On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  From Clubb’s residence, we proceeded to the Chinese telegraph office, where we wrote our dispatches. Packard produced a pair of dice, which we tossed to determine the order in which we would file, a procedure of some importance given the vagaries of the Chinese telegraph. Packard came in first and Roderick fifth. Bosshard casually agreed to file last, since he said his newspaper was in no hurry. We spent the night on cots in the desolate Manchukuo parliament building on the outskirts of the city. In the morning we rendezvoused at the consulate, where I encountered Packard and Roderick in heated argument. Packard had gone alone to the telegraph and found that Roderick had cunningly marked his dispatch “urgent” so that it would go out first. Roderick was unapologetic and chagrined only when he learned that his alleged trickery had been to no avail. In Chinese fashion, the telegraph clerk had put the last dispatch handed him atop the pile, and as a consequence Bosshard’s cable had gone out first with no consideration given Roderick’s urgent stamp. The Swiss fox had triumphed again.

  A telephone call from the consulate interrupted, summoning us to a meeting with General Tu Yu-ming, the commander in chief of Nationalist forces in Manchuria. We traveled to the Northeast General Headquarters huddling against the intense cold in an open weapons carrier. I had expected to see Sun Li-jen, the conqueror of Ssuping, who had also successfully defended Ch’angch’un against Lin Biao’s initial assaults, but he was not among those greeting us. He had been removed from his Ch’angch’un command, evidently having clashed with General Tu by opposing his policy of relying too much on a network of pillbox defenses and barbed wire systems around the Manchurian cities rather than engaging the Communists in offensive operations. Sun shared the view of Major General David Barr, chief of the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) in Nanking: “In modern warfare the most disastrous of all things to do is to retreat into a city behind walls and take a defensive position.”*

  At the headquarters we were ushered into a map room, where we were greeted by General Tu, a forty-two-year-old officer, well turned out, his close-cropped hair carefully coiffed. He was wearing a well-tailored uniform with three rows of decorations including the U.S. Army parachutist badge awarded him at the school run during World War II at Kunming by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He had distinguished himself during the 1942 Burma campaign as the commander of the first Chinese motorized corps. The general shook hands with each of us, taking our calling cards in his left hand while his aide offered cigarettes. From his Ch’angch’un headquarters, Tu commanded seven divisions covering the city with its bridgehead over the Sungari and twelve divisions based at Mukden, guarding the approaches from North Korea and Inner Mongolia. Most of his 225,000 troops were American equipped, and he benefited from the cover of the unopposed Nationalist Air Force.

  Tu told us Lin Biao was readying another assault across the Sungari but he was optimistic that he could hold his positions on the river. He would not say whether he intended to resume the Nationalist drive north to Harbin from his Sungari bridgehead or a sweep farther South down the Liaotung Peninsula, which would bring his troops close to the Russian-held port of Dairen. The previous October he had mounted an offensive with seven divisions down the peninsula to Tantung, on the Yalu River bordering North Korea, routing the Communists and inflicting heavy casualties on them. However, when two of his divisions pursued the Communists farther south, one of them was ambushed and only 1,000 of its troops escaped. Bolstered by replacement divisions, Tu renewed his offensive and secured control of the southern Manchurian railway network, but at a cost of 11,000 casualties. Tu told us his forces were ready to resume the advance on Harbin from his Sungari bridgehead but the timing turned on the outcome of diplomatic exchanges between the Nationalist government and Moscow. If the continuing threat of Russian intervention was removed, he was ready to take the offensive. Tu’s optimism about his prospects was short lived. When I returned to Manchuria in the spring of 1947, I found that the balance of forces in Manchuria had changed fundamentally from the glory days of Sun Li-jen’s march to the Sungari.

