Revolution and Civil War, episode 19
Breaking the Dikes
In the spring of 1938 Li Zongren, a general from Guangxi who once took up arms against Chiang Kai-shek, gives China a famous victory at Taierzhuang on the Grand Canal, and then Japan comes on again. The episode follows Li and Chiang through the loss of Xuzhou, the breaking of the Yellow River dikes to stop the Japanese, which drowns some 800,000 of China's own people, the long defence and fall of Wuhan, and the burning of Changsha by its own officials, while in Yan'an Mao Zedong lays the ground for his mastery of the party, and gives the flood real time as the war's hardest choice. It leans entirely on scholars.
Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify
Transcript
Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of China's Nationalist government, had lost Shanghai, and with Shanghai lost, his capital at Nanjing could not be defended either. He had sworn to defend Nanjing to the last, handed it to a former warlord who soon fled, and the city went through seven weeks of terror at the hands of the Japanese army. Chiang himself had flown out before dawn on the seventh of December, broken-hearted, and still making plans to fight on. His government was already on the move. The military command went up the Yangtze to Wuhan, the great river city in the middle of China, and the ministries went further still, to the hill city of Chongqing in the southwest, a last redoubt against an invasion by land. This episode is about the year that decided whether China would keep fighting at all. It has a famous victory in it, and a long retreat, and the hardest choice any Chinese leader made in the whole war. In January 1938 Japan raised the stakes. At an imperial conference in Tokyo, held in front of the emperor, the government gave Chiang seventy-two hours to accept harsh terms, including reparations and a separate north China under Japanese control. Before the Chinese had even answered, the Japanese prime minister announced that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang's government at all, and his foreign minister called the break stronger even than a declaration of war. So there would be no talking. The war would be settled on the ground, and the ground that mattered now was the country between the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Wuhan, that winter, was a strange and hopeful place. With the government's grip loosened by the war, the city became, for a few months, an oasis of freedom. Writers who had been stifled by censorship for years gathered there. The novelist Lao She led a movement to pour the message of resistance into old forms, folk songs and popular stories, and his play Defend Wuhan found an eager audience. The press was freer than it had ever been, and war correspondents who reported from the front became celebrities. Chiang's vice minister of propaganda, Hollington Tong, who had trained as a journalist in America and worked on New York newspapers, encouraged foreign correspondents to go to the front, and the front pages of the West began to fill with sympathy for China's resistance. The question everyone in that city was asking was simple. Could Wuhan be held? At the end of January Chiang called his generals to a military conference and told them that the first priority of the war was now a city most listeners have never heard of. It was Xuzhou, about five hundred kilometres north of Wuhan. Xuzhou sat at the midpoint of the Tianjin to Pukou railway, the line that ran north to south across the crowded plains of central China. It was also where that line crossed the Longhai railway, China's main artery from east to west, running from Lanzhou in the far west to the sea. Whoever held Xuzhou held the crossroads of the country. If you want to follow this war, keep an eye on the railways. Again and again, that is what the fighting is about. On the ninth of February the Japanese took the city of Bengbu, some four hundred kilometres northeast of Wuhan, and over the next few weeks they waged a savage campaign with Xuzhou as the target. They came in two columns, one from the north and one from the south, marching along the track of the railway, with the aim of crushing the Chinese between the two arms of a pincer. Japan's commanders hoped that by pouring in up to four hundred thousand troops they could destroy the Chinese armies holding the east and centre of the country. Chiang saw exactly what that meant. If Xuzhou fell, Wuhan would be in immense danger, and Wuhan was where he meant to make his stand. North of Xuzhou the two sides fought to the death at one town after another. The Chinese could not drive the Japanese back, but the Japanese could not scatter the defenders either. At Linyi, about fifty kilometres northeast of Xuzhou, a general named Zhang Zizhong, who had disgraced himself by abandoning an earlier battlefield, became a hero overnight for his stubborn refusal to let the Japanese through. To hold Xuzhou, Chiang had to trust a man he had good reason not to trust. His name was Li Zongren, and he came from Guangxi, a province in the far southwest that people in the old heartland of China had always looked down on as half civilized. Li was one of a group of young officers, trained in regional military schools, who fought in the early years of the republic to bring the region under national control. He joined the