China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (41 page)

There was an old hostel near the airfield, where the American airmen drank and danced with local girls and then retired with them to cubicle bedrooms built on two wings alongside the main building. Not for nothing was Guilin known as the sex capital of Free China. One popular spot was the Ledo Club, where a certain Fatima Ismail, widely suspected of selling information to the Japanese, entertained guests.

Three days after the Japanese seizure of Guilin, Wedemeyer had his first working session with
Chiang and his staff, during which he presented an overall plan to stiffen China’s defenses and eventually to be able to push the Japanese back. Code-named
Alpha, the plan was to equip and train thirty-nine Chinese divisions and to place teams of American advisers in every one of them. Chinese troops, whose standard condition was one of malnutrition, were to be fed properly. The very foreign concept for China of medical evacuation and care for the wounded was to be introduced. Every soldier was to be adequately equipped. All of this followed the model that Stilwell had created for Chinese troops he had trained in Ramgarh, India, and who were fighting well in Burma.

Wedemeyer was uncertain whether Alpha would work, not at all confident that even with proper
training and equipment, Chinese troops would have the will to fight, or, more accurately, have the leadership that would induce them to. In the early weeks and months of his China sojourn, he had been strangely inconsistent in his assessments, unwaveringly admiring of Chiang, whom he compared to Churchill, but skeptical of a Chinese military leadership that, he felt, was afflicted with a severe case of “stupidity and inefficiency,” which made it “
apathetic and unintelligent,” “impotent and confounded,” and therefore either unable or afraid to report accurately on conditions to the Generalissimo or to do much to improve them. Wedemeyer felt it should have been possible to defend Guilin. The Chinese 97th Army, which was well fed and well equipped, had held what appeared to be strong
positions north of the city. Chiang had assured Wedemeyer “categorically” that if the Japanese attacked, his forces could hold the Guilin-Liuzhou area for two months—but then they retreated without a fight. “The disorganization and muddled planning of the Chinese is beyond comprehension,” Wedemeyer wrote at the time. “
We can throw in great numbers of troops at tremendous cost logistically, but we do not know whether the Chinese will stick and fight.”

On the positive side, supplies were increasing substantially in volume, so there was more fuel and ammunition than ever before. About five thousand tons of supplies a month had moved over the Hump during most of the war; by early 1945, the American C-47s were delivering up to sixty thousand tons a month, a very big difference that the Japanese, whose supplies were diminishing, well understood. Indeed, if Wedemeyer had known what was in the minds of the Japanese high command on this point, he would have had more reason for cautious optimism. The Ichigo offensive had wound down because
Okamura’s supply lines were overextended and, where they weren’t overextended, they were snarled by the 14th Air Force’s effective attacks, which was the reason Okamura had wanted to seize the Guilin and Liuzhou airfields.

Okamura’s headquarters were in the Yangzi River port of Hankou, and there he had watched with his own eyes as Chennault’s B-29 bombers had hurled ordnance down on the factories and warehouses sprawled out on the riverbanks, causing spectacular blazes and creating massive congestion for ships, so that as much as one hundred thousand tons of Japanese supplies were stuck at various points on the river. On December 18 alone, seventy-seven B-29s and two hundred fighter planes had raided Hankou and its sister cities of Wuchang and Hanyang (now all part of the conglomeration Wuhan), and the Japanese, whose planes had been diverted to defend the coast against a possible American landing there, were unable to stop them. When it was over, a pall of thick, impenetrable smoke hung over the three cities.

American planes had also destroyed the bridges on the Beijing–Hankou railroad, spoiling Japan’s plan to use rail transport as an alternative to the river. The Japanese countered by unloading supplies where the rail line was broken, putting them on trucks, and reloading them where the line resumed, but the American bombs had destroyed so many locomotives that this method was of limited use. The Japanese were getting perhaps one-fourth of the supplies they had planned for. They had enough food, clothing, and ammunition, but gasoline was
going to run out in a few months, and Okamura foresaw the day, unless some action was taken, when the railroads south of the Yangzi would be entirely useless.

