China at War
Page 29
Twentieth Bomber Command, led by General Curtis LeMay, initiated operations in June 1944, flying raids over Singapore, Rangoon, Hanoi, Taiwan, Manchuria and Kyushu, the most south-westerly of Japan’s main islands, largely from bases in China and India.106 This experimental phase in 20th Bomber Command’s operations came to an end on 15 December. ‘As a result of six months of pioneering by 20th Bomber Command, Superfortresses here and in the Pacific can now get down to a steady, efficient smashing of Japan’s war potential,’ its headquarters announced that day.107 Three days later, on 18 December, ninety-six Superfortress bombers took off from the Chengdu air fields on their first large-scale strategic bombing raid. Their target was not some city in Japan but, as mentioned, Wuhan. Five hundred tons of bombs, filled with a new incendiary made of phosphorus and napalm invented by Harvard scientists, were dropped on the city,108 causing a firestorm which lasted several days and left tens of thousands of people dead.109 Following the raid, General Robert McLure, now the US Army’s chief of staff in China, ‘served notice on the Japanese that the concentrated bombing of Hankow [Wuhan] on December 18 was only the beginning of such heavy air strikes against their installations in China’.110 US censorship ensured that, while the actions of the Superfortresses were celebrated in heroic terms, few details of their consequences on the ground reached the American public. After the war, Curtis LeMay, who had personally commanded the raid on Wuhan, was frank: ‘enemy cities were pulverized or fried to a crisp.’111
The bombing of Japanese cities began in earnest after the raid on Wuhan, using the same technique that had been ‘perfected’ in China. However, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had been right. Even after the Allies had secured north Burma, built a road and laid an oil pipeline, not enough supplies were getting through to China. The first barrels of fuel reached China, via what became known as the Stilwell Road, only in May 1945. Mud slides and flooding regularly forced its closure.112 The whole plan of staging a strategic bombing campaign against Japan in China had been built on quicksand. After the destruction of Wuhan, the Superfortresses were withdrawn from China and the air raids on Japan were conducted from air fields in the Marianas.
For the Americans, China lost all remaining military value. But they could not simply walk away. Besides assisting in Operation Matterhorn, Wedemeyer’s orders had called for him to make sure that the USA stayed out of ‘civil strife, unless to protect lives’ and prevent a complete Nationalist collapse. In order to stabilise the situation, Wedemeyer did what he could to prevent Ichigo from reaching Sichuan. He then reorganised his headquarters, improved the living standards of Nationalist soldiers and, once the Japanese forces engaged in Ichigo had begun to withdraw, started to plan a counter-offensive by Chinese forces in China.
This was Operation Carbonado. With the amount of materiel reaching China expected to increase to 100,000 tons monthly, Wedemeyer began ‘the training of an army of 36 divisions and 20 commando groups with US liaison, supervision, training, and equipment’.113 Chennault’s 14th Air Force, together with the 10th Air Force, which was scheduled to redeploy from India to China in July 1945, were to establish control of the skies. Carbonado’s forces were to strike towards a port on the south China coast to give ‘the Generalissimo the opportunity, in time and resources, to create Chinese land forces that can and will carry the burden of at least a proportionate share of the fighting’. A not entirely secondary aim was ‘to strengthen the American position at the peace table’ by excluding the European powers from China.114
After Wedemeyer had been in China for several months, his views about the Nationalists, and in particular Chiang Kaishek, changed. He wrote to Marshall in April 1945 that ‘one finds an embryonic nation, a great political entity about to be born. Previously China consisted of a group of feudal dynasties which through the years resorted forcibly or voluntarily to political amalgamation’, but true unity was now emerging. ‘China at war does not mean large scale modern warfare, but means a stoic amorphous resistance’, which nonetheless was holding out. As to Chiang Kaishek, he ‘has refused attractive surrender terms on several occasions. This, I think, has been most fortunate for us.’115
