Revolution and Civil War, episode 27

Manchuria

Manchuria, closed to the Communists for fifteen years under Japan, becomes their strongest base after the war, and by 1948 Lin Biao, Mao Zedong's most gifted and most cautious general, has the Nationalist armies penned in its cities. The episode follows Lin, whom Mao says is harder to get moving than a cow over a fence, and Wei Lihuang, the Nationalist commander at Shenyang who will not obey Chiang Kai-shek's order to break out, through the Liaoshen campaign of autumn 1948, the storming of Jinzhou and the destruction of the Nationalists' relief army, and asks whether the civil war was decided here on the battlefield. It leans almost entirely on scholars, with a few of the Communists' own documents.

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Transcript

Last time, Chiang Kai-shek's government made its last throw at home. On 19 August 1948 it scrapped the old money for a new gold yuan, one gold yuan for three million of the old, and it froze prices and wages and banned all strikes and public protests. Chiang sent his own son to make it stick in Shanghai, and the young man went at it hard, inspecting markets himself and arresting speculators on the spot. A standard sack of rice, which had cost six point seven million yuan in June, cost sixty-three million in August. That is what the new money was up against. But while Shanghai watched the price of rice, the war that would decide everything was being fought somewhere else. It was being fought far to the north, beyond the Great Wall, in Manchuria. And that is where we go today. Manchuria is the great northeastern corner of China, the provinces beyond the eastern end of the Great Wall, a land of wide plains, cold winters, coal, iron and the railways and factories the Japanese had built there. In 1931 the Japanese army had seized it, and the next year Japan dressed it up as a puppet state called Manchukuo. Japanese control there was efficient. For almost fifteen years the region was completely closed to the Communists. Then, at the end of the war, it opened all at once. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan in the last week of the war, and its armies overran Manchuria in a matter of days. Three days before the Japanese surrender, the Communist commander in chief, Zhu De, ordered four armed groups to move into Manchuria and work with the Soviet Red Army. The biggest of them was a hundred thousand troops of the Eighth Route Army, the Communist army of the north. And at their head was Lin Biao. Lin Biao is one of the two men this episode follows, so let me tell you who he was. He was not yet forty. He had trained at Whampoa, the military academy the Nationalists and Communists had once run together, and had been commanding Communist armies since his early twenties. He was slight, often ill, and kept to himself. As a general he was a perfectionist about supplies, a commander who wanted to be absolutely sure of his advantage in numbers before he struck. Hold on to that picture of him, because Mao Zedong, the party's chairman, was a very different kind of man, and this story turns on the two of them. Lin was not the only one heading north. Mao also sent home the party's own Manchurian troops, men who had not seen their home region for fourteen years. For Mao, Manchuria was, in his own words, "the golden opportunity that occurs once in a thousand years." The battle for it, he told his colleagues, would "determine the fate of the revolution." Behind the scenes, Soviet officers advised the Communists to send most of their troops, by then some five hundred thousand men, into Manchuria. Mao hardly needed telling. Chiang wanted Manchuria just as badly. Taking over its civil and military power was, he believed, the top priority, and the American navy carried more than two hundred thousand of his troops to Manchurian ports. Not everyone around him agreed. His general Bai Chongxi argued that the odds were heavily against them, and Chiang's own plan was to show an all-out commitment while secretly keeping open the option to pull back from part or all of the region. The Soviets made it hard from the start. Moscow told Chiang's government that it could not land troops at the port of Dalian, and when five hundred Nationalist officials arrived in Changchun to take over the local governments, the Soviets would not let them leave the city. So both sides poured in, and the fight for Manchuria began. Their best armies, under a general named Du Yuming, came north to drive the Communists out, and Lin had to fight for his army's very existence through the winter of 1946. Twice he tried to take the railway town of Siping, and twice he failed. You'll meet Du Yuming again before this episode is over. What saved Lin in those years was partly a neighbour. In April 1946 the Soviets handed the northern city of Harbin to the