The Second World War (120 page)

Japanese soldiers took the food of the local population wherever they could, but in the country people often managed to hide theirs cleverly enough to survive. In towns and cities, however, the suffering was worse, as of course it was among their forced labourers and Allied prisoners of war. Japanese officers and soldiers resorted to cannibalism and not just of enemy corpses. Human flesh was regarded as a necessary food source, and ‘hunting parties’ went forth to obtain it. In New Guinea they killed, butchered and ate local people and slave labourers, as well as a number of Australian and American prisoners of war, whom they referred to as ‘
white pigs
’, as opposed to Asian ‘
black pigs
’. They cooked and ate the fleshy parts, the brains and the livers of their victims. Although told by their commanders that they were not allowed to eat their own dead, this did not stop them. On occasions they selected a comrade, especially one who refused to join in eating human meat, or they seized a soldier from another unit. Japanese soldiers later cut off in the Philippines acknowledged that ‘
it was not guerrillas
but our own soldiers of whom we were frightened’.

Japanese requisitions and intervention in farming had already led to famine in parts of south-east Asia, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. Their depredations disrupted agriculture and left little seed grain for the next season. Burma, which had been a great rice bowl for the region, was reduced to subsistence farming by the end of the war. In Indochina the Vichy French authorities, with the approval of their Japanese supervisors, fixed prices and established quotas. But then the Japanese Imperial Army would move from village to village and seize everything before the French officials arrived.

In the north of Indochina, the situation had become even more disastrous because farmers had been forced to plant jute, and with almost all the shipping seized by the Japanese they had no way of obtaining rice from the south. The consequent famine which the Tonkin peasantry suffered in 1944 and 1945 killed more than two million people. The Japanese had no intention of helping the region, mainly because of the growth in support there for the Communist Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh. They were aided and armed–ironically, with the perspective of later decades–by the American OSS. Roosevelt, with Stalin’s agreement at the Teheran conference, had decided not to allow the French to take back their colony, but this policy died with the President himself just before the end of the war in Europe.

The Japanese regime, dominated by the military, had banked on Germany winning the war in Europe and on America lacking the stomach for a real fight. With an astounding lack of imagination, Japanese leaders thought that they could still arrange favourable peace terms in spite of American outrage over Pearl Harbor. These fatal miscalculations became compounded by the inflexibility of the Japanese military hierarchy. While Japanese commanders rejected innovation, the American forces, with intelligent and dynamic men mobilized from all walks of life, learned very quickly, both technologically and tactically. Above all, the galvanization of military industry in the United States produced an overwhelming arsenal with nearly a hundred aircraft carriers at sea by the end of 1944.

Some historians have argued that, because Japan’s losses in merchant shipping were so catastrophic, its large army on the Chinese mainland could never have been redeployed to face Allied forces elsewhere, so the question of whether or not Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were holding them down was irrelevant. In fact some ground troops and much of the naval aviation were redeployed, but this school of thought still feels that all support to China was completely wasted. This argument overlooks the point that without the earlier resistance of the Chinese armies, and their persistence in staying in the war, Japanese forces elsewhere could have been much stronger.

The Japanese Ichig
Offensive, which had begun in April 1944, appeared to bear out the most pessimistic opinions of Nationalist fighting abilities. Even Chiang’s own officers despaired.
‘We got the order to retreat
,’ recorded a captain. ‘A mass of men, horses, carts, was streaming back. It was a shambles. I suddenly saw Huang Chi-hsiang, our general, hurrying past us on a horse, wearing pyjamas and only one boot. It seemed so shockingly undignified. If generals were running away, why should ordinary soldiers stay and fight? The Japanese were sending in tanks, and we had nothing to fight tanks with.’

All the contradictions of US policy, which had tried to make maximum use of China with minimum support, had come together in a counterproductive crescendo. Having focused almost exclusively on Burma to open the road, and concentrated the rearming and training programme on the Nationalist divisions deployed there, Stilwell had achieved little for Chiang Kai-shek’s armies facing the Japanese in China itself. As the Americans themselves knew only too well, these troops were too weak from malnutrition to be able to fight, even if they received the right weapons. So it was unfair to blame them for failing to defend the American air bases, especially since American bombing raids on the home islands and other targets had provoked the Japanese response in the first place. And Roosevelt did not want the B-29s diverted to help Chinese troops on the
ground. The only exception came in November and December when the Superfortresses devastated Japanese supply depots in Hankow.

