On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Abandoning their beleaguered field commands, Generals Wei Li-huang and Tu Yu-ming escaped from Mukden by air to the port of Hulutao. Wei continued on to Canton in South China, arriving there on November 6. Three days later, on Chiang’s orders he was placed under house arrest. He was charged with disobedience and responsibility for the fatal delay in carrying out orders to open the Mukden-Chinchow corridor, but the following April he was allowed by Vice President Li Tsung-jen to go into exile in Hong Kong. In a report to the U.S. Defense Department, in which he cited Wei’s delay in undertaking the breakout operation as critical, Barr said: “That General Wei Li-huang was able to get away with such complete disobedience of orders without punishment or even censure, as far as I know, points to one reason why the Nationalists are losing the present war.” As for Tu Yu-ming, Barr described him as an officer of “little worth.”

  In 1955, Wei returned to the mainland from Hong Kong and was warmly welcomed by the Communists. In 1959, Mao appointed him a vice chairman of the National Defense Council. When he died in Peking in 1960, Wei was given a grandiose funeral, which gave rise to speculation that he had been a tool of the Communists all along. However, attributing the loss of Manchuria largely to complicity by Wei with the Communists as portrayed in some accounts is flat wrong. When Wei took command in Manchuria in January 1948, the Nationalist city garrisons were already isolated and encircled by the Communists and had suffered heavy losses. The Generalissimo was as much at fault as Wei in delaying the Mukden-Chinchow operation. When General Barr told Ho Ying-chin, the Nationalist defense minister, that the corridor could have been kept open if Wei had moved promptly as ordered, thus allowing the Nationalist garrisons to escape into North China, the defense minister replied: “You are correct, but my hands were tied because the Generalissimo directed the entire operation alone from Peking without any reference to me or the General Staff.”

  Apart from the delays, I felt there was reason to doubt that the Mukden-Chinchow operation could have succeeded. The railroad tracks between the two cities had been torn up by the Communists, and it would have taken months to make the line fit for military transport. Certainly, Lin Biao would not have camped idly by on the flanks of the corridor allowing the Nationalist garrisons to escape into North China.

  When the Generalissimo returned to Nanking from Peking after directing the abortive Manchurian operations, he said in a message to the Chinese people: “The loss of Manchuria is discouraging but it relieves the government of a formidable burden, so far as military defenses are concerned, and allows it to concentrate its war effort to the south of the Great Wall.” In Manchuria Chiang had lost seven armies, comprising thirty divisions plus other brigades, many of them American equipped and trained, a total of more than 400,000 troops, of which about 245,000 were taken prisoner or defected. Many of the Nationalist units, finding themselves isolated, operating on territory far from home, and lacking confidence in the strategy of the top leadership, had deserted to the Communists simply to escape annihilation. As I reported in my dispatches, I found no evidence that Nationalist troops defected for ideological reasons. Those who surrendered were treated extremely well by the Communists inducing them to join the ranks. During the Civil War more than 800,000 former Nationalist soldiers eventually served with the Communists.

  Summing up the Nationalist disaster, General Barr said in his report to the Department of the Army: “The Nationalist troops in Manchuria were the finest soldiers the government had. The large majority of the units were United States equipped and included many soldiers and junior officers who had received United States training during the war with Japan. I am convinced that if these troops had proper leadership from the top, the Communists would have suffered a major defeat.”

  Lin Biao’s forces suffered an estimated 75,000 casualties in the Manchurian campaign. The losses were more than made up by Nationalist defections to his forces. His war booty included a vast supply of American weapons and equipment, more significant in determining the eventual outcome of the Civil War than what had been obtained from Japanese arsenals in Manchuria. At the conclusion of the Manchurian campaign, Lin Biao had a well-equipped force of 360,000 troops available for a decisive thrust into North China.

