Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (25 page)

The press, too, was freer than it had ever been before, giving rise to a wide range of competing viewpoints. Zou Taofen published his left-oriented
Shenghuo
(Life)
magazines, already well known in prewar China, not least because of Du Zhongyuan’s controversial columns. War correspondents such as Fan Changjiang also became celebrities because of their incisive front-line reporting. Overseas journalists were dealt with by Hollington K. Tong (Dong Xianguang), Chiang’s vice minister of propaganda. Tong had trained in the US at the Missouri School of Journalism and at Columbia University, and also worked for various New York newspapers. He used his knowledge of the American press to encourage foreign correspondents to report from the battlefront. In doing so, he managed to create a strong feeling of sympathy for the Chinese resistance on newspaper front pages in the West.
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As Wuhan’s inhabitants explored their unexpected new freedoms, the Japanese continued their conquest of central China. On February 9, 1938, they seized the city of Bengbu, some 400 kilometers northeast of Wuhan, giving them control of areas north of the Huai River. The next few weeks saw a savage campaign with Xuzhou as the target. The Japanese advanced in two columns from north and south, marching along the track of the Jinpu railway. The Chinese defenders stood their ground along the eastern end of the Longhai railway, near the port of Lianyungang. The Japanese aim was to crush the Chinese between the two halves of their pincer movement. At Yixian and at Huaiyuan, north of Xuzhou, both sides fought to the death: the Chinese could not drive back the Japanese, but the Japanese could not scatter the defenders either. At Linyi, some 50 kilometers northeast of Xuzhou, Zhang Zizhong, a general who had disgraced himself by abandoning an earlier battlefield, became a feted hero because of his determination to stop Japanese troops (led by Itagaki Seishirô, the conqueror of Manchuria).
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The Japanese hoped that their capacity to pour in up to 400,000 troops could destroy the Chinese forces holding eastern and central China.
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Chiang was determined that this should not happen, recognizing that the fall of Xuzhou would then place Wuhan in immense danger. On April 1, 1938, he gave a speech to Nationalist Party delegates in which he linked the defense of Wuhan to the fate of the party itself. Although the Japanese had so far managed to invade seven provinces, Chiang declared, they had only taken the provincial capital cities and main transport routes: “villages and cities off those main communication routes, they have absolutely not been able to invade and occupy.” The Japanese, he went on, might have more than half a million soldiers, but even so, they had found themselves bogged down after eight or nine months of hard fighting. Chiang went on to declare that as long as the Chinese held Guangzhou (Canton), then “it would be of no significance if [the Japanese] invaded Wuhan.” Holding Guangzhou would enable China to keep its sea links to the outside world, and after all, “Guangdong province is our revolutionary base area”: Guangdong, of course, had been the homeland of Sun Yat-sen. If the Japanese “dwarfs” attacked Wuhan and Guangzhou, it would cost them a great deal, and would threaten their ability to maintain order in the zones they now occupied. Chiang restated the plan: “I tell all of you here clearly: the base area for our war will not be in the zones east of the Beiping–Wuhan or Wuhan–Guangdong railway lines, but to their west.”
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For that reason he had authorized the withdrawal of Chinese troops behind the railway lines.

Chiang’s speech mixed defiance with an attempt to explain why the Chinese had to regroup. Evidently, he was trying to have it both ways, or at least put a brave face on what was turning into a military disaster. But his position was extremely difficult. At the time he made the speech, Chiang simply did not know whether Wuhan could be held. He had to declare that the city was important, and to show both the Chinese public and the wider world that his resistance was real, yet he could not afford to tie his reputation too tightly to a city that might fall.

