scorched earth policy

scorched earth policy, whereby retreating armies destroyed or dismantled everything in the path of their advancing opponents to deprive them of shelter, food, natural resources, working factories, anything that might be of use to them. Chiang Kai-shek employed it during the China incident when he had the dykes of the Yellow River dynamited in June 1938 to slow the Japanese advance on Hankow and to deny them valuable agricultural resources. The resulting floods ravaged three provinces leaving perhaps two million homeless and many thousands dead. Not until 1947 was the Yellow River returned to its pre-1938 channel. The Red Army implemented it with great ruthlessness before the advancing Wehrmacht after the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA). They destroyed or removed their factories, blew up the Dnepropetrovsk dam which supplied the Donets industrial region with power, and dismantled the installations belonging to the Maikop oilfields in the Caucasus so that the Germans were unable to extract any oil from them.

The British never exercised the policy with any efficiency. For example, they failed to destroy vessels on the west coast of Malaya during the Malayan campaign, allowing Japanese troops to use them to outflank British positions on the west coast. During the fighting which preceded the fall of Singapore, Churchill urged the garrison to implement a scorched earth policy if the island were in danger of falling, but, as the official historian of that British military disaster drily pointed out, it is difficult to carry out on ground you are still defending.