Some of Wedemeyer’s reports about the situation under Stilwell must have set cheeks blushing in Washington. He told the celebrated strategist Stanley Embick that ‘my predecessor had neither the character nor the ability to be a good regimental commander … he spent so much time in the jungles of Upper Burma commanding a few battalions and acquiring a great deal of publicity so that he neglected sorely the responsibilities inherent in his position.’116 One of Wedemeyer’s first acts was to recommend that Frank Dorn, Stilwell’s Number Two who had been in charge of Y Force, was not just recalled but demoted, a recommendation that in the end was not accepted. He described Dorn in an efficiency report as of ‘questionable loyalty, uncooperative, extremely selfish, of immature judgment, and not dependable’.117
If the US press carried numerous reports about Nationalist smuggling, it kept quiet about American involvement in it. Wedemeyer worked hard to force through the publication of an article in Roundup, a weekly magazine for US armed forces in China, Burma and India, which revealed that the Criminal Investigation Department of the US Army had uncovered a ‘smuggling ring that has been operating over the Hump [the air route from India to China], taking an estimated sum of more that US$ 4 million’. The article went on to explain that ‘the list of items smuggled across the towering Hump and disposed of in China reads like an export index. There were arms, ammunition, clothing, military supplies and equipment, drugs, foreign currency, gems, and sundry PX supplies [military gear].’ One US Air Force pilot had parachuted from his plane with $10,000 in gold bars, never to be seen again. Eighty-seven major cases were brought before military tribunals and a number of offenders ended up serving stiff sentences at the US Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.118
Carbonado’s units went into action to defend the Zhijiang air base in Hunan province in April 1945. Despite their success, Wedemeyer decided not to press home the advantage the Nationalist forces had gained because ‘we did not believe that a counter-offensive would be wise. Supply remained critical … in place of an attack, we began building ground and air force stockpiles to give ad equate logistical support to a successful offensive … to Fort Bayard [Beihai].’119 Japan surrendered before Carbonado could be implemented. US naval aircraft on their way to Fort Bayard, on the Liuzhou peninsula in south Guangxi province, were diverted to Shanghai when the news broke of the end of the war.120
Following Japan’s surrender, US policy became to ‘bring the boys home’ with all possible speed. Wedemeyer reported to Chiang Kaishek that President Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt after the latter’s sudden death on 12 April 1945, ‘emphasized that US forces in the China Theater must be inactivated as early as possible’. Secretary of State James Byrnes stressed that ‘Americans must not be employed to facilitate Central Government operations against dissident groups’.121 On 16 August, the day after Japan’s surrender, Wedemeyer removed ‘liaison personnel from Chinese units’ so that ‘US forces will not, rpt [repeat] not, become engaged in fratricidal war’.122 General Marshall ordered the occupation of ports like Shanghai so that Japanese troops in China could be concentrated there and repatriated ‘in an orderly fashion’ in the shortest possible time.123 Once the repatriation was complete, with all Japanese forces disarmed and securely back in Japan under US supervision, thus precluding any possibility of a revival of Japanese militarism in China, the USA would be free to leave the competing parties in China to fight it out.
The Communist Response
The greatest beneficiaries of Operation Ichigo were the Communists. The Japan ese concentrated 80 per cent of their forces in Ichigo, that is, 500,000 out of 650,000 troops outside Manchuria, leaving just 150,000 to garrison the rest of the country – an impossibility. The Japanese therefore had to turn to puppet armies, local militia and the police to maintain their positions.124 Ichigo also brought an end
to the ferocious campaign of suppression by Japanese troops against the Communists, popularly referred to as the ‘Three All’ – burn all, kill all, loot all – campaign. Ichigo also removed any danger of a Nationalist attack on Communist areas. In 1943, General Hu Zongnan in Xi’an had prepared a Blitzkrieg on Yan’an, which was called off only after a Communist sleeper agent on his staff alerted Yan’an.125 The Communists began a propaganda blitz which convinced the Nationalists that proceeding would cause too much damage to their reputation. In history, sometimes things that are not done are just as important as things that are done. Soon after the Nationalists bottled out of this opportunity to strike a blow against the Communists, Ichigo allowed the Communists to stage a break-out from the areas to which the Japanese and the Nationalists had confined them.
