China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Even before that, Hurley had pressed the president for information about Yalta and what exactly had been decided there with regard to China. At first, FDR had denied to his ambassador that there had been a secret agreement on China between him and Stalin, but on his final visit to the White House, Hurley finally got him to acknowledge the truth, and FDR showed Hurley the text of the deal with Stalin. In later accounts of this incident, Hurley says he was deeply shocked. “American diplomats,” he charged, had “surrendered the territorial integrity and political independence of China … and [written] the blueprint for the Communist conquest.”

  But as his unauthorized biographer, Russell D. Buhite, has noted, he was probably feigning his outrage or at least exaggerating it. Hurley understood full well the need to induce the Soviet Union to get into the war, and he accepted the concomitant necessity of giving them something in China in return. What he wanted—or, more accurately, what he unrealistically wished for—was a deal between Moscow and Chungking that would preempt Soviet help to the CCP. Hurley seems to have taken it on himself to go to London and Moscow in an effort (sanctioned, he later said, by Roosevelt, though this is uncertain) to get British and Russian support for his China policy.

  And so, once again, Hurley was off swimming naïvely in the treacherous waters of international diplomacy. He met with Churchill, who dutifully agreed to support the Chiang government and to encourage the KMT and the CCP to make a deal, and who subsequently did nothing of the kind. Then it was on to Moscow, where Hurley saw Stalin and Molotov, who assured him that they supported Chiang Kai-shek’s government and his government alone and that they had no intention of throwing their weight behind the “radish” Communists of China.

  It is amazing how easily Hurley, so ready to suspect the China hands of dark, hidden, and nefarious motivations, was taken in by this confection. He never seems to have suspected that Molotov and Stalin could be trying to neutralize the United States by providing false assurances about their intentions. Ironically, one of the China hands that he had battled with, John Davies, was now in Moscow, and he tried to warn his old boss that he was being sold a bill of goods—and yet it was Davies who was later accused of softness on Communism rather than Hurley. “There was ample advice to [Hurley] which he showed no desire to tap,” George Kennan commented.

  While the political maneuvering took place, the war in China sputtered on. Thousands were dying as Japan’s China Expeditionary Army, under General Yasuji Okamura, made a last-ditch effort to knock China once and for all out of the conflict. Okamura had 820,000 men organized into twenty-five divisions, an armored brigade, eleven independent infantry brigades, a cavalry brigade, and ten independent brigades. These troops were deployed in three formations—the North China Area Army holding the territory between the Yellow River and the Great Wall, the Sixth Area Army, which faced the Chinese and the Americans in east China, and the Thirteenth Area Army in Shanghai and the lower Yangzi Valley. Okamura himself commanded the Sixth Area Army, which, with five divisions and 228 cannon, was the elite force that kept the Americans of China theater headquarters, and especially its commander, General Albert Wedemeyer, up at night.

  Okamura was the type of Japanese officer—ruthless, determined, and capable—to inspire worry. He had been in China since he commanded troops in the occupation of Shanghai in 1932, and in that role he had gained the dubious distinction of being the first such commander to order the forced prostitution of local women, given the stupendously euphonious name “comfort women,” who were made available to Japanese troops in virtually all of the territories they invaded and occupied.

  After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, Okamura commanded the Japanese Eleventh Army in some of the major battles in the Yangzi River Valley. Transferred to the northern provinces in the spring of 1939, Okamura requested permission to use poison gas, arguing that it was needed to give his troops “the feeling of victory,” and he subsequently commanded the largest chemical attack of the war.

  In 1940, a full general and overall commander of the North China Area Army, Okamura was in charge when the Communists launched the surprise Hundred Regiments Offensive, which Japan countered with the brutal tactic known to the Chinese as the Three Alls policy—“burn all, kill all, loot all.” Japanese troops under his command were responsible for the deaths of what scholars have estimated to be 2.7 million noncombatants. After that, in 1944, Okamura was the overall commander of the Ichigo offensive, the effort stretching over many months in 1944 to conquer all of east and southeast China, knocking out along the way the American 14th Air Force’s bases. The photographs of him show a stern, dour, grim man in uniform, every inch the graduate of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy that he was, deeply imbued with the Japanese military values of iron discipline, the unsparing massacre of the enemy, and the glory of victory for the emperor.