  4

  FALL OF MANCHURIA

  Six months after his retreat from Yenan, Mao issued, on September 7, 1947, a new directive to the PLA from his Shensi mountain headquarters. He began by summarizing military operations from July 1946 to June 1947. He said his forces had “wiped out” 1,120,000 Nationalist troops and militia supporters. But then he conceded that the Communists had been forced to yield considerable territory of the “Liberated Areas” and had suffered 300,000 casualties. After stressing the fundamental need of forging ahead with land reform to gain the support of the peasantry, he then laid down the strategic and tactical guidelines for the next phase of military operations.

  The Maoist strategy called for maneuver in the countryside followed by step-by-step encirclement of Nationalist-held towns and cities. He had first employed this strategy in the 1920s and 1930s against Chiang Kai-shek’s vastly superior forces. In 1938 Mao elaborated on this strategy in his classic work On Protracted War, drawn from lectures he made in Yenan in 1938, which became the basic text for war against the Japanese and used subsequently in the Civil War. The book laid out tactics by which the morale and combat effectiveness of an enemy army superior in numbers and equipment could be broken down. “To achieve success,” he said, “Chinese troops must conduct their warfare with a high degree of mobility on extensive battlefields, making swift advances and withdrawals, swift concentrations and dispersals. This means large scale mobile warfare, not positional warfare . . . It does not mean the abandonment of all the vital strategic positions, which should be defended by positional warfare as long as profitable. Besides employing trained armies to carry on mobile warfare, we must organize great numbers of guerrilla units among the peasants.”

  As recorded by Lionel Max Chassin in his book The Communist Conquest of China, these were the specific tactics which Mao elaborated in his September 7 directive to his widely dispersed troops:

  Attack dispersed isolated enemy forces first . . . attack concentrated strong enemy forces later; take medium and small cities and extensive rural areas first; take big cities later.

  Make wiping out the enemy’s effective strength our main objective; do not make holding or seizing a place our main objective . . .

  In every battle concentrate an absolutely superior force, encircle the enemy forces completely . . . do not let any escape from the net.

  Fight no battle unprepared. Fight no battle you are not sure of winning.

  Strive to draw the enemy into mobile warfare . . .

  Resolutely attack and seize all fortified points and cities which are weakly defended. For the time being leave alone all fortified points and cities which are strongly defended

  Replenish our strength with all the arms and most of the soldiers captured from the enemy (80 to 90 per cent of the men and a small number of the junior officers).

  This Maoist protracted war strategy was adapted in the 1950s, with the help of Chinese Communist advisers, by Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s top military commander, and effectively employed in the wars against the French and then against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies.

  In the spring of 1948, the PLA launched a general counteroffensive retrieving lost territory including Yenan. The offensive was in progress in March when I returned to Mukden, wangling a ride on a U.S. Air Force transport carrying supplies to the American consular mission, headed by Angus Ward. I found that the strategic situation had changed radically in all of Manchuria since my interview with Tu Yu-ming in Ch’angch’un a year earlier. Mounting a strike force of 600,000 troops, Lin Biao had succeeded in isolating Mukden and Chinchow, the vital communications and supply center south of the metropolis, as well as Ch’angch’un in the north. Lin Biao massed antiaircraft artillery around the encircled cities, which were being supplied by air, compelling the Nationalist transport planes to make their drops from high altitudes. Many, if not most, of the parachuted packets floated into the
hands of the PLA.

  Alarmed, Chiang flew from Nanking to Peking to take personal command of Manchurian field operations. As General Ho Ying-chin, the defense minister, groused privately to American advisers, Chiang began issuing orders without consulting with the general staff. When his New Fifth Corps was wiped out in a Communist ambush as it ventured beyond the Mukden defense perimeter, Chiang in a fury flew on to the metropolis, where he reshuffled the Manchurian High Command. He appointed General Wei Lihuang as commander in chief, demoting Tu Yu-ming to deputy. In the 1930s, Chiang had bestowed the title “Ever Victorious General” on Wei as a reward for having wiped out a Maoist guerrilla base area.

