Battle of Wuhan
large-scale battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War over 4 months in 1938
The Battle of Wuhan (traditional Chinese: 武漢會戰; simplified Chinese: 武汉会战; Japanese: 武漢作戦 (ぶかんさくせん)), popularly known to the Chinese as the Defense of Wuhan (traditional Chinese: 武漢保衛戰; simplified Chinese: 武汉保卫战), and to the Japanese as the Capture of Wuhan, was the largest, longest, and bloodiest battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Engagements took place across vast areas of Anhui, Henan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and Hubei provinces over four and a half months. More than one million National Revolutionary Army troops from the Fifth and Ninth War Zones were put under the direct command of Chiang Kai-shek, defending Wuhan from the Central China Area Army of the Imperial Japanese Army led by Shunroku Hata. Chinese forces were supported by the Soviet Volunteer Group, volunteer pilots from the Soviet Air Forces.
The battle ended with the capture of Wuhan by Japanese forces. China took up to one million casualties, military and civilian. Japan, which suffered its heaviest losses of the war, diverted its attention north, prolonging the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The end of the battle began a strategic stalemate in the war, shifting from pitched to local battles.
Background
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on 7 July 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) launched a full-scale invasion of China. Both Beijing and Tianjin had fallen to the Japanese by 30 July, which exposed the rest of the North China Plain.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Battle of Wuhan” as large-scale battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War over 4 months in 1938. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as large-scale battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War over 4 months in 1938. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2038907. Authority coordinates are 30.567, 114.267. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Wuhan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.