Holding Xuzhou was the first priority. And doing so meant that Chiang had to place great trust in one of his rivals: the southwestern general Li Zongren. The relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and Li Zongren would be one of the most ambivalent in wartime China. Li came from Guangxi, a province in southwestern China that had always been regarded as half civilized by those who lived in China’s cultural heartland in the east. Its people had never felt themselves to be fully a part of the empire ruled from Beijing (or even Nanjing), and in the early days of the republic there was a powerful impetus for autonomy in the region. Li was one of a group of young officers, trained in regional military academies, who fought to bring the region under national control, and he joined the Nationalist Party in 1923, the year that Sun Yat-sen announced his alliance with the Soviets. (Li was not a graduate of the Baoding Academy, but had trained in Yunnan’s equivalent institution, which had similar views about military professionalism.) Li enthusiastically took part in the Northern Expedition of 1926–1928, and had a crucial role in the National Revolutionary Army gaining control over much of north China. But after the establishment of the Nanjing government, Li became wary of Chiang’s desire to centralize power in his own person. In 1930 Li’s “Guangxi clique” took part in the Central Plains war, the attempt by a group of militarist leaders to topple Chiang. Although they did not succeed, Li retreated to his own base in the southwest, ready to challenge Chiang again. It took the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 to change Li’s position; now he believed that a Japanese invasion posed a greater threat than Chiang.
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The tension between the two men was clear from the earliest days of the war. On October 10, 1937, Chiang had appointed Li commander of the Fifth War Zone. Li agreed on condition that Chiang did not interfere with the way that Li commanded his own troops; in other words, Chiang was not to send any
shouling
(personal commands) to Li’s subordinates. In fact, Chiang stuck to the agreement throughout the war, a sign of how much he valued his wary colleague. (He also treated Li’s fellow Guangxi commander, Bai Chongxi, with great caution.)
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Chiang was conscious that he needed a commander who could produce some sort of victory in the midst of endless retreat and destruction.

As part of the public-relations battle, journalists were given open access to the commanders on the Xuzhou front. Li and his associates were keen to burnish their own images and give the impression of efficient, competent command to the newsmen who came to visit them. One of those journalists was, of course, Du Zhongyuan. Du spared no effort in praising the “formidable southwestern general, Li Zongren.” He was “elegant and refined” and “vastly magnanimous.” In language that echoed the way the Communist armies presented their troops to the public, Du also suggested that Li’s armies were under strict instructions:

The most important point in the people’s war is that . . . troops do not harass the people of the country. If the people are the water, the soldiers are the fish, and if you have fish with no water, inevitably they’re going to choke; worse still is to use our water to nurture the enemy’s fish—that really is incomparably stupid.
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In Xuzhou itself, Du claimed that the local population all expressed great enthusiasm for Li, calling him “Duke Jiang” in a classical reference to a renowned warrior. Li talked at some length with Du, and invited him and his companions to dine with him. The evening was spent in banter, and Du praised Li’s abilities as a raconteur. All this served to boost Li’s image as a calm, effective commander who represented the true face of the Chinese Army.
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Sheng Cheng was another journalist who traveled to the Xuzhou front. Sheng, like his contemporary Du Zhongyuan, was a product of the turmoil of early years of the republic. He had traveled to France, and on returning to China had been at the iconic May Fourth demonstration of 1919, even taking part in the burning of the house of a minister who was considered overly close to the Japanese. Now he was part of the All-China Cultural Committee on Resistance to Japan, which aimed to use the media to inspire people for the long war. He kept copious notes drawn from interviews with soldiers who were taking part in the Xuzhou campaign.

Despite the outward calm reported by the media, a frightening reality was on the horizon by late March 1938: the Japanese were close to victory on the Xuzhou front. The North China Area Army (led by Generals Itagaki Seishirô, Nishio Toshizô, and Isogai Rensuke) was to link up with the Central China Expeditionary Force (under General Hata Shunroku), in a combined drive on central China.
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Li Zongren and his senior colleagues, including generals Bai Chongxi and Tang Enbo, decided to confront the Japanese at the traditional stone-walled city of Taierzhuang. The town was not big, but it was strategically significant, lying not only along the Grand Canal, China’s major north–south waterway, but also on a rail line that linked the Jinpu and Longhai lines, bypassing Xuzhou. Chiang Kai-shek himself visited Xuzhou on March 24. While that city was still in Chinese hands, the Japanese troops in the north and south remained separated from one another. The loss of the city would close the pincer. By late March, Chinese troops appeared to be gaining ground in Taierzhuang, but then the Japanese started to increase the number of troops, drawing men from the column led by General Isogai Rensuke. The defending generals were no longer sure whether they could hold the position, but Chiang made it clear in a telegram of April 1, 1938, that “the enemy at Taierzhuang must be destroyed.”
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Even by the savage standards set by the war so far, the fighting at Taierzhuang was brutal, with the combatants confronting each other face-to-face. Sheng Cheng’s notes reflect the battle memories of Chi Fengcheng, one of the star officers of the campaign:

