On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  During Mao’s absence in Chungking, the Soviets flew Zeng Gelin, commander of a small Chinese Communist task force in Manchuria, with their Russian advisers from Mukden to Yenan, where they met with Liu Shaoqi, who was in control of the party and military during Mao’s absence. The Russians told Liu that they intended to allow the Nationalists to take over the major cities of Manchuria, including Harbin, Ch’angch’un, and Mukden, now known as Shenyang, in keeping with the treaty that Stalin had signed with Chiang, but the Communists could operate freely elsewhere in the northeast, implying they would receive Soviet assistance. Based on this report, the Central Committee decided that Manchuria could fall into its grasp if its troops were free to maneuver in the countryside against the Nationalist-held cities. The committee saw conquest of Manchuria as key to victory in the Civil War. With Mao’s approval, Liu immediately diverted eighty thousand troops of the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, with a large number of political cadres, northward.

  To lead the Manchurian campaign, Liu turned to General Lin Biao, one of the PLA’s most accomplished field commanders and writers on military doctrine. It put Lin Biao on a ladder to eminence that would eventually culminate in the 1960s when Lin would be promoted as Mao’s official successor, only to come later to a violent end. Lin’s rise to eminence and his mysterious downfall have a storybook quality. Lin graduated in 1925 from Whampoa Military Academy during the first KMT-CCP United Front. But unlike many of the newly minted officers, Lin became a protégé of Zhou Enlai, the political tutor at the academy, rather than of Chiang Kai-shek, the commandant. At the age of twenty, Lin became a colonel in the Nationalist Army, but in the aftermath of the KMT-CCP split in 1927, he defected to the Communists. Mao gave him command of the First Red Corps of the Red Army, and in 1924 he led the vanguard troops on the 8,000-mile Long March to Yenan. There, at the age of twenty-eight, Lin became president of the Red Army Military Academy and gave a series of lectures published as Struggle and War and Revolution that became Communist military doctrine much like Mao’s essay On Protracted War. He also became a devastating guerrilla fighter, jolting the Nationalists into putting a price of $100,000 on his head. In 1937, at the Battle of the Ping-hsing Pass, where his division defeated Japanese troops, the young commander suffered a severe chest wound. To convalesce he was sent to the Soviet Union, where he studied military science.

  To carry out the mission, given to him by Liu Shaoqi, of preparing a Manchurian offensive, Lin Biao led a vanguard of 30,000 troops to join the guerrillas already operating in Manchuria. The Communist reinforcements moved into Manchuria through the northwestern corridor of Chahar and Jehol provinces and also from Shantung to ports on the coast of Manchuria’s Kwangtung Peninsula.

  Stalin’s exchanges with Mao and Chiang did not divert the Soviet dictator from pursuing his reach for the spoils of Manchuria. While withdrawing his main occupation force, which consisted of some 300,000 troops, in May 1946, he asserted Soviet rights to “trophies of war of the Red Army,” and his forces stripped the region’s Japanese-built factories, transporting their machinery by rail to Siberia. Touring the region, the American Pauley Mission estimated in its November 1946 report to President Truman the value of the Russian take at about $900 million. Typically, as I found when traveling in Manchuria in 1971, at the huge Kirin hydroelectric project the Russians had hauled away six of the eight turbines.

  While the Russians took with them much of the heavy Japanese military ordnance, they abandoned arsenals containing substantial quantities of light arms and munitions. To assure Communist advance access to these depots, the Russians delayed the debarkation of Nationalist troops into Manchuria through the ports of Dairen, Hulutao, and Yingkou. In the opposing race for the surrendered Japanese spoils, the U.S. Air Force in September flew 26,000 Nationalist troops aboard two hundred Douglas C-54 Skymaster transports into Nanking and Shanghai and then a further 5,000 troops into Peking. As Truman noted in his memoirs, the operation was accelerated to forestall a move by the Communists to take the surrender of the Japanese at all towns and cities within their reach. But before the airlifted Nationalist divisions could drive north to take possession of the Manchurian cities, the Communists pounced on Japanese arms depots at Harbin, Mukden, and other sites before retreating to the countryside. However, Stalin delayed until 1947 the turnover to the Communists of the largest cache of Japanese weapons, including tanks and heavy artillery, stored at the Russian base at Manchouli in Manchuria. The Russians had appropriated these weapons at a Japanese depot south of Mukden with the apparent intention of eventually transporting them to the Soviet Union. In yielding these arms Stalin seemed to put aside earlier doubts about whether the Communists were capable of defeating the Nationalists in the Civil War and decided to render more substantial aid to Mao. He also may have become concerned about continued American military aid to Chiang’s forces and the possibility that a total Nationalist victory might provide the Americans with bases in proximity to his eastern borders. The acquisition of the Japanese weaponry was of critical help to the Communists in their conquest of Manchuria. The troops, commanded by Lin Biao, had been equipped prior to acquisition of the Japanese arms mainly with crude Chinese manufactured weapons along with a motley collection of old European arms. Apart from supplying Lin Biao with the Japanese arms, the principal assistance given the Communists by the Russians was in the transport of PLA troops on the Manchurian railways which the Russians had retained under their control. While Lin Biao prized the military help given to him by the Russians, he stood by helplessly while they were looting the Manchurian industrial complex.

