On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Having taken Hsuchow on December 1, the Communist armies of Liu Bocheng and Chen Yi pursued and struck the flanks of the retreating Hsuchow garrison, bringing it to a halt sixty miles from the city. In desperation, Tu Yu-ming, the Nationalist commander, circled the huge column into a defense perimeter northwest of the town of Yungcheng, about a hundred miles north of Pengpu, the safe haven on the Huai River to which he had hoped to escape. Trucks were emplaced along the outer rim of the perimeter, and the troops dug trenches behind them in the ice-crusted soil. The Armored Corps and artillery were sited at the center of the perimeter to lay down protective fire. Within the perimeter, pelted by freezing rain and snow, the civilians who had accompanied the column huddled in improvised shelters in an abandoned village. In desperation, Tu Yu-ming radioed the Generalissimo begging for a relief column that would enable his troops to break out of the encirclement.

  Upon arrival from Hsuchow at Shanghai’s Longhua Military Airport, I became witness to another sort of mass flight. In anticipation of an imminent Communist assault on the coastal metropolis, a civilian exodus had begun. Chinese who could afford the huge ticket prices were flying out on foreign-owned commercial airliners. Along the wharves of the Whampoa River opposite the towering buildings of the Bund, housing the great trading companies, foreign banks, and the swank Cathay Hotel, all manner of small ships were taking on passengers bound for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the southern ports. The U.S. Navy transport Banfield was lying nearby with several hundred marines aboard to aid Americans if evacuation was ordered. But at that moment most of the 100,000 foreign residents seemed somewhat less inclined than the Chinese to leave Shanghai, reluctant to forsake the easy life they had enjoyed there. At the Shanghai Club, which boasted the longest bar in the world, and at the American and Diamond bars, I spoke to British, French, and American residents, many of them women, who were ignoring warnings of their consulates to leave if they had no compelling reason to stay on. British traders, like those of Jardine Matheson, were least ready to abandon their lucrative business. The American-owned Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury carried a speech by the British consul general, Robert Urquhart, in which he told businesspeople meeting at the Country Club on Bubbling Well Road: “Shanghai is home to us as a community, not merely a trading post, and we are not going to up and leave our community home at the first signs of an approaching storm. Does anyone suggest that if there is a change of government here, the new one will be so unreasonable that they will make civilized life and normal trading impossible? I have great confidence that the government of China will not fall into the hands of any but responsible men, who will have the interests of their country at heart. And we foreigners ask for nothing more.”

  The British consul general was thus keeping the colonial “stiff upper lip” despite daily signs that the metropolis of 6 million was becoming unmanageable. Overrun with desperate, starving refugees, the streets were in chaos despite the presence of thousands of troops striving to enforce martial law. The economy was disintegrating. On November 1, General Chiang Ching-kuo, one of the Generalissimo’s sons, who had been put in charge of maintaining order, had resigned his post, declaring indignantly that the city had fallen into the toils of “unscrupulous merchants, bureaucrats, politicians and racketeers.” In August, in events leading up to his resignation, Chiang had issued draconian economic reform decrees to curb currency speculation, hoarding, and black marketing. He had sternly enforced the regulations, executing some of the offenders on the streets as crowds looked on. But when his measures began to restrict the speculative business life of the city, Chiang encountered opposition from local titans. The general had the support of K. C. Wu, the ebullient, courageous mayor of Shanghai. But he ran afoul of Tu Yueh-sheng, the notorious leader of the underworld, a member of the Green Gang secret society, who was known to have political ties to Chiang Kai-shek. The irrepressible Chiang Ching-kuo also crossed his stepmother, Madame Chiang Kai-sheck. His agents discovered a huge hoard of prohibited goods in the warehouses of the Yangtze Development Corporation, controlled by H. H. Kung, the banker husband of Madame Chiang’s elder sister. Chiang’s agents raided the warehouses and threatened to arrest David Kung, the banker’s son, who was in charge of the cache. Madame Chiang flew to Shanghai, and soon after, David Kung left for the United States, fleeing any reprisal in the scandal. Restraints on prices and wages were scrapped under the pressure of the local overlords the day before Chiang Ching-kuo resigned. The value of the currency plummeted thereafter. In a stunt to stabilize the currency, the Bank of China proclaimed it would sell 40 grams of gold to each applicant at the fixed price of 3,800 yuan an ounce. Some 30,000 people, frantic to exchange their paper currency before it became worthless, rushed to line up before the bank. Ten suffocated in the mad crush. The exchange offer turned out to be only a token gesture, since the bank’s gold reserves had already been earmarked for transfer to Taiwan on Chiang Kaishek’s personal order.

