64088
OSMANU UNIVERSITY UBRARr
Call No.*^ , ^ /^ < - A< *in No. 2
Author
Title
This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below,
THUNDER OUT OF CHINA
THUNDER OUT OF CHINA
For years the authors, as members
of the Chungking bureau of Time,
had a special opportunity to observe
and report, and their deep enthusi-
asm for tje Chinese people has
taken them far outside the ordinary
confines of Far Eastern reporting.
Here are the roots and reasons
for the civil war that has been
gnawing China's vitals ; here is the
record of the United States' un-
*
successful attempt to formulate a
China policy and bring order out of
chaos. Here is an intimate and
warm appraisal of one of the great-
est American generals "Uncle
Joe" Stilwell and a much less
tender estimate of Ambassador
Hurley in action. Here are the
campaigns, in jungle and rice-field
and mountains, which wasted
Japan's strength. Above all, here is
the portrait of 500,000,000 Chinese
people, eager for a new world,
swamped in their government's
bureaucratic weakness, and torn
apart by civil war.
THUNDER OUT OF CHINA
by
THEODORE H. WHITE
and
ANNALEE JACOBY
LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANGZ LTD
1947
To
DAVID H. WHITE
PRINTED IN CHEAT BRITAIN BY PURNBLL AND SONS, LTD. (T,U ( )
PAULTON (SOMSaSXT) AND LONDON
CONTENTS
A Note To the Reader page 6
Introduction 7
Chapter i. Chungking, a Point in Time 13
a. The Peasant 28
3. The Rise of the Kuomintang 40
4. War 53
5. Stalemate 71
6. Campaign in the South Seas 84
7. Government by Trustee 97
8. Chiang K'ai-shek The People's Choice? 116
9. Doomed Men The Chinese Army 128
10. Stilwell'sWar 140
11. The Honan Famine 159
12. Disaster in the East 171
13. The Chinese Communists 188
14. The Stilwell Crisis 202
15. Politics in Yenan 213
1 6. Patrick J. Hurley 228
17. 1945 The Year of the Great Promise 240
1 8. Utopia Stillborn 251
19. Victory and Civil War 259
20. China and the Future 276
21. Tentatively, Then? . . . 286
Index 301
Maps
China (End Paper)
Stilwell's Strategy 15 J
East China Campaign i?4
5
A NOTE TO THE READER
THIS BOOK is the product of two minds, and almost all
the chapters are the result of the closest collaboration between
the two authors. Sometimes only one of us was present to observe
and report the events noted, and in such cases the first person
singular in a few chapters refers to Theodore H. White.
We wish to thank many people for their aid in reading, editing,
and preparing this manuscript for publication. Among those who
have assisted most are Jack Belden, Robert Machol, Margaret
Durdin, Nancy Bean, Carol Whitmore, and Gladys White, who
have helped enormously in weeding out the errors in the book.
Such errors as may remain and the conclusions and opinions
expressed here are, however, our responsibility.
We wish further to acknowledge our thanks to Time In-
corporated for permission to reproduce material and portions of
dispatches that we sent to them in our capacity as staff cor-
respondents. The opinions and conclusions of this book are,
however, the opinions and conclusions of the two authors and in
no sense reflect the policy or opinions of Time Incorporated. We
also thank the Associated Press for permission to reproduce its first
dispatch announcing the attack on Pearl Harbour.
The maps for this book have been graciously prepared by Frank
Stockman, Anthony Sodaro, and Allan McNab.
T. H.W. and A.].
August 15, 1946
INTRODUCTION
No LAST SHOT was fired in this war; there was no last
stand, no last day dividing peace from strife. Half a dozen radio
stations scattered about the face of the globe crackled sparks of
electricity from capital to capital and into millions of humble
homes; peace came through the air and was simultaneous over all
the face of the earth. The great ceremony on the battleship
Missouri in Tokyo Bay was anticlimax, an obsolete rite performed
with primitive ceremony for a peace that had not come and a war
that had not ended.
The greatest fleet in the world lay amidst the greatest ruins in
the world under a dark and cheerless canopy of clouds. The U.S.S.
Iowa was on one side of the Missouri^ the U.S.S. South Dakota on
the other. A tattered flag with thirty-one stars was hung on one
of the turrets 6f the battleship the flag of the infant republic,
which Commodore Perry brought with him to the same bay
almost a hundred years before. Above the mainmast fluttered
the battle flag of the Union of today. The deck was crowded with
the apostles of the American genius the technicians. There were
technicians of heavy bombardment, technicians of tactical
bombardment, technicians of amphibious landings, technicians
of carrier-borne war. These men were artists at the craft of
slaughter, trained to perfection by four years of war. The ship
itself was the apotheosis of all American skills, from the cobweb
of radar at the foretop above the grey slabs of armour, carefully
compounded of secret and mysterious alloys, below. It was an
American show. There were a Russian with a red band about his
cap and a Tass newsreel man who insisted on crawling in among
the main actors to get his shots; there was a Canadian general
who flubbed his part and signed on the wrong line; there was a
carefully tailored Chinese general who had spent the war in
Chungking, where he disposed tired divisions on paper about a
continental map. These too were technicians, but they were lost
in the serried ranks of American khaki and white. The victory
in the Pacific had been a severely technical victory, and, as
befitted the world's greatest masters of technique, we overawed
all others.
The Japanese supplied the one touch of humanity. Haifa dozen
Japanese were piped over the side of the Missouri, but for the
purposes of history and in every man's memory there were only
two the general, Umezu, and the statesman, Shigemitsu. Umezu
was dressed in parade uniform, all his ribbons glistening, his eyes
blank, but you could see the brown pockmarks on his cheeks
swelling and falling in emotion. Shigemitsu was dressed in a tall
silk hat and a formal morning coat as if he were attending a
wedding or a funeral. He had a wooden leg, and he limped along
the deck; when he began to clamber to the veranda deck where
the peace was to be signed, he clutched the ropes and struggled
up with infinite pain and discomfort. With savage satisfaction
everyone watched Shigemitsu struggling up the steps; no
American offered a hand to help the crippled old man.
Shigemitsu and Umezu were brought forward, and after a few
carefully chosen words beautifully spoken by General Mac Arthur,
they signed their names to a document marking an end to the
Japanese Empire. Now Shigemitsu and Umezu were both
technicians; if anyone had asked them why they had lost, why
they were being forced to sign an end to all their world, they
would have advanced a dozen cogent reasons wrapped up in
figures on tonnages, metals, guns, divisions, alliances, and ill-
timed decisions. All their reasons would have been valid to
specialists. Probably neither Shigemitsu nor Umezu ever enter-
tained for a moment the thought that they might have lost because
what they had conceived was so hideously wicked that it generated
its own defeat. When they had signed, the generals and admirals
of all the other nations put their signatures to the document, and
peace, if peace it was, had come.
This victory had been an American victory, one achieved by an
overwhelming weight of metal, guns, and superior technique,
which had crushed Japan utterly and completely. But there was
no indication at the moment of victory on the Missouri, or in the
days of defeat before victory, or in the days of exuberance after
it, that America understood the war she had been fighting in the
Pacific. We had been threatened out of the darkness of the Orient;
we had recognized the threat as something indescribably malevo-
lent and had fashioned a steamroller that crushed it to extinction.
But we had never stopped to inquire from what sources the threat
had been generated.
America's war had cut blindly across the course of the greatest
revolution in the history of mankind, the revolution of Asia. We
had temporarily lanced one of the pressure heads and released
some of the tension by an enormous letting of blood. But the basic
tensions and underlying pressures were still there, accumulating
for new crises. Peace did not follow victory. All through Asia
men continued to kill each other; they continue to do so today and
will be doing so for a long time to come.
In Asia there are over a billion people who are tired of the world
as it is ; they live literally in such terrible bondage that they have
nothing to lose but their chains. They are so cramped by ignorance
and poverty that to write down a description of their daily life
would make an American reader disbelieve the printed word. In
India a human being has an average life expectancy of twenty-
seven years. In China half the people die before they reach the age
of thirty. Everywhere in Asia life is infused with a few terrible
certainties hunger, indignity, and violence. In war and peace,
in famine and in glut, a dead human body is a common sight on
open highway or city street. In Shanghai collecting the lifeless
bodies of child labourers at factory gates in the morning is a
routine affair. The beating, whipping, torture, and humiliation
of the villagers of Asia by officials and gendarmes is part of the
substance of government authority. These people live by the sweat
of their brow; they live on what they can scratch out of exhausted
soils by the most primitive methods with the most savage invest-
ment of their sinew and strength. When the weather turns against
them, nothing can save them from death by hunger. Less than a
thousand years ago Europe lived this way; then Europe revolted
against the old system in a series of bloody wars that lifted it
generation by generation to what we regard as civilization. The
people of Asia are now going through the same process.
History books devote too much of their attention to the study of
successful revolutions. When huge masses of people erupt out of
misery, in bloodshed and violence, to make their lives better, they
are usually greeted by the horror and vituperation of con-
temporary historians. Only time makes such uprisings respectable.
When uprisings fail and a superficial stability is re-established, the
stability is regarded as something fine and gratifying. Beneath
such stability, however, the miseries, tensions, pressures, and fears
of the abortive revolution continue, growing inward in a tortured
pattern of violence. The people's suppressed passions are seduced
by false slogans and phrases, and they are easily led into disastrous
adventures against the peace of the entire world. This is what
happened in Japan.
The war we fought against Japan was a war against the end
result of a revolution that had failed. A hundred years ago the
impact of the West on China and Japan started the wheels of
revolution turning. For generations it was customary to think that
Japan had made a successful transition into the modern world and
that China had failed. That was wrong; Japan's revolution failed
within fifteen years of Perry's arrival in Tokyo Bay. It was seized
by the feudal, reactionary-minded leaders of Japan's Middle Ages,
and its energies were twisted into the structure of the Japanese
Empire as we knew it in 1941 a society that could not solve its
own, problems except by aggression against the world, an aggres-
sion in which it was doomed. Out of the misery latent in the
villages of Japan and the regimentation of her workers, the leaders
of Japan bred disaster for everyone. The very chaos that has
persisted in China for a hundred years has proved that the revolu-
tionary surge of the Chinese people against their ancient un-
happiness is too strong for any grouf) to control and distort.
The war Japan fought against us was one in which the Japanese
were beaten from the outset. They were led by military technicians
who had only a jungle understanding of politics; they were
defeated by superior military technicians who had as little
understanding of politics but incomparably greater treasure in
steel and science. By defeating Japan, however, we did not make
peace. The same revolutionary forces that miscarried in Japan are
still operating everywhere else in Asia. Throughout that continent
men are still trying to free themselves from their past of hunger
and suffering.
The forces of change are working more critically and more ex-
plosively in China than anywhere else on the entire continent. The
peace of Asia and our own future security depend on our under-
standing how powerful these forces are, what creates them, and
what holds them back. Except for General Joseph Stilwell, no
Allied military commander seems to have understood that this
was the fundamental problem of the war in the Orient. Stilwell
had no ideology but he understood that in fighting the war we
were outlining the peace at the same time. He understood that
10
both victory and peace rested on the measure with which the
strength of the people could be freed from feudal restraints. He
arrived at his policy empirically by exposure to Chinese life in the
field; it was not supported by the American government, and he
was relieved of command; but his relief from command is a mark
of greater glory than any he won on the field of battle.
This book is a partial story of the China war; only a Chinese
can write the true history of his people. The story of the China war
is the story of the tragedy of Chiang K'ai-shek, a man who mis-
understood the war as badly as the Japanese or the Allied
technicians of victory. Chiang could not understand the re-
volution whose creature he was except as something fearful and
terrible that had to be crushed. He had every favouring grace on
his side the support of powerful allies, the cause of justice, and in
the beginning the whole hearted and enthusiastic support of all his
people. The people whom he led felt instinctively that this war
against Japan was a war against the entire rotten fabric of time-
worn misery. When Chiang tried to fight the Japanese and
preserve the old fabric at the same time, he was not only unable
to defeat the Japanese but powerless to preserve his own authority.
His historic enemies, the Communists, grew from an army of
85,000 to an army of a million, from the governors of 1,500,000
peasants to the masters of 90,000,000. The Communists used no
magic; they knew the changes the people wanted, and they
sponsored these changes. Both parties lied, cheated, and broke
agreements ; but the Communists had the people with them, and
with the people they made their own new justice. When the
might of American technique moved to support Chiang K'ai-shek
in the final year of the war, not even America could recapture
for him the power that had been his in the first glorious year of
the war of national resistance.
ii
CHAPTER I
CHUNGKING, A POINT IN TIME
CHUNGKING, CHINA'S WARTIME capital, is marked on
no man's map. The place labelled Chungking is a sleepy town
perched on a cliff that rises through the mists above the Yangtze
River to the sky; so long as the waters of the Yangtze flow down
to the Pacific, that river town will remain. The Chungking of
history was a point in time, a temporal bivouac with an extra-
geographical meaning, like Munich or Versailles. It was an
episode shared by hundreds of thousands of people who had
gathered in the shadow of its walls out of a faith in China's
greatness and an overwhelming passion to hold the land against
the Japanese. Men great and small, noble and corrupt, brave and
cowardly, convened there for a brief moment; they are all gone
home now. London, Paris, Moscow, and Washington are great
cities still, centres of command and decision; the same great names
live on in them, the s,ame friends meet at old familiar rendezvous.
But Chungking was a function of war alone, a point in time ; it is
dead, and the great hopes and lofty promises with which it once
kindled all China are dead with it.
History made Chungking the capital of China at war because
by tradition, logic, and compulsion there was no other choice.
For centuries it had been famous as the key city of the key province
of the hinterland. The Yangtze, the great river of China, is
pinched almost in two by the narrow rock gorges that separate
central China from the interior; Chungking is the first large city
above the gorges, a bastion that frowns on any attempt to force
entrance into the west by river. Commercially and politically it
dominates the province of Szechwan, which in turn dominates
all western China. Szechwan Four Rivers is a huge triangle of
land, larger in area and population than France or Britain. It has
lived behind its forbidding mountain barriers as a law unto itself
throughout Chinese history. In winter the province is moist and
chilly, in summer warm and humid. Some of the richest mineral
resources and some of the most fertile land in China lie within
its mountains. Everything grows in Szechwan and grows well
sugar, wheat, rice, oranges, azaleas, poppies, vegetables. The
Chinese have a saying that whatever grows anywhere in China
grows better in Szechwan.
Its remoteness and self-sufficiency set the province apart from
the main stream of national events. It figures in legend and
history as a mystic land far back of beyond. Actually Szechwan
fulfilled by its backwardness its most important function; its
people were usually the last in Chinese history to give allegiance
to each new dynasty, the hardest to administer from Peking, the
reservoir of strength in successive revolts against alien rule, an
anchor against disaster. It was, for example, from Szechwan that
the republican revolution against the Manchus burst into central
China in 1911, caught the attention of the world, and touched
off the generation of change out of which modern China was born.
But afterwards Szechwan, unnoticed, went its own way for twenty-
five long years; it did not pursue the revolution but dissolved into
anarchy. The troops of its war lords, trailing disease and terror
from valley to valley, laid it waste. As the old system of govern-
ment withered away, the war lords assumed complete sway over
the lives of the peasants and fought among themselves wars that
were as comic and barbarous as any ever recorded. The war lords
were colourful figures; they lived joyfully with many concubines
in great mansions, waxed fat on- the opium trade, extorted taxes
from the peasantry sometimes fifty years in advance, wrung land
from the original owners to add to their own estates. In the process
they became great manorial barons, full of wealth and pride.
By the middle 1930*8 a master war lord named Liu Hsiang had
subjugated the others by a combination of guile and force, much
as Chiang K'ai-shek had done in unifying the rest of China; when
the Japanese struck in 1937, Szechwan was knit together by a
network of semi-feudal alliances securely controlled from
Chungking by General Liu. Within this war-lord federation
secret societies flourished along the river valleys. The cities reeked
of opium; cholera, dysentery, syphilis, and trachoma rotted the
health of the people. Industry was almost non-existent, education
was primitive; two so-called colleges and one first-class mission
university alone served the province's 50,000,000 people. The
peasants of western China worked their fields as their fathers and
forefathers had done before them; their horizons reached only as
far as the next market town. When Japan attacked China, the
war lords of Szechwan gave full allegiance to Chiang K'ai-shek,
14
but to their curious way of thinking this effected merely an
alliance between themselves and Chiang against the Japanese,
rather than an integration and subordination of their indepen-
dence to anyone else's command. When the Japanese drove inland,
the province accepted the new refugees as exiles and regarded
the new national capital, in Chungking, as a guest government.
The city taken over by the Central Government as its house of
exile was known even in China as a uniquely unpleasant place.
For six months of the year a pall of fog and rain overhangs it and
coats its alleys with slime. Chungking stands on a tongue of land
licking out into the junction of the Yangtze and Chialing Rivers;
the water level swells 60 to 90 feet during flood seasons and yearly
wipes out the hopeful fringe of shacks that mushroom along the
river's edge. Chungking grew up in service to an economy of
thousands of peasant villages ; it bought their rice, meat, and silk
and provided them with thread, cloth, and kerosene. It was a
rural city, and its sounds and smells were those of a great feudal
village. The wall of old Chungking encircles the peninsula from
its tip at the river junction to the crest of the spiny ridge where the
city opens out into the backland. The wall was built, the natives
say, about five centuries ago; it stands almost intact today, its
nine great gates still channelling traffic. When the bombings of
Chungking began in 1 939, one of the gates was still barred every
evening by the night watchman. Eight of the nine gates opened
out on the cliffs overlooking the river, but the ninth gave entrance
by land ; this was the Tung Yuan Men, the Gate Connecting with
Distant Places. The old imperial road used to leave Chungking
through the Tung Yuan Men and follow the valleys to Chengtu;
thence it lifted over the northern mountains to Sian and continued
deviously to Peking. Now the main motor road to western China
pierces the walls a hundred yards from Tung Yuan Men, but the
beggars still cluster by the shadowy old archway, and the peddlers
sell shoelaces and tangerines by its worn steps.
Almost all there was of Chungking before the war lay within
the wall. Two hundred thousand people cramped themselves into
this meagre area. The few rich men in the community, war lords,
great bankers, and rich landlords, had private and palatial homes
several miles out of town. An air of timelessness brooded over the
wall. The encroachment of the twentieth century was only a few
decades old when the war against Japan began. The first rickshas
had appeared only in 1927; they were a novelty, and so were the
15
two motor roads. A public telephone system came in 1931, a new
water system in 1932, and twenty-four-hour electric service in
1935. The first motor vessel had forced its way up the Yangtze at
the beginning of the century; few followed it.
A thousand Chungking alleyways darted off down the slopes
of the hills from the two main roads ; they twisted and tumbled
over steps that had been polished smooth by the tramp of
centuries of padding straw-sandalled feet. The native Szechwanese
lived in these alleys as they had for centuries ; they held aloof from
the worldly downriver Chinese and were suspicious of them. The
alleys were tiny, cut with dark slantwise shadows; on foggy days
they were tunnels through the greyness, and some were so narrow
that a passerby would catch the drip from the eaves on both sides
with his umbrella. Coolies with buckets of water staggered up the
slime-encrusted steps to the side alleys that the new water mains
could not reach; sewage and garbage were emptied into the same
stream from which drinking water was taken. Oil lamps and
candles burned in homes at night. When they fell ill, some of the
people used the three excellent mission clinics or the hospital,
but more of them went to herb doctors who compounded cures for
them by esoteric recipes calling for everything from crystals of musk
to children's urine. They guarded against infection by tying a live
cock to the chest of a corpse to keep away spirits. They wore greyed
towels about their heads, turban fashion, as the relic of forgotten
mourning for a folk-hero dead sixteen centuries ago. The women
nursed their babies in the open streets as they chatted with their
neighbours; they would hold a child over the gutter to relieve
himself.
The old streets were full of fine ancient noises squealing pigs,
bawling babies, squawking hens, gossiping women, yelling men,
and the eternal singsong chant of coolies carrying their burdens
up from the cargo boats at the river's edge to the level of the city
itself. The cotton-yardage salesman, laden with wares, advertised
them by clacking a rhythmic beat on a block of wood as he
walked. The notions dealer carried his goods in a square box on
his back and enumerated them loudly. The night-soil collector
had a chant all his own. So did the man selling brassware cats'
bells, knives, toothpicks, ear-cleaners, all dangling from a long
pole. Shops that refinished cotton quilts provided a sort of bass
violin accompaniment as the workers strummed on vibrating thongs
that twanged into the cotton, hummed over it, and twanged again.
16
About this old city in 1939 grew the new wartime capital.
Chiang had chosen Chungking for the same geographical reasons
that had made it important to every conqueror. Here all the
communications of western China gather to a focus. Roads run to
the southeast, Yunnan, Chengtu, and the north. The rivers all
join in Chungking before they plunge on into the gorges. From
Chungking, Chiang could reach more of his fronts with supplies
and reinforcements in less time than from any other city that was
left to him. Moreover, Chungking had other advantages its
famous winter fog that shrouded the city from Japanese bombers
for six months of the year, its cliffs" from which were carved the
world's most impregnable air-raid shelters.
All through the fall of 1938 and the spring of 1939, driven in
flight by the Japanese, government personnel came pouring in,
ragtag, bobtail, and aristocracy. Government offices were
migrating en masse. They came by bus and sedan, by truck and
ricksha, by boat and on foot. Peddlers, shopkeepers, politicians,
all ended their march in the walled city. The population of 200,000
more than doubled in a few months; within six months after the
fall of Hankow in 1938 it was nudging the million mark. The old
town burst at the seams. A dizzy spirit of exhilaration coursed
through its lanes and alleys. It was as if a county seat of Kentucky
mountaineers had suddenly been called on to play host to all the
most feverishly dynamic New Yorkers, Texans, and Californians.
New buildings spread like fungus. Szechwan had no steel, so
bamboo was sunk for corner poles; few nails, so bamboo strips
were tied for joining; little wood, so bamboo was split and inter-
laced for walls. Then the ramshackle boxes were coated thick with
mud and roofed with thatch or tile. And in these huts lived the
believers in Free China officials who could have returned to
collaboration and comfort, but who stayed on in Chungking
because their country needed them. The town filled with new
stores and signboards. Each store proclaimed its origin: Nanking
Hat Shop, Hankow Dry Cleaners, Hsuchow Candy Store, and
Shanghai Garage and Motor Repair Works almost by the dozen.
Refugees had their own food tastes, which Szechwanese
restaurants could not satisfy, and restaurants, proclaiming each
its speciality, followed the refugees up from the coast. In squalid,
hastily built sheds you could buy Fukienese-style fish food,
Cantonese delicacies, peppery Hunanese chicken, flaky Peking
duck. By the middle years of the war, when a luxury group had
Be 17
grown up in Chungking, its tables were almost as good as those
of imperial Peking for those who had the price. All the dialects
of China mixed together in Chungking in a weird, happy caco-
phony of snarls, burrs, drawls, and staccatos. A foreigner who
asked direction in halting Mandarin dialect was likely to be
answered by a Cantonese who spoke Mandarin even worse.
Officials in government bureaux found that it was easier to deal
with some of their fellows in writing and that their Szechwanese
messenger boys could scarcely understand them.
Chungking seethed and spread. It spilled out of the city wall
and reached beyond the suburbs to engulf rice paddies and fields.
The government gave the streets new names Road of the
National Republic; Road of People's Livelihood; First, Second,
and Third Middle Roads and all these high-sounding names
appeared on official stationery and invitations. The ricksha men
knew nothing of them, however, and when you received an in-
vitation, you had to translate quickly back to the old Szechwanese
to let your puller know that you wanted the cliff of the Merciful
Buddha, the slope of Seven Stars, or just the corner of Shansi
and White Elephant Streets.
Chungking, the refugees and exiles decided almost instantly,
was a horrid place, and one of the worst things about it was the
people. The downriver folk who had come up the Yangtze with
their government regarded the Szechwanese as a curious species
of second-grade inhabitant. It was true that rich Chungking
banking families like the Young brothers belonged to the aristo-
cracy of wealth that made the rich of all China one family. But
the average Szechwanese, with his dirty white turban, his whining
singsong voice, his languid manners, seemed backward even to
the most backward of coastal Chinese, who, after all, had seen
street cars. The natives, on their side, regarded the downriver
people as interlopers and foreigners, to be mulcted, squeezed,
and sneered at; they were irritated by the crowding and the
rising prices. Chungking had been little touched by Western
ways; it clung to the old customs; marriages were still arranged
by parents, and husband and wife met on their wedding day for
the first time. Chungking disapproved of the lipstick on down-
river girls; it disliked their frizzled hair; it was shocked by boys
and girls eating together in public restaurants.
Perhaps the newcomers found the weather even more irritating
than the people. There were only two seasons in Chungking, both
18
bad. From early fall to late spring the fogs and rains made a
dripping canopy over the city; damp and cold reigned in every
home. The slime in the street was inches thick, and people carried
the slippery mud with them as they went from bedroom to council
chamber and back. There was no escaping the chilly moisture
except by visiting the handful of people who lived in modern
homes in which coal was burned. The crowded, huddled refugee
population, cramped together in their jerry-built shacks, could
only warm their fingers over expensive charcoal pots or go to bed
early. Everyone shivered until summer came; then the heat
settled down, and the sun glared. Dust coated the city almost as
thickly as mud during the wintertime. Moisture remained in the
air, perspiration dripped, and prickly heat ravaged the skin. Every
errand became an expedition, each expedition an ordeal. Swarms
of bugs emerged; small green ones swam on drinking water and
spiders four inches across crawled on the walls. The famous
Chungking mosquitoes came, and Americans claimed the mos-
quitoes worked in threes; two lifted the mosquito net, while the
third zoomed in for the kill. Meat spoiled ; there was never enough
water for washing; dysentery spread and could not be evaded.
Under the fog and within the heat there unrolled during the six
years of war an almost fantastic pageant of life. All the varying
layers of Chinese society in all their stages of development blended
together in a city whose essential personality was compounded in
equal parts of exasperation, madness, and charm. TheShanghai and
Hongkong women sneaked away to get bootleg permanent waves,
which the government declared illegal; the native boatmen and
carriers sneaked away to get bootleg opium, which the government
likewisedeclaredillegal.Thefew automobiles of the rich, screeching
through the streets, dodged trussed pigs, squeaking barrows,
battered rickshas. Parades adorned with green leaves besought the
gods for rain in time of drought; traditional marriage processions
merrily paraded behind red-draped bridal chairs under archways
and banners that called on the public to celebrate National Aviation
Day. The city was full of drifting odours, both nauseous and
fragrant. Chestnuts roasted over charcoal and gravel, and the winds
drew faint, sweet scents out of herb shops. In summer the over-
powering stench of human filth in the open gutters blended with the
intoxicating aroma of Chinese foods frying in deep fat with spices.
The one quality that foreigners, refugees, and Szechwanese
shared was strangeness. Refugees from the coast were strangers
both in time and space. Retreating across the face of their country,
they had receded at each remove one step closer to the ancient
origins of the nation out of which they had so lately lifted them-
selves ; when they arrived at Chungking, they were in feudal times.
The natives of Chungking were strangers in time alone; the new
world had moved in on them, and they could not understand it.
On the night of the first major bombing raid in Chungking an
eclipse of the moon occurred over Szechwan. According to the
folklore of China a lunar eclipse happens when the giant dog of
heaven tries to devour the moon. The dog can be prevented from
swallowing the moon only by beating great bronze gongs to
frighten him from his celestial meal. All through the night, between
the raids of the third and fourth of May, the beating of the gongs
that were rescuing the moon echoed within the city wall, mingling
with the sound of fire and the many-tongued sorrow of the stricken.
The bombings were what made Chungking great and fused all
the jagged groups of men and women into a single community.
Chungking was a defenceless city. Its anti-aircraft guns were
almost useless; the rifling on their old barrels had worn smooth
by the time the Japanese began their major assault on the city.
It had no radar nor any air force worthy of the name. Its people
were huddled dangerously close; its buildings were tinder, its
firefighting equipment and water supply negligible. It could op-
pose the strength of the Japanese with only three resources : the
magnificent caves in the rock cliffs on which the city rested, the
almost fantastic air-raid precaution system that Chinese ingenuity
so quickly contrived, and the indomitable will of the people.
The bombings began in May 1939. The Japanese had waited
for months after the collapse of Hankow in the fall of 1938. They
had made an offer of peace on slave's terms to Chiang K'ai-shek,
and he had rejected it. Every major city was in the hands of the
invader, and the shattered Chinese armies were sprawled help-
lessly along a mountain line from Mongolia to Canton. Chinese
resistance, the Japanese felt, was broken; it remained only to
scourge the still stubborn spirit of the Chinese government with
flame to bring an acknowledgment of defeat. This task the Japan-
ese handed over to their air force. When the winter fogs lifted
from about Chungking at the end of April, the Japanese planes
took over. Two raids ushered in the new era, one hard on the
heels of the other. The first bombing, which took place on May 3,
20
1939, did little damage, the bombs falling for the most part into
the waters of the Yangtze. The second raid the next day was a
disaster. The bombers came from the north, out of the dusk, in
serene, unbroken line-abreast formation, wing tip to wing tip,
and laced their pattern through the very heart of the old city.
The ineffectual anti-aircraft missiles traced their trajectories
through the glowing sky to end in pink bursts that were always
short, always behind the bomber formation.
Terror hit Chungking with all the impact of the bombs. Panic
came from the known the dead, the bleeding, the hundreds of
thousands who could not crowd into a shelter. Even more it came
from the unknown the droning planes from a new age, for which
superstition had no explanation and no remedy. Japanese in-
cendiaries started a dozen small fires, which within an hour or two
had met in several distinct patches of creeping destruction that
were eating out the ancient slums forever. Within the back alleys,
the lanes, and the twisting byways of the city thousands of men
and women were being roasted to death ; nothing could save them.
The curious patterns of ancient temples, lit from behind by an
unreal sea of red flame, were outlined against the night. All the
compound noises of a great fire were intensified by the setting of
the old walled city there were the whistling and crackling of
timbers, the screaming of people, and the intermittent popping of
bamboo joints as the lath-and-bamboo slums dissolved in the heat.
People poured down the one main street that led out of the old
wall to the suburbs. Panic was transmitted by a mass of wordless
phenomena by taut faces in the half-light, by the crush of bodies,
by babies crying, by women keening, by men sitting on kerbs and
rocking back and forth without a sound. The planes had gone;
these people were fleeing from a modern world, more terrifying
than anything they could comprehend. They were carrying with
them in the panic of the moment a curious salvage; some had live
chickens, others household goods, mattresses, teakettles, some-
times the corpses of relatives. The cavalcade padded swiftly into
the darkness of the fields without a break in the shuffling of feet
in the dust. Here and there a sedan chair, a ricksha, an army
truck, or a limousine broke into the procession, which would let it
pass, then silently close and trudge swiftly on.
At first Chungking had no answer for the bombs. A people who
prayed for rain, who carved squat, familiar household gods and
21
placated them with everyday necessities, could not cope with the
idea of engined monsters dropping death from overhead. If the
Japanese had followed up with a few more equally savage raids,
Chungking might have broken. The government toyed for a few
days with the idea of retreating farther into the Szechwanese
hinterland. The streets were barren of people for a week. Rubble
lay strewn along the highways. But the Japanese did not come.
For some unknown reason it was almost a month before they
returned, and by that time Chungking had caught its second wind,
though there was panic again and again in the next few weeks.
A few drifters in the streets would be startled and would run at
the imagined sound of an air-raid siren; others would follow, till
hundreds of people were racing for the dugouts in terror, although
there was not an enemy plane within hundreds of miles. By mid-
summer even these fleeting false panics had passed, and Chung-
king had settled into the mould of endurance that was to carry it
through three summers of bombings. The people had two things
to understand and trtfst a magnificent air-raid warning system
and the dugouts.
The warning system was a monumental elaboration of Chinese
ingenuity, decked out with a few tricks contributed by America's
technician of the air, Clare Chennault, senior aeronautical adviser
to the Chinese government all through the war. It was arranged
to notify Chungking when planes were coming, whether they were
scouts or bombers, and how much time there would be before
they arrived. The main bombing base for the Japanese was in
Hankow; Chinese spies in Hankow would watch the Japanese
take off, then splice into the city telephone system to report the
news to Chinese radios hidden in the city. These radios would
flash the news from Hankow to the Chinese network all about the
enemy lines, and almost before the enemy planes were at cruising
altitude, Chungking would know that they were on their way.
The Chinese had no radar net to strain the altitude, direction, and
magnitude of the attacking body from the skies, but they had
literally thousands of two-man teams watching the skies all over
the rim of Free China.
In the beginning Chungking""relied on a simple siren system,
with a warning alert when planes crossed the downriver border of
the province; later all sorts of refinements were added. The
government erected towering gallowslike poles on all the highest
hills in the city and about its mountainous rim. An enormous
22
paper lantern was hung on each pole when the first siren sounded ;
this meant that planes were approaching, an hour away. Two red
lanterns meant that the enemy was coming close; when both
were suddenly dropped, it meant, " Get inside the dugout; they're
here." A long green paper stocking was the all-clear signal; at
night the lanterns were lighted. The city fathers wasted no time
on dimouts, brownouts, or blackouts; when the Japanese were
within 50 miles, the central switch at the power house was pulled,
and the city went dead lights, radios, telephones, machinery. If
a gendarme saw a lighted window, a cigarette, or a glowing flash-
light during a raid, he simply shot at it.
The warning net was designed to fit into a pattern of precautions
based on the Chungking system of dugouts. Chungking rests on
steep rocky cliffs. These cliffs were bored through with channels,
passageways, and caverns, some of them a mile and a half long.
Blasting dugouts became one of the city's basic trades. All winter
long the blasters chanted as they swung their mallets in rhythm
against the walls of rock; the booming of black powder in the
caves was the constant undertone of city noise. The crushed rock
was used to surface new roads. Each government bureau had a
dugout close at hand, and bureaus competed to build the biggest
and driest shelter. Each member of each department had a ticket
that permitted his wife, children, mother, father, and assorted
other relatives to share his shelter. The people had faith in their
dugouts. Over the years of bombing not more than two or three
of the deep-dug caves collapsed, and with the lantern-and-siren
system there was always enough time to get to shelter and settle
down before danger was at hand.
Around this system Chungking made a new life. More than
ever it was necessary to live where you worked; a sudden raid
made movement impossible. Offices built dormitories ; they held
most of the workers and their families as well. A visitor to the
Central Broadcasting System stooped under lines of wet laundry
just inside the impressive entrance; babies gurgled and played on
the steps of imposing executive offices. Everything, office files and
workers' clothing, was kept packed so that it could be whisked
to the dugout when the siren sounded. The sky set the day's plans.
Long errands were saved for a cloudy day. When the sun promised
to shine, people got up before daybreak for their expeditions, so as
to avoid being caught away from their dugout by a raid. The mass
reaction of Chungking, of its officials and its citizens, was superb;
23
they simply accepted the fact that on any sunlit day during the
summer months they might be killed. All were thirsty, all were
sleepless, all walked in the dust, all crouched in caves. They began
to be proud of themselves, and they began to admire those about
them who were suffering the same ordeal; Chinese in Western
clothes and Chinese in blue cotton gowns felt that they were the
same flesh and blood.
The government's only resource was its people, and for a brief
period of isolation from outside aid it realized its dependence on
the people and gave them leadership. For the first heroic period in
Chungking leadership was as idealistic and self-sacrificing as the
led. The mayor of Chungking was a chubby American-trained
intellectual named K. C. Wu. His direction of the city's life under
bombardment was magnificent. He dashed about in the open
during raids to direct relief and firefighting with the utmost
personal courage. He was a favourite with the Generalissimo, and
his personal example was a stimulus to all. When the bombers
tore great patches of destruction through the town, K. C. Wu
saw that clean new streets followed the bombers. Wu's later career
was an anticlimax, for he, even more than others, succumbed to
the atmosphere of cynicism and opportunism that conquered the
capital by the end of the war.
From early May to late September, while the heat weighed on
the city like a brazen shell, the Japanese scourged Chunking
with effortless ease. In 1939 they specialized in night raids; in
1940 they came usually by day; by 1941 they had varied their
programme and were coming by both day and night, so that the
dugout population was penned in foul, damp air hour after inter-
minable hour. The water mains were bombed out, the electrical
system shattered, and there were no materials for repair. Almost
nothing could be bought in the shops ; peasants hesitated to carry
their food into a city of death.
Chungking wore its scars as badges of honour. The smashed
shop front, the burned-out acres of devastation, the bamboo-and-
mud squalor of the new housing, were all wounds of war, and
Chungking's visitors were shown the sights as evidence of its
courage. Coolies carried buckets of water from the river banks
miles away, and the -town's best hotel offered a bath consisting of
one inch of water and one inch of mud as its greatest luxury. The
few establishments with modern flush toilets installed wooden
24
tubs, from which a bucket of muddy water could be dipped to
slosh down the drain. The water quota was usually one tin basin-
ful per person per day. You skimmed off bugs in the morning
and worked down in sections from head to foot, and you washed
in the same water at noon and at night; finally, after spitting
toothpaste into it, you emptied it out the front door with relief.
People stank with a ripe goaty odour for lack of baths, but no one
minded; they wore their old clothes week after week, mud- or
sweat-stained, depending on the season. All that remained of the
telephone system was snarled coils of wire in the streets. There
was no light for days on end, for the power lines sustained hit
after hit. Sewage piled up in the gutters and smelled; mosquitoes
bred in the stagnant pools of water deep in the ruins, and malaria
flourished. Dysentery grew worse; so did cholera, rashes, and a
repulsive assortment of internal parasites. The smallest sore
festered and persisted. Rats that lived in the shattered slums grew
fat and loathsome on what they found beneath the debris ; sometimes
they were bold enough to swarm about your ankles as you walked
at night, and the press reported that they killed babies in their cribs.
People who had followed their government up from the coast
found themselves caught between the bombings and the inflation.
They hungered for food, for clothes, for warmth. A family was
lucky to have one room to itself in some shack. Unmarried junior
officials were crammed together in government dormitories, four
or more of them to each small room; they slept on mattresses of
one thin cotton quilt, which barely softened the springs of knotted
cord. Most homes and offices were unheated; officials shivered
in their overcoats all day and used them for bed coverings at night.
Prices rose higher and higher daily, while salaries lagged further
behind. The government saw to it that its servants got several
sacks of rice each month; it granted them a minimum amount of
coarse cloth, cooking oil, salt, and fuel at fixed prices. These
basic things guaranteed existence; the paper-money salary grew
more worthless each passing month, until an entire month's
earnings could be spent on a single evening's party. The govern-
ment gave a certain number of banquets, and these were gay
occasions a time to eat enough.
No one who arrived in Chungking in 1938 or 1939 expected to
stay there for more than a year or two. As time went on, the com-
munity grew together into the greatest mixing of provincial strains
in the history of China. Men who left their wives behind in
Bx 25
Shanghai and Canton either acquired concubines or brought
their wives through the blockade lines to join them. Babies were
born, and their parents bartered the last possessions they had
carried with them for powdered milk and vitamin pills. Families
who had formerly sent their children to the relatively efficient
schools of the coast now watched their education in poorly heated,
overcrowded rabbit warrens; the children were growing up
speaking the slurred, whining dialect of Szechwan, and the
parents' ears winced. Railways and street cars became tales of
magic. Normally the young people who had come with the
government would have met their own kind in their own circles
at the coast, or appropriate marriages would have been arranged
by their parents. Now nature took its way. Men from Peking
married girls of Szechwan; daughters of Shanghai families
married Cantonese. It was a curious mixing. At the war's end
a lovely Cantonese girl who had married a Shanghai boy and who
was being sent to Shanghai by her government department before
her husband could leave said: "He's given me a letter of intro-
duction to his mother. I hear she's old-fashioned; we won't
understand each other I can't speak that dialect."
All the hundreds of thousands who had followed the govern-
ment inland could have bettered themselves by remaining at the
coast and eating the bread of the Japanese. The Japanese and their
puppet Chinese regimes offered salaries two and three times as
large as the Chungking government; they offered all the comforts
of home. And yet not once in all the period of bombings, in the
years when China stood alone without an ally in the world, was
there any talk of quitting among the small officials. The faint-
hearted had deserted the government with Wang Ching-wei, the
chief puppet, before the bombings began; the rest meant to see it
through. In the cabinet and high up in the army generals and
dignitaries occasionally toyed with a Japanese peace offer, but
the basic stock of devotion, discipline, and hope in the lower ranks
of the civil servants was solid as rock.
Frequently officials would be sent on government missions to
Hongkong, the British island, by night plane. The Chinese
National Airline flew over the Japanese lines to Hongkong at
night and landed their passengers at dawn. You could leave the
squalor and filth of Chungking in early evening and six hours
later see Hongkong below you, glowing like a Christmas tree in
the darkness, its paved highways and traffic lights strung out like
36
glittering tinsel all the way to the crest of the island peak. By
morning you would be established in a hotel with clean sheets,
running water, and room service at the end of a phone. Every-
thing that Chungking lacked was in Hongkong and boats ran
from Hongkong to Shanghai and Tientsin and to the families left
behind. Yet even in the days when victory seemed a myth and
China stood alone, the men who flew to Hongkong returned to
take up the burden of resistance with their government.
Looking back on Chungking across the years that succeeded
Pearl Harbour, it seems strange now to speak of it in such terms
of enthusiasm. By the end of the war it had become a city of un-
bridled cynicism, corrupt to the core. But the early Chungking,
under the bombings, was more than a legend that foreign corre-
spondents told the world. The foreigners who lived with the
Chinese were caught up in the spirit of the place and swept away
by it. From them the illusion of a great and vibrant China made
its way across the world, and by the time Pearl Harbour imposed
new standards of restraint and censorship, the picture was fully
established, and it was difficult to write of the changes that were
falsifying it. Towards the end of the war, when censorship was
lifted and a more truthful view of Chinese politics began to be
given the American people, the facts were so at variance with the
illusion generated out of Chungking's early ordeal that the out-
side world came to believe that the city's spirit had always, even
in the beginning, been a propagandist's lie. Yet between 1939 and
1941 Chungking throbbed with the strength of a nation at war.
It was easy then for a hurried traveller to make the mistake of
believing that the city itself was strong and that strength ran out
from it and energized the countryside. The contrary was true. The
strength of China lay in the countryside, in the power and energy
of hundreds of millions of peasants; it was their will that infused
Chungking with strength. Chungking alone was nothing; the real
answers to the war lay in the myriad villages that covered the land.
The old spirit in Chungking lasted until the bombings ended,
until Pearl Harbour. When danger passed, the spirit died.
Only once again and briefly did it return to hover over Chung-
king's tumbling hills. It was after V-J day, and the city was strik-
ing its tents. People were packing bags and household goods;
thousands were preparing for the trek that was to take them home in
victory over the roads they had travelled as exiles six years before.
27
High above the topmost hill in Chungking, which overlooks the
spectacular valley of the Chialing River, is a patch of grassy land.
From the summit of the hill you can see both the winding course
of the river and the spiralling chains of light that twist about
Chungking's hills at night. For a few days after the victory a full
moon glowed in the sky. If you had climbed to the top of the hill
during the moon's week of radiance, you would have seen a sad
and inspiring sight. Sitting quietly on the hilltop were scattered
little groups of people. They were utterly silent, looking down on
the moon-filled valley and the silver river; they had come to bid
farewell to a war and a city and a point in time.
CHAPTER 2
THE PEASANT
THE CHINESE WHO fought this war were peasants born
in the Middle Ages to die in the twentieth century.
The strength of Chungking and its government came from the
villages in which these peasants lived and from their ancient way
of life a way that Westerners cast off four or five hundred years
ago in an age of violence almost as terrifying as the present. In
our folk memories now we recall those times as a period of
romance; we have thrust away into the dark corners of our minds
the barbarous substance that underlay the feudal tinsel.
This civilization of our past, like the civilization of China in our
own times, rested on the effective enslavement of the common
man. He was chained to his land and ensared in a net of social
convention that made him prey to superstition, pestilence, and
the mercy of his overlords. He shivered in winter, hungered in
famine, often died of the simple hardship of his daily life before
he reached maturity. On this base rested the thinnest conceivable
superstructure of a leisure class that profited by the peasants' toil
and preserved for posterity the learning and graces it had inherited
from antiquity. The members of this class could bring themselves
by no stretch of their imagination to picture the toiling brutes
beneath them as men like themselves with inalienable human dig-
nities and sensitiveness. When the Western world revolted against
this system, it did so in a series of murderous wars that cul-
minated in the French Revolution. We revere the memory of that
revolution, but we regard such uprisings in our own time with
horror and loathing. Nevertheless a revolution of this kind is now
seething in molten fury throughout Asia. And the very centre
of the upheaval lies in the villages of China.
Eighty per cent of China's four hundred and more millions live
in villages. Almost all of these people live by working the soil; the
most important single fact about China is that it is a land of
peasants, a nation of toiling, weather-worn men and women who
work in the fields each day from dawn to dusk, who hunger for
the land and love the land, and for whom all the meaning of life
lies in their relationship to the land. The great cities of China-
linked by a web of modern communications to each other and the
Western world are excrescences only recently thrown up by the
impact of the twentieth century. Their civilization is alien to
China ; their inhabitants are drawn from the fields, their thoughts
still conditioned by the village over which the skyscrapers and
factories throw their shadow.
The village is a cluster of adobe huts and shelters. If it is a large
village, there is a wall of mud and rubble round it; a small village
consists of ten or twelve houses clustered close to each other for
protection. In a prosperous village the walls of the adobe huts are
whitewashed, and green trees shade the larger houses; a poor vil-
lage and most of them are poor is a mass of crumbling
weathered yellows and browns. The homes have no ceilings but
the raftered roofs; they have no floors but the beaten earth. Their
windows are made of greased paper, admitting so little light that
the inner recesses are always dim. In his house the peasant stores
his grain; in it he keeps his animals at night; in it is the ancestral
shrine that he venerates. By day the street is empty of men pigs
wallow in it, chickens cackle in the alleyways, babies run bare-
bottomed in the sun, mothers with full brown breasts suckle
infants in doorways. At dusk the men return from the fields, and
all over China at the same hour the villages are covered with a
blue haze of smoke that curls from each homestead as the evening
meal is cooked. At the same moment in every village, timed only
to the setting of the sun, the same spiralling wisps of smoke go
up from the houses to the sky. In the larger villages yellow light
may gleam for a few hours from the doorways of the more com-
fortable, who can afford oil for illumination; but in the smaller
villages the smoke fades away into the dark, and when night is
20
coine, the village sleeps, with no point of light to break its
shadows.
Men and women come together in the village to produce
children, till the land, and raise crops. The unity of man, village,
and field is total and rigid. All the work is done by hand, from
the sowing of the rice grains in early spring, through the laborious
transplanting of the tufts in water-filled paddies in late spring, to
the final harvesting by sickle in the fall. The Chinese farmer does
not farm; he gardens. He, his wife, and his children pluck out the
weeds one by one. He hoards his family's night soil through all
the months of the year; in the spring he ladles out of mortar pits
hug6 stinking buckets of dark green liquid offal, and carefully,
without wasting a drop, he spreads the life-giving nitrogen among
his vegetables and plants. When harvest time comes, the whole
family goes out to the field to bring in the grain. The family helps
him thresh his grain, either by monotonously beating it with a
flail or by guiding animals that draw huge stone rollers round and
round in a circle over the threshing floor. All life is attached to
the soil; the peasant works at it, eats of it, returns to it all that his
body excretes, and is finally himself returned to the soil.
Certain basic differences exist between the Chinese farmer and
the farmer of America. The Chinese peasant's acres are pocket-
handkerchief plots. The average Chinese farm, including those of
the sparsely populated northwest, is less than 4 acres ; in some of
the densely settled provinces of the south and west the average is
between one and one and a half acres per farm. Even this meagre
morsel is poorly laid out, for it consists of scattered strips and bits
here and there, and the farmer must walk from one of these to
another to serve each in turn. The average farmer has few animals.
He cannot spare precious grain for feeding pigs or beef cattle or
precious meadow land for dairy products. He may have one or
two pigs, but these, like his chickens, feed on kitchen scraps. If he
is well off, he may have an ox or buffalo to pull his plough, but most
farmers with their small holdings cannot afford even that.
The farmer himself is uneducated. He is illiterate, and full of
superstitions and habit ways that make it difficult to reach him
by print. His horizons are close drawn. Off the main highways
transportation is as tedious as it was a thousand years ago; the
people he sees and talks to all live within a day's walk of his birth-
place and think as he does. His techniques are primitive. He knows
little of proper seed selection, and till recently his government
30
has done little to improve seed strains; he knows nothing
about combating plant diseases; his sickles, crude ploughs, flails,
and stone rollers are like those his forefathers used. Frugality
governs all his actions. He gathers every wisp of grass and twists
it together for fuel. He sows beans or vegetables on the narrow
ridges that separate one paddy field from another, so that no
square foot of growing land is lost. He weaves hats, baskets, and
sandals out of rice straw; out of the pig's bladder he makes a toy
balloon for the children; every piece of string, every scrap of
paper, every rag is saved.
Last and most important, the yield of his back-breaking labour
is pitifully small. Although the yield per acre is fair 80 to go
per cent of what the American farmer gets from the same amount
of land the yield is miserably small in terms of man-hours, in
terms of mouths and human lives. One American farmer with
his machines, draught animals, good seeds, and broad acres will
produce 15 pounds of grain each year while the Chinese farmer is
producing one. This means that the Chinese farmer is constantly at
war with starvation; he and his family live in the shadow of hunger.
The human pattern is the family. In a way that we no longer
know except in rare instances, the family is a single personality.
The common strength of the family upholds the individual
through misfortune; the insatiable demands of the family deny
him the slightest human privacy.
Chinese women bear babies constantly, but the infant death
rate and disease cut down on the number of the living. The
Chinese love their children; when they can, they pamper them
outrageously. The poorest peasant tries to wrap his baby in
scarlet silks and suffocate him with parental care and affection.
Partly this is tenderness such as animates all parents ; partly it is
the result of social pressure, for children are the only form of old
age insurance that exists in China. Parents live by labour till
their muscles wither; when they are old, they must starve unless
the family cares for them. Childlessness is the greatest tragedy
possible to any family. Contrary to general belief, Chinese peas-
ants do not have large families. The patriarchal household, with
grandfather, grandmother, and married children all living under
one roof, is a minor phenomenon rather than the rule; most
peasant holdings are too small to support such a grouping. The
average family group has only five members. If a peasant has
3*
only enough land to feed himself and his family, he can afford
only one son; if he has two, his land must be divided between
them and will provide neither with enough to live. The land, too,
underlies the preference for sons. Only sons can inherit; a
daughter can have no part of her father's land and must go away
to share her husband's. So the farmer views the money spent on
his daughter and the food she eats as a waste, a temporary invest-
ment that can bring small return.
Weddings, celebrated everywhere with much the same glee
and ceremony, are also determined largely by the land. A rigid
social system outlines a series of gifts from the groom's family to
the bride's and from the bride's to her new home. These must
come from the land or be paid for by the land, and a family
with little to offer will have difficulty in arranging a match.
Weddings are arranged by parents, not lovers. They link the
families by a tenuous but useful kinship, so that every member
must be considered. Weddings provide joy for everyone but the
bride. Her father must give a dowry, but he is getting rid of a
drain on his resources, and he perhaps has acquired a future
source of credit. The groom receives household furniture and a
degree of independence in his household. The mother-in-law
gets another servant, to be trained and disciplined and used, who
some day will provide a grandchild. Only the bride has little
dignity and little standing. She is not really a member of the family
till she produces a son; if her husband displays affection, he may be
ridiculed by his family until his behaviour be comes properly distant .
Funerals provoke the same mourning and long-drawn-out
reverence everywhere. The funeral of a father is the son's prime
responsibility. He must provide fine burial garments and feasts
for friends and relatives. The funeral, too, is closely related to the
land. It may be postponed if death comes in a bad crop year;
sometimes part of the land will be mortgaged or even sold to cover
the expense. And if two sons dispute their inheritance, the one
who manages to pay for the funeral has consolidated his claim.
The dead does not leave the land ; it is his resting place, the home
of his spirit, and it must not be sold except as a last resort, because
generations past and gone still share in it.
Chinese peasant culture, so far as Westerners know it, is little
understood. The peasants share common superstitions such as the
code of the wind and water, whereby diviners arrange the con-
struction of a house so that it will be happily placed and catch
32
good luck. They all share a common form of ancestor worship
and a belief in local gods, at whose wayside shrines they burn
incense sticks. The fortune teller is found all over the land, and
women consult him everywhere. The great holidays/ of the year
differ in observance from place to place, but the greatest of them,
like New Year's Day, are much the same in all provinces. New
Year's is fixed by the lunar calendar and, like our Easter, may
fall on a different day each year. New Year's in China is a joyful
time; all bills are settled before then, the family rests from work,
wives return to visit their parents, new clothes are worn, and pates
are shaven smooth. It is a season of complete rest and feasting.
The villagers are quite unaware that the Central Government
has decreed that New Year's Day shall be January i and that
what China has always regarded as New Year's shall be quaintly
called Spring Festival.
Besides these national characteristics each locality boasts some
regional variation a special superstition revolving about a holy
mountain, a sacred cave, the propitiation of certain rivers and
lakes. The local customs, woven together into the national tradition,
give the provinces their special quality and mark every stranger,
whether Chinese or Western, as a foreigner in 'the village streets.
What binds all these people together is not so much their com-
mon culture, common language, or common traditions as it is
their subjection to a poverty and ignorance that knows no counter-
part in the Western world. It is their life in squalid huts, the close-
cramped rooms with earthen floors, the diseases of filth and mal-
nutrition, the cold of winter, the monotonous food. Out of this
searing crucible of want, the back bent by the stooping trans-
plantation of rice, the loins broken by the constant bearing of
children, comes the desperate struggle of all Chinese to live, to
scratch up enough for an existence above the line of misery. You
can see the entire tragedy in any village street in China. You see
the ripe girls as they approach the age of marriage cheeks
abloom, dark hair glistening with health, sturdy bodies full of
life; you see also their sisters ten or twelve years older, their eyes
tired, their bodies stooped, their breasts and bellies flaccid from
exhaustion and childbearing already old, for the life of China
has consumed them.
The brooding, underlying melancholy of the village is infused
by two qualities in which foreigners find an intoxicating charm.
33
One is the almost Puckish sense of humour that is so wonderfully
ingrained in the Chinese national character. Any oddity, no
matter how trivial, is the occasion for jest; a meeting of people
in the streets or at village teahouses ripples with rollicking
laughter. They have a broad practical sense of fun that delights
in the humiliation of pompous characters, the cut of foreigners'
clothes, intricate plays on words. Even some of the most practical
customs of the countryside are gravely explained in humorous
terms thus it is declared that a peasant driving a flock of ducks
to market has the right to let his ducks glean fallen rice grains in
the wayside paddies because the duck droppings more than enrich
the soil in return. The second quality is gossip, which runs like
quicksilver from hut to hut and whispering tongue to listening ear.
No man's quarrel is a private affair, for the entire village must
debate and judge it; the cruelty of a father, the faithlessness of a
son, the new concubine of the rich landlord, are village matters.
And if, God forbid, some good housewife or maiden with
advanced ideas should be persuaded to commit an indiscretion,
then the village literally seethes and crackles with talk. This gossip
covers the entire range of human affairs from the crops and taxes
to the ultimate dark distortions of war, peace, and world affairs.
The substratum of this life is emotional starvation. Since most
of the peasants are illiterate, they can enjoy neither books nor
newspapers. They have no moving pictures, no radios. Their
lives are conditioned by rumour, and almost anything will serve
to fill the great vacuum their boredom produces. The village fairs
are as much social as economic institutions. During the idle
season of the fields people gather at the booths and gossip, watch
magicians, listen to story-tellers. Sometimes a touring troupe of
actors will pass through a district to show an ancient classical
drama; the performance will be discussed and criticized for days
afterwards even by those who have not the remotest idea of what
the archaic words meant or what the involved symbolism repre-
sented. The villagers will cluster about anyone and anything if
it appears to be odd ; a mechanic fixing a faulty motor in a village
performs before a huge audience, and a foreigner with a camera
will find himself so quickly surrounded by cheerful, crowding
citizens that he will be unable to take any pictures.
Chinese village life cannot be painted entirely in sombre
colours, for it has great beauties. There are the beauties of hills
and mountains and slopes covered with silver crescents of paddy
34
field as far as the eye can reach. There are the beauties of meadows
covered with yellow rapeseed flowers, of trees hung with red per-
simmons, of fields of tall yellow grain. In the larger villages the
rich families foster all the ancient graces of China. There is no
form of architecture more lovely than a spreading Chinese court-
yard. Bridges arch across still pools where goldfish swim ; concentric
rings of rooms pierced by moon gates make an inner world of
serenity divided into quiet islands. Within such homes are pre-
served the classics, the embroidered silks, the lacquerware and
porcelain, the arts and crafts, that all the world so admires. The
peasant in his field hardly sees these graces, and when he does, he
scarcely sees them in the same light as those who enjoy these
things at the cost of his toil.
The weight of ignorance and labour is only part of the burden
the Chinese peasant bears; there is also the weight of a social
system as antique as his ideas and superstitions. The peasant's
relation to the land is conditioned by those who control the land.
It is characteristic of China's present social state that this, the
most overwhelming of all her problems, should completely lack
adequate statistics. Some people estimate but very roughly
that 30 per cent of China's peasants are part tenants and part
freeholders, another 30 per cent are tenants or landless farm
hands, and 40 per cent own the land they till. This analysis is
very shaky. The pressure on the tenant and the small owner is
far different from the pressure in American rural life. Chinese
landlords rackrent their fields to the last possible grain. On good
lands they demand from 50 to 60 per cent of the crops ; in some
areas, including Chungking, they take up to 80 per cent of the
cash crops. In districts where land ownership is highly concen-
trated, the great landlord may conduct himself as a baron with his
own armed retainers, his ruthless rent-collecting agents, and his
serfs the tenant farmers.
The small owner is frequently little better off than the tenant.
Anyone may tax him and usually does. He must bear the heavy
load of government exactions, the petty pilferings of all the local
officials, and the demands of army officers who may be stationed
in his district. Even the soldiers feel free to demand pigs, meat,
and food of him when passing through his district. Every farmer
needs credit at some time or other, and credit in China may
reduce the farmer who nominally owns his land to the status of
35
farm labourer for his creditor. A loan for seeds, tools, family
emergencies enmeshes the farmer in the web of usury. Despite
all government efforts to break the system in the villages, credit
still remains in the hands of the village pawnbrokers and loan
sharks often the same men who are the large landlords. Interest
rates run from 30 to 60 per cent a year and higher. Once caught
in the grip of the usurers, a man has little chance of getting out.
Marketing is another process in which the small peasant usually
loses. He sells his grain at low prices in the glut season of harvest;
what he buys back from the market he buys at high prices during
the lean season. Transportation is so crude, roads are so few, that
each district operates almost as an isolated entity. There is no
national market that fixes prices, nor are there railways to equalize
surplus and deficit areas.
The landlord, the loan shark, and the merchant may be one
and the same person in any village. Usually in a large town they
are a compact social group of " better" families. Their landed
wealth gives them an aura of respectability and a veneer of
civilization. When traditionalists speak of village democracy in
China, they usually refer to the ' 'elders'* who make community
decisions for the whole. Almost always the elders are members of
the rich landed families or are their commercial allies. The few
"literati" of China, those who can afford education, come from
these families; and the administrative government of the Chinese
nation has always been drawn from these educated people. By its
very origin the bureaucracy starts off with a feeling of loyalty and
devotion to its own group, to the cultivated well-to-do families
from which it sprang. In the village itself the unity of the landed
families and the local government is obvious. The pao chang and
the chia chang, as the local chiefs are called who are appointed by
the government in each village to levy its taxes, conscript soldiers,
and preserve public order, are almost invariably members of
such families.
To speak of these families as wealthy in the American sense
would be ridiculous. The largest landholders in China proper
usually possess no more than a few hundred acres. The total capital
of a merchant in a large town rarely exceeds the equivalent of
$50,000 U.S. But against the background of misery and savagery
in the countryside such wealth is spectacular. All men struggle
against misery, and out of their struggle come all of China's
problems for when the miserable struggle against nature, they
36
usually end by struggling among themselves. Only a Chinese
standing close to the peasant himself can understand for just how
meagre a handful of rice he can buy another Chinese and just
how great are the limits of tolerance to which he can push his
fellow man. Only someone who is exposed to the wretchedness of
work can fully savour the sweetness of indolence, and the fat-
jowled merchant and loan shark of the market town loves his hot,
rich foods the more because so few can enjoy them.
Appeal by the peasant against the oligarchy that rules him is
useless. The local government to which he must appeal against
iniquitous taxes, usurious interest, common police brutality, is by
its very constitution the guardian of the groups that crush him.
Even before the war the few interested students of the problem of
local government were shocking the conscience of China by
detailed local studies of how the system worked ; they were pro-
ducing dry little brochures that damned the system from paddy
field to courtyard. In some places peasants who failed to keep up
their interest rates were seized by local police and thrown into
jail; they were left to die of hunger unless their families brought
them rice and water. Peasants were forced to work unpaid on the
estates of some landlords as part of their feudal obligations. And
every agent of government or landlord took his own particular
percentage when levying his demands on the peasants' harvest.
The ancient trinity of landlord, loan shark, and merchant is a
symbol hated throughout Chinese history. It represents a system
that has shackled China's development for five centuries. During
the last century, however, the system has tightened about the
Chinese peasant as never before because of the impact of the
West, by commerce and violence, on its timeworn apparatus.
Concentration of landholding had usually been stimulated in
olden times by famine, flood, or disaster, when the peasant was
forced to sell or mortgage his lands to meet his emergency needs.
But the impact of Western commerce created new forms of liquid
wealth in China and concentrated it in the hands of the relatively
minute number of go-betweens of Western industry and the
Chinese market. This new commercial wealth lacked the know-
how, the courage, or the proper conditions to invest in industrial
enterprises, as commercial wealth historically did everywhere
else; it found in land its safest and most profitable form of invest-
ment. Particularly in the vicinity of such cities as Shanghai and
Canton, where the new wealth was created, it poured into the
37
countryside; land values shot upward, and the peasant was
crushed by a process he could not understand. In the neighbour-
hood of such cities 80 per cent of the peasants are bare-handed
tenants. The increasing importance of land as an item of com-
mercial speculation divorced the landlord from the personal obli-
gations he had formerly borne. Absentee landlords living in urban
comfort far from the villages sold and bought land at increasingly
high prices; they extracted the maximum possible revenue. By
ancient custom in certain places the tenant formerly had an in-
alienable right to his tillage; the landlord's legal title gave him
what was called "bottom" rights, but the tenant possessed
"surface" rights, the right to farm the soil, and no landlord
could sell the surface rights out from under the peasant or dis-
possess him of his means of livelihood. Such quaint customs,
however, dissolved as the acid of modern speculation ate away
into the ancient system of landholding.
On the coast the impact of Western commerce was direct and
clear; in the interior it was more subtle and diffused. The peasants
in the vast interior of China had employed themselves at cottage
industries during the idle months. Between peak seasons of work
in the fields the peasant turned out homespun cloth, straw baskets
and hats, and raw silk, which he could sell at a small profit in
local markets. His revenue from this industry was slight, but the
margin of his existence was so narrow that in most cases it was
absolutely vital to him. Western industry began to produce and
pour into the interior, both from overseas and from its Shanghai
outposts, new textiles, shiny gadgets, kerosene, and other materials
so cheap and of such superior quality that the peasant crafts
could not hope to compete. Peasant homes lack electricity or any
other source of power but the animal energy of human beings ;
no matter how cheaply they turned out goods, they could not
match factory-made competing articles either in quality or in
price. In some areas of China home industry was wiped out
entirely, and the peasant was left with no useful occupation to
fill his time and budget. Instead of creating an outlet for surplus
farm labour by establishing itself in the interior, industry con-
centrated at the coast and siphoned off the depressed farm popu-
lation to be consumed in mills, where it worked perhaps a four-
teen-hour day for a pittance.
Another grim factor for a generation past has been civil com-
motion. The war lords who tore the interior to pieces were most
of them shrewd, brutal men who wished to crystallize per-
manently both their gains and their social position; this could be
done best by acquiring land. Peasants were beaten off their fields,
or their ownership was taxed away. In one county near Chengtu,
in western China, 70 per cent of the land is held by a single person,
a former war lord. These war lords, even though their military
fangs are now drawn, are still potent economic forces.
Crushed by speculation, war lords, and Western commerce,
strait-jacketed by their ancient feudal relationships, the peasants
of China have been gradually forced to the wall. Despite all the
new railways and factories and the humane paper legislation of
the Central Government, some scholars think that China is per-
haps the only country in the world where the people eat less, live
more bitterly, and are clothed worse than they were five hundred
years ago.
Many Western and Chinese students have looked at China
through the eyes of her classics. Seeing it through such a medium,
they have regarded China as "quaint" and found a timeless
patina of age hanging over the villages and people. The biblical
rhythm of the fields makes Chinese life seem an idyl, swinging
from season to season, from sowing to harvest, from birth to death,
in divinely appointed cadences. Chinese intellectuals, writing of
their country and their people for foreign consumption, have
stressed this piquant charm along with the limpid purity of the
ancient philosophy. This composite picture of China is both false
and vicious. Beneath the superficial routine of the crops and the
village there is working a terrible ferment of change, which now,
with ever-increasing frequency, is bursting into the main stream
of Chinese politics. Those who see in the peasant's life an imagi-
nary loveliness are the first to stand terrified at the barbarities
his revolts bring about in the countryside when he is aroused.
There is no brutality more ferocious than that of a mass of people
who have the chance to work primitive justice on men who have
oppressed them. The spectacle of loot and massacre, of temples in
flames, of muddy sandals trampling over silken brocades, is awe-
some; but there is scant mercy or discrimination in any revolu-
tion, large or small.
The great question of China is whether any democratic form of
government can ease these tensions by wise laws, peacefully,
before the peasant takes the law into his own hands and sets the
countryside to flame,
39
CHAPTER 3
THE RISE OF THE KUOMINTANG
OUT OF THE misery of the countryside, out of the growing
strains and pressures in the villages, an urgency has been gene-
rating within China that can be stilled only by change by peace
if possible, by violence if there is no other way. Such revolu-
tionary pressure is not new in Chinese history. Time and again
the weight of the old system has grown too heavy for the peasant
to bear. At such moments he has punctuated the history of his
land with blood, swept it with desperate fury, thrown out the
reigning dynasty, and established a new order. Each of the many
dynasties of China was born of upheaval ; each started with a
vigorous administration on top, a reorganization and redistri-
bution of land and feudal obligations on the bottom. And with
each new dynasty in turn the process of widening differentiation
went on afresh until it was again intolerable, and revolution
brewed out of the suffering and discontent burst forth anew.
The crisis today is different from the crises of years gone by.
For one reason, an ordinary historical upheaval would yield only
a system of weak peasant equality, and what history demands
now is something that will lift Chinese society to the level of the
modern world. For another, the normal cycle of revolution and
reorganization has been too long frustrated. A hundred years ago
an overdue revolution against the moribund Manchu dynasty
swept from southern China almost to Peking itself; this Taiping
rebellion was a furious movement, yeasty with the first overtones
of Christian ideas, and it was whipped finally only by foreign
military intervention. Then, as now, it was felt that an orderly,
stable China was essential to world peace and that t such peace
could be assured only by crushing the revolt of the Chinese
peasantry. The suppression of the Taiping rebellion put the cap
on fundamental change in China for some sixty years, and the
pressure generated by this delay grew more intense with each
decade. Eventually, when the lid was lifted, China came apart
in a series of explosions; like a string of firecrackers, each sputter-
ing uprising generated another in a chain reaction of growing
violence. Out of this chaos two distinct groups emerged, which
40
had clear but diverging ideas about what to do to end the
chaos.
The collapse of the Manchu Empire in 191 1 stripped China of
her outward appearance of changelessness and stability. Within
less than five years the first political lesson of government had
been learned anew that the state rests on force. That was the
age of the war lords, and China broke up into a patchwork of
blood and unhappiness. Each war lord had his own army, each
army its district. The great war lords governed entire provinces;
their generals governed parts of provinces; their captains
governed counties, cities, towns. Three hundred men could keep
a county in subjection, levy taxes on it, rape its women, carry off
its sons, batten on its crops. All those who were accustomed to
govern were gone, and the soldiers who took over found with
astonishment that they were government. Their will was law;
paper they printed was money. Among themselves they fought
as the whim took them ; coalitions formed and re-formed ; ambi-
tion, treachery, and foul play became the code of Chinese politics.
And each evil deed was sanctified by its perpetrator, who proclaimed
it done for the unity of China. The only enduring legacy left by the
war lords was their belief in force ; the only conviction that Chiang
K'ai-shek and the Communists have shared for twenty years is the
conviction that armed strength is the only guarantee of security.
The war lords were purely destructive; in earlier ages such a
period of anarchy might have lasted for generations before re-
integration set in, but this was the twentieth century. All up and
down the China coast and far up the rivers concessions had been
wrung by foreign powers from the decadent Manchu govern-
ment. On China's main rivers were steamers of foreign ownership,
which were protected by gunboats flying foreign flags. Railways
owned and managed by foreigners sucked profit out of China to
foreign investors. China's tariffs were set and collected by
foreigners ; so was the most profitable of internal revenues, the
salt tax. The foreigners who lived in China had enormous con-
tempt for both the Manchus and the later war lords, but they
could not exist in island communities in the vastness of China;
for their own purposes they had to create or convert to their use
a body of Chinese who could K act as a bridge between themselves
and the nation they wished to plunder. Western businessmen
created Chinese businessmen in their likeness. New Chinese
4*
banks were developed ; old ones learned to substitute double-entry
book-keeping for beaded counting-boards. The factories, steam-
ships, mines, and railways that foreigners controlled needed a
host of skilled Chinese to operate them; their success caused
^Chinese businessmen to start similar projects, which needed the
same kind of management and engineers. A new kind of Chinese
began to appear, a naturalized citizen of the modern world ; a
middle class was developing in a feudal country.
No less forceful than the impact of Western armies and Western
business was the impact of Western ideas. The new universities
that were set up in China to teach the new sciences and skills
created scholars and students of a new sort, who thought less of
the Book of Odes and the millennial classics than they did of
Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Henry George. The adepts of the
new learning smarted even more than the businessmen under the
contempt, the brutality, and the indignity the imperial powers
heaped on China; they gave brilliant intellectual leadership to
the discontent within the land. The ferment seemed like a great
undisciplined anarchy, more froth and foam than substance. But it
arose from one basic problem the statelessness of China. The prob-
lem had one basic solution internal unity and strength in China.
The political instrument of the new merchant and educated
class was the party known as the Kuomintang. The architect of
the early Kuomintang, its very soul, was a sad-eyed dreamer
called Sun Yat-sen. It is customary now in intellectual circles to
sneer at the naivet6 with which he attacked world problems, but
Sun Yat-sen was the first man to formulate a programme of
action for all the complex problems of the Chinese people. It was
as if some Western thinker had attempted to devise one neat
solution for the problems of feudalism, the Renaissance and Refor-
mation, the industrial revolution, and the social unrest of today.
Sun Yat-sen was a Cantonese who had been educated in Hawaii;
he participated in almost every unsuccessful revolt against the
Manchu dynasty in the last decade of its existence, and he had
lived the life of a hunted exile in Japan, America, and Europe.
Almost every war lord who verbally espoused unity adorned his
ambition with quotations from Sun Yat-sen; almost all ended by
betraying him. The wretchedness of China, the burning elo-
quence of Sun Yat-sen's cause within him, the examples of
Western civilization in the countries of his exile, were all finally
synthesized in his book San Min Chu /, or Three Principles of the People.
4*
The San Min Chu I is not a perfect book, but its sanctity in
present-day China, among both Communists and Kuomintang,
makes it by all odds the major political theory in the land. The
book was a long time in maturing; it did not appear in print till
shortly before Sun's death and then only as the transcript of a
series of lectures he had given just before setting his party off on
the greatest adventure in its history. The ideas of Sun Yat-sen,
however, were current long before they were put into type.
Sun's theory started by examining China. Why was she so
humiliated in the family of nations? Why were her people so
miserable? His answer was simple China was weak, uneducated,
and divided. To solve the problem, he advanced three principles.
The first was the Principle of Nationalism. China must win
back her sovereignty and unity. The foreigners must be forced
out of their concessions; they must be made to disgorge the spoils
they had seized from the Manchus. China must have all the
powers and dignities that any foreign nation had; she must be
disciplined and the war lords purged. The second was the
Principle of People's Democracy. China must be a nation in
which the government serves the people and is responsible to
them. The people must be taught how to read and write and
eventually to vote. A system must be erected whereby their
authority runs upward from the village to command the highest
authority in the nation. The third was the Principle of People's
Livelihood. The basic industries of China must be socialized; the
government alone should assume^responsibility for vast indus-
trialization and reconstruction. Concurrently with the erection of
the superstructure of a modern economic system, the foundation
had to be strengthened. The peasant's lot was to be alleviated;
those who tilled the soil should own it.
The doctrine of Sun Yat-sen won instant acceptance through-
out the country. Few accepted it in its entirety, but it was a broad
programme, and there was something in it to touch the emotional
mainspring of almost every thinking Chinese. The new middle
class took it to its bosom; even the proud rural gentry could go
along on the general thesis that the war lords' strife and the
foreigners must go. The years of exile and failure had been years
of education for Sun Yat-sen. He began as a dreamer and an
intellectual; but he learned, as all China did during the decade
following the Manchu collapse, that dreams and theories alone
were insufficient for the reorganization of the land. Thousands,
43
perhaps millions, were willing to admit that his theories were right,
even to join his party. But the party needed force an armed tool
to work its will. By the early igao's history had conspired to give
Sun the strength he needed. First, the Russians had succeeded in
establishing their own revolution against feudalism and were
interested in revolution everywhere; they were willing to send to
China not only political mentors to aid Sun Yat-sen, but battle-
seasoned soldiers who could fashion an army for him. Secondly, the
decade-long violence within China had by now produced young
soldiers and officers who were interested in more than loot and
plunder; they were interested in their country as an end in itself,
and they sought political leadership for their military skills.
In 1923, Sun Yat-sen was permitted by the local war lord to set
up a nominal government in Canton. He had made such agree-
ments before with other war lords when they had sought inspiring
fagades for practical despotism; each time he had been betrayed
and cast out when he tried to exercise more than nominal
authority. This time it was to be different. Within a year this
new government of Sun Yat-sen was the seat of an incandescent
revolutionary movement. Sun set up in Canton a centre that was
both military and political. Two Russian agents were his most
conspicuous advisers Michael Borodin as political mentor and
a general known as Galen l for the new army. Communists were
brought into the movement and made members of the Kuo-
mintang. The political centre was the training school for a host
of flaming advocates of revolution, agents who were to circu-
late through all China in the next few years to preach the new
doctrines. The real strength, however, was in a school on the
banks of the muddy Whampoa River, where an academy for the
training of revolutionary officers was set up. This was to produce
men who, knowing how to wield force, would wield it not for the
sake offeree alone but in the name of a new China. To head this
academy Sun Yat-sen chose a slim and cold-eyed Chekiang youth
named Chiang K'ai-shek.
No adequate biography of Chiang K'ai-shek will appear in
our times. Many of those who could best tell of his career are
dead; the others are either his bonded servants, who see him as a
saint, or his desperate enemies who seek only his destruction. It
1 Also known as Vassily Blucher, later commander of the Russian armies in
Manchuria.
44
has been too dangerous too long in China to record the facts of
Chiang's career, so that now all that is known, apart from a few
idolatrous official biographies, consists of morsels of gossip.
In Canton Chiang was already the young hero of the revolu-
tion. The Russian advisers of Sun Yat-sen had been so taken with
him that they had sent him to Moscow in 1923, for a six months*
course in indoctrination. When he returned to head the Whampoa
academy, he rose rapidly from comparative obscurity to domi-
nance. The death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925 gave him almost
unchallenged authority.
By the spring of 1926 the revolutionary armies of the Kuomin-
tang were ready to set forth on the famous Northern March from
Canton to the Yangtze Valley to reclaim China from the war
lords. Chiang K'ai-shek was the commander-in-chief. It was a
motley host armed with discarded weapons of every conceivable
foreign manufacture. It was staffed with Russian advisers; some
of its key armies were commanded by repentant war lords who
had seen the light, Before it went the political agents, Com-
munist and Kuomintang, organizing peasants and factory workers
and preparing the people of the countryside for the dawn of a
new day. The army swept north on the very crest of a wave of
revolutionary enthusiasm and seized Hankow, whose workers had
already been organized and begun to strike in late summer.
From Hankow the armies turned east down the Yangtze Valley,
swept through Nanking and on to Shanghai.
The advance of the revolutionary armies sounded like the ham-
mers of doom to the foreign concession of Shanghai. From the
interior came stories of riots, bloodshed, and butchery, of strikes
that closed down all foreign shipping and factories, of Chinese
soldiers killing white men and raping white women. The tide
reached Shanghai in the spring of 1927. From within the city
Communist agents organized the workers for a revolt, and on
March 21, in a tremendous general strike, the entire city outside
of the International Settlement closed down. The armed unions
went on to make their strike one of the greatest of modern insur-
rections. They seized police stations, government buildings, and
factories so rapidly that by the time Chiang's Kuomintang armies
arrived at the suburbs, the workers were in complete control of the
native city and turned it over to the revolutionary government.
Three weeks after the climactic victory the alliance of Com-
munists and Kuomintang came to an end. What happened
45
during those three weeks is a matter of mystery. Overnight the
racketeering gangs of the waterfront and the underworld
materialized in Chiang's support. Trembling foreign business
men were quickly apprised that Chiang was indeed a "sensible"
leader, and foreign arms and assistance were supplied him. The
revolutionary forces were weak and vacillating; units of Chiang's
own armies made overtures to the Communists, for they sensed
an impending crisis. And then suddenly, without a word of warn-
ing, Chiang's deputies, assisted by cohorts from the underworld
and blessed by foreign opinion, turned on the workers, disarmed
them, executed their leaders, and forced the Communists under-
ground by a purge that was to continue for years.
The Kuomintang itself was astounded by this breach of faith
and split into two separate groups, one under Chiang K'ai-shek
the other under the left wing at Hankow. By 1928, however, the
Kuomintang had knitted together again in a solid anti-Com-
munist front and had achieved stability. The party was now
completely respectable in the eyes of the foreign world and was
recognized as the only legitimate government of China. It pro-
ceeded to transfer the seat of its power from Canton to the
Yangtze Valley. In the cities it controlled, the wheels of industry
began to turn. But in the countryside Sun Yat-sen's programme
of peasant reform died stillborn; the old system, aggravated by
continuing civil war and commercial speculation, still loomed
over the peasantry. The revolution had miscarried.
What had happened? To understand the tragedy of the great
uprising it is necessary to return to Canton and establish the
personality of the historic antagonist of Chiang K'ai-shek the
Communist Party of China. Like the Kuomintang, the Chinese
Communist Party was born of intellectual ferment. It appeared
much Jater on the scene of Chinese history and took its analysis
and solution of China's problems from the example of the Russian
revolution. The Communists agreed completely with Sun Yat-
sen and the Kuomintang that the foreigners must be thrown out,
the war lords annihilated; but they went a step further. They
asked: For whose benefit should China be reorganized? They
answered: For the Chinese peasant himself.
To accomplish this it was necessary not only to achieve all the
aims of the Kuomintang, but to go further, to smash in every
village the shackles of feudalism that chained the peasant to the
46
Middle Ages. In the cities the new industrial workers of the
factories and mills were to be the constituents of the new era.
The savage exploitation of labour by the coastal entrepreneurs
would have to be ended before industry could be a blessing rather
than a new curse to China. The Communists brought to their
early alliance with the Kuomintang all the discipline and
zealotry that are characteristic of their movement everywhere.
In its early days the Chinese Communist Party was organically
linked with Moscow. The Russian delegation attached to Sun
Yat-sen controlled the party completely and, under the strictest
injunction from Moscow, committed it to unreserved subordina-
tion to the Kuomintang. Communist agents spearheaded the
great organizing drives that led the triumphal Northern March
of the revolutionary armies. They converted the areas of combat
into quicksands for their war-lord enemies; peasant and labour
unions developed almost overnight as the masses rose to the
first leadership they had ever known as their own.
Chiang saw in the Communists a leadership as coldblooded
and ruthless as his own. To his passionate nationalism their con-
nection with Russia was wicked. His brief visit to Russia had given
him an insight into the working of a dictatorial state along with a
lasting dislike for the Russians. He saw the Communists as Russian
agents, possessed of some magic formula that would tear the
countryside apart in social upheaval and he hated them. For
the first three years of his alliance with the Communists he bided
his time. He needed both Russian arms and peasant support; he
could not afford a break. His march to the Yangtze Valley, how-
ever, brought him into contact for the first time with the highest
rungs of the new Chinese industrial and commercial aristocracy.
These men, no less than the foreigners, were terrified of strikes
and labour unions; slogans of agrarian reform threatened to upset
the entire system of rural commerce and landholding. Chiang
suddenly found in the Shanghai business world a new base of
support, a base powerful enough to maintain his party and his
armies; with these men and their money behind him, he was no
longer dependent on Russian aid or agrarian revolution. When
he makes up his mind, Chiang acts swiftly. Before the Com-
munist leaders had any inkling of what was happening, their
movement had been beheaded, and within a year of the Shanghai
coup Communism was illegal from end to end of China.
47
Chiang K'ai-shek was the chief architect of the new China that
emerged. Occasionally, in fits of sulkiness, he would withdraw
from the government for a few months to prove that only he
could hold its diverse elements together; he always returned with
greater prestige and strength than before. The new Kuomintang
government was a dictatorship. It glossed itself with the phrases of
Sun Yat-sen and Claimed that it was the ' * trustee J ' of the people, who
were in a state of "political tutelage ". Its secret police were ubiqui-
tous, while its censorship closed down like a vacuum pack over the
Chinese press and Chinese universities. It held elections nowhere,
for its conception of strengthening China was to strengthen itself,
and it governed by fiat. This government rested on a four-legged stool
an army, a bureaucracy, the urban business men, the rural gentry.
The army was the darling of Chiang K'ai-shek. Chiang im-
ported a corps of Prussian advisers to forge it into a powerful
striking weapon. Its soldiers learned to goose-step, to use German
rifles and artillery. Within the army was a praetorian guard con-
sisting of the original group of Whampoa cadets. The young
students of the military academy had been decimated in the early
revolutionary battles, but those who survived were loyal to the
Kuomintang before all else and faithful to Chiang as the symbol
of the new China. As succeeding classes of students entered, the
cadets rose in rank from captain to major to colonel. By the time
the war against Japan broke out, an estimated forty of the
Whampoa cadets were divisional commanders. About Chiang
clustered a number of senior military men who shared his own
background of war-lord education; they were men who belonged
to no coherent group. They commanded the campaigns Chiang
wished to fight, but never did they have any such affection or
loyalty as he gave to the youths he trained himself. Chiang's
army was the strongest ever seen in China. From 1929 to 1937
there was not a year when he was not engaged in civil war. The
base of his strength was the lower Yangtze Valley, while all about
him lay the provinces controlled by war lords. These individually
and then in coalition challenged his rule, and one by one he
would either buy them off or destroy them. He gradually brought
central China as far as the gorges of the Yangtze under his con-
trol, until all China south of the Yellow River had acknowledged
him as its overlord by the time the Japanese struck.
Almost as large a figure as the army in the process of unifi-
cation was the new bureaucracy Chiang was creating at Nanking.
48
China had never before had even the most primitive form of
modern government. The new regime had a real Ministry of
Finance, a real Ministry of Railways, a real Ministry of Industry.
It had agricultural research stations and health bureaux, and
although these bureaux scarcely met Western standards, they
were the best China had ever seen. A Central Bank was created,
which brought the first stable currency China had had in a
generation. New roads were pushed through, stimulating com-
merce and industry. New textbooks were written, new sciences
cultivated. The scholars, students, and engineers who served
in these administrations were neither devoutly faithful to Chiang
nor happy about the Kuomintang dictatorship, but for all of
them it provided the first opportunity to serve their country.
They were men of ability and generally of integrity and here,
for the first time, were careers open to their talents.
The other two mainstays were the classes that formed the social
basis of the government. The first, a relatively progressive element,
was the businessmen on the coast and in the great cities. They
had profited by the revolution. They had loosened foreign control
of their customs; they dealt now with Western businessmen as
with equals. The new government with its stable finance, its
rational structure of taxation, gave them for the first time op-
portunities that Western businessmen had enjoyed for decades.
The government preserved law and order within the Yangtze
Valley and constructed new railways. A wave of prosperity
lifted Chinese commercial and industrial activity to new levels;
exports and imports soared; production multiplied.
In the countryside the Kuomintang rested on the landed
gentry. The Kuomintang indeed wrote into its law books some
of the most progressive legislation ever conceived to alleviate
peasant misery but the legislation was never applied; it was
window-dressing. The government reached back into antiquity
and revived a system for the countryside that seemed simple.
Each county was subdivided into units; each of these, called pao,
consisted of a hundred families and was further subdivided into
chia comprising ten families. Each pao and chia was to choose
headmen who would be the transmission belt of all the new
reforms the Kuomintang sought to establish. On paper the system
looked fine. But actually the pao and the chia chieftains were the
same landlords and gentry who had always ruled the village.
Looking up at his government from below, the peasant could
Go 49
see no change. His taxes ran on as before; his rent and interest
rates were just as high as ever; his court of appeal consisted of the
same men who had always denied his demands. The revolution had
brought him nothing. The Kuomintang, the party of the National-
ist Revolution, was now securely established in every village, with
roots in local party cells of the well-born and well-to-do.
The driving spirit of the government was Chiang K'ai-shek
himself. He could safely leave the tasks of party organization,
administration, and reconstruction to his subordinates; with a
minimum of guidance the pent-up talents of educated Chinese
could direct the technical tasks of modernizing China. He
devoted his own energies and interest to two great problems, the
Communists and the Japanese.
The alliance of Chiang K'ai-shek and the Communists against
the war lords and imperialists had broken over the basic question
of the peasant and his land. The Communists had tried but
too late to bring the uprising to its appointed climax with
redistribution of the land and reorganization of the whole system
of feudal relationships in the village. In the turbulence that had
accompanied the Northern March the peasants had time and
again taken the law into their own hands and made their own
judgments. You could hardly ask men to overthrow foreign
imperialism and corrupt war lords and at the same time condone
injustice and oppression in the village, where it struck nearest
home. The Kuomintang wanted to limit the revolution to the
accomplishment of a few specific aims such as the end of imperial-
ism and war-lordism; it promised to take care of rent, credit,
and all other peasant problems after it had the government
established. But the peasants did not want to wait.
When Chiang forced the Communists underground, he cut
them off from the workers of the city, but he could not break their
contact with the agitated peasantry. South of the Yangtze the
Communists found the memory of the revolution still green in
the hearts of the villagers, and their troops proceeded to establish
a miniature soviet republic. Chiang waged unceasing war against
this soviet republic in southern China. With his government
buttressed by loans from America, his troops, German-armed
and trained, tightened their blockade ring about Communist
areas each succeeding year. The very war against the Com-
munists drew war lords into alliance with Chiang for mutual
50
protection. The struggle against the Communists was savage
and relentless. Within the areas that Chiang controlled, his
police butchered Communist leaders; families of known Com-
munist leaders were wiped out; students were watched and spied
on, and possession of Communist literature was made a crime
punishable by death. In Communist areas it was the village
landlord who fared worse, and the hatred of the poor for the
rich was given full rein.
By 1934 the pressure on the Communists had grown too great,
and bursting out of Chiang's blockade line, they performed that
spectacular feat known as the Long March. Men and women,
with bag, baggage, and archives, the Communists marched
from southern China to re-establish themselves in the northwest.
The winding route of the main column of 30,000 was over 6,000
miles long. The Long March was a savage ordeal that stands out
in Chinese Communist history as an emotional mountain peak.
The sufferings endured and the iron determination with which
they were mastered are beyond description. The countryside
through which the march passed is still dotted with stone block-
houses built by the government to hem in the Communists.
The ferocity of the fighting ravaged the peasants in hundreds on
hundreds of villages ; in many districts in southern and central
China the name of Communist is still hated for the destruction
this march wreaked on the countryside. In certain other districts
the Communists succeeded in creating a political loyalty among
the poorer peasants that lingered for years. The Communists
finally established themselves at the end of 1935 in the northwest,
in the areas just north of Yenan in Shensi, which later became
their chief base.
The Communists' arrival in Yenan coincided with a turning
point both in their own history and in the party line. By now they
had become an independent organization ; their ties with Moscow
were nominal. The Soviet Union had re-established friendly rela-
tions with Chiang K'ai-shek and left the Communist Party to fend
for itself. From their new base the Communists raised a new call :
Chinese unity against the Japanese! The response throughout
China was instant, for the most profound emotion was touched.
Japan had seized Manchuria in 1931, had pressed on down past
the Great Wall, was pouring opium into northern China, was
flagrantly abusing every international standard of decency. China
was being humiliated by the Japanese army in a way never
experienced before; nothing, it seemed, would satisfy Japan
except control over the whole vast country.
As for Chiang, he hated the Japanese with the stubborn fury
that is his greatest strength and his greatest fault. His armies, he
felt, were unable to stop the Japanese army; China's industry
could not match the modernized power of Japan's industry;
China was disunited. He wanted to wipe out the Communists
first, establish unity, and then face Japan. The new Communist
slogan forced him into an intolerable position. Its logic was
irrefutable; why should Chinese kill each other when a foreign
enemy was seeking to kill all Chinese? The Kuomintang ex-
plained in whispers that it was only biding its time against the
Japanese that when it was ready it would turn and defend
China. At the same time students were arrested and jailed for
anti-Japanese parades #nd demonstrations. Chinese journalists
and intellectuals stood aghast at what they saw. The threat of
national annihilation from without became graver with every
passing day; within, the government spent its resources not on
resistance to Japan but on a Communist witch-hunt.
Gradually the call for unity began to penetrate the army. In
the north, where the civil war against the Communists was still
being pushed, the campaign began to flag and finally came to a
dead stop. Chiang, flying to Sian to revive it, flew directly into a
conspiracy and was kidnapped not by Communists but by war
lords who refused to fight against Communists any more when
they might be fighting against the Japanese. During his two
weeks' internment Chiang met the Communists personally for
the first time since 1927. No one has ever recorded in full what
actually happened during Chiang's kidnapping and at his meet-
ing with the Communists, but the results were electric; the civil
war came to an abrupt end. Chiang recognized the right of the
Communists to govern their own areas in the north within the
loose framework of the Central Government. Their armies were
to be incorporated into the national armies. The Communists
were to give up their programme of revolution in the countryside.
The government was to institute immediate democratic reforms,
and Sun Yat-sen's programme as set forth in Three Principles of
the People was to be the code of the land.
This news came to the Japanese like an alarm in the night.
Ever since China's Nationalist Revolution, Japan had been
haunted by two prospects; one was the unity of China; the other,
52
Communism in China. Japan knew that a united, resurgent
China would ultimately be the leader of all Asia. Japan feared
Communism, too. Her own empire was based on thin, rocky
islands poor in every material resource except manpower. Her
armed might rested on the unthinking obedience of civilians and
soldiers; any system that challenged them to thought was a
menace to Japan. Thus, no matter which side won in China,
Chiang K'ai-shek or Communism, Japan would lose. And to
keep China permanently weak, disunited, and subordinate,
Japan's continental armies had been constantly pressing down
from the north, dabbling in war-lord politics, poisoning China
with thousands of agents. The new accord between Chiang and
the Communists meant that now there was the possibility not
only of a united China but of a united China in which Com-
munism was tolerated and condoned. There was no time to be lost.
On the night of July 7, 1937, at the Marco Polo Bridge outside
of Peking, Japanese garrison troops were engaged in field
manoeuvres. Someone fired a shot; the Japanese claimed they
had been assaulted the war had begun.
CHAPTER 4
WAR
O u T o F T H E turbulence of thirty years the Chinese people had
drawn a bitter but lasting education. The surging revolutionary
tides that had swept the land had finally produced leaders who
held themselves responsible for the nation in the eyes of history.
Beyond all the hatred that the warring parties bore each other,
they had come to share a conviction in China's unity and destiny.
All Japan's plans were to be shattered on the rocks of this con-
viction. The first volleys of the war against Japan cut across all
the discontent within China across the slogans, the treachery
and intrigue, the partisan zealotry. Even the imponderable
working of the revolution itself within the depths of Chinese
society was suspended for a time while the nation turned to face
the threat of the Japanese. There could be no China at all,
neither Communist nor Nationalist, in submission to Japan; there
could be no dignity whatever, either for rich or for poor.
The Japanese planned their 1937 operations on the mainland
53
on two planes, the military and the political. For five years they
had been biting into China above the Great Wall, section by
section, while the Chinese stewed in their internal wars and pro-
tested to the League of Nations. This time the Japanese expected
to wrench away the five provinces that lie below the Great Wall,
within the bend of the Yellow River. Having seized the north,
they hoped to persuade Chiang to yield them far-reaching con-
cessions and special privileges in what remained of the land.
Eventually the Japanese planned to tighten their economic-
military-political grip till it clutched all China and the Chinese
government had been reduced to the status of a subordinate
colonial administration. If the Japanese had struck five years
earlier, they might have succeeded, but in 1937 they were too late.
Their operations in the north proceeded according to plan
almost to the split second. Their columns opened out from Peking
and Tientsin, struck northwest through the famous Nankow Pass,
breached the Great Wall from the south, then wheeled around to
come down through it again from the north on the passes that
guard the northern flank of the iron-rich, coal-producing province
of Shansi. They struck south down the railway that leads from
Tientsin to Nanking and within a few months stood on the banks
of the Yellow River. The resistance that met the Japanese in
northern China was a combination of the very old and very new.
The war lords, surprising everyone, chose to fight it out in align-
ment with the Central Government, rather than yield to Japanese
threats or promises. Their armies, however, were ragamuffin
hordes. They had no common body of military tactics and skills,
no mutual confidence, no modern organization. They broke like
a wall of dust before the impact of Japan's steel-tipped legion.
It was summer, and the tank-led columns of the Japanese darted
almost at will across the yellow plains of northern China. Their
air force ruled the skies; it strafed what little movement there was
on Chinese highways. Japanese military intelligence in northern
China was superb. The first phases of the campaign ran like drill-
ground manoeuvres ; the Japanese columns cut down the railways
and highways to occupy successive objectives on schedule. By all
calculations the occupation of the key rail and road junctions
should have finished the job. These were the centres where political
agitation had bothered the Japanese ; these were the military keys to
the land. And yet somehow, though no Japanese could quite tell
why, the war went on. From the villages and mountains came
54
rifle fire. The Japanese sacked and looted; they raped the women
of the north till their lust was worn; they branded the centres they
held with terror, And yet about them, picking at them, bleeding
them, grew a conspiracy of resistance that seemed to nourish
itself from the earth alone. This was the resistance of partisan China.
Partisan China was the domain of the Reds. By agreement with
Chiang K'ai-shek they were to leave positional warfare to him and
wage guerrilla warfare behind the enemy lines In the fall of 1937,
starting from their small base in the barren sandlands of northern
Shensi, the former Red troops, now restyled the Eighth Route
Army of the Central Government, began in the fall of 1937 one
of the most amazing adventures in arms of all times. It was to lift
Communist military strength from 85,000 men in 1937 to over a
million by the end of the war, Communist political control from
1,500,000 to an estimated 90,000,000. In the early months of
resistance Communist expansion raced over the hills. Their
divisional and frontal units dissolved into regiments, the regi-
ments into battalions and companies; and they trickled off through
the Japanese lines into the countryside. Within four months after
the outbreak of the war Communist troops were standing on the
shores of the ocean, 700 miles from their starting point, and
organizing a new war behind the enemy lines.
The wells of hatred and terror that the Japanese had opened by
their ferocity were ready to be tapped, and the Communists
tapped them. The soldiers of war-lord armies who had fled the
Japanese columns on the perilous highways had taken refuge in
the hills; they were disorganized, lawless bands but they had
guns. Some were incorporated into Communist cadres of resist-
ance. The weapons the others abandoned or sold were soon being
used to arm a grass-roots peasant resistance. The students of the
northern universities had clamoured for war against Japan ; now
that the war had arrived and was surpassing in barbarism any-
thing they had conceived in their study halls, they too wanted to
take part in it. They abandoned their classes, crossed the lines,
and joined the resistance. Communist leadership was the rallying
point for the entire movement north of the Yellow River, and every
resource of human energy and intelligence, Communist, Kuomin-
tang, and nonpartisan, was swiftly geared into a programme of
social reorganization that provided a stable base for continuing
warfare. Relations between the Communists and the government
were good. Some of the early campaigns were exemplars of
co-ordination; the only major check the Japanese army received in
the north came at the magnificent battle of Hsinkou. There in
the mountain passes government troops held a frontal position long
enough to let the Communists filter across the enemy communication
lines and cut an entire division almost to pieces from the rear.
As the war in the north wore on, the Japanese columns closed
down the channels of communication and supply till frontal war-
fare became futile and impossible. By early 1938 the Red
army abandoned all standard army framework; the divisions
were now dissolved into a shifting net of marauding bands,
depending on the people for support. The government of Chiang
K'ai-shek, realizing the strength the Communists had generated,
grateful for the demands partisan resistance was making on
enemy strength, recognized the new system and authorized the
creation of an autonomous partisan base beyond the Yellow
River, deep in the enemy's rear. At a town called Fuping in
western Hupeh, a few days' march from Peking, the first guerrilla
government was established in January 1938; it included Com-
munists, Kuomintang members, and nonpartisan officials in a
regime sanctified by the blessing of the Central Government.
Japanese calculations, which had been upset in northern China
by partisan resistance, were even more thoroughly upset by what
happened in the lower Yangtze Valley. Long before the Com-
munists rooted themselves in the north, the attention of the
Japanese staff and the interest of the entire world had concen-
trated on the battle that was suffusing the entire Shanghai delta
in flame and blood. This was Chiang K'ai-shek's war.
Chiang watched the preliminary moves of the Japanese in
northern China with indecision. For a month he see-sawed back
and forth between the decision to fight and the knowledge of
China's weakness. When he did decide to resist, he struck in a
way that wrecked the smooth political-military structure of
Japan's ambitions. The Japanese had hoped to fight in the north
and to negotiate in the south. Chiang chose to precipitate a war
of the entire people against the enemy by throwing down the
gage of battle in his own bailiwick of the lower Yangtze, closest
to his own internal bases, where his best troops were marshalled
and ready. On August 13, 1937, he flung the best units of his
German-trained army into action against the Japanese marine
garrison in Shanghai. For a few days Chinese flesh and numbers
56
compressed the Japanese into a narrow strip by the banks of the
Whang-poo River. The Japanese realized that they were con-
fronted not with an isolated incident in northern China but with
a war against the Chinese people. To win this war would require
full mobilization of Japan's resources. The Japanese moved their
fleet to offshore anchorages, marshalled their air force at For-
mosa, and proceeded to pump steel at the massed Chinese troops
in overwhelming tonnages. Not even today is there any accurate
estimate of the carnage at Shanghai; Chinese casualties mounted
to the hundreds of thousands as the blood and courage of the
soldiers absorbed the shock of Japan's barrages.
Chiang's decision to hold at Shanghai is now, as it was then,
one of the most bitterly debated episodes of the entire war. It was
symbolic, almost with the symbolism of caricature, of the per-
sonality of the man. There was no hope of success in matching
Chinese flesh against Japanese metal; a withdrawal might have
salvaged some of the good units of the Chinese army for later
operations in the hinterland, where they could meet the Japanese
on more nearly even terms. These, however, were factual con-
siderations, and Chiang's stubbornness refused to submit to them.
The soldiers standing in the wet trenches and fed endlessly into
the slaughter were a projection of an inflexible will to resist. Since
Chiang had accepted war with Japan, he meant to fight it out his own
way yieldingnofootofgroundthatwasnottakenfromhimbyforce.
The resistance at Shanghai was futile in a military sense; in a
political sense it was one of the great demonstrations of the war.
It astounded the most world-weary of old China hands, and it
proved beyond further question in the record of history how much
suffering and heroism the Chinese people could display in the
face of hopeless odds. The demonstration at Shanghai was even
more valuable internally. The tale of the battle, carried into the
interior by word of mouth, kindled a spreading bonfire of patriotic
fervour. The line at the Yangtze gave time to mobilize the nation.
