The destruction and dislocation that ensued from Ichigo were terrible, and the casualty totals astronomical. Refugees choked the roads. The Japanese, hampered by their overextended supply lines and the harassment of the American bombers, were forced to live off the land, looting what they could, shooting or bayoneting those who resisted. Cities that had been bombed in 1938 and 1939 but then more or less left alone in the interim were bombed again. Guilin, the site of a major American air base, was burned to the ground and essentially depopulated, while, as we have seen, Changsha, the largest city of Hunan province, was left a depopulated ruin.
“I watched every disaster that struck Guilin with a heart of hatred,” the Chinese novelist Ba Jin wrote in a wartime diary.
I saw how those bombs destroyed the houses. I saw how the bombs exploded into flame, and I saw how the wind added to the fire, twisting two or three plumes of smoke together. On Yueya Mountain, I saw half the sky filled with black smoke, flames blazing across all of Guilin City. The black smoke was streaked with red flashes and huge red tongues of flame. The great fire on December 29th burned from the afternoon late into the night. Even the city gates fell and burned like matches. Countless cloths were burnt through next to the city walls, glazing red in my eyes like bundles of straw paper. Maybe there was a cloth factory’s warehouse or something there.…
From these simple reports, you can understand the situation of this city in distress, and from this city you can imagine many other Chinese cities. They are all in distress. But they grit their teeth under the suffering, and they will not surrender. I see no hint of a shadow over those cities’ appearances. The life I live in those places is not one of gloom and despair. Amid their suffering I even see the glee and laughter of China’s cities. China’s cities cannot be bombed into fear.
Simply to endure, to keep the hatred alive, was already a victory of sorts, at least a kind of redemption. But to fight back was better, and the group that was perceived to be doing so most bravely and tenaciously would win the admiration of China’s people. Chiang did fight back far more than many American observers and subsequent historians have realized. What was often more visible to these observers, who were not allowed to go to the front, was the nonmilitary resistance. Unoccupied China was the scene of posters, marching students singing patriotic songs, propaganda movies calling on the people to endure. Chiang made frequent speeches that were duly reported in the press; his glamorous wife, Soong Mei-ling, traveled the world, especially the United States, advertising China’s brave resistance and lobbying for help. The newspapers and official government press office reports were laden with accounts of victories won by China and ruinous losses suffered by Japan.
As we’ll see, there was an irony in this. The government’s claims were propagandistic exaggerations, which came to be widely disbelieved. But actually the government resisted far more than the Communists, who resisted very little and whose losses were a small fraction of those suffered by the KMT’s forces. And yet, both at home and abroad, Chiang came to be perceived less and less as a heroic fighter. More and more, it came to be the Communists who were deemed to be waging the good fight, the main force of Chinese resistance. While China’s misery eroded the prestige and legitimacy of Chiang and his government, the Communists were able to turn it to their advantage.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mao, Zhou, and the Americans
On July 22, 1944, eight American diplomats, soldiers, and spies boarded a United States Air Force C-47 cargo plane in the wartime capital of Chungking and flew to the Communists’ headquarters at Yenan. The route was almost due north over the six hundred miles that separated one political and geographical China from another, over the semitropical green mountains and terraced rice fields of Sichuan province to the ancient Chinese capital of Xian. The Americans made a brief stop there before proceeding across the Yellow River, a broad, corrugated band more mud brown than yellow. To the south was government territory; east was the Japanese-occupied puppet state officially known, like the government-controlled China, as the Republic of China. About two hundred miles due north was Yenan, which one American visitor around that time described as an “eroded, lumpish plateau” where the Communists, having barely survived their Long March, had established their base area almost a decade before.
As the plane approached, a whitish nine-story Ming dynasty pagoda, famous as a Yenan landmark, loomed up on a nearby brown and treeless hill. A large crowd, some of its members giving hand signals to tell the pilot where to land, became visible on a field below. The plane descended close to the face of some cliffs “in which were dug caves where the Yenan elite snugly resided, safe from enemy bombing.”