  In Shanghai, I filed my Hsuchow dispatches at the AP office and billeted at the Foreign Correspondents Club. The club occupied the top three floors of the Broadway Mansions, a high-rise hotel linked to the Bund by a bridge over Soochow Creek, a polluted waterway to the Whampoa River crowded with native sampans. Many of the club bedrooms were standing empty, since correspondents had begun to evacuate the city, not willing to risk being trapped in a Communist takeover. I met there with Fred Hampson, the indomitable AP bureau chief for China, who had decided to remain in Shanghai through what seemed to be the inevitable Communist occupation. Over drinks in the empty bar, I found Hampson preoccupied by how he could post a correspondent with the advancing Communist armies. At the time, there were no independent Western correspondents reporting from the Communist side. As he spoke of his frustration, Hampson dangled before me the irresistible bait of fame. I left him wondering how I could become that famous correspondent.

  On my return to Nanking, I went to Harold Milks with a plan that I began to concoct on the plane, which I thought would get me back to the front and posted with the Communist forces. Tu Yu-ming’s encircled Hsuchow garrison column seemed destined for annihilation, and I foresaw a quick advance thereafter by the Communists on Pengpu, the principal town on the Huai River. I knew that there was in Pengpu an Italian Jesuit mission. My plan was to enter the mission, wait there until the Communists occupied the town, then emerge and ask the Communists to allow me to cover their advance on to Nanking and Shanghai. I envisioned myself as the sole Western reporter covering the advancing Communist troops, filing dispatches over their broadcast radio for pickup by the AP monitor in San Francisco. I also thought of seeking an interview with Mao Zedong. Recalling the friendly reception given me by the Communist leadership in Yenan in 1946, I thought I would find the Communists amenable. Milks, a seasoned midwestern newsman, listened with a trace of skepticism but nevertheless agreed. I confided also in Audrey’s father, Chester Ronning, who provided me with sage survival advice and a sack of Chinese silver dollars, acceptable currency in the Communist-held areas.

  On December 12, 1949, Milks drove me in his jeep to Pukow, the terminus on the Yangtze River of the rail link to Pengpu and Hsuchow. Troop trains were arriving from the north packed with wounded soldiers and thousands of refugees. The trains were so overcrowded that some refugees came into the station clinging to the iron cowcatchers at the front of the steaming locomotives. Despite the freezing December wind, women dressed in ragged tunics over trousers, with babies on backs, sat on top of the train, beside their men folk clutching bundles of their remaining worldly possessions. One old bearded man hanging out of a vestibule was holding a straw cage filled with quacking white ducks.

  Grinning soldiers in a crowded boxcar of one of the few trains going north, responding to my entreaties voiced in my poorly accented Chinese, hauled me aboard, and I found a place among them propped up against a sack of rice. The rice sacks, the soldiers told me with provocative leers, were stashed along the sides of the boxcar to afford some protection from the gunf
ire of Communist guerrillas who waited in ambush along the tracks. As the train jolted out of Pukow and rattled north, I peered out through a door left ajar and saw bodies of men, women, and children, looking like crumpled rag dolls, lying at the side of the tracks. Hands made numb by the intense cold, unable to hold on as they rode atop the moving trains coming from the north, they had toppled down. In the evening I gladly accepted a bowl of cold rice sprinkled with piquant sauce offered to me by a young officer. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I spent the night half awake, suffering the stench of unwashed bodies lying close together, staring into the darkness as the train jostled from stop to stop past flood-lit army blockhouses, and beginning to wonder if I had been too adventurous.