There were occasions when Chinese troops fought well. At Heng-yang, the surrounded Tenth Army, with good support from Chennault’s fighters and bombers, held back the Japanese for more than six weeks. An American journalist described the troops attempting to relieve the Tenth Army. ‘
One man in three
had a rifle… There was not a single motor, not a truck anywhere in the entire column. There was not a piece of artillery. At rarest intervals pack animals bore part of the burden… The men walked quietly, with the curious bitterness of Chinese soldiers who expect nothing but disaster… their guns were old, their yellow and brown uniforms threadbare. Each carried two grenades tucked in his belt; about the neck of each man was a long blue stocking inflated like a roll of bologna with dry rice kernels, the only field rations. Their feet were broken and puffed above their straw sandals.’ These were the pathetically ill-equipped Allied troops which Washington blamed for failing to stem the largest Japanese ground offensive of the whole war in the Far East.

The loss of Heng-yang on 8 August meant that the way was open to the other American air bases at Kweilin and Liuchow. Relations were not just strained to breaking point between Americans and the generalissimo. Chennault blamed Stilwell for having refused to listen to warnings of the Ichig
Offensive, while Stilwell blamed Chennault for causing it in the first place and for having taken the bulk of the supplies sent over the Hump, so that virtually none had gone to Chinese ground forces. Certainly Chen-nault’s earlier claims that his Fourteenth Air Force could defeat a Japanese advance now looked hollow. Stilwell wanted Chennault sacked, but Marshall refused. He and General Arnold also refused Chennault’s request that he should receive all the supplies sent to the B-29 Superfortress bomber command.

Roosevelt’s administration and the American press, which in 1941 had idealized Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist regime’s resistance to Japan, now turned against them with an exaggerated disgust. A failure to understand the fundamental problems along with their undoubted flaws produced another contradiction in US policy. Stilwell, the State Department and the OSS, in their exasperation with Chiang and the Nationalists, began to idealize Mao Tse-tung and the Communists.

In July, Roosevelt had told Chiang to appoint Stilwell commander-in-chief of all Chinese forces, including the Communists. The generalissimo had no intention of doing anything of the sort, especially if the Americans were thinking of arming the Communists, but he could only play for time. A straight refusal risked losing economic and military aid. The Ichig
Offensive, while devastating to Nationalist armies, had greatly helped the
Communists, because most of the Japanese forces involved had come from northern China and Manchuria. The Communists then profited from the Nationalists’ defeats by moving forces south into areas that the Nationalists had had to abandon.

The Americans, in a doomed attempt to make both sides co-operate, demanded the right to send a fact-finding group to Mao Tse-tung’s headquarters in Yenan. The ‘Dixie Mission’ arrived in July and was favour-ably impressed, as Mao intended them to be. Severely limited in what they could see and whom they could speak to freely, they had no idea of Mao’s determination to destroy the Nationalists completely, nor of the savage purges, ‘
rooting out traitors
within the [Chinese Communist Party] and enforcing Maoist ideology throughout the party ranks’. A reign of terror was established by mass rallies where suspects were denounced, with slogans and insults screamed at them. Confessions were extracted through physical and psychological torture and brainwashing. Mao’s regime, with its obsessive use of thought control and ‘self-criticism’, proved even more totalitarian than Stalinism. Mao did not use a secret police. Ordinary citizens were compelled to take part in the witch-hunts, torture and murder of alleged traitors. And
Mao’s personality cult
exceeded that of Stalin.

Communist cadres and military commanders were terrified of making a mistake. Now that the war was starting to develop away from purely guerrilla actions, they were afraid of being accused of contravening Maoist ideology, which had condemned conventional warfare ever since the disastrous Battle of the Hundred Regiments. Mao remained reluctant to risk forces which he wanted to conserve for fighting the Nationalists later, even though they were growing rapidly. By the end of 1944, the Chinese Communists increased their regular formations to a strength of 900,000 while their local forces of peasant militia were around 2.5 million strong.

The situation in China became so desperate during the Ichig
Offensive that Chiang wanted to bring back the divisions of Y-Force on the Salween front to help stem the Japanese advance. As this was at a critical moment in the Burma campaign, Roosevelt, Marshall and Stilwell were outraged, yet they still refused to acknowledge their responsibility for the Nationalists’ desperate plight. Marshall drafted a very strong note which was tantamount to an ultimatum, instructing the generalissimo to make Stilwell commander-in-chief immediately and to reinforce the Salween front.