On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  I mark August 6, 1945, that day when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, as the date of my entry into Asia. I was then an army infantry lieutenant aboard the troop transport Lydia Lykes, bound for Leyte in the Philippines, tagged to lead a platoon in the invasion of Japan. There were wild rousing cheers that day aboard the ship packed with infantrymen who hailed the atomic bombing as their escape from predictable deadly fire on the beaches of Japan. I was among the celebrants giving no thought to what devastation might have been wrought on the people of Hiroshima.

  Forty-two years later, standing amid the ruins of Hiroshima, I recalled that celebration aboard the Lydia Lykes. The mayor of Hiroshima had invited chief editors of the leading newspapers of the nuclear powers—China’s People’s Daily, the Times of London, Le Monde of Paris, Pravda of Moscow, and the New York Times—to a memorial service for victims of the bomb. I was summoned from among the five thousand mourners in the Peace Memorial Park to walk side by side with Victor Afanasyev, the editor of Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, bearing bouquets of white chrysanthemums, to the Memorial Cenotaph, on which was chiseled the names of the dead and the inscription “Let all the souls here rest in peace; For we shall not repeat the evil.” Upwards of 200,000 had died from the bomb blast and its aftereffects. We bowed and deposited the flowers before a flickering flame. We were guided then to the Peace Memorial Museum, where we were shown images of the destruction wrought by the bomb and the mutilated dead. Asked by Japanese reporters of my impressions, I spoke of my shock and profound sympathy. I inquired then why there were no photographs of the carnage at Pearl Harbor or what was perpetrated by the Japanese military in China. As consequence of the Japanese invasion begun in 1931, some 15 million Chinese had died. There was only silence. Viewing the horrific photographs of the Hiroshima dead, I was impelled to ponder President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. It is said that the bomb spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, likely me among them, who would have died in an invasion of Japan. But yet I wondered then, and have never ceased wondering, whether such an invasion was inevitable and whether there was sufficient justification for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and later Nagasaki. What if, rather than dropping the bombs, there had been a delay while other attacks were pressed on Japan? The Japanese navy had been effectively destroyed by the American fleet in the engagement in the Gulf of Leyte. Would not the Japanese have surrendered soon enough as they continued to suffer firebombing and starvation by blockade? As humanity confronts the threat of nuclear proliferation among rogue nations and theft of bomb components by terrorists, questions persist for me about the wisdom of the decision to introduce nuclear weapons and wage atomic warfare.

  These questions are implied in recent policy statements by some world leaders. Shortly after he assumed office in January 2009, President Barack Obama joined with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and British prime minister Gordon Brown in calling for the reinforcement of curbs on nuclear proliferation and reduction of arms in existing arsenals as steps toward the realization of a world free of nuclear weaponry. The American president said: “The goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.” His pronouncement was the first step toward reversing the policies that led to Hiroshima and the terrors of nuclear proliferation.

  I had volunteered for duty in the Pacific, rather than Europe, for reasons frankly somewhat peripheral to devotion to patriotic duty. From high school days in New York when I read Edgar Snow’s epic Red Star over China, I had dreamed of becoming a correspondent in China. I chose, therefore, to study at the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri because the school had long-standing contacts with universities in China. It was my crash course at Missouri in the Japanese language and other Asian studies that persuaded the army assignment officer to ship me to the Pacific rather than the European battleground. I was pleased, since I had planned, if I survived the war, to make my way to a news reporting job in China. My duffel aboard the Lydia Lykes was stuffed with books about China.