Communists, and the next day the regular units of the Red Army in Manchuria formally pulled back into the Soviet Union. Harbin became the Communist capital of the Northeast, the first big city the party had ever run. Many of the party leaders who came up from south of the Great Wall went at the job with suspicion and belligerence. For most of Harbin's well-to-do, the first months of Communist rule felt like the terror of the Soviet occupation all over again. It was the Soviets themselves, and the party's leadership, who told them to ease off the executions and the seizures of property. Slowly, as the fighting steadied, the city's new masters started putting merchants, engineers and teachers to work, even some who had worked closely with the Japanese. Out in the countryside, things were harder. Before the cadres left Yan'an for the Northeast, Mao told them to be as flexible as they could with the peasants. The people of Manchuria had been cut off from the rest of China for a long time, and he knew the villages there were different. What none of them knew was how different. Under Japan, Manchuria had been the most orderly part of China, oppressed but orderly. The Japanese collapse set off wars and famine, and by the time the Communists came looking for power, the Northeast had fallen into chaos. By the end of 1946, most people in the Northeast seem to have decided that no relief was coming from the government. Power, especially in the villages, was up for grabs. By the middle of that year, most of the Manchurian countryside was run by local strongmen, the men the Communists called bandits. Many of their bands had started as militia the Japanese army raised. Some preyed on villages and families the way Chinese brigands had for centuries; others fought to keep outsiders off their own districts and clans. The Communists at first fought a war of ruthless extermination against them, and it went slowly. Only when they began taking bandit troops into their own ranks did they make fast progress, and in some places the fighting went on until 1950. So in Manchuria the party's work in the villages was not so much to bring social justice as to bring order. Communist order, to be sure. But it was order, and it slowly won the Communists enough support to take hold of the whole region. It came at a price in blood. By May 1948 the party's leader in the Northeast, Gao Gang, could report to Mao that the terror had broken the hold of the old ruling classes, and that the countryside was pacified. They had other advantages, too. They were a large, disciplined force that could offer protection where law had long vanished, while the government had few local ties and little standing in the region. Their land reform was cut to fit local conditions, and they recruited from every people in the region's patchwork: Han Chinese, Mongols, Muslim and Buddhist minorities, Koreans, and even Japanese. And out of that patchwork, Lin Biao built an army. At its heart were the old units from the north, which supplied nearly all of his staff officers. Around them he gathered Manchurian exiles back from the Soviet Union and Mongolia, Korean units, men who had followed the old Manchurian warlords, bandits, and the handful of Manchurian Communists who had survived underground under Japan. By late 1946 he was on the brink of turning that motley crew into a modern army, better than any fighting force in China. He did it with hard military training, plenty of weapons, and the brutal crushing of all local opposition, and he drilled his men in the methods the Soviet army had developed. The Soviets did more than set an example. From 1947 on, hundreds of Soviet doctors, technical advisers and military and communications experts worked behind the Communist lines in Manchuria. A unit of three hundred Soviet railway troops kept the Communist railways running, Soviet doctors helped put down an epidemic of plague in the Communist camps, and Nationalist ships counted several Soviet freighters a week unloading troops and weapons at Yantai, a Communist-held port in Shandong. To pay for it all, in 1947 Communist Manchuria sent north by train one point one million tons of grain. By May of that year Lin could launch a campaign with four hundred thousand troops and two hundred heavy guns. And by the middle of 1947, more than half of all the territory the Communists held anywhere in China lay in the Northeast. Manchuria had become their main base, the hinge on which Mao's planned counteroffensives would turn. Had they lost it, they would have lost any power to attack the Nationalists at all, and their leaders might have been forced to settle on Chiang's terms or flee into exile in the Soviet Union. It also became their school. Under Soviet tutoring, the Northeast trained the cadres who would later take over and run the territories the Communists conquered farther south.