  As 1945 dawned, Okamura and the Japanese could congratulate themselves on some important recent successes in China—this in contrast to the war elsewhere, where devastating losses in the Pacific, in the Philippines, and in Burma, as well as the defeats earlier at Midway, Iwo Jima, and other Pacific atolls, were already spelling doom for the empire. Still, in early 1945 there seems to have been little thought of giving up. Nor did American commanders believe that the hardest fighting was behind them. In November 1944, even as the newly arrived Wedemeyer was familiarizing himself with the situation, Japan seized the portions of the Canton-Hankou-Beijing railroad line that were still in Chinese hands, thereby creating an unbroken railroad line stretching from the port of Haiphong in French Indochina all the way to Manchuria and Korea, potentially a critical supply line if a showdown battle between the United States and Japan were to take place on Chinese soil. At the same time, the 11th Army, with four glory-seeking divisions and a company of tanks, seized the American airfields of Guilin and Liuzhou, from which Chennault’s 14th Air Force had harassed Japanese supply lines in China and bombed shipping at sea.

  At a press conference a few weeks later, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced that victory was a long way off. “For many years the Japanese have been squatting on the China coast,” he said. “They have many thousands of troops there and lately have been reinforcing their grip. They have taken over an inland supply route from Canton to Hankou to Peiping, and have occupied three more airfields east of this route that were helpful to our airmen.” In addition, Japan still possessed powerful home defenses against an invasion, with production capacity still strong and large reserves of oil and gas.

  The losses of Guilin and Liuzhou were serious and worrisome, since not only were these the sites of large American airbases, they also commanded the roads further to the west, especially to Kweiyang and Kunming. Kunming was the terminus of the over-the-Hump airlift and the about-to-be-reopened Burma Road, the point of distribution for the American supplies without which China couldn’t stay in the war.

  Guilin was an old southern town with colonnaded streets and shops shaded under wide porticoes, a weather-beaten, stained, and picturesquely shabby place near an ethereally beautiful range of mountains that arose spire-like from the verdant countryside. Almost since the beginning of the Japanese war in 1937, American pilots had flown into and out of the military airport there, catching glimpses of the Li River, the early morning sunlight flashing on rice paddies plowed by water buffalo below, even as the pilots took off for bombing and strafing runs in the most lethal and modern aircraft known to men.

  At night, the pilots and maintenance crews had steaks and beer in bamboo shacks near the airfield, and then in the morning they sat at briefings for that day’s run. They talked about near misses and about their buddies who were shot down and never made it back. They expressed murderous fury at the Chinese desperadoes, some of them war refugees, who descended on Guilin precisely because the Americans were there, getting their hands on Lend-Lease supplies and selling them on the black market or, as was widely suspected, operating radio transmitters to let the Japanese know when the A
merican planes took off.

  There was an old hostel near the airfield, where the American airmen drank and danced with local girls and then retired with them to cubicle bedrooms built on two wings alongside the main building. Not for nothing was Guilin known as the sex capital of Free China. One popular spot was the Ledo Club, where a certain Fatima Ismail, widely suspected of selling information to the Japanese, entertained guests.

  Three days after the Japanese seizure of Guilin, Wedemeyer had his first working session with Chiang and his staff, during which he presented an overall plan to stiffen China’s defenses and eventually to be able to push the Japanese back. Code-named Alpha, the plan was to equip and train thirty-nine Chinese divisions and to place teams of American advisers in every one of them. Chinese troops, whose standard condition was one of malnutrition, were to be fed properly. The very foreign concept for China of medical evacuation and care for the wounded was to be introduced. Every soldier was to be adequately equipped. All of this followed the model that Stilwell had created for Chinese troops he had trained in Ramgarh, India, and who were fighting well in Burma.

