On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  As we began walking along the abandoned Pukow Railroad, Nationalist Air Force planes droned overhead on the way to drop supplies to Tu Yuming’s troops or strike at the encircling Communists. About five miles out of Tsaolaochi, we saw a barrier across the road controlled by men with guns. A peasant coming from the barrier mumbled something about “bad men.” Bandits, I thought apprehensively. The armed men had seen us, and so it was too late to turn back. There were four of them in peasant dress. A sharp-faced man, oddly wearing a crumpled gray fedora, pointed an American Thompson submachine gun at me. When I asked him in Chinese, “Who are you?” he shouted back, “Who are you?” and thrust his gun at me. “I am an American correspondent,” I said. He did not seem to understand and angrily shouted again: “Who are you?” He slipped the safety catch on the Tommy gun, and, as if in a trance, I watched his fingers wrap around the trigger. One of my baggage carriers cried out, “He is an American correspondent.” The sharp-faced one lowered the gun and searched us for weapons. Suddenly, two soldiers in uniform stood up about 150 yards from the barrier. They had been covering the roadblock with a machine gun. We were in the hands of Communist militia. I showed a letter written in Chinese to one of the uniformed militiamen. It identified me and asked clearance to proceed to the headquarters of Mao Zedong for an interview. I also showed him a photograph taken of me posing with Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, and other Communist leaders at the dinner in Yenan. The militiaman, a broad-faced peasant with a pistol strapped around his waist, looked blankly at the photo and the letter and shrugged.

  Escorted by a half dozen militia riflemen, I was taken with the railroad men on a long march to a village where the militia headquarters was located. It was the area in which Nationalist general Liu Chih’s Sixth and Eighth Army groups had come under attack by the militia during their futile effort to reach the encircled Twelfth Army Group. Decomposed bodies of soldiers still lay in the fields or in slit trenches and foxholes picked at by village dogs and flocks of cawing ravens. Peasants were fashioning mud bricks to rebuild walls and thatch roofs on houses smashed by artillery fire. Trees, once carefully husbanded near each cluster of huts, had been cut down during the fighting to clear fields of fire. We passed scores of wounded Nationalist soldiers, whom the Communists had released farther north, limping back to their homes in the south.

  At the headquarters, the militia chief told me of their victory. Proudly, he thumped his chest with the flat of his hand as he also trumpeted that the peasants of the region now owned the land and the landlords had been dealt with. He spoke of the coming of Communist comrades many months before the Battle of the Huai-Hai. The village, like others on the Huaipei Plain, had slumbered without a dream of change until Communist cadres coming from North China and Shantung Province suddenly appeared. In teams made up of about a half dozen cadres, some of them students, they visited the villages, where they entered into discussions with the peasants about their grievances. Nothing was said about Marxist-Leninist ideology. The cadres heard complaints about corrupt officials and the local landlord gentry who owned about one-fourth of the land. Laws restricting rents to 37.5 percent of the crop tilled by tenants were not being respected, and there were landlords who charged as much as 60 or 70 percent. Some of the gentry, called “Big Trees” by the Communists, behaved as petty despots, their men beating peasants who failed to pay their rents or the usurious interest charged on loans. It was not uncommon for a landlord to take the daughter of a peasant who failed to pay his rent as a slave maid or a concubine. Village officials deferred to the landlord “Big Trees,” and there were no restraints imposed by the provincial government as long as taxes were paid. Bolstered by the presence of the newly arrived Communist cadres, the peasants organized violent demonstrations against the ruling gentry. In the village where the Communist militia headquarters was now located, a landlord who owned more than 50 acres was denounced, humiliated at a trial, and stripped of his holdings. At a neighboring village, a landlord accused of killing one of his tenants was stoned to death. The middle peasants who tilled their own soil were left undisturbed, but all large landholdings were seized and distributed by the cadres to poor families, each adult receiving about one-third of an acre. Several weeks after the arrival of the party cadres, the first Communist army units came into the villages. The soldiers paid for their food, unlike the Nationalist troops, who angered the peasants by requisitioning supplies. Peasants were formed into so-called self-defense units. In the fall of 1948, when Chen Yi and Liu Bocheng’s columns entered the region to make ready for the Huai-Hai campaign, hundreds of villagers were ready to carry supplies and dig trenches across roads to slow the movement of Nationalist troops. When I asked the local militia leader how his men had been able to do battle against tanks and artillery of Liu Chih’s Sixth and Eighth army groups, he said: “These are our fields.”