  Mukden was a city in panic when I landed there. The Nationalist garrison of 200,000 troops, although better armed than the Communists, had sat too long behind the pillbox defenses, erected on the orders of Tu Yu-ming. When I toured the defense perimeter, interviewing field commanders, I found that Lin Biao’s columns had drawn a noose about the entire city and its environs. To guard against a Communist incursion into the city, other garrison troops in their yellow padded uniforms were manning pillboxes at intersections with machine guns sited down the thoroughfares. The streets were almost entirely empty except for refugees and beggars. Shops were boarded up. The big redbrick factories built by the Japanese, bombed by American troops during the war and then looted by the withdrawing Russians, were crumpled, abandoned shells. Three China-based commercial airlines, including General Claire L. Chennault’s Civil Air Transport (CAT), were bringing in food and other supplies for the military garrison and selected civilians. Huge salaries were being paid to the American pilots making the risky low-level flights over the Communist lines.

  There were 4 million people employed in farming areas within the Mukden perimeter, about sixty miles in diameter, but their produce was insufficient to feed the city’s population of 1.2 million and the great influx of refugees. More than 300,000 people were subsisting on bark and leaves and pressed soybean cakes, ordinarily used as fertilizer or animal fodder. Thousands were dying, many of them children, wasted by malnutrition and such diseases as pellagra and scurvy. Many were going blind because of diet deficiencies. I walked along the desolate streets past skeletal dead sprawled in the gutters. I was pursued by unbearably pitiful child beggars and women crying out for help, and soon my pockets were empty of coins and Chinese yuan bills. At elegant restaurants you could still get any kind of drink or food—if you had lots of money. Prices had soared to one million times the prewar index. A large stack of the local Manchurian dollars was needed to pay for a meal. Beggars squatted outside the restaurants, holding out their hands to well-fed Chinese officials emerging after rich dinners.

  At the airfields people were offering bribes and scuffling for places aboard the airlift shuttle planes, which were taking out about fifteen hundred passengers each day. I glimpsed air force planes departing loaded with personal possessions of officials, including valuable antiques which could be purchased for virtually nothing from desperate families in the dying city.

  I was staying at the Shenyang Railway Hotel, where drinks, food, and women were readily available for dollars. At the long hardwood bar, an improbable assortment of Americans, Russians, and Chinese sat gossiping about how to survive or profit from the mayhem. American civilian pilots speculated about how long they could go on with their flights for the Nationalists, for which they were being paid weekly salaries in the many thousands of dollars. Russians of the jointly operated Chinese-Soviet South Manchurian Railroad grumbled because they were at loose ends since the railways were cut, both the one leading north to Communist-held Harbin and the line southeast to Russian-occupied Port Arthur and Dairen. American military officers of JUSMAG joked cynically and despairingly about corrupt, cowardly Nationalist generals who would not heed their advice. Officials of the U.S. economic aid office spoke bitterly about the hopelessness of trying to feed the starving population and accused the Communists of driving refugees into the Mukden perimeter to aggravate the famine. Well-to-do Chinese talked about the money to be made in the manipulation of the currency, and several told me that since the Communists, after all, were Chinese, they were sure they could do business with them. The despairing talk and the drinking went on into the morning hours, many of the barflies fixed in place by fear of going out into the dangerous city. When I left Mukden, the crack of artillery fire reverberated ever more loudly on the empty streets.

  The Nationalist reverses in Manchuria did not surprise American military advisers. They had warned the Generalissimo as early as 1945 about the dangers of attempting to reoccupy all of Manchuria while the struggle with the Communists for control of China proper was still in progress. They cited the danger of positioning Nationalist forces in cities along a 1,000-mile defense corridor which would be difficult, if not impossible, to supply and sustain against Communist interdiction. Nevertheless, the Generalissimo, eager to retake control of the Manchurian industrial complex, decided to risk overextension of his forces and committed many of his best divisions to the struggle.