For two months the Japanese battered at Shanghai. Then, by a
clever outflanking movement to the south, they unpinned the
Chinese line and swept it away in utter confusion to Nanking.
Nanking, Chiang K'ai-shek's capital, fell on December 12,
1937, and an historic orgy of several weeks of rape, lust, and
wanton murder followed. The disaster all but unhinged Chinese
resistance. The broken Chinese armies were so scattered and dis-
organized that some even advertised the whereabouts of their
Gi 57
detachments in newspapers so that stragglers might rejoin their
units. If the Japanese had struck inland immediately, they might
have met no resistance more formidable than the hills and
mountains; instead they waited. They felt that the loss of China's
capital and great metropolis had eviscerated the nation's resist-
ance and that Chiang would be willing to talk peace.
The winter of '37-^38 worked a miracle in China. The seat of
government was transferred to the upriver port of Hankow, 800
miles from the sea, and the most complete unity of spirit and
motive that China had ever known existed there for a few months.
The Hankow spirit could never be quite precisely defined by those
who experienced it there and then. All China was on the move
drifting back from the coast into the interior and swirling in
confusion about the temporary capital. War-lord armies from the
south and southwest were marching to join the battle. The Com-
munists were speeding their partisans deeper into the tangled
communications that supported Japan's front. In Hankow the
government and the Communists sat in common council, made
common plans for the prosecution of the war. The government
authorized the creation of a second Communist army the New
Fourth on the lower Yangtze behind the Japanese lines; the
Communists participated in the meetings of the Military Council.
The elite of China's writers, engineers, and journalists con-
verged on Hankow to sew together the frayed strands of resistance.
By spring of 1938, when the Japanese resumed the campaign,
with Hankow as their ultimate objective, the new armies and the
new spirit had crystallized. In April 1938, for the first time in the
history of Japan, her armies suffered a frontal defeat at the battle
of Taierchwang. The setback was only temporary. Moving in
two great arms, the Japanese forces closed on Hankow from the
north and the east to pinch it off in the following fall. Almost
simultaneously their landing parties seized Canton, the great port
city of the south, and the Japanese rested on their arms a second time.
On paper the Japanese strategy was perfect. China falls into a
simple geographical pattern. Western China is a rocky, moun-
tainous land; eastern China is flat and alluvial, with scarcely a
hill to break the paddies for miles on end. Both western and
eastern China are drained by three great rivers that flow down
from the mountains across the flatlands to the Pacific Ocean. The
Japanese army now controlled the entire coast and all the centres
of industry. It also controlled the outlets of the three great rivers.
58
In the north it held the Peking-Tientsin area and the outlet of
the Yellow River. In central China it garrisoned both banks of
the Yangtze, from Shanghai through Nanking to Hankow. In
southern China it held Canton and dominated the West River.
With the cities, railways, and rivers under control, the Japanese
felt that they could wait until a paralysis of all economic and
transport functions brought Chinese resistance to a halt, and they
waited. They were still waiting seven years later, when the
Japanese army surrendered a ruined homeland to the Allies.
The Japanese blundered in China. Why they blundered was
best explained later by one of the shrewder statesmen of the
Chungking government, General Wu Te-chen, who said, "The
Japanese think they know China too much. 35 Japanese political
and military intelligence in China was far and away the finest in
the world, but it had concentrated on schisms and rifts, on per-
sonalities and feuds, on guns and factories. Its dossiers on each
province, each general, each army, contained so much of the
wickedness and corruption of China that the accumulated know-
ledge was blinding. The one fact that was obscure to them was
that China was a nation. They had seen a revolution proceeding
in China for thirteen years, but only its scum, its abortions, its
internal tensions; they had not measured its results. They were
fighting more than a coalition of armies; they were fighting an
entire people. They had watched the infant growth of Chinese
industries on the coast, had marked the new railways on the map.
But the strength of the Chinese was not in their cities; it was in
the hearts of the people. China was primitive, so primitive that
the destruction of her industries and cities, her railways and
machinery, did not upset her as similar disaster disrupted Europe
in later days. China was rooted in the soil. As long as the rain fell
and the sun shone, the crops would grow; no blockade of the
Japanese navy could interpose itself between the peasant and his
land. China had just emerged from chaos, but she was still so
close to it that the disruption of war could be fitted into the
normal routine of her life ; if, for example, it was necessary to move
government, industry, people, and army into the interior, it could
be done. There was an enormous elasticity in the system that Japan
meant to wreck when it was struck, it yielded, but it did not break.
Through the long months of 1938, as the Chinese armies were
pressed slowly back towards the interior, they found their way
59
clogged by moving people. The breathing space of winter had
given hundreds of thousands time to make their decision, and
China was on the move in one of the greatest mass migrations in
human history. It is curious that such a spectacle has not been
adequately recorded by any Chinese writer or novelist. Certainly
the long files of gaunt people who moved west across the roads
and mountains must have presented a sight unmatched since the
days of nomad hordes; yet no record tells how many made the
trek, where they came from, where they settled anew. The
government and the journals of China have recorded mainly
those things that were important to the war, the movement of the
armies, the officials, the universities, and the factories.
The government began evacuation of factories and industry
almost immediately on the outbreak of the war. The entire opera-
tion was in the hands of one of the most brilliant and lovable
men in China her Minister of Economic Affairs, Dr. Wong
Wen-hao. Wong was a tiny man, a scholarly doodler. He had a
deep cleft in his forehead that made him oddly attractive, and his
smile was unfailing. Through all the later years of the war he was
one of the few senior officials in the cabinet who were never
accused of corruption by anyone his shining integrity lifted
him above ordinary politics. China's prewar industry was a lop-
sided growth; it was concentrated at the coast and in a few great
river cities. Chinese private capital had invested overwhelmingly
in textiles and consumer goods. Heavy industry, dominated
by the government, was a diminutive tail attached to the body
of the economy; steel production was never more than 100,000
tons annually. The swiftness of the war in the north and the
ferocity of the fighting at Shanghai threatened to consume almost
overnight all the industry there was. Government records show
now that in all some 400 factories, with something over 200,000
tons of equipment, were moved in the retreat. These seem modest
figures in the light of Russia's later accomplishments ; only by
breaking them down can their significance be exposed. Wong
abandoned almost all China's textile mills and consumer in-
dustries to the enemy and concentrated on moving heavy
industries and arsenals inland. China salvaged less than 10 per
cent of her textile capacity, with perhaps 40 per cent of her
machine shops and heavy industry, but she saved more than 80
per cent of the capacity of her eleven obsolescent arsenals.
This meant that the Chinese would be threadbare during the
60
following years, but that the army's minimum needs might be
met.
The early stages of the industrial hegira carried little glory.
The removal from Shanghai started late; businessmen were
reluctant to let their plants be moved; the government was
slow in making its decisions. The first plant to go, the Shanghai
Machine Works, one of the finest mechanical shops in the
country, did not start up Soochow Creek till two weeks after the
fighting began. Soochow Greek runs through the heart of
Shanghai and skirted the battlefront. The machinery was loaded
in rowboats, covered with leaves and branches for camouflage,
and poled slowly upriver to the Yangtze; when air raids threat-
ened, the rowboats sheltered in reeds by the side of the river.
It was followed by other shops till the Japanese drive cut the
city off from the Yangtze in early December. Because it was
delayed too long, the Shanghai evacuation succeeded in moving
only 14,000 tons of equipment before the enemy advance ended it.
Shanghai, however, had proved the thing could be done, and
by the spring of 1 938 dozens of movable plants in northern and
central China were being taken down, repacked, and trans-
shipped to the far interior. A major engineering operation was
being performed while the national organism continued to
function and resist. From the Yellow River one of the greatest
textile mills in China, the Yufeng, set out on its trek to Szechwan,
a province 1,000 miles away and without a single railway.
In February it packed its 8,000 tons of machinery and bundled
them off down the railway to Hankow. In May it kissed the
railhead good-bye and set off by steamer upriver to the gorge
mouth. In August it was repackaged again to fit on some 380
native junks, which took it up the tumbling gorges to Szechwan;
1 20 of the boats sank in the gorges, but the junkmen raised all
but 21 and carried on. The convoy arrived in Chungking in
April 1939; a patch of hilly ground had been cleared for its
arrival, and by spring the company was busily training timid
Szechwanese peasant women to tend the rusting spindles.
An industrial wilderness stretched from Hankow on into the
west. Whatever went inland had to be moved by hand. Coolies
by hundreds and thousands hauled at blocks of steel weighing
up to 20 tons. By the last week of Hankow's resistance removals
had hit a stupendous pace. The Hankow power plant had been
operating up to the very last days, for it was essential to the
61
functions of life, but it was impossible to leave behind in Hankow,
the enormous 1 8-ton turbine, which would be irreplaceable after
retreat to Szechwan. The dismantling process reached the power
plant early in October, but the turbine could not be inched
aboard a steamer until October 23, just two days before the
Japanese entered the city. The removal of such massive machinery
presented problems that the tiny river steamers could not handle;
no steamer that could thread the gorges had a crane capable of
lifting more than 16 tons. The Chinese settled the problem by
lashing heavy machinery to pontoons, floating the pontoons,
tying the pontoons to the steamers, and sending the whole through
the rapids in tow.
The new industries, resettled in Szechwan, were a Rube Gold-
berg paradise. Steel factories were built with bamboo beams ; blast
furnaces were supplied with coal carried in hand baskets. Copper
refineries consumed copper coins collected from the peasantry,
converted them into pure copper by the most modern electrolytic
methods, then shipped the metal to arsenals buried deep in caves.
The migration of China's universities paralleled almost pre-
cisely the movement of her industries. Like industry, China's
system of higher education had grown in thirty years of chaos;
it too had concentrated along the coast and in the great cities,
and it too was one of the elements of the new China that Japan
most feared. Every major turning point in modern Chinese
history has been signalized by student uprisings and intellectual
discontent. Students had generated the anti-Manchu uprisings.
Their riots and demonstrations touched off the national uproar
of 1919, when even corrupt war lords were forced to repudiate
the Treaty of Versailles. Student-led riots struck some of the
most important notes in the rising crescendo of revolution of the
1920*8. Finally, the students and their professors were the most
enthusiastic and vociferous demonstrators against Japan, out-
side of the Communist Party.
The four great universities of northern China Peking National,
Tsinghua, Yenching, and Nankai were particularly loathed
by the Japanese. They singled out Tsinghua, which had been
built with American money, for special treatment. They smashed
its laboratories or removed its equipment to Japan and used
the student gymnasium to stable Japanese horses. Nankai
University was almost completely destroyed. In the basement of
Peking University, the seat of China's intellectual renaissance,
62
Japanese special police set up examination headquarters for their
political and military inquisition.
When the Japanese attacked in the summer of 1937, most of
the students were away on summer vacation. The Ministry of
Education sent out a call for them to appear at two rendezvous.
One was to be at Sian in the north, on the inner bank of the
Yellow River, the other at Ghangsha, south of the Yangtze.
From Sian the students of two colleges were told to move to
southern Shensi. When they arrived at the end of the railway,
they set out on the tail end of their journey for a i8o-mile march
over the rugged Tsingling mountain range. The deans of the
university were the general staff of the march, and they divided
their i,5OO-odd men and women into sections of 500 each. Each
unit was preceded by a police section, a foraging squad, and a
communications squad; its rear was brought up by pack animals
carrying rice and wheat cakes and by a few wheezing trucks
crawling over unimproved roads. The foraging squads descended
on villages, bought all the fresh vegetables they could find, and
had enough greens on hand to start a meal when the rest of the
students arrived with their cooking pots. The road they followed
runs over some of the most primitive terrain in China. Local
authorities quartered students in stables and farmhouses. En-
gineering students set up receiving stations to catch the evening
broadcasts; next morning they hung up posters as news bulletins
for the students farther back to read. For the villagers these
bulletins were a first exposure to the phenomenon of current news.
As the Japanese drove farther inland, university after university
packed up and moved away. Some evacuated their campuses
within a few days of the Japanese entry; the students of Sun
Yat-sen University were still poling boats bearing the college
library out of the northern suburbs of Canton when the Japanese
entered from the south. The agriculture department of National
Central University decided that its prize herd of blooded cattle
was too valuable to leave behind, and all through the summer
of 1938 the cattle grazed their way inland just a few weeks ahead
of the Japanese spearheads; not till the summer of 1939 did they
finally reach the quiet interior, where the bulls settled down to
to bring joy to the scrawny, inbred cows of Szechwan. Of China's
1 08 institutions of higher learning, 94 were either forced to move
inland or close down entirely. And yet the entire educational
system had been re-established by the fall of 1939, and 40,000
63
students were enrolled in the refugee colleges, as against 32,000
who had been registered in the last academic year before the war.
The transferred institutions of learning clustered mainly in
three centres. One was near Chungking, another near Chengtu
in western China, the third at Kunming, capital of Yunnan.
Each of these centres differed in texture and quality. The
universities in the Chungking suburbs, under strict government
control, were always infected by the capital's prevailing mood.
The universities about Changtu took refuge on the beautiful
campus of the missionary West China Union University, where
they were sheltered in relatively adequate quarters and, under
the protection of Canadian and American missionaries, preserved
their academic integrity almost inviolate; their scholastic
standards remained consistently the highest throughout the
war. The most important universities of northern China, how-
ever, all trekked on to 'the far southwest, where they combined
at Kunming for the duration of the war as the National South-
west University. The northern universities had been noted before
the war for their brilliant intellectual life, their advanced and
sparkling political alertness; arriving in Kunming, they estab-
lished themselves in squalor. The students were camped four,
six, and eight to a room, some of them domiciled in a rat-ridden,
cobwebbed abandoned theatre; they ate rice and vegetables
and not enough of these. The government, always suspicious
of the advanced political views of the northern universities,
watched these refugee institutions like a hawk, tightening the
net of surveillance closer about them with each passing year.
In the beginning it did not matter the universities were too
happy at having escaped the Japanese to care. If the students
lived hard, they knew that all China, too, was suffering. As the
years wore on and teachers hungered, as budgets were made a
mockery by inflation, the National Southwest University began to
re-assert itself politically and by the close of the war had become
the principal seat of political discontent in southern China.
The migrations of factories and universities were the most
spectacular. How many more millions of peasants and city folk were
set adrift by the Japanese invasion no one can guess estimates
run all the way from three to twenty-five million. The peasants
fled from the Japanese; they fled from the great flood of the
Yellow River, whose dykes had been opened to halt the Japanese
armies; they fled out of fear of the unknown. The workers who
64
accompanied the factories numbered perhaps no more than
10,000; they came because without them the machines would
be useless. The restaurant keepers, singsong girls, adventurers,
the little merchants who packed their cartons of cigarettes or
folded their bolts of cloth to come on the march, probably
numbered hundreds of thousands. The little people who accom-
panied the great organized movements travelled by foot, sampan,
junk, railway, and ricksha. Thousands crusted the junks moving
through the gorges; hundreds of thousands strung out over the
mountain roads like files of ants winding endlessly westward. There
is no estimate of the number who died of disease, exposure, or hunger
on the way; their bones are still whitening on the routes of march.
The war in China had settled into new moulds by the summer
of 1939. The trek was over; the wheels of what little industry
had been salvaged were turning again in new homes; the
universities were drawing up their fall curricula. The shattered
armies were digging in on the hill lines. The front now ran in
squiggly lines along the foothills of the west and along the rims
of all the great river valleys. In the north the Communists
began to dig deeper and deeper into the sleepy consciousness of
the villagers ; cut off from Chungking, they fashioned new tools
of government and grew wiser and stronger each year. In central
and southern China the loose federation of the Central Govern-
ment and the war lords began to run in familiar ruts; only in
Chungking, where the bombs fell from spring to autumn, the
old spirit persisted for a few more years.
China did not realize for some time longer that it had arrived
at a dead end. Meanwhile the Japanese hailed each of their new
campaigns as a climactic thrust at Chungking, and the Chinese
armies fought desperately to ward them off. These campaigns
were small but bitter, part of a new pattern of war that the
Japanese high command had settled on. The new pattern was
to keep the fronts in a constant state of imbalance; new divisions
and cadres were blooded in combat, then removed to reserve
areas for use in future campaigns. The Japanese erected new
industries along the coast in their rear and tied what remained
of the Chinese economy into Japan's conveyor system.
The trouble with almost all the writing that war correspondents
did in China was that it was built on press conferences and com-
muniqus. We used phrases the world understood to describe
65
a war that was incomprehensible to the West. Chinese com-
munique's, written by obscure men who had never smelled gun-
powder or heard a shot fired in anger, spoke of thousands of
men engaged, of bloody operations, of desperate attacks and
counterattacks. The Chinese put out such communiques for
years, in the beginning because they themselves believed that
the Japanese were still intent on smashing through the mountains
to the heartland beyond. Long after, they had ceased to believe
their own statements, Chinese wordsmiths were still glossing
the grimy, squalid contests at the front with the polished rhetoric
of earlier days. There were no real fronts, no barrages, no break-
throughs, anywhere on the China front, but men wrote of them
of supply trains, logistics, encirclements. The Chinese news-
papers themselves did not believe the reported claims of thousands
on thousands of Japanese being trapped or encircled, but they
printed them just the same. The foreign press became cynical.
Sometimes the exaggerations were too difficult to take straight.
Once American Army intelligence found there were only 30,000
Japanese engaged in an action; the Chinese military spokesmen
reported 80,000 in action, but the communiques recorded enemy
casualties totalling 120,000.
The campaigns the Japanese fought between 1938 and 1944
were foraging expeditions rather than battles. They had no greater
strategic objective than to keep the countryside in terror, to
sack the fields and towns, to keep the Chinese troops at the front
off balance, and to train their own green recruits under fire.
Most of them were known as rice-bowl campaigns, because they
occurred most frequently in central China, the rice bowl of the
land. The Japanese would concentrate several divisions, plunge
deep into the front, ravage the countryside, and' then turn back.
The Chinese would counter by envelopment; their units would
fall back before the thrusts, then close in on the flanks and rear
to pinch off the garrison supply posts that the Japanese set up
to feed their advance. The Chinese could never do more than
pinch off the Japanese salients and force them back into their
dug-in bases; to do more than that would have required a weight
of metal and equipment that Wong Wen-hao's transplanted
industry could not hope to provide. The result was the permanent
exhausting stalemate known as the China war.
This China war was fought along a flexible belt of no-man's-
land, 50 to 100 miles deep, all up and down the middle of
66
China. In this belt of devastation the Chinese had destroyed
every road, bridge, railway, or ferry that might aid the Japanese
in one of their periodic thrusts; the only Chinese defence was to
reduce the country to immobility. Japanese and Chinese troops
chased each other across the belt for six years; the peasants died of
starvation, the troops bled, the villages were burned to the ground,
towns changed hands as many as six or seven times, and yet for
six years the front remained stable with few significant changes.
One of the typical campaigns of this period was proceeding in
southeastern Shansi in the summer of 1939. Shansi is an im-
portant province it is laden with coal and has the most con-
siderable iron ores in China south of the Great Wall. It nestles
into the elbow of the Yellow River, and its rugged mountains
dominate the plains of northern China. By early 1939 the main
Chinese positions in the province were cut into the slopes of the
Chungtiao Mountains, which lie on the southern boundary,
just north of the Yellow River. The guerrilla areas of the Com-
munist Eighth Route Army were behind the Japanese strong
points and around them ; in front were Central Government troops.
I 1 went up to see this campaign in the fall of 1939 the first
time I had visited the Chinese army at the front. In the next
six years I saw the same sights over and over again, each year
more drab, each year less inspiring.
I started out with a column of Chinese troop reinforcements,
marching north to the line from the railhead on the Lunghai
line. The troops were strung out over the hills in long files,
trudging along without discipline or fixed pace. The padding
of their straw-sandalled feet made the dust lift knee-high about
them, and for miles away eyes in the hills saw an army marching
by serpentines of dust in the sky. The commander of each unit
rode at its head on his bony horse. Behind him were the foot
soldiers, and behind them came the baggage train coolie
soldiers carrying ammunition boxes slung from staves on their
shoulders; men burdened with sacks of rice; the company
kitchen, consisting of a single soot-blackened cauldron carried
by two men, bringing up the rear. This column had several
serviceable pack guns slung on mules. At that time the whole
Chinese army had about 1,400 pieces of artillery all told for a
front of 2,000 miles. A single pack howitzer loaded on muleback
looked heavier, more powerful, more important, than an entire
l The "I" throughout is Theodore H. White.
67
battery of Long Toms. Later in the war animal-drawn baggage
trains became a rarity, but this was 1939, anc ^ tne column I
accompanied had one it crawled along even more slowly
than the slogging foot soldiers. It was loaded high with sacks
of rice and with military gear. On the sacks of rice one or two
soldiers would be stretched dozing in the sun; the driver cracked
his whip smartly over the animals, and the wheels screamed
for lack of greasing, but no matter how the cart pitched in the
rutted road, the soldiers stayed sleeping on their sacks. There
was no hurry, for the war had lasted a long time already and
would last years more. On wet days the march was a column
of agony, the soldiers soaked through and through, their feet
encased in balls of clay and mud.
Traffic to the front was two-way. There was the insistent beat
of the marching men plodding forward, and in the opposite
direction came the derelicts of the battlefield. The sick and the
wounded usually made their way back to the rear on foot, on
their own. A serious head wound or a bad abdominal wound
meant death at the front, for the medical service could never
move these men to operating stations in time for help. Those
who could walk but who obviously were no longer of military
usefulness were given passes that permitted them to make their
way back by themselves. These were pitiful men, limping along
over the mountain passes, dragging themselves up by clutching
rocks or trees, leaning on staves. You met them at the saddle of
each pass as they sat resting from the long climb and looking
out over the next valley and next hill with glazed eyes. More
rarely you saw sick or wounded carried by stretcher to the rear.
They smelled horribly of wounds and filth, and flies formed a
cloud about them or even made a crust over their pus-filled
eyes or dirty wounds.
We crossed the Yellow River in dirty flatboats and then moved
up over thinner passes to the front. We followed hard on the heels
of the Japanese army retreating through the Hsin River valley.
It was fall, the season of the millet harvest, and the kaoliang too
was ripe. Chinese valleys are beautiful to look at from the
outside, before you know the burden of sorrow and superstition
within each village wall. When the road was in the clear on the
ridge, you could see clouds of chaff puffing into the air from
threshing floors where the peasants were flailing the grain from
the husks. The persimmons were ripe and red, glowing from
68
the thin branches of trees from which the leaves had long been
blown. The earth was being ploughed for winter wheat, and it
smelled good ; in some of the fields the thin blades of the new
crop coloured the soil with green, while in the next patch the
heavy pink-and-brown kaoliang ears hung down from tall
stalks to brush our heads as we rode past.
The Japanese had just left, but they had blazed a black, scarred
trail of devastation across the countryside. You might ride for
a day through a series of burned villages that were simply huddles
of ruins. In some places the roads were so torn that not even
Chinese mountain ponies could carry you down the ditches cut
across them. You had to pick your way down on foot and lead
your horse after you or ride for hours on the crest of a barren
ridge looking out into the hills beyond. Then there would be a
single hut standing by itself in the vastness of the hills; with roof
fallen in and timbers burned black, it would stand as a symbol
of the desolation that ran from end to end of no-man's-land.
The stories the villagers told were such tales as I heard repeated
later after every Japanese sortie. The peasants had fled before the
Japanese advance. When they did not flee voluntarily, they were
forced to leave by government edict, and they took with them
everything from seed grain to furniture. They bundled their pigs
and cattle off into the hills, hid their clothes and valuables in the
ground, and retired to the mountains to build mat sheds and
wait for the armies to force a decision. The Japanese entered a
barren wasteland. They had been held up by floods, and when
they reached their key objectives they had two weeks' growth of
beard; caked with mud, they were exhausted and furious.
In some of the districts through which I passed, every woman
caught by the Japanese had been raped without exception.
The tales of rape were so sickeningly alike that they were mon-
otonous unless they were relieved by some particular device of
fiendishness. Japanese soldiers had been seen copulating with
sows in some districts. In places where the villagers had not had
time to hide themselves effectively, the Japanese rode cavalry
through the high grain to trample the women into showing them-
selves. The Japanese officers brought their own concubines with
them from the large garrison cities women of Chinese, Russian,
Korean, or Japanese nationality but the men had to be serviced
by the countryside. When the Japanese transport system broke
down in the mud, peasants were stripped naked, lashed to carts,
60
and driven forward by the imperial army as beasts of burden.
Japanese horses and mules were beaten to death in the muck;
on any road and all the hills you could see the carcases of their
animals rotting and the bones of their horses whitening in the
sun. The Chinese peasants who were impressed to take their places
were driven with the same pitiless fury till they too collapsed
or were driven mad.
It took two weeks of riding and walking to get to the front. From
a regimental command post I was led up the bank of a hill to the
crest covered with stalks of tall wheat. With a soldier, I ran silently,
crouching behind the wheat, and then dropped in convenient
position. The man parted the wheat carefully and pointed down
into the valley. There were whitewashed houses in the distance
and the vague outline of a walled town. " Those are the Japanese,"
he whispered, pointing vaguely. I stared harder. Then I noticed
something moving in the grain fields not far from us. " What's
that?'' I asked. The soldier did not even turn to follow my
finger. " Those are the peasants," he said; "they have to harvest
the grain, you know it is the harvest season." Even the Japanese
could understand that; they were peasants themselves. Except
in the savagery of their raids they too could be neutral to the
people who worked in the fields.
I travelled the front in Shansi for 30 or 40 miles that week;
in later years I travelled it for many more miles in many provinces.
It was always anti-climax. I saw nothing anywhere but detached
clusters of men in foxholes who were guarding rusting machine-
guns or cleaning old rifles. Chinese outposts were clusters of
twenty or thirty men linked to their battalion headquarters by
runner, from battalion headquarters to division command by
telephone. The Japanese were usually disposed in villages with
concentrations of two or three hundred men supported by light
field artillery. You could look down on the Japanese from the
hills for over a thousand miles; at any point there would be five
times as many Chinese soldiers as Japanese. Yet always the
Japanese had heavy machine-guns and field artillery; before any
armed Chinese could move across the open mile or two to get at
the Japanese, he would be cut down by enemy fire, which no
support in his army's possession could neutralize.
It was all quiet on the China front in 1939. It was to be all
quiet in the same way, for the same reasons, for five more long
years.
70
CHAPTER 5
STALEMATE
1 wo YEARS WERE needed to bring the war back from
the tranquil front in southern Shansi to the open Pacific two
years of confusion in which the world watched a series of balancing
acts in the hills of China without perceiving their inner meaning
or historic significance. China's front lines were secure by 1939;
the government was re-established ; war had become the normal
way of life. During the first few months after the migration the
government hammered out some general routines of administration
and built a complex administrative structure above them. There
were very few mysteries about the way the Chinese ran their war.
The war rested on the peasant, who supplied the two essentials
of food and manpower. With the food he raised, the government
fed the army, the Kuomintang, the arsenal workers, and the
bureaucracy. With the manpower the peasant supplied, the
government kept recruits trudging to the front, built the roads,
moved essential tonnages. Ultimately all things, whether military
or political, resolved themselves into a peasant, dressed in torn
blue or grey gown, straining to supply the raw energy of re-
sistance. The movement of an army, the building of an American
airfield for B-2g's, the construction of shelter, the organization
of supply, all could be reduced to the number of peasant hands
available and the number of sacks of rice they could produce to
meet the crisis. All China's calculations were balanced on the
productivity of the peasant farmer. This was true even of arma-
ment production and specifically of the source of China's nitrates
for explosives there, too, the peasant was the key man, for the
Chinese got their nitrates from the excrement of the peasant's body,
which was carefully collected and used in compounding gunpowder.
At the beginning of the war the peasant was taxed in money,
and with this money the government bought his grain. The
monetary system began to sag in 1941 under the weight of in-
flation, and the government, on the advice of an American
economist, shifted to a tax in kind. For this new tax the govern-
ment calculated its requirements directly in sacks of grain; it
allocated a quota to be raised by each province; and the
provincial authorities broke this quota down by hsien, or counties,
and finally by villages. The old chieftains in each village made
sure that the poorest peasant always bore the largest share.
The new tax had the one virtue of making exquisitely clear just
what was the substance of war-making power and politics. The
peasant paid off to his local officials in grain; the local officials
took their cut of what they received and passed on the rest to the
government; the government then paid each of its functionaries
in bulging sacks of hard grain, whose value far outweighed the
wads of paper money that made up payrolls.
The new tax was a symbol of the changes the war was forcing
on the Koumintang. From the day of its maturity the Kuomin-
tang had rested on an association of the businessmen of the coast
and the landed gentry of the countryside. The businessmen,
the merchants, and the manufacturers of the coast had been
wiped out by the Japanese invasion, ancj the government now
got its political support almost exclusively from the gentry.
This shift was not clear on the surface. Indeed, a survey of senior
appointive officials in 1940 showed that 50 per cent came from
the two downriver commercial provinces that had always been
the chief Kuomintang bailiwicks 35 per cent from Kiangus
alone, 15 per cent from Chekiang, the Generalissimo's home
province. The shift became evident only in studying the things
the government failed to do and asking whom all its sins of
omission benefited. It was obvious, for example, that the grain
tax was being collected in double portion from the small peasants,
while the rich were evading it. The government winked at this,
left collection of the grain tax in the hands of local officials, and
made no protest as long as grain was forthcoming. In bulletins
and speeches government officials thundered against the hoarding
that was jabbing inflation on to successive pinnacles, and every-
one knew that the great hoarders were the landlords; yet no
action was ever taken. The government rested on the landlord,
the landlord on the peasant. To release the peasant energies
from their time-locked bitterness, to marshal these energies
against the foreign enemy, would require the harshest action
against the gentry who interposed themselves between Chung-
king and the paddy fields. The gentry was composed in part of
former war lords who still had military strength and in greater
part of the men who were the girders of the local Kuomintang
72
machine. The government felt the balance was too delicate to
survive any fundamental reform.
This internal balancing act was only one of a series. It was
paralleled by the military balancing act. The Japanese held
China with about fifteen or twenty divisions approximately
a million men. Their divisions were disposed along the coast,
along the railways, in the river valleys; each of their garrisons
was bound to the rest by a modern system of communications.
They held strategic central positions. Along the rim of these
positions, in an enormous continental semicircle, were the
Chinese troops, approximately 4,000,000 of them, pinned
down by primitive roads and lack of transport. To move a Chinese
division from northern to central China by foot might take a
month; a Japanese division could be shifted from Peking to
Hankow in ten days. It meant that in a war of manoeuvre the
Chinese were licked before they began; their only hope was to
have enough troops at each point of danger to meet any reason-
able threat.
Three or four key areas had to be held: the gorges of the
Yangtze in the heart of the land, the Yellow River bend at Tung-
kwan in the north, the flanks of Yunnan in the southwest,
Changsha and the rice bowl in the east. Each of these danger
areas was bolstered by a solid block of Chinese troops under
reliable commanders. All but one of the key areas were manned
by reliable troops of Chiang's own personal " central" army;
the one exception was at Changsha, where Hsueh Yueh, a peppery
Cantonese who had feuded with Chiang K'ai-shek in the years
before the war, won the right to command by his exceptional
military ability. Between these key areas motley provincial
and local levies were scattered. The vital lower Yangtze front
was held by Ku Chu-tung, a zealot who would surely pay as
much attention to Communist expansion as to the Japanese.
Commanders of the secondary areas were usually provincial
war lords who stood outside the pale of Chiang K'ai-shek's
confidence. At one time half of the eight or nine war areas
facing the Japanese were commanded by men who within the
previous fifteen years had fought or offered to fight open civil
war against Chiang K'ai-shek.
All these troops arrived fresh at their new places in 1939. In
1940 and '41 they were busy digging in. Chungking was too far
away to exercise more than nominal control, and the armies
73
settled down to govern their districts; they made and removed
county magistrates and judges, collected taxes, passed laws.
Some of the armies felt so secure that the soldiers engaged in
private farming to supplement their rations. Directives from
Chungking were ignored or obeyed as circumstances suggested.
There was no real central system of supply for this Chinese
army; each divisional commander was given a sum of money
and told to fend for himself. The straining arsenals of the Central
Government could produce at most some 15,000,000 bullets
a month and a few thousand shells for guns and mortars. This
was an average of four bullets per man per month. No sane
commander would dare to plan an offensive with so little reserve,
and gradually the spirit of attack eroded; ammunition was
hoarded till it grew old and stale. In 1943 a convoy of ox-drawn
carts was seen carrying to the front rifle bullets that bore on their
cases tl^e legend, "Made in 1931." Chungking was far away;
it took months to cover the rutty roads from its arsenals to the
battle lines of the north. No commander could hope to meet a
crisis with a plea to Chungking for emergency supplies a man
had to fight with what lay in his own storehouses.
Another balance existed in the trade and commerce of this
interim period. The world watched the blockade of China with
concern when the French railway to the southwest was cut off;
the Burma Road acquired the significance of a symbol as the
only breach in the blockade. Actually all Chinese adminis-
trators knew this the road and the railway were only minor
factors in the supply of China then. The Japanese blockade
until late 1941 was a sieve, punctured by one of the greatest
smuggling rings in history. It was estimated that half a million
men were employed just in the underground railway that brought
gasoline from offshore boats through the rocky inlets of the
southeastern coast to ,the Chinese government. The venal
Japanese army co-operated with Chinese profiteers. Cloth,
rubber tyres, and medicines were brought in by private enter-
prisers in as large quantities as gasoline and other critical
materials for the government, and this was anything but a one-
way trade; Chinese tungsten, tin, and antimony for Japanese
arms plants went out to the enemy over the same routes. Both
the Japanese and the Chinese were aware of what was going
on, and government agents participated actively. The Chinese
Liquid Fuel Control Commission paid all the haulage and
74
brokerage expenses for gasoline smuggled in and the full price
for any quantity lost en route through enemy action. The China
National Aviation Corporation, a government agency, bribed
the way for high octane gasoline right through the Japanese
army lines at Canton for use on the single vital airline that bound
China together. Chinese Communists bought guns, pistols, and
gasoline in enemy-garrisoned towns.
It was a curious front. The Chinese mail service crossed the
line regularly with letters from Chungking to all the major
cities occupied by the Japanese and back again. On the Indo-
Chinese border the Chinese officers bought the rice to feed their
troops from dealers who carried it from Japanese-controlled
areas facing them. Government officials remitted money regularly
to their families in Shanghai and Peking and received reports
of their properties held by the enemy.
The stalemate was reflected in Chungking by enormous
cynicism and unhappiness. The war had become neither war nor
peace, but a shadow world of imitation reality, in which neither
existed. All the old strains began to re-assert themselves, and the
greatest was that between the government and the Communists.
The union between government and Communists had not been
thought through to a conclusion by either side; it rested perilously
on the one specific point of defence against the Japanese, and
when the attack stopped, the union began to fall apart. To create
a stable base that might have power of its own a regeneration of
Chinese society would have been prerequisite, and the regenera-
tion of society was revolution something on which the two
parties could not agree.
The fundamental cause of cleavage was the expansion of the
Communist Party. Communist influence and arms were growing
month by month behind the enemy lines. Communist head-
quarters were still in Yenan, in northern Shensi, but by early
1939 the nuclear northern Shensi area had become only a small
fragment of the areas the Communists controlled, although it
was still the most significant. Their greatest strength already lay
beyond the Yellow River, along the coast, in the lower Yangtze
Valley. The early Red troops had been decimated in the first
years of war ; the new Red army, native to northern China, was
commanded by fresh young lieutenants and captains who had
never heard of Communism before the war began. In Yenan, as
75
in Chungking, the same old names persisted in high councils;
but in the field of Red operations new leadership was rising
from the grassroots. In essence the Communists relied on the
people around them for support. They had no safe rear area
with millions of peaceful peasants; the areas they controlled were
criss-crossed with Japanese lines of communications and studded
with Japanese garrisons and pillboxes. If they were to maintain
pressure against these Japanese, the Communists could never
rest. In defending themselves they were forced to agitate or die,
to keep public support at fever pitch or see it perish.
Their agitation and expansion behind the Japanese lines
brought them into incessant friction with government units. The
Japanese advance had left pockets of government troops in both
northern and central China. As the Communists organized
the countryside on a new social basis for support against the
Japanese, they clashed again and again with government troops
and officials. Civil and military government were one and the
same thing to them it was total war, and there were no neutrals.
The old village elders appointed by the government before the
war, the middle-aged county magistrates, were unable to adapt
themselves to rugged partisan warfare. Those who were able
to make the transition remained with the people; those who
were too old and brittle to change were removed on one pretext or
another by the partisans, who sought justification for their acts
in the war against Japan. Similarly, isolated government units
in Communist areas found themselves being sucked into Com-
munist-style war; when they were unwilling or unable to co-
operate, there was friction, and the two sides charged each other
with bad faith, with attacking each other. As the years wore on,
the government apparatus behind the Japanese lines dissolved,
was absorbed, and was replaced by a completely new form of
resistance under Communist control.
The first armed clash between the two elements came in the
summer of 1938. From then on, bands of Communist or govern-
ment troops in remote areas, isolated from their own high
commands, fought each other with increasing frequency. In
government areas Communist expansion was seen as a disease.
Since the government would not or could not mobilize the people
as the Communists did without striking at their own base of
social support, they felt the Communists, too, should desist
from organizing. In government-controlled areas the various
76
Communist bureaux were put under increasing surveillance.
Government zealots in Pingkiang, a small town in Hunan, fell on
local Communist war area liaison office and massacred its
personnel; similar bureaux in other cities were closed down.
Communist activity in Chiang K'ai-shek's China slowly went
underground till only in Chungking and Sian were open bureaux
maintained, and these were watched. In the fall of 1939 fighting
flared on a divisional scale in Shansi ; it was halted by a negotiated
truce in the spring of 1940, but even more bitter clashes followed
in the Yangtze Valley, where the New Fourth Army operated.
By midsummer of 1940 it was evident that some agreement
would have to be reached, or Chinese unity would be shattered.
There were any number of general problems. First was the strict
demarcation of the original civilian Communist area in northern
Shensi, where border guards of both parties fought intermittently.
Second was the matter of supplies. The government had promised
to pay and supply 45,000 troops of the Communist Eighth Route
Army; it had been willing in the spring of '38 to undertake
maintenance of 15,000 troops under the name of the New Fourth
Army, but both pay and supplies were slow in coming and were
guarded with conditions. The government's commitments were
good on paper, but in fact the Communists were fighting on
their own with little help from the government. Third and this
was most important the areas in which the government and
Communist armies operated against the Japanese had to be
clearly defined so as to reduce clashes to a minimum.
A general agreement in the summer of 1940 solved both the
demarcation of the Communist northern Shensi area and the
supply problem, The key to the agreement, however, was a
Communist commitment to remove all Eighth Route Army
troops to the northern bank of the Yellow River and New Fourth
Army troops to the area north of the Yangtze.
At the end of 1940 occurred what has ever since been known
as the New Fourth Army Incident one of the major turning
points in China's wartime politics, an emotional symbol that still
evokes sharp bitterness, the King Charles's head of the Chinese
civil war. No one knows precisely how it was that the govern-
ment troops came to trap and massacre the headquarters detach-
ment of the New Fourth Army in the first week of January 1941.
The best impartial summation that can be made after consulting
all available sources is this: The bulk of the New Fourth Army
77
had moved north across the Yangtze by the end of December.
There remained a headquarters detachment, including most of the
staff, the high command, and some combat troops totalling some-
thing more than 5,000 men. They had been ordered to move north,
and the government fixed their route; the Communists claim to
this day that it would have taken them directly into Japanese
garrisons along the river bank. They pleaded for a change in
route, and their delegate in Chungking, General Chou Enlai,
saw the Generalissimo. The Generalissimo, after approving a
change, invited Chou to a Christmas dinner, and the two of
them drank the cup of peace and friendship; all was settled.
Then suddenly Communist headquarters in Yenan snapped a
radio to their Chungking office; the New Fourth Army was
trapped and surrounded, by government troops, and the head-
quarters detachment was being massacred. Chou rushed to the
Generalissimo. He was unable to see him but was assured that
all was going smoothly and that orders were being issued to
government units not to impede the march of the New Fourth.
Who was lying? The Communists claim that the Generalis-
simo's henchmen launched the attack without his knowledge
and that when the attack became known, the Generalissimo
lied to cover it up and later condoned the action. The Kuomin-
tang claims that the New Fourth Army had attacked government
troops, who disciplined the insurgents. This claim blandly overlooks
the fact that the Communist unit was heavily out-numbered and
consisted mostly of noncombat staff and headquarters personnel.
Chungking buzzed with rumours of an open breach, of an
all-out civil war. When the confusion lifted, it was learned that
the entire headquarters of the New Fourth Army had been wiped
out, its chief of staff had been killed, its commander was in a
concentration camp, several thousand of its troops were dead and
several thousand more in captivity. The incident itself was bad
enough, but the victorious government troops treated their
captured Communist compatriots with Japanese ruthlessness.
Years later a university professor, not a Communist, who had
been captured while travelling with the group, told a gruesome
tale of the captivity. He said the Communists had had both men
and women on their staff, the women serving as political workers,
nurses, and staff members. According to him, government troops
raped their Communist captives; the girls contracted venereal
disease, and some committed suicide. The captives were held
78
near the scene of battle for a year and a half and were ttyen
marched 400 miles overland to a new concentration camp.
Both men and women were forced to haul the baggage of govern-
ment troops ; when they sickened, they were beaten ; some were
shot, and others were buried alive. By the time the professor
who told me the tale was released, only 300 prisoners of the several
thousand captured were still alive.
The New Fourth Army Incident drew a line of emotional
hysteria across all future relations of government and Com-
munists. All negotiations ceased. Supplies were cut off from
Communist armies everywhere. A blockade of picked govern-
ment troops was thrown about the Communist civilian base in
northern Shensi and sealed air-tight. In the beginning it had
been a war of all China against the Japanese; now it was a war
of two Chinas a Communist China and a Kuomintang China
against the Japanese; and there was a subsidiary war smouldering
simultaneously with these two great wars a war between
Communist China and Kuomintang China.
A visitor in Asia in the fall of 1941 would have found it difficult
to predict the outcome of the struggle between China and Japan.
Inflation was getting under way and was tugging at prices; the
Chinese army was losing its mobility; the Japanese were bombing
the capital at will. Heroism, courage, and devotion certainly
existed among the Chinese but there was an equal measure
of bitterness, suspicion, and treachery. The Chinese could not
win, but they would not quit. The Japanese had tried to crush
China's armies, wreck her economy, promote internal discord;
they had partial successes to show, but the sum total was failure.
China was still locked in a see-saw balance that the imperial
armies could not upset. This was confusing only if the struggle
were regarded as limited to Asia alone. Gradually it became
evident that a decision would not be reached in China itself.
The war there was part of something greater, part of a world
war that cut across China's own internal problems and sufferings.
China could not lose if the democracies won, nor could she win
if the democracies lost. Logically enough the Japanese were
arriving at the same conclusion at almost the same time. The
war in Asia was part of the greater World War in the West.
The leaders of the Japanese army realized that the fiction of
Versailles and the League of Nations had changed nothing and
79
that this was one of those periods when civilizations are made
and broken, when nations become great or perish. From 1931
on, the Japanese saw the world in its true state of anarchy and
decided to strike relentlessly, whenever the opportunity offered.
The leaders of Japan were small men, but they had large plans,
in which China figured as the key to all future Japanese greatness.
Before Japan could go on to a future in the larger world, the
China affair had to be settled and settled to Japan's taste, with
China playing the role of captive lashed to the chariot of Japanese
conquest.
Japan paused for reflection in the spring of 1939. She held
every important military objective in China from the deserts of
Mongolia to the sub-tropical delta of Canton; yet China was still
at war with her. To drive farther into the country would require
the uttermost exertion of every sinew of Japanese strength. Every
available soldier, every drop of gasoline, every ton of steel,
would have to be invested over a period of years to garrison the
interior of China till the Chinese yielded if they ever did. This,
in 1939, seemed absurd to many Japanese. A war was developing
in Europe whose decision, one way or another, would bind the
Japanese for decades to come, no matter what the decision in
China. The Japanese waited. The collapse of Western resistance
before Germany in the spring of 1940 rang every bell in the halls
of decision in Tokyo. France and the Netherlands had been
ravaged and finished; England was at death's door; these coun-
tries' empires in the South Seas were orphaned. The situation
tantalized the Nipponese, and imperial policy in 1940 turned
from the mainland to a diplomatic offensive in the South Seas.
The Japanese started by making demands on all three colonial
powers, and for a few months all went well for the would-be con-
querors. The French bureaucracy, having no roots either in their
homeland or in their colony, agreed to close the one railway still
supplying China, and they let the Japanese garrison northern
Indo-China. The British, stunned by the defeat in Europe,
agreed to close the Burma Road for three months and thus to seal
the last official channel through the back door into China. The
Dutch fell in with Japan's desire for economic co-operation; the
Japanese wanted the oil of the Netherlands Indies, and the
Dutch prepared to receive a mission to discuss the oil problem
in detail. In midsummer of 1940 it seemed that the Japanese
had won hands down and yet by fall they were ready to admit
80
that their diplomatic offensive had fizzled out like a wet fire-
cracker. Only in Indo-China had they got what they wanted.
The British reopened the Burma Road and refused to discuss the
matter further. In the fall the Dutch received the Japanese oil
negotiators in the Indies and offered to sell them something less
than 2,000,000 tons a year barely a quarter of the islands' yield.
It took the Japanese through the winter of 1940 and into the
spring of 1941 to digest the lessons they had learned and to come
up with an analysis and a solution. The analysis was correct;
the solution was disastrous.
Japan had two major problems. One was the unfinished war in
China, the second, the scarcely begun campaign in the South
Seas. Far the more pressing was the one involving the mainland,
but the campaign in the South Seas presented a time element
that made it a now-or-never affair. Ideally a time interval of
years should have come between the two enterprises, but history
would not wait. In early 1941 neither endeavour was going as
well as Japan desired. Japan had been considering both for some
months; it took no brilliancy to reach the obvious conclusion
that the source of her frustration lay far beyond the field of battle
or table of negotiation. It lay in the United States of America.
America was becoming month by month the great opponent of
the Japanese in the Pacific. China had watched with bitterness
the closing of the Burma Road by the British; she felt it was
betrayal of a common cause. China had nothing but contempt
for French action in Indo-China. Only the United States seemed
to offer her hope. It was true that Ajnerica was selling oil and
sjfel to the Japanese, but America was gradually beginning to
funnel aid into China too. On her faith in America, China pinned
all her future. It was the same in the Indies. The Dutch, with a
handful of old planes and a few cruisers, were no match for
Japan's navy and veteran army; but the Indies, encouraged by
American diplomacy, held firm against Japanese diplomatic
pressure. To the Japanese, American policy seemed like a frus-
trating conspiracy. A single word to China or the Indies by the
American government, and all would be settled; without that
word Japan could not move. To force the decision in America,
therefore, became the cornerstone of Japan's planning for 1941,
and by the spring of that year negotiations were under way in
Washington.
The Japanese insisted that their demands were reasonable. All
DC 81
they wanted in the Indies was the mineral resources; they would
gladly, they said, share these with the United States. All they
wanted in China, they claimed, was peace; and peace could come
only with Japanese control. The frustrations Japan met seemed
unjust to her Japan was not attacking other peoples; Japan
herself was being crushed and destroyed. "What do you expect
70,000,000 people to do? " the Japanese consul general in Batavia
asked during the oil negotiations. "To stay locked up in our rocky
little islands? . . . We must have oil ... if you will not give it
to us, we must take it here. . . . We must have peace in China
if it takes us one hundred years of war, we must have it. We have
risked our whole national life on it. ... We must expand. . . .
You fear us because you have wronged us." Secretly, the
Japanese wired their ambassadors in Europe an outline of the
negotiations they planned to conduct with the United States:
"To terminate the struggle with the Chinese by diplomatic
negotiations ; to establish an area of co-prosperity in East Asia ;
and to conserve our national resources in preparation for the
future."
Even while the preliminary conversations were in progress,
Japan's fiction of peace was ruptured by the greed of her army.
The Japanese generals marched their troops into southern Indo-
China, springboard for an assault on the South Seas. With a reflex
speed rarely found in democracies at peace, the United States
struck back. It clamped an embargo on oil and steel on the Jap-
anese islands, and the Dutch and British followed the American
lead. America's oil embargo set the Washington negotiations on
a new level. Now they were no longer concerned with abstract
fundamentals; the negotiations had become the raw stuff of war.
There was a time limit on all Japanese decisions she must get
American agreement before her oil ran out; she must surrender
and be reduced to impotence; or she must strike before she
became too weak to act.
The Japanese could now no longer march and negotiate
simultaneously. They were trapped, and they tried to back-
track. They would, they said, withdraw their troops from
southern Indo-China to northern Indo-China if America would
sell oil and steel again. But America could no longer reverse her-
self; to release oil and steel to the Japanese again would mean
American support of Japan's ambition in China. It was a course no
honourable leadership could take, and the American negotiators
82 ,
made it clear that without a free China there could be no
resumption of ordinary relations between our country and Japan.
Try as they might, the Japanese could find no formula to hold
China and to appease America at the same time.
The United States had a timetable, too. America's programme
was geared for movement by spring of 1 942 by then an American
volunteer air force comprising a pursuit group, a bombing
squadron, and possibly a torpedo squadron would be operating
under the Chinese flag from Chinese bases; by then the Indies
and Malaya would be re-armed; our island chain across the
Pacific would be equipped and garrisoned ; the Philippines would
have more American aircraft and American combat troops. By
the time all this was done, the Japanese would have been caught,
as the Chinese say, like a turtle in a bottle. The Japanese were
fully aware of this dead end; by fall debate within Japan had been
settled. On October 17, 1941, General Hideki Tojo was made
premier the first general on the active list to hold that office.
Tojo was of the inner core of the army, and the army piloted
Japan in her last few weeks of decision. Tojo's plan was to nego-
tiate with fervour to keep northern China while regaining free
access to world trade so that Japan might continue to grow
stronger. If the Americans refused, the gun was cocked.
By mid-November all Japanese embassies had received the code
words to be used in case of crisis. For a rupture in Japanese-
American relations the short-wave news broadcast was to use
twice the phrase HIGASHI NO KAZEAME "East wind rain/' By
the end of November the Japanese fleet was on the high seas, had
rendezvoused off Hokkaido, and was steaming towards the
northern Pacific; the ordinary coded cables became too slow, and
diplomats in Washington were told to use the telephone. By the
first week in December troops were gathered in southern Indo-
China for the push into the South Seas. On December 7, 1941,
in several thousand newspaper and radio offices in America, the
teletype rang twelve times with a bulletin. Tired Sunday editors
watched the keys beneath the glass panel beat out the flash. It
was 2: 22 p.m.
FLASH . . . WHITE HOUSE SAYS
JAPS ATTACK PEARL HARBOUR . . .
The war in Asia was now America's war.
CHAPTER 6
CAMPAIGN IN THE SOUTH SEAS
AMERICA WAS TOTALLY unprepared for the war that
she had accepted on the far side of the globe. The chief armament
of the Allies was an innocent faith in the superiority of the white
man over the coloured man, or at least of the white man's culture
over any other. Defence preparations were more pitiful than
imposing. In the Philippines we had the skeleton of an air force
thirty-five B-iy's, lumbering early types of the Flying Fortress,
undergunned and underarmoured, of which seventeen were
destroyed on the ground in the first day of action; twenty P-35's,
serviceable but slow, built for the Swedish government and
diverted to the Philippines; sixty early models of the P-4O; no
medium bombers at all; and a mongrel assortment of A-'ay's,
P-26's, and go-miles-per-hour observation planes. After the first
weeks of war this air force was reduced to thirty fighters and no
bombers. Our ground forces consisted of the Philippine Scouts, ex-
cellent jungle fighters ; several thousand National Guardsmen fresh
from the States; and a hodgepodge mass of hastily trained Filipino
reservists drawn from the rice paddies and farms of the islands.
The other Allies were weak, too. The Dutch in the Indies had
300 planes, but most of these were obsolete. They had 30,000
regular troops, of which six or seven thousand were Europeans
and the rest natives. They had rifles, machine-guns, some old field
pieces, and little else. Supplementary levies of 40,000 were quickly
called together, but they were untrained. The British in Malaya
were guarded by the jungles, their own pride, and the traditions of
empire. Their air force was almost entirely obsolete. They had
built a huge naval base at Singapore at an estimated cost of
300,000,000, but it was prepared to defend itself only against
attack from the sea ; the Japanese attack, of course, came overland.
Theoretically the British should have be^n the bastion of strength
in the South Seas they had an Australian division, thousands
of British troops, and a heavy high-seas battle fleet; but the
British command was incompetent and irresolute.
All the Western Allies in the Pacific the Americans, British,
and Dutch were as ill-prepared psychologically to face the
84
Japanese as the French chivalry had been to face the crossbow-
men of England at Agincourt. With the exception of Douglas
MacArthur the commanders of the war against Japan in
December 1941 were men blinded by an enormous and over-
weening arrogance. One of the generals of the United States Air
Corps at Pearl Harbour had delivered himself of a profound
statement at a party five months before the attack: "Hitler is our
real worry," said he. "As soon as we take care of the Germans,
we can turn to these Japs and say, 'There, there, little brothers,
just behave yourselves,' and they'll behave/'
In the mythology of the white-skinned warrior darker-skinned
people were just not fighting men. Everybody knew that all
Japanese were near-sighted and couldn't shoot, that their
bombing was inaccurate, that they were mimics, that tftey could
not build or maintain real machinery. Remember that story about
how they copied a British ship, patches and all or the one about
how they built a ship from phony plans, which turned turtle as
soon as it left the dry dock? Japanese planes were no good
remember how they cracked up the first model of the DG-4? In
spite of all this full specifications of the Japanese Zero had been
forwarded by military intelligence from China to Washington as
early as March 1941; its manoeuvrability, range, and engine
power were on record filed away and ignored. The master minds
of the West had watched the Japanese fight the Chinese for four
years, and they were unimpressed. Although they could not under-
stand the war in China and made little effort to find out more than
the bare bones of military fact, they were serene in their con-
clusions; the war in China had proved to them that the Japanese
were a fourth-rate military power, possessing neither the resources
nor the skill necessary to fight a modern war.
If the Allies were unprepared militarily and psychologically to
face the Japanese in field of battle, they were even more in-
adequately prepared to face the Japanese in a contest for the
loyalty of the people in the lands under attack. An era in world
history was coming to an end, but no one understood this until
too late; even after victory many failed to grasp it. Japan's plunge
into the South Seas was a turning point in the history of subject
Asia, so portentous a phase in a revolution of hundreds of
millions of men that the war itself was reduced almost to a detail.
For four hundred years, since the galleons of Don Alfonso de
Albuquerque threaded the Straits of Malacca in 1511, to be
85
followed by Saint Francis Xavier a few decades later, the white
man had trampled roughshod over the dignity and culture of the
dark-skinned peoples of Asia. The white man in his military
arrogance had looted the Orient of its wealth and thrust his faith
down the gullet of the heathen at bayonet's point. For four
hundred years the bitternesses of the people of Asia had been
gradually accumulating against this system, and the pressure was
volcanic. Now a dark-skinned people undertook to humiliate the
white man within sight of his slaves.
The Filipinos have an ancient legend about how God made the
world's first man. God fashioned a man tenderly until every detail
was perfect, they say, and then put the image into the oven to
bake. But He opened the oven too late; the man had burned black.
This was, after all, the first man God had ever created. Breathing
life into the figure, He determined to try again. He put the same
material into a second man, shaped with the same care, and
waited eagerly; but He grew impatient with waiting and opened
the oven too soon, and the man was underdone, a sickly, pasty
white. God was not satisfied and reproached Himself for this
second mistake. So He made a third man; He looked into the
oven every now and then, and when He took the figure out, this
man was baked neither too much nor too little. He was a smooth
golden brown, and God was satisfied.
The story could be Malay or Burmese or Indonesian; it could
be told of China or Japan; it could be the story of any brown-
or yellow-skinned people, who had been made defensively aware of
their colour by the coming of the white man. The consciousness
of colour that had been imposed with stress on the superiority and
dominance of the pale and on the humble subjection of the dark
was the strongest weapon in Japan's arsenal. Japan's tem-
pestuous assault on the empires of the South Seas in the winter
and spring of 1942 seemed like an overwhelming, dynamic parade
of military might; in actual fact it was not. It was the annihilation
of a handful of white men and their decrepit military establish-
ments trapped between the apathy and hatred of their subject
peoples on the one hand and the storming advance wave of what
some of those peoples thought was a crusade.
Except for the magnificent defence of Bataan and Gorregidor
by the Filipinos and Americans the campaign for the South Seas
was a narrative of shame, disgrace, and stupidity.
86
The Japanese had never in their history fought a foreign war to
its full conclusion. Even their war against America was never,
despite all their boastful propaganda, conceived as a war to the
finish against the white world ; it was merely a war to drive the
\vhite man from Asia. The first blow launched was against Pearl
Harbour. This was intended to gain enough time, by destroying
the American fleet, to conduct the campaign against the South
Seas undisturbed by a threat from the Pacific. There were four
separate points of attack in the South Seas : Hongkong and Manila
in the north, Malaya and the Netherlands Indies in the south.
Hongkong fell on schedule, but the Philippines held. The
defence of the Philippines, like every other phase of the South
Seas campaign, had its explanation in politics. Alone of all the
subject peoples the Filipinos fought side by side with their allies.
It was true that the Filipinos smarted under many of the in-
dignities common to all Asiatics. They were excluded from
American clubs; they got smaller salaries than white men doing
the same work; they disliked the condescension met with even by
their most educated. Their leaders still had bitter memories.
President Manuel Quezon had fought Americans forty years
before and surrendered finally to the father of General Douglas
MacArthur. General Carlos Romulo, first ambassador from the
Philippines to Washington, had heard his father tell how the
Americans tortured him with the water cure. But the Philippines
had been given schools and medicine, and they had a promise,
which they believed sincere, of independence in a few years; they
were junior partners in an enterprise that was moving towards
freedom. Nothing the Japanese could promise them could match
the substance of what they already had or compare with the
commitments America had already made.
A few Filipinos were carried away by Japanese propaganda
or the chance for gain and aided the enemy. Fifth columnists
flashed beacons and signals during the night as the Japanese
raided Manila; other fifth columnists sniped at air-raid wardens
trying to black out the city; still others gave information and
guidance to the Japanese troops. But the overwhelming mass
of the Filipinos remained loyal to America as to their own
interests. Their faith in American strength was childlike and
trusting. As the defenders of Luzon were compressed into
Corregidor and Bataan, the Filipinos still believed that a convoy
was on the way, that help was coming. Though defeat grew daily
87
more inevitable, their confidence remained unshaken; not even the
final collapse of all organized resistance in early May could convince
them that their interests lay with Japan. Two and a half years later
their trust, still intact, greeted the returning American army.
Allied strategy wrote the Philippines off the book by early
January as an irretrievable loss; it concentrated instead on holding
the line from Malaya to the Netherlands Indies. This was a hope-
less endeavour, for whatever was poured into this last line was
poured into a sea of despair and stagnation. The Japanese struck
at Malaya from the Thai border on December 12, 1941. They
crossed swiftly, through jungles the British believed impenetrable,
clear to the western coast of the peninsula, and then proceeded to
filter south through the plantations and forests towards Singapore.
Every ridiculed technique used by the Japanese became sud-
denly overwhelming. Japanese uniforms did break every military
convention, but the shabby tennis shoes and shorts were far better
adapted to jungle warfare than the weighty British boots, hel-
mets, gas masks, and miscellaneous gear. And the Japanese rag-
tag assortment of clothing made it possible for them to mingle
easily with the civilian population. They had no quartermaster
corps and almost no transport. The British bogged down in their
trucks, while the Japanese commandeered bicycles and pedalled
swiftly into battle over unnoticed trails. A Japanese soldier car-
ried a bottle of water, a ball of rice, some preserved seaweed, and
a few pickles; when he could not live off the land, this supplied
him for four days. To the British, dependent upon twenty-three
varieties of food, mostly tinned, it seemed that the enemy could
live literally "off the smell of an oil rag.'* The British had large-
calibre weapons, accurate and of long range, but long range and
high accuracy were wasted in dense tropical jungles where most
shooting had to be done blind ; the Japanese used small-calibre
weapons, and every man carried his own ammunition.
The fifth column helped the Japanese greatly in Malaya. It
used ingenious methods to point out headquarters or artillery
posts to strafing aircraft. Condensed milk cans, stripped of their
paper labels, glistened in the sun and, from the air, formed an
arrow pointing straight to the target. Leaves of banana trees,
green on top and yellow beneath, were turned with their yellow
sides up to form a signal that was even less noticeable from the
ground. Natives supplied food and acted as guides. With such
aid the Japanese made the 45O-mile drive from northern Malaya
88
to its southern tip in seven weeks; then they paused for a few days
to regroup for the assault on Singapore.
If the British had failed to prepare their subjects before the
war, they alienated them completely after the campaign began.
At Penang all British nationals "of pure British race" were
ordered to leave when the attack started, but no Asiatics were
permitted to go, not even Eurasian wives of Englishmen. This
order and the discrimination that was continued in other ways
shook native morale. Chinese were included in the classification
of inferior peoples by the British. Fifty leaders of various Chinese
communities Communists, Kuomintang, bankers, merchants
called on the governor of Singapore and asked for arms with
which to fight. They were refused. They flocked to work as fire-
fighters, stretcher bearers, ambulance drivers; they formed the
backbone of the air-raid precaution system. When Malay and
Indian labour evaporated, Chinese volunteers gathered at seven
each morning to work wherever they were needed. They manned
docks, cleared bombed buildings, dug trenches, moved supplies,
but not until the campaign was almost over were they allowed to
fight; the first company of Chinese volunteers moved to the front
only five days before the siege of the island began. As their trucks
drove off, they sang CKi Lai "Arise, you who refuse to be bond-
slaves." Several companies finally saw service after hasty train-
ing. One of these, stationed in a mangrove swamp on the north-
western edge of the island, was armed with motley weapons,
mostly shotguns, with seven rounds of ammunition per man. No
air-raid shelters had been built; they tried to dig trenches in the
pouring rain, but the water level was as high as the earth. Six
hours later the Japanese landed in that sector after a merciless
artillery barrage fired almost at machine-gun tempo, and the
Chinese were slaughtered.
By the end of February, Malaya and Singapore had been lost
and Japanese attention drawn off both north and south to
Burma and to the Indies. The Indies fell in a few weeks; there
was no active native unrest, but the apathy of the natives to the
defeat of their overlords made real defence impossible. In Burma
the native population turned on the whites in hatred burning,
looting, aiding the Japanese in every way it could devise. 1
1 The best description of the Burma campaign, indeed the best political
analysis of the entire war in the South Seas, is the opening chapter of Jack
Beldcn's Retreat with StilwelL
Di 89
Months later, in Australia, a dignified brown-skinned man, once
a high official in his own government and later an important
functionary under the British, tried to explain why the Japanese
triumphs had been so devastatingly thorough. His English was
halting, and he was eager to be understood, so he typed out
seven long pages. "Reasons for the War and the Japanese Vic-
tories" was his title. In the first three paragraphs he polished off
Japan's economic needs and the world struggle for power and
delivered a dissertation on armament and tactics; then for six
and a half pages he listed one small indignity after another to
which white men had subjected darker men. A Malay sultan
was refused admission to Singapore; a Malay official was forced
to climb out of his car while a white man was allowed to drive
through a barrier; the British insisted that they be called "Mis-
ter", but refused to use the respectful term to yellow men; he
himself had been unable to drink a cup of coffee with his fellow
workers because of a WHITE MEN ONLY placard. He ended: "The
way to win a peace that will endure is to fill the promises of free-
dom and equality among men your Atlantic Charter gave. These
stories I tell may sound small, but from tiny drops of water the
mighty ocean grows."
By the end of May the Japanese had achieved every one of
their major ambitions. They had raped the empires of the white
man from Hongkong in the north almost to Port Darwin in the
south and clear to the gates of Calcutta in the west. India, the
crown jewel of Western imperialism, lay just beyond the hills.
In the summer of 1942, India, hot and dusty under the scorch-
ing tropical sun, was waiting for leadership. Its 350,000,000
people, drugged with the heat, seared by their own inner passions
and conflicts, bound together only by a sense of their profound
misery and by hatred of the British Raj, were ripe for a stroke of
history. Never in the course of the war did the forces of the
United Nations stand closer to defeat than in the summer of
1942, and of all the sputtering points of disaster India was second
only to Stalingrad. The Germans were on the banks of the Volga
and only 30 miles short of Alexandria in the Western Desert of
Egypt. Burma had fallen. The Axis partners, the Germans and
Japanese, were now separated only by the turbulent, unstable
block of nations that for a century had been pawns in the rivalry
of great imperialisms. India was the most important of these
90
nations; if it were to throw out the white man, nothing could
keep the Japanese and Germans from making a junction that
might immeasurably prolong the war and multiply its cost.
The Allies were fighting a war theoretically for freedom. The
masses of Indian peasantry were more than ready for freedom;
they were already infected by the collapse of the imperial system
to the east. But there was a grotesque and paralysing complica-
tion to the problem. If India were to be free, the British would
have to go; if the British were driven out, the Japanese might
come in and stand within reach of victory. Only one solution
could have achieved honour, success, and victory; India's friend-
ship had to be purchased with the quickest, most sincere, most
complete possible grant of independence in order to persuade the
Indian masses to fight in their own interests as the Chinese were
doing. No one knows whether this solution could have been
worked out effectively in the few months between the collapse in
Burma and the crisis of August 1942. As it was, each party to the
drama blundered along in its appointed groove to the immediate
or ultimate doom of its own ambition. The Japanese blundered,
the British blundered, the Indian National Congress blundered.
The Japanese blundered by not striking in June, when the
crisis became clear. The wave of unrest that swept India was the
direct result of Japan's spectacular victories over the British
Empire elsewhere in Asia. But the Japanese had planned the
campaign as a military campaign first and a political campaign
second. They wished to make the bitterness of the subject
peoples a buttress for their own new empire rather than a prop
for freedom. In mimicking Europe, Japan mimicked European
weakness as well as European strength. She adopted wholesale
the blinding racism of the white empire builder that some men
were born to dominate other men and that she herself was the
divinely appointed vessel for such dominance. The barbarous
feeling of superiority of the Japanese, their terrifying contempt
for the white man, was an emotion rather than a reasoned
political theory, and sealed into this emotion was a contempt for
other yellow- and dark-skinned peoples as great as that of the old
rulers or even greater. The Japanese themselves in their strength
were the product of a revolution in Asiatic life, but they could not
understand the process. Without understanding the discontent
in India, they were unable to take advantage of the opportunity
the moment offered. If they had marshalled all their remaining
9'
military and political strength for the last push over the mountains
to India, they would have marched into the arms of a triumphant
revolution. In their arrogance they underestimated the Indians
and were unprepared to take advantage of the uprisings.
The blunders of the British were not immediately apparent.
In the spring of 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps had come from London
with a highly conditional promise of independence. Tired and
harassed in the heat of India, he presented his proposals faultily,
though he did try to achieve some necessary reforms; but he was
bound by the directives of the government. When the Cripps
mission failed, both the British and the Indians moved on to an
inevitable clash. The conduct of the summer crisis, with Gripps
gone, was left in the hands of the British civil service in India.
The British civil service acted precisely as was expected of it;
it treated the entire matter, the burning misery and passionate
longing for freedom, as if it were a police problem. With quiet,
courteous, and utterly ruthless severity it prepared to crush the
awakening masses. The first reaction of one of the senior British
officials in Delhi, on reading the resolution of the Indian Congress
that touched off the uprisings, was to say, "Do you know, I think
this is illegal."
By however unsavoury means the tide of revolt was stayed. It
is difficult to praise the British officials who effected this result;
yet if they had failed, India might have been drawn into the orbit
of the Axis. The blunder of the British was apparent only much
later, when it became plain that by suppressing the revolt, in-
stead of marshalling the friendship of India by the gift of independ-
ence, they had won an enduring legacy of hatred. The end of
British rule in India is written down for our times; where there
might have grown up an association of friendship not too greatly
different from that between the United States and the Philip-
pines, the British bought for themselves what may be permanent
and irrevocable hostility.
The Indian National Congress, finally, blundered as badly as
the Japanese or the British. This body is the oldest and most
weighty political association in India; it has led the Indian people
in three waves of assault on the British government. It resembles
the early Kuomintang of Chinese history, since it is compounded
of discontent at national humiliation, a desire for freedom,
agrarian misery, and a loosely defined social programme. As
with the Kuomintang in its early days, support comes to it from
9*
two sources the unhappy masses of the people and the educated
middle class that supplies leadership. And the Congress, again like
the Kuomintang, has sealed within it the seeds of future civil war.
The one sharp distinction that, more than any other, sets the
Congress off from the Kuomintang is its aversion to violence.
The Kuomintang grew out of the civil wars and turbulence of
the war lords and achieved power only when its leaders learned
how to wield violence in effecting political decision. Violence or
the threat of it infuses the political thought of every educated
Chinese. The Indian National Congress has been paralysed for
twenty-five years because it has entrusted spiritual leadership to
Mahatma Gandhi, who has convinced it that change can come
without violence.
In the summer of 1942 the Indian National Congress flung
away the greatest opportunity for Indian freedom in hundreds
of years by its policy of nonviolent resistance. The British were
weak their troops scattered to the extremity of the Empire,
the civil service unhappy and its morale sapped and the enemy
was at the gates. Millions on millions of Indians were waiting for
directions from the Congress leadership, which did call them out
of their shops, fields, and factories, but not to fight, merely to
protest. Leadership called them out to oppose their bare hands to
machine-guns and Bren-gun carriers, and it enjoined them not to
strike back. Many friends of Indian independence questioned
the wisdom of the Congress in turning against the British at a
moment when Axis victory threatened. But having made the
decision that this was the moment of destiny, the Congress was
blind to the fact that it could be implemented only by force, that
a passive resistance could end only in defeat and the unnecessary
sacrifice of hundreds of lives.
From June to August the Congress girded itself for the trial.
The issues it presented to the world and to the Indian people
were that only Indians could defend India efficiently against the
menace of Japanese assault and that India could not fight
efficiently in her own defence while she was shackled to a system
of slavery. The battle cry of the uprising was "Quit India'* a
demand that the British give complete independence to the people
of India to organize their own defence. The most brilliant presen-
tation of the Indian case came from Jawaharlal Nehru, the
almost saintly deputy leader of the Congress. A few days before
he was jailed for his participation in the movement, Nehru in
93
conversation summed up his entire attitude to the world of the
white man and Asia:
What has astounded me is the total inability of the British
to think in terms of the new world situation, in terms of realism
realism being more than military realism, it being political,
psychological, economic realism.
Englishmen, whoever they may be, cannot think of India
except in terms of an appendage to England. Their history
of India begins with the occupation of India. The average
European concept of Asia is as an appendage to Europe and
America a great mass of people fallen low who are to be
lifted by the good works of the west.
But in world perspective European domination is recent.
When the British came here, the industry of India was as
advanced as that of Great Britain. India had never been a
dependent country until Britain came. We absorbed our con-
querors and they became part of us. India was conquered
but the conquerors became Indians. India was never de-
pendent upon another country. Now the seat of power is in
London, not in India.
I see Europe now after all its magnificent achievements
trying its hardest to commit suicide I think about that and it
seems to me that there is something essential lacking in
European civilization, some poison which eats into it, which
brings about a war every twenty years. I feel that though Asia
lags behind yet she has a definite cultural stability mainly
in China and in India. . . .
The problem, as it presented itself to me at the beginning of
the war, was how to link up this new Asia with the progressive
forces in Europe and America. I wanted Asia to line up with
the forces fighting Hitler. It was impossible to do this in terms
of Asia as an appendage; it had to be treated on equal footing.
The fall of France was so tremendous, it so showed up the
rottenness of the western imperialist structures, that we
thought that at last people's eyes in Europe were opened to
the perils of Empire. And yet they were not opened.
Much later came the fall of Malaya and Burma which
at any rate was a direct lesson to the British for it was their
empire that was going to pieces. The astounding thing is that
even that had so little effect. . . .
94
In our minds so long as things were happening in Europe,
we criticized but didn't embarrass the government so as not
to get in the way of the war effort against the Axis. Now we
had to view the problem from a new point of view how to
defend India from invasion. ... It was obvious that we
couldn't move the people in that direction unless we could tell
them that they were defending their own freedom.
It was at this time that Cripps came . . . but the picture
Cripps put before us was so very like the existing picture with
all its incompetence that it was not possible to proceed to
make people feel they were defending their own freedom and
enthuse them. We could not make it a people's war.
The reaction to the Cripps visit taken together with the
situation in Burma and the treatment of hundreds of thousands
of Indian evacuees from Burma was tremendous. We could
not be onlookers while the fate of India was being decided,
especially when all our reason led us to the conviction that
British authority was not competent to defend India. If we did
not agree to the Cripps proposals were we to sit calmly by and
observe the degradation of our own people?
We came to the conclusion, in the balance, that we must
take action now and not allow the position to deteriorate still
further leading to the growth of pro-Japanese sentiment.
Under such leadership, the Congress moved to action. On
August 8, at a general assembly in Bombay, it approved and voted
into effect resolutions calling for a programme of complete non-
co-operation throughout the land until the British should quit
India. The government struck back within a matter of hours.
Employing its legal emergency powers, it clamped censorship
on the press. Gandhi, Nehru, and all other top members of the
Congress were placed under arrest in Bombay at dawn. The
police hunted down and jailed all the local leaders throughout
India who were thought dangerous.
All India was seething next day. Decapitated by the arrest of
its leaders, castrated by its philosophy of non-violence, the
movement boiled amorphously into the streets. The British Raj
was more gravely threatened than at any time since the Mutiny
of 1857. A rigid censorship was imposed on outgoing cables to
prevent the danger from becoming known either to the enemy
or to the British and American public; the government was
95
fighting for its existence. In Delhi, the capital, rioters assembled,
chanted the call, "Inqulab %indabad (long live the revolution)",
and massed their gold and red banners for parade. British troops
halted them in the main street of the city with lead. Shootings
resounded in the suburbs, buildings flamed, mobs tore down walls
to hurl bricks at the troops. Bren-gun carriers were called out,
and machine-gun emplacements were mounted to command the
alleyways. Officially the government admitted that it had killed
forty of the rioters; Indians multiplied the figure several times.
Within three days 60 per cent of Bombay's textile industry closed
down; thirty people had been killed in that city. Within another
week the great Tata mills, which accounted for almost all the
Indian steel production, had been closed by another strike. Like
a crown fire, disturbances leaped from Delhi and Bombay to
Lucknow and Cawnpore and all up and down the basin of the
Ganges. The British quickly concentrated their forces in the large
cities to subdue the centres of inflammation. But by this time the
uprising had spread cancerously to the countryside, and hundreds
of isolated actions flamed across the country. For a week rail service
between Calcutta and Delhi was cut; mobs tore up rails and cut
telephone and telegraph wires. The British were strained to the
utmost. Even the Royal Air Force was called out to strafe partisans
ripping up rails where ground troops could not penetrate.
Except in the large cities the uprising lacked co-ordination
and control. The peasants' reactions were instinctive rather than
reasoned; although their leaders denounced violence and death,
they themselves felt that this was war. Their attacks focused on
railways, bridges, and police stations. Where they found them-
selves able to inflict punishment, their fury was merciless. Police
officers were torn to bits by the hands of mobs, while others
were burned alive; when officers of the armed services were found
by themselves, without support, they were murdered. Some of
the unco-ordinated rioters seized entire districts and held large
areas so firmly that neither the mail nor the police could pene-
trate. The Congress had made no preparation for the use of arms
by the people or for the direction of their energies; it wanted
freedom by bloodless revolution and was unable to think in terms
of power politics. The unco-ordinated centres of dissidence were
picked off by the British one after another,. and by mid-Septem-
ber, after several thousand Indians had been killed, the crisis
had passed; imperial control was firm again. If the Japanese
96
invaded India, they would have to fight for it; they would not
be able to exploit it as a reservoir of revolutionary energy. Even
this gamble the British won, for the Japanese did not invade
India, but chose to expend their energy in a futile investment of
strength in the mid-Pacific.
With the crushing of the Indian revolt the war on the Asiatic
mainland was reduced to a war between China and Japan. The
war between Japan and the United States, a trial of brute
strength, lay far off; for all its titanic dimensions it had little
political significance, because Japan was foredoomed in that war
from the very beginning. The war between China and Japan
an inferior form of butchery was uniquely significant as a war
between two independent Asiatic peoples. The Western nations
had been unable to harness their power to any moral standards
in the first few months of the war against Japan; the Indian
Congress, which might have given Asia the moral leadership it
sought, had been subdued. Only the government of Chiang
K'ai-shek remained to hold forth to Asia a promise of a new world.
CHAPTER 7
GOVERNMENT BY TRUSTEE
CLAIMED THAT she had a government no elec-
tion had ever voted it into power, but officials and propagandists
liked the legitimacy of the word. They bridged the discrepancies
between fact and statement with the Kuomintang's peculiar
theory of state, a theory that did not work, but was nonetheless
interesting. By this theory, which persisted throughout the war,
China was assumed to have not a government of the people
but one held in trusteeship for them by the Kuomintang. Sun
Yat-sen outlined the party's responsibility in three stages. First
came a period of military operations, when the party defended
the people against foreign imperialism and domestic war lords.
Second was the period of political tutelage, in which the party
taught the people how to govern the country. Third would come
the period of constitutional government, when other parties
would also be permitted, and the Kuomintang would compete
against them to win favour at the polls.
The Kuomintang alone was responsible for the government
97
during the war; it was the government. It appointed and directed
all government officials. It controlled the national army; all
senior officers and over 90 per cent of the men were enrolled, at
least nominally, on the party roster, and political commissars were
attached to each unit. Since government and party were the same
thing, the army was a party army. The Kuomintang controlled
the censorship; party work was supported by government funds ;
party functionaries lived on public taxes. And since all other parties
were outlawed, criticism of the Kuomintang became a state offence.
Chiang's difficulty was that he tried to function in two stages of
trusteeship at once. To fight the war he needed to levy men,
money, and rice from the people; to do this he had to use the old,
oppressive network of village chiefs, which kept the peasants
under rigid control. And to fight the Communists he had to
intensify his censorship and secret police. At the same time he
was fond of democratic phrases and catchwords. He talked about
the imminence of the ballot and constitutional rights; he promised
the peasants more freedom, but operated always to restrict what
little they had. He was enmeshed in his own promises. His govern-
ment had two facades; one faced towards the peasant and re-
tained all the old fanffliar undemocratic features of Chinese
feudalism, but the imposing outer front, which faced China's
allies, was built of materials pleasing to Western eyes political
tutelage, habeas corpus, democracy.
On paper the government was logical. China had a council,
the Executive Yuan, that administered civilian affairs, introduced
legislation, drew up budgets, made appointments, declared wars,
and framed treaties. The eleven ministries under it looked like a
cabinet to Western eyes ; the Ministry of Information was not
included in the war cabinet but was directly responsible to the
Kuomintang. There was a Legislative Yuan, the pale shadow of a
congress, which could not make policy or even veto decisions
and existed only to rubber-stamp bills submitted to it. Then there
was the Judicial Yuan, with its system of courts. China had added
to these three familiar governmental divisions an Examination
Yuan, which passed on qualifications of functionaries from law-
yers to midwives, and a Control Yuan, with powers of review,
impeachment, and auditing a sort of state conscience. Over
all the five yuan was a State Council, whose functions were nebu-
lous except that the head of each yuan had to be chosen from
among its members. Next higher was the Supreme National
98
Defence Council, which exercised " supreme authority' '.And at the
pinnacle was Chiang K'ai-shek, with ' ' emergency ' ' wartime powers.
A sure way to madness was to follow this logic through.
Americans were used to a government based on law, and they
tried to understand China in terms of what China proclaimed
herself to be. After a few weeks of futile pursuit of reality new
arrivals often threw up their hands and declared that China had
no government but anarchy or a coalition of war lords, or that all
Chinese were of the seed of Fu Man-chu, or that this was stark
Fascism. All these simple explanations were wrong. The easiest
way to understand China was to decide first that the government
was only a false front for the Kuomintang, whose politics and
cleavages were the main determinants of decision, and that
behind the party was a personal despotism, the oldest form of
rule known to mankind.
The party chose a National Congress, which in turn chose a
Central Executive Committee, which in turn chose a Standing
Committee. And here, within the party, were all the debates and
decisions and powers that could not be traced in the government
itself. The Standing Committee of the party met every two weeks
in Chungking and gave orders to the highest government body,
the Supreme National Defence Council; the SNDC then handed
down orders to the various branches of government involved.
The Central Executive Committee named the heads of the five
yuan-, it chose the State Councillors; it controlled the Supreme
National Defence Council; if ever a new president of China were
chosen, this committee would choose him.
The Kuomintang's organization was patterned after the
Russian Communist Party; Russian advisers remodelled it that
way in 1923. In every county seat, in every sizeable army unit,
was a tangpu, or party cell. In the villages the tangpuwerc usually
in the hands of local officials and rural gentry who had enough
leisure time or education or money to take an interest in
politics. The tangpu rose in a pyramid to provincial councils and
the provincial councils were the base of the National Congress,
which was supposed to meet every two years. Kuomintang
members were a small minority of the people of China a tight
elite. Their duties were outlined thus:
All members of the Party must strictly observe the following
rules of discipline : (i) to obey the regulations and principles
99
of the Party, (2) to allow free discussions on any problem
concerning the Party, but to obey absolutely once a resolution
has been adopted, (3) to keep Party secrets, (4) to permit no
attack on fellow members or Party organs before outsiders,
(5) not to join any other political party, (6) not to organize
cliques or factions. 1
Loyal members tried with more or less success to follow the
line on the first five directives, but the Kuomintang was riddled
with cliques some liberal, some conservative, some only
nominally attached to it. It was as heterogeneous a political
catchall as the Democratic Party in America.
The most cohesive faction within the party and the most potent
force in government politics was the right-wing clique called the
CC. The Communists had attached this tag to it with the meaning
of Central Clique. The CC was reactionary; it was anti-foreign;
it stood closest to the Generalissimo, but it was also the only
group in the Kuomintang organized from the grassroots up. It
was headed by two men, Ch'en Li-fu and his older brother
Ch'en Kuo-fu. Ch'en Kuo-fu was tubercular. Throughout the
war he was director of personnel in the Generalissimo's House-
hold Bureau traffic manager for the flow of memoranda and
individuals seeking the Generalissimo's attention. The real boss
of the CC was Ch'en Li-fu, the younger brother. He had been
Kuomintang Minister of Organization for five years before the
war, and he organized well. In any real vote-getting contest
within the party the CC could manipulate the levers, rig the
issues, and shove its candidates through for an undisputed
majority. Whereas all other groups derived their strength either
from their armed forces or from the personal relationship of their
leaders to the patronage trough at the capital, the CC had been
able for a decade to marshal delegates and votes to support its
demands. Its votes and intraparty majorities were only part of a
well-rounded stock in trade that included such things as the favour
of Chiang K'ai-shek, the largest slice of patronage, control of the
nation's thought, press, and schools, and administration of an inde-
pendent secret police force responsible to the party machine alone.
The CC manipulated most Kuomintang votes and policies
and so it controlled the appointment of most of the minor officials
1 China Handbook, 1944, page 32, Chinese Ministry of Information, Chung-
king, China.
100
on the lower rungs of government. It spear-headed the drive
against liberals and Communists. In all this it acted as the chosen
deputy of the Generalissimo, but the Generalissimo, in his own
fashion, saw to it that even within the party a system of checks
and balances operated to keep the CG from absolute control.
In some provinces the tangpu and their superstructures were
entirely dominated by the local war lord ; in other areas the party
had definite particularistic, provincial tendencies. But most of
the tangpu were staffed by local bureaucrats and by local gentry,
and these were the stalwarts of the CG.
The next clique reading from right wing to left spoke for
the military. At the party Congresses the army's view was always
a critical factor. If army representation had been unified, it
might have been the tail to crack the Kuomintang whip. But it
was split between the military bureaucracy of Ho Ying-ch'in,
Minister of War for fourteen years, and the ardent young men of*
the Whampoa clique.
The Whampoa clique consisted of graduates of the military
academy Chiang had founded near the Whampoa River in
Canton twenty years before. These were warriors of a new stripe;
Chiang's older friends were architects of the new state, but here
was its product. Many Whampoa graduates had been lost in
the early civil war against the war lords and in later campaigns
against the Communists; those who survived were a closely knit
group. As the years rolled by, they rose in rank. Some forty
divisions of Chinese troops, a scant quarter of the total force at
the beginning of the war, were commanded by Whampoa men;
by the end over two-thirds of all divisions were under Whampoa
command. Two men were popularly accepted as spokesmen for
this clique General Hu Tsung-nan, graduate of the famous
first class at Whampoa, and Ch'en Ch'eng, a youthful Whampoa
instructor who succeeded Ho Ying-ch'in in 1 944 as Minister of War.
Ho's men were the most influential of the military in the
Kuomintang, as befitted their senior years and dignity. But the
younger Whampoa men, with zeal and cohesiveness, held the
promise of the future, and they voted at their own discretion.
Between the two groups there was little long-range political
difference. Both were authoritarian; both believed in the voice
of violence in political decisions. But the Whampoa men stood
for a relatively efficient administration and a house-cleaning
of the dead wood that burdened the war effort, while Ho's
101
henchmen wanted simply a perpetuation of the status quo with
all its fumbling and corruption.
One of the interim successors to Ch'en Li-fu as head of the
party's organization board was a German-trained scholar, Dr.
Chu Chia-hwa, who detested the CC. He gathered able and pro-
gressive party members about him. Chu Chia-hwa 's clique could not
be pigeonholed so neatly as the others. What it stood for was not
precisely defined; it was right wing, but not of the extreme right.
Dr. Chu, using his small faction to make combinations, threw its
weight where it might help tip the balance to the side of efficiency.
Towards the centre and nearer to American standards was the
Political Science Clique. These men, mostly educated in Japan or
America, understood modern business methods and wanted to
make, an efficient China, safe for industry and with an industry
that would do the country good. They stood for orderly govern-
ment by law, for a conservative but streamlined modern-style
state. Among them were some of China's foremost technicians,
who understood what should be but was not being done. The
Political Science Clique had drawn its main strength from the
businessmen of Shanghai and northern China, and the war,
by wiping out these groups, had stripped the Political Science
group of its main source of power. Since the thinking of the group
was direct, non-mystical, and modern, and since many of its
leaders spoke English, Americans found them easier to compre-
hend than other Chinese. Chiang, as he was forced to deal more
closely with America, naturally put more and more of the
Political Science Clique into key jobs. Here they performed in an
able but restrained fashion, while they dreamed of the efficiency
they could achieve if power, as well as the labour, were theirs.
The Kuomintang even had its liberals. The left-wingers were
led by Sun Fo, son of Sun Yat-sen. Because his father was also the
father of the revolution, Sun feared no persecution and, almost
alone in China, could say what he believed ; concentration camp
or torture could never be inflicted on him. He thought and acted
in Western terms; he wanted Western reforms. But he was a
scholar, probably the best-read person in Chungking a man of
silk, not of steel. His intelligence flickered over the panorama of
Chinese politics with astonishing brilliance, but he could not
match in drive or vigour the hard-bitten men who controlled the
Kuomintang. Though he would not break with the Kuomintang,
102
he did have the courage to oppose it from within and to speak
publicly against oppression and corruption. He said what the
people were thinking but did not dare to say. Sun was president
of the Legislative Yuan, a niche more impressive than important.
He knew what was going on in the party, and he used his position
to urge democracy and a bill of rights. Tremendous popular
support rolled up behind him, but he could command few votes
within the party. Chiang K'ai-shek used to refuse to see him
for months at a time.
The Generalissimo reigned, as tsungtsai, or director general,
over the entire Kuomintang. Less than i o per cent of the party
membership was independent of his will. The few real malcon-
tents rallied about Sun Fo in search of some of the ideals of the
revolution; the others fought clamorously for Chiang's attention.
The Generalissimo paid keen attention to sessions of the Central
Executive Committee and sensed the temper of minority criticism,
then decided on cabinet changes or policy statements in inner
council with the leaders of the various factions. Sometimes he
tossed away the myth of party trusteeship and simply strode into
meetings to announce his will to the Standing Committee and
receive its submissive approval. When the grip of the CC seemed
threatened, the Generalissimo rushed to its defence. And when
American criticism became too pressing, he would give a plum
to one or two fairly respectable characters from the Political
Science Clique to show his good faith.
The inner sanctum of the Generalissimo was the point from
which to view the party framework in proper perspective. There
his secretaries winnowed the thousands of visitors and gleaned
from the hundreds of memoranda the reports the Generalissimo
would handle personally. Access to Chiang's ear was access to high
political might. Quick decision could be found only in his personal
chamber, and only his command could steer the administration out
of well-worn ruts. The Generalissimo had almost unlimited power
even on paper. In theory the Central Executive Committee could
instruct him; in practice he instructed the committee, and he had
the legal right to veto any CEC decision. His grip on the govern-
ment was also legal; the work* of the Supreme National Defence
Council, which was the highest wartime organ of state, was con-
centrated in the hands of eleven members chosen by him. The
entire council met only when he, as chairman, called it together.
103
The government insistently denied that this was dictatorship,
but it described the function of its supreme body thus :
The chairman of the Supreme National Defence Council,
according to its organizational law, has emergency powers. He
does not have to adhere to the ordinary procedure while handling
party, political and military affairs. He has the authority to issue
such decrees as may be necessitated by the situation. In actual
practice, however, the chairman usually consults members of the
standing committee before exercising these powers. 1
The great trouble with the Chinese government was that
policy-making and administration were separated by a gulf as
great as the one that set the Generalissimo off from his trembling
functionaries. High policy was the Generalissimo's domain, and
administration was conducted by a handful of men who could be
trusted never to overstep their limited powers.
Chiang divided his administration into three main spheres
army, party, and civil government which he confided to a
triumvirate of three men unquestioningly loyal to him. Even
these three men were surrounded by a delicate series of checks
and balances that operated to throw all major decisions back
into his lap. But in spite of these limits this triumvirate was for
five years the greatest power in the land after the Generalissimo.
Ho Ying-ch'in ran the army; Ch'en Li-fu ran the party; H. H.
Kung ran the civilian government. All three, smooth and charm-
ing, had learned how to fit their own egos to the harsh angularities
of the Generalissimo's personality. Kung was on the far side of
middle age and Ch'en Li-fu on the near side, but all of them had
been Chiang's comrades-in-arms for some twenty years.
In a country at war the army is the most important branch of
affairs, and General Ho was probably the most powerful of
Chiang's three aides. Ho was in his late fifties a stocky, well-
built man with a round face; he was invariably courteous, and
his eyes, behind spectacles, seemed almost schoolmasterly. His
strength came primarily from his position as the Generalissimo's
military deputy, secondarily from the political machine he built
for himself in the army. Ho was rumoured to be one of the
wealthiest landlords in all Kweichow, the backward province
where he was born. He had studied at the Japanese Military
Academy at the same time as the Generalissimo. Like Chiang,
1 China Handbook, 1944, page 50.
104
he left Japan to join in the 1911 uprising against the Manchus;
his real career began with his appointment as dean of the Kuom-
intang's Whampoa military academy, and ever afterwards he
followed Chiang like a shadow. In 1927 he became chief of staff
of the national armies, a post that he held until May, 1946.
Ho directed the war from his offices in the rambling grey build-
ings of the National Military Council. He was a desk soldier, and
paper work flowed past his deputies in fantastic confusion. As
Minister of War and chief of staff from the outbreak of the war
against Japan until the Stilwell crisis, he was probably responsi-
ble, more than any other man except Chiang K'ai-shek, for the
incompetent direction and gradual rotting away of the Chinese
armies in the field. There were times when Chungking openly
talked of the current price for a job as a regimental commander.
The starving of Chinese soldiers, the extortion and slaughter of
conscription, the pay-rolls padded with the names of dead men
were all accepted by the capital as the natural consequence of a
corruption traceable directly to the offices of the Ministry of War.
Within the army itself Ho was far from being undisputed chief.
His opposition was the Whampoa clique, the cadet faction that
had grown to maturity during the war. By his control of supplies
and funds Ho could favour one unit over another and build up a
loyalty among men who were dependent on him. But two-thirds
of the divisions were commanded by Whampoa men, most of
whom sneered at Ho. One of the Whampoa leaders was General
Hu Tsung-nan, in his middle forties. He commanded the troops
who blockaded the Communists and sat at the Yellow River
crossings threatened by the Japanese. Hu was perhaps closer to
the Generalissimo's affection than any younger man in the army,
and he was mentioned as Chiang's successor. Rabidly anti-
Communist, like Ho Ying-ch'in, he detested the latter and during
the war permitted no interference by Ho in his personal war
area. Even in budget, supply, or personnel matters Hu Tsung-
nan took questions directly to the Generalissimo; his divisions
had larger allowances per capita than any other units in the
Chinese army.
Ch'en Ch'eng, another Whampoa leader and second rival of
Ho Ying-ch'in in the army, was probably the officer most liked
by Americans in China. He was a slim man, barely over five
feet tall, whose hair became greyer with each year of war. He was
high in the Generalissimo's favour in the early phases of the war
105
and proved abje to get along with the Communists then, but he
gradually slipped into the obscurity of a frontal command. His
chief task in the mid-war years was to defend the Yangtze gorges,
the bottleneck approach to Chungking. He was lifted from this
job by the Americans in 1943 and made commander of the joint
Sino-American training programme and commander of the
Salween troops, which were to punch through to Burma. Ch'en's
elevation to this post infuriated Ho Ying-ch'in, who saw his rival
becoming, with the aid of American supplies and equipment,
the most important figure in the army. Americans believed that
Ho's irritation caused the sabotage of the training programme,
the slow rate of combat replacements to the Salween, and the
niggardly budget allowed by the general staff to Ch'en's com-
mand. Not until Ho forced Ch'en out of his job and had a more
amenable officer placed in command of the American training
programme did it gather momentum.
Ho Ying-ch'in, Hu Tsung-nan, and Ch'en Ch'eng all gave
fealty to the Generalissimo. Though they rarely agreed on
strategy, the Generalissimo liked them all, and he placated and
soothed one after the other; nevertheless he saw to it that Ho,
his chief of staff, retained his dominant prestige. It was Ho who
had daily access to the Generalissimo's office; over- all planning
and inspection were Ho's responsibility. Even after the storm
broke around Ho, when the corruption and inefficiency of the
troops were obvious and Americans forced the substitution of
Ch'en Ch'eng as Minister of War, Ho remained chief of staff and
the top figure in the army.
Ch'en Li-fu, the party organizer and leader of the CC in the
Kuomintang, was easily the most impressive man of the trium-
virate of deputies. He had an exquisitely handsome face, with
burning eyes and glossy silver hair, and seemed as fragile as a
piece of old ivory. He was a ruthless, hated zealot high-
principled, relentless, and incorruptible; he was anti-foreign and
a mystical nationalist. He had no personal fortune, nor had he
ever been charged with corruption. The Generalissimo was bound
to Ch'en by an ancient debt. Chiang's first patron in the days of
his poverty in Shanghai was the strong-arm patriot Ch'en Chi-
mei; Ch'en Li-fu was this man's nephew and as such almost a
ward of the Generalissimo's. Ch'en had been Chiang's personal
secretary during the great Northern March in 1927, and later
106
Chiang named him chief of the organization board of the Kuomin-
tang to purge the party of all elements of liberal or Communist taint.
Ch'en Li-fu could explain himself with passionate eloquence.
To him the great menace to China was Communism, which he
held to be an alien aggression against Chinese thought. Ch'en
was a great Kuomintang theorist, and his writings were an
inchoate mass of half-rational, half-mystical pronouncements; no
American could possibly understand them. Ch'en dedicated him-
self to rooting out everything he thought foreign to China's heri-
tage. He believed that Western industry could be grafted onto
the body of China's ancient society without disturbing her time-
honoured codes and customs. He regarded the West as the
Japanese did an inferior civilization possessed of certain savage
tricks that are highly useful in modern society. His attitude was
the same that Western travellers take when they watch Australian
bushmen wielding the boomerang or African savages throwing
poison darts that these are effective devices, which should be
studied, but that the culture that begets them has little else to
offer. On the other hand Ch'en Li-fu grew lyrical in extolling
the greatness of China's past and explained the difference be-
tween the Chinese and American revolutions in poetical terms.
The Americans, he said, had to discover new truths on which to
found a state, but the Chinese only had to work backwards and re-
discover their old truths. Ch'en bristled at the charge that he was
a reactionary; he saw himself as a crusader trying to save China
from Communism. His sleep was untroubled by the screams of
those who suffered in Kuomintang concentration camps or by the
terrors his police imposed on liberals.
Thus Ch'en represented all those Chinese who saw their coun-
try only through traditional classicism. Chinese classics set their
primary emphasis on order and , stability in society; the ruler
must be wise, the people obedient. Philosophers had set out for
every man his station in life, and from that station there was no
escape. All relationships between classes were regulated, and the
government's function was to see that each man behaved accord-
ing to his place in society. The classics are still a drag on Chinese
thinking; despite the tremendous inroads of modern education,
hundreds of thousands of semi-literate citizens of China still see
the ancient codes and manners as binding on society, much as
American fundamentalists regard the Bible as binding on their
personal lives. Ch'en Li-fu most nearly symbolized this basic
107
faith in China's past. The rural gentry, the reservoir of Chinese
classicism, produced no other figure unless possibly Chiang
himself with convictions strong enough to withstand the impact
of the modern world. Unlike most mystics Ch'en had two great
practical qualifications. He had had a sound technological educa-
tion in America at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied
to be a mining engineer, and he had a brutal mastery of the tools
of police power. He was a man of incongruities he spoke in the
tongue of men and angels; he was a master of polished Chinese
classical prose; he was an exquisite calligrapher; yet he could roll
up his sleeves and make a deal across the table with the toughest
characters in Chinese politics.
As Minister of Education during the war years Ch'en had a
free hand in the shaping of Chinese minds. The great universities
had written an epic of scholarship and adventure on their trek
into the interior; the rst of the war was, intellectually, an anti-
climax. Both students and professors went hungry; inflation made
the instructors beggars. The cream of the nation's youth had been
skimmed off for war in the early years; in the north they joined
the Communists, while in central China they became Kuomintang
officers. The students who succeeded them were a mixed crew.
By law any student at a high school or university was exempt from
the draft; scholarship was more honourable and much more
desirable than military service. Enrollment boomed. Some of
the students, perhaps most, were sincerely patriotic, but the
government taught them little and found nothing much for them
to do. Ch'en Li-fu boasted of the change he brought about in
shifting interest from liberal arts to technology. Before the war
almost 70 per cent of the students in Chinese universities were
enrolled in liberal arts courses; under Ch'en the percentage
dropped to approximately 50 per cent. There was no quarrel
anywhere in China with this shift in scholastic emphasis; a
country at war needs engineers more than professors. But Ch'en
wa¬ content; he established an intellectual reign of terror in
political subjects such as history, economics, and sociology. Dis-
cussion of politics was forbidden at the universities; students spied
on their teachers, and faculty members spied on one another.
The Kuomintang, alarmed by the number of liberal, Com-
munist, and generally critical students, organized the San Min
Chu I Youth Corps as a junior branch of the Kuomintang. The
Youth Corps went to school; the government paid the bill. Within
1 08
a year there were 50,000 members. Professors wailed that colleges
were being ruined because, although Corps members pulled down
the scholarship level, they could not be flunked. The Corps was
Fascist in thought and appearance; it hailed the cult of the leader;
it held summer conventions where sturdy young men and women
marched about, barking the Chinese equivalent of " Heir' and
giving the clenched fist salute. On the campus it bullied liberals
and radicals into silence in the knowledge that it had the full
backing of the government behind it.
Ch'en Li-fu said he believed in academic freedom, but pro-
fessors who disagreed with him grew thin and hungry as inflation
took its course. They watched their words; their classrooms were
dangerous. The most famous economist in China was Professor
Ma Yin-ch'u, a jovial man who was graduated from Yale and
who once taught economics to the Generalissimo. Professor Ma
lectured on inflation, a subject that grew to be of fascinating
interest and inevitably touched on government. One evening
Professor Ma was invited to dinner with the Generalissimo. When
he got into the car that was sent for him, the two guards in the
front seat, with apologies for their rudeness, told him that he was
under arrest. For two years he lived in concentration camps or
under police surveillance. This was not a breach of academic
freedom, Ch'en Li-fu insisted. Professor Ma was nominally a
member of the Kuomintang; he had been criticizing the party's
policy in public ; it was a breach of party discipline for which he
was being punished.
Ch'en Li-fu conducted his ministry as if he were directing an
army. The careers of opposition professors in the national univer-
sities withered, while men who saw their way to agreement with
him flourished. Ch'en set about establishing a regimentation of
thought that was alien to the entire spirit of modern Chinese-
education. The government had approved textbooks for all
subjects, and these textbooks set the standards of knowledge from
secondary schools to colleges. As prewar texts wore out and were
replaced by the new texts, Chinese students from end to end of
the country began to parrot the same phrases. Given time, Ch'en
Li-fu felt that all China would be studying one code of thought,
learning one code of manners, and those codes would be after his
own heart. Ch'en's intellectual preoccupation went hand in hand
with an organizing genius that would have done credit to a
Tammany ward heeler. Once having manoeuvred his men into
109
key posts, he kept them rigidly in line and had their loyalty
checked constantly by the secret police he controlled.
During the middle years of the war Ch'en Li-fu rode high. His
censors made the press, stage, and literary world writhe under his
directives. As the truth and fiction of war separated more widely,
the censors eased the government's embarrassment by sup-
pressing the truth and creating a mythical China. A formal edict
was handed down by one of the Ministers of Information, a CG
appointee, that all authors should avoid realism and pessimism;
they should write gay, cheery things. A whole list of subjects was
forbidden for public discussion in print; it included Communism
and the Communist problem, China's relations with Russia,
affairs in turbulent Chinese Turkestan, criticism of America or
Britain, corruption in the government, sufferings of the troops
at the front, persecutipn of the peasantry. It was forbidden to
analyse taxation, to criticize government financial policy, to print
any figure about the budget or currency circulation. It was forbidden
to criticize any member of the government, his personality, his
family, his conduct. It was forbidden even to talk about rising prices !
The third member of the triumvirate around Chiang K'ai-
shek was Dr. Kung Hsiang-hsi, the husband of one of the
Generalissimo's sisters-in-law; he was premier of China until
another brother-in-law, T. V. Soong, succeeded him in 1944.
Kung was a round man with a soft face draped with pendulous
flabby chins, which made him a cartoonist's delight. He took
pride in being a lineal descendant of Confucius, in the seventy-
fifth generation. H. H. Kung was born into a Shansi banking
family about sixty-five years ago, taught school in Shansi, went to
America, received a degree at Yale, and returned to become a
revolutionary. Before taking part in national politics he amassed a
fortune as agent of the Standard Oil Company in Shansi. His rise
to power began with his marriage into the fabulous Soong family.
The youngest Soong daughter is Madame Chiang K'ai-shek; the
second daughter is the widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen; the oldest
daughter is Madame H. H. Kung; the oldest son is T. V. Soong.
Madame Kung is probably the shrewdest of the Soongs. Under
her far from gentle stimulus her husband became one of the most
powerful men in China. He was made the first Minister of
Industry in 1930, president of China's Central Bank in 1933, and
premier and Minister of Finance at the beginning of the war. He
no
became the Generalissimo's deputy for the curious apparatus that
was supposed to be the civilian government.
The war years did not treat Dr. Kung too gently. While his
family played in Hongkong or America, Kung lived alone in his
mansion under the bombs in Chungking. He acquired malaria
and a spleen condition that made his personal life a torment. An
amiable man, he disliked quarrels or crises, and he could be
coaxed into almost anything with a smile or a sob story. He was
the favourite target of American salesmen for high-pressure
campaigns. His one great desire was to be loved, and those who
knew him well found him so lovable that they called him Daddy.
Kung was a great patron of the Y.M.C.A. in China; as a
Y.M.C.A. man he might have achieved the affection his thirsty
soul craved. Unfortunately for Daddy, power politics sets
standards that differ from those of the Y.M.C.A. Confucius was
no help either, and after seven years of diligent, bumbling service
to the national cause, Daddy ended as runner-up for the title of
most unpopular character in China. The Chinese, with the most
biting sense of humour in the world, delight in public humiliation.
The henpecked figure of their premier, gutlessly presiding over a
cabinet that reeked of corruption and indecision, surrounded by
a kitchen council of cringing sycophants, symbolized all the
ridiculous decay they saw in their nation.
Criticism of Kung, the favourite indoor sport of Chungking for
five years, was both personal and political. Kung is intensely
sensitive to the personal variety. Once he asked an American what
people were saying about him, and the American replied, "Well,
people mostly say that you're a sucker for flattery and that your
family is terribly corrupt." Kung thought for a moment, then
commented, "But I always know when flattery is sincere. " The
personal criticism of Kung and his family often passed far beyond
truth and decency. One of Kung's friends said that ninety per cent
of the gossip was not true, but added, "Ten per cent is even worse
than the gossip. "
Kung's son, David, was made a director of the Central Trust,
the chief government purchasing agency, at the age of twenty-
two. The young man was not fitted either by temperament or
training for such a job, and his conduct was outrageous.
The feminine side of the family was no better. Kung's youngest
daughter, Jeannette, was inordinately arrogant. When the
American government sent Madame Chiang K'ai-shek and
Jeannette back to China on a 0-54, the plane arrived across the
Hump with barely enough gasoline to make the return trip.
Jeannette ordered the American ground crew to drain the wing
tanks because she wanted the gasoline herself. The American
Army crew naturally refused, and she was furious. When Kung's
oldest daughter, Rosamund, flew to America to be married, her
father commandeered one of the National Airways' aircraft to fly
a trousseau across the Hump for her. Madame Kung lived in
Hongkong until Pearl Harbour; then she stayed briefly in
Chungking, flew to America to join Madame Chiang in 1943, anc *
remained abroad. She is a woman with a highly developed money
sense. One or two of her financial operations, like her whispered
activities in the Shanghai textile market, were normal com-
mercial flyers. But many of her deals, such as her transactions in
foreign exchange, made commercial history and involved a
manipulation based on facts that only the wife of the Minister of
Finance would know. The conduct of all Kung's family mocked
the misery of the nation. Kung himself was a " liberal"; he dis-
liked torture, concentration camps, violence, and in foreign affairs
he stood for a close association with the Western democracies.
He had none of those sinister qualities that made Ch'en Li-fu so
dangerous; yet the people of China saw in him a grotesque
caricature of what they were fighting for, and they hated him.
Political criticism of Kung was equally sharp. The General-
issimo was the president of the Executive Yuan, supreme head of
the government; in theory his deputy was Dr. H. H. Kung as
vice-president of the Executive Yuan, but in practice both the
army and the party did as they liked, and Kung was low man on
the totem pole. The cabinet met once a week in Chungking. It
had little real authority even in routine matters; what authority
the Generalissimo could spare belonged to the Supreme National
Defence Council, the Military Council, or the Kuomintang
Standing Committee. The ministers took their lead from decisions
of the senior councils and rode off on their own out of Kung's
reach. Kung, for example, could not control T. V. Soong, who
was Minister of Foreign Affairs. Everything in this field was
decided on either by T. V. in consultation with the Generalissimo
or by the Generalissimo in consultation with the kitchen cabinet.
Kung could exercise no authority over Ho Ying-ch'in, who sat
in the cabinet as Minister of War. He could not argue with the
Ministry of Education, which was represented in the cabinet by
112
Ch'en Li-fu. He could not even command provincial administra-
tions; their governors were appointed by the Generalissimo on the
basis of some local equation of power and politics.
Occasionally a daring wave of public criticism or disgusted
American pressure would force some cabinet change. Then Kung
was almost powerless; the Generalissimo did the reshuffling. And
the Generalissimo made cabinet changes almost the way American
children play musical chairs; on the given signal everyone would
rush for someone else's seat. The Generalissimo's game was unique
to the extent that there were usually the same number of chairs
and the same number of players, and no one was ever left without
a place for long. The Generalissimo trusted few men; these few
held office with monotonous regularity. If a minister were forced
out of the cabinet by some particularly noisome scandal, he
usually became secretary general of something or other and
eventually reappeared as minister of a different department. Out-
siders rarely got into the game.
Kung was good-hearted. He issued fine orders to remit taxes in
stricken provinces and appropriated great wads of money to meet
temporary emergencies, but once he had signed his name he
thought his work was done, and his good intentions died stillborn
in Chungking. His main function was to keep the government and
army supplied with money. He was Minister of Finance, president
of the Central Bank, president of the Central Trust, and later
president of the Bank of China. To run China on any sound
economic basis required basic political decisions that only Chiang
K'ai-shek could make. To crack down on landlords who hoarded
grain, to set up a graduated tax, required dynamic social leader-
ship, which the Kuomintang suppressed. The characteristic
Chinese attitude toward taxes is reflected in an item from the
government news service: "To set an example for others Mr
Chang Tao-fan, Minister of Overseas Affairs, has voluntarily paid
the inheritance tax on a fortune estimated at $150,000 which he
recently inherited from his deceased father."
Kung could not touch the vital point where government met
people the grain tax in the villages. There was a horde of some
300,000 tax collectors, usually appointed locally, for the govern-
ment's authority rested on its ability to hand out franchises for
graft. Kung took the easy way out and printed money. Chinese
currency in circulation rose from a billion and a half dollars in
1937 to a trillion in 1946; prices followed currency upward until
Eo 113
at V-J day they stood at 2500 times the prewar level. The people
denounced Kung for the inflation, and economists privately
flayed him. Kung shrugged, serene in the confidence of his
masters. As long as he could produce enough money, Chiang,
Ho, and Ch'en were pleased with him. He held Chinese Currency
at the fictitious rate of $20.00 Chinese to $1.00 U.S. by a system
of rigid exchange controls. The rate had no connection with
reality, and the black market exchange went as high as 600 to i
while he held office, later 3000 to i. Kung insisted that as long
as the formal exchange rate was fixed, there was no inflation. "If
people want to pay $20,000 for a fountain pen, that's their busi-
ness, it's not inflation," he said once. "They're crazy, that's all."
Kung's preoccupation with the maintenance of the formal 20-
to-i exchange rate was not without an element of cunning. The
American Army had to build its installations and bases by paying
for them in Chinese currency; it could not buy its currency on the
black market for 400, 600, or 800 to i, but had to pay at the fixed
rate $1.00 U.S. for each $20.00 Chinese. As prices soared in
China, so did the price of every purchase of the American govern-
ment, till finally the building of an air base was costing
$40,000,000 U.S. and the building of a bamboo latrine from
$10,000 U.S. up. The Chinese government was accumulating
ever larger funds of American dollars on deposit in its name in
New York, while the American Army was receiving less for every
purchase. By the time the Army refused to go on with the agree-
ment any longer, hundreds of millions of dollars had been ac-
cumulated by the Ministry of Finance. In a strictly commercial
sense Kung had made a killing for his government, but from a
long-range point of view it was a penny-wise, pound-foolish
transaction. The extortionate exchange rate was known to every
American GI in China, who felt that America was being swindled
in the most scandalous and blatant fashion. Our men resented
the huge outlay of funds, and the bitterness they brought back
with them to America at the end of the war was much too high
a price politically for the Chinese to pay for the dollar credits in
New York.
Kung needed a few good men in order to operate at all, but the
financial chaos made efficient members of the government feel
as if they were wading through a swamp. He chose one of the
most brilliant men in China, Dr. T. F. Tsiang, to be budget
director. Tsiang laboured like a Trojan over the estimates coming
114
in from the clamorous unco-ordinated ministries. He was de-
nounced by CC people as a pink, by outsiders as a Kung man;
and when pressure was put on Daddy, the estimates always had
to cave in. Tsiang drew up the official budget a publicly known
secret, which no one was allowed to publish. In addition the
Generalissimo had a personal budget for " extraordinary
expenses " that was said to be almost as large; the Generalissimo
wrote enormous cheques running into hundreds of millions of
dollars for his favourites, and government banks honoured them
with the same paper credits and paper money that backed up
the regular budget. Even Tsiang could achieve little when it was
possible for an honoured associate to go to the Generalissimo and
get twice the money his bureau had been allotted. Yet it was
sometimes difficult for an outsider to criticise the way things were
going with a feeling of being completely justified. The fixed
salaries of junior government officers lagged behind the inflation
and offered them no choice but starvation or corruption. Salaries
were usually bolstered by bonuses drawn from money received
outside the budget ; the supplementary grants kept key men alive
and working with relative honesty but also made them dependent
on the favour of their immediate superiors, who had to curry
favour with other superiors, straight on up to the Generalissimo.
Two other men of glowing integrity and ability, in addition to
Tsiang, were in vital posts. One was Dr. Wong Wen-hao, Minister
of Economics and chief of the Natural Resources Commission;
the other was General Yu Ta-wei, the director of ordnance.
Wong ran the processing industries salvaged from the coast
copper refining, steel production, electric power; Yu directed the
arsenals that supplied the guns and bullets to keep China's armies
fighting. Budget grants to Yu were so small that he could not
afford to buy materials from Wong Wen-hao to make into arms ;
Wong could not lower his prices without going bankrupt, because
his budget also was too small. So the steel mills functioned at
20 per cent of capacity, arms-making equipment lay idle in 'dugout
caves, and the soldiers at the front cursed everyone from Kung
on down for the lack of supplies.
At a serious conference, when the economic crisis had all but
stopped production, Kung gravely suggested that the director
of ordnance produce cigarette-making machinery in his arsenals
and sell it at a big profit; then he could afford to make guns! It
was that kind of government.
"5
CHAPTER 8
CHIANG K'AI-SHEK
THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE?
FOR ALL THAT any observer might see the years of war
dealt kindly with Chiang K'ai-shek. His face changed by scarcely
a line or a wrinkle. Always immaculate, always encased in an
armour of self-discipline, he preserved his personality safe from
the prying curiosity of the public. Countless mass meetings hung
upon the short-clipped words he shrilled forth in his high-pitched
Chekiang accent. None ever saw him kindled by the emotion that
flickered from the adoring crowds; none ever saw him acknow-
ledge the surging cheers with more than a slow, taut smile or the
quick bobbing of his head.
Only the most convulsive moment of emotion can make him
lift the hard casing of control in public and show the man
beneath. In August 1945 Chiang sat quietly in a stuffy radio
station in Chungking waiting to tell the Chinese people that the
war was over. He was, as always, fixedly composed. His pate was
shaven clean, and no telltale fuzz indicated greying hair. His
spotless khaki tunic, barren of any decoration, was tightly but-
toned at the throat and buckled with a Sam Browne belt; a
fountain pen was clipped in his pocket. The studio was hot, and
the twenty people in the room oozed sweat; only the General-
issimo seemed cool. He adjusted horn-rimmed glasses, glanced
at the scarlet flowers on the table before him, and slowly turned
to the microphone to inform the people in his clear, high voice
that victory had been won. As he spoke, a loudspeaker outside
the building spread the news; and crowds, recognizing his con-
spicuous sedan, began to gather outside the stone building. He
could hear the faint sound of cheers.
Chiang finished in ten minutes. Then suddenly his head
sagged ; beneath his dark eyes the pouches of sleeplessness let go ;
the muscles of his slight body relaxed in profound exhaustion.
For a fleeting moment the smooth exterior was punctured, the
weariness and strain breaking through at the moment of victory
to show the man. As quickly as the mood came it was gone, and
he walked out of the studio, passed through the crowd with a
116
smiling nod here and there, then sped back to his home. Watching
him descend the stairs through the crowd to his sedan, no one
could tell that here was a man who had just seen the defeat of his
national enemy and who, only that night, was about to set in
motion the wheels of machinery that was to engulf the country
afresh in civil war.
Chiang's personal discipline is one of the first clues to his com-
plex, involved character. It has been bred of a tempestuous,
storm-tossed life and, like his lust for power, his calculating ruth-
lessness, his monumental stubbornness, has become more than an
individual characteristic it is a force in national politics.
Chiang's character reflects and distorts fifty of the most turbulent
years in Chinese history.
Chiang K'ai-shek was born almost sixty years ago into the
home of a small Chekiang farmer, a member of the governing
group of the village, at a moment when China was entering a
period of almost unprecedented chaos and disaster. His boy-
hood was sad. On his fiftieth birthday he wrote:
My father died when I was nine years old. . . . The miser-
able condition of my family at that time is beyond description.
My family, solitary and without influence, became at once the
target of much insult and maltreatment. ... It was entirely
due to my mother and her kindness and perseverance that the
family was saved from utter ruin. For a period of seventeen
years from the age of nine until I was twenty-five years old
my mother never spent a day free from domestic difficulties.
China, in Chiang's boyhood, was prey to every humiliation
foreign arms could heap on her, and Chiang, moved by the
national disaster, chose to become a soldier. He studied briefly
in Japan, then returned to participate in the competitive examina-
tions for admission to the first Chinese military academy, at
Paoting. He passed these examinations with distinction and
within a year had marked himself as one of the academy's out-
standing students. He was one of a handful chosen by the
academy in 1907 to be trained in Japan, and x there he was soon
selected to serve with a Japanese field artillery regiment as a
cadet. He did not like Japan and later spoke bitterly of his service
there. But he did like military life. Once he told a group of
Chinese students who had joined his army none too voluntarily:
117
When I was a young man, I made up my mind to become a
soldier. I have always believed that to be in the army is the
highest experience of human existence as well as the highest
form of revolutionary activity. All that I now possess in
experience, knowledge, spirit, and personality I gained
through military training and experience.
While he was in Japan, he was stirred, like other student
thinkers, by Sun Yat-sen's vision of a new China, strong and
great. In 191 1 he returned to China to join the uprising that over-
threw the Manchus and established the Chinese Republic. When
the first republic proved a mockery, he went to Shanghai; what
he did there is a matter of gossip and guess, for official biographies
skip hastily over this period. It is known, though, that he was
helped by a revolutionary named Ch'en Chi-mei, uncle of the
CC brothers. In 1915 Chiang participated in another military
coup aimed at seizing the Kiangnan arsenal near Shanghai.
His comrades of that adventure, who are still among his intimate
associates, fled the country, but Chiang disappeared somewhere
into Shanghai's murky underworld. He lived a fast, hard life of
personal danger, hunger, and abandon; then for a while he was
an inconspicuous clerk on the Shanghai stock exchange. At
that time, the underworld of Shanghai was dominated by the
notorious Green Gang that controlled the city's rackets of opium,
prostitution, and extortion. The Green Gang was an urban out-
growth of one of the many secret societies that have flourished in
China for centuries. Such a gang has no counterpart in western
life; it sank its roots into all the filth and misery of the great
lawless city, disposed of its gunmen as it saw fit, protected its
clients by violence, was an organized force perhaps more powerful
than the police. The border line between violent insurrectionary
and outright gangster was often blurred; men passed between
the two worlds with ease. No biographer can trace Chiang's
precise degree of association with the Green Gang; but no in-
formed Chinese denies the association, and no account of China's
revolution fails to record that at every crisis in Shanghai, the
gang acted in his support.
Out from the mists of Shanghai, Chiang K'ai-shek strode forth
into the full blaze of Chinese national politics at Canton in the
summer of 1924. Precisely how he arrived at this eminence from
his previous estate of penniless dependency on the Shanghai
118
publicans is obscure. He served briefly with a Fukienese war lord
after Shanghai; he had been brought to Sun Yat-sen's attention
by his Shanghai friends, and Sun sent him to study Russian
military techniques at Moscow in 1923. He had returned to China
and Canton with a huge distrust of the Russians but a shrewd
appreciation of the methods of the one-party state. Canton in
those days was bursting with fresh energy and new ideas. Kuo-
mintang leaders argued and competed; intrigue dissolved and
remade political alliances. During the two years of Chiang's
stay in Canton he was never beaten in a quarrel. He staged his
first successful armed coup in the spring of 1926 against the left
wing of his own party; it was a masterful piece of timing, and
after Sun Yat-sen's death he succeeded to the post of party
leader.
During the next twenty years both China and Chiang changed,
but his dominance in the Kuomintang was never once seriously
threatened. His one passion now became and remained an over-
riding lust for power. All his politics revolved about the concept
of force. He had grown up in a time of treachery and violence.
There were few standards of human decency his early war-lord
contemporaries did not violate; they obeyed no law but power,
and Chiang outwitted them at their own game. His false starts
in insurrection had taught him that he should show no mercy
to the vanquished and that the victor remains victor only as
long as his armies are intact. When he started north from Canton
in 1926 to seize the Yangtze Valley, he was an accomplished
student in all the arts of buying men or killing them.
A full decade elapsed between the success of the Nationalist
Revolution in 1927 and the invasion by the Japanese in 1937,
a decade in which the frail, brooding figure of Chiang K'ai-shek
grew ever larger and more meaningful in the life of China. Chiang
was shrewd only a shrewd man could have built up his power
from that of an insurrectionary to that of a leader willing and
able to offer combat to the Japanese Empire. He knew how to
draw on the Shanghai business world for support in money and
goods; he was student enough to bring some of China's finest
scholars into his administration. Power had come to Chiang K'ai-
shek as he rode the crest of a revolution to triumph over the war
lords ; the wave receded, but Chiang consolidated his victory on a
new basis. He still spoke of a Nationalist Revolution but the
fact that the revolution involved the will of the people escaped
"9
him. Chiang relied not on the emotion of the peasant masses but
on an army and its guns.
The war against Japan made Chiang K'ai-shek almost a demi-
god. For a brief moment at the war's outbreak he stood as the
incarnate symbol of all China's will to resistance and freedom.
Once again, as in the days of revolution, he was China doing
China's will, above reproach, above criticism, above all advice.
Chiang lived frugally by American standards. He breakfasted
on fresh fruit, toast, and milk. On state occasions his cook pre-
pared some of the most succulent delicacies of China, but at
home with Madame Chiang the Generalissimo dipped his chop-
sticks into simple food. He took little exercise except for long walks
in the country, with a covey of guards around him. He suffered
from the back injury he had received during the Sian kidnapping,
and his false teeth bothered him. The set he used during the war
was made by a Canadian missionary in western China; it was not
quite comfortable, and he often went about at home without it.
Once he had to cancel all public appearances while it was
repaired. Except for these minor irritations his health was good.
He always seemed composed and confident; during a conversation
only his foot, tapping nervously, and the continual grunt of "Hao,
hao" revealed the nervous tension that always seethed inside him.
As the leader of China at war Chiang was still harsh and ruth-
less, but he cloaked himself in the sanctity of a deacon; he became
a devout and practising Methodist. His utterances rang with the
sincerity of a Puritan, but his ferocity was that of an old Testa-
ment Joshua. He read the Bible every day and frowned on sin with
the intensity of one who has sampled it and found it less reward-
ing than piety. He did not smoke; he rarely drank. It is true that
American officers saw him at formal banquets when he would reach
back into his past and toss down wine with the best, but among
Chinese he was the ascetic. When the Communist leader Mao Tse-
tung arrived in Chungking to talk about a truce in China's civil war,
Chiang lifted a toast to him, but only touched the cup to his lips.
Chiang was incorruptible. Chinese pointed out, however, that a
man who had everything he could possibly want could afford to
be honest. The government provided him with an unlimited
budget, a fleet of limousines, and the best house wherever he
went. The Americans gave him a private aeroplane. In Chung-
king he had a town house in his headquarters compound; across
120
the Yangtze River, which he crossed by private launch, was a
magnificent country home. Later in the war he built a group
of villas as far outside Chungking in the other direction, named his
own "Shantung", and used the others to entertain state guests.
The houses, however modest by American standards, were magni-
ficent for Szechwan. They even had chrome-and-tile bathrooms,
which so awed the workmen that at one guest cottage, later
visited by Ambassador Hurley, they laid the entrance path
straight to the bathroom door.
Now Chiang, reigning over China, was high above all ordinary
mortals. He was infuriated by gossip he would have shrugged off
twenty years earlier. Once Chungking relayed the tale that during
Madame's absence the Generalissimo had lived with a young
nurse named Miss Ch'en, who cooked his native food for him.
The story was idle gossip, but it galled Chiang so that he sum-
moned cabinet ministers, foreign missionaries, and two corres-
pondents and proclaimed in the presence of Madame Chiang
his Christianity, his true monogamous love, his complete denial
of the gossip. Even during a month of disastrous military defeat
this garden confessional got top billing in Chungking conver-
sation for days. Semi-official transcripts of the Generalissimo's
denial could be obtained from the government on request.
The New Life Movement was one of the more voluntary
methods Chiang used for imposing the convictions and tastes of
his maturity on his people. The movement frowned on luxury,
smoking, drinking, dancing, permanent waves, gambling, spit-
ting in the streets. Every now and then the police tried to make
the rules stick; they stopped pedestrians from smoking in public
and told people not to throw orange peels in the gutters. These
outbursts of public piety passed away quickly; in the inner circle
they were regarded as personal foibles of Chiang's. Though even
Madame Chiang enjoyed cigarettes, the Generalissimo frowned
especially on Western dissipations. No dance was held in Chung-
king till late in 1943, when the American Army garrison was so
large that the prohibition could no longer be made to stick.
Chinese were still forbidden to dance unless foreigners were
present ; once a private house was raided because of dancing and
the guests arrested after the last American soldier had left.
No one knows how many positions Chiang K'ai-shek held
during the war years. At one time his secretary said there were
Ei 121
at least eighty-two; he imagined a complete list could be found
somewhere, but he had never compiled one. The Ministry of
Information made up an incomplete list, which stated that among
other things Chiang K'ai-shek was : chief executive of the Kuomin-
tang; president of the National Government; chairman of the
National Military Council; commander-in-chief of land, naval,
and air forces; supreme commander, China theatre; president
of the State Council; chairman of the Supreme National Defence
Council; director general of the Central Planning Board; chair-
man of the Party and Political Work Evaluation Committee;
director of the New Life Movement Association; chairman of the
Commission for Inauguration of Constitutional Government;
president of the Central Training Corps; president of the School
for Descendants of Revolutionary Martyrs; president of the
National Glider Association. 1
Chiang K'ai-shek thought of himself first as a military leader.
Though he may have been military director of his country's war
effort, he was no strategist. General Wedemeyer was shocked
when he arrived in China in 1944 to find that over half the
Chinese soldiers were starving not undernourished, but actually
starving and that Chiang had no effective over-all plan for
either attack or defence. Chiang was not very successful in trying
to outguess the Japanese or in moving defending forces to a
position before a thrust came; he sent soldiers trudging to the
front after battle had begun, though the Japanese had the
chairman, Commission on Aeronautical Affairs; chancellor, Central
Political Institute; president, Central Military Academy; president, Central
Police Academy; president, Chinese Air Force Juvenile Cadets School; presi-
dent, Staff College; chairman, Board of Directors of the Joint Board of Four
Government Banks; member, Overseas Chinese Contributions Custody Com-
mittee; president, China Aviation League; president, National Spiritual
Mobilization Council; president, Chinese Air Force Cadets School; honorary
president, National Central University; president, Central Youth Cadre
School; director, San Min Chu I Youth Corps; honorary chairman, National
Red Cross Society of China; honorary president, Boy Scout Association of
China; president, Central Military Police Academy; president, Cavalry School;
president, Artillery School; president, Engineers School; president, Military
Supplies School; president, Mechanized Unit School; president, Signal School;
president, Northwest Special Arms Associated Branch School; president,
Special Arms Cadre Training Corps; president, Special Cadre Training Class;
president, Cadre Training Class; president, Northwest Guerrilla Cadre Train-
ing Class; president, Southwest Guerrilla Cadre Training Class; president,
Quartermaster Corps School; president, Ordnance Technical School; presi-
dent, Army Medical School ; president, Veterinary School; president, Surveying
School ; president, Gendarmerie Training School, etc. He was also at various times
president of the Executive Yuan and chairman of the National Economic Council.
122
advantage of mobility. American officers said, summing up his
strategy, "He's a sucker for a feint."
Chiang thought of himself as a soldier, but his true genius
lay in politics; he had no equal in the ancient art of hog- trading.
Ringmaster at a balancing act, he brought China together and
kept it together. If his soldiers starved, that was the price of
keeping the loyalty of dubious generals, who profited from their
death. If he sent into battle soldiers who were doomed before
they heard gunfire, that was one way of reducing the forces of
a commander who might have challenged him.
As a politician Chiang dealt in force rather than ideas. Any
concept of China that differed from his own was treated with as
much hostility as an enemy division. In both party and govern-
ment, above honesty, experience, or ability, he insisted on the
one qualification of complete, unconditional loyalty to himself.
Since loyalty involved agreement, Chiang became a sage;
Chinese tradition respects scholarship above all things, and the
great ruler in Chinese eyes is the great teacher. Chiang's public
speeches began to sound like an instructor chastening his pupils;
he repeated over and over, "Be loyal; study hard; work hard;
love your country." Every national decision was made by him,
and he gradually came to believe that his knowledge and judg-
ment were better than any subordinate's.
When inflation grew into one of the country's biggest problems,
a high official of the government quipped, "The trouble with
China is that the Generalissimo doesn't know anything about
economics, and his Minister of Finance doesn't know anything,
either. " Nevertheless the Generalissimo wrote a book about
economics. It was a windy, foggy book full of ignorant theories,
and his own scholars recoiled from the shock of it; wiser men in
the government bravely had the brochure withdrawn from cir-
culation. Suppression made it a choice collector's item. During the
fall of 1942 and early 1943, the Generalissimo spent long hours in
his country home polishing his master work, China's Destiny. It
was largely written by one of his personal secretaries, but the
ideas and the final gloss were his own. Here was another omni-
scient textbook; it covered the anthropology of the Chinese
people, the nation's history, its future reconstruction. His advisers
took alarm at his interpretation of China's modern history, which
was viciously, indiscriminately antiforeign. He heaped on
foreigners the blame for war-lordism, prostitution, gun-running,
123
opium-smoking, gangsterism, and all the bloody chaos at the
birth of the Chinese Republic; he bewailed the influence of
foreign missionaries and their universities on Chinese culture.
This book sold half a million copies before it was " withdrawn for
revision," probably at the insistence of Madame Chiang. It too
became a collector's item but no foreign correspondent was per-
mitted by censorship to quote from it.
With government, army, and party as his own private domain
Chiang's curiosity and whims reached down to the lowest levels.
Sometimes he scolded, sometimes he punished, sometimes he
taught; no decision was too trivial to interest him. When he saw
the preview of the only big motion picture produced in Chung-
king during the war, a Chinese version of Amleto Vespa's thriller,
Secret Agent of Japan, he sent it back to the studio with personal
instructions to insert more footage on the work of the Kuomin-
tang. The Minister of Information called on him once in a long
gown; the minister, Chiang said, was too young to wear an old-
fashioned gown and sho\ild wear Western clothes. Chiang decided
who should and who should not be allowed to go to America;
he decided which students of the government Graduate School of
Journalism should have scholarships to study abroad. Students of
the National Central University complained of their food, and
the Generalissimo went out to have a meal at their mess himself;
he decided the food was good enough.
When his troops were fighting north of Mandalay, he wired to
General Stilwell: "I hear that watermelons are plentiful in the
region of Mandalay. Chinese soldiers like watermelons. See to it
that each company gets a watermelon each day." He deluged
commanders at the front with orders about trivial details, with-
out regard to the wretched state of China's communications.
Each day he read the Chungking press, to mark little things that
pleased or displeased him. When General Stilwell was relieved,
the Generalissimo had foreign correspondents' dispatches trans-
lated into Chinese and censored them himself totally. He sent
out orders on tabs of paper; sometimes he was forgetful and the
orders conflicted. "Make all provincial governments set the col-
lection of grain before all things this year," he would write; later
another tab would come down: "This year the gathering of new
recruits is the primary task of all provincial governments."
To foreigners his outer reserve argued stability, a sweetly
rational quality in a mad society. But sometimes Chiang erupted
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from his expressionless calm into a rage in which he threw tea-
cups, pounded on tables, shrieked, and yelled like a top-sergeant.
When he dealt with a rare character who refused to scrape before
him, like T. V. Soong, the results were dramatic. Their most
violent argument over the Communist problem in 1935 resulted
in Soong's disappearance from power for years. The British
Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr engineered another
meeting in 1938; this, too, ended in a tempest. Early in
1944 Chiang met T. V. again, and the result was another pro-
longed exile of Soong from power. In the summer of 1944,
Chiang was strolling along a country road when he saw an officer
leading recruits roped together. Such sights were common in
country places, but Chiang was infuriated and beat the officer
until a bodyguard rescued the man. When the Generalissimo
was reminded of the horror of Chinese conscription, he sum-
moned the general in charge of conscription and beat him un-
mercifully; the general was executed the next spring.
High officials with Western training realized that the General-
issimo was a poor administrator. In guarded private conversations
they admitted his faults but always set against them his one huge
virtue he meant to keep China in the war until Japan was
defeated; other men might sicken and tire, but he was China,
and he never faltered. No one else could keep all the balances
in Chinese politics so nicely adjusted and still maintain resistance.
He placed his armies so that they would fight together against
the enemy but never against him; the war lords were placated
by deft commitments; men who disliked him supported him be-
cause he was recognized by the world as the proper recipient of
loans and supplies to China. He controlled all the massive misery
of the countryside by the loyalty of the landlords and warded off
pressure from America with promises of reform.
In the summer of 1940 morale had reached an all-time low.
Everything was wrong. The Japanese were bombing day and
night, and the clear sky that brought the bombers was also sear-
ing rice in the fields and bringing famine. The Japanese were in
Indo-China; American policy was indecisive; the British
announced that they were closing the Burma Road. Chiang burst
out: "Nimen ta suan pan! (You people are counting beads on the
counting board!) You count how many troops we have, how
many rounds of ammunition, how many gallons of gasoline. But
I don't care. When I started seventeen years ago, I had 2000
125
cadets in a military school. America, France, England, and Japan
were against me. The Communists were stronger than they are
today. And I had no money. But I marched north and beat the
war lords. I united the country. Today I have 3,000,000 men
and half of China, and England and America are friends. Let
them come if they drive me back to Tibet, in five years I will be
back and will conquer all China again." For Chiang it was his war,
his enemy, his responsibility. He looked back not on three years of
war against Japan but on seventeen years in his personal career.
China was as much his own as the little academy in Canton had been.
Chiang felt just as personally about the only Chinese group
he could not control, the Communists. Only the Communists
could afford organized disobedience. They had their own terri-
tory and their own army, and they were beyond Chiang's reach.
They defied him; therefore in his eyes they were disloyal to China,
and he hated them. In 1941 he said: "You think it is important
that I have kept the Japanese from expanding during these
years. ... I tell you it is more important that I have kept the
Communists from spreading. The Japanese are a disease of the
skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart. They say they
wish to support me, but secretly all they want is to overthrow
me." His was a personal war. He remembered the Communists
as he had seen them last during the Long March. He had had
the pilot of his plane follow the long, straggling line of Communist
marchers fleeing over the hills for several hours so that he could
look down and watch.
Just when it was that loyalty to Chiang's leadership began to
crumble is difficult to say, but certainly disaffection set in about
the same time among the war lords, in Chungking, and among
the peasants. By the end of 1943 there was open discontent in the
headquarters of various field commanders, many of whom had
fought Chiang in past civil wars and followed his leadership now
only because of the greater menace of the Japanese. In the south-
west, Cantonese and Kwangsi generals growled at Chiang with
unconcealed anger from the security of their own camps; they
had known him when he had been just another warrior; to them
he was no god but a partner who ought to find money and
supplies for them. Independent war lords far to the northwest
and in Szechwan, Yunnan, and Sikang were kept in line by
Chiang by the award of honorary titles; he let them pursue their
126
private grafts, whether opium-running or simple double taxation,
as long as they fulfilled his demands for new recruits for the army
and new rice for the food tax. Chiang had contended with such
enemies for years, and he knew how to handle them.
Criticism of Chiang had notably infected Chungking by 1944.
Even those who felt that Chiang was the living embodiment of
the Chinese state, the rock in the quicksands of defeat, felt that
the "old man" was slipping that he, like other leaders, was open
to criticism. A more crucial sentiment against Chiang that grew
with every month held that China was greater than Chiang and
that Chiang himself was the point of paralysis. The group who
felt this way believed that Chinese energies were being held back
by the nature of Chiang's political balances and commitments,
that he could not balance corruption, duplicity, and extortion
and get a net effect of strength. Energy could come only from the
people, and Chiang's alliances bound him to the oppressors of
the people. Chiang emptied the vials of his wrath on this group
of unorganized critics within and without his own party. He
could deal with all, no matter how corrupt, who held him in
the same esteem he held himself; but any who could not accept
his formula that he was China were pariahs, to be ferreted out
and terrorized by his secret police. Some who hated Chiang more
than they loved China went over to the Japanese; others sought
a safe obscurity in a differeht province, in private business, in the
humdrum lower reaches of the bureaucracy. Except for a for-
tunate few the rest had to guard their every word.
Among those who could talk were some of the most honoured
names of the Nationalist Revolution. Gentle Madame Sun Yat-
sen, widow of the Kuomintang's founder, had a courage of steel.
She never attacked Chiang in public, but neither did she hide
her bitterness at the corruption and dissolution of the nation. She
preserved all the revolutionary ideals that had brought the Kuo-
mintang to power, and she gave quiet support to harassed liberal
and democratic groups. Dr. Sun Fo, for his part, did not hesitate
to speak his mind, either to Chiang or in open meeting; Chiang
could censor his accusations in both the foreign and the domestic
press, but he could not stop them. T. V. Soong also was too
fearless and too prominent to be intimidated; he could be
silenced only by admission once again to power.
The peasants too had had their fill of Chiang K'ai-shek's
government by 1944. His picture hung in government offices in
127
every village, and his name was still a magic symbol, but the men
who did his will among the peasants were hated and excoriated.
As early as 1942 reports of peasant uprisings began to seep into
the capital. These reports half gossip, half fact came from
everywhere, from areas remote from Communist influence. Dis-
content was spreading through the hundreds of thousands of
villages still under Kuomintang administration. There were up-
risings in Kweichow and Kansu, in Fukien and Hupeh. In Szech-
wanese villages there were riots angry, unorganized, unco-
ordinated. Chiang lived in a state of increasing petulance; bad
news of this sort made him furious. His temper flared so often
that people sought to bring him only pleasant news and flattery.
The press was silenced, and signs hung in country teahouses:
"It is forbidden to discuss national affairs."
Of all the grotesque elements of this personal government per-
haps the most incongruous was Chiang's assessment of his own
role. Chiang sincerely believed he was leading China to democ-
racy; it enraged him to be called a dictator. Once Chou En-lai,
chief Communist representative in Chungking, told him that the
Communists would turn over control of their army only to a
democratic government. Said Chiang, "Would you call me
undemocratic?"
CHAPTER 9
DOOMED MEN THE CHINESE ARMY
DURING THE FIRST World War the Germans sent General
Ludendorff to visit the Austrian high command. His laconic
report became legendary: "We are allied to a corpse."
Within a few months after Pearl Harbour the American Army
in Asia came to almost precisely the same conclusion about its
Chinese ally. The years of stalemate had made the Chinese army
a pulp, a tired, dispirited, unorganized mass, despised by the
enemy, alien to its own people, neglected by its government,
ridiculed by its allies. No one doubted the courage of the Chinese
soldier, but the army had no mobility, no strength, no leadership.
A simple set of figures told more than volumes of narrative
about China's army. In 1938, when the first Japanese offensive
campaigns had ended, the Chinese army mustered 4,000,000
men. For the next six years the Chinese government conscripted
128
a million and a half men a year; at a minimum the army should
have had 12,000,000 men on its rosters by 1944. But there were
still only 4,000,000 and these could be called effective only by
courtesy. What had happened to the other 8,000,000? No one
knew for sure. Battle deaths and casualties accounted for perhaps
a million lives in the intervening years of stalemate. The other
7,000,000 had simply vanished. They were missing because they
had died of sickness and hunger or because they had deserted
individually to their homes or en masse to the enemy.
China had a conscript army, recruited in the simplest and most
cold-blooded fashion. Chinese recruiting had none of the trim-
mings of number-drawing, physical examination, or legal
exemption. Chungking decided how many men it wanted and
assigned a certain quota to each province; the quota was sub-
divided for each county and village, and then the drafting began.
In some areas it was relatively honest, but on the whole it was
unspeakably corrupt. No one with money need fight; local
officials, for a fat profit, sold exemptions to the rich at standard
open prices. Any peasant who could scrape the money together
bought his way out. The men who were finally seized were often
those who could least afford to leave their families. When a
district had been stripped of eligible men, passersby were waylaid
or recruits bought from organized press gangs at so much a
head. Men were killed or mutilated in the process; sometimes
they starved to death before they reached a recruiting camp.
Men in the Chinese army never had a furlough, never went home,
rarely received mail. Going into the army was usually a death
sentence and more men died on their way to the army, through
the recruiting process, the barbarous training camps, and long
route marches, than after getting into it.
A soldier who survived training to reach the army at the front
was little better off than the raw recruit, for the Chinese army was
starving to death in the field. The food the Chinese soldier got, if
he were lucky, if his officers were honest, and if all regulations
were obeyed, was rice and vegetables. His ration was supposed
to be 24 ounces a day, but usually it was much less. This he sup-
plemented with occasional beans or watery turnips or on the
rarest occasions with meat, bought or seized from the countryside.
American soldiers used to laugh when they saw Chinese troops
carrying dead dogs slung from poles; they cursed when a pet
puppy disappeared from their barracks. The Chinese troops stole
129
dogs and ate them because they were starving and because the
fat pets the Americans kept ate more meat in a week than a
Chinese soldier saw in a month.
The route marches of the few armies that plodded across the
country left a trail of wasted cadavers on all the mountain roads.
Men in every stage of sickness and ill health would keep strugg-
ling along with their units because they could get food only with
their own companies. If they dropped from their line of march,
they lay as they fell until they died. The rice the Chinese soldier
stuffed into his belly and sometimes it was all he got was white,
polished rice. Vitamins had been stripped off with the husks in
the milling, and the troops suffered from every vitamin-deficiency
disease Western textbooks record and a few more that had never
been catalogued. Medical care in the Chinese army was primitive.
China has about one doctor to every 45,000 people, the United
States about one to every 800. In the thirty years before the war
against Japan the Chinese government had registered only
10,000 doctors, many of whom were simply medical mechanics,
whose training equalled that of a pharmacist. Half of these
"competent " physicians remained at the coast after the Japanese
invasion; the other half lived inland or soon went there. Almost
all the doctors in Free China were either in private practice
or attached to government health bureaux and civilian hospitals.
The entire Chinese army, with 300 divisions, shared the services of
probably no more than 500 capable physicians and surgeons
an average of slightly more than one to a division if they had been
assigned equally. In practice the few good men were concen-
trated in base hospitals and rear-area collecting points, while
whole divisions were without even one competent doctor.
The doctors who served the Chinese army were shockingly
underpaid; they received perhaps a tenth of what they might
have earned in private or civilian practice; they had few drugs or
tools with which to work; the emotional drain of the appalling
suffering in the army all but destroyed their own mental health.
Those who chose to stay with the army lived a life of simple
nobility and dignity. They devised makeshifts, forgot all their
training in shining laboratories, and concentrated on what small
improvements they could make in a hopeless situation. But many
collapsed and left the service as fast as they could. The total
result was that the average Chinese dressing station or divisional
hospital was managed by men who would not be employed as
130
soda jerks in American pharmacies, by men who had no more
idea of physiology and hygiene than a ploughman, by men who
filtered into the medical service because its control of hospitals and
supplies was one of the happy hunting-grounds of corruption.
The army had a thousand ailments, most of which were due to
starvation. With their constitutions ruined by poor food, sleep-
lessness, and years at the front, the Chinese soldiers were ripe
for any wandering infection. Probably 10 per cent of the troops
were tubercular. Their cramped quarters, their undernourish-
ment, their habit of plunging their chopsticks into a common bowl
of food, made it almost impossible to take preventive measures.
When troops were being gathered in China for the Burma cam-
paign, one unit was marched from the Canton front to Kweiyang,
where it was examined before being sent on to the active front in
northern Burma. Supposedly it was a good unit and was being
redeployed because it still had fighting effectiveness, but 30 per
cent of the effectives died on the 5OO-mile march, and of the
"sturdy" remainder 15 per cent were found by an American
doctor to be suffering from consumption.
Dysentery, malaria, and scabies were secondary scourges.
Dysentery began to take an increasingly heavy toll of the Chinese
army in 1939. The Chinese army treated 3000 cases of dysentery
in 1938; in 1940, with essentially the same field personnel and
the same number of soldiers in arms, it treated 15,900 more than
five times as many. Of this number 10,000 were treated in the last
six months of the year, for the simple but crushing reason that
the effect of three years of undernourishment in ruining the resist-
ance of the troops showed up suddenly then. The normal physical
reserves of the Chinese soldier's body had sunk so low that when
dysentery attacked and he could take no nourishment for a few
days, his life would gutter out like a candle. The rolls would list
his death as dysentery; actually he had died of starvation.
Chinese hospitals could scarcely handle all the cases that came to
them the badly managed institutions were dark charnel houses
of horror. Before the American Army took over, one hospital
near the Salween set aside a special ward with a concrete floor
for sufferers from dysentery; the uncontrollable bowels of the sick
men emptied onto the floor, which hospital attendants flushed
with buckets of water. The filth was gobbled up by pigs near the
hospital. The sick men could see the dead carried out each day
to be buried on the hillside above the hospital enclosure.
Malaria had been widespread in southern China before the
war. The flood of the Yellow River, the movement of troops
during the first two years of combat, and the peregrinations of the
refugees spread it far to the north and blighted all China with the
mosquito-borne parasite. Men rotted with it in Kwangsi in deep
summer, and the soldiers in the hills of Shansi shivered with
malarial chills in late fall. The troops who suffered most from
malaria were those stationed along the gorge of the Salween
River, where the battle line had to be held from 1942 to protect
Kunming and the plateau from Japanese assault up the BurmaRoad.
The Salween gorge is a dark scar across the western border-
land of Yunnan. It falls sickeningly away from stupendous
heights to a thin stream of rushing water 5000 feet below. The
Rockefeller Foundation regarded it as one of the three worst
malaria areas in the entire world. Malignant malaria had scoured
some of the fertile meadow lands in the low valleys bare of human
inhabitants. In the spfing of 1942 three Chinese divisions were
rushed to the Salween gorge to stem the Burma breakthrough.
One division marched into the bottom lines with 7000 men;
three weeks later only 4000 were able to stand and fight. One
company of the famous Eighty-eighth Division recorded 260
men out of 500 sick with malaria in a single month. The Chung-
king high command viewed the situation with shocking callous-
ness. Only T. V. Soong, a civilian, out of favour in Chungking,
had courage enough to bring the matter to the Generalissimo's
attention. Until the Americans took over medical authority in
that area, the troops had no mosquito nets. Ninety million tablets
of quinine were on hand in storehouses, but the Chinese army
insisted on hoarding them against a possible "emergency."
Americans complained of the lethargy of Chinese troops, their
laziness and sleepiness during the day. But the Americans slept
under mosquito nets at night, whereas many Chinese squatted
around their smudge fires till daybreak came and malaria-bearing
mosquitoes disappeared in the sunlight then the Chinese rested.
Scabies, a disease of vitamin deficiency and filth, attacked, by
some estimates, more than half the Chinese troops. Those who
were seriously infected had the itch not only on their hands, legs,
and bodies, but on their faces, which were swollen and dripped
pus. The army issued heavy cotton-padded uniforms to the troops
in the cold months, and these were worn day and night, without
changing, from fall to spring. There were no billets where
Chinese troops could bathe in hot water, and no soap was
issued.
Beri-beri was another vitamin-deficiency disease. You could
press your thumb into the swollen leg of a Chinese soldier who
had beri-beri, and the thumb print would still be there ten
minutes later. When vitamin Bi was injected into test subjects,
improvement was miraculous, but there were no vitamins for the
army as a whole. Leg ulcers suppurated; as the soldiers trudged
in their sandalled feet, liquid filth from their sores trickled down
their ankles to mix with road dust and flies.
Although tuberculosis, dysentery, malaria, and vitamin-
deficiency diseases were the chief scourges of the army, many
other maladies flourished too. Typhus, influenza, relapsing fever,
worms, all took their toll. Only venereal disease was conspicu-
ously absent from the list. This was partly because Chinese
troops lacked the money and the vitality for prostitutes, partly
because opportunity was lacking, possibly because Chinese
morals differed from those of Western armies.
In medical treatment, as in practically everything else, China
was handicapped by lack of supplies. Thousands of tons of drugs
each month might have checked the diseases of the Chinese army,
but until late in the war only 14 tons of foreign relief drugs came in
each month, plus some for American Army special training units.
China produced her own vaccines against cholera, and the army
medical service succeeded in keeping that disease from decimating
the ranks. If Asiatic cholera had taken hold in China in the closing
years of the war, it might have reduced the population by a third.
The treatment of the wounded, of course, was as bad as that
of the sick. The soldier who fell on the field of battle lay there till
his company stretcher-bearers two to a company found him;
they carried him for a full day across the paddies or the hills to
the divisional station. There, if he were lucky, the soldier found
a medical handyman established in a barn or temple. This man
might bind up his ruptured blood vessels, open since he was hit,
apply bamboo splints to his broken limbs, which had been
joggling on a stretcher for many hours, and send him on. If he
was still alive then, he might be carried across the roadless belt
of devastation that insulated the entire China front. Back in the
communications zone a truck could take him to a real hospital,
where, four days to a week later, he would reach the care of
the first competent surgeon. The result was predictable. An
abdominal or head wound meant certain death; an infected gash
meant gangrene.
It is easy to criticize the Chinese army for its treatment of the
sick and wounded, but it would be wicked to ascribe all the suffer-
ing to callous negligence. The staunch-hearted handful who
fought to help the Chinese soldier men like Dr. Richard Lu
of the Chinese army medical service and Dr. Robert Lim of the
Chinese Red Cross suffered agonies themselves as reports came
in from war areas. They could do nothing; they were trapped
by the harsh reality of the ignorant, feudal country on the one
hand, by corruption and lack of support from above on the other.
Elementary sanitation could not be taught an army of men
who were living in the Middle Ages; the soldiers had consulted
herb doctors all their lives, hygiene was a mystery to them,
and they believed in charms and ancient remedies. The medical
corps wanted men to drink only boiled water, but when they were
thirsty, soldiers drank from paddy fields. The medical corps
wanted to isolate sick men, but soldiers in the field all ate from
one common pot of food. The medical corps tried to see that all
the men were supplied with first-aid kits containing bandage
material, but soldiers who did have them used the padded
gauze to swab out the barrels of their rifles.
Competent technicians or trained personnel could not be
found. During the war years Chinese medical schools were not
prepared to turn out doctors in quantity or quality to meet the
army's needs; they could educate yearly only four or five hundred
students, who, with limited laboratory facilities and inadequate
textbooks, out of touch with Western research, could not hope to
be really good physicians.
Supplies and ambulances could not be secured in amounts to
meet the need. The strategy of the Chinese army required a belt
of devastation all along the front so that the Japanese army
would be forced to fight a foot war on equal terms with the
Chinese infantry. There were no roads in this belt, and wounded
soldiers had to be carried to the rear by other soldiers or by
peasants. Even where there were roads, there were few ambu-
lances. Five American ambulances in Europe could carry as many
wounded to hospitals in a day as 2000 Chinese stretcher-bearers*
The Chinese army had no real military tradition. Its com-
mander-in-chief, Chiang K'ai-shek, was a graduate of the first
class of the Paoting Military Academy, which had been founded
only forty years before as the first concession of the classical
mandarinate of the Manchus to modern war the first departure
from immemorial pattern in two millenniums of Chinese military
history. The Chinese army was a melange of sociological curios-
ities. The general staff had no common training; it was a con-
fused grouping of middle-aged men who had fought and hated
each other for a generation. It gave its orders on the basis of the
personalities involved or provincial political tensions and some-
times wondered whether it would be obeyed or not. In deploy-
ment of troops it thought not only of supply and the enemy but
of internal revolts and domestic security. Twenty divisions of
the best troops the government had were kept from the war
against Japan in order to blockade the Communists in the north.
Corruption in the Chinese forces was a cancer at the heart
that infected every limb. Almost to the close of the war each
division and army was treated as independent. Each division
commander received a certain amount of money, which he
apportioned as he saw fit for medical expenses, salaries, vege-
tables, and other items incidental to the conduct of a campaign.
As the inflation ate like acid at accepted ethics, the officers found
themselves perhaps better placed strategically for grafting than
any other group in the country. A divisional commander received,
say, money and supplies for 10,000 men, which his subordinates
in turn distributed to the lower echelons. But a division that
carried 10,000 men on its roster might actually have only 9000
men or 7000 or 5000! The difference between the roster
strength and the actual strength of any unit was the measure of
how much a commander could pocket personally. Further, the
less he fed the living, the greater his profit. Graft coursed from one
end of the Chinese army to the other. Payrolls were padded;
rice rolls were padded; the abuse became so flagrant that a
general's graft was finally recognized as his right. Divisions in the
Chinese armies were supposed to have approximately 10,000
men, but rarely did any division have more than 6000 and
draft levies had to be fed into them constantly just to, replace
the sick and dying. By 1943 some divisions had as few as 2000
officers and men.
Chinese officers treated their soldiers like animals. Soldiers
could be beaten, even killed, at a commander's whim, and
punishments included ear-cropping and flogging. Americans at
135
training centres were revolted to see how often a soldier might be
punished by being made to kneel on his bare knees on a rocky
parade ground, with his hands bound behind his back, until he
collapsed in the burning sun. Soldiers were personal servants not
only of the officers but of the officers' ladies and their families.
In fact a soldier who got a chance to be servant to an officer's
wife struck fortune; he might quietly change his uniform for a
white-coated servant's smock and be a civilian again. It was
dangerous to march a unit through a district from which a large
number of its soldiers had come; they would melt off into the
hills and never appear again. A story is told of a unit of 800
carrier troops marching from Kansu in northern China to
Yunnan to enter the American training programme; en route
200 died of sickness; 300 deserted. Another division marching
from northern China to the south passed happily or unhappily,
as one's sympathy may suggest through Szechwan, from which
most of its soldiers originally had been drawn; it started with
7000 men but merged with 3000, for whole companies had dis-
appeared to their homes.
The kindest thing to say about some leaders of the Chinese
officer corps is that they were incompetent. Besides thieving their
men's food and money, ignoring their sickness, and flaying them
mercilessly for infractions of discipline, they were bad leaders.
Their staff work was inefficient. They reported to their superiors
not what the situation actually was but what they thought their
superiors wanted it to be. In Chungking these reports were
accepted as fact, and decisions were based on them; errors
multiplied and were compounded from top to bottom. Towns
were reported recaptured that were still in Japanese hands;
enemy casualties were always exaggerated at each remove from
the battlefield, until, according to Chungking estimates, the
entire Japanese army should have been wiped out. The military
doctrine of the Chinese army was a chaotic mess of theory, with
Japanese insignia of rank, German goose-stepping, Russian
aerial tactics, Chinese supply practices, and hastily instilled
American techniques. The Chinese even harked back to the Mid-
dle Ages to explain some of the things they did. For example,
when at one camp site American veterinarians tried to persuade
the Chinese that their pack animals should not be lashed nose to
post at night but be allowed to lie and rest, the Chinese explained
that in the days of Kublai Khan, about A.D. 1250, it had been
136
customary to let pack animals lie down at night; but then one
night, still in Kublai Khan's time, when many animals were
lying asleep, a great snow had fallen, and the animals had all been
buried beneath it and died. Since then Chinese armies had tied
their horses with their heads high at night.
The Chinese army was an infantry army. Early and late,
American training officers hammered home American theories
of dispersion, of advance towards the enemy with belly flat on
the ground ; when the campaign on the Salween began, they stood
aghast in their observation posts to see Chinese officers fling
their troops erect against Japanese mountain strongholds. The
Napoleonic charge was still good doctrine for some Chinese com-
manders. No one who ever saw the Chinese soldier in the field
doubts his valour, but it was expended so uselessly by Chinese
leadership that observers sickened at the sight. Chinese ideas of
security were similarly bad. A tremendous state police system
was set up to watch for espionage and leakages of information.
But Japanese agents were everywhere. One war area commander
admitted that he paid a friendly visit to the Japanese commander
he opposed, because the commander had been his school-
mate in Japan. Individuals went back and forth between Chung-
king and puppet officials of the Japanese government in Nanking.
When, for example, the 6-29 project was still in the category of
top secret and bases were being contemplated in western China,
word leaked all the way to Shanghai, then under Japanese occu-
pation. A Chinese contractor in a Japanese-occupied city at the
coast, hearing from his friends that the Americans wanted big
bases from which to bomb Japan, journeyed through the lines
from the Japanese side to the Chinese side and proceeded to West
China, where the bases were being built. He got a contract to
work at one base, finished the job, and returned home to the
Japanese-occupied city with his knowledge and profit.
Beyond all this there were areas of deficiency in the Chinese
army that were matters more for sorrow than for criticism. A
significant portion of all the ills and evils came from the siege
conditions under which 'China existed, and for the shortages
American policy was as much to blame as anything. No other
country in modern times was ever blockaded as China was after
the closing of the Burma Road. When the road was cut off, some
15,000 trucks were operating in China; three years later, perhaps
5000. The difference spelled tragedy. It meant that troops could
not be shifted from front to front to meet a threat and that each
area commander became a local satrap, depending on his own
resources, not on Central Government supply.
The whole war effort was in the grip of paralysis. The busiest
trunk highway in China, studied over a period of a month in the
summer of 1943, averaged a daily count of 123 vehicles. This
figure was for vehicles going both ways -jeeps, trucks, buses, and
commercial vehicles, as well as army transportation. One of the
three main arterial highways leading into Chungking, clocked in the
same way, showed a daily average of only 60 vehicles, again for
traffic going both ways. This general condition was reflected in
Chinese military thinking. Chinese generals did not want to fight;
they did not want to spend ammunition or gasoline unless they
were forced to by intolerable pressure from above. They wanted to
wait and wait until someone else had won the victory for them.
Some men, even high in the army, were sound and courageous
Wei Li-huang, whose decency and perseverance finally
triumphed on the Salween; Ch'en Ch'eng, who began at last
to clean the stinking stables in Chungking when he became
Minister of War; Li Tsung-jen, the harsh brown K jpangsi
soldier; Sun Li-jen, who learned his craft in Burma unu^ S til-
well. Scattered over the whole sweep of the front were regimental
and divisional commanders who stood out like islands of honesty
in the swampland of the Chinese army. They pleaded the case
of their men with more pathos and bitterness than any foreigner
can hope to convey. Some of these field commanders hungered
with their men, marched with them on foot, died with them under
enemy fire. But they were a handful; the good in the Chinese
army went with the bad, and the net result was infamy.
That this army held the line against the Japanese for six years
is the most remarkable thing of all the strange things about it.
It would have been too much to expect actual combat victories.
The army's greatest victory was its staying alive and withstand-
ing the disintegrating pressure of its own government and society.
Many could not withstand this pressure ; hundreds of thousands
went over to the Japanese and joined the puppets of Wang
Ching-wei; other thousands joined the Communists or surren-
dered to them. The brutality and suffering that prevailed within
the Chinese army degraded not only the senior officers and the
men of the staff; it depraved the common soldier too. Treated
like a dog, hungering for food, he sought to appease his inner
discontent by taking what he could from one even weaker than
himself the peasant.
A young Chinese was sent to report on the scene of the " vic-
tory " in western Hupeh in 1943, which had been touted by the
press of China as a victory equal to Stalingrad. His unpublished
report, long after the campaign was over, was a testament of
disillusion and despair. Instead of a victory the reporter found
that Chinese losses had been between 70,000 and 80,000, enemy
losses between 3000 and 4000. More shocking yet was the apathy
he found among the people. His report read :
Politically, why were the peasants our enemies? Because we
ourselves sent them over to the enemy. Before the enemy
reached Lihsien and Tsing-chih, and when the situation was
critical, the garrison there issued an order for the people to
evacuate, only one member of each family being permitted
to remain. After two days had passed, another order was issued
ordering everyone without exception to leave, no one being
allowed to remain. Any offender would be prosecuted as a
traitor. After the people had left, the (Chinese) garrison
plundered the whole city and carried off the stolen property.
Those who were too old to leave their homes and unwilling to
depart were killed. In some cases their houses were burned
with them. On my arrival in Lihsien, clothes looted by the
garrison from the people were still offered on the market for
sale. I had talks with the people. At first they refused to tell
me anything. Later when I mentioned Chungking and told
them that I had come to make an inspection, they looked
around and as no attention was paid to them, one man slowly
put four fingers on the table and then turned the hand over. I
understood his meaning. He meant to say that the (Chinese)
44th Army looted the city completely. He told me in a low
voice that the army raped, plundered, set incendiary fires,
and murdered. When the country people had learned of the
thorough looting of the city by the army, they wished to return
home, but the troops did not permit them, and asked for money
if they wished to pass. Each person had to pay five hundred
to one thousand dollars. The 8yth Army acted likewise.
In travelling along the front line I was astonished to learn
from many people ^hat they thought that when the enemy
arrived they would not make any disturbance. Where the
*39
people obtained this kind of information is worthy of investiga-
tion. When the enemy advanced, in fact, they did not cause
any disturbance to the people. Wherever they passed, they
asked them to supply tea and water only. At the time they all
said that the enemy was better than the Chinese troops. When
they mentioned the Chinese troops, they felt them to be a
third party and not their own troops at all. On their retreat,
the enemy burned and killed on a large scale, giving them no
time to repent. The enemy was extraordinarily crafty and
cunning towards the Chinese people.
CHAPTER i o
STILWELL'S WAR
THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT set up the China-Burma-
India theatre of operations in the spring of 1942. The CBI
command was the stuff of legends ; Americans used to say that
you needed a crystal ball and a copy of Alice in Wonderland to
understand it. No Hollywood producer would dare film the mad,
unhappy grotesquerie of the CBI. It had everything maharajas,
dancing girls, war lords, head-hunters, jungles, deserts, rac-
keteers, secret agents. American pilots strafed enemy elephants
from P-4o's. The Chinese Gestapo ferreted out beautiful enemy
spies in our own headquarters and Japanese agents knifed an
American intelligence officer in the streets of Calcutta. Chinese
war lords introduced American army officers to the delights of
the opium pipe; American engineers doctored sick work ele-
phants with opium and paid native labourers with opium too.
Leopards and tigers killed American soldiers, and GFs hunted
them down with Garands. Birds built their nests in the exhaust
vents of B-i7's in India while China howled for air power.
Parties stomped over the silver floors of maharajas' palaces to
the sound of boogie-woogie. American agents climbed through
Himalayan passes to Lhasa to negotiate with the Dalai Lama
for the friendship of Tibet. The U.S. Navy undertook to train a
cavalry corps on the fringe of the Mongolian desert; it also
trained the dread State Police of China in the technique of the
F.B.I. American experts taught Chinese everything from potato
growing to the newest methods of artificial insemination.
140
CBI politics were a fabulous compound of logistics, personali-
ties, Communism, despotism, corruption, imperialism, nonsense,
and tragic impotence. Nowhere in the world did American policy
work with such oddly assorted characters. They included
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru; Lord Louis Mount-
batten, of the British royal family, and Sir Archibald Wavell,
poetaster warrior of the Western Desert; Chiang K'ai-shek,
Generalissimo of the Chinese armies, and his brittle wife, Madame
Chiang; and for minor characters the much-contriving governor
of Yunnan, Ling Yun, and the handsome dark-eyed insurrec-
tionary of the north, the Communist General Chou En-lai, along
with a host of others. The Americans dealing with these people
were just as colourful; they inevitably became infected with the
same qualities of intrigue and dissension, and it was a divided,
unhappy command.
The sole reason for the existence of this theatre was to keep
China in the war. Thus in the final campaign against Japan she
might form the anvil on which the hammers of Allied might would
beat the enemy to a pulp. It was the CBI's job to supply China,
retrain, re-equip, and regroup her armies, and send them out
once more to fight the Japanese. Almost a quarter of a million
Americans were assigned to this task; billions of dollars were
spent; thousands of lives were lost. It was an essential mission.
What was accomplished here was awarded less recognition, less
honour, less support, less encouragement, than any other phase
of America's war effort.
Priority tables rated the CBI theatre about the same as the
Caribbean. It had a grandiose mission and only a fraction of the
tools necessary to perform it. The GFs saw with blunt political
realism that they were expendables working on a holding opera-
tion; except for the gallant handful of Fourteenth Air Force
combat personnel, who were fighting a strategy and war of their
own, the Americans felt themselves a sop to political necessity. It
is true that in a military way the CBI theatre could not compare
with the great wars in Europe and the Pacific; its significance,
primarily political, lay in the fact that for the first time men of
a Western civilization had come to Asia as allies to fight side by
side with Asiatics in a common cause. All the suffering and un-
happiness of the Americans assigned to this task might have been
justified if their efforts had been made the beginning of a crusade
to introduce American ideas of freedom, democracy, and efficiency
141
into the turmoil of Asiatic politics. But they were not. High policy
hamstrung the responsible commander in meeting the situation.
The political responsibility, just as much as the military
responsibility, rested on the shoulders of one man who was
expected to accomplish miracles on a shoestring. General Joseph
W. Stilwell was cut from no ordinary military cloth. He was a
West Point graduate, had had a distinguished career in the First
World War, and between wars had become one of the great
specialists in infantry tactics in the U.S. Army. His assignments
had shifted him between the United States and China for twenty
years; sent to Peking as a language student shortly after the first
World War, he had achieved fluency in the language and had also
become an expert on Chinese military affairs. The outbreak of
the war between China and Japan in 1937 had found him
American military attach6 in northern China, and he had
followed the early cotirse of the war on foot till the stalemate in
1939. All this was conventional enough.
But Stilwell had another quality rare in professional soldiers
the long view. He was a man who could lift his eyes from the mud
and the filth of the campaign and look to the horizon. He knew
what the war was about. The awkward, vaguely worded directives
that were issued to him to retrain the Chinese armies could easily
have been interpreted as a humdrum routine assignment that
would have brought both honour and happiness without heart-
ache. Stilwell, however, saw his responsibility not merely to a
directive but to the American people as a whole : to fight a war
wholeheartedly, democratically, with no tolerance for corruption,
duplicity, or the niceties of diplomatic double talk.
Stilwell was ill served by his entire public relations staff. They
saw the Old Man as a colourful, lovable figure who could best
be interpreted to the American people as Vinegar Joe a cracker-
barrel philosopher, a man of dry Yankee wit, a first-class fighting
man. They obscured the warmth and tenderness of his spirit
almost completely. The key to StilwelFs character was his
realization of the dignity and worth of every man. He drew his
understanding of life from no complicated ideologies but from a
basic strain of American liberalism. He saw the Chinese peasant
soldier as not even the Chinese officers saw him as a man who
would fight like a man only when he was treated like a man. His
affection for the Chinese peasant soldier was boundless. He had
seen the hopeless early battles of China in 1937 and 1938 and had
142
come to believe in Chinese courage and gallantry as a cardinal
article of faith. At the same time no American officer realized
better the havoc that the years of corruption had wrought in the
Chinese army.
His entire programme was to train, feed, and equip the pulpy
mass of humanity into which the Chinese army had degenerated
and to make it fit to meet the Japanese on equal terms and shatter
them. StilwelFs education in China had begun with his earliest
assignment there twenty years before Pearl Harbour. Step by step
he was led from preoccupation with the soldier as an individual,
from the organization of individuals into a combat unit, to a
realization that military change could come only by sweeping
reform at the very heart of Chinese politics and administration.
By the time he was midway in his career as commander of the
CBI he realized that no grant of American aid, no fragile paper
reform, no single army strengthened or individual battle won,
could revitalize China. A modern army could function only in
a modern state, and he believed this modern state could come
only if American policy actively espoused democracy and effi-
ciency in Chungking. When the Stilwell crisis materialized out of
these convictions, many treated Stilwell as if he were an enemy of
the Chinese Republic; the GI's in Burma, however, realized how
wrong that judgment was. They were angry at Stilwell for an
entirely different reason because they felt that he had been a
"slopy lover", that he had favoured his Chinese troops in the
jungle over his own Americans.
Stilwell was the greatest and most inspiring figure in the CBI
theatre. His honesty was like a rock; his martial courage and
drive were complete and unquestioned; his simplicity mocked the
garish atmosphere of intrigue in which he was expected to operate.
But Stilwell had faults too and his faults sprang from his virtues.
His contempt for cant and hypocrisy was always too thinly dis-
guised for diplomacy. He could be simple and gentle with humble
people, but his sharp tongue scraped the sensitivity of the pompous
like sandpaper. He treated Chiang K'ai-shek as another soldier
with due courtesy and respect but no scraping or bowing and
their personalities clashed bitterly.
StilweU's loyalty to his subordinates was proverbial. A brilliant
combat soldier himself, he had first-class men as his combat
deputies; but he disliked paper work, and the men who did his
staff work served him atrociously. He retained old and trusted
143
soldiers long after their usefulness was ended and they had
become a handicap. Good administration was essential in a
theatre as large and complex as the CBI, which stretched from
Karachi to Sian, a distance as great as from San Diego to New
York. The slipshod staff work of some of his desk deputies left
Stilwell open to constant criticism.
An American officer once quipped, "To explain the CBI you
need a three-dimensional organization chart with a wire frame
work and five shades of coloured ribbon, which ought to indicate
at least the simpler relationships." General Stilwell wore three
hats. He was commander in chief of the CBI theatre; as such he
was responsible to the War Department in Washington and com-
manded all Americans in the CBI. But in China he was also chief
of staff to Chiang K'ai-shek, who was supreme commander of the
Chinese theatre of war; in this capacity Stilwell was responsible
to Chiang. In India he was deputy commander of the South-East
Asia Command, which had been set up in the summer of 1 943 ;
and here he was directly beneath British Admiral Lord Louis
Mountbatten. The dividing line between the China theatre and
the South-East Asia theatre was vague. Major General George
Stratemeyer was air officer for Stilwell; he commanded the
Tenth Air Force in India and the Fourteenth Air Force
(Chennault's) in China, but he was also responsible to Lord Louis
Mountbatten, for he was strategic air commander of the Sovith-
East Asia Command.
In China, of course, Chiang had his own chief of staff, General
Ho Ying-ch'in. Ho was chief of staff for the Chinese armies, while
Stilwell was supposed to be chief of staff for the China theatre.
In India, Lord Louis was commander only of South-East Asia
a command that consisted of Ceylon and areas yet to be re-
conquered; in practice he was based in India, drew his strength
from India, and marshalled his troops in India but did not
command there. India was commanded independently by Sir
Claude Auchinleck, G.O.C. in India. The CBI was split down the
middle by the wedge of Jap conquest in Burma. Over this wedge
flew Air Transport Command that formed a hinge between the
two separate areas, India and China. It was independent of
Stilwell, Chiang K'ai-shek, and Mountbatten and was com-
manded from Washington; it regarded itself as a kind of interstate
command, above theatre jurisdiction. In 1944 the Twentieth
144
Bomber Command of the B-2g's, a great hoglike organism that
consumed enormous quantities of goods and gasoline, entered the
CBI ; this command was completely above any control except that
of General Arnold in Washington. If all this does not sound exactly
clear, it is because it was never quite clear to anyone in the field.
None of the elements of this campaign pulled together harmoni-
ously. The one thing Stilwell wanted to do was fight. This was
war and he wanted to waste no moment of opportunity to hit
the enemy wherever he was exposed with whatever resources were
at hand. Fighting the Japanese was an obsession with Stilwell;
the reconquest of Burma and the smashing of the China blockade
preoccupied his every thought and energy. But a Burma campaign
was opposed by the British, the Chinese, and even elements of the
American Army.
The main source of opposition was the British. India was the
cornerstone of their entire imperial system, and British objectives
in the war in Asia were, first, to retain control in India and,
second, to reconquer the colonies ravished by the Japanese. China
seemed remote to the British in every way. Since the United States
was primarily responsible for the war against Japan, they felt
that its strategy should be left in American hands; if American
political and military plans required the smashing of the blockade
about China, the British felt it would be unseemly of them not to
acquiesce, but they gave only acquiescence, not full co-operation.
The British had vast reserves in India. They had an estimated
million Indian troops, a sizeable unit of the. Royal Air Force, a
native industrial system incomparably greater than China's.
Most of the energy of the government in India was devoted, how-
ever, not to the prosecution of the war but to the maintenance of
British rule. What military strength India could spare for the
war against the Axis was diverted to the war against Germany,
in which there was little danger that Indian troops would be
contaminated by dangerous ideas. The British in India, like
Chiang K'ai-shek in China, put most of their strength behind
maintaining internal stability. This may seem a harsh judgment on
the British troops, officers, and civil servants in India who sincerely
believed they were furthering the great war against the Axis. In
specific instances the co-operation of the Indian government with
the American Army was magnificent. But the colonial framework
within which the British worked, indeed their whole breeding and
indoctrination, made their wholehearted co-operation impossible.
Fo H5
Stilwell needed British aid in order to use India as his base for
a plunge into the Burma jungles. The British, however, had been
shocked into a state of funk by events in Burma and Malaya.
Churchill felt that Burma was a bad place for white men too
malarial and with too enervating a climate. The British could not
see how Stilwell, with a corporal's guard of Chinese and a few
Indian divisions, could hope to make progress in an area the
Japanese had won so easily. They did not want to begin any
campaign in a colony they had lost until they had an over-
whelming superiority in men and material, whereas Stilwell
wanted to fight with bare equality or less. For two years Stilwell
argued with the British command in the effort to goad them into
activity, and tempers frayed to the breaking point.
Politically, too, British interests diverged from Chinese and
American. The British wanted Burma reconquered neither by
Chinese, who were Orientals, nor by Americans, who were out-
siders. They meant to have Burma again as a colony; to re-
establish their prestige it was important that it should be retaken
by British forces under the same flag they had carried in defeat.
The American political advisers of Stilwell and the Office of War
Information under his command would have liked to raise the
battle cry of freedom in the areas Stilwell planned to reconquer;
they knew this was impossible, and they were unhappy because
they could not make American motives clear and clean in Asia.
A propaganda campaign based on the idea of freedom which,
after all, was what the war was presumably being fought about
would have struck directly at British interests. The British were
fighting two separate wars. In Europe they stood with all honour
for the freedom of humanity and the destruction of the Nazi slave
system; in Asia, for the status quo, for the Empire, for colonialism.
Chinese opposition to StilwelTs programme is hard to analyse
for in theory the Chinese wanted the blockade of their country
smashed as quickly as possible; they did want a Burma campaign
but not at great cost to themselves. If they' could crack the
blockade by signing documents and agreeing to Allied decisions,
they were all for it. But when it became necessary to implement
strategy by concrete work, by energetic co-operation, that was
something else. Chiang was perfectly willing to let Stilwell have
his way with the Chinese troops cut off in India; they were fed,
supplied, armed by other powers. But for China to implement
the strategy herself would ^ave meant reform from the ground up
146
and reform would threaten the delicate balances of Chinese
war-lord politics. The Chinese were convinced that America's
entry into the war had doomed the Japanese; as one American
wit said, "Pearl Harbour Day in America was Armistice Day out
here." The Chinese felt that they need only wait until the enemy
crumbled before American strength.
The third source of opposition to Stilwell's plan was within the
U.S. Army, in the person of a man just as colourful, just as
determined, as much admired and as much hated, as Stilwell
himself. This was Claire Chennault, airman extraordinary.
Chennault was the advocate of air power completely, un-
reservedly. For his beliefs, expressed repeatedly and without
hesitation, he was forced out of the U.S. Army and went to China
in 1936, where he watched and analysed the early battles of the
Japanese air force against the Chinese and Russians. In 1941 he
took out to Asia a handful of second-rate P-4o's and a collection
of undisciplined, courageous, magnificent Army and Navy
pilots from America to form the American Volunteer Group,
which he welded into one of the most spectacular single striking
groups in the history of aerial warfare, the Flying Tigers. When
the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbour, he was ready to fight.
Chennault's men shot the Japanese out of the skies with relentless
success day after day while other Allied air fronts throughout the
Pacific were collapsing before the Japanese Zeros. With the
establishment of the CBI command Chennault was brought back
into uniform as a brigadier general and was given command of the
China Air Task Force, which was later to become the independent
Fourteenth Air Force.
Chennault held that the Japanese could be, and would be,
defeated by air power. He saw China not as a base for ground
operations against the enemy army but as a vast staging ground
for aerial operations against the enemy's heartland and sea lanes.
He wanted to base his American air force in eastern China and
lash out from the coast against the enemy's shipping and ports.
He felt that fighting in Burma was a waste of time; if he could
sever Japan's ocean communications, the Japanese garrison in
Burma would wither in starvation. To Chennault the Burma Road
looked like a good thing to have but still a luxury; all American
supplies and effort should be concentrated on the one great task
of flying material into China, where it should be converted
primarily into air power in the form of strength for the Fourteenth
Air Force what was left should be turned over to the Chinese
to do with as they saw fit. Chennault believed that with sufficient
air power he could keep the Japanese armies in eastern China
from attacking his bases. The Fourteenth Air Force would be the
artillery and heavy support of the tired Chinese infantry.
Stilwell, on the other hand, held that air power was subordinate
to the over-all pattern. No air bases, he insisted, could be held in
eastern China for aerial operations against the Japanese without
a powerful Chinese army. This army could be developed only by
equipping it with supplies brought in over the Burma Road.
Therefore the road should have top priority it was a prerequisite
for staving off a Japanese attack against our air power. The great
feud between Chennault and Stilwell rocked the entire American
Army in China. You could be either a Stilwell man or a
Chennault man; to be friendly with both meant walking a tight-
rope. Both were dynamic, hard-hitting fighting men. Both were
badly served by aides who, conscious of the feud, delighted in
feeding the bitterness of one commander against the other with
bits of gossip. Only Major General Frank Merrill of Merrill's
Marauders, of all the top personalities in the theatre, sought to
heal the breach.
The bottleneck for all the conflicting ideas, strategies, and
ambitions in China was the Hump. To understand the precise
degree of happiness or unhappiness of any contender in the
China sweepstakes, you had to know the tonnage he was currently
receiving over the Hump. For two and a half years the only contact
China had with America and the Allied world was the fantastic
airline that crossed the Hump the spurs of the Himalayas from
upper Assam to the plateau of Yunnan. Loads carried over the
Hump began at the rate of 80 tons a month in the spring of 1942 ;
at the end of the war they were moving at the rate of 80,000 tons
a month. In the process the Hump drove men mad, killed them,
sent them back to America wasted with tropical fevers and
broken for the rest of their lives. Some of the boys called it the
Skyway to Hell; it was certainly the most dangerous, terrifying,
barbarous aerial transport run in the world. Unarmed cargo
carriers crossed 500 miles, of unchartered mountains and jungles
at 20,000 feet in spite of the Japanese air force, tropical monsoons,
and Tibetan ice. In some months the Hump command lost more
planes and personnel than the combat outfit, the Fourteenth Air
Force, that it supplied. It chewed up four commanders before
148
I943> when the Air Transport Command finally found in
Brigadier General Tom Hardin a man whose spectacular will
could master its problems.
The Hump was the key to all politics in China. Stilwell,
Chennault, and the Chinese government locked in bitter dispute
over how the tonnage should be distributed. During most of the
period of the blockade, cargo averaged less than 5000 tons a
month. Not till Hardin took over in the fall of 1943 did tonnage
begin to climb; it passed 10,000 tons in December of '43 and
reached 20,000 tons a month by the fall of 1944. Even 10,000 tons
a month was nothing in the arithmetic of war. Two heavy raids
by the Eighth Air Force out of England over Germany consumed
more tonnage than was moved into the China area in an entire
month. The three contenders for Hump tonnage Stilwell,
Chennault, and the Chinese government were like men trapped
and starved in a besieged city. The entire tonnage would have
been insufficient for the needs of any one of the three; split among
them, it came only to a tantalizing less-than-subsistence ration.
The three appealed again and again to Washington against the
iniquities of their superiors, subordinates, or colleagues; quarrels
over tonnage distribution reached even to the White House.
Chennault wanted as much material as possible to feed into the
forward eastern China bases where his boys were slaughtering
Japanese shipping. Stilwell wanted as much material as possible
for the ground forces to reopen the Burma Road and revitalize the
Chinese army. The government wanted material to keep the arsenals
and the civilian economy functioning at minimum efficiency.
The American government promised over and over again that
Hump tonnage would be increased to meet Chinese demands.
But strain as they might, die as gallantly as they did, the airmen
of the Hump could never meet the insatiable voracity of the
beleaguered garrisons beyond the mountains. Stilwell, who, as
commander in chief of the entire theatre, bore the ultimate
responsibility for distribution of the tonnage, was cursed from hell
to breakfast by everyone whose demands were unsatisfied from
the sweat-stained GI, who wanted beer and Wacs, to the Chinese
general staff, which wanted copper and trucks.
The original strategy for Asia had emerged from the Churchill-
Roosevelt White House conference the week after Pearl Harbour.
It was then the Allies' intention to hold the Singapore-Indies line
against the Japanese and to send supplies over the Burma Road
into China to revive her for battle. The collapse of the entire
Allied front in South-East Asia in the spring of 1942 did not alter
the basic continental strategy ; it merely delayed it. TheBurmaRoad
had been severed by the Japanese, and it was necessary to reopen
the road before the plan to aid China could begin to operate.
When Chiang K'ai-shek was given the honorific title of com-
mander in chief of the Allied high command for the China theatre,
he asked for an American to serve as his chief of staff. The United
States plucked Stilwell from command of an army corps in
California and sent him off to Asia to serve as Chiang's chief of
staff and to command all American forces in CBI. Caught in the
disastrous Burma campaign, Stilwell marched out to India on
foot; his plan for the next two years was conceived during this
march and was elaborated in the summer of 1942.
The first step was to be the training of the remnants of the
Chinese army that had escaped to India from Burma. These
troops would be the spearhead of the drive against the Burma
barrier that the Japanese had raised on China's flank; they would
pierce Burma in the north, at a point farthest from Japan's
bases of supply. At Kunming, within China, another training
centre for Chinese would be established ; here Americans would
teach basic techniques and organize a Chinese force to strike at
the Burma barrier from within. The two forces would act as
pincers, one operating from Ledo in northern Assam, the other
from the Salween in western China; when they met, the blockade
of China would be cut. These two movements were geared to fit
with ajonger-range plan. A third centre for training Chinese was
to be established in eastern China, at Kweilin. This centre would
not turn out so finished a product as the other two, for it would
lack sufficient equipment and personnel, but it would indoctrinate
the large infantry masses on the eastern front with American
methods and practices. The three forces were styled respectively
X, Y, and Z X-ray, Yoke, and Zebra, three words that became
famous in the CBI.
These forces were the building blocks of Stilwell's plan. He
began training the Indian force in the summer of 1942. At
Ramgarh, on the hot, dusty plain of central India, a training
school was functioning by fall. Americans taught Chinese officers
modern theory and gave them artillery and infantry practice;
they taught Chinese enlisted men signal corps work and veterinary
150
work. In India, Chinese troops were for the first time fed as much
as they could eat; they were paid in hard cash; they were given
shoes, clothing, medical care, even vitamin pills. The Kunming
school opened in early 1943; it was less lavish, for it could not
feed the troops so well and could not supply them with artillery
and significant items of equipment. The Kweilin school, which was
not established till late in 1943, gave Chinese officers only a
hurried exposure to American practices.
The timing of the over-all strategy was very simple. When the
X forces from Burma met the Y forces from China and the road
was open, both these forces, supplemented by the Z group, would
move towards the coast of eastern China. There they would meet
the American Navy, driving in from the Pacific to open a port.
Direct communications would then be re-established across the
Pacific between America and China, and the Japanese Empire
would be cut in two! Although all the Allies agreed on the
general plan of campaign, they never could agree to set it in
motion. Stilwell wanted to fight as quickly, as earnestly, as heartily
as possible, with whatever was at hand. He wanted to strike at
Burma in the fall of 1942; the British overruled him. He wanted
to strike in the spring of 1943; he was overruled again. He
persisted tirelessly in demanding that the blockade of China be
broken, and finally in November of 1943 he won the assent of the
combined chiefs of staff to start a real effort to retake Burma.
According to the Cairo plan the British would land on the coast
in southern Burma, the Chinese would push across the Salween
front with the Yoke forces, and Stilwell would command the X--
ray forces, plunging through the jungles of northern Burma to the
road junction. After the Cairo conference came the Allied meeting
at Teheran, in December 1943, at which Stalin and the Americans
insisted on a massive all-out effort across the English Channel to
relieve the pressure on Russia. Stalin's attitude forced a reversal
of the Cairo decision. If the Channel effort was to succeed, no
landing boats could be spared for Burma, Stilwell was therefore
designated to return to China and inform Chiang that the pro-
posed British landings in southern Burma were cancelled.
Chiang, who had been only mildly enthusiastic about the
Burma campaign, though he had committed himself to it at
Cairo, now declared that if there were to be no landing by the
British, there would be no offensive by the Chinese from the
Salween. But he conceded full authority to Stilwell to do as he
15*
wished with the three Chinese divisions that had been created
in India to fight or not, as he chose, to go as far as he wanted
in Burma, to set his own objectives and halt when he chose.
Stilwell, convinced by now that nothing further could be gained
by arguing or pleading in Delhi and Chungking, decided that he
was fighting the Burma campaign alone, and he flew to northern
Burma. There in January 1944 he launched the epic aoo-mile
jungle campaign that was to end at Myitkyina.
That campaign was as primitive and terrifying a war as any
in the world. No quarter was given by the enemy, by the jungle,
or by disease. Chinese soldiers, Americans of Merrill's Marauders,
Kachin scouts, British troopers, killed Japanese and were killed
by them for five months in the rain and heat of the swamps.
Stilwell, dressed in dirty khaki, puffing cigarettes, wearing a
floppy, old-fashioned campaign hat, was almost always within
the sound of gunfire. From late December 1943 to May 1944 he
was in the jungle almost constantly except for a few days of
absence to handle necessary paper work in Delhi or Chungking.
By April when the campaign to everybody's astonishment was
nearing success, Chiang K'ai-shek consented to launch the trans-
Salween offensive to complement the Burma drive.
Some felt that Stilwell's proper position was at a desk in head-
quarters, in the high diplomacy and the intricate administration
of his vast theatre, but Stilwell felt otherwise. There was a war to
be fought in Burma and no one to fight it but himself; no other
man had the faith, will, or energy to drive untried Chinese
divisions through the jungle to victory over Japanese veterans.
Nothing anywhere else in the whole theatre was nearly so pressing,
to him, as proving to the world that the Chinese could fight and
conquer the Japanese nothing so significant to the war effort as
the cracking of the blockade.
In the history of the China war the Burma campaign stands by
itself. This was the only offensive combat victory won by Chinese
troops against the Japanese in eight years of campaigning.
The average GI in China knew little about the struggle in the
stratosphere of Army policy and cared less. He lived on bad food,
in stinking, rat-infested Chinese hostels; he had to fight offbeat,
mud, and disease. No one bothered to explain to him what the
war was about. All he knew was what lay within the routine of
his daily life and he hated it. The United States government was
Fl i
Uncle Chump from over the Hump; Chiang K'ai-shek was
Chancre Jack; Sun Yat-sen was Sunset Sam; all Chinese were
"slope-headed bastards," shortened in general conversation to
the simple term "slopy."
The main port of entry for all Americans into China was
Kunming, capital of Yunnan. Before the war Kunming had been
even more backward than Chungking. Its streets were narrow,
its alleyways filthy; it was one of the national strongholds of the
opium merchants. Almost up to the outbreak of war its prostitutes
were penned in a street chained off at both ends; rich families
bought girl slaves to serve in the household. The province was
ruled by a curious character called Lung Yun, one of the most
devious and shaky supports of the national government. Lung
disliked Chiang K'ai-shek, but his power in the province was so
strong that not until after V-J Day did Chiang dare attack him.
Within two months of victory, however, the Generalissimo moved
against the governor, occupied his capital in a daring coup, and
brought Lung in disgrace to Chungking.
The war had dumped into this medieval cesspool two elements
out of the twentieth century in the shape of the finest refugee
universities in China and the shrewdest banking and commercial
speculators in the land. Both these elements were sheltered by the
governor, the refugee universities because their liberal professors
formed a front of restrained but vociferous opposition to Chiang's
dictatorship, the speculators because their completely un-
scrupulous black-marketeering added daily to the wealth of the
city he ruled. By the time the American invasion of Kunming
began, the prostitutes had been freed from their chained street,
opium-smoking had gone underground, and the city had acquired
a fagade of respectability.
Americans usually arrived at the big airport south of the city.
For two or three years this airport was one of the busiest on the
globe It handled most of the Hump traffic, all Chinese civilian
traffic, the Chinese National Airline's commercial carriers, the
courier and mail services, and the combat missions of the
Fourteenth Air Force. It was a gay place, lying just to the north of
a long blue lake, in the lee of a towering, scar-sided mountain
called Old Baldy. Old Baldy was the first China landmark 90 per
cent of American soldiers saw as they came and the last they
looked back on as they departed. You could lie on the grass beside
the runways and look up in the sky and see at any moment every-
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thing from 0-54*3 and 8-24*3 down to L-5's and L-4*s mixing in
the congested traffic patterns of the upper air. The field was never
silent for a moment from the roar of plane motors except when a
monsoon shut it down completely.
Within a few miles of the airport were scattered fifteen hostels
for American personnel, each with five to ten buildings. Of the
70,000 Americans in China probably half were stationed for a
longer or shorter period in the Kunming hostels. These were run
by the Chinese government, which established a special branch
of supply specifically for the care and feeding of Americans. By
Chinese standards the hostels were models of elegance. They were
warm, they were dry, and the Chinese thought the food was
excellent. The Chinese did their best to feed the Americans what
they thought Americans liked eggs, chicken, pork, vegetables.
To most of the Chinese mess attendants and the Chinese soldiers
who guarded the buildings even the slops of the American tables
were fit for kings. But the average American looked on his
accommodations with a jaundiced eye. Six to eight men, crammed
into one room, slept on double-tiered bunks; helmets, gas masks,
foot lockers, barracks bags, tumbled about in the dust and
confusion of the little cubicles. The Americans were nauseated
by the filth, grease, and general putrefaction of the messes, which,
however, were cleaner than anything the Chinese army had for
itself; almost every American who ate at them came down with
some variety of dysentery or diarrhoea during his stay in China.
In the barracks Americans, yelling and cursing, vented their
wrath on Chinese serving boys, until finally one American head-
quarters solemnly posted a general order: "U.S. personnel will
not beat, kick, or maltreat Chinese personnel under any circum-
stances. Such is not the policy of this headquarters/'
Before the war Kunming had been a resort town. It was 6000
feet high ; the climate was delightfully clear through most of the
year, and the intoxicating sun and sky seemed always to evoke a
gay light-headedness. The American soldiers worked during
daylight hours and saw the city usually after dark. Once or twice
a week, or as often as they could get a pass, enlisted men would
pour into town in search of wine, women, and entertainment,
and Chinese touts and racketeers would pluck them clean.
Restaurants served buffalo steak at $5.00 a head; whisky was
black-marketed at $100 a bottle and up. Fortunate officers made
alliances with English-speaking Chinese college students, with
155
nurses, with Red Cross girls. The enlisted men, all of whom
seemed bent on finding out personally whether it was true what
they said about Chinese women, had to be satisfied with com-
mercialized sex or do without. Venereal disease rates soared.
Entertainment for Americans in Kunming consisted of going to
the movies, which were always old and usually bad, or playing
poker for stakes that sometimes ran into thousands of dollars, or
getting drunk. Some of the air force squadrons could get enough
machinery together to make small distilleries and produce .a bad
potage out of brown sugar, but most of the men stuck to the tried-
and-tested Chinese chin pao juices mao tai, pai kar, yellow wine,
potato alcohol. The army could not spare its precious Hump
tonnage to haul beer, liquor, or normal PX supplies over the
mountains. USO troupes were likewise few and far between;
the big names seldom came to China. When the big names did
come, with a few exceptions like the popular Jinx Falkenburg-
Pat O'Brien troupe, they left a foul taste in the mouth of all who
had to deal with them.
If life was rugged in Kunming, it was worse in the dozens of
outposts that were gradually set down all through the land. The
Y and Z forces split up their men and officers into teams of four
or five who were scattered over all the southern fronts. The men
lived with Chinese regimental, divisional, army headquarters in
the field. Each American team consisted of a radio set, a jeep, a
few enlisted men, one or two officers, and a few cases of de-
hydrated rations; each team had a Chinese interpreter and
usually a Chinese cook. They lived in deserted farmhouses,
temples, paddy fields, jungle hammocks. They trudged through
the dust with the Chinese, crawled over mud-slick mountain
trails, slapped at mosquitoes, learned to eat rice and like it, grew
either to hate or to love one another. Some of these men came to
know the Chinese to whom they were assigned and to cherish a
real affection for them; most of them did not.
The men of the air force lived much better in the field than they
did at Kunming. Chennault believed in delegating responsibility
and giving his deputies free rein. He placed the eastern China
operations in the hands of one of the youngest Americans ever to
be made a general, Clinton (" Casey") Vincent, only twenty-
nine, and he assigned to Vincent, as his deputy, Colonel David
("Tex") Hill, also twenty-nine; to these two he turned over the
offensive. The young men, both accomplished combat pilots,
156
made the forward echelon of the Fourteenth Air Force a name to
conjure with. From their eastern China bases they sank over half
a million tons of Japanese shipping and drove the Japanese out
of the skies of China south of the Yangtze.
The forward echelon had its headquarters in Kweilin, the most
lovable and abandoned city in the Orient. Here, as in Kunming,
a group of Chinese liberals took shelter under war-lord provincial-
ism to needle the Central Government of Chiang K'ai-shek. For
intellectual Americans there was always good conversation; for
Americans of a more earthy sort there were women. Kweilin
swarmed with tarts of every degree, fat, thin, stocky, fragile,
sturdy. The famous prostitutes of Hongkong had fled inland after
the Japanese occupied their home town, and most of them came
to Kweilin to re-establish business ; they were silken-clad girls with
ivory bodies and complete devotion to their art. The town had
two red-light districts ; one was Slit Alley, north of the bridge, off
limit to American personnel because of the VD rate, and the
other was the main street itself, where the girls thronged every
evening, two and three deep, in a symphony of squeals, giggles,
laughter, and general jollity . There was no sense of shame, in the
orthodox sense, anywhere in the fabulous town. The hotels were
full of women waiting for Americans; they liked the Americans
with honest enthusiasm; they learned American slang and
American anatomical terms and spoke all the harsh words in
silver, flutelike tones that robbed them of all dirtiness. The harlots,
of course, were infiltrated through and through with Japanese
agents, and the American counter-intelligence corps were petu-
lantly impotent to stop the leakage of information from the
main combat base of the Fourteenth Air Force to the enemy.
The one abiding sentiment that almost all American enlisted
personnel and most of the officers shared was contempt and
dislike for China. Most Americans were attached to the air corps,
the service of supply, or training units. They saw little of the
Chinese soldier in the field; no more than a few hundred
Americans in China had seen Chinese troops march helplessly
against enemy positions and die on their feet. Few of them knew
or cared how the Chinese peasant lived ; they saw only the Chinese
government, the corrupt officials, the black marketeers. They
believed that all Chinese were corrupt, inefficient, and unreliable.
Americans saw the black market filled with goods that bore U.S.
Army insignia, and they; knew that such goods could be boot-
legged onto the commercial market only from supplies that other
Americans had flown across the Hump at the risk of their lives.
With total lack of discrimination they believed that the people
were as their government. They saw the squalor, filth, and ignor-
ance of the Chinese peasant and peasant soldier; the sight inspired
them not with compassion or pity but with loathing and revulsion.
Americans lived in a wasteland of loneliness and ignorance them-
selves; they were 15,000 miles from home; and they ascribed all
their misery to the Chinese among whom they dwelt.
The GFs and their officers were afloat in a sea of foggy rumours ;
they told each other stories that grew with monstrous exaggeration
at each retelling. They literally believed that the Chinese were
hiding thousands of planes in the hills, though the Chinese air
force had only a few hundred shabby, useless planes laid up for
lack of parts and gasoline. They believed that the Chinese had
stored literally millions of barrels of oil and gasoline in the north
for war against the Communists. They believed in all seriousness
that everything that was given to the Chinese government was
sold by it to commercial speculators for gold. Almost every
American soldier knew a few Chinese whom he liked; most of
them loved Chinese children; they liked to joke with the house-
boys; the officers enjoyed the sincere friendship they found in
cultivated Chinese homes. But each one would exempt the few
Chinese he knew from the circle of his contempt and curse the
rest with unflagging fervour and eloquence. The feeling was bone-
deep and bitter. During the great retreat in 1944, when all the
Fourteenth Air Force bases in East China were falling before the
Japanese drive, one officer was heard to say, "God, I'd just like
to kill one slopy before I get out of here."
The uneducated American attitude was a major tragedy in a
land of many tragedies. No one attempted to explain the war to
the American soldier, to teach him how and why the Chinese
people were as they were. High diplomacy made it impossible
to tell the American soldier that the Chinese people loathed
corruption even more intensely, because it affected them more
bitterly. No one, finally, tried to distinguish between the Chinese
people, who were profoundly good, and the Chinese government,
which was profoundly bad. One evening at the close of the Burma
campaign a number of correspondents were invited to talk to a
group of wounded and sick Americans in an army hospital at
158
Myitkyina. The session lasted almost two hours. When it was
over, one of the wounded men walking out of the back of the hall
said, " You know, that's the first time I ever heard anybody say
a good word about the Chinese. "
CHAPTER II
THE HONAN FAMINE
JLAMINE AND FLOOD are China's sorrow. From time out
of mind Chinese chronicles have recorded these recurrent disasters
with the beating, persistent note of doom. Always in their
chronicles Chinese historians have judged the great dynasties of
the past by their ability to meet and master such tragic emer-
gencies. In the concluding years of the war against Japan such
a famine ravaged the north and tested the government of Chiang
K'ai-shek. The story of the Honan famine rolled into Chungking
like tumbleweed blown by the wind. You clutched at facts, and
they dissolved into fragments of gossip: " I heard from a man who
was there . . ." " I saw in a letter from Loyang . . ." " In Sian they
say that ..." But there was no substance merely that ominous
tone of Chinese conversation that runs before disaster like dark-
ness before a thundercloud. In February 1943 the Ta Kung Poo,
the most independent Chinese paper in Chungking, published
the first real report of the almost unendurable suffering of the
people of Honan under one of the most terrible famines in Chinese
history. The government retaliated by suppressing the Ta Kung
Pao for three days.
The suppression of the Ta Kung Pao acted like a barb on the
foreign press. I decided to go to Honan; Harrison Forman of the
London Times came to the same decision at the same time. Five
days after the plane lifted us from the fog-bound airport of
Chungking we found ourselves, in the terrible cold dawn of North
China, at the stump of the railway line that leads from Sian to
Honan. Dozens of little food shops clustered about the end of the
line, each radiating the fragrance of frying food, each made
conspicuous in the dark by the blue flames that spat fitfully into
the night from the box bellows of the charcoal fire.
Dawn came slowly, like the gradual illumination of a stage in
the darkness. Peasants, sprawled about the station for acres,
'59
were waiting for the next train to take them away to the west
and food. Most of them had come on trains that sneaked by the
Japanese guns in the dark. Flatcars, boxcars, old coaches, were
stuffed with people; tight huddles braced themselves on the roofs.
It was freezing cold, and as the trains hurtled through the danger
zone, the fingers of those who were clinging to the car roofs
became numb; the weak fell under the steel wheels of the trains,
and as we retraced their route later in the day, we saw their
torn and bleeding bodies lying by the roadbed. But most of the
peasants were coming under their own power, by foot, by cart,
by wheelbarrow. This station was the great exit to the province,
a narrow spout between the Japanese to the north and the
mountains to the south, and here the refugees clustered till they
could move on to relief facilities in the west.
A great stink suffusfcd the mob. Dry sweat, urine, common
human filth, scented the morning. The peasants shivered in
pulsing reaction to the cold, and their grey and blue rags fluttered
and quivered in the wind. Here and there the smeared red rem-
nant of a bridal costume on a wrinkled woman broke the
monotony of colour; sometimes a squawling baby drew attention
to its filthy scarlet wrapping. Steaming breath rose in vaporous
clouds; noses trickled water; eyes were dark wounds in frigid
faces. Feet were swathed in dirty rags, and heads covered with
discoloured, filthy towels.
For the next 50 miles there was no regular rail service. The
tracks were intact across this stretch, and handcars could speed
across by day, but enemy guns commanded the route. To the
north, Japanese-held mountains marked out the northern bank
of the Yellow River; to the south, the high, jagged peaks of the
famous Flower Mountains of southern Shensi dug into the sky.
The gap between, flat as a threshing floor, with the railway
running through it, was some 30 or 40 miles east to west, and the
grey, sunless canopy of clouds made it unspeakably barren.
Across the flat plain were strung beads of bunched figures. The
endless procession rose beyond the horizon, wound across the
paths between the fields, passed silently into the greyness behind.
A Chinese crowd is usually a chattering carnival, as mobile as
quicksilver and rippling with laughter and curses. But grief and
frost had congealed these men to a soundless hush. They lifted
one foot after another, mechanically and without thought, and
like animals they plodded on into the distance. In far-distant
1 60
times primitive men may have migrated thus from prehistoric
lands of cold and hunger to lands of food and warmth.
The little knots of people who studded the paths repeated the
same patterns. A dozen times an hour some father pushed a wheel-
barrow past, the mother hauling at it in front with a rope, the
baby on the padding sometimes silent, sometimes crying; or the
woman of the family sat sidesaddle on her mule with her baby in
her arms, like an unhappy madonna, while the father belaboured
the rear of the mule with a staff. Old women hobbled along on
bound feet, stumbled and fell; no one picked them up. Other
old women rode pickaback on the strong shoulders of their sons,
staring through coal-black eyes at the hostile sky. Young men,
walking alone, strode at quicker pace, with all their possessions
in a kerchief over their shoulder. Small mounds of rags by the
roadside marked where the weak had collapsed ; sometimes a few
members of a family stood staring at a body in silent perplexity.
The children leaned on their staffs like old men; some carried
bundles as large as themselves ; others were dream-walkers whose
unseeing eyes were a thousand years old with suffering. Behind
them all, from the land of famine a cold wind blew, sending the
dust chasing them over the yellow plain. The march had been
going on for weeks; it was to continue for weeks more.
Five hours brought us to the point where regular rail traffic
began again. The railway administration had made ready a
private car to take us to Loyang, the provincial capital, and by
midmorning we were there. The bishop of the Loyang Catholic
mission was a great-hearted American, Thomas Megan of Eldora,
Iowa, a man reported to know more about the famine than any-
one else in the north. Megan accepted us kindly and gave us
warm food, and when we rode forth two days later, he accom-
panied us. Our objective was the town of Chengchow, a three
days' journey one by truck, then two by horse.
Each large town along the way had at least one restaurant open
for those whose purses were still full. Once we ordered a meal in
such a restaurant, but for us the spicy food was tasteless. Hungry
people, standing about the open kitchen, inhaled the smell with
shuddering greed; their eyes traced each steaming morsel from
bowl to lips and back. When we walked down the street, children
followed crying, "K'o lien, k'o lien (mercy, mercy). " If we pulled
peanuts or dried dates from our pockets, tiny ragamuffins
whipped by to snatch them from our fingers. The tear-stained
161
faces, smudgy and forlorn in the cold, shamed us. Chinese children
are beautiful in health; their hair glows then with the gloss of
fine natural oil, and their almond eyes sparkle. But these shrunken
scarecrows had pus-filled slits where eyes should be; malnutrition
had made their hair dry and brittle; hunger had bloated their
bellies; weather had chapped their skins. Their voices had
withered into a thin whine that called only for food.
The smaller villages were even worse than the market towns.
The silence was frightening. People fled the impersonal cruelty
of hunger as if a barbarian army were upon them. The villages
echoed with emptiness; streets were deserted, compost piles
untended waiting for spring, doors and windows boarded up.
The abandoned houses amplified the slightest sound. A baby
crying in a hidden room in a village sounded louder than the
pounding of our horses' hooves. Two lone women quarrelled in
a haunted street, and their shrieking rang louder than the hurly-
burly of a village fair.
There were corpses on the road. A girl no more than seventeen,
slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death;
her eyes were open, and the rain fell on them. People chipped at
bark, pounded it by the roadside for food ; vendors sold leaves at
a dollar a bundle. A dog digging at a mound was exposing a
human body. Ghostlike men were skimming the stagnant pools
to eat the green slime of the waters. We whipped our horses to
the quickest possible pace in the effort to make Chengchow by
evening of the third day. As dusk closed, snow began to fall,
light and powdery. Once our horses stumbled in a field and
sheered off violently from two people lying side by side in the
night, sobbing aloud in their desolation. By the time we entered
the city, the snow was heavy enough to muffle the thudding of our
horses' hooves.
When we awoke in the morning, the city was a white sepulchre
peopled with grey ghosts. Death ruled Chengchow, for the famine
centred there. Before the war it had held 120,000 people; now
it had less than 40,000. The city had been bombed, shelled, and
occupied by the Japanese, so that it had the half-destroyed air
of all battlefront cities. Rubble was stacked along the gutters, and
the great buildings, roofless, were open to the sky. Over the rubble
and ruins the snow spread a mantle that deadened every sound.
We stood at the head of the main street, looked down the deserted
way for all its length and saw nothing. Occasionally someone in
162
fluttering, wind-blown rags would totter out of a doorway. Those
who noticed us clustered round ; spreading their hands in suppli-
cation, they cried " K'o lien^ k'o lien" till our ears rang with it.
The quick and the dead confused us. Down a side street a man
trundled a wheelbarrow with a figure lying passively across it.
The inert form was dressed in blue rags, the naked feet covered
with goose-pimples; it stirred and quivered and seemed alive,
but the bobbing of the head only reflected the roughness of the
road. Other people were lying in the gutters ; we shook one or two
to make sure they were dead, and when one man moved slightly,
we thrust a large bill into his hand. His numb fingers closed about
the money, but it was only a reflex action; they unbent slowly,
and the bill trembled in his open palm. Another moaned as he
lay, and we shook him to try to make him get up. Then we turned
to a woman in rags who was clutching a baby; we begged her to
help us move the man to the refugee compound, and we gave her
a bill to strengthen our plea. As she bent, the baby fell from her
arms into the snow and cried pitifully. We saw them off, all three,
towards the compound, and the Catholic father who was escort-
ing us said, "At least let them die like human beings."
We heard the story of the people from the Protestant mis-
sionaries and the Catholic fathers who jointly controlled Ameri-
can relief moneys. The strong had fled earlier; all who were left
now were the old, the weak, and the few hardy characters who
were staying to guard the spring wheat that would soon be in
full growth. The people were slicing bark from elm trees, grinding
it to eat as food. Some were tearing up the roots of the new wheat;
in other villages people were living on pounded peanut husks or
refuse. Refugees on the road had been seen madly cramming
soil into their mouths to fill their bellies, and the missionary
hospitals were stuffed with people suffering from terrible intes-
tinal obstructions due to the filth they were eating.
Letters of the Protestant missionaries recorded the early stages
of the crisis,* when the trek started in the fall. Mobs of hungry
peasants, their women and children with them, had forced their
way into wealthy homes and stripped them of anything that could
be carried off. They had rushed into irrigated grain fields to
seize the standing crops. In some cases hunger had burned out
the most basic human emotions; two maddened parents had tied
six children to trees so they could not follow them as they left
in search of food. When a group of mother, baby, and two older
163
children became tired from the long hunt for food, the mother,
sitting down to nurse the infant, sent the older children on to look
for food at the next village; when they returned, the baby was
still sucking at the breast of the dead mother. In a fit of frenzy
the parents of two little children had murdered them rather than
hear them beg for something to eat. Some families sold all they
had for one last big meal, then committed suicide. Armed assaults
and robberies were epidemic all through the countryside. The
missionaries did what they could to pick up waifs along the road,
but they had to do it by stealth, for a report that the missionaries
were caring for starving children would have overwhelmed them
at once with orphans abandoned on their doorsteps.
By spring, when we arrived, the more vigorous, disturbing
elements had fled to the west, where there was food. Those who
remained were wasting in hopelessness with a minimum of
violence. The missionaries now reported something worse
cannibalism. A doctor told us of a woman caught boiling her
baby; she was not molested, because she insisted that the child
had died before she started to cook it. Another woman had been
caught cutting off the legs of her dead husband for meat; this,
too, was justified on the ground that the man was already dead.
In the mountain districts there were uglier tales of refugees
caught on lonely roads and killed for their flesh. How much of
this was just gruesome legend and how much truth we could not
judge. But we heard the same tales too frequently, in too widely
scattered places, to ignore the fact that in Honan human beings
were eating their own kind.
Honan is a fertile province. Before the war, it supported some
30,000,000 people, who farmed the rich loess soil exhaustively
and pressed upon it to the Malthusian limit. The cash crop was
spring wheat, which the peasants sowed in late autumn and har-
vested in mid-May; their secondary crops were millet and corn,
which were sown immediately after the wheat harvest and
gathered in by fall. In 1940 and '41 the crops had been poor, and
the normal carry-over disappeared; in 1942 the spring wheat
failed for lack of rain. The government took its usual share of the
spring wheat in taxes; in that season of shortage it meant almost
the whole crop. Blithely the provincial authorities assured them-
selves that rain would certainly fall and give the peasants enough
millet and corn to fill thcijr hungry bellies. But no rain fell. All
164
through the summer of '42 the skies were closed and the grain
withered on the stalk; by autumn the province was destitute.
The West, with a vast system of modern communications and
the economy of the world to draw on, has forgotten for decades
what famine means. But in the Orient, where hundreds of millions
still rely on whatever can be grown within a day's walk of their
birthplace for their sustenance, famine is still one of the recurring
threats to life. There are only two ways to deal with famine, both
of them simple, but both requiring major decision and swift execu-
tion. One is to move grain into the stricken areas in bulk and as
swiftly as possible; the other is to move people out of the stricken
areas in bulk and as swiftly as possible. No great wisdom is re-
quired to foresee a famine; if there is no rain, there will be no
crop, and if no crop grows, people will die.
The Chinese government failed to foresee the famine; when it
came, it failed to act until too late. As early as October, reports
of the situation were arriving in Chungking. In November two
government inspectors visited Honan, travelled the main motor
roads, and returned to say that the crisis was desperate and some-
thing must be done immediately. The Central Government
dismissed the matter by appropriating $200,000,000 paper
money for famine relief and sending a mandate to provincial
authorities to remit taxes. The banks in Chungking loaded the
bales of paper currency on trucks and sent a convoy northward
bearing paper, not food, to the stricken. It would indeed have
been hopeless to try to move heavy tonnages of grain from central
China over the broken, mountainous communications to northern
China and Honan. Yet just across the provincial border from
Honan was the province of Shensi, whose grain stores were more
than ample. A vigorous government would have ordered grain
from Shensi into neighbouring Honan immediately in order to
avert disaster. But cracking down on Shensi in favour of Honan
would have upset the delicate balance of power the government
found so essential to its functioning. Grain might also have been
moved to Honan from Hupeh, but the war area commander in
Hupeh would not permit it.
The relief money sent to Honan arrived gradually. By the time
we got there in March only $80,000,000 out of the $200,000,000
appropriated had reached the provincial government. Even this
money was badly managed. It was left to lie in provincial bank
accounts, drawing interest, while government officials debated
165
and bickered as to how it might best be used. In some places,
when money was distributed to starving farmsteads, the amount
of current taxes the peasants owed was deducted by local authori-
ties from the sums they received; even the national banks took
a cut of the relief funds as profit. The Central Government had
sent relief money in denominations of $ i oo Chinese currency
small enough, since a pound of wheat was selling at $16.00 to
$18.00 But the local hoarders refused to sell their grain for notes
of large denomination; to buy grain the peasants had to change
their money for five- and ten-dollar bills. And this they had to do
through the national banks, which discounted their own cur-
rency by 1 7 per cent in changing large bills for small bills. What
the people of Hqnan wanted was food. Up to March the govern-
ment had provided some 10,000 sacks of rice and 20,000 sacks of
mixed grain. This averaged almost a pound apiece for 10,000,000
people who had been starving since autumn.
Stupidity and inefficiency marked the relief effort. But the
grisly tragedy was compounded even further by the actions of
the constituted local authorities. The peasants, as we saw them,
were dying. They were dying on the roads, in the mountains,
by the railway stations, in their mud huts, in the fields. And as
they died, the government continued to wring from them the
last possible ounce of tax. The money tax the peasant had to pay
on his land was a trivial matter; the basic tax exacted from him
was the food tax, a percentage of all the grain he raised, and
despite the fine-sounding resolution of remittance in Chung-
king, the tax was being extorted from him by every device the
army and provincial authorities could dream up. The govern-
ment in county after county was demanding of the peasant more
actual poundage of grain than he had raised on his acres. No
excuses were allowed; peasants who were eating elm bark and
dried leaves had to haul their last sack of seed grain to the tax
collector's office. Peasants who were so weak they could barely
walk had to collect fodder for the army's horses, fodder that was
more nourishing than the filth they were cramming into their
own mouths. Peasants who could not pay were forced to the wall ;
they sold their cattle, their furniture, and even their land to
raise money to buy grain to meet the tax quotas. One of the most
macabre touches of all was the flurry of land speculation. Mer-
chants from Sian and Chengchow, small government officials,
army officers, and rich landlords who still had food were engaged
166
in purchasing the peasants' ancejstral acres at criminally low
figures. Concentration and dispossession were proceeding hand
in hand, in direct proportion to the intensity of hunger.
Government officials did not live lavishly by our standards,
but their tables steamed with hot wheat buns and fresh meat.
The lowliest party machine hack of the Kuomintang received
out of the tax quotas an average of 4 pounds of wheat a day.
After we had returned to tell the story in Chungking, all this was
denied; the wise men told us how credulous foreigners in China
usually were, and even the governor of the province of Honan
said we were exaggerating as we visited him in his comfortable
office. "Why," said he, "only the wealthy had to pay in full.
From the poor we collected no more than the land produced."
The actual physical brutality and indignity with which the tax
was collected was sickening, but the corruption that went hand
in hand with its collection was worse. The army officers and
local officials who collected the grain regarded their right to tax
as a supplement to their salary, a franchise to loot. Each month,
after the allotments had been made to the functionaries, the sur-
plus grain would be divided up by senior officers and placed on
the market for sale for their private pockets. Such bootleg tax
grain, indeed, was the chief source of the food that reached mar-
ket, and the racketeers who controlled it ran the price up to the
sky. Even American relief authorities, operating with American
money, were forced to beg army officers for the right to buy their
private hoards for distribution back to the very peasantry from
whom the grain had been extorted. The officers who sold it made
no concessions for humanity's sake ; at the rate of exchange then
current and with the famine prices in Honan, relief money that
could buy 60 bushels of wheat in America could buy only one
bushel of wheat in China.
These facts were gathered not from print but from the lips of
the peasants. We had tried to talk to some of the people, and one
evening when we were staying at an army headquarters, a group
of middle-aged men came to call, saying that they represented
the community. They had drawn up a bill of particulars and a
report that they wanted us to take to Chungking. They presented
us with two copies. The report said that of the 150,000 people
in the county 110,000 had absolutely nothing to eat; about 700
were dying daily, and another 700 were taking to the road. The
government had sent in 10,000 pounds of bran for the relief of the
167
starving since the famine began. We chatted with the leader of
the group. Did he own land? Yes, twenty mou. (i mou is one-sixth
of an acre.) How much had he harvested? Fifteen pounds of
grain per mou. What had the tax been? Thirteen pounds per mou.
The commanding general, a number of officers, and some
soldiers were listening attentively. The general, who suddenly
became furious, called the man aside; we could hear him berat-
ing the peasant in a loud whisper. The peasant turned back to us
and said he had made a mistake; the tax, after all, had been only
5 pounds per mou. The general demanded that we hand back
the written reports the peasants had given us ; we gave one copy
back, but the general insisted that both must be returned. We
looked around us, and in the dim light we could see the old man
trembling. We knew that after we left, all our sins would be
visited on him, and we were frightened ourselves; we handed
in the reports.
Thereafter, as much as possible, we tried to talk to the people
without any officials present. Always, everywhere, the same plea
was repeated in the same words: Stop the taxes; we can suffer
the famine, but we cannot bear the taxes; we can live on bark
and peanut shells, if they will only stop the taxes. We spoke to a
district officer; he had been ordered to produce 400,000 pounds
of grain as his tax quota for the year. But the total harvest in his
district had come to only 350,000 pounds. Where was he to get
the rest? We found a man in a lonesome village eating a horrid
concoction of buckwheat chaff, leaves, and elm bark. He had
raised 500 pounds of wheat on his own land last year; the govern-
ment had taken it all but decided it was insufficient, so he had
sold his ox and his ass to make up the deficit.
Journeying through the land by horseback for two weeks, we
talked each day with peasants and small officials. The snow that
fell during our journey soaked the fields, and the spring wheat of
the next season stood tall and green. It mocked the peasants
with promise of food two months in the future. "It is fine, yes,"
said an old man, "but who knows whether we will be alive to
eat it?"
I still have the menu of the banquet that was served by the
government officials of Chengchow the night before our depar-
ture. They served us sliced lotus, peppered chicken, beef, and
water chestnut. We had spring rolls, hot wheat buns, rice, bean
curd, and fish. We had two soups and three cakes with sugar
168
frosting. It was one of the finest and most sickening banquets I
ever ate.
We made our estimates by rough rule of thumb on the basis of
our interviews and the figures we thought most reliable. Of the
30,000,000 people of Honan, probably two or three million had
fled the province, and another two or three million had died of
hunger and disease. It was the greatest disaster of the war in
China, one of the greatest famines in the world. Bitter of heart,
we returned to Chungking. The bland equanimity of the capital
was unruffled ; officially the taxes had been remitted, despite the
testimony of the peasants to the contrary. The dead bodies were
lies; the dogs digging cadavers from the loess were figments of
our imagination. We knew that there was a fury, as cold and
relentless as death itself, in the bosom of the peasants of Honan,
that their loyalty had been hollowed to nothingness by the
extortion of their government. But no one in Chungking would
believe that for another year until the Japanese wrote the historic
finish to the entire episode.
In the spring of 1944 the Japanese decided to clean out the
province of Honan in preparation for their even greater push in
the south. The nominal defender of the Chinese war area in
Honan was a gimlet-eyed character called Chiang Ting-wen.
Chiang had been commander of Honan for several years. One
of his first measures on assuming command was an attempt to
strengthen Loyang, his walled capital, by digging a moat about
it; it was his idea of good strategy. He ako arrested every Com-
munist or suspected Communist he could find in the area. His
greatest renown in the province was for his ability to terrify the
civilian authorities of the districts his troops occupied. He had
browbeaten the governor of Honan into cowering co-operation
in the programme that stripped the peasants of their last reserves
of grain. The real commander of the Honan area was Chiang
Ting-wen's nominal deputy, General Tang En-po. Tang was far
superior to his chief in troops and in influence. A leader in the
Whampoa clique, he was a favourite of the Generalissimo's. He
was a relatively pleasant man, gracious, good-humoured, ener-
getic, and had done his best to mitigate the curse of the famine
without upsetting the army system in which he was enmeshed.
But since he was the outstanding power in Honan, the peasants
and civilians accepted him rather than Chiang Ting-wen as the
169
true author of their ills, and they mouthed deep and bitter
curses. "Honan has two sorrows," they quipped, "the Yellow
River and Tang En-po." Between them Tang and Chiang
Ting-wen commanded half a million men.
The Japanese used an estimated 60,000 men in their drive.
They struck in mid-April and cut through the Chinese lines the
way a butcher knife cuts through butter. Tang En-po was away
from his field headquarters at the time of attack; he never did
get back to direct the campaign. Japanese units of 500 men seized
passes held by thousands of Chinese one headquarters staff was
surprised by the enemy while it was playing basketball in the sun.
The troops who had ravaged the peasants in the year of famine
were themselves sick and lacking in morale after years of inaction;
they were ill-trained, their guns faulty, their ammunition
short. Under attack they broke and ran. The Chinese command
dissolved; it could not control the situation. The Chinese Twelfth
and Thirteenth Armies turned and fought one another. At
Loyang, the capital of the war area, panic seized the staff. Some
700 or 800 military trucks, in varying stages of decay, were at the
disposal of the army in Honan. About a hundred were used for
rushing reinforcements to shore up the crumbling front; the rest
were used by officers to evacuate private property. These officers,
with their wives and children and relatives, had all lived off the
land; now their baggage, household furniture, and fortunes were
loaded on military trucks and rushed to the safety of Sian in the
rear. To supplement the supply system both for the front and for
its own need, the army began to seize the peasants' oxen. Honan
is wheat country, and the peasants' chief capital is the plough
ox. The seizure of oxen for military ox trains was unbearable.
The peasants had waited long for this moment. They had
suffered through too many months of famine and merciless
military extortion. Now they turned, arming themselves with
birdguns, knives, and pitchforks. They began by disarming indi-
vidual soldiers and ended by disarming entire companies. It was
estimated that 50,000 Chinese soldiers were disarmed by their
own countrymen during the few weeks of the campaign. It would
have been miraculous if the Chinese armies had held for three
months; with the countryside in a state of armed rebellion there
was no hope at all for resistance. Within three weeks the Japanese
had seized all their objectives; the railway to the south lay in
their hands, and a Chinese army of 300,000 men had ceased to exist.
170
CHAPTER I 2
DISASTER IN THE EAST
JNo DEVICE OF censorship could keep news of the Honan
catastrophe from seeping through to Chungking it was the
first time since the outbreak of the war that the Chinese people
had turned and fought against their own colours. Hundreds of
thousands of traitors at the front had gone over to the enemy out
of exhaustion and hunger, and millions of Chinese in occupied
areas were serving the Japanese either actively or passively; but
never before had the unorganized peasants turned in cold blood
against their national troops while they were fighting the enemy.
Chungking seethed with the news. T. V. Soong, unheeded and
unsought, sat in his suburban mansion in bitterness and chanted
Cassandra-like prophecies of doom; Sun Fo denounced the entire
regime; the Communists could scarcely conceal their contempt
of the government. Even Chiang K'ai-shek, insulated within his
court of flattery, became infected with a sense of danger. But
before Chungking had had time to digest the lessons of humilia-
tion in Honan, the Japanese were on the move again, in their
greatest campaign in six years.
The coastline of East China curves like a semicircle whose
diameter is the Yangtze River and whose centre is the city of
Hankow. From Hankow a railway line, pointing like an arrow
almost due south, cuts the flatlands and the coast off from the
highlands and Chungking. The Japanese meant to drive down
this rail line and hack China in two. Now, with the perspective
of time, we can see the Japanese drive as a last futile effort to
ward off doom. But in 1 944 years of bitter fighting seemed to
stretch ahead. An effort so huge and massive seemed to indicate
untapped wells of strength in the Japanese Empire; the campaign
seemed an effort to frustrate all Allied strategy. The Japanese
meant to gain numerous objectives by their summer drive.
First, they intended to wipe out American air power on the
continent. The forward bases of the Fourteenth Air Force had
been the nesting place of American fighters and bombers that
were wrecking Japan's sea commerce. Their sea sweeps, by the
end of the campaign, had destroyed or damaged a million tons
of enemy shipping a fifth of Japan's prewar merchant marine.
These bases were strung out along the railway lines and highways
that Japan meant to conquer. By destroying the immediate
threat of the Fourteenth Air Force, the Japanese would also be
eliminating the greater long-range menace of the B-ag's. The
early 6-29 strikes from deep in West China had given the
Japanese a foretaste of disaster. In the east the Americans were
planning to lengthen the runways of the forward bases of the
Fourteenth to handle the huge Superfortresses. The 29*5 would
be able to strike even deeper into Japan from the enlarged bases
and to ravage its heartland. The Japanese were unaware that at
the moment they were planning their campaign against the East
China bases, American planners were tooling up for the assault
on Saipan, to place the bombers even closer to Honshu.
Second, the Japanese sought to frustrate American ground
strategy. Stilwell had been driving with great success towards the
ending of the blockade in Burma. He meant to move from central
China to the coast to meet the American Navy sometime in 1945
and cut the Japanese Empire in two. By driving a transcontinental
corridor down the railway line from north to south the Japanese
hoped to seal the mountainous west, which Stilwell was approach-
ing, from contact with the coast where Nimitz wished to land.
Third, success in the drive would be of tremendous propa-
ganda value. At least on the map the Japanese would then have
overland communications from Manchuria in the north all the
way down the centre of China to Indo-China and direct contact
with Singapore and the South Seas. With all the data available
now it is impossible to think that the Japanese staff could have
been so stupid as to think of the drive as an opening to the South
Seas; Japan lacked the rolling stock or automobiles to utilize
such a route. In the year that followed, Japan got not a ton of
rubber, oil, or tin over the new corridor to feed her starving
industry, but in 1944 Japanese propagandists were trumpeting
loud and long about their impregnable corridor to the south.
The last consideration of the Japanese was more hope than
sound expectation. This was to destroy Chinese power so
thoroughly in the east as to reduce Chiang's armies to permanent
impotence. In this objective they came perilously close to success.
Within a fortnight of the quick termination of the Honan
campaign the Japanese were ready to begin the soo-mile drive
172
from Hankow down the railway and valley of the Hsiang River
to Kweilin and Liuchow, their main targets. The Japanese were
striking at the heart of American interests on the mainland, but
there was nothing America could do to protect their bases save
watch the campaign and hope for a miracle.
The defence of East China rested in the hands of General
Hsueh Yueh, who delighted in the name of Tiger of Changsha.
Changsha, his capital, was the lid to the valley of the Hsiang
River, which stretched far to the south. It was the key to the
railway, to the richest rice-producing areas in China, and to the
defence of the valleys that were studded with American airfields.
Hsueh was a rugged fighter; he liked the Americans; he admired
the Fourteenth Air Force and took great pride in defending it.
His reputation as a successful leader rested on three previous
campaigns, in each of which he had frustrated a Japanese attack
on Changsha. This reputation, which meant more to the Chinese
and Americans than it did to the Japanese, did not survive the
events of 1944.
Hsueh was a peppery little Cantonese, and his host of Can-
tonese friends were detested by the people of Hunan province,
which he governed. He was said to have eleven armies, possibly
200,000 men, under his direct control. To the east, in another
war area, Yu Han-mou, another Cantonese general, had four
armies, totalling possibly 100,000 men, while south of Hsueh, on
the borders of Indo-China, was yet another Cantonese, General
Chang Fa-kwei, with perhaps 50,000 men. Hsueh disliked and
distrusted the Central Government, and the feeling was recipro-
cated. Though in earlier decades he had stood in open opposition
to Chiang K'ai-shek, he had subordinated himself to the national
cause against the Japanese in 1937 and fought with valiant cour-
age. By spring of 1944, however, the six-year stalemate had eaten
away his earlier wholehearted devotion. He had the responsi-
bility for defending the American bases, but he received almost
nothing from the cornucopia of American supplies about which
he read in the papers. He felt neglected and scorned, and his
attitude had communicated itself to the other Cantonese generals
to his south and east.
At the end of May 1944 the Japanese wheeled out of their
staging areas along the Yangtze, crossed the Milo River, and
struck south towards Changsha. They had been preparing the
move for weeks. The scouts of the Fourteenth Air Force reported
EAST CHINA
CAMPAIGN
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CHAN66HA-AIW MiAK9MAY'44
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CANTON
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NOV. '44
. JAP-HELD TIRPITORV
AT START OF CAMPAIGN
that though the highways north of the lines were barren of all
moving things by day, at night the yellow headlights of Japanese
trucks glowed for miles on end; mercilessly the fighters and bom-
bers of the forward echelon, striking at Japanese concentrations,
hit at rivers, fords, and staging points. Pursuit pilots flew them-
selves to exhaustion with three or four missions a day; they re-
turned to base only to snatch coffee and cold sandwiches, and
then flew back to hit again and again at an enemy who moved
only by night and melted into the countryside by day.
Between Hsueh and the Japanese lay the most ravaged of all
the belts of no-man's-land in all the country. The Japanese had
come in pronged columns on each previous attempt for Changsha;
each time Hsueh had pulled his frontal units out of position,
disposed them on the flanks of the Japanese columns, cut in from
behind, and forced them to retreat. Once, in 1941, the Japanese
had penetrated and sacked Changsha, but they had been forced
out and driven back to their original positions. This time the
Japanese came in greater strength and determination than ever
before. Hsueh defended the city as he always had, with the same
tactics and same units, but his units were three years older, their
weapons three years more worn, the soldiers three years hungrier
than when they had last won glory.
For the defence of Changsha, Hsueh Yueh concentrated almost
all the artillery of his war area a total of fifty-odd decrepit guns
and posted them on a dominant peak called Yoloshan. The
famous Fourth Army, whose glorious revolutionary tradition had
won it the nickname of Iron Army, was in the city; it had only
12,000 men to oppose a Japanese assault force estimated at
24,000. These dispositions completed, Hsueh Yueh withdrew his
headquarters about a hundred miles south. He hoped to suck
the Japanese into Changsha, hammer them with his guns from
Yoloshan when they entered the city, fold his flanks about them
from the rear, and make them fall back.
The bickering and internal contention that marked every tier
of command in the Chinese army showed up at once. The artil-
lery commander on Yoloshan demanded that the Fourth Army
dispatch several regiments to support the unprotected artillery;
the Fourth Army commander refused. The chief of staff of the
\var area intervened and ordered the Fourth Army to supply
infantry to the artillery; the commander of the Fourth still
refused without personal orders from Hsueh Yueh, and Hsueh
could not be reached by telephone. The Japanese moved in; they
pinched off the artillery, which had no infantry support, and then
wiped out the infantry of the Fourth Army, which had no artillery
support. Four thousand men of the Fourth Army escaped alive ; the
commander, having used his army's trucks to evacuate personal
goods and chattels from danger and having escaped as the city fell,
was arrested and shot on orders of Chiang K'ai-shek.
The campaign then dissolved in chaos. The people did not rise
against the army as they had in Honan, but there were enough
loose ends in the politics of the province to make it a happy land
for Japanese secret agents. Bands of three or four hundred Chinese
in Japanese service filtered through the hills in peasant clothes to
spy out dispositions, raid small villages, and set fires. Sometimes
they mixed individually in the throng of refugees; they would
ferret out a village's .secrets and defences, signal its condition by
lanterns in the night, set fires, and then wait until their associates
could swoop down from the hills. Japanese agents were armed
with grenades and pistols; their orders were to kill any Chinese
officer they could locate and all Americans. The troops fighting
in Hunan were largely Szechwanese or Cantonese, and their
dialects were different from the natives'; they did their best to
shoot all civilians who could not identify themselves, but as they
grew trigger-happy and nervous, they began to shoot suspects at
random. The countryside was in motion; hundreds of thousands
were fleeing. Refugees and fifth columnists could not be dis-
tinguished, and the soldiers operated in a quicksand.
Chungking now intervened, and for the next two months there
was no real command anywhere in the field. Ho Ying-ch'in's
general staff, Hsueh Yueh, Chang Fa-kwei, and Pai Chung-hsi,
all had conflicting ideas. The field commanders distrusted
Chungking; Chungking distrusted the field command. As the
troops fell back through the great valley, Hsueh Yueh wished to
concentrate two armies where the valley narrows and establish
a strong line at a point called Chuting. Chungking disapproved;
the two compromised, and one army was directed farther south,
the other left to hold. The army left behind had neither strength
to resist nor time to flee; it was decimated. For weeks the
Generalissimo balanced his dislike and distrust of the Cantonese
commander against the urgent national need for bolstering the
line; when he finally decided to send one army on foot from the
Communist blockade in the north to Hsueh in the south, it was
176
too late. The Generalissimo wanted Hsueh to retreat west, to the
mountainous rim of Szechwan and Kweichow. This would have
cut Hsueh off from his independent control of the rice supply of
Hunan and thrown him back completely on the supply system of
the Central Government. Hsueh claimed he did not want to
cross the Hsiang River from east to west with insufficient boats
under enemy fire; he therefore fell back eastward to southern
Hunan and thus widened the gap between the main Chinese
forces in the west and his own base. The Japanese drove on.
In June, Yu Han-mou was ordered to send the Sixty-second
Army to the relief of Hsueh. It moved up the railway to Heng-
yang, arriving in mid-June. Hsueh wanted to bracket it with his
own Tenth Army and make a strong point of Hengyang, the
junction where the railway divides to Canton and Kweilin. Again
Chungking and Hsueh could not see eye to eye; Chungking
decreed that the Tenth Army should hold alone at Hengyang
and that the Sixty-second should fall back to the southwest.
It was as if Eisenhower in fighting the Battle of the Bulge had
had to argue with Marshall over a period of weeks for each move
he wanted to make in the field. Indecision prevailed in Chung-
king. While the staff argued over strategy and bickered with
Hsueh Yueh, Chiang K'ai-shek pondered over American de-
mands for reform and proclaimed his fidelity to Madame
Chiang K'ai-shek at his famous garden party. By the end of June,
Hengyang, a grey, uninspiring rice town in southern Hunan, was
completely surrounded and the Tenth Army trapped. The heat
of full summer hung over Hunan; malaria and dysentery were
in their high season as the green fields shimmered with heat
waves. The Fourteenth Air Force was ripping into the supply
lines of the Japanese with all the resources at its disposal; it
consumed its pilots, its planes, its ground crews; its officers were
haggard, its men hollow-eyed.
Panic had struck all eastern China. The gay tarts of Kweilin
were packing to leave; the night clubs hung signs in their win-
dows: "So long, buddies, and good luck," said the one at the
Ledo, signed "Anne and Yvonne". Refugees poured down the
railway line and stuffed themselves into cars with their babies,
bedrolls, and luggage. They clung to train roofs, clustered on the
cowcatchers, spread boards over brakerods and slept on them.
American officers and men mingled in the trek. One American
officer, assisting at the birth of a Chinese baby on the roof of a
Go x 77
refugee train as the rain beat down, fed the mother and child
crushed sulfanilimide until they were out of danger.
Miraculously, at Hengyang, the Tenth Army held. It was cor-
nered, its position hopeless, but it fought with a desperate courage
that harked back to the days of Shanghai. Chungking's mercurial
mood soared again; the military spokesman claimed the Japanese
had been stopped ; the press revelled in the glorious stand of the
15,000 embattled men of the Tenth Army. The Chinese staff
interpreted the lull in the campaign as the end of Japanese ambi-
tion. A huge counter-offensive was announced to drive the
Japanese back to their starting line. The Sixty-second Army was
ordered back into battle at Hengyang,' where Hsueh Yueh had
originally wanted it. This was the moment for which Chungking
had been waiting, the final summoning of energies. It made good
reading in the press : liamlets were recaptured each day; generals
declared that contact with the besieged garrison had already been
made. In the field, far from Chungking, the counterattack had
a different countenance. The high command had millions of
troops on its books, but less than a hundred thousand were within
range of action. Of these one army, the Sixty-second, moved
towards assault position; it pushed one of its divisions to the point
where the enemy held ; the divisional commander sent forth two
of his three regiments and these constituted the Chinese drive.
I marched up with the Sixty-second Army as it moved on the
Japanese siege ring. With me was Graham Barrow of Reuters.
The distance from the railhead to the front was a matter of
30 miles. It was dawn when we fell into the troop column, but
the cloudless skies were already scorching. As far as we could see
ahead into the hills and beyond were marching men. They
crawled on foot over every footpath through the rice paddies;
they snaked along over every ditch and broken bridge in parallel
rivulets of sweating humanity. One man in three had a rifle ;
the rest carried supplies, telephone wire, rice sacks, machine-
gun parts. Between the unsmiling soldiers plodded blue-gowned
peasant coolies who had been impressed for supplementary carrier
duty. There was not a single motor, not a truck anywhere in the
entire column. There was not a piece of artillery. At rarest inter-
vals pack animals bore part of the burden. Now and then during
the day a little Chinese pony showed above the heads of the
marching troops; ponies were reserved for officers of regimental
rank or higher. The men walked quietly, with the curious bitter-
ness of Chinese soldiers who expect nothing but disaster at the
end of a trip, none suffering acutely, each bearing the bitterness
of decades one day farther along the road. They were wiry and
brown but thin; their guns were old, their yellow-and-brown
uniforms threadbare. Each carried two grenades tucked in his
belt; about the neck of each was a long blue stocking inflated like
a roll of bologna with dry rice kernels, the only field rations.
Their feet were broken and puffed above their straw sandals;
their heads were covered with birds' nests of leaves woven together
to give shade from the sun and supposedly to supply camouflage.
The sweat rolled from them; dust rose about them; the heat
clutched the entire country, and giddy, glistening waves rose
from the rice paddies.
Along the way we came on knots of peasants who had been
rounded up by the civilian officials for the service of the army.
The unit commanders stopped at these stations to pick up bag-
gage bearers, just as a truck in any other army would stop to
pick up gasoline at a filling station. The peasants marched with
the troops until they were exhausted, then fell out, were fed rice,
and were sent back to the service stations again. At night the
army holed up for a short rest in the deserted villages a few miles
back from the front. The soldiers seized for food what pigs or
vegetables the peasants had left in their flight; they tore boards,
doors, and wall planking from peasant homes to make beds;
they chopped up staves, fence posts, and rafters to make fire for
boiling their water and rice.
At three-thirty the next morning the attack was launched. The
Japanese held the high hills south of Hengyang; the Sixty-second
held a lower ridge facing them. The attacking division had two
French seventy-fives, from the First World War, and a few trench
mortars. It had 200 shells for the seventy-fives, and it expended
them 33 a miser counts out gold coins. From three-thirty till mid-
morning the Chinese crawled up the slopes to the Japanese
positions. Their rifles and bayonets tried to shoot or dig the enemy
out, but at mid-morning the Japanese were still there. Graham
Barrow and I clambered up to the highest Chinese position in the
afternoon to watch the fight. The Chinese mortars whistled fit-
fully over the crest where the Japanese were dug in; machine-
guns and rifles rattled at long intervals in the summer heat; not a
man was moving along the entire line.
'79
We waited for three days to see the counteroflfensive get under
way ; then we set our faces homeward. We realized that what we had
seen had been the counteroffensive, and nothing more would come
of the campaign. All that flesh and blood could do the Chinese soldiers
were doing. They were walking up hills and dying in the sun, but
they had no support, no guns, no directions. They were doomed.
The Japanese rested at Hengyang for over a month; they were
merely regrouping. One by one the Central Government moved
other tired Chinese armies up to the siege line to break through.
Eventually some 100,000 Chinese troops were trying to chew
their way through one-fourth that number of the enemy. Chung-
king breathed down the neck of the field commanders; Chung-
king decided when, how, and where the actions of the day should
take place. Reinforcements were fed piecemeal in nibbling
assaults. The numerical superiority of the Chinese was never
massed for one concentrated breakthrough; new units served
only to replace constant casualties.
At the end of August the Japanese resumed the initiative in the
comparative coolness of late summer. The Sixty-second Army
disappeared completely in five days of fighting. The Japanese
drove south through the hills to the pass of Chuanhsien, a narrow
gully that is the strategic opening into the province of Kwangsi
from the north. A relief army, the Ninety-third, held the pass. It
had marched down from the north to join the East China cam-
paign. The troops had starved en route, and when they arrived
in Kwangsi, they sacked the rice dumps at the railway station in
Liuchow. When discipline was re-established, they hurriedly
boarded trains and rode north to get in position. They had old,
Japanese-made artillery; they were tired; they had never co-
operated with the American air force before, and they were
afraid of it; they had no building materials for making dugouts
or shelters; they did not know the terrain, the people, or where
the enemy was. They spread out over the pass. The commander
did not know where his own flanks were, did not know the dis-
tance to the next Chinese unit in line, did not know which villages
the enemy held. To the American liaison group attached to him
he promised that he would hold his position to the last man with-
out yielding a yard. The American group went to sleep reassured;
awakened at night by the sound of marching feet, they found
that the Ninety-t^iird was marching south, abandoning the pass
before a shot had been fired.
1 80
Such incidents happened again and again in the campaign.
The Generalissimo ordered the commander of the Ninety-third
shot; he ordered the commander at Kweiping shot; he ordered
other officers shot. But morale in the Chinese army was too far
gone to be re-established by drumhead executions. The break at
the pass near Chuanhsien meant the end of the campaign for
eastern China. Sixty-five miles of easy country separated the
main American base from the Japanese advance. General Stil-
well and General Chennault flew down for a quick look in mid-
September the day after the breakthrough, and Stilwell ordered
Vincent, the commander of the forward echelon, to blow all
American strips and installations in the vicinity of Kweilin except
one bomber strip. This would be used up to the last minute to
ferry American guns and ammunition to Chang Fa-kwei, who was
now in command of the area.
The last days of Kweilin were sheer fantasy. The Chinese army
had disintegrated. One unit of 14,000 soldiers had only 2,000
serviceable rifles. The scattered reserves that had been rushed
from other fronts were spread in disorganization over an area of
500 miles; some were tired, others untried, all leaderless. Some
had old Chinese guns; some had Russian guns, others prewar
Japanese artillery. No one had enough ammunition. And the
Japanese were strong; the Japanese were in force, mobile, ahorse,
afoot, riding on trucks and captured trains. The fifth column was
everywhere, and the unsettling gossip and fear of it were worse
than the column itself. Behind every soldier was the shadow of a
traitor. The day before the preliminary evacuation of Kweilin two
American soldiers who were working on a field in the vicinity to
prepare it for demolition were fired at by men in civilian clothes in the
hills ; Chinese troops caught and executed the gunmen on the spot.
In Kweilin the Chinese prepared for the end. Civilian evacua-
tion had been completed ; in the suburbs the last of the refugees
were crawling away. One of the mountain trails to the interior
lay across the main American air base at Liangtang; as the
refugees moved across this trail and wound about the fringe of the
field, they looked up into the sky at the planes that were still
flying in and out for combat and evacuation. A man lay dead by
the side of the road ; people heaped straw on his body and kept
on. A woman bound a wet, bleeding, shapeless foot that had been
run over, then hobbled on. A farmer passed, carrying his baby
181
in a basket suspended from a shoulder stave; the baby crowed
and gurgled.
Thousands of refugees jammed the railway station. Red and
orange fires were bellying up in every direction, their light re-
flected against the mushrooms of dark smoke that hung over the
town. The heavy night air was full of the stench of human beings
who lay in mounds on the platforms. Babies wailed in the dark-
ness, mothers scolded, old men mumbled. In the cars people
were piled thick. Some had been packed on the trains for days ;
they would not leave their places for fear of being unable to get
aboard again. They could not relieve themselves anywhere but
where they lay stuffed; the odour of their bodies, the sweat, the
hungry breath mixed in great fumes, wafted above the yards.
Kweilin had the best railway shops and equipment in all of Free
China ; the railway administration had to decide how to use what
remained of its rolling stock for evacuation whether to use it for
refugees, for its own shop equipment, or for evacuation of American
supplies; some of each would certainly have to be left behind.
The city was quiet; houses were boarded up, shops empty.
The Central Caf6 lowered the price of its special Ting How
whisky from $900 to $600 a bottle at the beginning of the week;
the next day the price was cut another hundred ; on the last day
the whisky was being given away to any American still in town,
and then the cafe boarded its doors. The Ledo, the Paramount,
the Red Plum, the Lakeside, the Lockchun, all the other happy
establishments, were closed too; on the boards the departing
civilians had pasted patriotic strips in red and black calling for
resistance. Soldiers prepared barricades and trenches in the empty
streets for future use; they had raided the empty shops and stored
their dugouts with real food and real wine. The last five soldiers
I saw at the northern gate had seventeen bottles of wine that
they were finishing with great good cheer as they waited for the
enemy. The Americans at the base reacted with no confusion or
alarm. The technique of destroying bases by now was normal;
all had been planned in advance. High up on the Yunnanese
Plateau in the rear the Air Transport Command was standing by,
as it had been for days, ready to throw its carriers into the low-
lands to pull out equipment. Every single ton of bombs, gasoline,
spare parts, and repair shops that had been flown from India to
Kunming or Kweilin had cost at least 3 tons of gasoline to get it
there ; to evacuate now was to make half the work of the Hump futile.
182
Personnel rosters had to be telescoped so that air operation
against the enemy could proceed without an hour's halt, so that
men could perform their last service from Kweilin, fly south at
nightfall, pick up the thread of continuity the next day from rear
bases, and continue to hammer the enemy's columns without an
instant's let-up. Bomber crews flew out with their planes; fighter
pilots were responsible for removing themselves. Adjutants of all
squadrons were required to make sure that they had ordered
enough truck or transport space to fly or haul out the ground per-
sonnel left behind. The cargo carriers of ATC lined up on the
fields one after another, ten in a row, to haul out the goods and
men they had so dangerously brought in. Into the runways went
thousand-pound bombs. The fuses were pulled out, the nose
cavities filled with pasty explosive C compound. Men moving
through the ghostly glow of jeep headlights wired detonators
into sockets full of explosives. The GFs still working on demo-
lition were taking it as a matter of course. Two of them were
discussing explosives in the dim glow of distant fires. "You can
eat G compound, you know," said one of them and handtd a
gobbet of the clay to somebody standing near by. Another
volunteered, "You can eat dynamite too; it tastes pretty good if
you're hungry." "Yup," said somebody else, "but if you eat
too much dynamite, then you get a jag on, and the next morning
you have a hangover." Somebody giggled nervously. There was
silence, and then floating through the air came an extraneous
bit of conversation from some other soldiers nearby; it seemed
as unreal as everything else: "No one in my family snores except
my old man but, boy, he sure does snore."
Five hundred and fifty shacks and barracks had to be blown
up on the last night in Kweilin. The shacks and barracks were
tucked away between the hills around the base. In each shack
one of the demolition crews had set up a barrel of gasoline, usually
on a box or packing case. An officer gave the word ; a soldier stood
at the doorway with a carbine; someone else fixed his flashlight
on the gasoline drum in the dark, and the carbine fired. It fired
once, twice, three times. The sergeant waited a moment as the
gasoline trickled from the holed drums and its fumes filled the
rooms. Then he fired once more, and the fumes caught in a
single burst. Sometimes thatched roofs lifted several feet in the
air at the flash, and then fire rippled through the rooms like racing
water. The fires flared in red, gold, and white brilliance, each one
183
capped by black oil smoke. When the thatched roof caught, the
fire spilled down from crest to eaves in incredibly swift runlets.
The green grass on the hills looked fresh as day in the light of the
fires. One by one the buildings went till all the valley blazed as if
a monstrous army had lit campfires in the night. From other
dumps we heard the booming of explosives letting go and bombs
in the distance. In some of the shacks there was ammunition,
rifle and pistol clips that careless men had left behind; it popped
offlike a crackling corn. A cache of tracer bullets in one shack went
up in the air and pencilled white and red arches over the hills.
Two planes were left on the last strip the next morning, one a
cargo carrier, the other Casey Vincent's personal 6-25. I flew
out with Casey that morning. He pulled the 6-25 into the air
and wheeled it back to the field. Waving black plumes of smoke
showed where our barracks had been; only one strip was still
left of the greatest American installation in China, the one that
was to be used till the last moment to rush supplies to Chang
Fa-kwei's beleaguered garrison. The others were potholed with
black craters as ugly as eyeless sockets.
"I'm going to write a book about this campaign," said Vincent.
"I'm going to call it Fire and Fall Back"
In the next week the Japanese drove within 25 miles of Kweilin ;
then, instead of striking in immediate assault, they halted five
weeks to regroup and regather their overextended supply lines.
It was as if the stage manager of the war had called a halt to field
activity so that the audience might devote its full attention to
events in the capital. A crisis was developing there; it became
known in America later simply as the Stilwell crisis. Its ingredients
were mixed and confused; sharply etched personalities were
snarling at one another, contending parties were denouncing
each other, and popular criticism of the government, both in
China and abroad, was rising in thundering crescendo. On
October 18 the crisis was resolved by the relief of Stilwell. The
Japanese almost immediately launched their final assault on the
last remaining link between Free China and the coast, the
Kweilin-Liuchow gap.
The remnants of the Chinese armies were formed about the
two cities of Kweilin and Liuchow, a few thousand here, a few
thousand there, each little pocket bearing the standard of a full
army that had been a coherent unit a few months before. The
184
Japanese cut through the tired, disorganized fragments of the
Chinese army with careless ease. The government had dis-
banded the militiamen of Kwangsi in 1939 out of its general fear
of all armed popular movements ; a last desperate attempt was
made to call them back to the colours to defend their native soil.
But there were neither arms to give them nor spirited leaders to
guide them. The few eastern China generals who still retained a
local popular loyalty were old enemies of the Generalissimo, and
even in the hour of extremity he did not recall them. The Four-
teenth Air Force, chewing on Jap columns, made an impreg-
nable canopy of fury for the spent Chinese soldiery. But the
ground troops were too exhausted to take advantage of it.
Kweilin and Liuchow fell within a few days of each other, and
in mid-November the entire defence gave way. Entire armies dis-
appeared, lost in the hills and unable to make a stand. One army
from the Chungking garrison was rushed into position at the
famous Nantan Pass that separates the high plateau of Kweichow
from the low, steaming paddies of Kwangsi. It moved into the
notched pass with the exhortation to hold to the bitter end. The
troops received two days' rations when they dug in, and their
mortars had twenty shells to a gun. For nine days, without further
food or ammunition, they fought in the cold and freezing weather.
Their foraging parties scoured the hills for grain and animals,
but the hills were barren. With their ammunition expended and
their stomachs empty, the troops broke, and the Japanese surged
through the pass, 1 20 miles inland from Liuchow, pointing directly
at Kweiyang and the heart of the government's communications.
Panic had seized Chungking. Wedemeyer had arrived, expect-
ing to hold and strengthen eastern China. During his first week
in Chungking his combat reports told him that Kweilin and
Liuchow were being finally abandoned. Certain Chinese govern-
ment officials inquired at the American Embassy about the possi-
bility of evacuating their families from China by plane; others
began to sell their clothes and valuables. No one knew what was
happening in the east the line was torn open, bandits were
raiding the villages for scores of miles about the path of Japanese
advance, the Japanese cavalry appeared each day farther and
farther to the north.