As 1948 began, the Nationalists in Manchuria were under the command of Chen Cheng, Chiang's favourite general. On New Year's Day 1948, Chen announced that his army had finished its battle preparations and that the crisis of Manchuria had passed. It was a stupefying statement. Chen's heavily outnumbered army held about two or three percent of the whole region, and the Communists were closing the gap in weapons and training fast. Chen had been hoping to launch a winter offensive of his own. His officers, who knew the deep northern frost better than he did, talked him out of it, and icy winds that would have grounded his aircraft finished the idea. He still thought he could pick off Communist strongholds over the winter, and he persuaded Chiang to come to Shenyang in person to watch the beginning of his counteroffensive. Shenyang was the great city of southern Manchuria, its industrial heart, and the seat of the Nationalist command. Lin Biao, meanwhile, had not been planning a winter campaign at all. What became famous as his winter offensive was not first meant to be a broad offensive, or to happen in winter. He and his chief planner had been discussing limited attacks from early spring. Then the plan grew, as plans with Mao watching tended to. Lin's staff suggested sending local guerrillas with regular units in January to probe the defences north and west of Shenyang, and to placate Mao, Lin proposed widening the attack on both sides of the city if it went well. He explained his thinking to Mao: press straight against a target, and commit enough troops to hold the flanks. He later turned it into a doctrine, which he called One Point, Two Flanks. Mao was jubilant. He agreed at once. But he told his colleagues that getting Lin to mount a general offensive was harder than forcing a cow to jump a fence. That joke tells you a good deal about these two men. Mao was a gambler who wanted to move. Lin was a careful man who wanted to be sure. And for the rest of this year, Mao is going to keep pushing the cow at the fence. The first attack was set for the middle of January, northwest of Shenyang. Lin's troops moved quietly through the forests and the deep snow north of the city, and probably because the weather was too bad for flying, the Nationalists did not find them until the night before the attack. The Arctic cold and thick mist cut Chen's warplanes to a mere twelve sorties a day, and Lin sent a mass assault across the ice-hard Songhua River. The government's elite New Fifth Army, which had fought in Burma, moved out of Shenyang and was surrounded, and two Nationalist divisions were destroyed. The reinforcements sent out of the city arrived too late, came under attack at night, and fled back to Shenyang. When the news reached Lin, he asked Mao's permission to widen the attack, west of Shenyang and east toward the Liaodong peninsula. Mao was all for it. "The more battles, the fewer of the enemy's troops are left," he told Lin. What followed was the turn of the whole war in the north. A town west of Shenyang fell in late January, and a full Nationalist division with it. To the east, Communist columns took the city of Anshan and pushed south toward the sea. In late February the port of Yingkou fell, which let the Communists send supplies and reinforcements across the gulf to their forces in Shandong. In one stroke, Lin had cut the main railways, isolated Shenyang, and taken everything between the Korean border and the passes that led south into North China. In purely military terms, if there was one crucial manoeuvre in the whole civil war, it was this one: Lin going around Shenyang instead of at it, and pushing the Nationalists off the railways and out of the key ground in the southeast of Manchuria. And Chiang Kai-shek saw it happen. He had arrived in Shenyang on 12 January to watch his favourite general's counteroffensive. Instead he watched the destruction of some of his best troops, and the hopelessness that spread through the ranks as the Communists came on. He had doubted Chen's way of fighting from the start: keeping the main forces still so they could not be cut off and surrounded. In the end it was that stillness that got them destroyed. On 27 January, more saddened than angry, Chiang relieved Chen and sent him south "to rest." In his diary he wrote of hard times, when "the reports of failure come down just like snowflakes" from the Manchurian sky. Mao, from the other side, sent congratulations on the capture of Liaoyang and told Lin to fight on, to trap Chiang's troops in the Northeast and finish them off one by one. Lin had one score of his own to settle. He went for Siping again, his third try in two years, and this time he led the attack in person. The odds had changed completely. Lin had more than a hundred thousand men. The defenders were a single division of nineteen thousand, and they had nothing to answer his heavy artillery. Many of them had served under their commander since he defended Shanghai against the Japanese ten years before, and they promised each other they would not give up. On 12 March, with the Communists holding most of the town and the valley around it, they spent their last strength on a desperate breakout to the south. Only a few made it back to Nationalist lines. By the middle of March 1948, the war in Manchuria had been turned upside down from a year before. The Nationalists held only small pockets, around the cities of Changchun and Shenyang and on the region's southern edge. Lin Biao had the initiative.

