Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (26 page)

Conditions here at Hankow have changed from an atmosphere of pessimism to one of dogged optimism. The Government is more united under Chiang and there is a feeling that the future is not entirely hopeless due to the recent failure of Japanese arms at Hsuchow [Xuzhou] . . . I find no evidence for a desire for a peace by compromise among Chinese, and doubt whether the Government could persuade its army or its people to accept such a peace. The spirit of resistance is slowly spreading among the people who are awakening to a feeling that this is their war. Japanese air raids in the interior and atrocities by Japanese soldiers upon civilian populations are responsible for this stiffening of the people.
²⁰

The British had always been wary of Chiang Kai-shek, but Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador in China, wrote to the new British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, on April 29, 1938, shortly after the Taierzhuang victory, and gave grudging credit to China’s leader:

[Chiang] has now become the symbol of Chinese unity, which he himself has so far failed to achieve, but which the Japanese are well on the way to achieving for him . . . The days when Chinese people did not care who governed them seem to have gone . . . my visit to Central China from out of the gloom and depression of Shanghai has left me stimulated and more than disposed to believe that provided the financial end can be kept up Chinese resistance may be so prolonged and effective that in the end the Japanese effort may be frustrated . . . Chiang Kai-shek is obstinate and difficult to deal with . . . Nonetheless [the Nationalists] are making in their muddling way a good job of things in extremely difficult circumstances.
²¹

In the euphoria of a rare victory Chiang pushed Tang and Li to build on their success, and increased the number of troops deployed in the area to 450,000. But the Chinese Army was still afflicted by fundamental problems. The parochialism that had crippled Chiang’s armies repeatedly in the past half year reared its head again. Although the various generals had agreed to serve together in a war of resistance, they still looked out for the safety of their own troops first, concerned with protecting themselves from any attempt by Chiang to usurp their power. Li Zongren did not use his top Guangxi provincial troops at Taierzhuang, for instance, and tried to deflect the bulk of the fighting onto Tang Enbo’s men. Chiang’s generals were aware of the fates of two of their colleagues: Han Fuju of Shandong had been executed for his refusal to fight, while Zhang Xueliang of Manchuria had allowed Chiang to reduce the size of his northeastern army, and had ended up under house arrest. They were right to distrust Chiang. He truly did believe, after all, that their provincial armies should come under the control of a national military command, which he would lead. From the point of view of national unity, Chiang’s aspiration was not unreasonable. But it made other military leaders suspicious that taking part in the anti-Japanese war would lead to the dilution of their own power. The split nature of the military command also prevented logistics operating efficiently; supplies of ammunition and food to the front lines were unreliable and easily cut off.

The glow of Taierzhuang faded within days. The Japanese commanders learned from their defeat. They renewed their war plans and reinforced the numbers of troops, moving soldiers from Japanese armies in north and central China to enclose Xuzhou in a vise. Tang Enbo’s troops fought valiantly to the north and east of Taierzhuang, forcing the Japanese to battle for territory through the rest of April. But a Japanese advance in late April and early May managed to cut off Chinese access to the Long–Hai railway, severing the flow of Chinese troops who were trying to hold Xuzhou. Nor did Chinese troops to the south of the city show the persistence of Tang’s troops to the north. By mid-May the remaining Chinese troops in Xuzhou were about to be encircled. On May 15, Chiang Kai-shek authorized a withdrawal. “Duke Jiang,” along with Tang Enbo and Bai Chongxi, had to retreat. Somehow, forty divisions managed to escape from Xuzhou and slip past the Japanese, helped by a fortuitous sandstorm and fog on May 18.
²²

