Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (19 page)

Some areas were well prepared. Taiyuan in Shanxi province was ruled by the militarist Yan Xishan, one of the many militarists with whom Chiang had a wary relationship. Du had succeeded in his precarious journey north, and arrived at Taiyuan in early October 1937. On arrival, he reported “everywhere, we saw air-raid defense preparations, which had been started a year previously to get to this stage, proving the authorities’ early determination to set up resistance.” Less impressive, but more typical, was the scene in the city of Datong, some 250 kilometers north. Du grabbed a ride from Taiyuan in a car that was subsequently held up by military traffic and horse carts. The journey took him the best part of a day:

Datong looked very different from Taiyuan. Because enemy aircraft come many times every day, the whole city had a dead air, but apart from some long tunnels dug near the city, air-raid preparations were nil. The officials in the city would grab a few bread rolls for breakfast in the morning, and then hide in the tunnels all day from the aircraft, all the way until about 7 p.m., and only then would they dare to move freely . . . As for ordinary folk, there was no organization for them at all . . . even when the planes had flown off, the people still didn’t dare move . . . Even hiding in the tunnels, they did not dare to talk in a loud voice as they were afraid they could still be heard by the planes!
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Within weeks all the normal patterns of life were utterly disrupted. People had to work by night rather than day, remain quiet and still for long hours, and endure the constant fear of death. Shortly before Du arrived in Taiyuan, 180 people had been killed in a single air raid.

Chaos enveloped China, and it affected all levels of society, from shopkeepers and peasants to soldiers and government officials. Some jaundiced foreign observers expressed doubts about the government’s capacity to survive: one British diplomat, Douglas MacKillop, was particularly pessimistic in a note sent to London from Wuhan:

The strongest impression which one forms here is of the supineness, incapacity, disunion, irresponsibility and ill-founded optimism of the Chinese Government—optimism based almost wholly on hope that other countries including prominently our own will be willingly or (?unwillingly) [
sic
] involved in war and that a great catastrophe will save something out of the wreck for the Chinese government.

It can be stated fairly in their defence that their machinery of government and even their centre of gravity has been forcibly displaced, that they have never before been called upon to discharge full normal obligations of centralised sovereignty over this territory, that it is a difficult country to administer on modern lines, and that they are deprived of foreign advice and of the wealth of Shanghai to which they formerly had access. But the real question for us is surely not respective deserts of blame or sympathy but whether they are capable of existing . . . In my opinion [the] answer is that they will disintegrate as soon as they are forced to leave Hankow [Wuhan] . . .

I have spoken of Chinese Government and not of China. Latter unlike the former is probably indestructible.
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The British military attaché in Wuhan, W. A. Lovat-Fraser, sent a similarly worded note, which warned that the “Chinese army is irreparably smashed and air force is eliminated”; that the government, “most of whom are men with unsavoury records,” was trying to draw out resistance so as to attract British help; and that:

The Chinese are not serious about fighting our war and have done nothing but harm to our interests having brought about serious international situation in Shanghai and gravely jeopardised our commercial interests in Central China.

Central Government should therefore receive no encouragement to continue . . .
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These gloomy notes summed up the contradictory attitudes of the British and other Western diplomats in China. The view that “China” would last while its government would not was a clear expression of the long-standing Western idea that somehow modern government was alien to a more traditional and unchanging “Cathay.” For some, the idea that the Nationalist government was an indigenous product of a new, modern China still seemed hard to swallow. MacKillop’s note also grudgingly recognized that the problems of the Nationalists were not all of their own making, and that a would-be modernizing government had been forced to abandon its sources of finance and foreign expertise. However, this was uncomfortable ground for all the Western powers, because it suggested they were culpable. The last thing Britain needed was a war in China. The European situation was darkening and in a few months the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain would make his ill-fated trip to Munich and end up appeasing Hitler by handing over parts of Czechoslovakia. But MacKillop’s note, precisely because of its self-contradictory tone, betrays the unease in the minds of the diplomats on the ground. MacKillop was finding excuses for British inaction. The challenge for Chiang’s government was to prove MacKillop’s gloomy prediction wrong. And in fact there were British officials, such as Robert Howe, who wrote to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden about MacKillop’s views and stated his disagreement with them, arguing that China should not receive “special facilities,” but that British neutrality should also not restrict the Nationalists’ ability to import arms.
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Repeatedly, outsiders’ assessments of Chinese resistance rested on their perception of public morale. As a prominent figure in China’s press, Du Zhongyuan sought to shape that morale, and inspire his readership to continue the struggle against Japan. However, he also did not hesitate to criticize what he saw as weakness in the war effort. During his stay in Datong, he encountered a group of three or five wounded soldiers who had been serving under General Tang Enbo, a close ally of Chiang Kai-shek. Tang’s army had fought valiantly at Nankou, 150 kilometers northwest of Beiping, in mid-August, and had lost 26,000 men. But he had had little support from the Central Army; once again, Chiang had reserved his best troops to fight the war in central China, sensing that the north was already lost. The soldiers gave Du a critical account of how their efforts had been undermined by lack of material support, and Du tried to explain the defeat to his readers:

It was a pity the 29th Army was garrisoned there, as they had set up no defence works. So our army opened up Nankou, but we had to set up defences and do the fighting at the same time, so how could we achieve the task? Furthermore, our side had no aircraft nor cannon, so when the enemy aircraft came on raids, all they could do was wait to die . . . I don’t know how many times this sacrifice was made. Each day they only got one meal, because the supply transport corps were so often bombed by enemy aircraft. But what I felt saddest about was that when our side withdrew, a lot of our seriously wounded brothers had no-one to look after them. Some were crawling by the roadside, some shot themselves, and although ultimately our troops did manage to get back by luck, all the shops just opened up as normal and nobody took any interest in them. Please tell me—who are we fighting for? Who are we sacrificing for?