To replace Chen Cheng, Chiang turned to Wei Lihuang, the second man this episode follows. Wei was a veteran field commander who had led five Chinese armies on the eastern front in the second Burma campaign against the Japanese. He was not, as a general, the imaginative kind. But he had firm ideas, and he listened to his more experienced officers. He drove a hard bargain before he went. He insisted on full military, party and government powers in the region, and Chiang agreed, and found him a hundred thousand more troops to make up Chen's losses, with promises of supplies and more reinforcements to come. Wei arrived in Shenyang on 22 January, saw that he had no secure supplies and no reserves, and went onto a totally defensive footing. A week later Lin cut the railway from Shenyang to Jinzhou, and stormed every garrison along the line, destroying three more government divisions. Now, keep your eye on Jinzhou, because the rest of this story turns on it. Jinzhou sits on the railway near the coast, at the northern end of the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea that joins Manchuria to North China. Whoever held it held the door. Early in February, Wei reported that he had only about ten days of supplies left. He said he needed two hundred billion yuan to buy enough food "if the troops are to stay until the end of April." And the government itself was running out of troops and money. Students in Shanghai attacked the mayor, factory workers went on strike, and even prostitutes were demonstrating. "The people are losing confidence everywhere," Chiang wrote on 3 February. Chiang had once believed Manchuria was a trap. Yet for a year he had kept pouring good troops in after the dead and the wounded. He seems to have believed that once the Northeast was lost, defeat in the rest of China was bound to follow, so there was nothing to be gained by saving armies to hold a line farther south. But now, at last, he gave the order that might have saved them. He told Wei to pull his main forces out of Shenyang and Changchun, and to clear the railway as they went, all the way to Jinzhou near the coast. Wei refused. He feared his men would be ambushed and massacred on the way, and he said he would not abandon the hundred and twenty-two thousand men trapped to the north in Changchun. He needed to rest his armies and re-equip them with equipment flown into Shenyang first. And the roads were thawing, he said, and would be deep in mud until April, and the rivers were no longer frozen hard enough to cross. Communist troops by then surrounded Shenyang and held much of the railway to Jinzhou. And then something strange happened. For months, Chiang could not, or would not, make Wei carry out the order while it could still be done. Chiang had told Wei as early as that winter to plan an attack for early May to open a corridor from Shenyang to Jinzhou. His chief of operations flew to Shenyang six separate times to push the preparations along. Chiang sent a new deputy commander to Wei's headquarters, with orders to tell him that whatever the danger, he was to move his best armies out and secure the line to Jinzhou. Wei answered that before he risked his armies in the open country he needed large reinforcements and more time for his men to recover. If his best corps struck out for Jinzhou, he was certain it would be ambushed and destroyed. Instead of obeying, on 31 March, Wei flew to Nanjing to see Chiang in person, and the argument went on. Chiang still could not bring himself to remove him. By then, the government held a mere one percent of Manchuria, and only fifteen percent of China north of the Yellow River. Chiang again lamented that his government had no officers with the character to save the situation. "There are no such persons," he wrote. "What can I do?" That same month, in an unusually frank talk with the American ambassador, Chiang admitted he should have listened when Marshall told him the government could not beat the Communists by force. He said he "really wanted to reform but did not know how to go about it." The Americans were watching all this with growing alarm. Congress approved four hundred and sixty-three million dollars in economic aid for China, and another hundred million that China could spend on its armies. The American general on the spot was Barr, who headed the American military advisory group in Nanjing, there to counsel and supply Chiang's army rather than to fight. Not everyone agreed on how badly the army needed supplies. Barr reported that "no battle has been lost since my arrival due to lack of ammunition or equipment," while the American ambassador said shortages had weakened the defences in most war zones. And the first supplies bought with the new money did not arrive until November 1948, too late to play any part in Manchuria. In early May, at a conference at Chiang's house in the Purple Hills outside Nanjing, Barr gave his advice. If the attack out of Shenyang could not be made soon, the government should abandon Manchuria while it still could. Wei's commanders still insisted that a retreat was too risky. The American general was astonished that Wei kept getting away with turning down the Generalissimo's direct orders. But Chiang agreed to put it off again. By midsummer the Manchurian plain had dried out. Otherwise Wei was worse off than before, short of supplies, short of morale, and his one advantage, his aircraft, was shrinking for lack of spare planes and fuel. Chiang tried to find someone to replace him. No senior general wanted the job. So Wei stayed dug in with a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand men in Shenyang and a hundred thousand in Changchun, the best armies the government had left. On 19 July, Wei flew to Nanjing for yet another round with the Generalissimo, and surprised everyone. His troops were rested and in high spirits now, he said. He was confident he could hold Shenyang, but a retreat would send morale spiralling down again, and since a pullout might fail, staying was the safer course. Chiang gave in. Wei would stay in Shenyang three more months, and prepare his army for what they called an offensive withdrawal in November. Years later, Chiang explained why he had not pulled out earlier. He blamed "objections from high-ranking officers and the influence of public opinion, and politics", and above all "the tearful complaint of representatives from Manchuria." By November, there would be nothing left to withdraw. Then another Nationalist city fell. It was Jinan, and it fell early because a whole Nationalist division of former puppet troops, trusted with the city's western approaches, went over to the Communists. Puppet troops were Chinese soldiers who had served the Japanese and their collaborating regimes during the war, and who had been taken into the Nationalist army after it. On 29 September Chiang told the American general how disappointed he was. The old strategy of holding strong points and key cities at all cost, he said, would have to go. He asked Barr to sit in on his weekly war conferences.