  On landing in Leyte’s steamy jungle-encased port of Tacloban, I joined an infantry battalion engaged in rounding up Japanese stragglers in the jungle. In the grand strategy, Leyte had been the stepping-stone to Luzon, the larger island of the Philippines, and ultimately Japan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff targeted the Philippines rather than Japanese-held Taiwan, the other possible choice, in deference to General Douglas MacArthur’s plea that we were indebted to the ever loyal Filipino people who had endured Japanese occupation. At 10:00 hours on October 20, 1944, Sixth Army forces landed on the east coast of Leyte, and at 13:30 General MacArthur waded ashore to broadcast his message: “People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the Grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil.” But MacArthur’s intelligence staff, headed by Colonel Charles Willoughby, had underestimated Japanese capabilities. The struggle lasted longer than he projected, and MacArthur was not able to declare the island won until December 31. In fact, the ferocious battle was not completely over until May 8, when the last major Japanese holdouts were crushed. I cite these miscalculations because in retrospect I found them prescient of subsequent intelligence failures by Willoughby in the Korean War when he underestimated the capabilities of the Chinese Communist troops much as he did the Japanese on Leyte.

  On the island, my battalion guarded thousands of Japanese prisoners. During my inspections of the stockade in which generals were confined, I gained my first direct insight into the Japanese mind. When, I, a first lieutenant, entered their stockade, the generals would leap to attention and salute. Authority was paramount to them, as it was when they obeyed their blundering emperor.

  After six months on Leyte, while on leave in Manila, I encountered Captain Ernie Ernst, a polo teammate at Missouri, at an American officers’ club. Inevitably, the reunion began with the recollection of a hilarious tale from the annals of Missouri’s polo teams. When I entered the university in 1939, I was required to enroll in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The ROTC unit at Missouri specialized in horse-drawn field artillery. My first day in the stables I attempted to mount a horse from the wrong side, evoking guffaws from the other students, many of them farm-born youths, at the spectacle of this New Yorker thrown by a startled steed. With that humiliation, I became obsessed with horses and spent countless hours training on the riding paths. In my junior year I made the polo squad to the astonishment of Ernst, who was the captain of the team. When I met him in Manila, Ernie was stationed at Camp John Hay near Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines, as a public relations officer and liaison to the city government. He was homeward bound and proposed that I replace him. There followed transfer from the jungles of Leyte to the mountaintop camp near lovely Baguio.

  Fortuitously, the new posting brought me in contact with Preston Grover, the Associated Press bureau chief in Manila, who listened sympathetically to my journalistic aspirations. He introduced me to Frank Robertson, an Australian correspondent who was the Asian bureau chief of the International News Service, a subsidiary of the Hearst Newspapers. At a bar, I told Robertson that I was due for terminal leave, that I had declined a regular army commission, and that I had enrolled in the College of Chinese Studies in Peking. (The city was customarily referred to by old China hands as “Peking,” the Western rendering of its historical imperial title. Nor did China hands bow to the decision of Chiang Kai-shek to bestow the name “Peip’ing,” meaning Northern Peace, in the 1930s when he moved the capital south to Nanking. It would later become in Pinyin romanization “Beijing,” meaning Northern Capital, under Mao Zedong.) Robertson grinned when I told him of my plan to study the Chinese language at the college while I freelanced as a journalist. After a short cease-fire, fighting between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong had reignited, and Robertson was looking for a stringer in Peking to cover the Civil War. He ordered another scotch and offered me the job. The title that would adorn my name card in
English and Chinese would be “Chief Correspondent for North China and Manchuria.” The imposing title would compensate, I rationalized, for the meagerness of salary: fifty dollars a month plus payments for what was published. On a September morning in 1946 I boarded a U.S. Army transport plane bound for China. It was beyond my imagination that in a matter of weeks I would be flying from Peking to report from Mao Zedong’s headquarters in Yenan and that I would be covering the Chinese Civil War for the next three years. And during those years in China, I would meet and fall wildly in love with the beautiful Audrey Ronning, who would become my wife, the mother of our five daughters born in Saigon, London, Berlin, and New York, and my journalist partner in reporting assignments around the world.

  1

  PEKING

  COVERING THE CIVIL WAR

  The Chinese Communist official in the black tunic scrutinized me skeptically as I stood before his desk in the uniform of a recently promoted U.S. Army captain. I had just identified myself as a correspondent for the International News Service. An amused expression replaced the frown as I explained that I was newly arrived in Peking from Manila, still on terminal military leave, and I had not yet found time to buy civilian clothes. The Communist official was Huang Hua, and this meeting in September 1946 was the first of many encounters with him, some at historical junctures when he was a key figure in shaping relations between the United States and China.

  I had stopped at Huang Hua’s desk while making the rounds of Executive Headquarters, the truce organization established by President Truman’s envoy, General George C. Marshall, who arrived in China on December 20, 1945, with the mission of bringing about an end to the Civil War between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Before approaching Huang Hua, who was the spokesman for the Communist branch of Executive Headquarters, I had introduced myself to the American commissioner, Walter Robertson, and to the American military officers, who were so numerous that Peking residents jokingly spoke of the headquarters, which was housed in the former Peking Union Medical College, as the “Temple of One Thousand Sleeping Colonels.” Marshall at this moment was in Chungking attempting to bring the two warring factions into a coalition government. From Executive Headquarters, American, Nationalist, and Communist commissioners were sending out joint truce teams to battlefields to resolve violations of the cease-fire agreement negotiated by Marshall on January 13, 1945. Huang Hua was the personal aide to as well as spokesman for the Communist commissioner, General Ye Jianying, chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army.

  I hastened from my meeting with Huang Hua to Morrison Street, a thoroughfare lined with shops hawking everything from forbidden opium to precious antiques. There I found a Chinese tailor who promised to outfit me overnight in civilian garb. While being measured, peering through the tailor shop window, I watched the traffic on Morrison Street, which ran north–south linking the massive ancient gates of the walled city. Rickshaws and bicycles went by in large number, along with vintage foreign-made cars, and an occasional dust-laden camel or donkey caravan trekking in from the edges of the Gobi Desert. It was impossible to foretell that in August 2008 this same thoroughfare, renamed Wangfujing, would be lined with glistening office skyscrapers, high-rise apartment houses, and fashionable department stores and thronged with thousands of tourists attending the Olympic Games.

  Within days of my arrival, decked out in the ill-fitting pinstriped suit with massive shoulder pads made by the Chinese tailor, I was swapping gossip with other correspondents at the bar of the elegant Peking Club and lunching there with sources in the diplomatic community. I chatted with Andrei M. Ledovsky, the Russian consul general, who would later rank as the leading Soviet specialist and historian on East Asian affairs. I lived at first in the dormitory of the College of Chinese Studies, a Christian missionary-supported institution. When not out reporting, I took language lessons there from a bespectacled Mandarin-like professor who insisted that I apply myself rigorously and had me practicing Chinese tones endlessly. For generations the college had provided language training to foreign missionaries, military men, and businessmen. Among the people I met at the school was a former Louisiana schoolteacher who was simply boarding there. She was one of a number of unattached foreign women sashaying those days about China, slipping from one job to another, some becoming consorts of wealthy Chinese. She told me tales of her affair with a Chinese general. She would become Joan Taylor, a character in my first novel, The Peking Letter, published in 1999. In the warlord days of 1922, Chester Ronning, my future father-in-law, and his wife, Inga, then Lutheran missionaries, were students at the school in the company of General Joseph W. Stillwell and his wife, Win. Stillwell made extensive use of his Chinese during the war against Japan. Chinese divisions were deployed under his command in the operations against the Japanese which opened the vital Burma Road, the main overland route for delivery of supplies to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. Quarrels with Chiang, stemming from what Stillwell considered the Generalissimo’s inept leadership in the war against Japan, led to the general’s recall by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  After several months, I left the school dormitory to share a house with Captain David Galula, a brilliant young French assistant military attaché, who confided in me details of the briefings he was getting from his excellent Chinese and diplomatic sources. Galula went from Peking in the next years to observing insurgencies in Greece and Southeast Asia. In 1963 at Harvard University he wrote the book Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, which was still being quoted in 2005 by Americans searching for stratagems to cope with the insurgency in Iraq. The College of Chinese Studies was located in Peking’s Inner City, known as the old Manchu or Tartar city, which embraced the Forbidden City and the Legation Quarter. When Chiang Kai-shek moved the capital south to Nanking (later rendered in Pinyin as Nanjing), the foreign embassies followed; only their consulates remained open in the Legation Quarter. On some evenings Galula and I would go by rickshaw down the narrow, cobbled toutiao hutung (alleyways) along Hatamen Street, past the crimson walls of the Forbidden City, pausing at times to gaze at the purple and golden tile roofs of its palaces and temples before being wheeled through the Front Gate of the Outer City into the old Chinese quarter. There we would loll in the boisterous wine shops exchanging gossip and quips with Chinese acquaintances, at times visiting the company houses where slim joy girls with tinkling voices in silken cheongsams slit to the thigh offered jasmine tea and other delights.

