese Nationalist armies under the command of Chiang Kai-shek breached the Yellow River’s dikes at Huayuankou in Henan province in a desperate attempt to block a Japanese military advance.After Chinese and Japanese armies had clashed at Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937, the Japanese military launched a full-scale offensive into the heart of China, seizing Nationalist China’s capital of Nanjing in December 1937 and perpetrated brutal atrocities against its civilian residents.

Yet damage reports compiled after 1945 convey the magnitude of the catastrophe (see Table 1 and Table 2 below). By the 1940s they had evolved into a major guerrilla base known as the Yuwansu Base Area.The breach in the dam became such a major rallying point for the Communists that they actually tried to halt an attempt by the Chinese Government, with the assistance of the UN, to seal the breach.