Nationalist party in 1923, the year Sun Yat-sen made his alliance with the Soviets. He had marched in the Northern Expedition, the campaign of 1926 to 1928 that brought the Nationalists to power, and played a crucial part in winning the north. In those days he had watched Chiang under fire, and even though he was no admirer of Chiang, he marvelled that his commander stood calmly out in the open while the bullets screamed past them in the dark. But once Chiang was ruling from Nanjing, Li grew wary of his hunger to gather all power into his own hands. In 1930 Li, his fellow Guangxi general Bai Chongxi and several other militarists joined a coalition to bring down what they called Chiang's dictatorship, and fought a war against him that killed or wounded two hundred and forty thousand men. They lost, and Li went home to his own base in the southwest, ready to challenge Chiang again. What changed his mind was Japan. After Japan seized Manchuria in 1931, Li came to believe that a Japanese invasion was a greater danger than Chiang. So in October 1937 he accepted command of the Fifth War Zone, which took in Xuzhou, on one condition: Chiang was never to send orders directly to Li's own subordinates. Chiang, who usually could not stop himself from managing every detail, kept that promise for the whole war. It tells you how badly he needed this wary colleague, and how badly he needed someone, anyone, who could give China a victory in the middle of endless retreat. The government wanted the world to see its generals at work, so journalists were given open access to the commanders on the Xuzhou front. One of them was Du Zhongyuan, a journalist whose controversial columns in a well-known left-leaning magazine had already made his name. Du could not praise Li enough. He called him the "formidable southwestern general, Li Zongren", and wrote that he was "elegant and refined" and "vastly magnanimous". Li invited Du and his companions to dinner and spent the evening in banter, and the journalist came away admiring him as a teller of stories. He even claimed that the people of Xuzhou called Li by the name of an ancient hero, Duke Jiang. When the journalist reached Xuzhou in March, friends in Wuhan had warned him that the city was desolate and terrified. Instead, he found that "all the inhabitants of Xuzhou were quietly getting on with their business". Chiang himself came to Xuzhou on the twenty-fourth of March. As long as the city held, the two Japanese columns stayed apart. If it fell, the pincer would close.
By late March the danger was real. Two Japanese armies, one from the north and one from the centre of China, were meant to link up for a combined drive into the heart of the country. Li and his senior colleagues, Bai Chongxi and another general named Tang Enbo, decided where to meet them: at Tai'erzhuang, a small, old stone-walled town. Tai'erzhuang was not big, but it lay on the Grand Canal, China's great north to south waterway, and on a rail line that joined the two main railways while bypassing Xuzhou itself. The plan was Bai's, and it worked. Two Japanese divisions walked into an ambush at the railway spur by the town, about forty miles from the city they were trying to reach. Then the Japanese began feeding in more men, and the Chinese generals were no longer sure they could hold. Chiang left them in no doubt. In a telegram on the first of April he told them that the enemy at Tai'erzhuang must be destroyed. That same day Chiang made a speech to delegates of his party that tried to have it both ways. The Japanese had invaded seven provinces, he said, but they held only the provincial capitals and the main roads and railways. The villages and towns off those routes, they had "absolutely not been able to invade and occupy." He told them the real base for the war would lie west of the great railways, not east of them, and that as long as China held Guangzhou and its link to the sea, the loss of Wuhan would not matter much. He had to tell the country that Wuhan was worth fighting for, without tying his name to a city he might lose. At that moment, he simply did not know whether it could be held. What followed was some of the most brutal fighting of the war so far, face to face, through the little lanes of the town. A journalist named Sheng Cheng, who had marched in the May Fourth demonstration of 1919, went to the front and filled notebooks with what the soldiers told him. One of the officers he talked to was Chi Fengcheng, a star of the campaign. Chi remembered that they fought not only for streets and lanes but for single courtyards and houses, and that "Neither side was willing to budge." They would capture a house and then dig through a wall to get at the enemy next door. And, he said, "Sometimes the enemy would be digging a hole in the same wall at the same time." "Sometimes we faced each other with hand grenades—or we might even bite each other." On the first of April Chi asked for volunteers for a mission to take one building that was close to suicide. Fifty-seven were chosen. Ten came back. On the second and third of April Chi called the men holding the town's north railway station to see how they were doing. They were all crying and sneezing, because the Japanese had used tear gas. On paper, Japan should have won. Its army had cannon and heavy artillery that the Chinese could not match. But in the cramped lanes of Tai'erzhuang that advantage counted for nothing. And this time the Chinese command kept its own troops supplied, which so often was where Chinese defences collapsed, while cutting off the Japanese from fresh arms and ammunition. Slowly, the Japanese were worn down. On the seventh of April they broke and fled, leaving thousands of dead behind them. China later claimed that twenty thousand Japanese had been killed. The real number was probably closer to eight thousand. For once, the Chinese had won a decisive victory. There is one more thing to know about Tai'erzhuang, and it says a great deal about this army. Li Zongren did not send his best troops, his own Guangxi men, into the town. He tried to push the bulk of the fighting onto Tang Enbo's soldiers instead. Every general in Chiang's coalition looked out for his own army first, because he knew what Chiang wanted: one national army under one command, which Chiang would lead. They knew what had happened to two of their colleagues. One provincial commander had been shot for refusing to fight; another, Zhang Xueliang of Manchuria, had let Chiang cut down his army and ended up under house arrest. From the point of view of the nation, Chiang's wish for a single army was reasonable enough. From the point of view of a general from Guangxi, it looked like a trap. When the shooting stopped, the victors walked through what the Japanese had left behind. In the north station they found a makeshift crematorium, interrupted halfway through its work. "Not all the bones had been completely burned." Chi Fengcheng picked up a Japanese officer's helmet, scorched on the left side by gunpowder and marked with blood, from a fatal wound taken from behind. After the battle Li asked the journalist Sheng Cheng whether he had found any souvenirs. Sheng said he had found love letters on the bodies of Japanese soldiers, and the photograph of a girl, marked nineteen years old, February 1938. In the newspapers the Japanese were demons and devils. On the battlefield, the men who had killed them had not forgotten that they were human. The news set off an explosion of joy across unoccupied China. Du Zhongyuan wrote of "the glorious killing of the enemy". It was exaggerated, but it was a tremendous tonic to people who had heard nothing for months but news of defeat. Chi's soldiers, sitting around in the evenings, told Sheng that their commander had once given them the secret of war: "when you get food, eat it; when you can sleep, take it." An American military observer who spent three days watching the fight reported that the Chinese had dealt Japan "the first defeat that Japanese troops have suffered in the field in modern times." The American ambassador wrote home that the mood in Wuhan had swung from pessimism to dogged optimism, and that he could find no wish among the Chinese for a peace by compromise. Japanese bombing and Japanese atrocities, he thought, were stiffening the people, who were waking up to the feeling that this was their war. Even the British, who had always been wary of Chiang, gave him grudging credit. Their ambassador, Archibald Clark Kerr, wrote to London that Chiang "has now become the symbol of Chinese unity, which he himself has so far failed to achieve". The Japanese, he added, were well on the way to achieving it for him. The ambassador found Chiang "obstinate and difficult to deal with". But the Nationalists, he wrote, were "making in their muddling way a good job of things in extremely difficult circumstances". Then the glow faded, within days. Chiang, aggressive as ever, wanted to follow up with a great counterattack, and raised the number of troops in the area to four hundred and fifty thousand. But the Japanese commanders learned from their defeat. They brought in men from their armies in the north and the centre and began to close Xuzhou in a vice. In late April and early May a Japanese advance cut the Chinese off from the east to west railway, the line that brought reinforcements to the city. By the middle of May the Chinese troops left in Xuzhou were about to be surrounded. On the fifteenth of May Chiang authorized a withdrawal. And here Li Zongren did something harder than winning a battle. Instead of another attack, he devised a brilliantly executed retreat. Somehow, forty divisions slipped out of Xuzhou and past the Japanese, helped by a lucky sandstorm and fog on the eighteenth of May. The army lived to fight again. The city paid. Seven hundred people had been killed in a single air raid on the fourteenth of May. Canadian Jesuit priests who stayed on after Xuzhou fell recorded that more than a third of its houses had been destroyed and most of its people had fled in terror. Across the countryside around it came report after report of massacres. One of the towns that was utterly destroyed was Tai'erzhuang itself, the scene of the great victory only a few weeks before. Far to the northwest, in his base at Yan'an, the Communist leader Mao Zedong read the meaning of all this very clearly. In May he gave one of his most famous lectures, called On Protracted War, in which he mocked those who had been made "giddy" by Tai'erzhuang into hoping for a quick decision. China would win in the end, he said, but "it cannot win quickly". The fall of Xuzhou was a sign that this would be a long war, if China could survive the next few months. And that was not at all certain.