Following their first rush of expansion at the beginning of the war, neither the Communist Party nor the Communist armed forces had expanded. Mao insisted that no area of the organisation should expand beyond that which its population could sustain. Recruitment into the army was made merely to replace casualties. In the summer of 1944, as Japanese forces plunged into Hunan, the Communists abandoned this policy. Over the next year, the Chinese Communist Party and the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army all doubled in size, the Party to 1.2 million members and its armed forces to 1 million troops.126
As before, Mao Zedong was relatively cautious. He believed that Communist forces should focus on attacking, or winning over, puppet forces, militias and bandit gangs. He did not want to trigger civil war at this point, and nor did he want to take on the superior Japanese forces. However, he did agree to Commun ist forces being deployed in strategic locations in the south. His thinking was that ‘those who arrive first will be rulers, those who come later will be subordinates’.127 In August 1944, after Hengyang had fallen, one Eighth Route Army brigade, consisting of 3,000 soldiers and 750 Communist officials, marched to Hubei and crossed the Yangzi river into Hunan province. They collaborated with local Communists army units and Party members in Hunan, Hubei and Henan to ‘build a dike’ between areas controlled by the Nationalists in south-west China and China’s seaboard provinces, in order to make it hard for the Nationalists to return to their heartland after the fall of Japan. Ren Bishi, a member of the three-man Central Committee Secretariat, told these forces to be ready to ‘occupy Wuhan and Changsha’.128
In the autumn, the New Fourth Army, which had grown to 300,000 troops, established an operational base in the lower Yangzi region between Shanghai, Ningbo, Wusong and Nanjing. Its forces stood poised ‘to seize Hangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Nanjing’.129 A ‘Jiangsu–Zhejiang Military Region’ was established in January 1945 to ensure that the Communists would ‘be able to destroy the enemy, take over Nanjing, enter Shanghai, and cooperate with an Allied landing so that we will be in a strategically advantageous position at the time of Japan’s collapse’.130 The Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army deployments were designed to leave the Communists in as advantageous a position as possible as it became clear that US forces advancing through the Pacific meant the Japanese were doomed, while the Nationalists were near breaking point.
The change in the military balance of power had serious political repercussions; it allowed the Communists to mount a political offensive. The United Front had virtually ceased to function after the New Fourth Army Incident, but, facing Japanese attacks and an increasingly serious economic situation, in January 1944 Mao Zedong asked the Nationalist liaison office in Yan’an to relay to Chiang Kaishek a proposal to resume negotiations, to be conducted in Chongqing. Chiang Kaishek agreed, instructing his negotiators ‘to be accommodating with respect to political issues, but to be strict with regard to military ones’.131 He believed that an opportunity existed for the genuine integration of Communist forces into the Nationalist order of battle and for Communist acceptance of Nationalist military command authority. If the price was having to allow the Communists a high level of autonomy locally, then that was a price worth paying.
A first meeting between Zhang Zhizhong and Wang Shijie, the Nationalist negotiators, and Lin Boqu, the Communist negotiator, took place in Xi’an rather than Chongqing. The Communists demanded approval of an increased size of their armed forces, and hence in funding, in return for agreeing to incorporate Yan’an in the Nationalist administrative system, the withdrawal of Communist forces after the defeat of Japan to north of the Yellow river, and permission for KMT party organisations to operate in Communist base areas.132
The Communists raised their demands as Ichigo’s forces drove the Nationalists back. Already by the second half of May, after Henan’s villagers had turned their hoes – they did not have pitchforks – against the Nationalist forces, Communist demands had undergone a metamorphosis. They called for: 1) the implementation of democracy and freedom of speech, publication and assembly; 2) the legal recognition of the CCP and all other patriotic parties; 3) the implementation of local self-rule; 4) the recognition of Communist base areas in eastern and northern China; and 5) a substantial expansion of Communist armies. Not the least significant of the CCP’s negotiating stances was that it was now working on behalf of other political groups, not just itself.133
The Communists further stepped up their demands after the Nationalists lost Hunan province. After the fall of Hengyang, the Nationalists offered ‘the beginning of constitutional government within one year after Japan’s surrender, with all parties enjoying a position of equality’.134 In September, the Communists announced that they wanted the immediate convocation of a joint government: ‘we hope that the KMT immediately ends one party government and that the National Government calls a meeting of representatives of all anti-Japanese political parties, factions, armed forces, local governments, and civil organizations to organize an anti-Japanese joint government.’135 The Communists were asserting their political equivalence with the Nationalists while also suggesting that the political failures of the Nationalists had contributed to the disastrous turn that the war had taken. It was probably not coincidental that the USA was expressing similar arguments and demanding similar changes at this time.