  As I was leaving Yenan in late November, it became increasingly evident that the Communist leadership was bracing for a long struggle with Chiang Kai-shek. Three Nationalist army groups, comprising 250,000 men, had advanced within striking distance of Yenan. Bolstered by American military aid, Chiang was enjoying an overwhelming superiority in troops and equipment, including his unopposed air force. His troops numbered about 2.6 million men, while Communist forces totaled about 1.1 million. Four months after my departure from Yenan, the Maoist leaders and their followers, heavily outnumbered by advancing National divisions, abandoned their long-held stronghold.

  Before leaving Chungking, Zhou Enlai obtained a promise from Marshall that American transports would evacuate all Communist political representatives from Nationalist-held territory if peace negotiations were not resumed. On February 27–28, in an operation dubbed “Catfish,” the U.S. Air Force returned Communist officials and their families to Yenan from Peking, Chungking, Nanking, and Shanghai. As the last evacuation aircraft departed Yenan, American pilots observed Communist troops blowing up the airstrip to deny use of it to advancing Nationalist columns. As Huang Hua recalls in his Memoirs, published in 2008, the party’s Central Committee met and decided to disperse leaders, central organizations, and schools to the various bases held by the Communists. Mao, Zhou Enlai, and General Peng Dehuai, the deputy commander in chief of the army, would go to a remote county in northern Shensi to “carry on the war of liberation in the whole country.” On the morning of March 19, the Nationalist First Division descended from the heights above undefended Yenan and took possession of the city that was by then empty of Maoist adherents. Mao, who had been sheltering with other leaders out of fear of Nationalist air raids in a gully behind the Peach Orchard, left Yenan in a jeep with Jiang Qing and their daughter escorted by a small contingent of bodyguards for the northern Shensi mountains, where he set up a new headquarters in the small village of Chengyangcha to plan his counteroffensive in the intensifying Civil War.

  3

  BATTLE FOR MANCHURIA

  One month after my return in late November to Peking from Yenan, I traveled to Manchuria as fighting flared along the lower Sungari River front. The battles were being fought on grasslands crisscrossed by rivers and along the railway lines linking the principal cities and towns. The front extended from Communist-held northern Manchuria south to the Liao River
valley, controlled by the Nationalists. From Peking I flew in an Executive Headquarters plane to Ch’angch’un, the Nationalist-occupied former capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, situated not far from the southern banks of the broad Sungari. The city, which the Japanese had built in imitation of some features of Washington, D.C., was in ruins. Its pretentious white government buildings and outlying factories had been looted, first by the withdrawing Russians and then by Chinese mobs before the arrival of Nationalist troops.