After Xuzhou the Japanese kept moving west along the railways, and by the end of May they were only forty kilometres from the city of Zhengzhou. Early in June they took Kaifeng. Zhengzhou was where the east to west line crossed the main north to south line that ran from Beijing down to Wuhan. Take Zhengzhou, and Wuhan lay open. The Chinese defenders were desperate. There was a real chance that the whole war effort would collapse. To understand what happened next, you need to know about the river. The Yellow River takes its name from the yellow silt it carries, and that silt made the plains around it rich and fertile. The region had been the cradle of Chinese civilization. But every few centuries the river burst its banks and changed course without warning, drowning thousands of farmers. Over the centuries the Chinese had learned to hold it in its bed with massive dikes. The silt kept building up, so the dikes had to be built higher and higher, until in places the bed of the river lay above the level of the land around it. A great flood in 1887 had taken nearly a million lives. And many of those dikes stood near Zhengzhou, right across the path the Japanese would have to take to reach Wuhan by land. So the idea was there, waiting. As early as 1935 Chiang's German military adviser had written that the Yellow River was the last line of defence. Now, in the desperate days of 1938, men around Chiang put the idea to him: use water instead of soldiers. One of them was Cheng Qian, the commander of the First War Zone. Chiang flew to Zhengzhou and saw for himself that no attack by his army could drive the Japanese back now. The choice in front of him was stark. Let the Japanese take the city within days, or unleash the one weapon that could stop them, at least for a while. Chiang knew that if Wuhan fell quickly, his government might not have time to get away to Chongqing, and that a government caught in the open would be far more likely to surrender, leaving Japan master of almost all of China. He made his decision. He gave orders to General Wei Rulin to blow up the dike that held the Yellow River in place in central Henan. Everyone knew what that meant. Floods would turn much of central China into a sea of water and mud. And for the plan to work it had to be done fast, with no public warning, in case the Japanese found out and sped up their advance. One of the officers sent to do it was Xiong Xianyu, the chief of staff of the 8th Division, and he kept a diary. The army's first attempts to blow the dike at the small town of Zhaokou, between the fourth and sixth of June, failed. The structure was simply too strong. Another attempt nearby failed too, and hour by hour the Japanese came closer. The division commander asked Xiong where they should try next. Xiong talked through the lie of the land and named two places. One was too near the failed site, and the Japanese might reach it at any moment. The other was a village on a bend in the river called Huayuankou. "To give ourselves enough time," Xiong wrote, "Huayuankou would be best." Late on the sixth of June, Xiong and General Wei went out after dark to inspect the spot. At first, to the soldiers, this was a piece of military engineering, and in Xiong's word an "exciting" one. "The wind blew softly," he remembered, "and the river water trickled pleasantly." They could not judge the height of the water in the murky moonlight, and the bulbs in their flashlights had burned out. So they slept in their car, to be ready to choose the place to break the dike as soon as day came. Daylight brought home what they were about to do, and the men grew more and more uneasy. A regimental commander, Wang Songmei, spoke to the workers who would do the digging. "My brothers," he said, "this plan will be of benefit to our country and our nation, and will lessen the harm that is being done to the people." And he added, "In the future, you'll find good wives, and have plenty of children." It was a promise that fate would not curse them, in the old way, by denying them families for what they were about to do. On the eighth of June the work began, with some two thousand men. The government wanted it done fast. Xiong recorded that the highest authorities kept telephoning from Wuhan to check on progress, and the party even sent performers to sing and play music to keep the diggers' spirits up. A senior general promised every labourer a reward of two thousand yuan if they broke the dike by midnight, and a thousand if they managed it by six the next morning. After the explosives had failed at Zhaokou, they used none at all. All of that backbreaking digging was done by hand. And the workers earned their money. The dike was breached in a few hours. On the morning of the ninth of June, Xiong wrote, the mood turned tense and solemn. At first the water came through in a small stream. By about one in the afternoon it was fierce, flowing "like 10,000 horses." Looking out across the plain, Xiong felt as if a sea had appeared in front of him. "My heart ached," he wrote. The force of the water tore the breach wider, until a stream hundreds of feet across, carrying about three quarters of the whole river, was pouring southeast across the plains of central China. "We did this to stop the enemy," Xiong reflected, "so we didn't regret the huge sacrifice, as it was for a greater victory." But as the soldiers talked it over, they noticed something. The army had broken the dike. Who was going to look after the people whose homes it was about to destroy? That, they decided, was for the government and the whole country. Their division commander had already telephoned the night before to ask that help be sent for the people who would be flooded out. Wei, Xiong and their troops got away in wooden boats. Hundreds of thousands of farmers were not so lucky. Theodore H. White, an American correspondent for Time magazine, reported on the flood within days. A Yellow River flood, he explained, killed less by quick drowning than by slow disease and starvation, as the river's filth settled ankle-deep on the fields and smothered the crops. "Last week," he wrote, "about 500,000 peasants were driven from 2,000 communities to await rescue or death on whatever dry ground they could find." In the end the water spread over some fifty-four thousand square kilometres of central China, reaching the Huai River, the Grand Canal and even the Yangtze. The mouth of the Yellow River itself moved hundreds of miles to the south. Chiang knew that this could be a devastating blow to his government's name. So he announced that the dike had been broken, and blamed it on Japanese bombers. The Japanese furiously denied it. But most foreigners, who had heard what Japan's army had done at Nanjing, believed Chiang. The American correspondent thought the very idea that China had done it was unthinkable. Cutting a dike, he wrote, "is the blackest of Chinese crimes," and no Chinese army would risk that for a small gain on the battlefield. That, of course, is exactly what they had done. During the war the Nationalists never admitted it. But the truth got out quickly. A month later, the American ambassador noted privately that the Chinese had stopped the Japanese advance on Zhengzhou by breaching the dikes. How many died? In 1948 the Nationalists' own figures put the dead in the three flooded provinces, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu, at 844,489, with about 4.8 million people made refugees. Later studies put the toll lower, but still at around half a million dead, with three to five million refugees. If Japan had done this, it would be remembered as the worst atrocity of the whole war, worse in the number of people who suffered than the massacre at Nanjing. And Chiang? He saw the sacrifice as the price of a war for the survival of Chinese civilization. He showed no private remorse. He did not mention the flood in his diary at all. What did it buy? In the short run, exactly what Chiang wanted. The American embassy reported that the flood had completely checked the Japanese advance on Zhengzhou and stopped them taking Wuhan by rail. It forced the Japanese commander, General Hata, to change his whole plan and come at Wuhan the long way, up the Yangtze. The flood split the northern battlefield from the southern one, and the Japanese did not take Zhengzhou until April 1944, six years later. Here the sources disagree. One side says the flood saved central China, and Chiang's headquarters at Wuhan, for five more months; the other says it was pointless, since it only delayed what was coming anyway. What nobody can argue away is the cost. Chiang's choice can be partly explained by that hot summer of 1938, when his only hope seemed to be to deny Japan as much of China as possible, for as long as possible. It cannot be excused. And the people who paid that cost had never been asked.