  What had transpired in the militia leader’s village illustrated how the Communists gained mass peasant support in many regions of the country. The indifference of the Chiang Kai-shek government to the plight of the poorer peasants provided fertile ground for Communist inroads. In June 1946 the Nationalist government had reintroduced a land tax, which was so indiscriminately administered that it aroused anger and despair among the poorer peasants. To support its military operations, the government also increased requisitions of grain despite warnings by provincial authorities that peasants in desperation were being driven to uprisings, banditry, and flight to the towns and cities. Belatedly, only when the Communists were on the brink of victory did the Nationalist government begin to seriously consider land redistribution programs designed to attract peasant support, but only token efforts were made.

  During the Civil War the Communist land reform policies fluctuated with the tides of battle and were not implemented in either a uniform or orderly manner, particularly in the treatment of the landlords and the middle peasants. In travels to regions other than the Huaipei Plain, I spoke to Chinese who had experienced rampant terror, especially in Hopei and Shantung provinces after the issuance of the May 1946 decree by the Communist Politburo on land redistribution. Hundreds of thousands of landlords and at times also middle peasants were denounced, deprived of their land and goods, and many were stoned or beaten to death in the mass “speak bitterness” struggle sessions. The peasants were incited by party cadres of “leftist tendency” who did not heed the more moderate policies instituted later, which granted landlords not convicted of “crimes against the people” the right to retain land on the scale of the average holdings and guaranteed protection to middle peasants who tilled their own fields. In instances in which Nationalist troops reoccupied areas where the Communists had carried out land redistribution, the returning landlord “Big Trees” often wreaked the most brutal vengeance on peasants who had supported the Communists.

  In later years, recalling the passion of the militia leader in the Huaipei village, I wondered whether the peasants who had rallied to the Communists felt cheated when Mao collectivized their independent landholdings in 1952 and in 1958 herded them into giant People’s Communes. Two years after Mao’s death in 1976, the communes were completely dismantled. Under Deng Xiaoping, who had become China’s paramount leader, peasants were given plots of land on thirty-year leases to farm in a relatively free market economy. Millions of peasants were lifted out of absolute poverty. But then the Huaipei militia leader would be shocked to know that, following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the early years of the twenty-first century, Communist police would be beating and incarcerating peasants who were taking part in thousands of rural demonstrations protesting their exploitation by corrupt local officials, arbitrary seizure by developers of their allocated land, and industrial pollution of their environment.

  My first night in the “Liberated Areas” was spent at the militia headquarters in a mud-walled shed, where I stretched out on sacks of kaoliang (sorghum) grain. With rats scampering about, I pulled my wool knit hat down over my chin and during the night endured several rodents trea
ding across my covered face. I was glad to see the morning and the militiaman who brought a feast of fresh hen’s eggs, steaming hot brown kaoliang bread, and tea.

  We marched north all the next day but stopped, at my request, at the village of Chungchou, where there was a Farmer’s Bank, where I exchanged one of the silver dollars given to me by Ronning for 200 yuan of the Communist-issued currency. At sundown we came into a village where I was greeted by the commander of a unit of General Liu Bocheng’s columns. It was my first contact on the Huaipei Plain with a regular army unit. The commander, who wore no badge of rank or unit identification, was a lean, powerfully built man with a friendly, compassionate manner about him. “We will escort you to Suhsien,” he said. “You will go by horse tomorrow.” He released the railway men who had accompanied me, telling them they could go wherever they liked.