  The Nationalist defeat in Manchuria was one of the two military reverses which sealed the loss of the China mainland to Mao. The other was the Battle of the Huai-Hai, during which the Nationalist Army was finally shattered. Before all else, the debacle suffered by the Nationalists in Manchuria stemmed from Chiang Kai-shek’s bungling strategy. But no doubt, a major factor was Lin Biao’s brilliant exploitation of the fumbles of the Generalissimo and his generals.

  Lin Biao would eventually become a nonperson in official Chinese archives as a consequence of his falling-out with Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Yet he must rank as the most effective of the Communist field commanders. The proof lies in his accomplishments in the war against Japan, the conquest of Manchuria, and his subsequent campaigns through North and Central China south to the Indochina border. His ranking as such is not diminished by Mao’s assertions in two articles of his Selected Works that the main instructions for both the Manchurian and North China campaigns were drawn up by him rather than by Lin Biao. Mao was a brilliant overall strategist, like Zhu De, the commander in chief of the armies, and no doubt Lin Biao and the other field commanders made use of the strategic, tactical, and political guidelines laid down by him in his directive of September 7, 1947, from the Shensi headquarters. But Mao is not to be ranked with Lin Biao, Chen Yi, Liu Bocheng, and Peng Dehuai, who certainly were the most effective field commanders of the Civil War.

  5

  NANKING

  On the morning of November 23, 1948, three weeks after the fall of Mukden, standing on the bleak Nanking airfield, chilled by the biting wind off the turbulent Yangtze River, I watched disconsolately as the Australian Air Force plane lifted over the city wall and headed east toward Tokyo. With Communist armies advancing toward the Nationalist capital, the dependents of foreign diplomats were being evacuated. Audrey, to whom I was newly engaged, the daughter of Chester Ronning, minister-counselor of the Canadian Embassy, was aboard the plane with her mother, two siblings, and other women and children of the Canadian and Australian embassies. As the plane disappeared into the clouds, I wondered when I might see Audrey again. We’d had so little time together.

  I climbed back into my jeep. Glancing at the rows of Nationalist B-24 and B-25 bombers and P-38 fighters on the tarmac, I thought of how impressive they looked, and yet they had been so ineffectual in operations against the Communists. Washington had provided Chiang Kai-shek with a sizable air force, much of it delivered since the end of the war against Japan. It comprised 939 aircraft in 15 squadrons. More than 5,000 personnel had been trained by American instructors. But the performance of the air crews was ranked as being of the lowest order by frustrated officers of the Air Advisory Division of JUSMAG. The bomber and fighter pilots habitually clung to such high altitudes in combat operations so as to render the Nationalist Air Force virtually useless. Fighter strafing runs were usually carried out ineffectively at altitudes of 1,500 to 2,000 feet. Parachute drops to beleaguered garrisons and units were often made from such high altitudes that the supplies frequently drifted into the hands of besieging Communist forces. Some American advisers believed that the poor performance by the pilots was deliberate, reflecting their lack of belief in the cause for which they supposedly were fighting. General Barr bluntly said he thought that the Chinese pilots simply did not want to kill any of their compatriots, irrespective of whether they were “enemy” Communists.

  For weeks prior to the fall of the Manchurian cities, there had been frequent frenzied scenes at the Nanking airport. Nationalist transports were swooping in from the north, harbingers of the imminent fall of some city to the Communists, bearing the families and concubines of generals and senior officials, together with large cases of personal belongings. Observing the traffic, I thought of what better u
se might have been made of those transports—rescuing troops from Communist encirclements on the Manchurian plain.

