In seeking Russian assistance for negotiation of a peace settlement, Stuart had directly, and through Chang Chi-chung, contacted the Soviet ambassador, General N. V. Roschin, several times. Some of these contacts, I learned, were not reported to the State Department. Roschin repeatedly expressed interest in a mediation effort. On January 10, 1949, Stalin sent to Mao a Nationalist memorandum, apparently forwarded to him by Roschin, in which the Li Tsung-jen government requested Soviet mediation in the Civil War. Stalin asked Mao for his comment on a reply which he had drafted implying his own interest in a peaceful solution to the Civil War and his concern about the possibility of American military intervention. Mao was said, according to Chinese archival sources, to have immediately rejected the idea of Soviet mediation. Nevertheless, Stalin seems to have persisted. On January 23, Li Tsung-jen informed Stuart that he had reached a tentative understanding with Roschin for Russian intercession. The Soviet price was a pledge that Li would maintain China’s strict neutrality in any future international conflict, eliminate American influence from China to the greatest extent possible, and establish a new basis for effective cooperation between China and the Soviet Union. When Li asked for Washington approval of this negotiating approach, the State Department told Stuart to reject the idea as “incredible.”
At this juncture, the Nationalists suffered another military disaster. General Fu Tso-yi, who had become the commander of the Peking-Tientsin defense line in North China, had secretly been in contact with General Lin Biao, whose troops were closing in on Peking. Seeking to avoid a destructive Communist assault on the old imperial capital, Fu asked a Yenching University professor to arrange a contrived surrender by Fu that would not allow Chiang to paint him as a traitor. Lin Biao acceded with a face-saving siege of the old capital during which the Communists pumped a few 75-mm shells into the city, mostly duds, so as not to damage its historical monuments, and a Communist regiment marched in unopposed on January 23. Prior to surrender of the city, the tale is told, which I was never able to confirm, that Lin Biao decided that it might be necessary to breach the city’s thick sixty-foot-high wall by blasting open the western segment in the ancient Chinese sector with artillery fire. But before commencing the bombardment, his command is said to have consulted with a noted archaeologist at Tsinghua University, which is located just outside Peking, to determine whether any historic landmarks would be destroyed. The expert replied that valuable Ming architecture would be demolished and suggested a more vacant target area elsewhere along the wall.
The Generalissimo had violently opposed the surrender, but Li Tsungjen, as acting president, was in agreement. Li sent an envoy to meet with the Communists in Peking, but the envoy, Ho Ssu-yuan, a former mayor of Peking, was kidnapped and killed by the Nationalist secret police. Li was reputed to have also been a target for assassination, but he escaped. After the surrender of Peking, Fu Tso-yi was rewarded by Mao with a ministerial position in the new Peking administration. The twenty-five Nationalist divisions under Fu’s command were absorbed into Communist armies.
On March 2 the Nationalist cruiser Chungking, donated a year earlier by Britain and the pride of the navy, slipped away from its mooring at Shanghai and defected to the Communists. Nationalist bombers found it off the Manchurian port of Hulutao on March 20 and sank it.
Beleaguered on all sides, Li Tsung-jen sent a delegation to Peking on April 1 to negotiate for peace. On its arrival, the Communists handed it an “Agreement on Internal Peace,” which stipulated eight conditions tantamount to complete surrender. When Li Tsung-jen received the document in Nanking, the acting president rejected it, asserting that the terms would give the Communists “military control of the entire nation.” Chang Chi-chung, the head of the Nationalist delegation, then defected to the Communists.
At midnight April 20 the Communist ultimatum expired, and in an “Order to the Army for the Country-wide Advance,” Mao Zedong and Zhu De, the army commander in chief, signaled to their forces that the moment had arrived for the crossing of the Yangtze and the envelopment of Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. The order stated: “After the People’s Liberation Army has encircled Nanking, we are willing to give the Li Tsung-jen Government at Nanking another opportunity to sign the Agreement on Internal Peace, if that government has not yet fled and dispersed and desires to sign it.” On April 22, even as Communist troops embarked on the crossing of the Yangtze, Li Tsung-jen, accompanied by General Ho Ying-chin, the temporary premier of government, and General Pai Chung-hsi, went to Hangchow from Nanking for a conference with the Generalissimo, who had flown there from his Fenghua retreat. Li Tsung-jen pleaded for defense of the south by falling back on his native Kwangsi and Kwangtung. In a joint communiqué the conferees pledged unity and a “fight to the end” with Ho Ying-chin empowered to exercise unified command over the armed forces. But for Chiang the conference was only a delaying tactic. He was intent only on preparing Taiwan as his fortified refuge, where he had already transferred 300,000 troops as well as air and naval units. When the Hangchow conference ended, Li Tsungjen and Ho Ying-chin boarded a plane for Nanking, not realizing that it was the eve of the fall of their capital.
