China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (22 page)

Davies draws a verbal portrait of the three top leaders, sitting on stools and talking for two or three hours in Zhou Enlai’s cave. Mao was obviously the leader, the authority, the first among equals in Yenan, “big and plump with a round, bland, almost feminine face.” Davies spoke of “the incandescence of his personality” and the “immense, smooth calm and sureness to him.” This description is so strikingly similar to
Henry Kissinger’s twenty-two years later, when he met Mao not in a cave but in the inner recesses of a new imperial city. In Kissinger’s description, Mao “
dominated the room—not by the pomp that in most states confers a degree of majesty on the leaders, but by exuding in almost tangible form the overwhelming drive to prevail.”

Zhou Enlai, who spent his life as Mao’s number two, impressed Davies with his “mobility, his anger, his earnestness, and his amusement fully set forth in his face,” while “Old Zhu,” as he called Zhu De, was “the shambling, slow, shrewd peasant.”

Members of the Dixie Mission were taken on foot or horseback from Yenan headquarters to the front on expeditions lasting weeks or even months. Among them was
Raymond P. Ludden, one of the Chinese-language officers who had socialized with Snow in Beijing a few years before and who, like Davies, was now assigned to Stilwell’s command. Ludden spent four months traveling through Shaanxi province, observing the Communists’ administration of villages that were theoretically under Japanese control.
His conclusion was that the Communists had the support of the local population, that they had done a good job mobilizing the peasants, and that the Communist leadership was “the most realistic, well-knit, and tough-minded group in China.”

One important reason
for the American impulse to like the Communists was illustrated by the experience of a thirty-year-old American pilot,
George Varoff, and the ten crew members of a B-29 Superfortress bomber that took off from Shaanxi province on December 7, 1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor, to bomb Japanese targets in Mukden in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Varoff had been a track star back home, the world record holder in the pole vault for a time, having jumped fourteen feet four and five-eighths inches at a 1936 meet in Princeton, New Jersey, so his situation attracted attention in the newspapers.
On January 3, 1945, The New York Times reported him missing in action. Two weeks later, the paper announced that Varoff was safe and had been returned to his air base in China. The paper provided no details about what had happened to him or how he had been rescued, because that information involved a network run by the Chinese Communists and their American friends that had to be kept secret.

Varoff’s mission had been to hit an arsenal and airplane factory in Mukden, but at twenty-two thousand feet his B-29, which was the most potent bomber in the American airborne arsenal of the time, was so cold that ice built up on the cockpit windows, making it difficult for Varoff to follow the lead plane in his formation. His aircraft’s tail gun, manned by Sergeant John P. Quinlan, failed to function. As he neared the target, Japanese fighters attacked from all directions, streaking through the American formation and pursuing the American planes that had dropped their bombs. Varoff’s plane was hit, forcing him to turn back toward Shaanxi. Two other planes from the American formation peeled away from the rest of the convoy to serve as escorts.

Varoff descended to twenty-four hundred feet in an effort to keep his engine running as slowly as possible, but when it became clear that he wasn’t going to make it, he ordered the entire crew to bail out, and then he jumped himself. Buffeted by the cold, heavy winds as he dropped, straining to pull his parachute’s shrouds so he could maneuver to land in a valley, he watched as his plane crashed into a mountain peak in a ball of fire. The two escort planes circled overhead, marking the position of the downed Americans before they turned west toward base. Varoff fell into the side of a rugged hill and lost consciousness when his head hit a rock. He woke up to find the snow stained by his blood.

The odds of survival for Varoff and his crew were not good. The eleven Americans, scattered by heavy winds across several of the region’s rugged mountains, were in Hebei province, which was controlled by Japanese troops who, having seen the planes, would start searching for them right away, and who would surely execute any Americans they captured. But within minutes of the B-29’s crash, Chinese peasants were combing the several square miles of forest and crag trying to reach the downed American airmen first. Whole mountainsides were speckled with the light of torches as the search went on through the night, and within two days, the Chinese had found all eleven airmen and brought them to a Chinese Communist guerrilla outpost belonging to what the Americans called the
Balu
s, for
Balujun
, or Eighth Route Army. Two
of the Americans were badly injured and had to be carried to shelter on the backs of peasants. One,
William Wood, who operated the plane’s radar, was knocked unconscious when he landed, and when he came to, he saw that local people had already carried him to a dwelling.

The
Balus
fed the Americans, tended to their wounds, and assured them that they would be escorted to safety. For more than a month, they moved the airmen from one location to another, keeping them out of the hands of the Japanese, and, as the Americans later reported, treating them as heroes. Chinese peasants scavenged for eggs, peanuts, and fruit and gave them to the flyboys. Banquets were held for them by the villagers who harbored them, all under the threat of discovery and retaliation by the Japanese, who were looking for them. The
Balu
s sent word up the chain of command that they had custody of the airmen, and American military officials were informed of their whereabouts. After several weeks of constant moving about, the Communists carved a runway out of a stretch of isolated mountain road and an American plane was able to land. On a cold winter day in January of the new year, the men of the
Balujun
watched as the captured Americans met the Americans who arrived in the rescue plane and then flew them back to their base.