  The next morning, on horses led by one mounted rifleman and with another militiaman leading a horse laden with my baggage, we rode out of the village, passing through a cluster of boys with shaven heads staring wide-eyed at the first “foreign devil” they had ever seen. The commander waved good-bye. I would see him again and come to like him more than anyone else I met on the plain. We rode well away from the railroad so as not to risk being strafed. Nationalist fighters and bombers passed overhead on the way to or returning from the encirclement of Tu Yu-ming’s Hsuchow column, seventy miles to the northwest. Each village seemed like the other as our horses picked their way across the monotonous plain, following paths through the fields and along the banks of irrigation ditches. At a village in which we stopped for the night, I shared a hut with my escort and soldiers who played cards and sang at fireside. One of the songs referred to Chiang Kai-shek as “a running dog of the Americans,” and with a grin, one of the soldiers asked in a friendly fashion: “Why is Truman helping Chiang?” I simply smiled and shook my head. In the morning I was awaken by soldiers drilling outside the hut and singing: “On to Nanking and strike down Chiang Kai-shek.” Speaking later to the soldiers in the campsite, I listened to them repeating the litany of political commissars who promised liberation of their families from ruthless landlords and corrupt Kuomintang village officials. I never heard any references to Marxist-Leninist ideology. At one meeting the common soldiers were being briefed by an officer on the strategy of the campaign. It was this sort of indoctrination by many thousands of political commissars which cemented the loyalty of the sons of peasants serving in the Communist armies. Nothing like it, as far as I knew, was done in the Nationalist forces.

  We rode on the next day, and our journey took us through the eastern edge of the battlefield where General Huang Wei’s Twelfth Army Group had been destroyed three weeks earlier. The battlefield was deserted and silent, except for the cawing of ravens perched on human body parts. The fields had been cratered by artillery fire. Demolished American-made vehicles, stripped of parts, lay half buried. Huang and thousands of his troops had been marched off to prisoner encampments in long lines. I saw no one mourning or caring for the fallen, their bodies lying in fields illuminated by the golden glow of a setting sun. The shrunken face of one of the dead sprawled beside the road, his body sniffed at by village dogs, haunted me for years. My escort told me that Liu Bocheng and Chen Yi’s conquering divisions had marched north to join the encirclement of Tu Yu-ming’s forces.

  At dusk on January 5, we reached what was apparently the main field Communist headquarters, about ten miles southwest of Suhsien. Artillery fire could be heard from the nearby battlefield where the Hsuchow column was dug in encircled by some 300,000 Communist troops. I was taken first by my escort to a hut where I waited until a man named Wu, addressed as “Deputy Commissar” but dressed like the soldiers in a plain uniform without insignia, arrived and questioned me in Chinese. He was obviously a sophisticated, well-educated man but hard-faced and suspicious. When I tried to engage him with pleasantries, he would tell me nothing about himself except that he was from Hopei Province. “I cannot take responsibility,” Wu said, “for allowing you to pass into the Liberated Area. Your case must be referred to my superiors.” He left with my letter requesting that I be permitted to proceed to Mao’s headquarters for an interview with the Communist leader. I was escorted to another peasant hut with a grain shed, in which I slept restively that night listening to the thud of nearby artillery fire. At dawn, I found myself under the guard of three soldiers, all armed with American carbines. They permitted me to walk out into bright sunshine. Out of a clear sky, a Nationalist fighter swooped down on a strafing run, its machine gun fire stitching across a nearby field. It did not occur to me to duck for cover, nor did it excite my guards, who presented me with a breakfast of duck eggs. All through that day, and into the night, I heard the heavy thudding of artillery fire. Then, at dawn, the guns fell silent. When I tried to leave the hut to learn what was transpiring, one of the guards blocked my way.

  In the late morning, Wu entered the hut where I had spent the night and told me firmly: “In regard to your mission we ask you to return. This area is a war zone and it is not convenient for you to proceed.” I interjected: “But if it is a question of danger, I don’t care.” Wu snapped back: “You don’t care, but we do care about you passing through here.” Shaken, I turned and walked into the grain shed and in frustration beat my fist against the sacks of grain stalks. When composed, I returned to face Wu. I asked if I could proceed via Shantung to Tsingtao, where U.S. Marines were based. He declined. When I asked for an explanation in writing, he shook his head and said: “It is enough that you have asked and we have refused.” He said he did not know whether my request for an interview with Mao had been referred directly to the Communist leader. Stung by Wu’s hardness, I said bitterly: “You know I came here to tell your side of the story.” Wu’s features relaxed. “You cannot help us,” he said softly and then shaking his head impatiently added firmly: “The horses are outside the door.”

