The Second World War (14 page)

In northern China, the Japanese experienced some setbacks almost entirely at the hands of Nationalist troops. Communist forces from the Eighth Route Army, who claimed to be able to march more than a hundred kilometres in a day, were kept out of the worst of the fighting on Mao’s strict orders. But by the end of the year the Kwantung Army controlled the towns of Chahar and Suiyuan provinces and the northern part of Shansi. South of Peking they seized the province of Shantung and its capital with ease, largely due to the cowardice of the regional commander, General Han Fu-chu.

General Han, who had fled in an aeroplane, taking with him the contents of the local treasury and a silver coffin, was arrested by the Nationalists and sentenced to death. He was made to kneel and then a fellow general shot him through the head. This warning to commanders was widely acclaimed by all parties and contributed greatly to Chinese unity. The Japanese were increasingly dismayed to find how determined the Chinese were to fight on, even after losing their capital and almost all their air force. And they were exasperated by the way the Chinese managed, after the Battle of Shanghai, to avoid the sort of decisive engagement which would destroy them.

In January 1938, the Japanese began to advance north up the railway line from Nanking towards Suchow, a major communications centre and of great strategic value since it was linked to a port on the east coast and lay astride the railway line to the west. If Suchow fell, then the great industrial agglomeration of Wuchang and Hankow (today’s Wuhan) would be vulnerable. As in the Russian Civil War, railway lines in China were of immense importance for the movement and supply of armies. Chiang Kaishek, who had long known that Suchow would represent a key objective in a Japanese invasion, assembled some 400,000 troops in the region, a mixture of Nationalist divisions and those of warlord allies.

The generalissimo was well aware of the importance of the coming
battles. The conflict in China had attracted many foreign journalists and was seen as a counterpart to the Spanish Civil War. Some of the same writers, photographers and film-makers who had been in Spain–Robert Capa, Joris Ivens, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood–arrived to witness and record Chinese resistance to the Japanese onslaught. The forthcoming defence of Wuchang was compared to the Republican defence of Madrid against Franco’s Army of Africa in the autumn of 1936. Doctors who had treated Spanish Republican wounded soon began to arrive to help Nationalist and Communist forces in China. The most notable was the Canadian surgeon Dr Norman Bethune, who died in China from blood poisoning.

Stalin also saw certain parallels with the Spanish Civil War, but Chiang was misled by his representative in Moscow, who was far too optimistic in his belief that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan. While the fighting continued, Chiang opened indirect negotiations with the Japanese through the German ambassador partly in a bid to force Stalin’s hand, but their terms were too harsh. Stalin, presumably well briefed by one of his agents, knew that the Nationalists could not possibly accept them.

In February, Japanese divisions of the 2nd Army coming from the north crossed the Yellow River to encircle the Chinese formations. By the end of March, the Japanese had entered the city of Suchow, where furious fighting continued for several days. The Chinese had few weapons to deal with Japanese tanks, but Soviet armament had begun to arrive, and counterattacks were made sixty kilometres to the east at Taierchuang, where the Nationalists claimed a great victory. The Japanese rushed in reinforcements from Japan and Manchuria. On 17 May, they believed that they had trapped the bulk of the Chinese divisions, but, splitting into small groups, 200,000 Nationalist troops escaped the encirclement. Suchow was finally lost on 21 May and 30,000 prisoners taken.

In July, the first major border clash between the Japanese and the Red Army took place at Lake Khasan. Again the Nationalists hoped that the Soviet Union would enter the war, but their expectations were dashed. Stalin even tacitly recognized Japanese control of Manchuria. With Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia, he was deeply concerned about the German threat in the west. But Stalin did begin to send military advisers to the Nationalists. The first had arrived in June, just before the departure of General von Falkenhausen and his team, who had been ordered back to Germany by Göring.

The Japanese then planned to attack Wuchang and Hankow, as Chiang had feared. They also decided to set up their own Chinese puppet government. To slow the enemy advance, Chiang Kai-shek gave orders for the Yellow River dikes to be breached, or, in the words of the high command decision, to ‘
use water as a substitute
for soldiers’. This drowned-earth
policy delayed the Japanese by about five months, but the destruction and civilian deaths that it caused over 70,000 square kilometres were horrific. There was no high ground on which people could seek shelter. The official death toll from drowning, starvation and illness reached 800,000, while more than six million people became refugees.

Once the ground was finally dry enough to take their vehicles the Japanese resumed their advance on Wuchang and Hankow, with Imperial Navy forces operating on the Yangtze, and the 11th Army either side following both the north and the south bank. The Yangtze became a vital supply line for their forces, immune to guerrilla attack.

The Nationalists had by then received some 500 Soviet aircraft and 150 ‘volunteer’
Red Army pilots
, but since they served for only a three-month tour they were gone as soon as they had gained vital experience. Between 150 and 200 served at a time, and altogether 2,000 of them flew in China. They had mounted a successful ambush on 29 April 1938, when they correctly guessed that the Japanese would launch a large raid on Wuchang for the Emperor Hirohito’s birthday, but overall the Imperial Japanese Navy pilots imposed their superiority in central and southern China. Chinese pilots, despite flying unsuitable aircraft, tended to go for spectacular attacks on warships which led to their own destruction.

In July, the Japanese bombed the river port of Kiukiang, almost certainly using chemical weapons which they euphemistically called ‘special smoke’. On 26 July, when the town fell, the Namita Detachment carried out another terrible massacre of civilians. But in the intense heat the 11th Army advance slowed, due to the bitter resistance of Chinese forces and large numbers of Japanese soldiers succumbing to malaria and cholera. This gave the Chinese time to dismantle factories and ship them up the Yangtze towards Chungking. On 21 October, the Japanese 21st Army captured the great port of Canton on the south coast in an amphibious operation. Four days later the 6th Division of the 11th Army entered Wuchang as the Chinese forces withdrew.

Chiang Kai-shek railed at the deficiencies in staff work, liaison, intelligence and communications. Divisional headquarters tried to avoid orders from higher command to attack. There was never any defence in depth, just a single line of trenches which could easily be broken, and reserves were seldom deployed in the right place. But the next disaster was largely the fault of Chiang himself.

After the fall of Wuchang, the city of Changsha appeared vulnerable. Japanese aircraft bombed it on 8 November. The next day, Chiang ordered that the town should be prepared for demolition by fire in case the Japanese broke through. He gave the example of the Russians destroying Moscow in 1812. Three days later completely mistaken rumours spread
that the Japanese were about to arrive, and in the early hours of 13 November the city was set ablaze. Changsha burned for three days. Two-thirds of the city including the warehouses filled with rice and grain were utterly destroyed. Twenty thousand people died, including all the wounded soldiers, and 200,000 were made homeless.

In spite of its victories, the Imperial Japanese Army was far from complacent. Its commanders knew that they had failed to deliver a knockout blow. Their supply lines were over-extended and vulnerable. And they were only too conscious of Soviet military support for the Nationalists, with Red Army pilots now shooting down many of their planes. The Japanese wondered uneasily what Stalin might be planning. These concerns prompted them in November to propose a general withdrawal of their forces to behind the Great Wall in the north, providing that the Nationalists changed their government, conceded Japan’s right to Manchuria, allowed the Japanese exploitation of their resources and agreed to form a joint front against the Communists. Chiang’s rival, Wang Ching-wei, left for Indochina in December and made contact with the Japanese authorities in Shanghai. He felt that, as the leader of the peace faction within the Kuomintang, he was their obvious candidate to replace Chiang. But few politicians followed him when he left to join the enemy. Chiang’s powerful appeal to national redemption won out.

The Japanese, having abandoned a strategy of shock attack to obtain a rapid victory, now followed a more cautious path. With war in Europe approaching, they suspected that they would soon have to redeploy part of their vast forces in China on other fronts. They also believed, rather obtusely after the atrocities their troops had committed, that they could win over the Chinese population. So although the Nationalist forces and Chinese civilians continued to suffer huge casualties–some twenty million Chinese would die before the war ended in 1945–the Japanese turned to smaller-scale operations, mainly suppressing guerrilla groups in their rear.

The Communists recruited large numbers of local civilians into their guerrilla militias, such as the New Fourth Army along the valley of the central Yangtze. Many of these peasant partisans were armed with little more than farm implements or bamboo spears. But following the
Central Committee plenum in October 1938
, Mao’s policy was strict. Communist forces were not to fight the Japanese, unless attacked. They were to conserve their strength for seizing territory from the Nationalists. Mao made clear that Chiang Kai-shek was their ultimate opponent, their ‘enemy No.1’.

Japanese raids into the countryside used massacre and mass rape as a weapon of terror. Japanese soldiers began by killing any young men in a village. ‘
They roped them together
and then split their heads open with
swords.’ Then they turned their attention to the women. Corporal Nakamura wrote in his diary in September 1938 of a raid on Lukuochen, south of Nanking: ‘
We seized the village
and searched every house. We tried to capture the most interesting girls. The chase lasted for two hours. Niura shot one to death because it was her first time and she was ugly and was despised by the rest of us.’ Both the rape of Nanking and countless local atrocities provoked a patriotic anger among the peasantry unimaginable before the war when they had had little idea of Japan or even China as a nation.

The next major battle did not take place until March 1939, when the Japanese moved large forces into Kiangsi province to attack its capital of Nan-chang. Chinese resistance was fierce, despite the Japanese using poison gas again. On 27 March the city fell after house-to-house fighting. Hundreds of thousands more refugees moved westwards, bent under the heavy bundles on their backs, or pushing wooden wheelbarrows with their worldly possessions–quilts, tools and rice bowls. The hair of their women folk was matted with dust, and the old ones had to hobble painfully on their bound feet.

The generalissimo ordered a counter-attack to recapture Nanchang. This took the Japanese by surprise and the
Nationalists
fought their way into the town in late April, but the effort was too much. Chiang Kai-shek, having threatened commanders with death if the city was not taken, then had to agree to a withdrawal.

Soon after the Soviet–Japanese clashes in May on the Khalkhin Gol, which prompted Stalin to send Zhukov there as commander, the chief Soviet military adviser with Chiang Kai-shek urged him to launch a major counter-offensive to retake the city of Wuchang. Stalin misled Chiang with the idea that he was about to conclude an agreement with the British, when in fact he was already moving towards an arrangement with Nazi Germany. But Chiang stalled, suspecting rightly that Stalin simply wanted pressure to be taken off the Soviet border regions. The Nationalists were alarmed by Communist expansion and by Stalin’s increasing support for Mao. Yet Chiang calculated that Stalin’s main aim was to keep the Kuomintang in the war against Japan, so he felt he could resist the encroachment of Communist forces. This led to many murderous engagements, in which according to Chinese Communist figures over 11,000 people were killed.

Although Changsha had been half destroyed by the tragic fire, the Japanese were still determined to capture the town because of its strategic position. Changsha was an obvious target as it lay on the railway line between Canton and Wuchang, both of which were now occupied by
strong Japanese forces. Its capture would seal off the Nationalists in their western stronghold of Szechuan. The Japanese launched their attack in August, at the same time as their comrades in the Kwantung Army were fighting General Zhukov’s forces far to the north.

On 13 September, while German forces advanced deep into Poland, the Japanese advanced on Changsha with 120,000 men in six divisions. The Nationalist plan was to withdraw slowly at first in a fighting retreat, then to allow the Japanese to advance rapidly to the city, before striking with an unexpected counter-attack on their flanks. Chiang Kai-shek had already noted the Japanese tendency to over-extend themselves. Rival generals, keen to gain glory, pushed on without taking account of neigh-bouring formations. His programme of training since the loss of Wuchang had had an effect, and the ambush worked. The Chinese claimed to have inflicted 40,000 casualties on the Japanese.

Stalin’s main priority that August while Zhukov was winning the Battle of Khalkhin Gol was to avoid broadening the conflict with Japan while he began secret negotiations with Germany. Yet the announcement of the Nazi–Soviet pact shook the Japanese leadership to the core. They found it almost impossible to believe that their German ally could come to an agreement with the Communist devil. At the same time, Stalin’s refusal to fight the Japanese after Zhukov’s victory was naturally a major blow to the Nationalists. The ceasefire agreement on the Mongolian and Siberian borders allowed the Japanese to concentrate on fighting the Chinese without having to look over their shoulder to the Soviet north.