Morale improved in subsequent months. Chen Kewen’s spirits were lifted when he heard marching soldiers bellow ‘The March of the Volunteers’, a patriotic song composed in 1935, which became widely popular and is now the PRC’s national anthem.49 He was impressed with Chiang Kaishek’s determined attitude. Looking tired but resolute, Chiang kept an audience of a thousand people spellbound at a Sun Yatsen memorial meeting, insisting that the fight would continue and that no compromise with Japan was possible: ‘such a supreme commander will lift the spirit of the broad masses,’ Chen wrote.50 A New Year’s Day lecture by Chiang in the city’s auditorium brought tears to his eyes.51 Theatres staged patriotic plays such as ‘Night Light Cup’, a story about a son who wishes to join the war but whose mother wants him to work to pay off the family debts. In cinemas, newsreels reported on Japanese bombing attacks before showing feature films such as the movie version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.52 The radio broadcasted ‘war reports and heroic marches’.53 Chen’s resolve to do his best for his government and country strengthened: ‘if we organise ourselves,’ he wrote, referring to the thousands of people like himself in government jobs who had to make the system work, ‘then after a hundred defeats we shall be able to gain the final victory.’54 He spent his days doing his job, going to dinners, playing cards and reading, including Darwin, H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come and Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World, a seventeenth-century novel by Pu Songling critical of the corruption of his time and pessimistic about the future. The Bible, according to Chen, was selling briskly.55
Chiang reached for his inner Brutus to toughen military spines. He convened a meeting of senior officers of the First and Fifth War Zones of north China on 11 January 1938. He talked at length about the lack of discipline, the looting by China’s own soldiers, the failure of divisional commanders to coordinate their actions and the general disregard for central orders. Chiang singled out for criticism the military governor of Shandong province, General Han Fuju, who had simply withdrawn when a few ‘second-rate’ Japanese divisions entered his province. That move endangered the Fifth War Zone, in between north China and the Yangzi delta and a forward defence for Wuhan. When the meeting drew to a close, General Han was arrested.56 He was charged with disobedience and sent to Wuhan, where he was condemned to death by a court martial on which sat generals Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi of the Guangxi Clique, generals Chen Cheng and Hu Zongnan for the Nationalists, and his former patron, General Feng Yuxiang. The trial was meant to symbolise the unanimity of Chiang Kaishek and his allies and drive home their determination to fight the Japanese. General Han Fuju was executed with a bullet to the back of his head.
Chiang Kaishek also wanted to make an example of General Liu Xiang of Sichuan province. The Nationalists had long planned to retreat there, but now they needed to be sure they could do so. Ill in hospital in Wuhan, General Liu was confronted with evidence that he had conspired with General Han Fuju and died shortly afterwards.57 Anyone in Sichuan thinking about resisting the Nationalists had been put on notice. Chen Kewen believed that the deaths of generals Han Fuju and Liu Xiang would meet with popular approval. General Liu Xiang, he stated, had died ‘at the right time and in the right place’, with some of his forces at the front and he himself in Wuhan at the centre of resistance.58
On 15 January 1938, Japanese prime minister Konoye Fumimaro declared that ‘the Imperial Government will not deal with the National Government hereafter’.59 Japan’s decision to end intense back-door negotiations must go down in history as one of the greatest foreign policy blunders of any Axis power. By assigning the Nationalists to the dust heap of history while significant Nationalist figures wanted to sue for peace, Konoye ensured that the best option for many became to stick with Chiang Kaishek. All those who depended on the Nationalists, including China’s financial elites, also had solid reason to continue to support the Nationalists. Their holdings of Nationalist currency would lose their value if the Nationalists were just cast aside.
The Guangxi Clique and the Communists provided invaluable help in stiffening morale. General Li Zongren spoke with determination at press meetings, pushed his subordinates hard and brought a large part of his Guangxi Army to the Fifth War Zone. In Wuhan, General Bai Chongxi stated in a lecture to KMT party workers that ‘300,000 deaths is nothing. In the European War no country lost less than thirty plus million men’, thus preparing them for the sacrifices that would be demanded of them.60
At this time the Communists followed the policy ‘Everything for the united front’. Some of their most prominent figures were in Wuhan, including Wang Ming, the Party secretary at the time, and Zhou Enlai. They published the New China Daily, which proclaimed Communist support for the Nationalists and the war. They joined mass rallies where they praised their Nationalist colleagues and insisted that Wuhan had to be defended as Madrid had been in the Spanish Civil War.61 Diary of an Army Enlistee by the famous left-wing author Xie Bingying circulated in Wuhan, as did she herself, speaking at many rallies. The famous Communist author, intellectual and archaeologist Guo Moruo rushed to Wuhan from Japan, where he had been living with his Japanese wife and children. In Wuhan he published poems and essays, spoke at public gatherings and joined rallies.62
The presence of many eminent foreigners buttressed morale, too. The writers Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, the journalists Edgar Snow, George Taylor, Jack Belden and Michael Lindsay, German advisors such as Alexander von Falkenhausen, photographers such as Robert Capa and V. Rogov, and the activist and journalist Agnes Smedley were all there. ‘History, grown weary of Shanghai, bored with Barcelona, has fixed her capricious interests upon Hankow,’ wrote Auden and Isherwood.63 (Hankow is part of Wuhan, which is in fact made up of three cities.) With the eyes of the world fixed on Wuhan, and with world sympathy on China’s side, suing for peace became difficult.
A significant victory buoyed spirits. Following the falls of Shanghai and Nanjing, the defence of Wuhan became the focus of Nationalist strategy. Forces were deployed in the outer approaches to Wuhan in north and south China, barriers were constructed at three strategic points along the Yangzi river and several rings of fortified defences were thrown up around the city.64 General Li Zongren, commanding the Fifth War Zone, blocked Japanese approach routes from north China and Shandong province. After the decision was made in early January 1938 to try to stop the Japanese from moving on Wuhan through Shandong, troop numbers there were increased from 80,000 to 300,000.65
As had happened after the Battle of Shanghai, Japanese action on the ground undermined General Staff orders ‘not to be dragged into expanding operational areas and becoming trapped’.66 Claiming that they needed to pursue fleeing Nationalist forces in order to pacify occupied areas, Japanese ground forces swung into action, aiming to clear the Tianjin–Nanjing railway, converge at Xuzhou and cut all lines of retreat for Nationalist forces in the Fifth War Zone. The advance of General Hata Shunroku’s 13th Division from the south was stopped at the broad Huai river, which cuts through the north China plain from west to east. In the north, General Itagaki Seishiro’s 5th Division was brought to a halt at Linyi in south Shandong province. The Nationalists poured reinforcements into the Fifth War Zone, including General Tang Enbo’s four powerful German-trained divisions. Japan’s 10th Division, led by General Isogai Rensuke, overconfident from a series of quick victories in Shandong, advanced from the north-west towards Xuzhou, hoping to unlock the battlefield. But they became trapped at Taierzhuang, 60 kilometres north-east of Xuzhou, between defenders in the town itself and General Tang Enbo’s forces to their rear and on their flank. On 7 April, the units having lost contact with each other and having incurred between 10,000 and 20,000 casualties between them, General Isogai ordered a retreat.67
Wuhan erupted. ‘A million and a half Chinese in this temporary capital tonight jubilantly celebrated China’s first decisive victory,’ reported the Washington Post.68 The city ‘has gone wild with excitement’, according to The T
imes.69 Chinese newspapers had been hailing the exploits of the Fifth War Zone for days; they issued special editions on the day of the victory. When Chen Kewen learned of it, he ‘ecstatically embraced’ a friend. Hundreds of thousands of people joined a victory parade that evening, while General Feng Yuxiang published a poem in which he called the Japanese ‘soft-shelled turtles in a jar’ and predicted that all Japanese forces would be driven from China ‘before the spring wheat turns yellow’.70 In his memoir, General Chen Cheng, now the commander-in-chief of the Wuhan Garrison Command, compared the Taierzhuang victory to the Battle of Tannenberg, the famous August 1914 battle in which the German commander, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, and his deputy, Erich Ludendorff, trapped and destroyed an advancing Russian army.71
The victory could not have come at a better time for the Nationalists. A KMT emergency conference opened on 29 March to rally supporters, convince the general population that they had a plan for the future and to broaden the base for the war. The conference adopted a provisional constitution that linked war to national redemption. ‘The Three People’s Principles and the Last Testament of Sun Yatsen are our guides in fighting Japanese aggression and remaking the country,’ it declared.72 The constitution presented China’s war with Japan as part of a global ‘fight for peace and justice in the world’. It also established a National Political Consultative Conference to ‘unite all forces in the country’,73 and promised ‘full safeguards for freedom of speech, publication, assembly and association’. The conference appointed Chiang Kaishek as Director General of the KMT, adding the party portfolio to the army and government ones he already possessed.74 The Chinese press welcomed the constitution as ‘substantially in agreement with wishes expressed in various quarters over the last half year’.75 The Communist Party instructed its members to ‘adopt an attitude of active support’.76
The first meeting of the National Political Consultative Conference, presented in the foreign press as China’s national assembly, took place in July. It had a 200-person membership, made up of eighty-eight provincial representatives selected for their local stature, as well as important non-KMT intellectuals, politicians, artists and entrepreneurs. These included Communist luminaries such as Mao Zedong, Wang Ming and Deng Yingchao, Zhou Enlai’s wife; well-known leaders of smaller parties; the last Confucian, Liang Shuming; Jiang Baili, the strategist who had first called for a war of attrition; the Malay Straits entrepreneur Chen Jiageng (Tan Kah Kee), representing overseas Chinese; and the political scientist Qian Duansheng. It formed, one commentator argued, ‘the best group of people China has had’.77 The conference met four times a year to review both domestic and international policies, call ministers to account and conduct investigations through its committees.78 Although some ridiculed its proceedings as ‘endless meetings, few decisions, and even less action’,79 Chen Kewen’s response was that ‘at least it provides an education in democratic politics’.80
Following the Taierzhuang victory, Nationalist forces counter-attacked. ‘Generalissimo Chiang’s armies, estimated at 500,000 men, were on the offensive at both ends of the Long–Hai railroad’, reported the Washington Post,81 referring to the east–west-running railway in northern China. However, the Japanese General Staff decided that the Taierzhuang victory would not be allowed to stand. Abandoning plans not to expand operational areas in 1938, it poured reinforcements into Xuzhou, bringing the number of Japanese troops deployed there to 400,000.82 New staff officers were dispatched to China to ensure proper coordination. Japanese commanders began to talk about doing to the Chinese what Hannibal had done to the Romans at the Battle of Cannae: encircling and destroying them after a minor tactical setback.83
They did not succeed. Although hard-pressed by Chiang Kaishek to go on the offensive, on 15 May General Li Zongren ordered a retreat before the Japanese could finish the encirclement, telling Chiang, ‘I fear the complete defeat of the enemy will be impossible.’84 Most Fifth War Zone forces retreated from Xuzhou in good order. Li Zongren’s ability to ignore Chiang Kaishek’s orders illustrates a phenomenon described by the historian Stephen MacKinnon: Chiang Kaishek increasingly had to share power over military operations with an older, more established generation of generals who regarded him as a bit of an upstart. These men shared a common background in having studied at China’s military academy at Baoding after the 1911 Revolution; they knew each other well; they had solid local support; and they had vast battlefield experience – although often very little knowledge of recent innovations in equipment, tactics and strategy.85 This development fits with Clausewitz’s observation that chance and the commander becomes more important as war slips from state control.
Wuhan
This brutal phase of the War of Resistance had yet to reach its climax. On 18 June 1938, Tokyo approved a plan to take Wuhan and occupy Canton that summer and autumn.86 Some 400,000 troops, deployed in two armies, amassed for the assault on Wuhan. They faced 800,000 Chinese troops in two war zones, the Fifth War Zone under General Li Zongren as before and the Ninth, south of the Yangzi river, under General Chen Cheng. While Japanese ground forces advanced along four lines of approach, its navy, making use of the high levels of the Yangzi during the summer months, also joined the fray.
The Battle of Wuhan began on 14 June, when the Japanese seized the city of Anqing, about 100 kilometres upriver from Nanjing, after just one day of fighting. Next was the Madang barrier, also on the Yangzi, which the German advisors who had helped in its construction had vouched would hold for three months. It fell within days because the Japanese attacked it from the rear, having landed units upstream. The Nationalist commander charged with defending the area where the Japanese landed was executed after having repeatedly failed to obey orders to attack. Resistance in the Ninth War Zone was tougher, but by the end of July the last major opposition before Wuhan south of the Yangzi had been crushed. In the Fifth War Zone, the Japanese also had to work harder, in September having to battle three weeks in order to advance just 10 kilometres. However, by the end of that month they overcame the last Yangzi river barrier at Tianjiazhen, some 150 kilometres downstream from Wuhan. By this time, in central China another Japanese force had advanced along the Huai river and cut the Beijing–Wuhan railway. Japanese forces could now move on Wuhan from the north, the east and the south, making any further resistance pointless.
Already by late June, Wuhan had begun to empty out, with some of Chen Kewen’s colleagues deciding to return to Beijing and Shanghai.87 They were done with fighting for the Nationalists. If the restaurants of Wuhan had been busy in the first months of the city’s defence, by July they were empty, as beggars and refugees crowded its streets. On 17 July, government personnel were instructed to be prepared to leave the city on ten days’ notice. Following a policy decided the previous December, Chen Kewen’s main task in Wuhan was to facilitate the movement of people, offices, industries, equipment, archives and materiel to Chongqing.88 The Nationalists fought so hard at Xuzhou and defended Wuhan with so many troops that they bought enough time to complete the transfer of people and goods to ‘the rear’, in south-west China.
Chen Kewen left Wuhan on 1 August, his task complete. By this time, the great excitements of the spring had dissipated. In early summer, Mao Zedong published his pamphlet On War of Attrition, in which he argued that both those who maintained that China could prevail over Japan quickly and those who believed that China had no chance of doing so were wrong; China would win, but only after a very long time, and only if it fought according to the principles he espoused. In Chongqing, Chen Kewen found the atmosphere different to that in Wuhan. In Wuhan ‘men and women found it easy to meet and to be together. Chats in coffee shops, conversations in restaurants and cinemas: none of that is possible here.’89 In Chongqing, Chen Kewen soon realised, he would have to live a more Spartan and dangerous life, with no likelihood of a resumption of his Nanjing life any time soon. His May Fourth yearnings would have to be put on hold for the time being.
Scor
ched Earth
On 21 August, Chiang Kaishek and his wife Chiang Meiling set off to Cockerel Mountain, a resort north of Wuhan. Here they prayed and recited the fifth book of Jeremiah’s Lamentations, which grieve for God’s destruction of Jerusalem and bewail his anger with his followers.90 It begins with ‘Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach. Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are orphans and fatherless’ and ends with ‘But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.’ As the pair pondered the wreckage of war, a question that might well have pressed on their minds was whether God’s wrath had been provoked by the destruction caused by Japan’s armed forces or the Nationalists’ own scorched earth policy.
The scorched earth policy was deliberate. As historian Yang Weizhen has pointed out, well before the War of Resistance began, Chinese strategists and commentators had seized upon Russia’s defeat of Napoleon in 1812, when the Russians burned Moscow to the ground, as well as Britain’s use of the policy during the Boer War in South Africa, as promising precedents.91 Antecedents can also be found in Chinese warfare. ‘Clearing the countryside and erecting high walls’ – moving food and people inside walled settlement and destroying the surrounding countryside – was a standard practice in the Chinese military tradition. Already in a speech of April 1936, later published as a pamphlet, General Li Zongren advocated: ‘resist Japan by scorching the earth.’ According to Yang Weizhen, by the time of the Battle of Wuhan, ‘resistance of Japan through a scorched earth policy … had become policy’.92
China at War Page 15