  Wedemeyer was uncertain whether Alpha would work, not at all confident that even with proper training and equipment, Chinese troops would have the will to fight, or, more accurately, have the leadership that would induce them to. In the early weeks and months of his China sojourn, he had been strangely inconsistent in his assessments, unwaveringly admiring of Chiang, whom he compared to Churchill, but skeptical of a Chinese military leadership that, he felt, was afflicted with a severe case of “stupidity and inefficiency,” which made it “apathetic and unintelligent,” “impotent and confounded,” and therefore either unable or afraid to report accurately on conditions to the Generalissimo or to do much to improve them. Wedemeyer felt it should have been possible to defend Guilin. The Chinese 97th Army, which was well fed and well equipped, had held what appeared to be strong positions north of the city. Chiang had assured Wedemeyer “categorically” that if the Japanese attacked, his forces could hold the Guilin-Liuzhou area for two months—but then they retreated without a fight. “The disorganization and muddled planning of the Chinese is beyond comprehension,” Wedemeyer wrote at the time. “We can throw in great numbers of troops at tremendous cost logistically, but we do not know whether the Chinese will stick and fight.”

  On the positive side, supplies were increasing substantially in volume, so there was more fuel and ammunition than ever before. About five thousand tons of supplies a month had moved over the Hump during most of the war; by early 1945, the American C-47s were delivering up to sixty thousand tons a month, a very big difference that the Japanese, whose supplies were diminishing, well understood. Indeed, if Wedemeyer had known what was in the minds of the Japanese high command on this point, he would have had more reason for cautious optimism. The Ichigo offensive had wound down because Okamura’s supply lines were overextended and, where they weren’t overextended, they were snarled by the 14th Air Force’s effective attacks, which was the reason Okamura had wanted to seize the Guilin and Liuzhou airfields.

  Okamura’s headquarters were in the Yangzi River port of Hankou, and there he had watched with his own eyes as Chennault’s B-29 bombers had hurled ordnance down on the factories and warehouses sprawled out on the riverbanks, causing spectacular blazes and creating massive congestion for ships, so that as much as one hundred thousand tons of Japanese supplies were stuck at various points on the river. On December 18 alone, seventy-seven B-29s and two hundred fighter planes had raided Hankou and its sister cities of Wuchang and Hanyang (now all part of the conglomeration Wuhan), and the Japanese, whose planes had been diverted to defend the coast against a possible American landing there, were unable to stop them. When it was over, a pall of thick, impenetrable smoke hung over the three cities.

  American planes had also destroyed the bridges on the Beijing–Hankou railroad, spoiling Japan’s plan to use rail transport as an alternative to the river. The Japanese countered by unloading supplies where the rail line was broken, putting them on trucks, and reloading them where the line resumed, but the American bombs had destroyed so many locomotives that this method was of limited use. The Japanese were getting perhaps one-fourth of the supplies they had planned for. They had enough food, clothing, and ammunition, but gasoline was going to run out in a few months, and Okamura foresaw the day, unless some action was taken, when the railroads south of the Yangzi would be entirely useless.

  The situation had produced a lull in the fighting as the Japanese regrouped, tried to reorganize their supply lines, and decided what to do. The high command in Tokyo was in favor of relinquishing its bases in south China and concentrating instead on defending the China coast from the anticipated American landing there. The lull reflected Japan’s troubles, though the interpretation of the lull on the Allies’ side exposed the ambiguities of fighting in China. Rumors were flying to the effect that the Chinese government was secretly in cahoots with the Japanese, allowing them to seize the American airfields in exchange for a moratorium on the war against China itself. When Wedemeyer, diplomatic and respectful as always, brought these rumors up with the Generalissimo, Chiang was “absolutely non-committal,” Wedemeyer reported at the time. “There was no indication, emotional or otherwise, that he either denied or admitted it. His spontaneous reaction was a dry cackle.”

