On October 25, 1938, the Chinese forces defending Wuhan withdrew, and the battle for the city, which had begun in June, came to an end. The campaign was the largest of the war between China and Japan up to that point, with about a million Chinese soldiers engaged against some 350,000 Japanese troops, and it covered a wide area of Hubei, Jiangxi and Anhui. The city fell. The fighting had lasted about four and a half months.
The Japanese had expected to take Wuhan quickly and to force a surrender, and they advanced along the Yangtze and from the north, and they used gas and heavy bombing of the city, and the Chinese armies fought a series of delaying actions and gave ground slowly. The Chinese forces were badly equipped and short of artillery and aircraft, and the cost in dead and wounded was very high on both sides, running to hundreds of thousands. The cost was high. The Japanese also suffered from the length of their supply lines.
The loss of the city did not end the war. The war went on. The Chinese government moved to Chongqing and kept fighting, and the Japanese army found that it could take the main cities and the railways but could not destroy the Chinese forces or control the countryside, and the front settled into a long stalemate that lasted until 1944. The battle is also remembered for the part played by the civilian population and for the damage done to the city of Wuhan.
The date is marked in China as the point at which the war entered its phase of prolonged resistance. The term that was used at the time described a war of attrition in which the Chinese side would trade space for time, and the strategy was set out by the national government after the fall of Nanjing. Wuhan was the largest engagement of that phase.