The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  The generalissimo would not have been pleased to learn that Gellhorn had been bowled over by the Communist representative in Chungking, Chou En-lai. Hemingway, on the other hand, showed that he was not as uncritical of the Communists as he had been in Spain. He was well aware of the effectiveness of their propaganda, and how Communist supporters such as Edgar Snow had managed to persuade readers in the United States that Mao’s forces were fighting hard while the corrupt Nationalists were doing little, when in fact the opposite was true.

  Corruption there certainly was in Nationalist China, but it varied from army to army and officer to officer. Old-style staff officers in the Fiftieth Army used military trucks to bring opium from Szechuan to sell in the Yangtze valley, but not all Nationalist officers followed traditional war-lord behaviour. While some profited shamelessly from the theft and sale of their own soldiers’ rations, others, more modern and liberal, dug into their own pockets to buy medical supplies for their men. The Communists soon proved no better. Their production and sale of opium was designed to create a war-chest to fight the Nationalists later. In 1943, the Soviet ambassador estimated Communist opium sales at 44,760 kilos, worth $60 million at the time.

  Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a double-edged development from the Nationalists’ point of view. On the positive side, it meant that Stalin could not afford to be so assertive in his bid to take over the province of Sinkiang. And above all it clarified the battle-lines of the Second World War, putting Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union on the same side against Germany and Japan. On the other hand, it made Stalin even more determined to avoid a clash with Japan. Stalin feared a build-up of Japanese forces in the north and asked the Chinese Communists to launch major guerrilla attacks, but Mao, while signalling assent, did nothing. The only Communist offensive, Operation a Hundred Regiments, had taken place the summer before. Mao had been furious, since it had helped the Nationalists when they were hard pressed, and although it caused severe damage to railways and mines, Communist casualties had been heavy.

  Despite the return of Communist forces to virtual neutrality in the course of 1941, the Japanese commander, General Okamura Yasuji, launched his savage ‘Three All’ anti-partisan drives–‘kill all, burn all, destroy all’–against Communist base areas. Younger men, if they were not slaughtered, were seized for forced labour. Starvation was also used as a weapon. The Japanese burned all the harvest which they could not take for themselves. It has been estimated that the population of Communist base areas fell from forty-four million to twenty-five million during this period.

  To Moscow’s fury, Mao withdrew many of his forces, and split up those still behind Japanese lines. In Soviet eyes, this was a betrayal of ‘proletarian internationalism’ which obliged Communists everywhere to make every sacrifice for the ‘Motherland of the oppressed’. Stalin now knew for certain that Mao was more interested in seizing territory from the Nationalists than in fighting the Japanese. Mao was also doing everything he could to reduce Soviet influence within the Chinese Communist Party.

  Although Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Japan in April and subsequently ceased delivering military supplies to the Nationalists, he still continued to provide them with military advisers. The chief adviser at this time was General Vasily Chuikov, who would later command the 62nd Army in the defence of Stalingrad. Altogether some 1,500 Red Army officers had served in China, obtaining experience and assessing weapons systems there as they had in the Spanish Civil War.

  The British also offered arms and training for Chinese guerrilla detachments. This had been organized by the Special Operations Executive office in Hong Kong, but because its officers began to arm Communist groups in the East River area, Chiang demanded that the programme be stopped. The Americans, meanwhile, had begun to provide assistance. This included the formation of the American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers, commanded by the retired US Army Air Corps officer Claire Chennault, Chiang Kai-shek’s aviation adviser, and equipped with a hundred Curtiss P-40s. They were based in Burma to help protect the road link to south-west China, but the P-40 stood little chance against the Japanese Mitsubishi Zero unless the pilot used special tactics.

