We made seventeen miles the next day, and we were back at the headquarters of the sympathetic commander of one of Liu Bocheng’s units. Sitting before a campfire, the commander asked me about the two-party system and the status of blacks in the United States. He told me he had been with the Communist forces since 1936 and had seen his wife and family only once since then. In the morning before I left, the commander wrote on the flyleaf of my diary in fine Chinese characters. “We would like to fight to the end with our American friends for democracy, freedom and happiness.” He signed his name Tian Wuzhang without indicating his rank. Another day’s journey and we were within five miles of the Huai River Bridge. My escort found two peasants to help with my baggage, and waved good-bye. I approached the Nationalist outpost at the bridge holding up a white handkerchief, and they took me in. I stayed the night in the Jesuit mission, said goodbye to the bishop in sadness, knowing that the Communists in occupation of Pengpu would never tolerate the mission for very long, particularly Jesuit schooling of the children. At the railway station, I forced my way into a boxcar packed with refugees and Nationalist soldiers who had discarded their weapons. On January 12 I was back in Nanking, where for the first time I was able to file to the AP my account of the final phase of the Battle of the Huai-Hai and my journey across the Huaipei Plain. I also reported from Nanking that Nationalist troops had evacuated Pengpu on January 16 after blowing up its railroad bridge, so treasured by the people of Pengpu, and looting the shops. A new defense line was established thirty miles north of Nanking.*
For the Communists, the Huai-Hai campaign lasted sixty-five days in a deployment of swift movement and entrapment of segments of the Nationalist armies. They had suffered 30,000 killed in combat. But in what was the most decisive battle of the Civil War, the Communists had achieved total victory over a Nationalist force of roughly their own size but better equipped and in complete control of the air. They succeeded in eliminating fifty-six Nationalist divisions, including some of Chiang Kai-shek’s best American-equipped and -trained troops and the Armored Corps, altogether comprising 555,000 men. The Communists took 327,000 prisoners. At least four and a half Nationalist divisions defected to them. The military equipment captured, much of it American, was beyond counting. The battle was the final blow that shattered the Nationalist Army. As I had observed in Manchuria, the Nationalist disaster on the Huaipei Plain stemmed directly from Chiang Kai-shek’s strategic miscalculations. Rejecting all advice, he had elected to stand before the vulnerable Hsuchow salient, exposing his armies to piecemeal destruction. In selecting his field commanders, Chiang appointed generals personally loyal to him, rather than the most competent. Defeat became inevitable even before the first shots were fired on the battlefields. The way was now open, as Mao had predicted on October 11, for an attack across the Yangtze on Nanking, Chiang’s capital, and Shanghai. It was the turning point of the Civil War.
7
THE JESUITS
In 1971, I was able to contact Padre Mario Francesco, the last of the Pengpu mission’s superiors. He was living in Rome, and through Paul Hofmann, the Times bureau chief there, I received a letter from him with this account of what happened to Pengpu and the Jesuits after the Communists occupied the town in January 1949:
When the Communists first came, they preached freedom. For the first year, the people kept quiet because they believed them. Then the Communists made everyone sign statements asking if they had cooperated with the old government. Worse, everyone was asked to write his own autobiography many times and answer three terrible questions: One: What do you think of Communism? Two: Give the names of your friends and enemies. Three: What evil deeds have you done to the people? Then there began the wave of denunciations and executions of the so-called “enemies of the people.”
The mission did not escape this process. The Communists didn’t want to expel the missionaries outright but were determined to find “evidence” of their wrongdoings so that the people would denounce them or they would leave of their own accord. It was a process to try to break down the missionaries, and it was this continual harassment that in the end killed the Bishop. The Communists would come in day and night and ask for the mission’s accounts. They had already frozen the mission’s money in the banks. They first came to the mission on January 19, 1950, asking for one room, to put their agent in to report everything that went on in the mission. Later they took over the whole second floor of the mission headquarters to house foreign guests, such as a group of Russian engineers who came in to rebuild the bridge which had been blown up by the Nationalists. When there were foreign guests in the building, the priests were confined to their quarters and only allowed out for a short time when it was certain that they would not meet with other foreigners. Once there was a delegation from the Italian Communist Party—but there were no contacts allowed.