The situation had produced a lull in the fighting as the Japanese regrouped, tried to reorganize their supply lines, and decided what to do. The high command in Tokyo was in favor of relinquishing its bases in south China and concentrating instead on defending the China coast from the anticipated American landing there. The lull reflected Japan’s troubles, though the interpretation of the lull on the Allies’ side exposed the ambiguities of fighting in China. Rumors were flying to the effect that the Chinese government was secretly in cahoots with the Japanese, allowing them to seize the American airfields in exchange for a moratorium on the war against China itself. When Wedemeyer, diplomatic and respectful as always, brought these rumors up with the Generalissimo, Chiang was “absolutely non-committal,” Wedemeyer reported at the time. “There was no indication, emotional or otherwise, that he either denied or admitted it. His spontaneous reaction was
a dry cackle.”

Wedemeyer gamely moved on as though the rumors didn’t exist. The training of Chinese divisions and the assignment of American advisers—eventually there were more than three thousand of them—continued. Meanwhile, as spring approached, Okamura, ignoring the views of Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, decided on an audacious plan of his own. In January 1945, he took another American airfield, at Suichuan, northeast of Guilin. But he knew that taking the minor airfields like that one was only a temporary gain, or perhaps no gain at all, because Chennault’s planes and fliers could simply relocate to another field and resume operations from there. Whereas at Guilin there had been infrastructure, warehouses, barracks, an intelligence headquarters, and equipment, at Suichuan, according to the official American account of the China theater, “all the Japanese inherited were
empty runways.” Taking this into account, imperial headquarters had decided to abandon the conquest of more Chinese territory and instead to guard the south China coast. This decision had been forced on the Japanese by the American recapture of the Philippines, which opened a staging area for the landing of American troops in China itself.

But Okamura thought the fear of an invasion was exaggerated. He wanted to attack Chungking and deal a lethal blow to the enemy, not merely to put a temporary check on his actions. It was a critical moment.
If the Chinese defenses crumbled as they had so often in the past, Okamura could still hope that he could knock China out of the war. But if the Chinese resistance was stiff, Japan would have little choice but to resort to a war of defensive attrition, withdrawing to the coasts and trying to stop the Allies from using China as a springboard for the invasion of the home islands.

Okamura chose the town of Zhijiang to be the first target of this desperate new offensive. Zhijiang was an otherwise undistinguished place in western Hunan province, a rugged area with few roads where most of the goods transport took place on the backs of coolies running on footpaths from village to village or by sampan on the region’s many rivers and streams. The town itself held one of Chennault’s most important airfields, which made it a rich target, but Okamura saw it in addition as a potential base for raids against Chungking itself, about three hundred miles to the northwest, or perhaps against Kunming.

Early in the spring of 1945, he massed twenty thousand Japanese troops on the plains east of Zhijiang. On April 13, under the watchful eyes of Allied air reconnaissance, these troops began a general advance. To meet this menacing force and turn it back, avoiding a direct threat to Chungking and Kunming, was now the challenge facing the joint Chinese and American command, a test of the new
spirit of cooperation taking place even before the initial Alpha training was done.

The Chinese 51st Division of the 74th Army was a few miles north of the main road leading east and west into Zhijiang, along which the Japanese advance was expected to proceed. But the Japanese here in western Hunan were getting past the troops placed between them and Zhijiang by infiltrating in large numbers through the maze of hills and valleys. It was the same tactic they had used successfully in Burma in 1942, their men cutting quickly through the jungle, avoiding the roads and outmaneuvering the British, the Americans, and the Chinese.

The American liaison officer for the 51st was Colonel
Louis V. Jones. The Chinese division commander told Jones that he was moving out of the area with two regiments in an effort to stop the infiltration, so Jones, along with a radio team, an interpreter, and forty-four coolies, trekked through the hills to follow them. The next day, he discovered that the two regiments had overshot the valley through which the Japanese were likely to advance. A third Chinese regiment, the 151st, which had not moved out with the other two, was left in position, and it went into action by itself against the Japanese on the night of April 17. The
next day, Jones caught up with the Chinese division commander and persuaded him to redeploy his troops; in doing so, they held a six-mile front against the advancing enemy.