  Wedemeyer gamely moved on as though the rumors didn’t exist. The training of Chinese divisions and the assignment of American advisers—eventually there were more than three thousand of them—continued. Meanwhile, as spring approached, Okamura, ignoring the views of Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, decided on an audacious plan of his own. In January 1945, he took another American airfield, at Suichuan, northeast of Guilin. But he knew that taking the minor airfields like that one was only a temporary gain, or perhaps no gain at all, because Chennault’s planes and fliers could simply relocate to another field and resume operations from there. Whereas at Guilin there had been infrastructure, warehouses, barracks, an intelligence headquarters, and equipment, at Suichuan, according to the official American account of the China theater, “all the Japanese inherited were empty runways.” Taking this into account, imperial headquarters had decided to abandon the conquest of more Chinese territory and instead to guard the south China coast. This decision had been forced on the Japanese by the American recapture of the Philippines, which opened a staging area for the landing of American troops in China itself.

  But Okamura thought the fear of an invasion was exaggerated. He wanted to attack Chungking and deal a lethal blow to the enemy, not merely to put a temporary check on his actions. It was a critical moment. If the Chinese defenses crumbled as they had so often in the past, Okamura could still hope that he could knock China out of the war. But if the Chinese resistance was stiff, Japan would have little choice but to resort to a war of defensive attrition, withdrawing to the coasts and trying to stop the Allies from using China as a springboard for the invasion of the home islands.

  Okamura chose the town of Zhijiang to be the first target of this desperate new offensive. Zhijiang was an otherwise undistinguished place in western Hunan province, a rugged area with few roads where most of the goods transport took place on the backs of coolies running on footpaths from village to village or by sampan on the region’s many rivers and streams. The town itself held one of Chennault’s most important airfields, which made it a rich target, but Okamura saw it in addition as a potential base for raids against Chungking itself, about three hundred miles to the northwest, or perhaps against Kunming.

  Early in the spring of 1945, he massed twenty thousand Japanese troops on the plains east of Zhijiang. On April 13, under the watchful eyes of Allied air reconnaissance, these troops began a general advance. To meet this menacing force and turn it back, avoiding a direct threat to Chungking and Kunming, was now the challenge facing the joint Chinese and American command, a test of the new spirit of cooperation taking place even before the initial Alph
a training was done.

  The Chinese 51st Division of the 74th Army was a few miles north of the main road leading east and west into Zhijiang, along which the Japanese advance was expected to proceed. But the Japanese here in western Hunan were getting past the troops placed between them and Zhijiang by infiltrating in large numbers through the maze of hills and valleys. It was the same tactic they had used successfully in Burma in 1942, their men cutting quickly through the jungle, avoiding the roads and outmaneuvering the British, the Americans, and the Chinese.

  The American liaison officer for the 51st was Colonel Louis V. Jones. The Chinese division commander told Jones that he was moving out of the area with two regiments in an effort to stop the infiltration, so Jones, along with a radio team, an interpreter, and forty-four coolies, trekked through the hills to follow them. The next day, he discovered that the two regiments had overshot the valley through which the Japanese were likely to advance. A third Chinese regiment, the 151st, which had not moved out with the other two, was left in position, and it went into action by itself against the Japanese on the night of April 17. The next day, Jones caught up with the Chinese division commander and persuaded him to redeploy his troops; in doing so, they held a six-mile front against the advancing enemy.

  On the 19th, the division commander requested air support. One plane arrived the next day, four the day after, but then rain closed in, putting an end to aerial operations. The tough fighters of the Japanese 116th Division and the 133rd Infantry Regiment ground ahead, at the slow pace of a mile and a half an hour. Soon, they took the town of Shanmen, which provided a base of operations in the hills. But, as the official history puts it, despite the pressure, the Chinese 151st Regiment “held stoutly.”