One evening a Chinese priest arrived at the mission by river boat without official permission. The police agent reported his visit and the Bishop had to spend three nights in jail as punishment. Worse, the Bishop was forced to buy an advertisement in the local paper to say he had been wrong to receive a visitor without authorization and that the Communists were good because they had kept him in prison only three days. There was no limit to the charity of the Bishop. When the Communists came, they took everything he had, and when he had nothing more to give, he died. He died in the mission, sitting upright in his room with his breviary in his hands, on June 13, 1951.
Things got worse when the Bishop died. The Communists tried to say that the Bishop had committed suicide, taken too much opium. But the missionaries were able to get a statement from the doctors that he had died of a heart attack. When the Bishop died the Communists closed the church, defaced its facade to make it look like a bank, removed Gothic decorations and turned it into a theater. The priests were forced to move out of their residence and went to the nunnery. The Bishop was buried in an area south of the compound near the seminary. Some 2,000 Chinese Catholics came to his funeral. The Communists asked for their names. It was at this point that the mission decided to burn all its records. At this time, too, the Communists banned baptism, but the priests did not heed this ruling. They opened two new chapels in the nunnery and received more Chinese Catholics than before. When the Communists took over the mission schools, I went to teach in the seminary.
The Communist line to the missionaries was: “We protect the mission, but the people want you to leave.” At least 1,000 meetings were held with the people to try to get them to denounce the “foreign dogs.” But the people, who had been cared for by the mission hospital and whose sons had gone to their school, steadfastly refused to denounce the missionaries.
Then the Communists tried intimidation. They called in one of the 40 Chinese nurses and told her that her father was to be shot but she could save his life. She was asked to testify that I had done some fault, to give the names of the best Catholics of the mission and admit that there was a section of the Legion of Mary (which to Chinese minds sounded paramilitary) in the mission, which wasn’t true. She finally agreed so as to save her father, and was told to bring her photo and not to tell anyone about the police pressure. But she came to me crying and told me everything. I counseled her to tell the police that everything she has said was false—which she did. She was then forced to report to the police daily, but nothing happened to her father.
Finally, the police picked on a former seminary student who had been a soldier in the Nationalist Army and was working at the mission and took pictures of him with me, holding a Latin grammar book and next to a crucifix. To me the police pointed out Article 12 of the Chinese State Constitution that says those who keep traitors must suffer the same punishment as traitors. This was intended to frighten me and make me leave of my own free will. But I only laughed and gave the police my written answer: “If I have gone against Chinese laws, I must do penance in China.” The police were very angry. Then they said that if I did not sign a statement saying, “I leave China freel
y,” five Chinese would be put in jail. Only then did I agree to sign, but the five Chinese were put in jail anyway. This happened in January 1953. I was the last of the superiors in the Pengpu Mission.*
8
CROSSING OF THE YANGTZE
On my return to Nanking from the Huapei Plain in January 1949, I found the Nationalists and their supporters cowering in despair as they awaited a Communist onslaught. On Christmas Eve, Chiang Kai-shek had attended services at the Song of Victory Church, which his wife established for Christian members of the government. He sang carols in his guttural native Chekiang accent. The next morning he told subordinates he would announce his resignation on Chinese New Year’s Day. There was reason enough for him to depart. Nationalist military strength had been reduced to 1.5 million troops, of which 500,000 were service troops, while the Communist armies swelled by Nationalist defections were now estimated by Western analysts at 1.6 million, virtually all combat effectives. In Washington Madame Chiang had found the doors shut when she arrived to plead for additional financial aid to rescue Nationalist China from its runaway inflation. In December 1947, the Truman administration had proposed a $1.5 billion program of aid over four years, but the Congress had reduced it to $338 million when it passed in April 1948. Following the shock of the fall of Mukden, Truman reminded Madame Chiang that the United States had already provided $3.8 billion in aid, much of it military equipment which was now in the hands of the Communists. Dean Acheson, who was shortly to succeed the ailing Marshall as secretary of state, shared the general skepticism and disillusionment with the Generalissimo. After General Barr’s experience, there was no interest in Chiang’s proposal that American officers, perhaps General Douglas MacArthur or General Mark Clark, join in staff direction of the Nationalist war effort.