That summer Chiang also lost an old partner. On the twenty-second of June every German military adviser in China was ordered home by Berlin, on pain of being judged a traitor. Hitler's government had decided that Japan, not China, was the partner it wanted in Asia. Chiang gave a gracious speech in praise of the departing head of the mission and told him he hoped he would come back after the war. As the Germans left, they made sure the roof of their train carried a large German flag, swastika and all. It was a sensible precaution. Wuhan was already being bombed. About eight hundred thousand Chinese troops had been gathered to defend the city. Because the flood blocked the way from the north, the Japanese came up the Yangtze with their navy, backed by some nine divisions. It was a hot summer and the river ran high, so Japanese cruisers could steam upstream and fire their big guns at close range into the Chinese positions dug along the banks. Chiang had decided not to pile his armies into Wuhan itself. Instead he would fight a long series of defences along the south bank of the Yangtze, making the Japanese fight their way up it, position by position. China had one source of help from outside. Stalin wanted China to keep fighting Japan, and Soviet pilots flew Soviet aircraft for China; between 1938 and 1940 some two thousand of them would serve there. In May Chiang wrote to Stalin that China could not have kept fighting without his help, but that it was still in a life or death situation, and he begged for sixty-five more aircraft. China, he reported, had only ten light bombers left. Stalin quickly agreed. Soon there would be 3,665 Soviet military men in the country, advisers, pilots and technicians. And when rumours spread that autumn that Chiang might make peace with Japan, Stalin hurried to promise equipment for sixty divisions and five hundred more fighter planes. Between the twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh of June Japanese bombers pounded the river fortress at Madang until it surrendered. A month later the Chinese abandoned the city of Jiujiang, two hundred and fifty kilometres down the river from Wuhan, and its people were put through a spree of murder and rape. At the end of July Chiang gave his troops a hard speech. He told them, "Our achievement in our first year has been to bog down the Japanese". Then he turned on his own army. Soldiers were robbing the people they were supposed to defend. "Not only should you not steal," he told them, "you should be giving things to the people." Commanders must stay at their posts. He reminded them that the commander who had let Madang fall had been shot. And officers must not leave their men to save themselves. Wuhan, unlike Shanghai, had proper air raid shelters, but "we shouldn't just jump into them and abandon our men!" It may have helped. In August the Japanese had to fight much harder for every mile of the river. Under General Xue Yue, one of the generals loyal to Chiang, some hundred thousand Chinese troops drove the Japanese back at Huangmei. At the fortress of Tianjiazhen thousands of men held out until the end of September, and the Japanese won there only by using poison gas. At one point the invaders took three weeks to advance ten miles. Behind the lines, the government was racing to ship its factories upriver, and thousands of Chinese were hauling heavily loaded barges and rafts upstream through the fast water of the Three Gorges. But the old weakness was still there. North of Wuhan, at Xinyang, Li Zongren's Guangxi troops were fighting to exhaustion. They expected another general close to Chiang, Hu Zongnan, to relieve them. Instead Hu led his troops away from the city, and the Japanese took it without a fight. Xinyang gave them the north to south railway into Wuhan, and that was the endgame. As the end came near, Chiang spoke to the defenders one more time, and he did something interesting. He talked about Nanjing. He told them he had asked the soldiers there to sacrifice themselves for the capital and for Sun Yat-sen's tomb, and that they had faced death as if it were going home. If they had simply retreated, he said, it would have been the worst shame in five thousand years of history. Now, by defending Wuhan, he told them, "we avenge our comrades and wash away our shame." It was not quite what had happened. The defenders of Nanjing had fought hard for two days, but they were gone by the time the Japanese overran the city. Chiang needed a story that would make his men fight, and at the same time he had to warn them that this would not be a fight to the death. When the moment came, they must have a plan to leave. Up in Yan'an, Mao agreed that Wuhan should not be held to the last man. The point of defending it, he wrote in October, was "to drain the enemy, on the one hand, and win time, on the other". Zhou Enlai, the Communist leader who had joined the alliance's government in Wuhan, brought Chiang a handwritten letter from Mao that October, praising his great leadership and the lasting solidarity of the two parties. Chiang knew Mao was being cynical. And yet he envied the Communists. Their members, he wrote, had a tight organization and an iron discipline, while most of his own party had become a special class, struggling for power and their own selfish concerns. Several times that year he even suggested to Zhou that the two parties merge into one, on condition that Mao and the Red Army's commander, Zhu De, take a holiday abroad. Apparently in all seriousness, he proposed that the Nationalists could join the Comintern. Mao's answer was that Communists could join the Nationalist party as individuals, as they had in the 1920s. Neither side would give up what mattered, and some weeks later Zhou told Chiang the idea simply was not possible. In mid-October the Japanese struck in the far south too. They landed on the coast of Guangdong, and within ten days they had taken the great port of Guangzhou. And in late October, with the Japanese closing in, Li Zongren, holding the line north of the city, had to pull his forces back into the mountains. Chiang ordered every usable factory and plant left in Wuhan destroyed, and the government's last people began to withdraw, in good order. He had decided that Wuhan, defended at the cost of so much blood, was no longer essential.