  I drove from the airport into Hsinchiehkow, the central district of Nanking, where most of the government offices and the best shops were located. The approaches to the city were guarded by well-armed Nationalist army divisions under the cover of the air force, but the capital nevertheless was gripped with a pervasive sense of impending doom. The war was going badly for the Nationalists on all fronts. Whereas the Nationalists had begun the year with almost a three-to-one numerical superiority in military manpower, the Communists now held the advantage in terms of combat effectives. They had taken the initiative in all sectors. The Communists admitted to suffering at least 300,000 casualties in two years of aggressive offensives, but the losses had been more than made up by Nationalist defections and recruiting. To the northwest of the capital, beyond the Huai River, which flowed east to west about one hundred miles north of Nanking, one million troops of the opposing camps were moving into confrontation on the approaches to both Nanking and Shanghai for what would become one of the largest military engagements in history. I drove past hundreds of Nationalist soldiers in disheveled yellow uniforms, stragglers and deserters from the defeated armies in the north, wandering aimlessly through the streets. Thousands of refugees from the carnage of the war zone, among them elites fleeing Communist purges in the countryside, were camped with their families on the sidewalks, huddled against buildings for shelter. The city was under martial law. Police stood with fixed bayonets at street intersections. Gendarmes had been deployed to beat back mobs clamoring to loot shops in which speculators were selling hoarded stocks of rice at ever soaring prices. There were pitiful sights of refugee families squatting before restaurants hoping scraps would be thrown to them. Each morning sanitation trucks patrolling the streets picked up the bodies of those who had died of hunger or cold during the night.

  A week before Audrey’s departure I had looked on stunned as the eight hundred American officers and enlisted men of JUSMAG were evacuated overnight in a pell-mell rush. In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had decided to withdraw the advisers hastily, believing that JUSMAG could no longer serve a useful purpose and that Nanking would soon be in the hands of the Communists. In the JUSMAG compounds, tons of warehoused supplies were abandoned as well as personal possessions in family apartments of officers, everything from record players to fancy draperies. The leavings disappeared within hours as former Chinese employees and scavengers ravaged the premises. I walked through the empty American Officers’ Club, where I months earlier met Audrey at a dinner hosted by the American military attaché. The leader of the club’s White Russian band would strike up our favorite song, “Golden Earrings,” as we entered the club. The swank club, a palatial residence with stately gardens, once occupied by Wang Ching-wei, president of the Japanese puppet regime during World War II, now stood stripped, empty, discarded sheets of music littering the bandstand.

  General Barr, frustrated and bitter after the withdrawal of his advisory group in unseemly haste, fired off a report on November 18 to the Department of Defense on his relations with Chiang Kai-shek and his generals, in which he said: “No battle has been lost since my arrival due to the lack of ammunition or equipment. Their military debacles in my opinion can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership and many other morale destroying factors that led to a complete loss of the will to fight. The complete ineptness of high military leaders and the widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the Armed Forces could in some measure have been controlled and directed had the above authority and facilities been available. Chinese leaders completely lack the moral courage to issue and enforce an unpopular decision.” Barr, who shared the contents of his report with me, also told the department that the military situation had deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of U.S. troops and a secure American supply pipeline could provide a remedy. But the general recommended against any such commitment, which he said would require thousands of American troops.

  The general had been frank and forthcoming when Chiang Kai-shek solicited his advice, but his guidance was rarely heeded. As he departed, Barr had reason to recall Marshall’s caution at the time he was appointed chief of JUSMAG a year earlier:

  I am willing that General Barr should make his advice available to the Generalissimo on an informal and confidential basis and that the Army Advisory Group should supply advice with respect to reorganization of Chinese Army Services of Supply should that be desired. I am, however, not willing that we should accept responsibility for Chinese strategic plans and operations. I think you will agree that the implications of accepting that responsibility would be very far-reaching and grave and that such responsibility is in logic inseparable from the authority to make it effective. Whatever the Generalissimo may feel moved to say with respect to his willingness to delegate necessary powers to Americans, I know from my own experience that advice is always listened to very politely but frequently ignored when deemed unpalatable.

