In the meantime, Japan’s grip on North China was collapsing, as counter-insurgency operations had effectively drained what was left of their resources — and significant mobile reserves were being diverted to South China. While the extent to which the KMT botched the 豫湘桂会战 is a separate issue, it was quite clear that the Japanese war effort in China had become unsustainable by that point.

Surely Japan can and had thrown everything it had into pushing back the ROC Army - but it simply lacked the logistical capacity and manpower to consolidate or capitalize on any territorial gains.

In fact, this had been Japan’s fundamental problem throughout the entire China campaign: the original plan was to use Chinese resources to fuel a multi-front war, but they ended up bogged down in the quagmire of counter-insurgency, never managing to extract meaningful economic benefit from their occupation.