That autumn, the two sides came together for the battle that would settle Manchuria. It is known as the Liaoshen campaign, from Liaoning, the southern province of Manchuria, and Shenyang, its chief city. It grew out of two men's impatience. Mao was tired of the slow, long-term plan he himself had set that spring, and Chiang would not leave Manchuria without a final showdown with the Communists. By the summer, Mao had moved his headquarters to the small town of Xibaipo, where for the first time since the fall of Yan'an the party's political and military leaders worked side by side. The speed of the Nationalist collapse north of the Wall had surprised him, and he was rethinking how soon he could win all of China. His great worry was that over the summer Chiang might move his Manchurian armies south of the Wall, where they could fight under far better conditions. He complained again and again about the quality of Lin's plans. In late July Lin proposed going for the coastal towns of Jinzhou and Tangshan, and setting a trap for the Nationalist forces around Shenyang. Mao agreed at once. At last, he could tell his colleagues, there was a plan. Then Mao found out that Lin was thinking about a smaller campaign, later, in winter. He was shocked. Then he was furious, and he ordered Lin to get going at once. In a stream of telegrams he berated Lin for serious mistakes. He had told Lin two months before to get food ready for his troops, he wrote, and in two months of telegrams Lin had never once said whether he had done it. Lin moved. And Mao was still angry. "The key to the whole military situation in the Northeast lies in the capture of Yi county, Jinzhou and Jinxi", he wrote in late September. And three weeks after Lin's troops set out, they still had not begun the attack on Yi county. "The movement is so unbelievably slow, you should conduct self-criticism." Self-criticism was a ritual of the Communist Party: a member who had erred confessed his mistakes, in writing or before his comrades, and promised to correct them. To be told to do it by the chairman was a humiliation. Now, Lin's caution was not foolish. The Nationalist armies in Manchuria were still strong enough to beat him if he was careless. His fear was that the moment the enemy saw that Jinzhou was the real target, they would rush troops to it both from the Manchurian cities and from south of the Wall, and he would be outflanked. By 24 September most of Yi county was in Communist hands, cutting Jinzhou off from the north. The county town fell on 1 October, but with heavy Communist losses. Those losses, and a delay in the troops meant to cut the city off from the south, were probably why Lin had second thoughts in early October, and began to talk of turning back to attack Changchun instead. Mao mocked him. Five months ago, he wrote, Changchun could probably have been beaten easily, and Lin had not wanted to do it. Two months ago, the same. Now, when everything was changing, he dared not attack Jinzhou and wanted to pull back to Changchun. And where, Mao asked, was Lin's command post? It should have been near Jinzhou before the troops ever moved. He hoped Lin would get himself to the front, quickly. On 3 October, to be sure Lin had it in writing as a formal order, he telegraphed again: "We insist that you should not in any way change the planned strategy, leave Jinzhou aside and shift to attack Changchun." Lin was to "concentrate all your forces and try to seize Jinzhou within about ten days." As the two Communist rings closed on Jinzhou, the battle for the city began. It was the start of the great offensives that, almost exactly a year later, would let Mao proclaim the People's Republic from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. The next day Lin accepted. Mao told him it was very good that he had made up his mind to attack Jinzhou, that it had taken a month of telegrams to get him there, and that anyway, his mistake had been corrected. The cow was over the fence. And what Lin had in hand was enormous. That autumn he commanded some seven hundred thousand men against some three hundred thousand under Wei. His troops were rested and ready, some divisions trained on captured American weapons, and the Soviets had stepped up their help, rebuilding the railway bridge across the Songhua River. From intercepted messages, and probably other intelligence, Lin knew that Chiang meant to move his best armies to Jinzhou, close to the port of Huludao, from which they could be evacuated by sea. So his plan was bold: leave Shenyang alone, take Jinzhou first, and trap everything the Nationalists had left in Manchuria behind it. The American election coming that November gave both sides a reason to want a decisive victory in Manchuria before it. On 12 September the Communists hit the outposts around Shenyang and along the railway to Jinzhou, and with impressive speed, twenty-three divisions, almost three hundred thousand men, threw a siege ring around Jinzhou. Inside the city was the Nationalist Sixth Army, under General Fan Hanjie. Half its men were from far-off Yunnan, short of ammunition, with no stomach for another bitter winter under siege. Chiang now saw the