China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  Guo Moruo did not elaborate on the parallels between the Chongzhen Emperor and Chiang Kaishek, but he did not need to. Chiang too had acted with decisiveness after he rose to power. But, like the Chongzhen Emperor, he had developed a habit of constantly castigating his officials, he too had sprayed personal orders around, ignored established military and civilian hierarchies, failed to relieve the suffering in the countryside, even sending his armies there to keep order. Guo’s ‘1644’ amounted to a stinging denunciation of Chiang Kaishek.

  The piece caused a storm. The day after the final instalment appeared, Tao Xisheng, the editor of the Nationalists’ Central Daily News and widely thought to have ghostwritten China’s Destiny, attacked Guo. He argued that Li’s peasant rebellion, based in north China, had succeeded in overthrowing the Ming Dynasty, but that it had been conducted ‘at a time of extreme foreign threat’, resulting in China being ‘ruled by an alien dynasty for 260 years’.138 The debate about ‘1644’ carried on for months. In Yan’an, Mao ordered Guo’s piece to be read by all Party members.139 In subsequent months he regularly criticised the Nationalists and held up the Communists as a competent, fair and democratic alternative. As a political attack piece, ‘1644’ did its job brilliantly. It undermined Chiang’s China’s Destiny with great effectiveness.

  Nationalist fortunes reached their greatest height during 1943. China was recognised as one of the Big Four, the Wang Jingwei government was no longer a significant concern, serious negotiations with the Communists were taking place, front lines were holding, and Japan and Germany were on the defensive. The year 1944 was the stark opposite. The pressures that had been building since 1941 not only cracked a façade of stubborn resistance, but came close to engulfing the Nationalists. Operation Ichigo threw their forces out of most of the areas they had controlled since the Battle of Wuhan in 1938, the United States turned sour on them, party morale collapsed, and the Communists spread out across much of the country north of the Yangzi river.

  In Chongqing, Chiang Kaishek cut a beleaguered figure. He continued to pray, read the Bible and study Confucian works such as Huang Zongxi’s Ming Confucianism, a seventeenth-century work which traced the development of Neo-Confucianism in the Ming Dynasty.140 The Taiwan historian Ch’en Yung-fa is no doubt correct in his suggestion that Chiang clung to the idea that a ruler draws support as much through his virtue as through his political and military strength. But that stance now only added to Chiang’s vulnerability. He had been haranguing his commanders and officials from the first day of the War of Resistance. After eight years, such diatribes, besides annoying his audience, could only serve to underscore his failures. Both the famine in Henan and the millions of refugees who had taken to the road undermined Chiang Kaishek’s attempt to project himself as a Confucian general in the mould of Zeng Guofan, the famously meditative suppressor of the Taiping Rebellion. Guo Moruo’s ‘1644’ had been precisely targeted to undercut that image.

  By the spring of 1945, the situation had begun to stabilise. The Japanese were retreating and General Wedemeyer was assisting the Nationalists in building up a new army with thirty-six divisions – although the Japanese would surrender before that rebuilding programme could be completed. The question was whether it would be the Communists or the Nationalists who would make best use of Japan’s demise.

  — ELEVEN —

  JAPAN’S SURRENDER IN CHINA

  What do we mean by the defeat of the enemy? Simply the destruction of his forces, whether by death, injury, or any other means.

  Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)1

  After the battle, many new ghosts cry,

  The solitary old man worries and grieves.

  Ragged clouds are low amid the dusk,

  Snow dances quickly in the whirling wind.

  The ladle’s cast aside, the cup not green,

  The stove still looks as if a fiery red.

  To many places, communications are broken,

  I sit, but cannot read my books for grief.

  Du Fu, Facing Snow (755–7)2

  At the stroke of 9 a.m. on 9 September 1945, the slightly stooped figure of the commander-in-chief of Japan’s forces in China, General Okamura Yasuji, walked into the auditorium of the Central Military Academy on Huangpu Road in Nanjing. The building had served as the Japanese military headquarters in China during the Second World War and only the previous week had been rechristened as China’s supreme headquarters. General Okamura’s purpose on this bright and sunny day was to surrender Japan’s forces in China to General He Yingqin, commander-in-chief of the Nationalist forces.

