General Lin Biao in Manchuria
It was the Communist forces under General Lin Biao in Manchuria that inflicted the first major blow against the Nationalists. General Lin had a reputation as an expert in battlefield tactics. Edgar Snow describes him in Red Star over China as ‘rather slight, oval-faced, handsome’ and ‘shy and reserved’.35 Unlike many Second World War commanders, Lin made no effort to become popular with his troops; the development of a personal cult was not for him. But, Snow reports, he was known as a genius at ‘feints, masked strategy, surprises, ambushes, flank attacks, pounces from the rear’. In the Jiangxi Soviet in the 1930s, Lin’s First Red Army Corps of 20,000 men ‘became the most dreaded’ of all the Communist forces because of ‘Lin’s extraordinary talent as a tactician’. In the autumn of 1948, the general led 700,000 Communist troops to victory over a Nationalist force of 550,000 men in the Battle of Liaoning and Shenyang, often known as the Liaoshen Campaign.36 That blow was decisive, starting a Communist sweep south that gained momentum like an avalanche rolling down a mountain, eventually pushing the Nationalists out of mainland China.
The Communists prevailed in the Civil War not just because they were better at mobilising popular support in the countryside, but because the Communist Party was a far more disciplined organisation than the Nationalists, and they were also able to secure the support of urban youths and many intellectuals. The Japanese arms the Soviets delivered and the supplies they provided to the Communists ensured that, during the Liaoshen Campaign, General Lin Biao enjoyed not just superiority of numbers but in terms of arms and ammunition too. ‘Between the years 1947–48, during all major engagements the Communist artillery was at least four times that of the Nationalists’, Professor Li Chen of People’s University in Beijing has concluded from his research.37
The Soviets did more than furnish arms and ammunition. Several thousand Soviet military personnel provided ‘technical guidance and medical aid’.38 They did so in the Lüshun–Dalian area, on the southern tip of the Manchurian peninsula, where they maintained a large number of troops,39 as was permitted under the 1945 Treaty of Friendship between China and the Soviet Union.40 By 1948 the annual production of Communist arsenals there and in north Manchuria had reached 2,000 60mm artillery shells, 500,000 mortar rounds, 1.5 million grenades and 17 million rounds of rifle ammunition.41 The Chinese Communists also ‘conscripted 8,000 Japanese doctors and nurses to set up hospitals for wounded soldiers’, and an unknown number of Japanese experts were made to work in Communist military industries, air force academies and artillery schools.42 While the Americans ensured that most Japanese were repatriated speedily from Nationalist held areas, the Soviets and the Chinese Communists did not move with such speed. About half a million of the 2.7 million Japanese soldiers in Soviet hands were put to work in 700 labour camps all over the Soviet Union, building railway lines, restoring factories and working on the land, 43 while a substantial number were conscripted into Communist armies. Repatriation was eventually completed in 1956, but a number remained missing.
The Communists had to learn to use all the equipment they now had in their hands. Many of the leading Communists in Manchuria had received training in the Soviet Union. After General Lin Biao went there to receive medical care in 1938, he stayed until 1942, probably studying Soviet battle planning at the Frunze Military Academy. General Zhu Rui spent five years in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, three of them at the Mikhail Kalinin Artillery School. General Zhu Rui was despatched to Manchuria in November 1946 together with 1,000 teachers and students of the Yan’an Artillery School, almost its entire staff and student body. General Liu Yalou also studied at the Frunze Military Academy, from 1939 to 1941. He then received a commission in the Soviet Red Army and fought the Germans on the Soviets’ western front. A serious student of both European and Chinese warfare, he wrote an article about the Battle of Stalingrad and translated the ‘Regulations on Field Staff Work’ of the Soviet Red Army into Chinese.44
While General Zhu Rui ensured that General Lin Biao’s forces were trained in the effective use of artillery, General Liu Yalou trained up staff officers to organise and coordinate the combined artillery and infantry operations. General Zhu Rui instructed artillery units in indirect fire techniques. Until then, Communist commanders deployed cannons at the front in a haphazard way, having them fire at targets in sight, using them like high-tech battering rams. In indirect fire, the artillery is moved to the rear, and usually hidden in camouflaged positions. Forward observers communicate target coordinates to widely dispersed artillery units, enabling them to deliver concentrated barrages on the most critical points in the enemy position or lay down screening fire in front of advancing infantry.45
Indirect fire requires rapid coordination and close cooperation between the artillery and the infantry. This is where General Liu Yalou came in.46 He trained thousands of staff officers at a military academy established in Manchuria in 1946. In guerrilla warfare, staff officers did little more than prepare battle orders. General Liu’s staff officers were a different breed. They collected and interpreted intelligence, supervised the implementation of battle plans and ensured that commanders were supplied with up-to-date information.47 They constructed and supervised flows of information from troops in the field to higher unit headquarters. ‘Once camped,’ General Liu insisted, staff officers ‘should immediately produce a report with a map and then submit it to regimental and divisional headquarters within 20 minutes. A division should send a report to the general headquarters within one hour after its troops have reached a given location.’48 Large-scale operations were possible only if such a flow of information was in place.