9
THE FALL OF NANKING
During the night of April 20–21, 1949, Communist troops, jammed aboard thousands of junks, sampans, and motor launches, swarmed across the Yangtze on a 325-mile front to envelop Nanking. They met little resistance from the 350,000 Nationalist troops concentrated in the Shanghai-Nanking region. Chen Yi’s Ninth and Tenth armies crossed on the east. Their crossings were facilitated by large-scale Nationalist defections. At the Kiangyin fortress, guarding the Yangtze narrows, about ninety miles downriver midway between Nanking and Shanghai, the Communists succeeded in bribing the commander, General Tai Yung-kwan, who turned his thirty heavy guns on Nationalist river gunboats, preventing them from blocking the Communist crossings. At Nanking, Commodore Lin Tsun defected to the Communists with his naval squadron. Shanghai, some 150 miles downriver on the Yangtze, was left isolated for a later assault by Chen Yi. The Second Field Army, commanded by Liu Bocheng, crossed upriver west of Nanking. In Central China, Lin Biao’s Fourth Field Army also breached the Yangtze.
The massive Communist crossing of the Yangtze stunned Americans. Like hundreds of newspapers across the United States, the Sioux City Journal of Iowa published my dispatch under a banner headline. The dispatch said: “Chinese Communist troops slashed across the Yangtze today at a point near Nanking and the American Embassy warned Americans to flee the tottering capital while there is still time. The Embassy in telling Americans to consider leaving Nanking raised the possibility that the city may become a battleground. Chinese officials were leaving the city by every plane.” The New York Daily News published my story in an extra edition under the banner headline “Red Troops Drive across Yangtze.”
The crossings led to an unexpected bloody international clash. On the morning of April 20, the British frigate Amethyst, proceeding up the Yangtze to Nanking, came under the fire of Communist assault troops who were poised on the mist-covered northern bank waiting for the order to cross the river. The frigate was struck fifty-three times. Of its 183-man crew, 23 were killed and 31 were wounded. The Amethyst had been en route to Nanking to relieve the destroyer Consort on station there and to furnish protection and provisions to the British Embassy. The Consort, coming from Nanking, the cruiser London, and the frigate Black Swan, racing up from Shanghai to the aid of the Amethyst, also came under damaging Communist fire and withdrew to Shanghai without being able to succor the crippled frigate. The London suffered 12 men killed and 20 wounded in the Communist shelling. Medical teams traveling overland from Nanking and seaplanes managed to reach the Amethyst with help for the wounded. I was on the riverbank as the wounded were landed from small craft and spoke to them. But the vessel itself remained trapped for 101 days because the captain refused to sign a Communist document acknowledging responsibility for “criminally invading Chinese territorial waters.” The frigate, whi
ch had been immobilized by Communist artillery, escaped under fire on July 30, using a passing Chinese vessel as a screen.
At dawn on the morning of April 23, I was awakened in the Associated Press compound by sounds of explosions on the Nanking riverfront. The previous evening I had stood alone on a quay in the river port illuminated by Nationalist flares listening to the distant thud of artillery fire. Before returning to the AP compound I filed a story saying that the Communists would storm across the river in a matter of hours to seize Nanking. I was alone with the story. Harold Milks, the chief AP correspondent, had left Nanking in March on three months’ home leave, convinced the Communists would not take the city before his return. He left the AP compound with its two Chinese servants in my care. The explosions at the river port indicated that the Communists would be crossing there. I clambered into the jeep in the courtyard and drove to Chungshan Road, the city’s principal thoroughfare, and headed north toward the river quays. I was startled to find that the Nationalist military checkpoints on Chungshan Road were unmanned. I would soon learn that the Nationalist garrison had abandoned the city and the municipal police had fled with them. The Nationalist Twenty-sixth Army, which had been ordered to reinforce the garrison, never arrived. Thousands of refugees and disheveled Nationalist soldiers were fleeing south on all roads. Many came from north of the Yangtze, which they had crossed in sampans and small boats during the night fleeing Communist artillery barrages. Driving past the city’s Northwest and North gates, I saw they were ajar and unguarded. The new railway station, a towering building of glass and white stone, just outside the North Gate had been destroyed evidently by Nationalist demolition teams. The river port was ablaze with torched buildings and exploding fuel dumps. There were no Communist troops as yet in sight.