  Over China itself, and especially the capital of Chungking, pilots in the tiny Nationalist air force did what they could to break up formations of Japanese bombers. Imperial General Headquarters had been forced to accept in December 1938 that Nationalist Chinese tactics had thwarted any hope of a quick victory. So they resorted to strategic bombing in the hope of destroying the Chinese will to resist. All industrial concerns were targeted but the main objective was the Nationalists’ capital, which was attacked relentlessly with high explosive and incendiaries. The Japanese adopted a strategy of multiple small raids, to keep the city on constant alert and wear down its air defences. Chinese historians refer to the ‘Great Bombing of Chungking’, of which the most intense stage continued from January 1939 until December 1941 when Japanese naval aviation units were redeployed to the Pacific. More than 15,000 Chinese civilians were killed and 20,000 badly injured.

  On 18 September 1941, the Japanese 11th Army launched a fresh offensive against the strategically important city of Changsha with four divisions. The fighting was heavy as the Chinese forces withdrew. As always, the wounded suffered the most in a retreat. A Chinese doctor from Trinidad in the West Indies described one scene, which was sadly typical. ‘A Red Cross ambulance stood on the road surrounded by hundreds of wounded men standing or lying down. It was loaded and the lightly wounded had clambered onto the roof. Some had even crowded into the chauffeur’s seat. The driver was standing in front of them, his arms uplifted, pleading desperately. This was not an uncommon scene. Wounded men would lie down on the highway to prevent the trucks from leaving them behind.’

  During this renewed attempt to encircle Changsha, the Japanese for once suffered more casualties than they inflicted. The Nationalists’ combination of conventional and semi-guerrilla operations was becoming more effective. The plan had been drawn up by General Chuikov. Yet again the Chinese counter-attacked just as the Japanese entered the city. Japanese sources claimed that they pulled back only because of orders from Imperial General Headquarters, while the Chinese hailed a great victory.

  The Chinese, meanwhile, had sent a large force against the important Yangtze river-port of Ichang in an attempt to retake it. On 10 October, they nearly succeeded in crushing the Japanese 13th Division defending the place. ‘The division’s situation was so desperate that the staff prepared to burn regimental flags, destroy secret papers and commit suicide.’ But they were saved just in time by the 39th Division coming to their rescue.

  Both the Nationalist armies and their warlord allies, as well as the Chinese Communists, deliberately fought a long and geographically extended campaign, avoiding major offensives themselves. At times both Nationalists and, especially, the Communists sought local truces with the Japanese. The Imperial Japanese Army, on the other hand, used operations in China as a training ground for newly raised formations. And although China’s continuing resistance to Japan did not alter the outcome of the war in the Far East, it had considerable indirect effects.

  Even by the time the Japanese began the wider Pacific war in December 1941, their China Expeditionary Army was still 680,000 strong. This was four times larger than the total of the Japanese ground forces used to attack the British, Dutch and United States possessions. Also, as several historians have pointed out, the treasury and resources devoted to the Sino-Japanese War since 1937 could have been used to far greater effect in preparation for the Pacific war, particularly the construction of more aircraft carriers. Yet the most important consequence of Chinese resistance, combined with the Soviet victory at Khalkhin Gol, was the Japanese refusal to attack Siberia when the Red Army was at its most vulnerable in the autumn and early winter of 1941. The course of the Second World War might well have been very different had such an attack been launched.

  In Februa
ry 1942, General Marshall selected Major General Joseph Stilwell as the US commander in China and Burma. Stilwell had been the US military attaché in Nanking with the Nationalist government when the War of Resistance against Japan had begun in 1937. He was therefore regarded in Washington as an old China hand. But ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell regarded Chinese officers as lazy, duplicitous, byzantine, inscrutable, unmilitary, corrupt and even stupid. His view remained largely that nineteenth-century one of seeing China as ‘the sick man of Asia’. He seems to have had little understanding of the very real difficulties that Chiang Kai-shek’s regime faced, especially in the problems of food supply, which had forced the withdrawal of many troops to richer agricultural areas simply to prevent them from deserting through hunger.

  Food, as Stilwell refused to acknowledge, was bound to be the Nationalists’ main preoccupation, especially since their areas had been swamped with more than fifty million refugees fleeing Japanese cruelty. After bad harvests and the loss of agricultural areas to the enemy, food prices rose vertiginously. The poor and the refugees starved, and even minor officials struggled to feed their families. The government found it virtually impossible to prevent speculators and officers from holding back grain and rice to make large profits later, even though part of their hoarded stocks rotted. The corruption which Stilwell condemned was very hard to combat.