  Under heavy armed escort, I visited Nationalist units dug in along the Sungari front. The soldiers in their thick padded uniforms were hunkered down in cold so bitter that they could not with bare hands touch the metal of their weapons without losing skin. At his headquarters, I interviewed the Nationalist commander, Lieutenant General Sun Li-jen, a slim handsome forty-seven-year-old graduate of the Virginia Military Academy and Purdue University who was regarded by General Stillwell as one of the ablest Nationalist field commanders. In the Burma campaign against the Japanese he had earned the sobriquet of “Rommel of the East.” In the spring of 1946, Sun’s American-trained and -equipped New First Army, which had a component of 70,000 Burma veterans, spearheaded the Nationalist drive into Manchuria. Ferried into North China aboard U.S. Air Force transports, Sun’s forces had pushed north as Russian occupation troops withdrew and took control of Mukden, the great metropolis of southern Manchuria. Sun’s troops then struck farther north against the principal Chinese Communist stronghold position at Ssuping city on the critical rail line linking Mukden with Ch’angch’un. Sun’s tanks overran Ssuping on May 19 in a hard-fought forty-day struggle against 110,000 entrenched Communists, both sides suffering extremely heavy casualties. Four days later, although his divisions had suffered 25,000 casualties in the Ssuping street fighting, Sun’s armored columns backed by the Nationalist Fifth Army went on to take Ch’angch’un on May 23. The battered Communist forces defending Ch’angch’un, which had expended virtually all their munitions, were sent reeling back across the Sungari River. Sun then established a bridgehead over the Sungari for a further advance on Harbin, the principal city of northern Manchuria and headquarters of Lin Biao, the Communist commander. His troops exhausted after their retreat from the south and having suffered 20,000 casualties, Lin Biao drafted an order on June 6 for withdrawal from Harbin. However, under pressure from General Marshall, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to a fifteen-day truce on June 7, and the Generalissimo called a halt to the Nationalist drive north. Marshall had warned Chiang, with President Truman’s sanction, that the United States would not support an advance into northern Manchuria, which Stalin held to be a sphere of special Russian interests under the terms of the Yalta Agreement and the Treaty of Alliance between the Nationalists and the Soviets of 1945. Marshall was unwilling to risk Stalin taking retaliatory military action.

  Marshall was strongly criticized by some American observers for halting the Nationalist advance and depriving Sun Li-jen of the opportunity of seizing Harbin and thus dealing a crippling blow to the Chinese Communists. But the Soviet diplomat and historian Andrei Ledovsky, whom I had come to know in Peking, retorted in a retrospective essay that Marshall made the right decision, that a Nationalist advance into northern Manchuria “could have had unpredictable and dangerous consequences—not only for the Kuomintang, but also for the United States and the entire international situation in the Far East.” He said that Stalin might have sent his army back into Manchuria, justifying his action as a response to atrocities committed against Russian citizens by Nationalist troops. The abuse of the Russians, which I had reported in my own dispatches, had led to the withdrawal of Soviet specialists operating the Chinese South Manchurian Railway under the 1945 treaty arrangements.

  Following the cease-fire, Sun told me, the Communists had regrouped and were preparing for a counteroffensive. He was not underestimating his Communist adversary Lin Biao, the hero of the Battle of the Ping-hsing Pass in the war against the Japanese. After his humiliating retreat from Ssuping, Lin Biao had reorganized the Northeast Democratic United Army, a ragtag force made up of Northern Chinese, Manchurians, Mongol cavalrymen, and North Korean units, into his New Fourth Army. About ten days after my departure from Ch’angch’un, Lin Biao sent 300,000 of his troops, many equipped with the newly acquired Japanese weaponry, across the frozen Sungari River in three successive thrusts on a broad front and for a short time enveloped Ch’angch’un, cutting off the power station supplying electricity and water to the city. However, Lin fell back in disarray across the river when Sun counterattacked. The armies then dug in, confronting each other across the Sungari.

  On Christmas Eve I left Ch’angch’un by train for Mukden, the Manchurian metropolis in the south. It was one of the last trains to leave the city. I was accompanied by Jules Joelson, a sober, rather nervous correspondent for the Agence France-Presse, and Vladimir Drozdov, a pint-sized Russian correspondent who wore a big square fur hat with a red star on it. Drozdov worked for the Russian Daily News, which served the twenty thousand Russian émigrés living in Shanghai. Not long out of Ch’angch’un on the 200-mile journey, the train jolted to a stop, and we were told that Lin Biao’s guerrillas had ripped up the rails. The guerrillas employing what they called their “sparrow” tactics were raiding the rail and highway links between the various Manchurian cities garrisoned by the Nationalists. Guarded by the Nationalist Railway Police aboard the train, we sat in a crowded, unheated coach in subzero temperatures as the rails were repaired. Drozdov huddled close to me as Chinese passengers snarled “tapitze” (big nose) at him. The Chinese, angered by maltreatment during the Russian occupation, were harassing the White Russian communities in the Manchurian cities.