General Lin Biao developed battle tactics designed to reduce losses resulting from primitive tactics. Until then, when launching offensive operations, the Communists had usually simply thrown men at enemy fronts. That did not matter much during the War of Resistance when the Communists restricted their operations to mobile guerrilla warfare or in attacks on poorly trained and armed puppet or bandit forces. But against Nationalist forces equipped with machine guns and powerful artillery, and supported by a substantial air force of about 1,000 aeroplanes, such human wave tactics were not just costly but ineffective.
In Manchuria, General Lin Biao drilled his units in implementing his tactics and in a system of troop organisation that became known as ‘One point, two flanks’ and ‘the 3–3 system’. ‘One point, two flanks’ entailed the concentration of superior numbers of men on two or more points in the flank or rear of the enemy, while a small force tied down its front line. He also insisted on wedge formations. The sharp point of the wedge was to open up a breech in the enemy position. The troops behind the point then flooded through the opening and attacked the defenders in their rear and on their flanks. ‘According to Soviet battle experience,’ Lin wrote, ‘whether in the case of the German Army attacking the Soviet Union or the Red Army counter-attacking Germany, their approach to the offensive was to deploy in the shape of a wedge.’49 National revolutionary war did not emerge in China without any outside influence.
In the ‘3–3 system’ of troop organisation, a squad was made up of three or four teams of three soldiers. The squad leader and his deputy (usually an experienced and politically reliable soldier) took charge of a team each, while the other team or teams selected their own leader. Operating in triangular formations, teams provided covering fire for each other as the squad advanced.50 The ‘3–3’ system allowed formations to spread out according to the terrain and enemy fire patterns and so reduce casualty figures. Six to eight paces separated each soldier but cohesion was maintained as team leaders stayed within earshot of their squad leader. The system facilitated night fighting, which nullified Nationalist air superiority, and helped the Communists incorporate large numbers of new recruits.