  The Nationalists’ solution was to tax the peasantry in kind, but this shifted the burden of feeding the vast armies to their shoulders, when they were also conscripted in huge numbers for military labour. Famine soon followed in many regions. Conscription also became harder as a result, with recruiters resorting to force, and ignoring all exemptions. Rations were constantly reduced and by the end of the war inflation made a soldier’s pay for a whole month less than the cost of two cabbages. An extended and ravaged agrarian society in which communications had broken down was bound to find it almost impossible to wage a modern war. The Communists did better in their less populated areas, mainly by imposing ferocious controls at every level. They were also far-sighted in the way they used labour more effectively, and even brought in their troops to help with the harvest. Communist armies also set up their own farms to make them self-sufficient. They thus attracted far more support among poor peasants than the Nationalists. But their great advantage was to be left comparatively undisturbed while the Japanese concentrated their forces against the Nationalists.

  Marshall had also chosen Stilwell because he was utterly committed to the US Army doctrine which emphasized the importance of the offensive. But the Nationalists and their allied armies were simply not in a position to launch effective operations. They lacked the transport to concentrate forces, they lacked air support and they lacked tanks. This was why Chiang Kai-shek had decided even before the war began that their sole chance of survival was a drawn-out war of attrition. Chiang, a realist who knew his country and the limitations of his armies far better than Stilwell, had to put up with constant harangues about his lack of ‘offensive spirit’. Stilwell referred to the generalissimo contemptuously as ‘Peanut’. Chiang, underestimating the American public’s anger with Japan, wrongly feared that the United States might make peace with Tokyo and abandon him. So in his desperate need for its aid he felt that he had to put up with such a disrespectful ally.

  Stilwell also shared the general suspicion of Marshall and his followers that the British were interested only in regaining their empire, and were prepared to manipulate American support to achieve this end. But in his belief that the Japanese could most effectively be defeated in China, Stilwell was entirely alone. This view was completely at odds with Washington’s strategy of encouraging Chiang Kai-shek to tie down large Japanese forces in China while the United States won mastery of the Pacific. Marshall firmly refused Stilwell’s request for an American army corps to spearhead the fighting in China.

  Stilwell’s belief in the primacy of the war in China led him, however, to focus on Burma to secure the Nationalists’ supply line. The British, on the other hand, regarded Chiang Kai-shek’s forces as a means to defend India, and later as an ally to help them recover the lost imperial possessions of Burma and Malaya. Hong Kong would be a much more complex matter, as they knew, because Chiang was set on regaining it for China.

  Despite being partly responsible for the disaster in Burma, Stilwell was depicted as a hero in the American press, which remained woefully ignorant about the war in China. The Nationalists had in fact been effective in their management of the war up until 1941, by managing to balance the needs of the rural economy with the conscription of two million men a year and the necessity of feeding them. But the Japanese offensive from southern Shensi, capturing the communications centre of Ichang on the Yangtze, cut most Nationalist armies off from their food supplies in Szechuan.

  Chiang Kai-shek was displeased that Stilwell, after the long withdrawal in Burma, had retreated into India in 1942 with two of his best divisions. He rightly suspected that Stilwell was trying to build his own independent command, but tolerated it since he was even more concerned that these formations did not come under the control of the British. These two divisions, the 22nd and 38th, were re-equipped with the backlog of Lend–Lease equipment destined for Chiang’s armies in China, and which now could not get through because of the loss of the Burma Road. Only transport planes flying over ‘the Hump’ of the Himalayas could bring in a small amount of supplies. Even more aid intended for the Nationalists was either stockpiled in the USA or given to the British. Stilwell’s control over Lend–Lease supplies was bound to lead to tensions and suspicion in his relations with the generalissimo, whose chief of staff he was supposed to be. Stilwell strongly believed that, as the dispenser of aid, he should use it as a lever to force Chiang to do what he was told.

