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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. |
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I. C. B. DEAR and M. R. D. FOOT. "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Companion to World War II. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. I. C. B. DEAR and M. R. D. FOOT. "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Companion to World War II. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O129-scorchedearthpolicy.html I. C. B. DEAR and M. R. D. FOOT. "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Companion to World War II. 2001. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O129-scorchedearthpolicy.html |
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scorched earth policy
scorched earth policy a military strategy of burning or destroying crops or other resources that might be of use to an invading enemy force; the term is first used in English in 1937 in a report of the Sino-Japanese conflict, and is apparently a translation of Chinese jiāotŭ (zhèngcè) ‘scorched earth (policy)’.
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Cite this article
ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2006. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2006. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-scorchedearthpolicy.html ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2006. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-scorchedearthpolicy.html |
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scorched earth policy
scorched earth pol·i·cy • n. a military strategy of burning or destroying buildings, crops, or other resources that might be of use to an invading enemy force. ∎ fig. a strategy that involves taking extreme action: a lawyer renowned for his scorched earth policy in divorce cases. |
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Cite this article
"scorched earth policy." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-scorchedearthpolicy.html "scorched earth policy." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-scorchedearthpolicy.html |
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