With the Japanese at the Changsha city gates, Chiang Kai-shek decided something needed to be done. Wuhan had fallen, Yueyang in northern Hunan following suit. The Generalissimo decided to burn the entire city. The Chinese army couldn’t hold it. He reasoned that the Japanese couldn’t capture what didn’t exist.

It didn’t work as plan. The fires were started before the preset time. The 2,500-year-old city burned to the ground, and 3,000 people died on November 13, 1938. The fire made Changsha one of the most damaged cities of the war, like Stalingrad, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Japanese troops didn’t occupy the city, but tried again – in four separate attacks. The feisty Hunan people foiled the plans of the Japanese army in the first three battles, the city finally being occupied in 1944.

The above bell in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, China,  is a memorial to the fire and those that lost their lives in the fire.