On Chinese New Year’s Day, the Generalissimo was driven in his Cadillac out of the Great Peace Gate to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum on a slope of Purple Mountain. Standing at the foot of the stairs, I watched Chiang, in army uniform, cane in hand, mount the white stone steps to the tomb of the founder of the Chinese Republic. At the entrance, Chiang bowed three times before the white marble statue of the seated Sun Yat-sen. Emerging from the tomb, the Generalissimo paused and looked out over his walled capital for the last time. Then, saluting and nodding to soldiers massed before the tomb, he walked down the steps leaning heavily on his cane, reentered his limousine, and sped back to the Heavenly Palace, where he issued his resignation statement. He named Li Tsung-jen as acting president but in fact did not surrender the key levers of military and financial power. A few days later, on January 22, he flew to Fenghua, his birthplace, a picturesque town in Chekiang Province near the southern coast. Ostensibly, the Generalissimo had retired in Confucian humility to the life of a country squire. In reality, he was feverishly preparing his retreat to Taiwan, one hundred miles off the Fukien coast. While planning to leave Li Tsung-jen behind to face the Communists, Chiang denied him control over the bulk of the armed forces. For military support, Li could count only on General Pai Chung-hsi, the Central China commander, based in Hankow, who commanded 350,000 troops. When Li pleaded for additional resources to defend the Yangtze River line, Chiang rebuffed him. The Generalissimo meanwhile ordered the transfer to Taiwan of the air force, the navy, and the best army divisions, commanded by generals personally loyal to him. American military aid shipments en route were diverted to the island. The government’s reserve of gold and silver bullion and other foreign exchange, as well as thousands of ancient art treasures collected from leading museums, were shipped surreptitiously in a convoy of cargo vessels to Taiwan.
To secure the Taiwan redoubt, the Generalissimo clamped tighter military and police control over the restive 8 million Taiwanese. At the end of World War II, the Allied command transferred authority over the island, which had been a Japanese colony for fifty years, to the Chiang government pending conclusion of a peace treaty. The Nationalist troops sent to occupy the island accepted the surrender of the Japanese and then indulged in an orgy of looting. Nationalist officials seized public enterprises and land for their personal use. In protest, the Taiwanese, in February and March 1947, staged public demonstrations demanding that the governor, Ch’en I, who had been appointed by Chiang, immediately take action to restore order and curb corrupt officials in his administration. Ch’en’s response to the appeals was to summon additional troops from the mainland to repress the demonstrators. Between 10,000 and 20,000 Taiwanese were massacred, including several thousand of the island’s political and cultural elite. Reacting to the shock abroad, Chiang ordered Ch’en I executed in punishment for his excesses, but the Taiwanese population remained hostile to the mainlanders.
As Communist armies regrouped for a crossing of the Yangtze, I became aware of a strange game of secret diplomacy and political intrigue in play, involving the Soviet Embassy in Nanking. The action swirled about the lonely figure of the American ambassador, J. Leighton Stuart.
