Battle of West Hunan

The Battle of West Hunan (), also known as the Battle of Xuefeng Mountains () and the Zhijiang Campaign (), was the Japanese invasion of west Hunan and the subsequent Allied counterattack that occurred between 6 April and 7 June 1945, during the last months of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japanese strategic aims for this campaign were to seize Chinese airfields and secure railroads in West Hunan, and to achieve a decisive victory that their depleted land forces needed. This campaign, if successful, would also have allowed Japan to attack Sichuan and eventually the Chinese wartime capital Chongqing. Although Japan was able to make initial headways, Chinese forces with air support from the Americans were able to turn the tide and forced the Japanese into a rout, recovering a substantial amount of lost ground. This was the last major Japanese offensive, and the last of 22 major battles during the war to involve more than 100,000 troops. Concurrently, the Chinese managed to repel a Japanese offensive in Henan and Hubei and launched a successful attack on Japanese forces in Guangxi, turning the course of the war sharply in China's favor even as they prepared to launch a full-scale counterattack across South China. By April 1945, China had already been at war with Japan for more than seven years. Both nations were exhausted by years of battles, bombings and blockades. From 1941–1943, both sides maintained a "dynamic equilibrium", where field engagements were often numerous, involved large numbers of troops and produced high casualty counts, but the results of which were mostly indecisive. Operation Ichi-Go in 1944 changed the status quo, as Japanese forces were able to break through the inadequate Chinese defenses and occupy eastern Henan, a corridor in the eastern parts of Hunan through Changsha and eastern parts of Guangxi through Guilin–Liuzhou, connecting Japanese-held areas from north to south in a continuous railway corridor.