Pressing my horn and driving as fast as I could to elude fleeing Nationalist soldiers trying to flag me down, I headed back into the city steering through mobs roaming the streets. The palatial residences of Li Tsung-jen, Mayor Teng Chieh, and other Nationalist leaders had been looted. The mayor had tried to escape by car with 300 million yuan snatched from the city treasury but, as reported later in the Chinese press, was beaten up by his bodyguards and left stranded by his chauffeur with his legs broken. (By the next day, the gold yuan was selling at 1.5 million to one U.S. dollar, making the mayor’s intended haul worth only $200.) Looters swarming in from the slums of Futse Miao, the old Chinese quarter, were going about their thievery laughing and shouting to each other. From upper floors of the villas, they were hurling sofas, carpets, and bedding to the lawns below, where they were hauled away on peasant carts or on the backs of excited men, women, and children. A grinning Nationalist soldier, who had thrown away his rifle, was making off with a lamp in each hand. An old woman, wearing a ragged black tunic, hobbling on tiny feet bound in the old custom, went off with four elaborately embroidered cushions. Looters had also ransacked the huge Executive Yuan and the Ministry of Communications buildings, stealing away with window sashes and everything else that could be moved.
Making my way through the crowds, I drove to the Ming Tomb Airfield in the southeastern district. The field was in pandemonium. Transports of the Chinese Air Force and the two Chinese Airlines, CNAC and CATC, were being loaded in frenzy and taking off in quick succession. In disbelief I watched a Nationalist general running about ordering soldiers to load his piano and other furniture aboard an air force plane. Members of the Legislative Yuan were boarding another plane, several carrying tennis racquets. “We shall come back,” a bespectacled legislator said to me in a trembling voice. Soldiers were swinging bayoneted rifles to hold back sobbing civilians trying to force or bribe their way aboard the planes taking on Nationalist officials and their families. Philip Crowe, the chief of the American aid mission, who had suffered a heart attack, arrived at the field on a stretcher and was put aboard the last plane to leave by his friend, Chester Ronning. The Nationalist leaders had already left for Canton, the southern metropolis. Before Li Tsung-jen and his premier, Ho Ying-chin, fled at about 9 A.M. from a refuge in the Ministry of Defense compound, George Yeh, the acting foreign minister, telephoned Jacques Meyrier, the French ambassador and doyen of the diplomatic corps, to tell him that the government was leaving and asked that the chiefs of missions follow it to Canton. In early February, the Nationalist premier, Sun Fo, son of Sun Yat-sen, had gone to Canton, where he installed his ministerial offices, leaving Li Tsung-jen to negotiate with the Communists. But in March, Sun Fo had been ousted on a corruption charge and replaced with Ho Ying-chin. The French ambassador told the foreign minister that the chiefs of mission, apart from the Soviet ambassador, who already was in Canton, intended to remain in Nanking. The United States and other Western governments were retaining the option of establishing contacts with the Communists through their ambassadors in Nanking. Meyrier confided in Leighton Stuart that the Paris government was concerned about what impact Mao’s military advance might have on Indochina, where the French were waging war with Ho Chi Minh. It was a prescient concern, since the positioning in 1950 of Mao’s forces on the Indochina frontier would enable Ho to defeat the French.
At dusk, the mobs became more violent. They looted abandoned police stations for weapons. Shooting broke out as volunteer militia organized by an Emergency Peace Preservation Committee tried to restrain looters. Dead lay in the streets. Time bombs left by the Nationalists in ammunition and fuel dumps on the banks of the river exploded, lighting fires that reddened the skies. Nationalist artillery positioned near Dragon Hill in the southern suburb fired aimlessly over the city toward the northern bank evidently to cover the withdrawal of Nationalist Army units. Families in the diplomatic missions huddled apprehensively behind barred gates. In the American Embassy compound, young diplomats patrolled the grounds with flashlights. A platoon of marines had been stationed in the compound, but it had been flown out on April 20 to Shanghai on the orders of Vice Admiral Oscar Badger, commander of the West Pacific Fleet, to avoid possible clashes with the Communists. Six marines were left behind to protect the 200 embassy personnel. The Commonwealth missions were guarded by a security force of 250 armed turbaned Sikhs organized by Sardar K. M. Panikkar, the ambassador of India.