General Lin Biao’s first efforts in large-scale warfare were disasters. In February 1947, four Communist divisions equipped with ninety pieces of artillery and a number of tanks att
acked an isolated Nationalist unit with just 5,000 troops. The Communists were quickly put to flight.51 In June, General Lin Biao concentrated 100,000 troops in an attempt to retake the city of Siping and so offset the loss of Yan’an. He once again suffered a beating. According to the British air attaché’s report, the defeat had come about as a result of factors such as rain turning the roads to mud, malfunctioning logistics and a lack of coordination, but also the Nationalists’ ‘effective use of airpower’.52 Lin Biao lost half his troops.53
Burnt by the disaster, General Lin Biao put his forces through a major retraining programme that lasted six months. He had his units rehearse basic skills such as cleaning weapons, firing accurately in coordinated patterns, setting up camp and entrenching. Small unit exercises inculcated Lin Biao’s tactics of ‘one point, two flanks’ and ‘four fasts and one slow’. The latter was a post-Siping addition to Lin Biao’s tactical prescriptions. It insisted that speed and aggression were important in everything except in deciding when to launch an offensive. Commanders should take their time to make careful prepar ations so that they knew the terrain and were accurately informed about enemy positions, and could make sure that their own units were in the right place and understood their assignments fully.54 Platoon commanders and squad leaders received training in the exercise of command, the organisation of fields of fire, the use of explosives and the construction of fortifications. At division level and above, the focus was on staff work, liaison, communication and the coord ination of troop movements.55 Under General Liu Yalou’s overall guidance, each squad developed a special skill. There were fire squads, assault squads and demolition squads. Others developed night-fighting techniques or became adept at scaling walls.56
The training programme also aimed at strengthening morale and heightening aggression. At ‘speak bitterness’ meetings, soldiers talked about how they and their friends and families had suffered in the past. They attended performances of revolutionary operas such as The White Haired Girl, the story of a poor peasant daughter whose father was killed by a landowner to whom he was indebted. Following a series of unhappy events, including being taken as a concubine by her father’s killer, the story ends happily when the daughter is re-united with her fiancé, a Communist soldier. Slogans such as ‘Defeat Chiang Kaishek, Liberate China’ and ‘All Poor People under Heaven are One Family’ were drummed into the soldiers.57
By autumn 1948, Lin Biao’s forces were as ready as they would ever be. Short of ammunition, the Nationalists had withdrawn into Manchuria’s largest cities – Changchun, Shenyang and Jinzhou – to hunker down behind high city walls. Land revolution had altered power relations in the countryside, giving a large number of people a stake in a Communist victory. Strong emotions had been let loose and a simple but effective narrative about the Communists freeing China from a bad past and taking it to a bright future had been spread widely. Nationalist demoralisation deepened further. In July 1948, Ralph Stevenson wrote that ‘war weariness and economic distress resulting from continual civil war are approaching point of desperation’.58 At the same time, the Communists knew that they could not sustain their current level of mobilisation for much longer. The waiting, the wrecking and the avoidance of battle had done their work. It was time to strike.
The Liaoshen Campaign
Changchun, ‘eternal spring’ in Chinese, is a city in north Manchuria. Its name defies the severe cold the city experiences every winter, when average temperatures fall to below freezing for four months and strong winds add a severe chill factor to the cold. The Japanese made Changchun the capital of Manzhouguo, renaming it Xinjing or New Capital. Seeking to turn the city into a monument to the benefits of the Japanese empire, they fitted it with wide boulevards lined with trees, grand ministries, spacious parks and elegant villas.59
In May 1947, just as spring was finally beginning to break through, General Lin Biao ordered his forces to put Changchun’s 500,000 residents and 100,000-strong garrison under siege, an idea that originated more with him than with Mao Zedong. The two had been debating which city in Manchuria to attack: Jinzhou in the Liaoxi Corridor; Shenyang, 250 kilometres north of Jinzhou and Manchuria’s largest city, main transportation hub and most important industrial centre; or Changchun, another 300 kilometres north from Shenyang. Lin pushed for Changchun on the grounds that Nationalist forces were weaker there, that an attack on Jinzhou would allow Nationalist forces in Changchun to withdraw south to Shenyang, and that supplying his troops in south Manchuria would impose serious transport difficulties. Mao accepted Lin’s arguments, but only grudgingly, believing that Lin Biao was being too cautious.60
General Lin Biao was not wrong to worry about the ability of his troops, then still in the middle of their training programme, to take large cities by assault. At the beginning of the siege of Changchun, he ordered seven divisions to destroy two Nationalist divisions at the city’s two air fields They failed and the Nationalist divisions were able to escape back into the city, leading Mao to wonder, ‘Are the troops still using the old tactics of charging en masse?’61 The logistical difficulties Lin Biao faced were also all too real. The Communists restored the railways in the areas they occupied, but their carrying capacity was limited. During the Liaoshen Campaign, they pressed 1.6 million men into service and requisitioned 6,000 ox carts to haul supplies. Even so, front-line troops survived by living off the land.62
General Lin Biao’s men isolated Changchun, shutting down both its air fields blocking its roads and severing its railway connection to Shenyang. In August General Lin Biao ordered the encirclement to be tightened in order to prevent the Nationalists from getting hold of the crops then ripening in the fields around the city. Its residents soon began to starve. Thousands of people crammed into a no-man’s land between Nationalist and Communist lines. When refugees left Changchun, the Nationalists soldiers stripped them of all their valuables, ‘pots and pans as well as gold and silver and even salt’.63 Then they became stuck. Communist sentries ignored ‘the pleas of mothers holding aloft starving children on the other side of the barbed-wire barricades’.64 An August 1947 report to Mao from Manchuria, signed by Lin Biao among others, describes the impact of this cruel policy on the Communist soldiers:
Not allowing the starving people to leave the city and pushing back those who have left is extremely difficult to explain to both the starving people and the soldiers. The starving people … kneel in front of our soldiers begging to be let through; some of them leave their babies and children and then run away; some bring rope and hang themselves in front of our sentries.65
The siege was not lifted.