In November 1948, before leaving for Pengpu, I had called upon Ambassador Stuart in his villa on the edge of the compound housing the embassy chancery. What prompted my request for a talk was a visit to the political section of the chancery, where I was told privately by members of the Political Section that the ambassador was at bitter loggerheads with his embassy’s minister-counselor, Lewis Clark. In the sitting room of his villa, over cups of jasmine tea, responding to my delicately put questions, Stuart told me that despite the opposition of his embassy officers he was actively continuing to seek a peace settlement that would bring Mao and Chiang into a coalition government and stop the killing in the Civil War. Stuart spoke more as the missionary he was before his appointment as ambassador than as a functionary obliged to comply with Washington’s bidding. The policy he was pursuing was at cross-purposes with the instructions given the embassy by General Marshall, the secretary of state.
In December 1945, when Marshall arrived in China on his mediation mission, he had arranged for Stuart’s appointment as ambassador, replacing Patrick Hurley, so as to make use of Stuart’s knowledge of the country and personal influence with the Chinese. Stuart, born in China, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was then president of Yenching University, a missionary-supported school on the outskirts of Peking, often referred to as the “Harvard of China.” Yenching faculty and students revered the seventy-year-old Stuart, a thin spare man with dark cavernous eyes under heavy eyebrows, as a saintly figure. Appointed ambassador, Stuart worked closely with Marshall in his failed effort to bring about a peace settlement based on a coalition government. Two months after the general’s departure from China in January 1947, there was a switch in White House policy that threw Stuart into despair. In the wake of the Communist takeover of government in an internal coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, President Truman’s pursuit of coalition government in China had become a painful political embarrassment, and the policy was abandoned. Marshall, who had become secretary of state, specifically instructed the Nanking embassy in August to dissuade the Chiang government from seeking a coalition. He told the embassy to impress upon the Nationalists “the pattern of engulfment which has resulted from coalition government in Eastern Europe.” Despite these instructions, Stuart continued to explore the possibilities of coalition government, turning at times to the Soviet Embassy, which, as he told me, encouraged him to believe that Russian help in peacemaking might be forthcoming. In October, Marshall virtually reprimanded Stuart, instructing him to tell the Generalissimo that his mediation proposals were his own and did not have the approval of the State Department.
When I spoke to Stuart in November, he was bent on searching for ways to persuade the Generalissimo to retire so that Li Tsung-jen, then vice president, would assume full power and make peace with the Communists. Stuart’s only ally in American Embassy circles was Philip Fugh, his longtime Chinese secretary and confidant, whom he regarded as an adopted son. I became friendly with Fugh, a friendship that continued with him and his family for many years. Fugh’s
influence with the ambassador, who was often operating independently, was deeply resented in the embassy chancery. Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, after a visit to China on a presidential fact-finding mission in July 1947, speculated that Fugh was a spy. He retracted the damaging aspersion years later. Fugh was Stuart’s principal contact with Li Tsung-jen, the acting president. In early January, Fugh met with Chang Chi-chung, a skillful political intriguer who was Li Tsung-jen’s key intermediary in peace negotiations with the Communists and his contacts with the Soviet Embassy. Secretly, Chang had been in touch with Zhou Enlai, with whom he had an old personal tie. Fugh told Stuart that he had been informed by Chang that the Russians were advising the Communists to halt at the Yangtze. The Soviet historian Ledovsky does not believe that Stalin told Mao specifically not to cross the Yangtze but certainly cautioned him against further advances, which might invite American military intervention. Stalin certainly had something to gain by leaving China fragmented. Apart from the concessions he had wrung from Chiang Kai-shek in Manchuria, he was being further tempted by Chang Chi-chung, who traveled to Sinkiang to negotiate an agreement that would have given Moscow special trading rights, bringing the Central Asia province under Soviet influence. Mao would later make reference to Stalin’s double-dealing at a secret Central Committee meeting in 1962, saying: “This was in 1945, when Stalin tried to prevent the Chinese Revolution by saying there should not be a civil war and that we must collaborate with Chiang Kai-shek. At that time we did not carry this into effect, and the revolution was victorious. After the victory they again suspected that China would be like Yugoslavia and I would become a Tito.”
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 11