  At dawn we were in Pengpu, a rude market town with a population of about 250,000 which traded the grain crops and livestock of Anhwei Province. Hoisting up my duffel, I jumped out of the boxcar into a frantic mob struggling to get on the train, which was to return south. Women were carrying or pushing frightened children into the boxcars or climbing up the side of the train to tie them to whatever metal protrusion they found on top. I followed the soldiers, who opened a path through the crowds with swinging rifle butts, to the small dingy station. There I found a rickshaw pulled by a young coolie who took me at a trot over muddied streets to the walled compound of the Sacred Heart Jesuit Mission, a cluster of about twenty buildings around a redbrick Gothic church. As I paid the rickshaw puller, I asked him if he feared the coming of the Communists. “No.” he replied. “It will be better. When the fighting stops, the rice will be cheaper.”

  Welcomed by a priest into the Catholic mission, I was received by Bishop Cipriano Cassini, a kind, portly Italian in his fifties with a trim gray beard who wore a black skullcap and a large crucifix over a long black gown that swept the stone floor. His mission operated schools for the education of some ten thousand Chinese boys, a nunnery, an orphanage for abandoned infant girls, and a hospital. Cassini, who had come to China sixteen years earlier, had been appointed bishop by the Vatican in 1936. He spoke Italian, French, Chinese, and a few words of English, and we carried on our conversation in fragments of several languages. Over strong black coffee, he listened sympathetically to my plan and told me: “You are welcome to share our bread and shelter.” He readily agreed to allow me to stay in the mission, not manifesting any concern that harboring an American might someday invite Communist retaliation.

  In the afternoon, I called on General Liu Chih, the Nationalist commander in chief, who had fled Hsuchow on November 28. I found him in a villa vacated by a wealthy rice merchant. The general, fleshy in a plain uniform, flashed a gold-toothed smile as he welcomed me into his map room, heated by a coal brazier. “We are closing a trap on Chen Yi and Liu Bo-cheng,” he said, pointing to his situation wall map. He had sent his Sixth Army Group, commanded by General Li Yen-nien, and the Eighth Army Group, under General Liu Ju-ming, a total force of eleven divisions, north from the Huai River line with orders to smash the Communist columns against the anvil, as his interpreter described it, of the encircled Nationalist Twelfth Army Group, commanded by General Huang Wei. The Twelfth was trapped forty-five miles northwest of Pengpu. I left Liu Chih’s headquarters less than convinced.

  Two days later, on December 15, his troops decimated by Communist artillery, and after one of his twelve infantry divisions had defected, General Huang surrendered the remnants of his Twelfth Army Group. His forces compressed into a four-mile-square area, he had held out for almost three weeks. He was taken prisoner with his deputy commander, Wu Shao-chou. The next day, Liu Chih’s Sixth and Eighth armies, which had advanced only seventeen miles, came under attack by Liu Bocheng’s columns and turned back to Pengpu harassed by local Communist militia. Standing on the banks on the Huai River, I watched their tanks and truck convoys rattle back over the railway bridge, followed by long lines of weary infantry. One of the last trains arriving from the north brought a company of light tanks on flat cars which were sent south to a new defense line that was being prepared.

  On December 16, I was told at the garrison headquarters that Tu Yuming’s Hsuchow column was still holding out, awaiting help from the south. The following day, the Communist radio carried a message from Mao Zedong addressed to Tu Yu-ming: “You are at the end of your rope. For more than ten days, you have been surrounded ring on ring and received blow upon blow, and your position has shrunk greatly. You have such a tiny place and so many people crowded together that a single shell from us can kill many of you. Your wounded soldiers and the families who have followed the Army are complaining to high heaven. Your soldiers and many of your officers have no stomach for more fighting. Hold dear the lives of your subordinates and families and find a way out for them as soon as possible. Stop sending them to a senseless death.” Tu Yu-ming did not reply.

