Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (56 page)

For 17 months Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell has been under fire in Washington, London and New Delhi. Critics said the new Ledo Road from India to China was not worth the effort . . . In India’s capital last week, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell sat rigidly in his rattan-cane armchair, long fingers playing with his favorite cigaret holder, eyes almost shut. Curtly he replied to his critics: the Ledo Road fulfills two U.S. objectives: 1) to get at least some supplies to blockaded China; 2) to set up a situation in which Japs are killed . . . Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten differs with Stilwell . . . The U.S. commander admitted that a southern China port must be opened before the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek can be rearmed. But “Vinegar Joe,” who probably knows China better than any brasshat in New Delhi, stoutly held that the “Hump” air route and the Ledo Road can fill the immediate gap in China’s desperate needs, thus fit into the general Asia strategy.
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It was an article meant to provoke, and it did just that, infuriating Mountbatten, who tried unsuccessfully to have Stilwell recalled.
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It also reflected the particular viewpoint of Stilwell and his supporters in the press. Ever since being forced to walk out of the jungle in May 1942, Stilwell had had an obsession with the recovery of Burma. At the Cairo Conference the proposal for Buccaneer had raised his hopes, only for them to be dashed again after its cancellation. All the same, British and Chinese troops had already been moved in preparation for an assault on Burma, and by late December 1943 the Chinese had begun to encounter Japanese outposts in the border areas. But Southeast Asian Command (SEAC), under Mountbatten, vetoed the idea of fighting to reopen the road from Ledo in Assam, in northeast India, through Burma into Yunnan in southwest China. Now a battle between the Allies broke out, as Stilwell insisted on launching an assault as soon as possible on the Ledo Road, whereas Mountbatten and the American Albert Wedemeyer, SEAC’s chief of staff, maintained that such a plan was impractical. In the end Stilwell prevailed. He sent representatives to lobby Roosevelt, who did not take a clear stand, but also did not say no to a campaign in north Burma. A major disruption between Stilwell and SEAC would have been highly embarrassing and distracted attention just when the Allied commanders were preoccupied with their top priority: the secret preparations for D-Day just four months away. Stilwell was able to launch his campaign because nobody had the incentive to stop him.

Chiang Kai-shek was still concerned that a major Japanese assault was imminent. But his words did little to convince his Western Allies. On March 27 Chiang suggested that transferring Y Force (some 90,000 men in total) and the American fighter planes to India for the Burma campaign would leave central China vulnerable. Roosevelt replied on April 3 that further aid to China would be “unjustified” unless Chiang agreed to send the troops. Under further pressure from Stilwell (and Marshall), Chiang was forced to acquiesce.
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Despite his deep misgivings, he sent 40,000 Chinese troops under General Huang Weili to the Burma front. Stilwell sent his troops, Chinese and American, in a bold dash for Myitkyina in northeast Burma. On May 17 he captured the airfield there, but within a short time history repeated itself. Once again, as in 1942, Stilwell found himself besieged in the city by the Japanese.

This time, however, there was more support coming to Stilwell’s rescue. Huang Yaowu was one of the soldiers assigned to the 22nd Division of the New Sixth Army. The troops in India were well drilled and also benefited from information provided by Chinese divisions stationed in India. The intelligence was hardly reassuring. The Japanese were taking advantage of their experience in jungle warfare to place machine-gun nests in trees. On some parts of the road, with dense jungle on one side and, on the other, a sheer cliff, soldiers had to use vines to climb up.
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The lush, monsoon-nourished jungle of Burma was very different from the plains or forests of China; the territory felt as alien to the Chinese soldiers fighting there as it did to their American and British counterparts. Soon enough, Huang and his comrades were sent into the jungle themselves. They rapidly developed ways to avoid attracting the attention of the Japanese, using a system of “monkey cries” to keep in contact with one another; if Huang gave three cries, and his comrade replied with three, that signaled “all clear.”