  When the bespectacled General Okamura entered the auditorium, he and his colleagues removed their swords at its entrance and left them there. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in Japan, had ordained that no Japanese should be allowed to wear his sword again after the formal surrender ceremony.3 By being allowed to take off their swords in the entrance hall, Japan’s most senior officers were spared the embarrassment of having to do so in public, a delicate gesture that had the practical advantage of avoiding the horror of General Okamura, or any other Japanese representative, committing seppuku – ritual suicide by plunging a sword into one’s stomach – after the completion of the ceremony. Accompanying General Okamura were the senior military representatives of Japanese forces in Formosa, Japan’s China Fleet, the Japanese Imperial Headquarters, and Japan’s 38th Army in French Indochina. Thus, all areas over which China was to assume control as per the Allied decision (which included French Indochina north of the 18th parallel) were represented.

  The Japanese delegation was led single file to a small rectangular table. General He Yingqing and other senior Chinese officers were already in place, sitting behind a larger rectangular table on a raised platform. The hundred or so Allied dignitaries, including US, British, Canadian and Dutch military and civil representatives, were also already in their seats, separated from the main actors in the ceremony by a low wooden fence. As the flashlights of the press photographers went off, General Okamura and his colleagues bowed to General He Yingqin and sat down.

  General He Yingqin ordered General Okamura to present his credentials; these were handed over by the Japanese chief of staff, General Saburo Kobayashi. General He looked at them briefly before putting them to his side.4 He then handed General Saburo two copies of the surrender document. General Saburo presented these to General Okamura, who stood up and received them into both hands with arms outstretched, as courtesy required. He sat down, signed them, drew a round seal from his pocket, imprinted it on the document and then nodded his head just once, as if to underscore the finality of the moment. General Saburo took the documents to General He, also courteously presenting them in both hands with outstretched arms. General He Yingqin received them in the same way, signed them in turn, and then had one copy passed back to General Okamura.

  The final act was for General Okamura to be presented with Order Number 1 by Chiang Kaishek in the latter’s capacity as Supreme Allied Commander of the China Theatre. After having received this, again in the appropriate way, General Okamura and the other Japanese representatives stood up and were led away. The whole ceremony took no more than twenty minutes. The only unscripted moment came when General He Yingqin received the signed and sealed surrender document: he was supposed to have remained seated while doing so, but he could not help himself and stood up out of politeness.5

  The timing of the ceremony was anything but coincidental. In Chinese the word for the number nine is pronounced the same as the word for ‘long-lasting’ or ‘enduring’. The number nine also has a religious significance, especially in Buddhism. By holding the surrender of Japanese forces in China on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month, the suggestion was that now a new era of peace would begin and last ‘forever, forever, and forever more’. The date also referenced the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the time the guns fell silent over the battlefields of the First World War back in 1918.r />
  This carefully choreographed exercise in state theatre had two main objectives. The first was to make Chiang Kaishek appear the benevolent victor, desirous of peace, magnanimous towards the vanquished and with the good of his country foremost in his mind. Following the 15 August broadcast of Emperor Hirohito in which he announced Japan’s acceptance of the surrender terms of the Allies, Chiang Kaishek too had taken to the airwaves to address his nation. He stated that he wished China to be guided by the Christian imperatives of ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ and ‘Love thy enemy’.6 He announced that China’s policy was not to seek revenge but ‘to treat Japan with generosity and magnanimity’, a policy popularised later with the phrase ‘Let us repay evil with kindness’.

  The second, veiled purpose was to convince the Japanese to collaborate with him in keeping the Communists at bay. Bottled up in Sichuan, with most of his troops weak and demoralised, deep grievances against his regime entrenched across China and his government in disarray, Chiang Kaishek needed the help of the Japanese if his government were to survive the transition to peace. The Nationalists had won the war, but without the help of their mortal enemy, their return to the large cities and fertile plains of China proper would be difficult. To be at the mercy of one’s enemy is not what Clausewitz would have regarded as a useful victory.

  At his headquarters in Nanjing, General Okamura listened to Chiang’s broadcast and took note of its tone.7 In the days before 15 August, he had received conflicting information. On 10 August, his intelligence organisation had picked up messages from Europe and Chongqing indicating that Japan was preparing to accept the Allied conditions for surrender, with the pos ition of Emperor Hirohito the only remaining stumbling block. However, on 12 August, Japan’s Imperial High Command had ordered him to ‘protect our territory and safeguard our Emperor’. He had issued a general order to the forces under his command that they should not ‘be misled by enemy rumours about peace’ and he had wired Tokyo that he was in agreement with the policy of continuing the war. The next day he was told to transfer two of his divisions to Manchuria to assist Japanese forces fighting Operation August Storm, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which had begun on 9 August, the day the USA exploded its second atom bomb.

  As late as 14 August, Instruction 1380 of the Imperial High Command, received at 12.30 p.m., Tokyo time, told General Okamura to ‘destroy all enemy forces who might attack and fight a war of attrition against the Soviets, the Americans and the Chinese in support of the battle waged by the army on the homeland of the Empire’.8 General Okamura, in a message copied to subordinate headquarters, replied that he remained fully prepared to continue the war. It was only at 5.20 p.m. that afternoon, when he received the message that ‘the worst has come to pass’, that General Okamura accepted that the war was over.9 He received confirmation the next morning at 10.10 a.m., and at noon he listened to Emperor Hirohito’s first ever radio broadcast, in the company of his headquarters staff, who assembled outside bowing reverentially east towards the Emperor. Their mood is difficult to imagine, not only because a military effort that had begun eight years earlier had ended in disaster, but also because Emperor Hirohito was considered divine. It was as if a deity had decided to speak out. Deities don’t normally do that.

  It is unsurprising that General Okamura found solace in Chiang Kaishek’s promise of a benevolent approach to the vanquished. Soviet forces in Manchuria were doing their best to make good on Stalin’s pronouncement that they would wreak revenge for Russia’s defeat by Japan in the 1905 Russo–Japanese War.10 Two atomic bombs, Big Boy and Fat Man, had destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completing the strategic bombardment of Japan by 21st Bomber Command of 20th Air Force, which had already laid waste to many Japanese cities. The two cities had been left off target lists until then so that accurate assessments of the impact of the new bombs could be made. With a million troops and about as many Japanese citizens to look after, General Okamura had to worry about the retribution that the Chinese populace might exact once they learned that their former masters, under whose rule they had suffered so much, had fallen. Finally, he was faced with the task of convincing Japan’s armies in China to accept the indignity of handing in their weapons to an enemy they had defeated time and time again. The general faced an extremely difficult situation, one for which no army manual provided guidance.

  Chiang Kaishek’s choice of General He Yingqing as his representative at the Nanjing surrender ceremony was intended to make General Okamura’s task of surrendering Japanese forces in China easier to bear. Generals Okamura and He Yingqin had entered Japan’s Military Academy in the same year, making them classmates – a bond of a much more meaningful, and hence useful, nature in Japan and China than in the West. The two had met across negotiating tables in the 1930s when the Nationalists were still pursuing their ‘first unity then resistance’ policy. General He Yingqing had acted for Chiang Kaishek at these occasions, so that if things went wrong any blame for signing these (for the Nationalists) embarrassing treaties would fall on his shoulders. As he had served Chiang loyally with little regard for his own reputation, the choice of General He to preside over China’s acceptance of the Japanese surrender not only made life easier for General Okamura, it was also a way of telling the entire Chinese nation that it should have no doubt about the ultimate loyalty of General He.

  General Okamura accepted Chiang Kaishek’s invitation to participate in the surrender ceremony not because he had no choice. The Japanese were down, but not out. In China they still controlled a very large army perfectly capable of continuing the war. On the evening of Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast, General Okamura and his most senior colleagues toyed with the idea of concentrating all Japanese forces near the port of Qingdao in Shandong province, in a ‘semi-independent deployment’. On 16 August, General Okumara came to the conclusion that ‘the revival of East Asia now depends on the prosperity, wealth, and strength of China. Japan must give it all possible help.’ That evening, he met with his vice chief of staff and the commander of Japanese forces in Shanghai; both had come to the same conclusion. On 18 August, General Okamura submitted ‘Guidelines for Our China Policy after the Restoration of Peace’ to Tokyo. He argued that Japan’s aim should be to ‘remove all ancient causes for enmity and we must concentrate all efforts on assisting and strengthening China in order to aid the resurgence of Japan and the revival of East Asia’. That meant, according to him, supporting the ‘Central Government in Chongqing’. While ‘the differences between Chongqing and Yan’an must be settled by the Chinese themselves, nonetheless, if Yan’an undertakes actions to resist and harm Japan, then we must resolutely punish them’.11 This policy received the endorsement of army and navy leaders in Tokyo as well as Japanese military and civil authorities in China. Their considerations probably included the thought that China under the Nationalists would be a bulwark against the Soviet Union as well as the USA. It would also be helpful to Japan’s economic recovery.

  Nothing brings into better relief Japan’s miscalculation in 1937. Had they supported the Nationalists then – or at least not stood in their way as they consolidated their rule – China and Japan would not have gone to war, none of this would ever have happened and this book would not have been written. In 1945 the Japanese ended up defending a government which in 1937 they had believed to be such a grave threat to their security that they had gone to war with it with the aim of vanquishing it or rendering it irrelevant. This was all avoidable.

  On the same day as Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast, General Okamura had received a radio message from Chiang Kaishek instructing him to order his forces to cease all military operations and to send a delegate to an air field in Yushan county, Jiangxi province to receive instructions from General He Yingqin. Having decided to support the Nationalists, General Okamura replied to Chiang Kaishek saying that he would sent Major General Takeo Imai, the vice chief of the General Staff of the China Expeditionary Army, in an unmarked twin-engine
aeroplane. Because heavy rain made that air field inoperable, on 19 August Chiang told General Okamura to send General Takeo to the Zhijiang air base in western Hunan instead. He issued very clear instructions: the aeroplane should fly at 5,000 feet, take off at 10 a.m. Chongqing time, have the Japanese flag painted on the undersides and tops of its wings, and trail 4-metre-long strips of red cloth from its wing tips. Three Allied planes would accompany the plane from Wuhan and, once it was near Zhijiang, the pilot was to make himself known to ground control with the message ‘King Able air control, repeat, King Able air control’ sent on the 5860KC radio frequency.12

  On 21 August, General Takeo received General He’s instructions on the Zhijiang air base with the order to take them to General Okamura. They required General Okamura to ensure that all Japanese units stayed in their present pos itions; safeguarded all materiel, supplies and archives; maintained social order; and accepted orders only from Chiang Kaishek or General He Yingqing.13 Nationalist liaison officers flew back with General Takeo. An advance party of 175 personnel were transported in twelve US aeroplanes to Nanjing on 27 August to prepare for the arrival of General He and the re-establishment of the Nationalist supreme headquarters in the capital of the Republic of China.14 The liaison officers kept stressing that Japanese forces should remain where they were and take responsibility for preserving order, both in large cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing and Tianjin and along the main transport links.15

  There were, of course, problems. Many Japanese troops at the front, where Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast had not come through clearly, had assumed that the Emperor had taken to the airwaves to spur them on to even greater effort. Although many senior officers had seen the writing on the wall, the majority were convinced that one or two major campaigns on the Japanese homeland or in China would convince the Allies to accept more favourable surrender terms. Most members of the rank and file remained convinced that Japan’s final triumph lay not far into the future. As the truth began to dawn, there was widespread consternation, a good deal of anger and a considerable outpouring of grief. Some troops threatened to kill their commanding officers unless they agreed to carry on the war. There were an unknown number of suicides. General Okamura was aware of around twenty in the lower Yangzi region alone. For himself, as he wrote in his diary, he had decided that ‘I shall neither seek life nor death’.16