danger clearly. By late September, he and his general staff had decided that Jinzhou was Lin's immediate aim, and on 26 September Chiang ordered Wei to send part of his own forces out of Shenyang against the Communists closing on the city from the north. Wei refused. He still thought Lin's real target was Shenyang, and that Jinzhou was a trap. And he argued that the Nationalist units outside the Communist ring were far better placed than he was to break the siege. Chiang threatened to relieve him of his command. Wei did not reply to the telegram. Chiang's chief of the general staff, Gu Zhutong, went to Wei's headquarters, and he could not move him either. On 1 October, at the war room of the Ministry of National Defence in Nanjing, the American general spoke up. Five days had passed, he pointed out, since Wei had been ordered to attack to the west, and there was still no sign of the attack. He told them the troops should "break out to the west of their position at once, ready or not." Chiang went north himself. In Beijing he met Fu Zuoyi, the general who commanded the Nationalist forces in North China. Fu, you'll hear more of him next time. Chiang was deeply gloomy at that meeting. He suggested that only a war between the Soviet Union and the United States could save the situation. Fu was losing confidence in him, but agreed to send an army and another division to fight for Jinzhou. Then Chiang flew on to Shenyang. From the air he looked down on the Manchurian plain and saw a few hundred thousand Communist soldiers spread across the fallow wheat fields. The news that the Generalissimo was coming had finally made Wei think again. He formed two forces, together more than a hundred and thirty thousand men, the core of what the Nationalists had left in Manchuria, and waited for Chiang to give them their marching orders. Chiang told Wei and his staff that they all had to work together in the decisive battles ahead, "otherwise, see you in the next life." This was the battle for Manchuria, he declared. From now on it was win or lose. His plan was for two strike forces to converge on Lin's divisions around Jinzhou from two directions, while the garrison inside attacked outward. After his urgent pleas, Washington agreed to rush thirty thousand barrels of aviation fuel from Japan for the air support he promised them. The force from Shenyang was called the Western Strike Force, ninety thousand men under General Liao Yaoxiang. On 9 October Wei finally ordered it to break through the ring and move down the railway toward Jinzhou. It went with only eleven divisions instead of the fifteen Chiang had ordered. Once again, Wei was disobeying his commander. At first the Nationalists moved fast, faster than Lin had reckoned. On 11 October a corps sent from Shenyang retook the port of Yingkou, and the relief forces were pushing down the railway toward Jinzhou. On 12 October Chiang ordered the second strike force, on the coast at Huludao, to march north and attack the Communists besieging Jinzhou. Lin's reports to Mao show he knew how dangerous this was. If he could not finish Jinzhou fast, the whole idea of using it as bait to draw out Wei's armies could turn on him, and his own best troops could be cornered far from their bases. The Communists stopped the force from Huludao forty kilometres short of Jinzhou. The Western Strike Force was stalled halfway from Shenyang. The bait had held. Now Lin had to take it himself.

The attack on the medieval walls of Jinzhou began in the early morning of 14 October. Mist lay over the ground and hid some of the Communist units as they moved into position. Then the guns opened up. All summer, Soviet instructors had trained Lin's army in heavy artillery, and every bit of that training now fell on the defenders. Communist sappers blew holes in the city walls, and the defenders fell back into the wrecked city. "This is the life and death moment for the overall military situation in Manchuria," Chiang told his generals. He threw in everything he had, and ordered more divisions from North China to the rescue of Jinzhou. It was too late. Once the artillery had breached the walls, the Nationalist air force could do almost nothing. From then on it was street fighting, a bloody battle the Nationalists could not win. North of the city, other Communist units stopped the relief forces coming down from Shenyang, with heavy losses on both sides. General Fan's last outpost was the railway station. When he finally raised the white flag over it, the Communists had taken more than ninety thousand prisoners. How many Nationalist soldiers died is hard to say. As many as forty thousand, in the siege and the storm, is probable. Chiang was back in Shenyang on 15 October when the last holdouts in Jinzhou surrendered. The tables had turned. The initiative was with Lin and his commanders again, and now the trap could close. Lin swung the main forces that had taken Jinzhou straight back north, while other Communist units shut off the road back for the Nationalist troops who had set out from Shenyang. And the Nationalists' last great field army in Manchuria was out in the open, between Jinzhou and Shenyang, with nowhere left to go.