  Persuaded that I was a correspondent and not some kind of a spy, Huang Hua dined with me in the fabulous duck and Mongolian restaurants where conversation was enhanced with cups of hsiao hsin, the hot yellow wine. A trim man of thirty-eight, with a quick smile, he spoke good English and enjoyed chatting and tilting ideologically with American correspondents. One of his closest friends was the American journalist Edgar Snow. In 1936, when Huang Hua was a militant leader of the underground student movement at Yenching University (later Peking University) and being hunted by the Nationalist secret police, Snow provided him with refuge in his Peking apartment. Later that year, Huang Hua joined the Communist Party and slipped out of Peking to meet Snow in the cave city of Yenan. Two years earlier, facing annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in the Civil War, the Red Army had made the 8,000-mile Long March to the Yen River valley. In Yenan, Huang Hua served as translator and recorder for the American journalist when he interviewed Mao and other Communist leaders for his book.

  Huang Hua was intensely curious about the United States. He would bring books about America to my room in the college’s monastic stone dormitory, and we would spend many hours discussing their contents. It was a harbinger of his future extensive involvements with the United States. In 1949, after the Communist occupation of Nanking, he became Premier Zhou Enlai’s envoy in negotiations with J. Leighton Stuart, the American ambassador in Nanking, when Mao was seeking Washington’s recognition. He was the chief delegate confronting the Americans
at the Panmunjom peace negotiations during the Korean War. Later, he would become the first ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations and then foreign minister. He would be at the airfield in July 1971 to welcome Henry Kissinger when the national security adviser arrived secretly to prepare for President Nixon’s historic visit to China.

  When the Civil War reignited in 1946 in full fury, I seized every opportunity to fly to the remote battlefields of North China and Manchuria to report on the collision of hundreds of thousands of troops in some of the largest battles in history. Little or no news was reaching the outside world about these battles during which many tens of thousands of combatants and civilians were killed. My first trip in September was to Communist-besieged Tat’ung, a coal-mining and industrial city which lay in a basin surrounded by mountains in northern Shansi Province, between the Inner and Outer Great Wall. I traveled aboard an Executive Headquarters plane with a truce team made up of American, Nationalist, and Communist delegates. We landed on a rough airstrip outside the city encased by massive walls. Passing through the Communist lines under a flag of truce, we crossed a wide moat, went through a strangely incongruous electrified barbed-wire fence, and entered Tat’ung through its towering ancient gate. Inside the isolated city, garrisoned by 10,000 Nationalist troops, more than 100,000 inhabitants were carrying on their daily lives stoically awaiting the impending Communist assault. The truce team made no progress in its talks with either the garrison commander or his Communist besiegers, commanded by General He Long. The January 13 cease-fire which General Marshall had arranged in Chungking with Chiang Kai-shek and Zhou Enlai, the Communist negotiator, was no longer being complied with by either side. Several days after our departure, General He Long’s Communist forces stormed Tat’ung and seized the Northern Gate. But he was compelled to break off the attack, having suffered some 10,000 casualties, as a Nationalist column, including mounted cavalry, commanded by General Fu Tso-yi, approached the city. Exploiting the Communist retreat, Fu continued his advance and on October 10 took Kalgan, the capital of Chahar Province (named after a Mongolian clan and in 1952 incorporated into Inner Mongolia), which was the principal Communist stronghold in North China.