As he had at Nanjing, Chiang stayed in command until the very last day. On the morning of the twenty-fourth of October he called his senior officers and aides on a field radiophone with the message he always gave at such times. You can go now, he told them. Each of them protested that he could not leave before his commander did. "You must go first," Chiang told them. "I'll leave soon after." It was unusually cold in Wuhan that day, and snow was falling on the city. At ten that night Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, came out to the bombed airfield. Flashes of light lit the field, snowflakes fell softly through the drifting smoke, and the ground shook with the thud of exploding shells. Their own plane, flown by Chiang's personal American pilot, Royal Leonard, had been held up by false radio signals. A German pilot was found to fly them instead, and then ruled out, because he admitted that he could take off at night but not land. That is not a quality you want in a pilot. At last a civilian airliner touched down. The Chiangs climbed aboard and took off through a thick pall of smoke for Hengyang, four hundred and fifty kilometres to the south. A few minutes later Leonard landed his own plane. When he learned that the Chiangs had already gone, he crammed in forty or so Chinese from the hundreds who were besieging the aircraft. He took off, he remembered, to "the booming of siege guns, the crackling of flame, and the red, ghastly light of a city burning." The next day, the twenty-fifth of October 1938, Wuhan was surrounded on every side, and it fell. China had now lost Shanghai, Nanjing, Xuzhou, Guangzhou and Wuhan. And yet the thing that Japan, and most of the world, had expected had not happened. The Chinese government had not surrendered, and it had not collapsed. Japan had won a pyrrhic and limited victory, and what came next was a stalemate that would last for seven years. In the end Japan would hold most of China's great cities, all of Manchuria and the north, the whole Yangtze valley up to Wuhan, and the coast all the way down to near Wenzhou. In time it would take several major ports farther south as well, Guangzhou among them.
After a short stop at Hengyang, the Chiangs did not fly to their new capital. They flew to Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, an old walled city on the Xiang River in the rich rice country of central China. In Changsha, an American missionary doctor named Phil Greene worked at the Yale-in-China Hospital, and he wrote down what came next. When forty thousand refugees, a crowd of generals and then Chiang himself descended on the city, he wrote, chaos and panic spread. On the twenty-sixth of October the arsenal behind his hospital blew up, killing thirty. Two days later, twenty-one thousand wounded from Wuhan were reported in the town. By the start of November people expected Changsha to fall within two weeks, and the whole town was leaving by boat, train, bus, rickshaw and wheelbarrow. Then, after a prayer meeting, friends told the doctor something strange. They had seen oil and cotton waste being handed out to the officials of each ward of the city. By the eleventh of November only a small part of the city's half million people were left. Greene was the only doctor still at the mission. The next day he wrote of an uncanny stillness, a deserted, evidently doomed city. That same day, the twelfth of November, the governor of Hunan, Zhang Zhizhong, received a report that Japanese cavalry were within twenty miles, and ordered the city evacuated. Early the next morning Greene woke to shouting in the streets and saw fires burning across the entire city, set by Chinese soldiers and police. The missionaries and nurses begged the soldiers not to burn their buildings. Others saw the military hospital downtown in flames, with the sick and wounded trying to drag themselves out through its doors and windows. "For two days and nights the roar of the fire, the pall of the smoke and the wanton destruction" went on, the doctor remembered. And the Japanese never came. They had stopped their advance at Dongting Lake, nearly eighty kilometres away. Changsha had burned for nothing, and thousands of people must have died in the fires. On the fourteenth of November the governor issued an apology, saying he had not ordered the burning. The next day Greene got a letter from Soong Mei-ling, who had been his wife's classmate at Wellesley, telling him that her husband was not responsible either. On the sixteenth Chiang arrived to investigate. The missionaries soon learned that the garrison commander, the regimental commander and the chief of police had all been shot. The governor, a trusted follower of Chiang's, was dismissed, but stayed on in Changsha. The doctor sent a radio message to his wife through a British gunboat anchored in the river. The hospital was full, and