In all, about sixty downed American airmen were saved in this way, some by the Nationalists but most by the Communists, who had the more extensive network behind Japanese lines and were estimated to have suffered some six hundred fatalities fighting off Japanese troops in these rescue operations. Saving American airmen involved great bravery by the ordinary Chinese like those who combed the mountains of Hebei looking for Varoff and his crew, because they surely knew the Japanese would have had no hesitation in executing anybody they caught doing so. Wartime censorship kept these rescue operations from being known to the American public, but the members of the Dixie Mission certainly knew about them, and they were just the sort of thing to promote an atmosphere of common purpose and good feeling.

While Barrett was in Yenan, he witnessed the return of one
John Baglio. After going down not far from Beijing, Baglio was guided by a local farmer to the
Balu
s, who passed him safely from one area to another on a thousand-mile trek, giving him a party at every stop, until he arrived in Yenan. Barrett noted that “Baglio was one American who couldn’t have cared less about the political beliefs of the Chinese Communists.
All he knew was that they had saved him.”

The next time American pilots bailed out into the hands of
Communist troops was in Korea about five years later, and the reception this time was imprisonment and torture, which makes the level of wartime cooperation all the more amazing and the decline of the relationship into enmity all the more shocking and costly.

These rescues did not happen spontaneously. They were the product of close coordination between one of the members of the Dixie Mission, First Lieutenant
Henry S. Whittlesley, born and raised in China, and the representative of the Air-Ground Aid Service in Yenan, and his counterparts in the Eighth Route Army. Whittlesley, who died in 1945 in a Japanese ambush (the Communists named one of their airfields after him), collected information on the best places for American fliers to bail out—meaning the places where the Communist guerrilla presence was strongest—and that information was passed along to pilots in their briefings.

The Americans carried “blood chits” in their bags, pieces of cloth inscribed with Chinese characters that identified them as friends and asked for help. They packed “pointy-talkies,” bilingual phrase books that enabled either side to communicate by pointing to phrases in their own language. Those men with a bit of linguistic aptitude learned a few Chinese phrases, like
Meiguo Feidi
, American flier, and
Balujun
. All of these devices were put to good use by Varoff and his crew on the day they parachuted into Hebei, Varoff’s first words to the first Chinese he encountered being
Meiguo Feidi
and
Balujun
. It was this sort of cooperation that fed the mood of goodwill, along with the bracing clean air and the sense of a new type of person emerging from the revolutionary cauldron, all in great contrast to steamy, ruined Chungking with its reek of pretention, corruption, and incompetence. Years later, Barrett summed it all up in a single crisp sentence: “The Chinese Communists are
our bitter enemies now, but they were certainly ‘good guys’ then, particularly to the airmen who received their help.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dark Side

A
merican and other foreign visitors to Yenan met many people. They interviewed Japanese prisoners who had been captured by the
Eighth Route Army, treated well, and persuaded to join the
Japanese People’s Emancipation League, which called for the overthrow of the militarists in Tokyo. They met
George Hatem, a Swiss-educated American doctor who had thrown in his lot with the
CCP years before and was in charge of Yenan’s hospitals. Hatem had escorted
Edgar Snow to Bao-an for Snow’s famous expedition to the Communist base area, and now he served as a kind of friend to subsequent American visitors. A couple of Soviet journalists (actually intelligence agents) were at Yenan, and if the Americans weren’t exactly friendly with them (they kept to themselves), they knew they were there. They had more contact with
Michael Lindsay, a radio expert working for the Chinese Communists in Yenan whom everybody believed to be a British spy.

One person the Americans did not meet was
Wang Shiwei, a thirty-seven-year-old literary figure; the translator of Engels and Trotsky as well as of works by Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Hardy and one of thousands of idealistic Chinese who, inspired by tales of the revolutionaries’ heroic anti-Japanese exploits, and by Mao’s welcome to the “patriotic bourgeoisie” and “intellectuals,” had traveled to Yenan to join up. These people, including well-known artists, writers, and scholars exhilarated by the idea of a new China rising out of the ashes of the war, did not simply show up at Yenan and get accepted into the revolution. The chief Chinese scholar of the Yenan experience,
Gao Hua, a Nanjing University historian, has described the careful organization and process of interrogations by which new arrivals were screened for
membership in the Maoist revolution.
To gain access to Yenan at all,
newcomers had to have letters of recommendation obtained from the underground CCP organizations in China’s major cities. The bearers of these letters were kept in interrogation centers outside Yenan and only admitted into the inner sanctum when they had been properly vetted. From there, to get a taste of the Spartan hardship that awaited them, they were expected to walk to Yenan, a distance of about three hundred miles, which took nine or ten days. Once in Yenan, the new recruit underwent further questioning until, finally, he or she was assigned a job by the Central Organization Department.

Wang Shiwei was one of these young intellectuals, though older than most of them. He was from Shanghai and a veteran of the CCP, having joined the party in 1926. He arrived in Yenan in the very early days after the Communists’ arrival there, in 1936, and was assigned, as befits a budding theoretician, to do research in the Academy for Marxist-Leninist Studies. He was, by the accounts of those who knew him, a poetic and passionate individual who wrote essays about “
how bloodthirsty and evil and filthy and dark old China was.” But he was also disillusioned by some aspects of the Yenan adventure, and his disillusionment was shared by many others who, during their time in China’s revolutionary headquarters, had firsthand experience of the gap between the seductive theory of the place and the realities of naked privilege and power.