That army belonged to Liao Yaoxiang. Liao, like Wei, had made his name fighting the Japanese in Burma, and his men were among the best trained in the Nationalist army. When he heard that Jinzhou had surrendered, he wanted to march his eleven divisions to Yingkou and take them out of Manchuria by ship. On 19 October Chiang met his generals in Beijing: Du Yuming, Wei and Fu Zuoyi. Chiang wanted to keep fighting to retake Jinzhou. Du backed Liao's call to pull out to Yingkou. Fu gave no opinion. Then, as Du remembered it, Chiang lost his temper and leapt from his seat. "It was Marshall," he grumbled, "this American, who lost us and lost China." George Marshall was the American general who had come to China at the end of 1945 to broker a peace between the Nationalists and the Communists, and had gone home in failure at the start of 1947. In 1945, Chiang told his generals, he had meant to hold only a small part of Manchuria, north as far as Jinzhou. It was Marshall's actions and words that had drawn him into sending his best armies deep into the region. There was something to it, though not in the way the Americans later told it. In 1949 the American government would claim that Chiang had gone into Manchuria against the advice of competent American military observers. That claim does not hold up. It is true that the American commander in China, General Wedemeyer, told Chiang in November 1945 that the Nationalists could not win in Manchuria. But the policymakers in Washington never took up his view. America wanted Chiang to stand firm on China's sovereignty over Manchuria, and it carried almost a quarter of a million of his soldiers there to do it. Marshall's own first peace plan gave the government a fourteen to one advantage in troops in Manchuria, and he even promised to find surplus winter clothing for the Nationalist soldiers heading north. Chiang had in fact decided, tentatively, in the middle of November 1945, to pull out of Manchuria. Some encouraging moves from the Soviets, and Marshall's first steps and words, changed his mind. Only in the spring of 1946 did Marshall begin to tell him that he could not defeat the Communists there, and even then he did not urge him to leave. But it was Chiang's own victories in 1946 that convinced him he could hold southern Manchuria, and it was Chiang who kept pouring in troops for almost two more years, even after he saw, early in 1947, that he was unlikely to succeed. It was too late to argue about it. Chiang soon saw that Liao's force alone could not retake Jinzhou, and he approved the march to Yingkou. But he approved it late. Lin had brought up twenty-four more divisions by forced marches. Liao saw that he was hopelessly outnumbered and tried to turn back toward Shenyang, but his men were blocked at a river crossing. By 26 October Liao's army was surrounded by half a million Communist troops. Early that morning, Lin inspected his troops, and told them this was the final battle for the Northeast. At dawn they moved in. The Nationalists fell back into the marshland around Heishan, with their communications in pieces and no hope of help from outside, and they made easy targets. The slaughter was immense. Soon the marshes were literally filled with blood, and a Communist officer remembered advancing over the bodies of dead enemy soldiers. Many Nationalist units were overrun before they could even surrender. After a day of vicious fighting, the huge government formation broke, and ran off in all directions across the flat land, with its several thousand horses. The battle lasted two days and one night. At the end of it the Communists had taken more than sixty thousand prisoners, and at least twenty-five thousand men of what had been the last big Nationalist army in Manchuria were dead. Liao Yaoxiang was captured. So were twenty-two tanks, a hundred and fifty guns, six hundred vehicles and six thousand horses. Chiang had thought of Liao's corps as the best fighting force the government had left. It was gone.

With the field army destroyed, the cities could not hold. In Changchun, the Communist underground had been in touch for some time with the main Nationalist commander, Zeng Zesheng. As the news of Jinzhou came in, he agreed to talk to Communist political officers smuggled into the city. He and most of his officers went over to the Communists, and Mao sent personal orders that they be taken into the Communist army with their ranks. On 21 October they shelled their former comrades, the last loyal troops holed up in the Bank of China building, into surrender. That left Shenyang. Even now, Wei insisted on defending it, and even asked for ten more divisions. On 30 October the Communists broke through the walls into the eastern part of the city. As hand-to-hand fighting raged, Wei and a number of his staff officers flew out of the surrounded airport. At the start of November the most senior officer left behind went out to the airport to meet the Communists, and surrendered the city. Shenyang fell after only the most lacklustre attempts to defend it. Some of what was left of Wei's army broke through to Yingkou, and was carried away south by sea. On 9 November government ships took a hundred and forty thousand troops and their equipment off from Huludao. The battle for Manchuria was over. On the other side of the world, something else happened that same week. On the same day Shenyang fell, Truman was re-elected president of the United States, by the narrowest of margins. Chiang, like many American commentators, had been sure that Truman's Republican rival would win. He had hoped that the Republicans would bring back the close alliance he felt China and America had had in the Second World War, and that they would act against the Communist threat, even at the risk of all-out war. With Truman and the Democrats, he felt, there would be little but empty phrases. To him, Truman's victory was a blow almost as heavy as the disasters in Manchuria. He had already had one shock. On 12 October his foreign minister told him that the United States had decided to evacuate its citizens from Beijing and Tianjin. In Nanjing, Chiang wanted to order an immediate counterattack. His closest advisers talked him out of it. An order to send more troops beyond the Great Wall, they warned, could set off defections, even a rebellion. In the end he did not even call a full meeting of his supreme military council. By the time Shenyang fell, his mind was already on holding a line south of the Yellow River, and for that he needed the Americans. For the first time in the civil war, it was clear to him that his regime's very survival might depend on what help Washington would give. On 9 November Chiang drafted a letter straight to Truman. The most important reason for the disaster, he wrote, was the Soviet Union's breach of its 1945 treaty with China. Without Soviet help, the Communists could never have swept through the Northeast. Now they were coming toward Nanjing and Shanghai, he warned, and if they were not stopped, the democracies would lose all of China. He begged for military aid and a firm statement of support. On 1 December he sent his wife, Soong Mei-ling, to Washington, to plead for faster deliveries and promises of more, just as she had pleaded China's case in the Second World War.