As in Nanjing, this Chinese army may have lived to fight another day, but the effect on Xuzhou itself was horrific. The city had experienced Japanese bombardment beginning in August 1937, and the mood of the population had fluctuated between cautious hope and utter despair. In March, Du Zhongyuan had visited the city. Before he left Wuhan, he had been told by friends that “the city was desolate and the people were terrified,” but in fact “all the inhabitants of Xuzhou were quietly getting on with their business . . . sometimes it was even calmer than Wuhan.”
²³
The Australian journalist Rhodes Farmer observed something similar in a book published at the end of the war, noting the “ordinary townsfolk who became wardens, fire-fighters and first-aid workers during the raid and then went back to their civil jobs.”
²⁴
But the departure of Nationalist troops in mid-May left the city and its outskirts at the mercy of an angry Imperial Army. Bombing continued throughout the final days of battle, and 700 people were killed in a single raid on May 14, 1938. In the area around Xuzhou itself, buildings and bridges were destroyed, some by the retreating Chinese troops, some by the advancing Japanese. One of the towns that was utterly destroyed was Taierzhuang, the setting of the iconic Chinese defense just a few weeks earlier. The scene in Xuzhou itself was recorded by Canadian Jesuits who remained in the city after it fell: more than a third of the houses were destroyed, and most of the local population had fled in terror. In all the rural areas around the city, there were repeated reports of massacres, many of them witnessed by missionaries. Aside from the atrocities committed by the Japanese themselves, the local population found that they were assailed by bandits in the absence of local law enforcement, and that none of the vital agricultural tasks, such as planting seed, were being carried out.
²⁵

The loss of Xuzhou was both strategic and symbolic. Its fall marked another terrible blow to Chiang’s attempt to hold central China and control the transportation of troops in the region. Morale, built up so suddenly by the Taierzhuang victory, was now battered again, though it did not collapse. The fall of Xuzhou was also a sign, if one supported the resistance, that the war would be a long one and that a swift victory against Japan was no longer a possibility. Mao Zedong’s Yan’an base area was many hundreds of kilometers northwest of Xuzhou, but he understood the meaning of defeat there. In May 1938 he gave one of his most celebrated lectures, “On Protracted War,” in which he chided those who had been overly optimistic: “After the Taierzhuang victory, some people maintained that the Xuzhou campaign should be fought as a ‘quasi-decisive campaign’ and that the previous policy of protracted war should be changed.” Such people had been made “giddy” by Taierzhuang. Mao had no doubts that China would ultimately prevail (he could hardly say otherwise), but “it cannot win quickly, and the War of Resistance will be a protracted war.”
²⁶
In the meantime, the development of guerrilla warfare was an essential part of the long-term strategy, which the Communist armies would seek to develop in north China.

Yet the loss of Xuzhou did not necessarily portend a long war. It could, rather, suggest that the war would be terrifyingly short.

Chapter 9

The Deadly River

O
N JUNE
7, 1938, the first secretary at the US Embassy in Wuhan reported that the Japanese had taken the city of Kaifeng, 450 kilometers to the north. Slowly but inexorably, the Japanese army was moving westward, holding close to the railway lines that brought tens of thousands of its troops across the plains of central China. “The second phase of the Lunghai [Long-Hai] campaign is now nearing a close,” he declared. “A direct campaign for the capture of Hankow [Wuhan] will ensue.”
¹

But before they could strike at Chiang Kai-shek’s center of command, the Japanese needed to take the city of Zhengzhou, where two major railway lines, the west–east Long–Hai and the north–south Ping–Han (Beiping to Wuhan), intersected. If the Japanese captured the city, then Wuhan and the northwestern city of Xi’an would in turn become vulnerable. Once they had recovered from the shocking defeat at Taierzhuang, the Japanese had advanced deep into central China by the end of May 1938, and were just 40 kilometers from Zhengzhou.

By the spring of 1938 the Chinese defenders were desperate. There was a serious chance that the entire Chinese war effort would collapse. The Nationalist armies’ most significant success as defenders of a shrinking area of “Free China” had been their avoidance of complete disaster. The government had undertaken highly successful propaganda efforts with the foreign press to persuade the world that the Nationalists had some plan other than constant retreat. If the Japanese had taken Wuhan in the spring, then the Chinese Army would have had to retreat at high speed, giving an even greater impression of disintegration. However much sympathy there might be from progressives around the world, it was clear that Western governments would do nothing to save China unless they were persuaded that doing so was in their own interests.