  Without food and growing hungrier as the hours passed, I became curious and inquired about a paper bag which Joelson kept close at his side. He confessed he had been to Harbin and was returning to Peking, and as ordered by his French wife, he was bearing a jar of the finest caviar obtained in a White Russian shop. Yielding to our piteous whimpers for food, Joelson reluctantly opened the jar and placed it between us. We dipped into the jar, eating it by the handful. (I had no taste for caviar for years thereafter.) After fourteen hours on the tracks, the rails were repaired, and the train clanked on to Mukden. I spent Christmas in the Shenyang Railway Hotel, venturing out to dine with Drozdov at the superb White Russian restaurants, whose proprietors seemed impervious to the Civil War, and returned after New Year’s to Peking.

  In early March 1947, with the conflict in Manchuria shaping up as one of the most decisive battles of the Civil War, I flew to Ch’angch’un once again, this time in the company of six other correspondents: Walter Bosshard of the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, who was the dean of the press corps in Peking; Benjamin Welles, of the New York Times; Don Starr, of the Chicago Tribune; Jules Joelson; and my two news agency competitors, who had become legendary figures on the China scene, John Roderick of the Associated Press and Reynolds Packard of the United Press. In all they made up a coterie who were professionally and in lifestyle typical of the array of journalists covering the Civil War. Bosshard, the Swiss, a tall dignified man with a shock of gray hair, a correspondent in the old tradition of the adventurer and explorer, lived, of course, in the best Peking style. He rented a house in Wang-fuchien, one of sixteen owned by Prince Pu Lun, a cousin of Pu Yi, the last monarch of the Qing dynasty, who in 1934 had become the puppet emperor of Manchukuo under the Japanese. Invited to dine, I would recline in the main room under polished hardwood beams of his Chinese house beside the blazing hearth fire to listen enthralled to his tales of mandarins, revolutionaries, warlords, and famous concubines. At dinner there would be French wine and liqueurs made in a Catholic monastery near Peking, which would be served by two long-gowned servants, who moved wraithlike anticipating every wish. Beyond the red-painted front door there was a courtyard with moon gates and flower beds. His antiques came from a shop just down the road owned by Walter Plaut, a German aristocrat, who sold his treasured wa
res only to those appreciative clients he personally held in esteem.

  Much of the social life in Peking whirled about Ben Welles, son of Sumner Welles, then U.S. Undersecretary of State, and his beautiful English wife, Cynthia. He married Cynthia while stationed in London covering World War II after she had divorced the son of Lord Beaverbrook, the British press baron. John Roderick was the very able Associated Press man who had lived for several months in Yenan before my visit there, transmitting his dispatches via the Yenan Radio to the AP listening station in San Francisco. Then there was Reynolds Packard of the United Press, celebrated for less flattering reasons. A fleshy, lusty man, Packard felt he had to write the kind of copy that would be read by the “Kansas City Milkman,” which became the title of a book he later wrote exposing the foibles of his news agency. He was fired upon our return from Manchuria after filing a story that he picked up from the imaginative Chinese press about a “human-headed spider,” which caused a sensation around the world. A jokester on my International News Service cable desk, in keeping with the agency’s concern about cable transmission costs, sent me a message instructing me not to file unless I located a spider with two human heads.

  Our flight to Ch’angch’un aboard a very worn C-47 of the U.S. Air Force was occasioned because the battle for Manchuria had intensified and also by a diplomatic uproar over the Communist capture and jailing of two American assistant military attachés, Major Robert Riggs and Captain John Collins. The incident had become a major source of tension between Washington and the Communists. At Ch’angch’un we were met beside the snow-packed runway by the seventeen-year-old son of O. Edmund Clubb, the U.S. consul general, driving an army ambulance. At the consulate, as we thawed out from the subzero cold before a roaring fire, the consul general told us about the rather freakish circumstances of the attachés’ misfortune which had landed them in a Harbin prison. They were touring the Sungari front and had dismounted from their jeep to survey with binoculars distant troop movements when the Chinese driver of their jeep and their interpreter suddenly panicked and drove off, leaving them stranded. The isolated officers were soon nabbed by Communist soldiers. The attachés were freed after fifty-five days in captivity. Clubb, a cool, resourceful diplomat, managed to negotiate their release by radio. Holding a white flag, Clubb went to a crossing on the tense Sungari front, where he accepted their handover. Clubb was later to become the last American diplomat to be stationed in Peking after the Communist takeover. It fell to him, as consul general, to haul down the American flag there in April 1950.*