China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, in a public address made just after his retirement from the post of commander of the US Asiatic fleet, evaluated Japan’s terror bombing as ‘perfectly stupid as a military performance’ because it had done more than anything else ‘to unify China’.84 It would take a long time for that assessment of the impact of terror bombing campaigns on local populations to become generally accepted.

  The Winter Offensive (December 1939–January 1940)

  At the Nanyue Military Conference on 25 November 1938, Chiang declared that in the first phase of the war, up to the Battle of Wuhan, Japan had been ‘lured deep into a battle area advantageous for decisive campaign by our forces’.85 Now, he stated, ‘we will shift from defence to offence and turn defeat into victory’.86 A nationwide offensive in the winter of 1939–40 aimed to put that thought into action.

  On the twenty-eighth anniversary of the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, 10 October 1939, the Nationalist Military Affairs Commission adopted a ‘War Plan for the Winter Offensive of the National Army’.87 The maximum objective was the reconquest of, most importantly, Wuhan, but also of Kaifeng and Jiujiang.88 If that proved unattainable, then large numbers of enemy troops were to be eliminated and a substantial amount of territory liberated. The offensive’s operational strategy was straightforward: the Yangzi river was to be blocked to deprive the Imperial Japanese Army’s 11th Army at Wuhan of supplies and reinforcements; troops in the Wuhan region would then attack the 11th Army, while all other forces across China, including Nationalist guerrilla forces, would cut railway lines as well as highways and harass the Japanese to prevent relief forces from being able to make their way to Wuhan. Like so many military campaigns, the winter offensive had political as well as purely military objectives. Coming in the aftermath of Wang Jingwei’s defection and in the run-up to the inauguration of Wang’s government, it was meant to serve as a clear demonstration of the continued ability of the Nationalists to mobilise forces across the country.

  Following the Nanyue conference, the Nationalists rearranged their forces in eight war zones and two large guerrilla zones. The two most important war zones, the Fifth War Zone in north Hubei, west Anhui and south Henan province, and the Ninth War Zone in the provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi, were to surround the 11th Army. The Tenth War Zone in Shaanxi province protected the cotton and wheat-producing region, defended the Tongguan Pass critical to the security of north-west China, and kept an eye on the Communist base area of Yan’an to the north. The Eighth War Zone operated in the region bordering Mongolia, with its complex ethnic make-up. General Yan Xishan’s Second War Zone invested the Zhongtiao mountains in south Shanxi province. South China was only lightly defended because it was thought, erroneously as it turned out, that the Japanese were unlikely to attack this area because that risked premature conflict with Western empires.

  The distribution of Nationalist forces in far-flung war zones across China compelled the Japanese to spread their nearly 1 million troops across the country and ensured that no single Japanese offensive could deliver a decisive blow. War zones were located in agriculturally productive areas with large populations to simplify supply and help with recruitment. Generals with strong local ties served as local commanders, while the central forces, which were invariably better armed, were led by generals loyal to Chiang Kaishek.

  Two events that happened during the summer of 1939 suggest that the Japanese were vulnerable. Firstly, the Soviet General Georgy Zhukov, later the hero of the Battle of Stalingrad, inflicted an embarrassing defeat on the Kuantung Army at the Battle of Nomonhan, a border war fought on the Mongolia– Manchuria border involving hundreds of aeroplanes and tanks. But Germany’s decision to sign a non-aggression treaty with Japan’s main enemy, the Soviet Union, on 23 August, came as an utter shock to Japan. The failure of 11th Army units to capture Changsha that autumn was a further disaster. In 1939 shortages also compelled Japan to introduce rationing.89 Chiang, always on the look-out for the fortuitous moment that might radically alter a situation, had good reason to think that a counter-offensive might stand a chance.

  Initially, the Winter Offensive scored some stunning successes. Suddenly, all across China, from Shaanxi in the north-west all the way to Guangdong and Guangxi in the south, Japanese officials and soldiers lay dead, Japanese buildings were burning and Japanese military units were under fire. General Okamura Yasuji, commander-in-chief of the 11th Army, was shocked: ‘We have never seen the Chinese army undertake such a large-scale and determined attack.’90 On 20 December, the Chinese ambassador to the USA told President Roosevelt that China had begun ‘a widespread offensive against the Japanese on all fronts’ and that he ‘was confident we may hear of some victory soon’.91

  Unlike the 1968 Tet Offensive – the surprise nationwide attack on South Vietnamese and US positions during the Vietnam War – the Winter Offensive made no lasting impact. The performance of Third War Zone forces was woeful. They stopped their attempt to block the Yangzi river after only three days, despite facing just one Japanese division in dispersed formation along a 25-kilometre front and despite also having been supplied with extra heavy artillery and being supported by diversionary attacks on the cities of Nanchang and Hangzhou.92 Also, the main supply line of the 11th Army in the Wuhan region was not severed, a major setback.

  Clashes between forces under General Yan Xishan, who had controlled Shanxi province since the 1911 Revolution, and the Communists, who had used the War of Resistance to build up their strength in the area, blunted the efforts of the Second War Zone, tasked with clearing the Zhongtiao mountains. The plan called for a main offensive led by General Wei Lihuang with three armies, supported by Communist forces led by General Zhu De, who were to block two mountain passes into Shanxi and prevent Japanese relief forces from entering the province. This operation fell apart when General Yan Xishan and the Communist forces came to blows.93

  The fatal blow was a surprise invasion of Guangxi province in the south by the Imperial Japanese Army’s 5th Division. Its aim was to sever the Hanoi–Kunming railway by which military materiel was transported to the Nationalists. The Japanese landed at Pakhoi on the south China coast on 15 November. A week later, they captured the provincial capital of Nanning, from where they advanced north to the Kunlun Pass, threatening General Long Yun’s Yunnan province. A political objective of the Japanese invasion was to put pressure on generals in south China, such as Long Yun, and suggest to them that joining Wang Jingwei might be a better option for them.

  Chiang Kaishek ordered south no fewer than nineteen divisions from the Ninth War Zone, including General Du Lüming’s 200th Division, China’s only fully mechanised division, thus upending the Ninth War Zone’s plans for attacking the 11th Army. The battle for the Kunlun Pass raged for the next few weeks. The Nationalists were victorious there, but failed in their drive towards Nanning. On 26 December, Nationalist spokesmen ‘conceded’ Japanese claims that their hold over Nanning was secure.94 It was clear that Japan’s invasion of Guangxi province had spiked the Winter Offensive.95

  Despite the disappointing denouement, the Winter Offensive had one positive result for Chiang Kaishek. General Li Zongren of the Guangxi Clique had become a national hero in the first year of the war, feted for the Taierzhuang victory. The disaster in Guangxi diminished the stature of the Guangxi Clique and reduced its war-making potential.

  The Winter Offensive had been a bold attempt to go on the attack, embarrass the Japanese and seize the strategic initiative. It came after two-thirds of Nationalist forces had been retrained and re-equipped. After it failed, the prospects of a second Nationalist military build-up were remote. Shortages were beginning to be felt everywhere. Japanese bombing had destroyed much of Sichuan’s small industrial base. The KMT was demoralised and widely derided as ineffectual, a criticism which Chiang Kaishek wholeheartedly and frequently endorsed and which had led him to found a new party, the Youth Party, intended as an alternative to the Chinese Communist Party for China’s youth.
Importing weapons and ammunition had also become impossible. The Japanese blockaded the coast. In the summer of 1940, Britain, afraid of angering the Japanese as it struggled to survive German attacks, even closed the Burma Road. The Soviet Union, having pocketed an armistice with Japan, reduced its support for the Nationalists. The Nationalists had few options left other than to keep going and hope for positive changes in the international situation.

  Nightmare visions of scarcity in land and resources had driven Japan to seek the occupation of first Manchuria and then north China. But rather than solving such perceived shortages, Japan’s occupation of ever more territory intensified them. In essence, Japan ended up becoming responsible for the feeding of an extra 100 million people living in areas that depended on food imports. While most Nationalist forces were stationed in food surplus regions, Japan itself, Manchuria, north China, the lower Yangzi and Canton regions and Wuhan were all net food-importing regions. Already in 1939, shortages in north China led to calls for imports from Japan, the opposite of what had been intended. That year Japan shipped in 6 million bags of rice from Australia. By 1941, rations in Japan were reduced to 330 grams of cereal per day.96

  In the face of the reality that China was not proving to be the solution to Japan’s resource problems and that the Nationalists had not submitted and nor were they likely to, Japan had two options: go after Chiang Kaishek and utterly defeat him, which required a massive increase in troop numbers and a denuding of the Kuantung Army facing the Soviets in Manchuria, or withdraw. The latter option was difficult because the Japanese population had been fed stories of great victories and a bright new Japanese-style future spreading all over east Asia.97 The Japanese government was faced with a difficult choice.

  The Imperial Japanese Army’s Yichang Operation of spring 1940 underlined the problem. Tokyo decided on a temporary troop surge to degrade Nationalist combat capacity before beginning a draw-down to 500,000 troops at the end of the year, and a further reduction by 100,000 persons each of the following two years. Two additional divisions were allocated to the 11th Army, which was ordered to clean out the Fifth War Zone and seize Yichang. On 1 May, three Japanese divisions thrust into northern Hubei, seeking out the 31st Army Group commanded by General Tang Enbo, the general loyal to Chiang Kaishek and a key contributor to the Nationalist victories at Taierzhuang in the spring of 1938 and at the Kunlun Pass the previous year. General Tang adopted a tactic, whose usefulness had been proven several times before, of falling back until the Japanese reached their objectives and began to return to their jumping-off points, then to fall on their flanks. General Zhang Zizhong, one of the heroes of the Shanghai campaign, led his forces into the battle area from the east, tempting two Japanese divisions away from General Tang’s forces. General Tang mauled the remaining one, causing 4,000 casualties.

  The Japanese regrouped and inflicted heavy defeats on Fifth War Zone forces, but controversy then erupted among 11th Army commanders about whether to return to Wuhan or continue on to Yichang. The expansionists won the day and on 12 June Yichang fell into Japanese hands. Five days later, they departed as planned after having tipped tons of food and captured weapons into the Yangzi river, only to be ordered back again after Hitler’s triumphs in Europe convinced Imperial General Headquarters to order the permanent occupation of Yichang.98

  This level of prevarication underscored the fact that Japan had begun to act opportunistically rather than in line with a considered long-range plan. A Communist offensive, the largest of the war, which lasted through the autumn, illustrated that even if the Nationalists could somehow be forced to the negotiating table, Japan’s problems in China would still be far from over. In what was called the Hundred Regiments Offensive, a large number of small Communist units attacked Japanese forces all over north China between 20 August and 5 December, fighting back against Japanese pacification campaigns and convincing Chiang Kaishek that they were serious about resisting Japan.99 Once Japan tried and failed to bomb the Nationalists to the negotiating table for the second time, in the summer of 1941, it had become clear that regime change had run its course. Japan was stuck.

  Momentous times create heroes. General Zhang Zizhong died on the afternoon of 16 May 1940, in north Hubei, while resisting the Japanese push to Yichang. When the news reached Chiang Kaishek in Chongqing, he was, his diary records, ‘deeply distressed’ and immediately ordered General Li Zongren to recover General Zhang’s body and move it to Chongqing. Further reports declared that when Zhang died he had been leading an attack, had suffered wounds to his arms and chest but had refused to be taken behind the lines, instead insisting that his forces move on ‘for the country, for our people, for our commander-in-chief. My conscience is now at peace. Kill the enemy to revenge their evil.’100 When the Japanese discovered who they had killed – the most senior Chinese general to die during the Second World War – they gave him a respectful burial. When Nationalist units recovered his bodily remains, they were treated with herbs, dressed in a new uniform, placed in a hardwood coffin and transported to Chongqing, first in a truck and then on a steamer up the Yangzi.101 As the news spread, people came out in their hundreds and even thousands, so reports claim, bowing, setting off firecrackers and offering incense, flowers and fruit, with one woman preparing a bowl of noodles ‘to make General Zhang a good northern meal’.102