  Amid the chaos in the capital, in a modern Nanking office building erected in an inner courtyard of the old “Heavenly” Palace built by leaders of the Tai’ping Rebellion who with a distorted view of Western Christianity had risen up against the Qing dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century, the Generalissimo sat behind a massive desk defiantly warding off entreaties by panicky ministers. The vice president, Li Tsung-jen, and other leaders of the ruling KMT Party and government were eager for peace talks with the Communists, but the Generalissimo thwarted them at every turn. A lean, erect indomitable man, the sixty-one-year-old Chiang was unshaken in his conviction that ultimately he would defeat his Communist foes. This was the essence of what I heard him declare at one of his rare press conferences in the palace. Presumably it was also the import of the message he asked Madame Chiang Kai-shek, his Wellesley-educated wife, to convey to Washington in personal appeals to President Truman and Secretary of State Marshall for a new infusion of massive assistance.

  I was appalled by the evident ineptitude and corruption of Chiang’s regime, but I was not totally without sympathy for the struggling Generalissimo. After establishing Nanking as his capital in 1928, the Generalissimo had found little time to unify China and transform the “Southern Capital” of the Ming emperors into the proud Nationalist capital he envisioned. In 1931, four years after he had marched to Peking from Canton, the southern metropolis where Sun Yat-sen founded the Chinese Republic, and succeeded in compelling the northern warlords to bow to him, the Japanese attacked in Manchuria and then, in 1932, at Shanghai. Renewing their advance in 1937, the Japanese seized Nanking, where their troops slaughtered as many as 200,000 people and raped, according to reliable foreign accounts, some 20,000 women. Chiang fled to Chungking, which became his temporary wartime capital. When he returned to Nanking in 1946, he was still at war with Mao Zedong in a divided China, but he began rebuilding his capital. He also settled a score, as best he could, with the Japanese. Soon after I arrived in 1947, I went outside the city to a large dusty field and watched as three Japanese generals among those who had been in command in Nanking in 1937 were hauled roughly from the back of a truck, their hands tied behind their backs. Forced to their knees, they were executed, each with a single pistol shot to the back of their shaven heads, while Chinese spectators jostled and jeered behind a cordon of Nationalist soldiers.

  After driving through the littered streets of Hsinchiehkow, scribbling notes on the pitiful scenes and trying to put Audrey’s departure out of my mind, I drove to the Associated Press compound in the northern district to meet Harold Milks, the bureau chief. I had just left the International News Service and joined the AP as his deputy. The unexpected move to the AP came after a falling out with INS. I had been transferred from Peking to Nanking as a staff correspondent, but without the reward of pay sufficient to live comfortably in a city in which a hefty sack of the inflated local currency was necessary to buy a restaurant meal. The break
ing point came when I received a circular letter addressed to the INS foreign staff stating that living allowances would no longer be paid. Young reporters, eager to get a start as foreign correspondents, were typically being paid shoestring salaries by INS and the United Press. In my case, the timing was incomprehensible. The Civil War was at its height, and my copy was receiving wide play around the world. Also, unbeknownst to my INS bosses, I had just received tentative job offers from the New York Times and the Associated Press. I was sharing a house with Henry R. Lieberman, the Times bureau chief, Christopher Rand of the Herald Tribune, and other correspondents. Lieberman had offered me a job which gained the approval of Ted Bernstein, then the foreign news editor, and I had already begun filing stories to the Times without a byline during Hank’s absence in the field. Fred Hampson, the AP bureau chief in Shanghai, had also offered me a job. I messaged good-bye with some satisfaction to Barry Farris, the editor of INS, and awaited a final word from the Times. One morning, it came in the form of a cable: “Negative on Topping,” signed by Cyrus Sulzberger, the chief correspondent for the Times, a nephew of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher. I had never met Cyrus Sulzberger, who was based in Paris and had the final say on hiring for the foreign staff. Within the hour, I telephoned Hampson and took the job with the AP. It was a move I never regretted. I worked for the AP for the next eleven years in China, Vietnam, London, and Berlin before joining the Times in 1959. I came to regard the AP as the most essential and finest news organization in the world.