Ambassador Johnson, writing from the temporary embassy at Wuhan in July 1938, did not believe that the Nationalists could hold the tricity. But he commended Chiang’s strategy to Washington. Controlling the huge territory triangulated by Beiping, Nanjing, and Wuhan put pressure on the Japanese armies. Johnson drew on the expertise of colleagues including Frank Dorn, an American military observer, to argue that if the Japanese were to relieve that pressure, they needed to capture Wuhan. Johnson also noted that the political effect of the loss of Wuhan would be to concentrate Nationalist strength much more in southern China, leaving the north to the Japanese and the CCP. The fall of the city would be an economic blow for Chiang, as the customs revenue that had flowed through the city would no longer be received by the government. In addition, the city was the largest major industrial center left under Chiang’s control. Yet Johnson also stressed that “the Chinese intend to make the taking of Hankow as expensive as possible.” Finally, he added the key vote of confidence: “It is our conclusion that serious as the loss of Hankow will be it does not mean the collapse of Chinese resistance.”
²
The Japanese, he said, wanted to treat the capture of Wuhan as the end of the war in China; for the Chinese, however, it would mark merely the end of a phase.

Further American correspondence over the summer of 1938 showed how important the Wuhan question was in gauging the seriousness of Chinese resistance. John Carter Vincent of the State Department’s Division of Far Eastern Affairs wrote to Stanley K. Hornbeck, adviser to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, declaring that he had talked to an American close to the Japanese government and that “the Chinese do not appreciate the strength of their own position,” adding “if the Chinese can maintain resistance in a reasonable degree of effectiveness” (this meant holding down some half a million Japanese troops), then the Japanese would be compelled to “withdraw from China within a year.” Vincent’s assessment of the length of the war was clearly very wrong, but he was astute to point out that “very much now depends on the strength of the Chinese will and ability to continue effective resistance.” Vincent stressed to Hornbeck: “I believe, as I think you do, that it is vitally important not only for China but for us and other democratic nations that Chinese resistance not collapse.” Vincent recognized that the US could not become directly involved in the war at this point, but urged Hornbeck to consider encouraging financial support for China, as well as trade restrictions on Japan.
³

There were competing instincts at play within the Nationalist government. The state was making demands of the wider population, and had consequently accepted the necessity of doing more for the people’s welfare. The recent period in Wuhan had seen one of the biggest refugee relief efforts in Chinese history, supported by the Nationalist government. In 1937–1938 government-run shelters housed about 60 percent of the refugee population (some 20,000 people), assisted by local charitable organizations as well as the International Red Cross.
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Yet there was also a more callous streak in the government’s collective psyche, leading officials to regard the lives of individuals as expendable. This side would come into play as Chiang’s government debated whether it could stop the Japanese.

Over the centuries the force that had shaped central China more than any other was a waterway known as “China’s Sorrow”: the Yellow River (Huang He). The loess silt that floated in the river gave it its distinctive name, and rendered it far less navigable than its southern counterpart, the Yangtze. The Yellow River also made the surrounding land rich and fertile, and the region had been the cradle of China’s civilization. However, the nurturing river could be treacherous too. Every few centuries the Yellow River would burst its banks and change direction without warning, flooding land and drowning thousands of peasant farmers. Eventually, the Chinese had learned to control the river, and it was held in check by massive dikes that prevented the river from leaving its bed. Many of those dikes were located near Zhengzhou, across the path that the Japanese would have to take to approach Wuhan by land. There was one way to stop the Japanese advance, at least for a while: to breach the dikes. But to do so would unleash incalculable suffering on those who lived nearby. A major flood on the Yellow River in 1887 had taken nearly a million lives.