  Chiang Kaishek, surrounded by his highest officials, welcomed the general’s coffin at one of Chongqing’s gates. It was transported to the north Chongqing suburb of Beipei, where a temporary tomb was being prepared to serve as General Zhang’s resting place until such time as his home town was recovered and he could be buried there. Soon he was being compared to China’s most famous hero of the past, General Yue Fei, who in the twelfth century had battled to ‘win back our lakes and mountains, our streams and plains’ from northern invaders, only to be murdered on the orders of a peace-mongering official of the Song Dynasty, Qin Hui. Zhang Zizhong’s Chongqing tomb became the site for annual sacrifices, his story became the subject of popular songs, one of China’s most famous authors produced a play about his heroics, memorial tablets to him were placed in shrines across the country, and a suburb of Yichang and even a whole county were renamed after him.103

  The founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu, now living in exile in Chongqing having been expelled from the Party, produced a memorial scroll with the line ‘it is after winter’s cold that we know the pine tree and the cypress’, in a reference to Confucius’s Analects, China’s most important classical text, meaning that a person’s true character stands revealed only after facing the hardest test, just as pine trees and cypresses will not shed their green even after the severest winter cold. This was apposite because General Zhang Zizhong, who was one of the north China generals, had fled from Tianjin when the Japanese approached the city, even though he was its mayor. But he redeemed himself, first at the Battle of Taierzhuang and then during the Yichang Operation, in both cases cooperating with Chiang loyalist General Tang Enbo. The contrast with the behaviour of Wang Jingwei and Yan Xishan was clear, which is no doubt why Chiang decided to foster a Zhang Zizhong cult.

  Momentous times also create villains. Wang Jingwei died in a hospital in Nagoya in Japan on 10 November 1944 and was buried on Purple Mountain in a concrete grave with a view of Sun Yatsen. His mourners knew what would happen, and it did. Upon their return to Nanjing the following year, the Nationalists blasted open his tomb, dug up his body and dumped it in the Yangzi river.104 Any vestige of Wang’s existence was eradicated. When I visited in 2005, there was a sculpture of Wang and his wife, Chen Bijun, at his gravesite. It had the Wangs kneeling, head bowed in shame in the direction of the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum, arms tied together behind their backs, with a fence around it, just like the statues of Qin Hui and his wife outside the temple dedicated to Yue Fei in Hangzhou. Wang was to stand condemned as the Qin Hui of his time.

  The statues of the Wangs are no more, I am told, because Nanjing citizens destroyed the
m repeatedly and local officials became tired of having to repair them. In their place stands a cherry orchard donated by the Japanese. Wang’s poetry remains officially unpublished in China, although it does circulate and is admired for its beauty and sophistication. His poetry earned much praise at the time and was read as suggesting Wang’s essentially honest intentions. One admirer compared his peace campaign to ‘the example of the Buddha feeding his body to a hungry tiger’.105 Had Wang lived to see the end of the war, the Nationalists in Sichuan, who by then were in an extremely weak position, would likely have offered him a deal to facilitate their return to Nanjing. Consequently his reputation would have been different, as it would be for Indo-nesia’s Soekarno, the Philippines’s Manuel Roxas, India’s Subhas Chandre Bose and Burma’s Aung San, all of whom worked with the Japanese occupiers.106 Timing is everything.

  — EIGHT —

  WAR COMMUNISM

  Even anger against injustice

  Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we

  Who wished to lay the foundation of kindness

  Could not ourselves be kind.

  Bertolt Brecht, ‘To Posterity’ (1939)1

  ‘One of the most barren, chronologically depressed, and sparsely populated regions in China.’ Thus has the historian Lyman Van Slyke described Yan’an, the wartime home of the Chinese Communists.2 When the journalist Edgar Snow made his way there to meet Mao Zedong in 1936, for an interview that would lead to his classic book Red Star over China, which made Mao famous in the West and in China, he described the region as ‘one of the poorest parts of China I had seen … the crops grown are strictly limited by the steep gradients, both in quantity and quality. There are few genuine mountains, only endless broken hills, hills as interminable as a sentence by James Joyce.’3