Disaster almost struck after the C-47 landed on the grassy runway. One of its wheels sunk into an old grave, causing the aircraft to dip to the left. The still-turning propeller hit the ground and separated from its shaft, causing it to shear through the fuselage at the front of the plane, narrowly missing the pilot. After a bit of confused milling about by passengers and bystanders, Zhou Enlai, the urbane external face of Chinese Communism, strode across the field and shook hands with the head of the delegation, Colonel David Barrett, a tall, stout, genial former military attaché who had spent the better part of the previous decade in China and spoke Chinese well.
A half dozen or so of the American group worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was eager to get information about the Communist movement but also information from the Communists about the occupying Japanese army and the forces of the Chinese puppet government. Among these agents was the former Wall Street Journal reporter Raymond Cromley, who had been stationed in Japan and was an expert on Japan’s military. There was Charles Stelle, a veteran of a guerrilla commando squad who had seen action in Burma and who would choose Japanese targets in North China. Another recruit, Brooke Dolan, had traveled widely in China and Tibet on bird-collecting expeditions sponsored by the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and was deemed familiar with the Communist-dominated areas.
The ranking civilian was thirty-six-year-old John Stewart Service, who, like his friend John Paton Davies, the political adviser to Stilwell, had been born in China of missionary parents. Service was smart, articulate, sophisticated, good-looking in a very American, Jimmy Stewart sort of way, and one of a group of extremely bright and brave young Chinese-speaking Foreign Service officers whose fates came to be bound up in the treacherous domestic politics of China and America.
The welcome was warm, as could be expected of people who had waited a long time for the arrival of a group of desired guests. The Communists had been trying for years to establish their own relationship with the United States. Zhou Enlai had suggested that a delegation be sent to Yenan in 1943, and Davies had officially proposed exactly that to the State Department. “With the Chinese Communists looking so ominously on the horizon, the American Government was urgently in need of first-hand information about and contact with them,” Davies wrote later.
And it was certainly true that, aside from the cordial exchanges between Americans and the Communist representatives in Chungking—Zhou and his aides—the American government had had almost no direct knowledge of a movement that, by early 1944, controlled an area with a population of nearly 100 million people. Were the Communists really fighting the Japanese, as they claimed? Were they ideologues subservient to Moscow and bent on world domination, as the Kuomintang insisted, or were they nationalists whose social and political program, as Stilwell believed, went no further than some benign land reform?
Information on these questions came secondhand from ambiguous sources. One official dispatch written by an American diplomat at the embassy in Chungking conveyed impressions about the Communist movement as if it were on another planet, identified its sources as “a French national who was in Communist-controlled territory,” a “Belgian Eurasian who recently travelled through that territory,” and “an American airman who crashed in an are
a controlled by Chinese guerrillas.” The White House formally asked Chiang’s government for permission to send American military observers to the Communist headquarters in February 1944. Chiang replied that he would “facilitate” this plan, but he stiffly resisted it.
Chiang’s resistance was understandable, since the American request amounted to an unofficial recognition of the Communists and their state within the larger state of China. And yet the KMT probably did itself no favors in blocking American contact with the Communists or, for that matter, in its overall propaganda about them, which the American ambassador, Clarence Gauss, termed laden with “obvious untruths,” “hardly credible,” and “slightly ludicrous.” And it was, though it wasn’t all wrong either. The official portrayal of the CCP, given by chief of staff Ho Ying-chin to Stilwell’s chief of staff, Major General T. G. Hearn, in April, was this: Its aim was “to prolong China’s war of resistance as long as possible … in the hope of creating a state of general confusion in the Far East [in order to] seize the political power in China to serve as a stepping stone towards a World Revolution.” As for Communist troops, Ho said, they were “only an unorganized and undisciplined and untrained horde” that was collaborating with the Japanese, not fighting them. The Communists, moreover, according to Ho, were deeply unpopular in the areas they controlled because their policy was to “terrorize them into submission,” but because “there is always the possibility of an armed revolt on the part of the Chinese Communists against the Central Government,” it has been necessary to “maintain a certain number of troops in that region.” The Americans estimated that about 400,000 government troops maintained a blockade of the Communist area and were unavailable for anti-Japanese combat.