We had a battle for the little lanes [of the town], and unprecedently, not just streets and lanes, but even courtyards and houses. Neither side was willing to budge. Sometimes we’d capture a house, and dig a hole in the wall to approach the enemy. 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. Or when we could hear that the enemy was in the house, then we’d climb the roof and drop bombs inside—and kill them all.
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The battle raged for a week. On April 1, General Chi asked for volunteers for a near-suicide mission to capture a building: of fifty-seven chosen, only ten survived. One soldier claimed to have fired at a Japanese bomber and to have succeeded in bringing it down; he and his comrades then set it on fire before another aircraft could come in to rescue the pilot. On April 2 and 3, Chi called the Chinese defenders at the town’s north station to check on the situation. They were all crying and sneezing because the Japanese had used tear gas. The Japanese had superior technology, including cannon and heavy artillery, but for once the cramped conditions in Taierzhuang gave them no advantage. The Chinese command managed to resupply their troops successfully (this is what so often undermined Chinese defenses on other occasions), and also prevented the Japanese from restocking their own dwindling supplies of arms and bullets. Slowly, the Japanese were worn down. On April 7 they finally broke and fled, leaving behind thousands of dead; the Chinese later claimed that 20,000 Japanese had been killed, although the number was probably closer to 8,000. For once, the Chinese had won a decisive victory.

There was an explosion of joy all over unoccupied China. Du Zhongyuan wrote of “the glorious killing of the enemy,” and even Katharine Hand, stuck out in Japanese-controlled Shandong, heard the news.
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The victory provided a much-needed morale boost for the army as well as the wider population. Sheng Cheng recorded evening conversations with soldiers of General Chi Fengcheng’s division, who traded banter with their senior officer. At one point, the men claimed, Chi had given them “the secret of war”: “when you get food, eat it; when you can sleep, take it.” These sorts of familiar, slightly glib-sounding truths were much more resonant when the Nationalist forces had shown that they were capable of more than retreat.

The victors may have described the battle in terms of glorious success, but they did not forget that their enemies were human. Chi recalled one scene he came across: he had picked up a Japanese officer’s helmet, the left side of which had been scorched by gunpowder, with a trace of blood, the marker of a fatal wound taken from behind. Elsewhere in Taierzhuang they found religious and personal trinkets: images of the Buddha, wooden fish, and flags decorated with slogans. A makeshift Japanese crematorium in the north station had been interrupted partway through its work: “Not all the bones had been completely burned.” After the battle, Li Zongren asked Sheng if he had picked up any souvenirs on the battlefield. Sheng replied that he had found love letters on the corpses of Japanese soldiers, as well as the photograph of a girl (perhaps a hometown sweetheart) marked “19 years old, February 1938.”
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These sentiments stood in contrast to news coverage in which the Japanese were portrayed only as demons, devils, and “dwarf bandits.”

The foreign community noted the new, optimistic turn of events and the way it seemed to have revitalized the resistance effort. US ambassador Nelson Johnson wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull from Wuhan just days after Taierzhuang. He passed on reports from his American military observers: one had spent time in Shanxi, where he had been impressed by Communist success in mobilizing guerrilla fighters against the Japanese; and another had spent three days watching the fighting at Taierzhuang, and had confirmed that “Chinese troops in the field there won a well-deserved victory over Japanese troops, administering the first defeat that Japanese troops have suffered in the field in modern times.” This confirmed Johnson’s view that Japan would need to use a great deal more force than it had anticipated in pacifying China. He noted that the mood in unoccupied China had been similarly transformed: