China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (15 page)

While on her journey westward, Liu discovered that she was pregnant. She and her mother and brother, along with the two brothers they had met on the way, would walk for a day, then her mother and their traveling companions would find work for a few days to get food for the trip ahead. It took a year to get to Chungking. Liu gave birth to a child who was in poor health from the beginning and died when Liu, running for the cover of some trees during a Japanese bombardment, fell.

“
We dug a hole in a field and buried him and moved on with our journey,” she said many years later. “My heart was broken. Even today I do not know where he was buried.”

When the group arrived in Chungking, Liu married the older brother, who turned out to be a drinker and a philanderer. He frequented brothels. He brought girls home and demanded that his wife cook for them. Eventually her husband left for good, and Liu got a job teaching in the elementary school of the War Relief Bureau in Chungking. Her mother and she did washing and cleaning jobs. The principal at her school helped himself to part of her salary. She had another child, a daughter, who fell ill with pneumonia, but there was no money for medicine, and “
she died in my arms.”

In April 1944,
having failed to
force a Chinese surrender and facing the likelihood that the United States would use Chinese territory for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, Japan brought the period of stalemate to an end, launching the
Ichigo campaign to secure the provinces of Henan, Hunan, and Guangxi. This was the second period of prolonged and intense fighting of the eight-year war as the Japanese attempted to achieve two goals. One was to open a land route to Indochina, which Japan had seized in 1940, in order to move troops and supplies on the rail lines from Haiphong harbor all the way to Manchuria and then by ship to Japan itself. The second was to destroy the numerous airfields used by the American 14th Air Force to bomb Japanese targets both in occupied China and in the Pacific. It was in this campaign that
Changsha was finally taken.

The Ichigo campaign has never received much attention in the West, in large part because it came simultaneously with other important engagements in the war, including the Allied landings in Normandy.
Still, stretching out over the entire second half of 1944, it was the single largest Japanese offensive of the war, involving half a million men in seventeen divisions, some of them moved from Manchuria and the Japanese home islands. On the Chinese side were an equal number of men, many of them, as always, malnourished and underequipped and fighting with their usual inconsistency, running away at times, standing and dying at others.

The destruction and dislocation that ensued from Ichigo were terrible, and the casualty totals astronomical. Refugees choked the roads. The Japanese, hampered by their overextended supply lines and the harassment of the American bombers, were forced to live off the land, looting what they could, shooting or bayoneting those who resisted. Cities that had been bombed in 1938 and 1939 but then more or less left alone in the interim were bombed again. Guilin, the site of a major American air base, was burned to the ground and essentially depopulated, while, as we have seen, Changsha, the largest city of Hunan province, was left a depopulated ruin.

“
I watched every disaster that struck Guilin with a heart of hatred,” the Chinese novelist Ba Jin wrote in a wartime diary.

Simply to endure
, to keep the hatred alive, was already a victory of sorts, at least a kind of redemption. But to fight back was better, and the group that was perceived to be doing so most bravely and tenaciously would win the admiration of China’s people. Chiang did fight back far more than many American observers and subsequent historians have realized. What was often more visible to these observers, who were not allowed to go to the front, was the nonmilitary resistance. Unoccupied China was the scene of posters, marching students singing patriotic songs, propaganda movies calling on the people to endure. Chiang made frequent speeches that were duly reported in the press; his glamorous wife,
Soong Mei-ling, traveled the world, especially the United States, advertising China’s brave resistance and lobbying for help. The newspapers and official government press office reports were laden with accounts of victories won by China and ruinous losses suffered by Japan.

As we’ll see, there was an irony in this. The government’s claims were propagandistic exaggerations, which came to be widely disbelieved. But actually the government resisted far more than the Communists, who resisted very little and whose losses were a small fraction of those suffered by the KMT’s forces. And yet, both at home and abroad, Chiang came to be perceived less and less as a heroic fighter. More and more, it came to be the Communists who were deemed to be waging the good fight, the main force of Chinese resistance. While China’s misery eroded the prestige and legitimacy of Chiang and his government, the Communists were able to turn it to their advantage.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mao, Zhou, and the Americans

O
n July 22, 19
44, eight American diplomats, soldiers, and spies boarded a United States Air Force C-47 cargo plane in the wartime capital of Chungking and flew to the Communists’ headquarters at Yenan. The route was almost due north over the six hundred miles that separated one political and geographical China from another, over the semitropical green mountains and terraced rice fields of Sichuan province to the ancient Chinese capital of Xian. The Americans made a brief stop there before proceeding across the Yellow River, a broad, corrugated band more mud brown than yellow. To the south was government territory; east was the Japanese-occupied puppet state officially known, like the government-controlled China, as the Republic of China. About two hundred miles due north was Yenan, which one American visitor around that time described as an “eroded, lumpish plateau” where the Communists, having barely survived their
Long March, had established their base area almost a decade before.

As the plane approached, a whitish nine-story Ming dynasty pagoda, famous as a Yenan landmark, loomed up on a nearby brown and treeless hill. A large crowd, some of its members giving hand signals to tell the pilot where to land, became visible on a field below. The plane descended close to the face of some cliffs “
in which were dug caves where the Yenan elite snugly resided, safe from enemy bombing.”

Disaster almost struck after the C-47 landed on the grassy runway. One of its wheels sunk into an old grave, causing the aircraft to dip to the left. The still-turning propeller hit the ground and separated from its shaft, causing it to shear through the fuselage at the front of the plane, narrowly missing the pilot. After a bit of confused milling about by passengers and bystanders, Zhou Enlai, the urbane external face of
Chinese Communism, strode across the field and shook hands with the head of the delegation, Colonel David Barrett, a tall, stout, genial former military attaché who had spent the better part of the previous decade in China and spoke Chinese well.

A half dozen or so of the American group worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was eager to get information about the Communist movement but also information from the Communists about the occupying Japanese army and the forces of the Chinese puppet government.
Among these agents was the former
Wall Street Journal
reporter
Raymond Cromley, who had been stationed in Japan and was an expert on Japan’s military. There was
Charles Stelle, a veteran of a guerrilla commando squad who had seen action in Burma and who would choose Japanese targets in North China.
Another recruit, Brooke Dolan, had traveled widely in China and Tibet on bird-collecting expeditions sponsored by the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and was deemed familiar with the Communist-dominated areas.

The ranking civilian was thirty-six-year-old John Stewart Service, who, like his friend John Paton Davies, the political adviser to Stilwell, had been born in China of missionary parents. Service was smart, articulate, sophisticated, good-looking in a very American, Jimmy Stewart sort of way, and one of a group of extremely bright and brave young Chinese-speaking Foreign Service officers whose fates came to be bound up in the treacherous domestic politics of China and America.

The welcome was warm, as could be expected of people who had waited a long time for the arrival of a group of desired guests. The Communists had been trying for years to establish their own relationship with the United States. Zhou Enlai had suggested that a delegation be sent to Yenan in 1943, and Davies had officially proposed exactly that to the State Department. “
With the Chinese Communists looking so ominously on the horizon, the American Government was urgently in need of first-hand information about and contact with them,” Davies wrote later.

And it was certainly true that, aside from the cordial exchanges between Americans and the Communist representatives in Chungking—Zhou and his aides—the American government had had almost no direct knowledge of a movement that, by early 1944, controlled an area with a population of nearly 100 million people. Were the Communists really fighting the Japanese, as they claimed? Were they
ideologues subservient to Moscow and bent on world domination, as the Kuomintang insisted, or were they nationalists whose social and political program, as Stilwell believed, went no further than some benign land reform?