On 10 October, the thirty-third anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, Zhou Enlai published an article in Liberation Daily just as Ichigo was beginning to threaten Sichuan. In this article he repeated his demand that the Nationalists should agree to a joint government immediately, and added that said government should have authority over military affairs.136 The Communists knew full well that Chiang would never agree to the latter. The article was simply a provocation, intended to make the Nationalists appear like a reactionary dictatorship trying to cling on to power rather than doing what was best for China. Again not uncoincidentally, US journalists were writing in the same vein at the same time.
Subverting Chiang Kaishek’s China’s Destiny was part of the strategy of the Communists. In 1944 Guo Moruo, the historian, archaeologist and writer who had rushed to Wuhan in 1938 having lived in Japan for a decade, published ‘In Commemoration of the 300th Anniversary of 1644’. Guo Moruo was a Communist Party member, famous for romantic poems such as ‘The Goddess’, although also the subject of controversy, including for being excessively subservient to China’s political masters after 1949. Guo lived in Chongqing during the war. Sichuan was his home province.
The year 1644 was, as Guo’s readers would have known, the year in which the Ming Dynasty fell to a peasant rebellion led by Li Zicheng. Li Zicheng assumed the title of ‘The Charging King’, but he would hold Beijing only for a few weeks. The combined forces of the Ming General Wu Sangui and the Manchus defeated him at the Shanhaiguan Pass, the gateway into China from Manchuria. Having fled Beijing, Li died the next year at the hands of the pursuing Manchu forces.
To criticise the present through historical analogy is a common device in Chinese historical and political argument. No one would have missed that Guo Moruo meant to compare 1644 with 1944, with the last Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming Dynasty standing for Chiang Kaishek, Li Zichen
g for Mao Zedong, Wu Sangui for Wang Jingwei and the Manchus for the Japanese. The thrust of Guo’s argument was that Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists were doomed and that Mao would rise to power on the back of the peasant rebellion he had led in north China. Any doubts anyone might have had about Guo’s intentions would have been dispelled by the fact that, while the first instalment of his article was published on the anniversary of the day that the Ming Emperor had committed suicide in Beijing, Guo had finished the manuscript on 10 March, as he noted at the end of the article. That date coincided with the first anniversary of the publication of Chiang Kaishek’s China’s Destiny. This was altogether too much of a coincidence.
Guo Moruo’s ‘1644’ challenged the version of China’s history which Chiang had articulated in China’s Destiny. No, Chiang Kaishek was not China’s saviour, he was the Chongzhen Emperor. Upon ascending to the throne, the Chongzhen Emperor had acted with skill and decisiveness in removing corrupt officials, Guo wrote, but he had then become rather erratic, spraying contradictory edicts around and causing endless confusion and injustice. The Chongzhen Emperor had been personally frugal, and he had issued edicts in which he declared his concern for his subjects, humbly blaming himself for the hardships they suffered, as all virtuous rulers should. The Chongzhen Emperor had berated his officials, but he had failed to act on advice to force wealthy landowners and merchants to open up their grain stores to relieve famine, instead accepting the case that civil order would break down if the starving were allowed to take what they needed. The Chongzhen Emperor had said the right things, but he had not acted upon them, and when his treasuries were opened after his death, huge amounts of wealth were discovered – wealth that could have been used to alleviate the suffering of the rural poor.137