nothing in it had been destroyed. And one line more: "Most of the city gone". So who gave the order? Here the sources disagree. One view is that Chiang, sure the Japanese would sweep on inland after Wuhan, gave his officials the impression, if not a direct order, that Changsha should be burned, so that it was his command that led them to act, and he then denied it. The other calls the fires a ghastly mistake, leaves open whether Chiang ordered them at all, and points out that he had never before called for a city about to be lost to be wholly destroyed, and never did again. One man blamed his own side. Zhou Fohai was an official in Chiang's government, and Changsha was his hometown. Zhou had flown out of Wuhan on the twenty-fourth of October, a day earlier than he was meant to, which was a lucky escape. Now, in Chongqing, he was disgusted. "I've heard that we ourselves burned Changsha," he wrote. "Before the enemy even got there, we burned our own land." It was, he wrote, like treating your own people as the enemy. Hold on to Zhou Fohai. We will meet him again before this episode is over.
All eyes now turned to Chongqing. In November 1938 Chiang and his large headquarters arrived there for what would turn out to be a stay of eight years. Chongqing sits on a huge rock where the Jialing River runs into the Yangtze. In summer the stone is blistering hot, and from October to April it is wet with dripping rain or thick fog. Hundreds of steps cut into the rock centuries before curled down the cliff to the river, and porters carried the goods unloaded at the wharves up to the city on bamboo poles across their shoulders. Now men in blue Sun Yat-sen uniforms were everywhere, walking the streets or riding in sedan chairs and rickshaws while their bearers shouted to clear the way. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from the lower Yangtze lived in sheds made of rice straw, scavenging for food and work. And engineers were dynamiting caves into the rock, to serve as air raid shelters. Remember those caves. The city was going to need them. The government had moved fifteen hundred kilometres up the Yangtze. And the people came too. A city of fewer than half a million in 1937 would more than double in size within eight years, as millions of refugees fled west. Chongqing became a small copy of the whole nation. The journalist Du Zhongyuan, who had visited seven years before, remembered it as "an utterly feudal place full of opium and gambling." Now he found the roads newly repaired and the town filled with government offices. Theodore H. White, the American correspondent, who would become one of Chiang's harshest critics by the end of the war, saw something else there. Wartime Chongqing, he wrote, was a "moment in time," when people fought to hold the land out of a belief in China's greatness. Many of the newcomers from the rich east looked down on the place as backward and filthy. The novelist Lao She tried the local cigarettes, made with poor tobacco, and noticed that after a few puffs the mosquitoes fled. "Smokable and drives away insects", he wrote, "truly valuable!" Chiang and Soong Mei-ling settled outside the city in a fairly modest ten-room house called Huangshan, behind a high stone wall patrolled by guards. The plainclothes men who guarded it had been trained by Walter Stennes, a German who had once led Hitler's brownshirts in Berlin, then rebelled against Hitler and made his way to China, or so he said. He ran Chiang's bodyguard, and he was also, it turned out, a Soviet agent. His problems were enormous. Although a good deal of machinery had been carried west, probably ninety percent of Nationalist China's industry was lost, and perhaps eighty percent of its arms industry. The east of China was gone, and with it the customs revenue, the most fertile provinces and the most advanced infrastructure in the country. Virtually every major city in China was in Japanese hands by the end of 1938. Chiang still held three quarters of that enormous country, and probably two thirds of its people. But much of that land was thinly peopled, and most Chinese lived in the east and south, which he had lost or held only precariously. And the grip on his own generals that he had won by the end of 1936 had disappeared. At a military conference in Hunan that November, Chiang told his officers that the first stage of the war was over. He reached back for lessons into China's past. He quoted the ancient strategist Sunzi: "If the enemy comes to us, we can take advantage of him". And he reminded them of Zeng Guofan, the Qing official who, some seventy years earlier, had been beaten by the Taiping rebels and thought of taking his own life, then studied his defeat, rebuilt his army in Hunan and crushed the rebellion. The parallel was clear. Then he told his officers what was wrong with their army. The dead should be carried off the battlefield and buried in proper, marked graves. Wounded soldiers were being left by their commanders to beg or steal to live. And in too many places, when the army arrived, the people moved away. The Japanese, he wrote in his diary, were "impatient and short-tempered". They wanted to finish the war with one decisive blow. So China would do the opposite: "slow everything down," and fight a long war of attrition. Where his army had once sent three divisions, sometimes six, against a single Japanese division and still lost, from now on, he wrote, it must try to use six to nine, and strike at the enemy's flank. His government had no intention of surrendering. But it no longer had the strength for a large offensive either.