  The Pacific war, with its emphasis on sea and air power in support of amphibious landings, was very different from the continental war on mainland China. In the Philippines, General MacArthur had held back the bulk of his troops when the Japanese, on 10 December 1941, made small landings on the northern end of the main island of Luzon. He rightly guessed that these were diversionary attacks to split his forces. Two days later, another Japanese landing was made on the south-eastern peninsula of Luzon. The main assault did not come until 22 December, when 43,000 men of the 14th Army landed on beaches 200 kilometres north of Manila.

  The two principal landings indicated the Imperial Japanese Army’s intention to mount a pincer attack on the Philippine capital. In theory, MacArthur commanded a force of 130,000 men, but the vast majority were Philippine reserve units. He had only 31,000 American and Philippine troops on whom he felt able to count. The battle-hardened Japanese troops, with armoured spearheads, were soon pushing his forces back towards Manila Bay. MacArthur put into effect the established contingency plan Orange. This was to withdraw his troops into the Bataan Peninsula on the west side of Manila Bay and hold out there. The island of Corregidor at the mouth of the great inlet could control the entrance with its coastal artillery batteries, and defend the south-eastern end of the fifty-kilometre-long peninsula.

  Lacking sufficient military transport to withdraw his southern forces, MacArthur commandeered Manila’s gaudily painted buses. On the evening of 24 December, accompanied by President Manuel Quezon and his government, MacArthur left the capital by steamer to set up his headquarters on the island fortress of Corregidor, known as ‘the Rock’. Huge oil depots and stores around Manila and in the navy yard were set on fire, sending billowing pillars of black smoke into the sky.

  The withdrawal of the 15,000 American and 65,000 Philippine soldiers to Bataan and its first defence line along the Pampanga River was carried out with difficulty. Many of the Filipino reservists had slipped away to return home, but others took to the hills to continue a guerrilla war against the invaders. Across the bay from Bataan, the Japanese entered Manila on 2 January 1942. MacArthur’s biggest problem was to feed 80,000 soldiers and 26,000 civilian refugees on the peninsula now that the Japan
ese navy had set up an effective blockade and enjoyed air supremacy.

  The Japanese attacks began on 9 January. MacArthur’s forces holding the neck of the Bataan Peninsula were divided by Mount Natib in the middle. The terrain of thick jungle and ravines on the western side and the swamps on the eastern side along Manila Bay both provided a hellish terrain in their different ways. Malaria and dengue fever ravaged MacArthur’s troops, who were short of quinine as well as other medical supplies. Most were already weakened by dysentery, which the US Marine Corps called the ‘Yangtze rapids’. MacArthur’s main mistake was to have dispersed his supplies rather than concentrate them on Bataan and Corregidor.

  After two weeks of bitter fighting, the Japanese broke through in the mountainous centre on 22 January and forced MacArthur’s troops to pull back to another line halfway down the peninsula. His sick soldiers, their uniforms in tatters, and their skin starting to rot from the jungle and swamps, were already exhausted and severely weakened. A new threat appeared with four Japanese amphibious landings around the south-west tip of the peninsula. These were contained and fought off with the greatest difficulty, causing heavy casualties on both sides.

  The resistance of the American and Filipino troops had been so effective, inflicting such heavy losses on the Japanese, that in mid-February Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu pulled back his troops a little way to rest them and await reinforcements. Although the defenders’ morale was boosted, and they took the opportunity to improve their defences, the toll of sickness and the realization that no outside help could be expected soon had its effect. Many of the ‘Battling Bastards of Bataan’, as they called themselves, became embittered by the idea of MacArthur exhorting them to further effort from the safety of the concrete tunnels on Corregidor. He became known as ‘Dugout Doug’. MacArthur had wanted to stay in the Philippines, but he received a direct order from Roosevelt to leave for Australia to prepare to fight back. On 12 March, MacArthur, with his family and staff, left on a flotilla of four fast patrol torpedo or PT boats.