And Wei Lihuang? Chiang stripped him of all his titles and posts and put him under house arrest in Nanjing, to await trial for refusing to move his troops out of Shenyang until it was too late. Years before, Chiang had received reports that Wei was in touch with the Communists, and had apparently brushed them aside. Now Nanjing was full of talk that Wei had been bought by the Communists, and had sabotaged the retreat on purpose. Chiang never explained why he had not fired him months earlier. At the end he accused Wei of cowardice, but he never blamed him for the disaster or spoke of treason, perhaps because he had ignored those early warnings himself. What we do know is where Wei ended up. In 1955 he would go back to Beijing from Hong Kong, and take his place in the organizations of the People's Republic. The cost was staggering. The fall of the Northeast had cost Chiang's regime almost four hundred thousand of its best troops. Another count puts the loss at three hundred thousand, and of those, two hundred and forty-six thousand were captured, many of them quickly put into the Communist army. The next fighting they would see would be in Korea. It gave the Communists one of the richest parts of China, and with it the kind of legitimacy that, to most Chinese, came with holding it. On 29 October Chiang told an American correspondent that his government's leaders would have been ashamed to give up the country's great cities without a fight, and so "we defended too many cities, and this stretched our supply lines." The loss of Manchuria, he predicted, would "open a Pandora's Box in the Far East," and that if China fell to the Communists, Asia would become the key region for the Communist bloc. On a Sunday morning after the defeat, Chiang and his wife went to a new church in Nanjing that she had paid for. He gave a little sermon himself, from the Book of Chronicles, on a king who had it in his heart to build a house for the Lord, and was told he could not, because he had been a man of war. The lesson Chiang drew from it was short: "Man proposes but God disposes." So was Manchuria lost because Wei Lihuang would not move? Here the sources disagree. The American general Barr judged that Chiang's plans and orders in that autumn's battles were sound, and that had they been obeyed, the results would probably have been favourable. The other side finds that highly doubtful, given how strong the Communists, with Soviet help, had grown in the region, and how far financial and moral decay had eaten into the Nationalist regime. Still, there is some weight to the argument that had Chiang pulled out of Manchuria even as late as the spring of 1948, he might have had the strength to hold a line at the Yellow River or the Yangtze, though only with large American help. And this much is clear. This campaign, and the one that came right after it, decided the civil war on the battlefield. Lin Biao did not stop to rest. He led his great army, seven hundred and fifty thousand well-armed men, down the frost-covered roads of Manchuria, past the Great Wall, toward Tianjin. And only days after Shenyang fell, far to the south, north of the Huai River, the climactic battle of the civil war was already beginning. There, around the railway city of Xuzhou, Du Yuming, whose armies Lin had once fought for his life in Manchuria, now waited with four hundred and fifty thousand Nationalist troops, on Chiang's orders, for the blow to fall. That is next time: Huaihai.

Sources

• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 315-316, 319-321, 347-349, 371-373, 380-382, 382-383, 383-385, 385-386, 386-388, 388-389, 389-390, 390-392, 392-394
• Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), pp. 118-0, 1, 1-3, 125-126, 126, 128-129, 175-177, 177-178, 183-185, 87-189, 192-193, 193-194, 194-195, 195-196, 196-197, 197-198
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
• United States Department of State, United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949 (the China White Paper) (1949), p. 331-333, https://archive.org/download/VanSlykeLymanTheChinaWhitePaper1949/Van%20Slyke%2C%20Lyman%20-%20The%20China%20White%20Paper%201949.pdf