In the far north, the Communist leaders had spent that year in a struggle for power among themselves. In November 1937 a rival named Wang Ming had flown home from Moscow, where he had represented the Chinese party, carrying Stalin's instructions in person. He saw himself as Stalin's best pupil. Stalin wanted the Chinese Communists to put revolution aside, fight Japan alongside Chiang, and wage guerrilla war in the enemy's rear. Mao went to the airfield at Yan'an to welcome him and even called him "a blessing from the sky". It meant nothing. Mao understood that Wang Ming was the most dangerous rival for power he had yet met. Wang presented himself as the only true interpreter of Moscow's wishes, and for a while it worked. Later Mao remembered that after Wang Ming came back, his own authority did not reach beyond his cave. In December Wang went to Wuhan to run the party's work in the Yangtze valley, and set up a rival centre of power there, preaching close cooperation with Chiang. Zhou Enlai, the party's great negotiator, came over to his side. In January 1938 Mao noted sarcastically that he was "just starting to study military questions," and thought it best to read some more philosophy before writing anything. At a meeting in Yan'an in the early spring of 1938, the two sides fought each other openly, and neither could win. So Mao turned to the one authority both men accepted. He asked Moscow. In March he sent one of his closest confidants, Ren Bishi, to the Soviet Union to explain the situation and ask for instructions. In April a veteran party leader, Zhang Guotao, unable to bear his isolation, fled Yan'an for Wuhan and quit the party altogether. The Comintern was Moscow's headquarters for the world's Communist parties, and its head was a Bulgarian, Georgi Dimitrov. Ren went carefully. He praised Wang Ming, and assured the Comintern that Mao was every bit as loyal to Moscow as Wang was. In June Dimitrov consulted Stalin. And in early July Dimitrov gave the Chinese delegates his answer to carry home. "You must tell everyone that it is necessary to support Mao Zedong as the leader of the Communist Party of China." And then: "Such persons as Wang Ming should no longer fight for the leadership." When the message was read out to the party leaders in September, one of them remembered, it made an enormous impression. The question of who led the party was settled. Years later Mao himself admitted that without the Comintern's instruction, it would have been very hard to solve the problem of the leadership. With Moscow's blessing in hand, Mao moved quickly. From late September to early November 1938 the party held a long meeting of its Central Committee, which it called the Sixth Plenum, and Mao spoke at great length. He read his main report over three days, and it stunned his audience. In it he laid out the party's history as a story of errors on the right and errors on the left, all of them corrected at last by the leadership that had taken charge on the Long March. In other words, by Mao. And he set out the main idea of his report. Marxism had to be made Chinese, fitted to China's own conditions. As he put it, "There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, but only concrete Marxism". The party, he said, must drop its empty foreign phrases and find "a new and vital Chinese style and manner, pleasing to the eye and to the ear of the Chinese common people." In a closed session he reminded the party what it all came down to. Political power, he said, "grows out of the barrel of a gun." Chiang was not fooled. Zhang Guotao, the veteran who had fled Yan'an, declared that Mao had one aim in this war: to grow his armies and his bases for the final struggle with the Nationalists. The foundation of Mao's rule over the Communist party had been laid, in the same autumn that Chiang lost Wuhan. And in Chongqing, someone was asking a very different question. Zhou Fohai, the official from Changsha, had been gloomy since the fall of Shanghai. Back then he had written, "China will have no more history". Now, in the long evenings of his first weeks in Chongqing, he talked about the war with Wang Jingwei, Chiang's official deputy, who had joined Sun Yat-sen's revolution early and been one of his closest allies. At the beginning of November the Japanese prime minister went on the radio and offered China a New Order in Asia. He did not take back his refusal to deal with Chiang's government. But he hinted that a Nationalist party with different leaders might find Tokyo more friendly. That was enough to catch Wang Jingwei's interest. He quietly sent one of his circle to Shanghai, to find out what Japan would offer. Next time: a flight to Hanoi, a government in Nanjing under Japanese protection, and Chongqing under the bombs.
Sources
- Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 315-317, 318-319, 321-322, 322-324, 324-325, 325-326, 330-331
- Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 58-60, 88-90, 154-155, 155-156, 156-158, 158-159, 159-161, 161-162
- Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 306-307, 307-310
- Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)