  In front of the hut there was an escort officer and two soldiers already mounted. Wu returned my typewriter and camera, taken from me when I arrived. As I mounted my horse, Wu came up beside me, put his hand on the saddle, and said gently, speaking in English to me for the first time. “I hope to see you again. Peaceful journey. Good-bye.”

  As we rode out of the village, there was no sound of gunfire, only an eerie stillness. I said to the escort officer: “Are the Hsuchow troops finished?” “Yes,” he replied. “Just about finished.” It was January 7. In the next days as we rode back toward the Nationalist lines, the escort officer told me what had taken place within the encirclement and was later detailed on the Communist radio. Tu Yu-ming did not reply to Mao’s December 17 message, in which Mao guaranteed life and safety to all if he would surrender. Thereafter, conditions in the Nationalist camp steadily worsened. Airdrops by Nationalist transports made from above two thousand feet could not meet the needs of the thousands of trapped military and civilians. Two-thirds of what was parachuted drifted into the hands of the Communists. Horses were slaughtered for food. Soldiers scrounged for bark and roots in the fields. Lacking fuel for fires, women and children froze to death in crowded huts. Communist loudspeakers along the perimeter offered food and safety to the Nationalist soldiers if they would surrender. Panic spread among the Nationalist troops when word circulated that Chiang Kai-shek might order the bombing of the Armored Corps so the tanks would not fall into Communist hands. Just before the final artillery barrage opened on January 6, the loudspeakers boomed out: “There is no escape.” The Second Army Group was the first to surrender, then the Thirteenth, and finally the Armored Corps. By January 10, the Communists had rounded up the last of the fleeing Nationalist soldiers. The Battle of the Huai-Hai ended with the capture of Tu Yu-ming, the commander of the encircled Hsuchow column, who attempted to escape in the uniform of an ordinary Communist soldier. His deputy, Li Mi, managed to escape. I later came upon him in Burma, where he was involved in a secret American Central Intelligence Agency operation. Tu Yu-ming survived as a prisoner an
d after the Civil War was granted comfortable retirement by the Communists, as were many other Nationalist officers. Lieutenant Colonel Chen, who piloted the plane that took me to besieged Hsuchow, was permitted to return from Taiwan and resettle in Peking. I encountered him by chance in 2003 at his well-furnished apartment, brought there for drinks by our friend, his American daughter, Rose Chen. “You must be one of the American correspondents I took to Hsuchow,” he exclaimed when I entered his Peking apartment, and we embraced.

  On the journey back to Pengpu with my soldier escort, we followed the same line of villages. In every village the nights were alive with high-spirited soldiers singing patriotic songs. All seemed to have been briefed on the general strategy of the campaign and the impending assault across the Yangtze. The October 10 statement of Mao Zedong that it would take one more year to completely defeat the Nationalists was widely quoted. In one village, soldiers intensely curious about American technology crowded around when I demonstrated my typewriter and camera. One of them asked about automat restaurants in the United States. “Twenty years after all China is Communist, we shall have automat restaurants,” he said. (It was this quote in the stories I wrote about my trek across the Huaipei Plain upon my return to Nanking that seemed to evoke the most interest in the United States.) Thinking of that soldier as I write: If he survived, what fun it would have been to observe his reactions to the present-day skyscrapers of Shanghai.

  That first night on my return journey I lay awake in my hut, tossing about, unable to sleep, dejected by the rebuff at the Communist headquarters. Staring into the darkness, the spell of my trek across the Huaipei Plain fading, I began to accept that my venture had been out of time and place. The era of easy mixing of Americans with the Communists such as in Yenan during the days of the Dixie Mission and the Marshall negotiations in Chungking was ended. There would be no more jovial dinners with exchanges of toasts or friendly ideological debates. We were beyond that crossroads. Mao Zedong was bent on his revolutionary course, and he would not be diverted by American influence, or for that matter, by the Russians. When will we talk to each other again? I wondered.