Du was clearly depressed by the lack of enthusiasm for the war that he detected all across China. He did offer some practical help to the soldiers he had encountered, paying for a car to take them to Taiyuan, but reflected on the “terrible situation of the wounded soldiers and the lack of popular understanding, and the general corruption of the military and the officials,” asking—not entirely rhetorically—“how can we make war like this?” His journey back to Taiyuan did not improve his mood: “the further we went, the worse the road got . . . we almost slid down the cliff,” and the travelers ended up walking for part of the journey and only getting to the city at one o’clock in the morning. He headed for the Shanxi Hotel: “I really felt as if I’d got out of hell and entered paradise, and pen and ink can’t describe the sweetness of my night’s sleep.”
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Hair-raising car rides, trains that would not function, discomfort: these might seem like small matters compared to the devastation of battle. But battles—crucial for changing the path of the conflict, but marginal to its lived everyday experience—were only a small part of the kind of total war that characterized the twentieth century. The press was a powerful weapon for the Nationalists in shaping the way that war was understood, and Du’s own newspaper columns were part of that strategy. China did not have a widespread broadcasting network in the 1930s, but it had a rich and lively press culture, and its readers would have understood and empathized with Du’s experiences precisely because they were themselves enduring similar privations. The great newspapers of China—for example, the Tianjin
Da gongbao
—followed their readers into exile, constituting a new civil society that grew up as China itself fought for survival.

Du Zhongyuan had witnessed the gallant preparations that Yan Xishan’s troops had set up in Taiyuan, hundreds of kilometers west of Shandong. The Japanese had captured major railheads including the city of Shijiazhuang in Hebei province, which gave them the bases they needed to launch an assault on Taiyuan. From October 13 the Japanese attacked in three separate groupings. Yan’s troops resisted valiantly, but after taking tens of thousands of casualties, the line finally broke, and the troops fled west. The Japanese took the city as terrified crowds of Chinese soldiers and civilians tried to escape the aerial bombardment. The Communist Eighth Route Army was not directly involved in the defense of the city, although Mao positioned troops nearby. However, he told close comrades, including Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, that they should be prepared for the city to fall, and that if necessary, “be prepared to burn the city of Taiyuan.”
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The fall of Taiyuan now convinced Mao that the CCP must engage in a long war, making fuller use of guerrilla combat that could excite the Chinese people. He wrote, in typically earthy style, “The essence of the contradiction is that those who have seized the latrine pit can’t shit, while the people of the whole country, who suffer acutely from bloating, have no pit. Resistance by the government and the army alone can never defeat Japanese imperialism.”
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Instead, the Communist forces would be used to harass the enemy: “A guerrilla war should be mainly in the enemy’s flanks and rear.”
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The CCP’s efforts in guerrilla warfare were in stark contrast with some of Chiang’s other commanders. Most notorious was Han Fuju, governor of Shandong province (where the missionary Katharine Hand was located), who tried to make a deal with the Japanese and then flew to Kaifeng at the end of December 1937, abandoning his armies. Chiang had him arrested, and he was later court-martialed and executed as an example to other generals who might feel tempted to leave their command.
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Meanwhile, on December 14, as Chinese troops fled Shandong, the bombing began. Katharine Hand wrote: “ . . . the barracks just south of us were bombed, my house shook . . . It is an experience I don’t care to repeat often. I found I could scarcely speak when it was over. 7 bombs were dropped, not all exploding. 2 men were killed and several injured.” The next few weeks saw constant bombardment. On December 25 Hand wrote ruefully: “And such a Christmas! I was so thankful for the happy service in the Church in the morning. Then in the afternoon eleven bombs.” She noted that she “had to have a stool lest my knees give way and I add to the fright of the group.” The following day she wrote “there was no rush for shelter” as the bombers came back, but the fear remained.
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Du Zhongyuan noted in one of his reports that the wider population feared the enemy aircraft as if they were “ghosts and spirits.”
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Superstitious beliefs were just one of the obstacles that stood in the way of efforts to institute a rational civilian response in the face of constant aerial bombardment. The rhetoric in China, as it would be in wartime London three years later, was of defiance, and for many, that defiance was fierce and real. But it coexisted with a fear that death might come from above at any time, unannounced and terrifying.

The scenes that Katharine Hand witnessed as the Chinese armies withdrew from Shandong were reproduced countless times as the battlefront moved further west. The military campaigns in north China and central China had become distinct from one another, but refugees were not subject to military discipline, and they traveled in panic from one zone of conflict to the next. Nobody knew how fast the Japanese would move, and what their occupation would be like when they arrived. The Nationalists quickly created an official portrait of a defiant retreat into the interior, in which large numbers of patriotic Chinese chose to follow their government into exile rather than live under Japanese oppression. And this was indeed the motivation of many.

For those fleeing central China, the lifeline was the Yangtze River, the waterway that could bring them to safety in Wuhan, or further west upriver 800 kilometers away, in Chongqing. The government made arrangements for some 25,000 skilled workers to be brought west to staff the arsenals. Factories were also broken down and shipped, as it would be nearly impossible to build new plants from scratch in the midst of war.
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Some of the most prominent refugees were businessmen from Shanghai, desperate to bring their factories with them. The owner of a pencil factory recalled: