1938 Yellow River flood

'Huayuankou Dam Burst Incident') was a man-made flood from June 1938 to January 1947 created by the intentional destruction of levees on the Yellow River in Huayuankou, Henan by the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

NRA commanders intended the flood to act as a scorched earth defensive line against the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces.

[4][5] Secondly, the flooding of significant portions of land and railway sections made it difficult for the Japanese military to enter Shaanxi, thereby preventing them from invading the Sichuan basin, where the Chinese wartime capital of Chongqing and China's southwestern home front were located.

[7] In the short term, the NRA aimed to use the flood to halt the rapid transit of Japanese units from Northern China to areas near Wuhan.

[7][8][9][10] The flood achieved the strategic intentions set by NRA commanders; in particular, the Japanese Operation 5 never captured Shaanxi, Sichuan or Chongqing.

[15] Inspired by the strategic outcome, dykes elsewhere in China, especially along the Yangtze, were subsequently destroyed by Chinese and Japanese forces alike.

[16] In 1935, Alexander von Falkenhausen was commissioned by the Chinese to write a report on the strategic planning of the upcoming Sino-Japanese War.

[19] On 1 June 1938 in a military meeting, the Commander-in-chief Chiang Kai-shek sanctioned to open up the dikes (levees) on the Yellow River near Zhengzhou.

The goal of the operation was to stop the advancing Japanese troops by following a strategy of "using water as a substitute for soldiers" (以水代兵, pinyin: Yǐshuǐ dàibīng).

Firstly, the flood in Henan safeguarded the Shaanxi section of the Longhai railway, the major northwest traffic where the Soviet Union sent their military supplies to the Chinese National Army from August 1937 to March 1941.

[4] Secondly, the inundated land across Henan and the flooded tracks of the Beijing–Wuhan Railway made it difficult for the Japanese Army to mobilize into Shaanxi.

Believing that the civilians would help them, the Chinese Communists turned the flooded area into a recruiting ground, directing survivors' anger towards a common enemy to bring them into their ranks.

Two professional sources put it to between 400,000 and 500,000, according to Wang Zhibin (1986)[14] and Bi Chunfu (1995),[15] an editor at the Yellow River Conservancy Commission of the Ministry of Water Resources and a researcher at Second Historical Archives of China respectively.

A much higher estimate of 893,303 total deaths given by the Nationalist government's relief statistics in 1948[27] was discredited for its unspecified methodology of body counting and its questionable approximation of the missing figure of Anhui province.