  Returning from Mukden to Nanking, where I was newly based after being posted in Peking for six months, I was told that General David Barr, the commander of JUSMAG, was urging the Generalissimo to make a progressive withdrawal from Manchuria. Barr had warned Chiang that the Nationalist garrisons could not be indefinitely supplied by air and were becoming increasingly vulnerable to destruction piecemeal by the gathering Communist forces. The Communist guerrillas, pressing their “sparrow” warfare, were raiding Nationalist lines of communication between North China and Manchuria. To consolidate their hold on the countryside the Communists had instituted an even more radical land redistribution program. It brought them the widespread support of the poorer peasants and served to eliminate local opposition through the disenfranchising of thousands of landlords and middle peasants who fled into the Nationalist-held cities. Barr’s withdrawal plan, which would have begun with the transfer of the exposed Ch’angch’un garrison south to Mukden, was rejected by Chiang. Barr then advised the Generalissimo to reopen the Communist-severed 120-mile rail corridor extending south from Mukden to Chinchow, the principal supply base for the some 300,000 troops of the Manchurian garrisons. The strategic aim was to assure a continuous flow of supplies northward from Chinchow to the Nationalist garrisons and to provide, if necessary, an escape corridor for them south into North China. The clearing of the corridor was to be effected by a convergence of strike forces from the Mukden and Chinchow garrisons with the help of troops from Taiwan landed at the port of Hulutao.

  The Generalissimo concurred on the plan on March 8, but he did not actually order Wei Li-huang to launch the operation until September 25. Thereafter, despite repeated prodding by Chiang and the general staff, apparently because he feared that a reduction in the strength of the Mukden garrison would invite a Communist attack, the Manchurian commander did not attempt his breakout until October 9. Wei committed only eleven divisions of the Mukden garrison to a Western Strike Force to open the corridor to Chinchow rather than the fifteen divisions as ordered.

  As the strike force advanced toward Chinchow, Lin Biao, who had anticipated the Nationalist maneuver, attacked the Chinchow complex. The city was defended by some 120,000 troops under General Fan Han-chieh, the second in command in Manchuria. Lin Biao encircled the city with twenty divisions. As the siege progressed, 5,400 Nationalist troops were flown into Chinchow from Mukden to bolster the garrison just before the Communists shelled and shut down the airport. Buckling under a succession of assaults, the Nationalist Ninety-third Army, holding a section of the Chinchow perimeter, defected. Eight divisions of Communist troops then broke through gaps in the city walls which they had blasted open with artillery fire and in a bloody battle decimated 34,000 of the defenders. The rest of the garrison surrendered on October 20. The Communists took 88,000 prisoners including General Fan Han-chieh. The reinforcement of nine divisions sent from Taiwan, which had landed at the port of Hulutao, was blocked fro
m reaching the Chinchow battle area and reembarked. The Communist victory effectively destroyed the Nationalist communications system in Manchuria. Enormous stores of military supplies and equipment stockpiled at Chinchow were garnered by the Communists. Lin Biao then wheeled north and pounced with eleven columns of 200,000 troops on the strike force, which had been moving southwest from Mukden toward Chinchow. The strike force attempted to retreat to Mukden but was blocked. In three days of heavy fighting, during which the commanding general, General Liao Yaohsiang, a respected veteran of the Burma campaign, was killed early in the battle, the entire strike force was decimated or surrendered by October 28. At Ch’angch’un, the Sixtieth Army, composed of Yunnanese troops brought in from the Indochina border, defied orders to attempt a breakout from the encircled city to the aid of Mukden. They turned on the garrison commander, General Cheng Tung-kuo, and defected to the Communists. Cheng was taken prisoner while trying to hold out in the city’s Central Bank building with two of his trusted battalions. The rest of his garrison of 80,000 troops then surrendered on October 20. Mukden’s turn came on November 2. The garrison, depleted by the departure of the troops of the Western Strike Force, surrendered after the garrison commander, General Chou Fu-cheng, defected with his Fifty-third Army.