Instead the Communists requisitioned all grain within a 20–30-kilometre radius.66 Changchun’s commander-in-chief, General Zheng Dongguo, told a Presbyterian missionary that ‘the majority of the people are living on grass and bark, social order has completely broken down, and cases of cannibalism are frequent.’67 On 7 October, The New York Times reported that ‘refugees who recently arrived in Mukden [Shenyang] drew a picture of dead bodies littering the streets, with one pound of kaoliang (millet) selling for more than $50 (US) while hungry civilians were surviving on soy bean cake and tree bark and leaves. They estimated that the population had dwindled to half.’68 Today, the death toll of the siege of Changchun is reckoned to lie between 120,000 and 330,000.69 Zhang Zhenglong, author of the widely read but banned 1989 history of Communist forces in Manchuria, White Snow, Red Blood, recently drew a parallel between Hiroshima and Changchun. ‘The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.’70 He could have added Nanjing to the list if he had wanted to be truly provocative.
The Communists also isolated the city of Shenyang.71 There, too, the situ ation became grim, although the encirclement was less tight than at Changchun. Supplies reached the city by air and the Nationalists controlled the surrounding countryside. Even so, Henry Lieberman reported for The New York Times on 2 July that ‘an estimated 300,000 persons, one fourth of Mukden
[Shenyang]’s population, are slowly starving to death …With Mukden cut off by land from China proper and living off a restricted hinterland, the poorest quarter of the population is existing mainly on cattle fodder. Some are eating tree leaves and bark.’72 While 1,500 Shenyang residents fled the city every day, Lieberman went on to say that ‘at least an equal number of refugees are pouring into the city from Communist-controlled areas. Mayor Tung Wen-chi said today that the Reds were forcing refugees into Mukden as part of the campaign to starve the city.’
On 7 September, Mao Zedong instructed Lin Biao to take Jinzhou. The harvest was now in and therefore supplies were at their most plentiful. To wait longer, possibly until the next winter had passed, risked foregoing the opportunity altogether. In attacking Jinzhou rather than Shenyang or Changchun, the aim was ‘to close the door and beat the dog’, that is, to seal off Manchuria by taking this key city. With Jinzhou in Communist hands, no relief force from north China could come to the aid of the Nationalist armies in Manchuria, who would also be prevented from withdrawing through the Liaoxi Corridor.73 The Communists could then set to work to destroy the Nationalist armies in Changchun and Shenyang.
Once the decision to assault Jinzhou was made, General Lin Biao took two weeks to move his forces into position. Seventh and Fourth Columns blocked the railway line south of Jinzhou. Eleventh Column surrounded port towns along the coast south of the city in order to prevent Nationalist withdrawals through these. Other forces surrounded Jinzhou itself. From high ground near the city, Communist artillery pounded Jinzhou’s one usable air field, thus preventing an attempt by the Nationalists to airlift divisions from Shenyang to Jinzhou.74
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