On the 19th, the division commander requested air support. One plane arrived the next day, four the day after, but then rain closed in, putting an end to aerial operations. The tough fighters of the Japanese 116th Division and the 133rd Infantry Regiment ground ahead, at the slow pace of a mile and a half an hour. Soon, they took the town of Shanmen, which provided a base of operations in the hills. But, as the official history puts it, despite the pressure, the Chinese 151st Regiment “
held stoutly.”

So did other Chinese units, all along the seventy-five-mile-long front of the Japanese attack. When a large gap appeared in the front northwest of Shanmen, a Chinese army, the 18th, moved in and prevented an enemy breakthrough. Elsewhere along the front, Chinese units were “
holding well, and replying to every Japanese gain with counterattacks.” Meanwhile something rare in the struggle against Japan was occurring. Zhijiang became one of a string of bases stretching all the way to Kunming, where supplies poured in. A field hospital was established to care for the wounded, and a vehicle maintenance company was set up so that damaged supply trucks could be fixed and continue to function. A network of supply points extended out from Zhijiang on both roads and navigable streams. Food, weapons—submachine guns, 60-millimeter mortars, Bren guns—ammunition, and even summer uniforms arrived at those points and then were distributed by truck or sampan to the Chinese troops, even as portable surgical hospitals were set up to the rear of the front.

The fighting continued for months in this Chinese backwater. Eventually, eight base hospitals were operating so wounded Chinese soldiers got medical attention rather than being left to die as had happened so often during this long war. Rice came in by boat from the Dongting Lake area to the northeast and was distributed by truck to the troops, so there was no need for another of the malign practices common among Chinese soldiers, stealing food from local villages or going desperately hungry. An army does indeed travel on its stomach, a basic and elementary point that often seemed lost on Chinese Nationalist armies, but not in the battle for Zhijiang.

Meanwhile, as the experience of Colonel Jones indicated, there was good cooperation between Chinese commanders and their American
advisers. Stilwell’s frustrations in 1942 in
Burma, where his orders were ignored or countermanded by Chiang, were not repeated in western Hunan in 1945. One liaison officer, Colonel
George L. Goodridge, who had arrived in February to help with the training of Chinese troops, reported, “
Whenever the situation changed, the general called the liaison officer to the map and after explaining the situation, asked for his opinion.… In most cases the ensuing order followed along the lines of the plan suggested by the liaison officer.”

On May 2, at the entrance to the Wuyang Valley, on the southern route of the Japanese advance, the Chinese Fifth Division directly faced the enemy. A decision was made, with the agreement of American advisers, to attempt an encirclement, which, the official history says, “was a
complete success,” with “a fair amount of Japanese equipment including artillery, some documents, and six prisoners” seized. In the days ahead, China’s 121st Division moved north and succeeded in turning the Japanese left flank. Other units streamed down from the north and cut behind the Japanese concentrations, forcing the enemy to find ways to retreat.

On May 11, the 11th Division of the Chinese 18th Army captured a Japanese supply dump along with five hundred horses. Meanwhile, seeing the magnitude of the effort that would be required to avoid defeat, and aware of the orders of Imperial General Headquarters to redeploy toward the coast, Okamura decided against sending in reinforcements and ordered his forces to withdraw from the Zhijiang campaign.

Around this time, apparently sensing an opportunity, Chiang Kai-shek did what he had done so often before. He sent orders to his commanding general,
He Yingqin, to seize the city of Hengyang in central Hunan province. This was exactly the kind of aggressiveness and boldness that Americans, most notably Stilwell, felt Chiang always lacked. Still, it was interference, and Wedemeyer, learning of the order, reminded the Gimo that he, Wedemeyer, couldn’t very well coordinate the overall battle if Chiang was giving orders to his generals without telling him about them. The Chinese, Wedemeyer also said, weren’t ready for an operation on the scale required to retake Hengyang.
Chiang backed down, saying that he hadn’t issued an order but only expressed an opinion. In other words, Wedemeyer had managed what the irascible Stilwell had failed to do, which was persuade China’s president and commander in chief not to meddle.