  On the morning of December 18, in the Sacred Heart Church, I watched more than a hundred Chinese children chanting hymns, kneeling to be baptized. Above them, in the sandbagged steeple, soldiers at the lookout post listened to the rites conducted by a Chinese Catholic nun. That afternoon, the people of Pengpu, observing that demolition charges were being placed under the 1,823-foot, nine-span bridge across the Huai River, gathered before the garrison headquarters to protest its destruction. The bridge, erected forty years earlier, had served to transform Pengpu from a mud village into a bustling commercial center by attracting trade from the countryside. When a garrison spokesman emerged to tell the townspeople that the bridge might have to be blown to hinder a Communist crossing, there were shouted protests. I heard one man call out that the bridge belonged neither to the Nationalists or the Communists but to the people. They knew how difficult it would be to repair the structure. They spoke of that day in January 1938 during the war with Japan when Chinese troops blew up the bridge to impede the advance of Japanese troops. It took the Japanese eight months to repair the bridge. The Pengpu garrison did not blow up the bridge, but the troops began on December 27 removing sections of the bridge for shipment south to Pukow, making it impassable to truck and rail traffic.

  On Christmas Eve, I spoke to Harold Milks on the single telephone line out of Pengpu, dictated my dispatch, and told him if the Communists did not come soon, I would try to reach their lines by crossing to the other side of the Huai River. That night, Milks sent a brief dispatch describing me as “the loneliest Associated Press staff member in the whole world this Christmas eve.” By wondrous chance, Audrey read the dispatch in Vancouver, where she was attending the University of British Columbia. Strolling with a friend along a Vancouver avenue, she saw a rain-sodden newspaper lying on the sidewalk with a large headline about the China Civil War. Picking it up, she spotted the box, written by Milks, at the bottom of the front page describing my lonely Christmas vigil in Pengpu.

  In fact, I was not all that lonely. That afternoon at the railway station I ran into three newly arrived British newsmen. They were Patrick O’ Donovan of the Observer, Bill Sydney of the Daily Express, and Lachie MacDonald of the Daily Mail. To welcome them suitably I shopped at a Chinese provision store and was delighted to find a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch, for which I paid the equivalent of twenty dollars. In a bedroom of the mission, portraits of the saints looking down on us, I doled out the scotch into tea mugs. With cheers we downed the precious drink and then in unison spat on the flagstones. I had been taken. The bottle had been filled with stale tea and resealed. We managed, nevertheless, a Christmas drink with a bottle of Italian red wine contributed by an obliging priest. I accompanied O’Donovan, a burley Irish Catholic man, to midnight Christmas mass, during which he knelt in prayer beside Chinese worshipers and received the sacrament from the bishop. The unheated church was draped in festive red cloth and crowded with about two hundred worshipers, mostly Chinese, who came carrying bedding, since they intended to stay the night. The town was under curfew, and edgy sentries were patrolling the snow-covered streets. Before the altar an Italian priest set up a large book of Christmas music, verses
rendered in Chinese characters, and led the congregation in singing “Adeste Fideles.” Christmas dawned to the sound of random shooting in the town.

  On Christmas Day, Liu Chih sent a message urging us to leave Pengpu aboard his train. The Huai River line was not to be defended, and he was moving his headquarters south. My companions of the night decided to depart with him, and I went to the railway station to say good-bye. I watched them leave on an armored train with tank turrets affixed atop the cars, the locomotive pushing an open steel-plated car manned by machine gunners. I then felt very alone.

  Growing impatient, I decided on New Year’s Day to cross the Huai River and hike north to the Communist outposts. After being told twice by the garrison commander that I could not cross the river, I managed to negotiate a pass from a Nationalist officer who was beyond caring about the activities of a crazy American. A priest found two railway workers, eager to return to their homes north of the river, who agreed to carry my baggage. Dressed in a U.S. Army pile jacket and a brown wool hat, I set out 0n the morning of January 2 followed by the railway men bearing my duffel between them on a yo-stick, the quintessential bamboo pole. At the railroad bridge, an army lieutenant checked my papers, looked me over curiously, and then escorted us on the pedestrian walk across the span to the last outpost at Tsaolaochi, ten miles north of Pengpu. Beyond, he warned, lay no-man’s-land, ruled by bandits who preyed on travelers. Unarmed, we would be vulnerable until we reached the first Communist outpost. North of that outpost, the Communists were in control of all the Huaipei Plain except for the flaming perimeter held by the Hsuchow column, ninety miles to the northwest of Tsaolaochi.