Thread by @thehistoryguy

The Chinese government deliberately flooded a vast area of its own territory in 1938, successfully halting a Japanese advance, but the price was massive causalities and damage to its own resources and reputation.

Flood as a weapon of war. Thread. 👇

I was on the Normandy beaches this week where before D-day in 1944 the Germans deliberately flooded fields behind the beaches to create obstacles to aircraft landing. The ground behind Utah beach was flooded so that troops could only advance inland using a few narrow causeways.

The Dutch pioneered conflict flooding. At the 1574 siege of Leiden the Dutch sliced through various dykes and rode the wave in a shallow draft flotilla all the way to the besieged city. The Spanish panicked at the rising waters and mostly fled.

So pleased with their success, the Dutch built a defensive network in the 17th Century that was based around sluices or breaching of dykes which could transform the provine of Holland (with its 3 vital cities) into an island.

The engineering works are now a World Heritage Site

Water levels were carefully controlled so, as the old expression goes, it was too deep for the army but not deep enough for the navy. Strongpoints were carefully sited along it with optimised fields of fire.

Water defeated the Sun King when the Dutch flooded the system to stop Louis XIV in 1672, but it froze in the winters of the 1790s and the French were able to walk across it.

The Dutch continued to enlarge the network before WW2, and even into the Cold War.

Back to China, 1938- the Chinese destroyed dykes on the Yellow River to stop the Japanese advance into the Sichuan Basin. While it did stop them, vast numbers of Chinese were killed, fields covered in silt & the communists used it to discredit the Chinese govt & recruit followers

Interestingly the Chinese initially tried to blame Japanese bombing for the flood. So there's nothing new in information war around responsibility for the act.

The most appalling I’ve ever come across was in Parker's monumental 17th C book:

There was a siege of Kaifeng, China in 1642. After 6 months both sides were desperate. The Ming governor & the peasant rebel leader Li Zicheng both seem to have made a terrible decision

.....to breach the dykes to scour the other side into oblivion. Heavy rain seems to have exacerbated their breaching and a wall of water smashed into Kaifeng. 75% of its residents drowned or died in the dislocation that followed.

What many of these examples have in common is that long after the armies and their commanders depart to roll the iron dice on some other field of battle, the environmental damage remains catastrophic and enduring.