With the last week in November a cold wave rolled down out of
the north across the high Kweichow plateau. I drove into Kwei-
yang to see the end of the campaign, and for 500 miles the roads
Gi 185
were ribbons of ice strung along the hills. The telephone wires,
coated with rime and ice, sagged limply under their burden or,
breaking, buried themselves in the snow. Dead refugees lying by
the wayside were preserved from decomposition by the frost;
those who had lain for several days were stripped of their clothes
by the living, who needed warmth. The hungry clustered about
the horses and mules that had died on the road, to strip meat and
flesh from the carcasses in red slivers. Others chipped at timbers
and logs in deserted villages- to get wood for bonfires. A gaunt
Bactrian camel, red-tasselled and haughty-necked, threaded its
\yay through the procession. At night wolves loped along the
road through the deserted villages.
Perhaps the only military unit in the entire insane rout that had
any real sense of coherence and purpose was a group of fifteen
American army officers and enlisted men of the OSS. Major
Frank Gleason, a red-headed twenty-five-year-old boy from Penn-
sylvania, was their commander. Their job was to tear apart
everything in the course of retreat that could be of value to the
Japanese. With complete singlemindedness, Gleason laid waste
the countryside. He recruited Chinese coolies to help him as he
progressed through the ravaged highway area; having no funds
to pay them, he enfranchised them to forage in the towns on
which the enemy was descending. Gleason's unit started the
campaign with three trucks and wound up with eight vehicles,
a Chinese orphan they had adopted as a mascot, a Chinese cook,
and an assortment of hangers-on who had grown fat on the sale
of bicycles, tyres, gauges, and equipment abandoned by the
Chinese army in full flight.
At Tushan, 140 miles from the key junction of Kweiyang,
Gleason heard one of the often repeated stories of the China
theatre. The Chinese, someone said, have a lot of arms buried in
the hills around here. When the Japanese were 20 miles away,
Gleason decided to investigate. His preliminary investigation
was staggering; he found three great ammunition dumps, com-
prising from twenty to thirty warehouses, each about 200 feet
long, in which the Chinese had been collecting their ammunition
for years against a crisis in East China; with the Japanese on the
threshold, the ammunition was still being hoarded. The supply-
starved troops down the road had already abandoned every
defensible position, but the Chinese staff clung to its hoard with
monumental inefficiency. Fifty thousand tons of supplies were
186
stacked uselessly at Tushan. There was ammunition of every type
French, Czech, American, Chinese, German, and Russian;
there were mortars and thousands of mortar shells, fifty new
pieces of artillery and huge quantities of ammunition to supply
them ; best of all, from Gleason's point of view, there were 20
tons of dynamite with which to blow the dumps to kingdom come.
Gleason began his work in midmorning of the last day; the
Japanese were expected to enter the town in early afternoon.
His men had finished their work by four and on their way out of
town blew up the last bridges.
The Japanese, entering Tushan that day, sent a few cavalry
patrols probing up the road. They held their positions about
Tushan for a week, then began to contract their lines, and dug in
for the winter at the town of Hochih, midway between Kweiyang
and Liuchow. For a full year Chungking debated the reasons for
the Japanese withdrawal. Ambassador Hurley declared, with
becoming modesty, that his moral courage had held the Chinese
from total collapse. The gossips, who always knew everything if
it was discreditable enough, were sure that Chiang K'ai-shek
had made a secret deal with the Japanese to save Chungking in
return for his intercession on their behalf at the ultimate peace.
The reasons for the Japanese withdrawal were quite clear in the
field. They had prepared for a campaign in East China to drive
a corridor from Hankow south to the border of Indo-China.
Their mission .accomplished, they probed casually at the ap-
proaches to Chungking; where there should have been a strong
defence line, they found nothing but a gaping hole. A single
Japanese division, tearing through this hole up into the Kwei-
chow plateau, met no resistance but the elements, which, how-
ever, were on China's side. Kweichow is a barren, poverty-
stricken province. There were no rich harvests of grain to feed
the invader as there had been in eastern China. The Japanese,
having prepared for a summer campaign, were dressed in summer
cottons; the cold that now clamped down on them with mur-
derous intensity froze them as mercilessly as it froze the Chinese.
They were 200 miles from their supply base, and they had no
alternate plans to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity
that Chinese collapse presented. Something more was working
against the Japanese; a new defence plan had been prepared by
General Wedemeyer late in November. He had flown into the
battle zone two divisions of American-trained troops from
187
northern Burma, where Stilwell had trained them in victory; he
had demanded of Chiang 60,000 troops from the Communist
blockade in the north for the same purpose, and these likewise
were being flown in. These new elements were gathering for a
last-ditch stand to meet the over-extended and tired Japanese
spearheads. The Japanese thought better of the entire matter
and withdrew to defend their corridor in the east.
Thus in December 1944 the invasion of China by Japan reached
its high-water mark and receded. For the government and its
armies 1944 had been a year of unmitigated disaster. Almost half
a million Chinese soldiers had been lost, the entire coast was cut
off from the Central Government, eight provinces and a popu-
lation of more than 100,000,000 had been ripped from the direct
control of Chungking. The Kuomintang could explain its defeats
in convincing terms of poverty and weakness. It could rightly
charge America with having neglected it during a period of great
want and suffering. But it could not explain why another Chinese
army, that of the Communists, was moving from success to success
in North China. The Japanese had crossed the Yellow River in
their Honan drive in April; in August, while their colums were
tearing through Hunan, hundreds of miles to the south, the
Japanese were already being forced to defend their positions in
the north against a counteroflfensive. The Communists had fol-
lowed in their wake and were beginning to organize the peasants
of Honan.
CHAPTER 13
THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS
IN 1937 THE war found the Communists a splinter group
in the sandlands of northern Shensi, where they governed one and
a half million people in an area of 30,000 square miles defended
by a Red Army of 85,000. The summer of 1944 saw them in
control of 300,000 miles of Chinese soil, inhabited by 90,000,000
people and defending themselves with an army of almost a
million regular troops supported by more than twice as many
peasant militiamen. Their party membership had grown from
perhaps 200,000 to 1,000,000. They had exploded rather than
expanded. From their base in northern Shensi they had driven
across the hills of Shansi and the plains of Hopei to the Pacific.
1 88
Their guerrillas flickered about the Great Wall and the approaches
to Manchuria. Even by 1941 the centre of balance in Communist
territory had shifted beyond the Yellow River and was somewhere
behind the Japanese lines, between the Yellow River and the
ocean.
Their swift early expansion was checked from 1940 to 1942. In
the summer of 1940 they launched a broad but ill-timed counter-
offensive called the Hundred Regiments' Battle against Japanese
railway communications in the north. They blew bridges sky-
high, pinched off Japanese garrisons, and stopped railway move-
ment for several weeks. But the Communists were not really ripe
for this kind of action, and they could not hold their gains; the
aroused Japanese responded with a series of heavy counters trokes.
Between 1941 and 1943, while the Central Government sealed
the blockade airtight behind them, the Communists desperately
resisted a series of trip-hammer "mopping-up" Japanese cam-
paigns. The Communists' control of northern China weakened
for a while under this impact; they were driven back into their
solid bases, where they clung with the tenacity of desperation.
The pressure had lifted by 1943, however. The Japanese were
too thoroughly preoccupied in the South Seas, against America,
to divert more strength to the supposedly "conquered" areas of
northern China; they withdrew to their walled cities and supply
lines and dug in. The Communists, too, had dug in but
differently; the government blockade had strengthened them
rather than strangled them, for it had made them self-reliant and
self-sufficient. They had devised new methods of production and
organization that more than balanced the loss of what little help
the Kuomintang had previously doled out to them. By 1 943 they
were in full tide of expansion again. They had nearly eliminated
government influence in the province of Shantung by the end
of that year, and the Eighth Route Army in northern Kiangsu
was stronger than ever.
The New Fourth Army, which the Central Government had
tried to wipe out in 1941, was also flourishing. It occupied all the
central part of Kiangsu and most of the south of the province.
Its units stretched inland along the Yangtze River to Hankow,
and about that inland metropolis the New Fourth Army had
created a huge base that covered most of the province of Hupeh
and parts of southern Honan. An enclave of Communists
operated about Canton in the south, and another pocket of
189
Communists was carrying on independent warfare against the
Japanese on the island of Hainan, off the coast of French Indo-
China. The various units of the Eighth Route and New Fourth
Armies were an organic part of a system of local governments,
which the Communists called " liberated regions". In the summer
of 1944 there were eighteen such liberated regions, and more
were contemplated in the new areas of Japanese conquest.
The tremendous energy behind the Communist drive was co-
ordinated from Yenan. A radio and courier network linked all
Communist centres from Hainan in the south to the outskirts
of Manchuria. The radios were an amateur patchwork of broken
Japanese sets, second-hand tubes, and makeshift materials. But
the codes, which were excellent, baffled both the Kuomintang and
the Japanese, and these communications bound together with iron
cords of discipline the eighteen local governments in a coalition
that seemed at times a shadow government and at times the most
effective righting instrument of the Chinese people.
Ninety per cent of the vast Communist-controlled area was
marked on the map as Japanese-held. It is true that Japanese
garrisons and lines of communication laced the entire fabric; it is
true that in no single liberated region did the Communists hold
more than a few hundred miles of land completely clear of the
enemy; it is true that almost every government centre they
established was a mobile command post ready to move or fight
with the troops on a few hours' notice. But each of these govern-
ments was able to collect taxes, pass laws, fight the enemy, arm
the peasants, and create a loyalty to its leadership that endured
whatever savagery the Japanese marshalled against it.
Though their enemies denounced the Communists' beliefs and
attributed to them every shameful excess they could imagine, no
one could deny they had wrought a miracle in arms. In six years
the Communists had thrown out from the barren hills a chain of
bases that swept in an arc from Manchuria to the Yangtze
Valley. Rarely in the history of modern war or politics has there
been any political adventure to match this in imagination or
epic grandeur. The job was done by men who worked with history
as if it were a tool and with peasants as if they were raw material;
they reached down into the darkness of each village and sum-
moned from it with their will and their slogans such resources
of power as neither the Kuomintang nor Japan imagined could
exist. The power came from the people from the unleashing of
190
the internal tensions that had so long paralysed the countryside,
from the intelligence of masses of men, from the dauntless,
enduring courage of the peasant.
The entire Communist political thesis could be reduced to a
single paragraph: If you take a peasant who has been swindled,
beaten, and kicked about for all his waking days and whose father
has transmitted to him an emotion of bitterness reaching back for
generations if you take such a peasant, treat him like a man, ask
his opinion, let him vote for a local government, let him organize
his own police and gendarmes, decide on his own taxes, and vote
himself a reduction in rent and interest if you do all that, the
peasant becomes a man who has something to fight for, and he
will fight to preserve it against any enemy, Japanese or Chinese.
If in addition you present the peasant with an army and a govern-
ment that help him harvest, teach him to read and write, and
fight off the Japanese who raped his wife and tortured his mother,
he develops a loyalty to the army and the government and to the
party that controls them. He votes for that party, thinks the way
that party wants him to think, and in many cases becomes an
active participant.
The Communists, beyond any doubt, are complete masters of
brutality when brutality becomes necessary. Stirring the peasant
out of his millennial apathy into active, organized movement
requires the simplest, most direct appeal to his emotions. It is
work for fanatics. The Communists of China were and are men
who consume themselves first of all; the older party members
had given themselves to the movement totally, had no life outside
the party, had made their own personalities a torch to light the
way for the peasants. Men who sacrificed themselves so cruelly to
an ideal were equally cruel to opposition, equally ruthless to any
group that the party labelled as an enemy. The chief task the
Communist Party undertook during the war years was war itself.
Their operations flowed from the theory that all war is total war,
and the chief duty of the party was to weld peasants and army
into one. There were not enough Communists to fight a war alone
the peasantry had to be taught to defend itself and govern itself
even if every accepted standard of legality and tradition had to be
swept away. Through fifteen years of merciless class warfare the
Communists had been experimenting in techniques of mass
action; they had learned while fighting Chiang K'ai-shek how to
tap the reservoirs of discontent in each village for fresh power.
Now they proceeded to modify these techniques for the national
war against the Japanese.
The party set out t6 teach the peasants self-government. In all
of Chinese history the peasants had had no such experience, and
they were putty in the hands of their Communist mentors. Village
and county councils were created, and in them were lodged the
powers that touched the peasants' life most closely. Their prob-
lems were such as the peasants had been exposed to since child-
hood. Swept into the machinery of government for the first time,
the peasants found that they possessed unknown talents and un-
suspected abilities. No village council needed a classical education
to decide who should pay more taxes and who less, for the com-
mon good. The villagers knew who collected how much grain
and from what fields ; they were the best fitted to apportion the
burden of war. Scholars and bureaucrats with college degrees
were not needed to organize village self-defence corps. The crude
talents that were called forth by the new responsibilities were
skilfully developed by far-seeing Communist leadership.
To the Kuomintang what the Communists were doing seemed
devilishly clever. The Communists took the laws that Kuomin-
tang liberals had written into sterile statute books, and they
taught the peasants to apply them. Nanking, in 1930, had passed
an abortive law limiting rent on land to 37.5 per cent of the crop
yield. The law had never been implemented. But now, in Com-
munist areas, the village and county councils chosen from among
the people voted these laws into effect. The voting may have been
illegal, but it could not be assailed as undemocratic. Who would
vote against cutting his rent rates by half? Peasants participating
in such meetings and belonging to such governments learned that
government is a lever that can be applied for their interests as
well as against them. Democracy meant more grain in the harvest
basket of the man who tilled the soil. In Communist areas where
the Japanese could not penetrate, the peasants actually lived
better during the war than they had before.
Reform was held under tight control from above. The Com-
munists had learned in civil war days how bitterly the landed
groups could fight against violent reform. Any such cleavage
within the villages during the war against the Japanese was
dangerous; a united front of all 'classes was a prime requisite.
Landlords received guarantees from the local government that
although rents had been cut, they would be paid; although
19*
interest rates were reduced, moneylenders were assured of the
integrity of their loans. Expropriation had been a cardinal tenet
of Communist doctrine in the 1 930*5; now it was outlawed except
in cases of landlords who aided or collaborated with the invader.
By and large the landlords and the well-to-do of North China
hated the Japanese as much as the peasantry did. They too died
and suffered ; they too were fired by patriotism. Reform, they found,
was not nearly so painful as defeat or invasion; they co-operated,
some actively and some passively, with the Communist leadership,
and they were swept along in the popular tide of resistance.
To staff all the local governments the Communists scoured the
social resources of the land. They tutored peasant leaders, who
became able military commanders as well as local deputies and
administrators. A host of intellectuals and students had aban-
doned their careers in the large cities of China at the call of war;
the Communists made organizers, teachers, and bureaucratic
cadres of them. As the area under Communist control expanded
and deepened, careers opened that offered opportunity for young
talent to advance quicker than ever before. While the Kuomin-
tang remained stationary and its bureaucracy entrenched itself
at the trough through the years of stalemate, the Communists
unceasingly recruited new talent in the field. Young men of
twenty-five became the magistrates of counties of several hundred
thousand people; girls of college years organized mass movements
that aimed at nothing less than revolution.
The reforms the Communists championed did not stop at self-
government in the village nor at the equalization of economic
injustice, although these were massive objectives. Communist
theory aimed at the activization of every human particle of
Chinese society. Their headquarters in Yenan were a clearing
house of ideas and techniques; each successful practice established
in any region was reported back to Yenan, lifted from the level
of operation to that of principle, and then spread over all the
rest of Red China by the party.
Co-operative associations taught peasants how to work together
in primitive industrial units. A Youth National Salvation Associa-
tion was launched to make adolescents part of the military estab-
lishment; children not yet in their teens guarded roads, spied on
Japanese garrisons, ran courier duty. The Woman's National
Salvation Association became a vital social fact; in it Communist
organizers taught backward peasant women to spin and weave,
to make stockings and sandals, to read and write. The peasant
woman had been a brood mare, a beast of burden; the Com-
munists believed that only with education could she become an
active citizen participating in local government, and each such
participant increased the government's strength. Teaching her to
make sandals, socks, and cloth helped provide necessary clothing
materials for both troops and civilians in place of supplies that
had been cut off by the Japanese and the Kuomintang. It also
gave the housewife a little income of her own, which raised her
status within her own household and freed her from the domi-
nance of her husband and in-laws.
The new governments and reforms constituted half of the Com-
munists' appeal; the military leadership of the Communist armies
made up the other half. In a sense the Communists won their real
popularity by the war they waged against Japan. The black
nature of Japanese conquest was common foe to every man, rich
or poor, learned or ignorant. The Japanese had begun with bar-
barism, and when barbarism begot resistance, no fresh reserves of
terror remained to cow the peasants. As each succeeding Japanese
atrocity failed, it called forth a new doctrine of savagery. The
baffled Japanese in the course of six years arrived at total political
bankruptcy in northern China; their final slogan in 1944 was
simply: "Kill all, burn all, loot all." From one end of northern
China to another the blackened shells of villages gave testimony
to the wrath of the enemy, while in a hundred thousand homes
peasants nursed the bitterness of revenge for a wife raped, a
husband tortured, a child slaughtered in cold blood.
The war between the Communists and the Japanese trans-
formed the face of the land. The Japanese dug ditches paralleling
their highways and railways for hundreds of miles up hill and
down valley. All along these lines of communications scallops of
machine-gun emplacements were cut into the soil; they were
manned constantly by the Japanese or by Chinese traitors. Every
bridge was guarded by a blockhouse; when American planes
began to strafe the rail lines, the blockhouses became flak towers.
Telephone poles were set in concrete to keep the guerrillas from
ripping them out; in some places lights were lit atop these poles
at night for further protection. The Japanese garrisons mostly
dwelt in larger cities, which were moated and turreted like some-
thing out of Ivanhoe. They sallied forth from these garrison posts
periodically to combat the Communist armies; they struck into
194
the hills and villages time and again ; they plundered, they killed
and then returned to bind up their wounds and plan further pillage.
The regular army of the Communists was difficult to describe.
It had a very loose structural framework, for it was a partisan
army. By agreement with the Central Government the Eighth
Route Army had been limited to a total of 45,000 men, or three
divisions; later, when its personnel expanded over the half-
million mark, it still clung to the framework of its original three
divisions, although each division now had several hundred
thousand men. The largest single concentration of Communist
and also of Kuomintang man power was posted on the blockade
line north of Sian, where 50,000 picked Communist troops
opposed perhaps several hundred thousand Central Government
troops. Across the Yellow River and along the coast there could
not be any grouping of Communist troops even remotely com-
parable to this in size, for any such concentration would have
been an open invitation to the Japanese to attack frontally in a
battle they could surely win.
Communist regulars operated in bands of three to four hundred
men each. Each band was linked to another band and to head-
quarters either by telephone or by radio. Each command was
regional rather than mobile. The various commands pyramided
into subdistricts and full districts, which were in turn responsible
to the three original divisional headquarters. The divisional
headquarters of both the Eighth Route Army and the New
Fourth Army reported back to the general staff in Yenan, which
was commanded by Chu Teh. Commanders of the various
districts and subdistricts flicked their scattered bands about the
map like a train dispatcher routing express trains. Any number
of bands could concentrate swiftly for an attack in clusters up
to fifteen or twenty thousand men and then as quickly dissolve
and return to their homes. If a Japanese column struck into the
hills on a foraging or mopping-up operation, spies instantly
reported its movement to a district headquarters. The com-
mander studied the enemy's line of march and considered his
own troop dispositions; he issued orders by radio, telephone, or
runner, and from the hills and villages a dozen guerrilla bands,
falling on the enemy's extended columns, would prick and draw
blood from his flanks like matadors with a bull. These bands
could not remain concentrated for large operations, because they
depended on the people of specific localities for support; it was
195
impossible to keep striking masses manoeuvrable without" estab-
lishing dumps of food and ammunition that would have been much
too tempting to an enemy with vehicles and artillery. Each band
drew its nourishment from the district in which it lived, not from
a general supply system. The dispersion of the Communist forces
was their great strength and also their great weakness. The
Japanese could not catch enough of them at one time to do any
harm. The guerrillas had no single industrial or military base
whose loss would make them vulnerable as a whole. But they
likewise could not challenge any important Japanese garrison
post or Japanese control of the railway system defended by earth-
works and heavy armament. Though they could blunt a Japanese
spearhead or turn it aside, they could not stop it.
This army did not know how to handle artillery; it did not
know how to handle an air corps ; it knew little of modern signal
corps work, mechanization, or medical practice; its warriors
could not manoeuvre 'a division in battle. Only one quality made
it great its fighting spirit. It was a partisan army, and it fought
with the aid of the people. Its reserves, nationwide, were the min
ping, the armed militia. Almost all able-bodied peasants belonged
to the min ping, self-governing local defence groups whose mem-
bers tilled the soil and fought for it at the same time. The Com-
munists claimed that some 2,000,000 peasant soldiers scattered
over the land co-operated with the troops of the Eighth Route
and New Fourth Armies. These men were armed with the heritage
of a generation of civil strife. Some had bird guns, others muzzle-
loaders, the discard of the war-lord armies of previous decades ;
some were armed with pitchforks, some with knives. Occasionally
the regulars turned over Japanese tommy guns to the local
militia, since they could not capture enough ammunition to
make them an effective regular weapon. The min ping fought by
themselves or called in regulars for support as Japanese action
required. Their leaders were chosen from among their own
number; their knowledge of their own terrain with its hills and
passes almost made up for the enemy's batteries.
The Communists indoctrinated and trained these troops in all
the simple elementary tactics of warfare, and they went on to
elaborate a unique system of earthy defence. In 1942 they became
interested in mines; the peasants two years later had lifted mine
warfare almost to the level of an indigenous national sport. The
peasants were taught to bring old temple bells and scrap metal to
196
local army ordnance depots; there they received the equivalent
weight in empty metal mine shells, which they filled with black
powder or more rarely with smokeless powder produced by the
local government. They made fuses themselves. If metal was
lacking, they made mines out of porcelain, logs, or rock. The
peasants sowed the land with death; they laid the mines in circles
about Japanese garrisons and blockhouses so that when the
Japanese moved about they might blow themselves to bits. The
peasants planted mines about their villages; at night they laid
them along the paths leading in, with only one approach left
quite clear. The safe path, which was changed each night, was
known only to the local regular commander and the head of the
village committee of public safety. The villagers hoarded their
mines against Japanese drives, and when one of the periodic
thrusts against them was under way, they would haul out their
stored destruction and plant it everywhere on the bridges across
country streams, under steppings tones in brooks, beneath foot-
paths. They planted mines by the gate in the wall, by the hitch-
ing posts, in the main square wherever the Japanese might
gather. The Communist newspapers, little more than local pep
sheets, encouraged the villagers' ingenuity with every propa-
ganda trick conceivable, even to publicizing local "mine heroes"
the way American sports writers nominate home-run kings.
The regular Eighth Route Army, the peasant militia, and the
mine fields were supplemented by a native intelligence system
that gave the Communists total coverage for operations against
the enemy. A system of road tickets was established, under which
no man could travel unless his ticket was signed by the proper
partisan authorities. Child scouts inspected road tickets and
watched from hilltops for enemy movement. The countryside was
instantly aware of every moving Japanese, every enemy truck. On
some of the hills long poles were erected, tufted at the top so that
from a distance they looked like brooms. When hill sentries saw
Japanese on the march, they knocked the poles flat, and the low-
land peasants knew the Japanese were on the way. The village
mobilization committees were prepared to go into action on the
instant of alarm. Women and children took to the hills or tunnels;
each family drove away its livestock to hiding, concealed its grain,
buried its valuables; self-defence groups armed themselves and
mined the paths. On the plains of Hopei, where hill cover was
remote, the war went underground. Peasants began by building
'97
tunnels under individual villages; then one village was linked up
to another. Towards the end of the war the underground chambers,
connected for miles, twisted and turned in a labyrinth known only
to the natives; in these caves peasants with rifles were equal to the
Japanese.
Major engagements, in which some twenty or thirty thousand
Communist guerrillas and an equal or greater number of militia-
men were co-ordinated to resist a Japanese drive, were undertaken
only under special circumstances. The Communists fought when
they had an opportunity to surprise a very small group of the
enemy and to capture more than enough rifles and ammunition
to make up what they spent in the fray; since Communist armies
from 1941 on were armed almost solely with captured enemy
mattriel, the possible yield of capture always had to be calculated
against the possible expenditure in assault. They fought to protect
the countryside during its period of greatest weakness, the harvest
season. This was the favourite raiding season for the Japanese, for
a successful coup might not only fill their food depots but leave
the peasantry destitute for months. To prevent this the Com-
munists had to battle even under unfavourable circumstances to
protect the peasants as they gathered the crop. They also fought
when one of their own primary administrative centres were
threatened; at the heart of each block of liberated territory were
patches of land that the Communists held inviolate through five
or six years of guerrilla warfare, and here what little permanent
administrative machinery they had was installed.
This military pattern varied somewhat from area to area. Most
of the information about Communist warfare comes from reports
on northern China, the domain of the Eighth Route Army, which
American military observers visited; Communist propaganda
indicated that much the same form of fighting was carried on in
central China, where the New Fourth Army functioned, but on a
more primitive, less elaborate scale. This warfare was an historic
achievement, but it was obscured by" propaganda, both Kuomin-
tang and Communist. The Kuomintang elected to hold the official
thesis that the Communists were not fighting at all, that they were
in active league with the Japanese, that they were only a terrorist
coalition ruling the countryside by force. This picture was
fantastically incorrect and was so easily proved false that almost
all American observers accepted the Communist version of their
own war. By and large this version was sound; yet it too was
stained with overvivid propaganda. The Communists, for
example, claimed that they held down most of the Japanese
troops in China and that they bore the main weight of resistance;
this was untrue. At peak periods of Japanese activity perhaps
40 per cent of all tne Japanese in China were battling Com-
munists or garrisoning Communist-held land. But during the
significant campaigns it was the weary soldiers of the Central
Government who took the shock, gnawed at the enemy, and died.
During the-campaigns of 1937-38 or the eastern China campaign
of 1944 more than 70 per cent of Japanese effort was concentrated
against the troops of Chiang K'ai-shek and his war-lord allies.
Communist claims of enemy casualties were nowhere nearly so
exaggerated as those of the Central Government; yet they could
not be accepted as accurate. The Communists claimed that they
had accounted for half a million Japanese casualties. But when
General Okamura, Japanese commander in chief in China, made
his report to the Allies after V-J day, he estimated that the
Japanese had lost less than 50,000 men to the guerrillas. The true
figure is probably somewhere between the two estimates. Another
discouraging facet of Communist propaganda was their accounts
of the incessant clashes between their troops and Central Govern-
ment troops in the field. The Communists lived and fought by a
dynamic political philosophy; their entire strength was based on
organization of hitherto unorganized men. Their expansion and
their reforms frequently clashed with the vestigial remnants the
Kuomintang government left behind the Japanese advance. The
Communists, with the people on the side of their reforms, usually
won in such clashes. Who attacked whom was never clearly
known, but invariably each side insisted it was the one under
assault. The. Communists cried "Wolf, wolf!" at every fray. It
was easy to understand their intense emotion when you looked
back on the butchery of the New Fourth Army by the government
in 1941 ; yet to give credit to it at all times was impossible. In the
spring of 1945, for example, the Communists launched a huge
expansion drive southward to the coast; they were in constant
conflict with the Central Government. Most of the Communist
expansion was directed against the Japanese, but they fought
government troops when necessary too, and as they reported
attacks on themselves in broad new areas of penetration behind
the Japanese lines, they sounded like the man who claimed he had
been hit in the fist with the other fellow's eye.
Many of these clashes expressed not so much military enmity as
broad political discontent. China had no open forum of dis-
cussion, no means of rectifying a tangled political problem by
peaceful discussion in Chungking. In modern China no political
decision had ever been arrived at without the use or threat of
armed force. Bullets are ballots in Chinese politics. No Chinese
group other than the Communists ever dared to arm the people,
for that meant enabling peasants to rectify their own grievances.
The Communists, serene in the consciousness of popular support,
could arm hundreds of thousands and know that the arms would
not be turned against them. In this sense the Communists were
a link with the great agrarian revolutions of Chinese history, in
which arming of the people had always been a prerequisite for
the overthrow of the old dynasty.
The old village system and officialdom began to crumble under
the impact of the Communists' dynamic revolutionary creed.
When the older local powers called in remnants of Kuomintang
troops behind the enemy lines to support their dictates, they were
confronted with armed popular force. The Communists preached
not only war against Japan but war against the entire past. These
clashes could not be judged by accepted rules of warfare. Hard and
bitter men were fighting a civil war. Sometimes the law may have
been on one side, sometimes on the other, but in a civil war all law
is in doubt.
The Communists had reached a new maturity of decision by
the summer of 1944. Between 1941, when the New Fourth Army
had been massacred, and 1944, when the great campaign in the
east exposed .the weakness of the Central Government, their
attitude towards Chiang K'ai-shek's administration changed from
fear to contempt. The Communists saw the Kuomintang armies,
supplied with American guns, gasoline, and vehicles in quantities
that seemed huge to them, collapsing like straw men before the
Japanese drive. The tired legions of the Kuomintang seemed ob-
jects of pity, not enmity. The spontaneous uprising of the peasants
in Honan against the government convinced the Communists
that the Chungking regime was a ramshackle structure whose
days were numbered.
Negotiations between the Central Government and the Com-
munists began anew in the spring of 1944. The Communists
appeared in Chungking this time not as beggars but as proud
200
ambassadors of a powerful armed movement. Their arrogance
shocked the government negotiators, who had expected that the
years of blockade would have worn them down. The government
had expected chastened, respectful men, grateful for what few
crumbs could be spared from Chungking's lean tables. The
Kuomintang negotiators were astounded by what the Com-
munists presented as a fitting basis for negotiations. "They seem
to forget/* one government spokesman said plaintively, "that
after all we are the government."
The Communist demands of the summer of 1944 were far-
reaching. Among them were these points :
1 . The Central Government should give supplies to and recog-
nize sixteen Communist divisions in the field.
2. The government should release all political prisoners.
3. The Communist Party and other minority parties should be
granted legal status, and their classification as outlaws should cease.
4. A coalition government should be established in which they
and other minority parties might participate.
5. The government should recognize the legitimacy of all the
"liberated" regions as popularly elected governments.
Nonpartisan opinion held these Communist demands to be well
justified on the whole except for the last. 1 The Communist-con-
trolled liberated regions spread all over the Yellow River basin
and the entire lower Yangtze from Shanghai through Nanking to
Canton. To recognize these governments would reduce the
Kuomintang to a secondary power in the land; it would mean that
when peace came, the Communists would be in control of the
richest, most highly developed areas of the coast, while the
Kuomintang would still be locked in the hinterland.
It was probable, however, that the Communists had advanced
the last demand for bargaining purposes in order to gain their
J Nonpartisan opinion, both Chinese and foreign, usually favoured the
Communists in their great debates with the Kuomintang. The reason for this
was simple. The Central Government until 1944 forbade any journalist or
observer to travel in Communist territory; it insisted that its own version of
the Communist problem be fully accepted. It denounced the Communists
with its every resource of vituperation. The standing Communist reply to
government charges was an invitation to all journalists to come and visit their
areas of operation and see for themselves whether the charges were true or
false. With one party to a dispute refusing permission for independent in-
vestigation of its charges and the other party inviting it, public opinion almost
invariably sides with the group inviting investigation.
201
more immediate and pressing desires and that they stood ready
to yield halfway. Indeed, in the following year they did abandon
their claim to the Yangtze Valley. The bargaining, which began
hi' May 1944, broke down in late summer. By that time it was
evident that any solution within China must await a solution of
China's relations with America and Chinese- American relations
were mounting to the Stilwell crisis.
CHAPTER 14
THE STILWELL CRISIS
BY MIDSUMMER OF 1944 the crisis within China was pressing
insufferably on American policy. What was happening in China
was so vastly complicated, so intertwined with America's own
grand strategy of war, that it had become a matter of primary
concern in our own statecraft. The two men who represented
America in China in 1944 were General Joseph W. Stilwell and
Ambassador Clarence Gauss. Both men had spent the most im-
portant years of their lives in China and had been in intimate
contact with its daily affairs since 1941 ; by the summer of 1944
both had come to substantially the same conclusion about the
situation in China,
Their conclusion was this : The crisis in the field could not be
solved by American aid alone, however necessary that might be.
The military crisis was in their eyes only the end result of an al-
most total breakdown of principle, administration, and policy in
the Chungking government. Since America was supporting the
Chinese government at huge expense, since American lives were
at stake, since any revival of China was conditioned by increased
American aid and supply, both Gauss and Stilwell felt that
America was justified in demanding sweeping reforms within
China in the name of the joint war against the Japanese. To make
any effective use of what America could give and was giving, the
Chinese government had to achieve some minimum level of
efficiency and decency.
Chiang K'ai-shek could only partly endorse this American con-
clusion. He needed American support desperately, and he was
willing to yield to America on paper on any specific charge or any
specific administrative demand. But to reform in the American
202
sense meant that his government would have to draw support from
the people, Communist, Kuomintang, or nonpartisan. It meant
that the government would have to purify itself by purging the
corrupt officers and decadent landed gentry who, though they
were a drag on the nation's energy, supported Chiang personally.
Chiang wished to associate America with himself in a scheme of
balances concession against promise, piecemeal reform against
piecemeal aid. For two years just such an association had existed.
Now the Americans wanted an end of haggling and bargaining,
a reform at the heart that would transform the Chinese govern-
ment into an efficient ally.
Stilwell had arrived at his final conviction after years of the most
discouraging, grief-cursed attempts to co-operate with the Chinese
general staff. Slowly and painfully each individual American
requirement had to be wrung from the depths of Chinese re-
luctance. This half-hearted co-operation shackled progress.
StilwelPs frame of reference was the over-all war against Japan;
Ho Yingch'in's one frame of reference was support and defence of
the Kuomintang regime. Thus in 1942 Stilwell had seen nothing
incongruous in his request that the Chinese Communists be sent
to fight the Japanese in Burma, but to Ho Ying-ch'in and the
Chinese government the movement of Communists across the
country threatened the opening of Pandora's box. No decisions
could be made, no troops transferred, no promotions effected, no
supplies sent, without reference to the tangled political feuds
within the army and the government.
Stilwell wanted to clean out the deadwood, the incompetent,
and the corrupt from the command. It was impossible to fight the
Japanese with an army so sick and hungry, so shockingly led and
brutally mistreated as the Chinese soldiery of 1944. In Burma,
Stilwell had taken the dross of the troops left from the campaign
of 1942 and hammered them into the metal of war; his technique
had been brutally simple but sound beyond any challenge. He had
fed, armed, trained, and clothed them, and the Chinese officers
of the army in northern Burma had come to understand the use
of a modern supply system and had learned the craft of aggressive
leadership. Stilwell had taken these troops into the jungle, given
them personal leadership, and confirmed them in victory and
confidence. For two years he had tried to develop within the
greater mass of the Chinese army in its own country an elite
similar to the corps he had forged in Burma. He had had to
203
bargain at every step, with indifferent success, for paper agree-
ment to what was indisputably necessary, and even when com-
mitments were reduced to paper, little resulted in deed.
The Chinese had agreed even before Pearl Harbour to permit
Americans to train an army of thirty divisions in modern methods
and techniques, but they did not even designate the divisions on
paper for eight months after the agreement was made. They
promised Stilwell men of first-class physique for his campaigns of
attack in Burma and on the Salween; 50 per cent of the miserable,
crippled, undernourished men sent to the American depots had
to be rejected at their first medical examinations. Though the
Chinese had promised enough troops to keep Stilwell's assault
divisions up to strength, he was thousands short in Burma, tens
of thousands short on the Salween, in the fall of 1944. Stilwell had
demanded in 1942 an adequate diet for at least those units of the
Chinese army that were at the front. Eighteen months later his
urgings had resulted only in the addition of a pound of meat and
several pounds of beans a month to the rice-and-salt diet of the
Chinese troops, and even this improvement was limited to a few
select divisions on the Salween.
The Americans sought Chiang K'ai-shek's permission to send
a military intelligence team to Yenan. The military information
that the Communists had was vital to the over-all war against
Japan. The Communists controlled 90,000,000 people, their in-
formation network ran beyond the gates of Manchuria, and their
knowledge of Japanese troop dispositions and movements was
invaluable to our own military security. It was a full year before
the Kuomintang, in the summer of 1944, finally consented to the
establishment of an American military observation mission in
Yenan.
All of these and dozens of small matters formed the substance
of repeated ill-tempered, patience-wearing bouts of bargaining
between Chinese and Americans. By the summer of 1944, with
the military crisis at its highest pitch, it was obvious that no
solution for the increasingly desperate situation could be found
through the routine channels of bargain and compromise. Quick
decisions were required, and Stilwell had decided that he could
fulfil his function only if he had the same sweeping authority of
command over Chinese troops in China that he possessed and
utilized successfully in the jungles of Burma.
While Stilwell was forming his conclusions from experience with
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the machinery of Chinese military administration, Ambassador
Gauss had been arriving at similar fundamental conclusions from
experience with Chinese politics. Gauss resembled Stilwell in
many respects. He was blunt and outspoken; he had a contempt
for shams and forms; his apparent tartness concealed an inner
shyness. These qualities seemed unfortunate; Chinese sought
comfort and warmth from America. The ambassador, they felt,
should be like one bearing fruits and sympathy to a sickbed; they
wished to be cherished and sustained, for they were suffering. Gauss
offered them instead the cold, intelligent aid of a skilful surgeon
who knows the knife must be applied before recovery can begin.
The political situation to which the ambassador addressed him-
self was a complete deadlock between the government and the
Communists. Those who had the Generalissimo's ear were zealots
who had made a career out of their hatred of the Communists.
While Stilwell pleaded for more troops to fight the Japanese,
politics kept twenty divisions of the finest government armies
inactive in the north to guard the blockade about the Com-
munist base area. A black censorship suppressed all criticism of the
government; secret police silenced the voices of protest. The
screen of censorship sheltered the triumvirate of Ch'en Li-fu,
Ho Ying-ch'in, and H. H. Kung, impervious to attack; anyone
who dared suggest they be removed was labelled a tool of Com-
munist or Japanese propaganda. Meanwhile honest men in
government administration were being devoured by inflation.
Salaries of officials remained fixed, and the exiles of Chungking
found themselves trapped between skyrocketing prices and semi-
static salaries. Prices stood at 500 times their prewar level and
were still rising. Planes hauled bales of banknotes, printed in
America, across the Hump by the ton, and the government
pumped the new currency into circulation at the rate of
$5,000,000,000 Chinese a month. All this affected American
policy. Within one year, while prices tripled, government pro-
ductive bureaux were limited to budget increases of only 20 per
cent. The ordnance department of the Chinese army found it
easier and cheaper to get copper from American Lend-Lease,
airborne over the Hump, than to purchase it from the govern-
ment's own factories within a hundred miles of the armament
plants. Government steel plants were operating at only 20 per
cent of capacity, because army arsenals could not afford to buy
the finished steel for conversion into arms.
205
Through the summer of 1944 the American Embassy kept
pressing matters that seemed undebatable a clean and vigorous
administration, unity, thorough-going reform. The American
Embassy already foresaw the bitterness that was to mature the
next year in full-fledged civil war. It urged Chiang to create a
representative government for China to express the will of all
groups and all parties, to let fresh air into the close atmosphere of
its one-party dictatorship. Shrewdly assessing America's own self-
interest, Gauss urged Chiang to come to some sort of friendly
agreement with the Russians in order that China itself might not
become a bone of contention in some future Russian-American
rivalry. The pleadings of Gauss and Stilwell fell on deaf ears.
In August 1944 President Roosevelt packaged all the problems
of China into a neat bundle and handed it to the famous Hurley-
Nelson mission. This, mission had sweeping presidential authority
to consider every detail of the China crisis. Both men were
Roosevelt's personal emissaries. Donald Nelson was to offer the
donkey a carrot to make it move, while Patrick J. Hurley was to
push it from behind. Nelson was a one-man comfort corps offering
a blueprint for the future that seemed one step short of Paradise.
He was to survey China's war industries and her economic
structure, devise ways and means of increasing production, find
out what American supplies China needed, determine how
American technical specialists could be best used, and investigate
possibilities of postwar trade and investment. He was eminently
suited for the task. Hurley, a wealthy lawyer from Oklahoma,
had the far more difficult assignment of harmonizing relations
between Chiang and Stilwell, securing the appointment of Stilwell
as commander in chief of all the Chinese armies, and settling the
political deadlock between the Communists and the Central
Government; it was a stupendous order.
.The two arrived in Chungking early in September 1944 with
a minimum of ceremony. Both were tired by their long trip from
the States, and they were whisked away to a new and sumptuously
appointed residence specially prepared for them, where the ex-
cook of Shanghai's finest hotel stood ready to serve them. That
evening Stilwell, Gauss, Hurley, and Nelson conferred for an hour
and a half, with Gauss analysing the complex China situation.
Gauss was to accompany Hurley and Nelson to their first inter-
view with the Generalissimo the next day, which proved a
206
rousing success. Hurley assured the Generalissimo that the
American government stood behind Chiang personally all the
way and that the mission had been sent simply to aid him and
China. The Generalissimo liked Hurley immediately, and a
friendship was born.
The accelerating demoralization in eastern China lent urgency
to the demands of the American emissaries. Chiang K'ai-shek was
desperate for supply and support. Both Nelson and Hurley as-
sured him that American aid would be forthcoming in greater
quantities than ever before; all they required was Chiang's assent
to certain new formulas. Within a fortnight the Generalissimo had
accepted Stilwell as commander in chief of all Chinese armies and
signified his acceptance by a formal letter to Stilwell. The grant
of authority to Stilwell was sweeping; it gave authority to promote
and demote, reward and punish, transfer and reorganize troops,
all as he saw fit. The Generalissimo explained that from now on,
as commander in chief of all armies in China, Stilwell's work
would probably be 60 per cent military and 40 per cent political.
At last it seemed as if all Chinese soldiers, Communist and
Kuomintang, war lord and guerrilla, were to be streamlined under
one co-ordinated control.
The grant of authority was made in mid-September during the
week of breakthrough north of Kweilin, and Stilwell promptly
flew to Kweilin to survey the disaster. He decided to blow all but
one air strip at Kweilin and to use the last remaining bomber
runway until the last moment to fly supplies to the defending
troops who were digging in for a final stand. To Stilwell with his
new authority the field of battle seemed charged with hope. He
conferred with the commander of the Kweilin area, General
Chang Fa-kwei. General Chang consented, with only one
condition, to a final summoning of energies for a counter attack
to disorganize the Japanese before their ultimate assault on
Kweilin. The condition was that Stilwell should return to the
scene of operation, supervise it personally, and by showing him-
self to the unhappy, beaten Chinese troops inspire them to a
supreme effort. Stilwell, consenting, hurried back to Chungking
to confer with the Chinese high command before entering
directly into the fray.
On the flight Stilwell pondered the problems of the campaign
and composed a general memorandum outlining measures not
only for the immediate crisis about Kweilin but for general
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reorganization of the Chinese armies. The note was not meant to
be diplomatic; it was a military document conceived in the
urgency of a brutal campaign and intended for immediate
execution, the first real evidence of what command by an
American could mean. To the Chinese, who had expected a
diplomatic, gradual approach to the problems of command,
Stilwell's language was as startling as a bucket of cold water.
Their sense of affront at its bluntness blocked recognition of the
soundness of the plan. A few days later, while the Chinese were
still considering Stilwell's pressing proposals, a message arrived
from Washington with Roosevelt's signature. Stilwell was ordered
to deliver the message to Chiang K'ai-shek in person.
That evening the Generalissimo was entertaining Hurley and
Nelson at his country estate. Stilwell was announced and in-
formed the Generalissimo that he had a message from President
Roosevelt. Hurley, Stilwell, and the Generalissimo withdrew to
another room, and without a word of explanation Stilwell handed
Chiang a Chinese translation of Roosevelt's note. It was believed
to have been the harshest document that had been delivered to
Chiang in three years of alliance, and to have contained an un-
tempered demand for immediate and sweeping reform and action
to cope with the military crisis. Chiang read the message in stony
silence, with his knee trembling nervously. Some desultory
conversation followed, in which Stilwell mentioned certain minor
administrative details and skirted perilously around the burden
of the message itself. Stilwell left shortly in an atmosphere of frigid
formality while Chiang privately indulged in one of his famous
rages. He declared to his intimates that he did not need America;
if need be, he could go along on his own without American aid.
The Generalissimo's wrath was incandescent.
For a few days conversations hung suspended. The Japanese
closed about Kweilin. The campaigns on the Salween and in
northern Burma stuttered along on pure momentum. All things
waited upon decision in Chungking. What went on within the
mind of Chiang K'ai-shek is a matter of purest speculation. For
years he had disliked Stilwell. He had seen in Stilwell's creation of
a new Chinese army in Burma the erection of a machine that
threatened the nature of his control. Stilwell's handling of Lend-
Lease had annoyed him; to Chiang, Lend-Lease was a gift that
he knew best how to use, but Stilwell insisted on wringing out of
Lend-Lease and out of his own control of the American air force
208
the last possible ounce of concession from the Chinese staff. In
Chiang's eyes America was a generous comrade nation.
Roosevelt was friendly; Madame Chiang had come back from
Washington in triumph. Hurley and Chennault were both close
to his heart. The chief shadow on Chinese-American relations,
for Chiang, must have been Stilwell's personality.
Chiang was fully aware of Stilwell's popularity not only with
Chinese liberals but with the Communists. Stilwell's repeated
pressure for use of the Communist armies against Japan and for
the ending of the blockade seemed to Chiang to be part of a
political plot to undermine his government. He had given Stilwell
command of the Chinese armies, and now Stilwell presented him
first with a harsh document calling for total overhaul of his
military machine and next with a note from Washington that
seemed outrageous. To Chiang the note signed by Roosevelt must
have seemed like the handiwork of Stilwell himself, the ultimate
twisting of the knife. It was obvious that Stilwell in command
meant not only a new army but a new China. Chiang had made
paper promises for years ; now they were to be shoved down his
throat. It was true that only a few days before he had consented to
StilweU's command, but now, in his inmost heart, he found that he
could not go through with it. His own word had to be repudiated.
When the Generalissimo's reply came, it was transmitted to
Hurley for communication to the United States government. It
was sharp and to the point. He was through with Stilwell not only
as commander in chief but in any capacity whatsoever in China.
The original agreement had been made, the Generalissimo said,
when he believed that the American proposition called for
Stilwell's appointment to command under himself as chief of
state. "All this ended/' said the note, " when it was made manifest
to me that General Stilwell had no intention of co-operating with
me but believed in fact that he was appointed to command over
me." So much for his word as chief of state. The note struck
consternation into the American negotiators. Stilwell was urgent
for settling at some lesser level he knew that the Philippine
landing was scheduled within a month and that /high strategy
required China to exert the utmost pressure from the continent
in order to reduce the pressure MacArthur would encounter.
Stilwell wanted action. He suggested that the Communist issue be
dropped entirely from the conversations, that both Americans
and Chinese concentrate on creating a limited but efficient
He 209
striking force of Central Government troops in the south-west.
Chiang was adamant; he would not budge in his request for
Stilwell's removal.
At this point a completely unexpected twist was given to the
entire negotiations. Daddy Kung was in America at that time,
and in his usual well-meaning way and with his usual maladroit
administrative genius he entered the crisis. At a dinner party he
had met and chatted with Harry Hopkins; he asked what
Roosevelt planned to do about Stilwell. Whatever Hopkins said,
Kung understood him to have replied that if Chiang insisted, the
President would remove Stilwell. Kung pounced on this juicy
morsel of good news and cabled it with instant speed to
Chungking. The negotiations had been a well-kept secret in
Chungking, and not even the highest circles of the Kuomintang
understood how bitter the deadlock had grown. But now the
Generalissimo, feeling that he had won, summoned the Standing
Committee of the Kuomintang and unburdened himself. He in-
formed them that he had agreed to have an American commander
in chief in China, because China could trust America, but that
under no circumstances would he permit that commander in
chief to be General Stilwell; if America insisted, he would go it
alone, retreating farther into the mountains with his loyal
divisions before the Japanese advance.
The Standing Committee met regularly in strictest secrecy on
Monday afternoons. It usually took anywhere from three days to
a week before their discussions leaked about, but the electric
revelation of the Generalissimo's willingness to break with
America over Stilwell flashed about town with unprecedented
swiftness. By evening the American Embassy whose in-
formation, under Gauss, was swift and highly accurate had
heard the story and informed the negotiators of it. It was bad
news, for if the Generalissimo had committed himself irrevocably
to his inner circle, he could not retract without ruindtis loss of
prestige. The Americans frantically wired Washington for con-
firmation or denial of the Hopkins story. Hopkins wired back
that he had been misquoted; he had informed Kung that before
Roosevelt took any action on Stilwell, he would have to consult
carefully with General George Marshall. But it was too late; too
many people in the Chinese government knew that the
Generalissimo had committed himself on the Stilwell matter, and
nothing could make him change his mind.
210
Roosevelt tried to compromise. He yielded on America's
demand for Stilwell's appointment as commander in chief and
requested only that Stilwell should be given whatever support
was necessary for opening the Burma Road, and should not be
removed from China. Hurley delivered the message, which was
received in stony silence. Chiang could not be moved. He had
two points: first, so long as he was head of the state there could be
no question about his right to remove any officer from China;
and second, he no longer reposed confidence in Stilwell's military
judgment. According to Chiang, Stilwell had drained China dry
of man-power and resources for the Salween-Burma campaign,
while eastern China fell without support ; Stilwell had been absent
from China too long and derelict in his duties as chief of staff.
Later Hurley repeated Chiang's remarks to one of the authors as
if he believed them. Stilwell's defence against Chiang's charges
could not be made public, but it was unchallengeable.
First, it was true that a request for appointment of a foreigner
as commander in chief of China's armies was a breach of China's
sovereignty. But Chiang had made no objection to this violation of
sovereignty so long as he felt it would result in strengthening his
position within China; he objected only after it became clear that
Americanization of his army meant an end to the system of
bureaucracy and corruption that controlled it. It was impossible
to clean up the Chinese army without eventually cleaning up
Chinese politics; Chiang was not great enough to do the task
himself or to permit others to do it.
Second, it was true that Stilwell had concentrated great forces
for the prosecution of the Burma-Salween campaign. But in
China there existed only two strategic concentrations of man-
power that might have furnished enough strength to slow or halt
the Japanese drive in eastern China. One army was engaged on
the Salween against the Japanese; the other, in the north, was
guarding the Communist blockade. Both were at the command
of the Central Government, but the maintenance of the Com-
munist blockade was a project mu 