However, there were advantages to being in Burma. Stilwell’s control of Lend-Lease supplies meant that the troops were well resourced. Huang remembered becoming tired of beef and pumpkin at every meal; but this was a diet whose quality would have been the envy of many of the troops who would soon be fighting more than 2,000 kilometers to the east.
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Yet the Allies could not know that the Japanese had their own plans: its leaders had made the extraordinary decision to launch a major assault into the Chinese mainland at the same time as a major campaign in Burma. In the autumn of 1943 the Imperial General Headquarters had looked at the increasingly perilous position in Asia. As the Americans advanced in the Pacific, it became clear that the initial Japanese gains of early 1942 were vulnerable. By the spring of 1944 Allied assaults had forced Tokyo to regroup its forces to protect at least some of its empire in the Central Pacific. The loss of the Marshall Islands in February 1944 led General Tôjô to dismiss the head of the Navy and install himself as chief of staff for the Army.
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Now the Japanese decided, as in 1941, to double their bets and hope that a bold and unexpected move would once again give them the advantage. They resolved to launch one last, massive thrust against the Asian mainland. Operation Ugô was to send 85,000 troops from northern Burma into British India.

Another major campaign was to knock China out of the war for good: Operation Ichigô [“Number One”]. The Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo approved a military operation that would create a clear corridor of operations in central China. The idea was taken up by Japan’s China Expeditionary Command, which had spent much of the last year bogged down trying to keep control over the areas of occupation. On January 4, 1944, the plan was laid out. The key military aims were to destroy the American air bases in central China, and to open up a route between central China and French Indochina using the railway network. Though Prime Minister Tôjô endorsed only the destruction of the air bases, the plan was officially approved and put into action on January 24.
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Ichigô was the largest operation ever undertaken by the Japanese Army. Some half a million troops were mobilized across central China to the border with French Indochina. But Ichigô was about much more than named strategic objectives. For both the Japanese and the Nationalists, the campaign was a last-ditch attempt to remain in the war. The attempt to neutralize China completely became an urgent, even desperate priority. If the Japanese could gain the initiative in Asia, they just might be able to negotiate a settlement with the Americans, who were concentrating on Europe.
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In mid-April the suspicions of Chiang and Gauss proved devastatingly correct. A mighty assault by the Imperial Japanese Army thrust into Henan. Half a million men and 200 bombers were mobilized, with supplies of fuel for eight months and ammunition for two years.
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It took a long time for the Nationalist command to understand what the Japanese were doing. Xu Yongchang, minister of military operations, was convinced well into the spring of 1944 that any Japanese assault would come in southern China, and it was not until May that it was clear the attack would be along the Ping–Han (Beiping–Wuhan) railway line in the center of the country.
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Troops moved to defend central China against the coming storm.

Now the army felt the effects of years of attrition from Japanese assault and governmental corruption and incompetence. Recruitment had been falling since 1941, and press-ganging of new soldiers had become much more common. Conscripts were often marched in gangs tied together with ropes to an area far from home; if they were too close to their own villages, they might simply flee.
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Inflation had eaten away at military salaries and made service far less attractive. At the same time some of the best Chinese armies that remained, including the Yunnan-based Y Force, were thousands of kilometers away in Burma, by Stilwell’s side as he fought to relieve the siege of Myitkyina.

The huge gap between the theoretical strength of the Chinese forces in central China and the ragged reality was exposed in the nightmare days of May 1944. Jiang Dingwen and Tang Enbo were the two generals placed in charge of the First War Zone in northern China, defending the city of Luoyang, on the Yellow River in Henan, the province that had suffered so much from flood and famine. Jiang gave his account of what happened in northern Henan, an area still suffering grievously from the breach of the dike at Huayuankou in 1938. “I’d already thought that there were not enough troops,” he wrote, but when he asked for reinforcements he was not granted them. Other Nationalist troops had been moved away to block off the Communists, he said, and “we faced the enemy on three sides. The area to defend was huge and the troops very few.” The Japanese, in contrast, had motorized troops who could operate to full advantage in this flat terrain.

Jiang Dingwen also hinted heavily that the problems lay not with him but his commander in chief. His troops should have attacked on April 23 or 24, early in the campaign, to launch a decisive battle at Luoyang, but he had not received Chiang’s permission to attack until May 1. By that time the Japanese had advanced even further, and it was too late. Jiang had to send his army to relieve Tang Enbo, because Tang had set out in another direction to follow Chiang Kai-shek’s previous order that they should hold nearby Yu county. These kinds of communications failures were endemic. The 38th and 13th Armies failed to receive the message that they should advance to Luoyang and ended up following the previous order to head to Yu county instead. In the days that followed, the same story came up repeatedly: some of Tang and Jiang’s troops made their way to the next crisis area, but too many of the other troops found themselves cut off from communications, and a coordinated strategy became impossible. And, Jiang hinted (“Mr. Chiang, you can still remember this”), Chiang Kai-shek’s orders were what had confused the issue.
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Yet the most chilling aspect of Jiang’s account was his description of the reaction of the local civilian population:

During this campaign, the unexpected phenomenon was that the people of the mountains in western Henan attacked our troops, taking guns, bullets, and explosives, and even high-powered mortars and radio equipment . . . They surrounded our troops and killed our officers. We heard this pretty often. The heads of the villages and
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(village mutual-responsibility groups) just ran away. At the same time, they took away our stored grain, leaving their houses and fields empty, which meant that our officers and soldiers had no food for many days.
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Jiang grudgingly admitted that the army’s own behavior may have played a role. “There were certainly a minority of soldiers who did not keep discipline and harassed the villagers,” he conceded, “but it was the lack of civilian administration that meant that they could not compete with the military.” However, Jiang did see how damaging the breakdown of trust had been. “Actually this is truly painful for me to say: in the end the damages we suffered from the attack by the people were more serious than the losses from battles with the enemy.”
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Jiang’s account was self-serving, placing the blame on Tang, Chiang, and anyone but himself. A document submitted to the government indicting the commanders was unsparing in its accusations. The reason for the failure of the campaign in the First War Zone, they declared, was that “Jiang Dingwen and his deputy Tang Enbo paid no attention to political and military matters,” and had instead diverted their time to enriching themselves, thereby encouraging their subordinates to act in the same way. Jiang and Tang’s troops had had various advantages, for instance, Czech weapons that might actually have been superior to some of those used by the enemy, yet they were never properly used. They had taken a cut from the ordinary soldiers’ salaries, the accusation went, and had padded the official rolls with nonexistent soldiers to claim their salaries, so the divisions were actually undermanned.

While Jiang Dingwen was nominally in command, most observers believed that Tang Enbo was the real authority, and his accusers aimed their fire squarely at him. Heroics at Taierzhuang six years previously now carried no weight. “Tang Enbo had the major responsibility for defeating the enemy in central China,” declared his critic, Guo Zhonghuai. “But when the enemy were crossing the Yellow River . . . he didn’t himself lead from the front, but retreated . . . relaxing and taking a dip in the hot springs.” With the lead officer taking a long soak some 400
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away (perhaps 800 kilometers) from the battlefront, the troops scattered and ran: “No wonder they didn’t fire even one bullet.” Tang’s troops, supposedly among the elite of the Nationalist forces, were used alongside civilians to carry the baggage of officials who wanted to escape the combat zone. Tang himself fled, taking with him two telegraphists and about 20–30 personal bodyguards, “running like a rat . . . and completely losing contact with his army.” The accusations sharpened: Tang, they said, had faked reports claiming that he had engaged with the enemy, or was going to attack. “But he didn’t even know where his armies were,” Guo’s indictment went on, “so how can he order them to attack? The crime of giving false military information is difficult to forgive.”
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