Ho’s communication was more a caricature than an outright falsehood. The Communists were indeed a greater long-range threat to Chiang’s rule in China than the Japanese, and a “World Revolution” masterminded from Moscow was their ultimate goal, though a much more distant and theoretical one than Ho believed. Under the circumstances, a public relations campaign to prevent any favorable view of the Communists from gaining traction in American policymaking circles was deemed essential to the KMT’s survival, and the policies it pursued directly reflected this goal. Western reporters in Chungking suffered a heavy censorship that didn’t exactly enhance the government’s credibility, nor did the frequent press briefings, which, as Ambassador Gauss put it, consisted largely of the “mouthing of homilies.” Unfortunately for the KMT, the foreign press and diplomatic corps came simply to disbelieve the reports put out by the Government Information Office, with its impressive accounts of Chinese victories and staggeringly huge and suspiciously precise figures for Japanese casualties. No detail was overlooked. For some time the authorities banned the use of the word “inflation” from western news reports—this at a time when just about every person in Chungking was suffering from rapidly rising prices.
Needless to say, under the circumstances, no verifiable picture of the Chinese Communists was available in Chungking, where western reporters were based, and, indeed, these reporters were banned even from mentioning the Communists in their dispatches except, as Harrison Forman of the New York Herald Tribune later noted, “to quote the Generalissimo and other high government officials when they accused the Communists of ‘forcibly occupying national territory,’ of ‘assaulting National Government troops,’ or of ‘obstructing the prosecution of the war.’ ” The foreign reporters’ requests to be allowed to visit the Communist areas were entirely unwelcome, and they became more numerous as impatience with censorship increased. Chiang himself worried aloud that the “young and naïve” members of any American observer mission would “believe the CCP’s propaganda” and pass along their credulity to “senior officers in Washington.”
Chiang was caught between the perceived need to manipulate opinion and the need to maintain a degree of credibility among the foreigners. In addition, by the spring of 1944, the government was getting mauled by the Ichigo offensive in Honan province and was threatened by an attack in Shaanxi, making it more than ever dependent on American Lend-Lease supplies. Chiang also nurtured a certain hope that, contrary to his fears, if western reporters and military observers visited the Communist headquarters in Yenan, they might come to understand the dictatorial and deceitful nature of the Communists. In April, Chiang replied to a formal request submitted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Association, whose president was Brooks Atkinson of the Times, saying that the government would allow a visit to Yenan—provided the Communists would “guarantee full freedom of movement and investigation during [the] trip in Communist areas.”
A few months later, a press delegation consisting of a handful of American and British correspondents left for Yenan, accompanied by both KMT and Communist officials—“minders” in current journalists’ parlance. Shortly after, Chiang relented on the request for an official military observer mission and what soon came to be known as the Dixie Mission—because it would be based in rebel territory—was born.
On the day of the observers’ arrival in Yenan there was a lunch with Zhu De, commander of the Communist armies, and with Zhou Enlai, who didn’t wait to show off his skills at personal diplomacy. “Captain,” he said to Jack E. Champion, the pilot of the damaged C-47, “we consider your plane a hero. Fortunately, another hero, yourself, was not injured. Chairman Mao has asked me to convey to you his relief that you came to no harm.” Mao himself helped to set the affable tone, writing in an editorial in Liberation Daily that the arrival of the mission was “the most exciting event ever since the war against Japan started.”
Very soon, Service and Barrett were lunching, dining, and drinking tea with the men who would, four years later, become the leaders of the People’s Republic of China, and they liked them. Their dispatches describe the Communist leaders as direct, unpretentious, full of Eagle Scout vigor, and, above all, cordial, accessible, unguarded, and open—these latter qualities were in unspoken contrast to Chiang Kai-shek, who lived in imperious seclusion in his antique-laden hilltop residence outside Chungking, dubbed Peanut’s Berchtesgaden by Stilwell. Years later, Mao and other senior Communists were to occupy a garden compound adjacent to the Forbidden City in Beijing surrounded by high walls and a moat and as forbidden to ordinary people as the palace next door had been. But in Yenan they impressed their American visitors with the simplicity of their lives, residing in caves fitted with wooden doors and paper-lined window frames, furnished with rustic desks and tables, as well as a stand for an enamel washbasin. This was not Berchtesgaden; this was more akin to Valley Forge.
The caves themselves were an impressive sight, cut out of the loess cliffs in levels, connected by a geometry of steep zigzag paths. Each cave had an arched entrance, a narrow terrace in front for a small vegetable garden, and perhaps a chicken coop or pigpen or a children’s play area. The impression was of a sort of desert encampment on a grand scale, like the children of Israel in the Sinai, or the Roman legions in the Middle East. There was no indoor plumbing. The latrines were located a good distance away. The caves were dimly lit with kerosene lamps and heated by charcoal braziers that emitted a dangerous amount of carbon monoxide; one of the mission members, Melvin A. Casberg, a doctor from St. Louis, warned his colleagues to keep the cave doors open for ventilation when the heat was on. The Communist leaders wore padded cotton jackets and pants unadorned by any insignia of rank, and they said they longed for friendship with America, which, they insisted, they admired for its democratic nature. To Forman, who had been to Yenan a few months before on the journalists’ guided tour, the whole scene was “a magnificent symbol of the tenacity and determination of the Border Region people.”
After just six days in Yenan, Service reported to the State Department on his initial first impressions, which were “extremely favorable,” very much like Forman’s. One enters an area like Yenan, he said, “with a conscious determination not to be swept off one’s feet,” to remain aware that things couldn’t be quite
as good as they’ve been described by previous visitors. And yet, he continued, “All of our party have had the same feeling—that we have come into a different country and are meeting a different people.”
Among the elements in the picture that impressed Service and, he says, the other members of the observer group were a few absences—“of show and formality, both in speech and action,” of “bodyguards, gendarmes and the clap-trap of Chungking officialdom,” and of “beggars” and “desperate poverty,” both of which were inescapable elsewhere in China. “Mao Zedong and other leaders are universally spoken of with respect (amounting in the case of Mao to a sort of veneration) but these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking,” Service reported. As for the fight against the Japanese, “morale is very high.… There is no defeatism, but rather confidence. There is no war-weariness.” At the same time, “there is everywhere an emphasis on democracy and intimate relations with the common people.” He found himself in agreement with one of the western journalists already there who observed, “We have come to the mountains of North Shaanxi to find the most modern place in China.” Most important perhaps, Service ruminated on the likelihood that the KMT would fail in the long run and that the Communists would succeed. “One cannot help coming to feel that [the Communist movement] is strong and successful, and that it has such drive behind it and has tied itself so closely to the people that it will not easily be killed.” In this he was entirely correct; this view came to be shared by a majority of the State Department’s China experts.
A month after his arrival, Service was received by Mao for a meeting that lasted eight hours, during which the Communist Party chairman pleaded with this junior American diplomat, a mere second secretary from the embassy in Chungking, for long-term cooperation. Mao said he wanted an American consulate to be established in Yenan and to remain there after the end of the war, because, Mao said, the end of the war would mean a withdrawal of the military observers, and an official American civilian presence would deter a Kuomintang attack. Mao requested that the Americans pressure Chiang to undertake democratic reforms, so that the Communists could participate in the government. He worried aloud that if the Kuomintang didn’t reform itself, there would be civil war, and then American arms would be used against the Communists. To forestall that prospect, Mao asked that American aid go to all forces fighting the Japanese, including the Communists. He told Service that the Chinese considered Americans to be the “ideal of democracy” and a restraint on the repressiveness of the KMT.
China 1945 Page 11