At 6 P.M., I picked up Bill Kuan, a Chinese reporter who worked for the Agence France-Presse, and after inspecting the two airfields, which we found wrecked, we headed for the Nanking Hotel to look for General Ma Ching-yuan, head of the Peace Preservation Committee. Driving along Chungshan Road, we were halted by eight Nationalist soldiers standing in a line across the boulevard pointing their rifles at us. Their leader said they were the last Nationalist sentries on the Nanking riverfront and had left their posts at sundown. The eight climbed onto the jeep, hanging on to the hood and sides, and we drove to the Sun Yat-sen Circle in the center of the city, where they were dropped off. Kuan asked them where they were going. “Out the South Gate,” their leader said. We watched them, the last of the garrison of Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, disappear into the darkness.
In the dilapidated Nanking Hotel, which was flying the white flag of the Peace Preservation Committee, we found people composing poster slogans to welcome the Communists. We were told that the head of the committee, General Ma, was spending the night at the Cairo Hotel, and so we drove there. In a dingy bedroom we found Ma, a retired army officer in the company of an odd assortment of people. There was a Nationalist colonel in a snappy uniform who told us he had been ordered to remain behind to help negotiate the city’s surrender. A handsome girl in a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up sat beside a bespectacled young man. They did not encourage questions, and I assumed they were of the Communist underground, which had surfaced in the city. All listened silently as Ma unburdened himself.
Ma told us that at midnight of April 22, he had been aroused by a telephone call from General Chang Yao-ming, the Nanking garrison commander, who said his troops were evacuating the city immediately and asked him to take control during the transition period. He promised to p
rovide Ma with police and security detachments to maintain order. Ma, a balding sixty-five-year-old man, dressed in a black buttoned-up tunic, recalled that conversation bitterly. Sitting on the edge of a chair, hands folded between his knees, shaking his head, he repeated: “We don’t have enough troops to protect the city from looters.” Ma had been able to marshal a security force of only a few hundred soldiers, police, and volunteers to safeguard the city of one million people. He said he was trying desperately to bring the Communist troops into the city as soon as possible to protect the diplomatic missions and ward off attacks on public buildings and utilities by Nationalist saboteurs. He had managed to contact the Communists by radio and had informed them the capital was ready to surrender. Communist troops had already crossed the Yangtze to Shang Hsin Ho, about three miles from the city’s Northwest Gate. As we left him, Ma said he intended to go with a delegation, including Chen Yu-kuang, president of Nanking University, and Nu Cheng-yuan, a professor at Ginling College, out the Northwest Gate to Shang Hsin Ho, where they would contact the Communists and escort them into the city. Kuan and I then went to the central telegraph office to file dispatches. When we emerged, we saw that the Judicial Yuan, an imposing yellow structure on Chungshan Road, was in flames. Speculating that the flames, casting a red glow on the clouds, might bring the Communists into the city more quickly, I slowly drove north on the boulevard toward the Northwest Gate, where we hoped to meet them. It was 3:20 A.M. Suddenly, I heard a shout in Chinese of “halt,” and I stopped. From shrubbery on the sides of the boulevard, two soldiers with rifles aimed at us converged on the jeep. “Who are you and what are you doing,” one of the soldiers said, beaming a flashlight on us. Kuan replied: “I am a correspondent of the French news agency, and he is from the American Associated Press.” Shining his flashlight on my face and examining me intently, the soldier exclaimed: “American, American!” Then he said: “Do you know who we are? We are the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.” They were men of Chen Yi’s army, the point on the first column into Nanking. We were about a mile and a half from the Northwest Gate. The soldiers asked us to follow and led us to an infantry officer leading a column of troops into the city. The soldiers sweating under full packs and carrying heavy weapons looked exhausted. Their officer kept shouting, urging them to keep moving. These were not the troops who had been scheduled to parade into the city at sunrise. The fires in the city had brought this column at forced march through the Northwest Gate to take control. Slowly moving at the lead of the Communist column was a civilian jeep carrying army officers and apparently members of the Peace Preservation Committee. The infantry officer questioned Kuan and me and then impatiently ordered us back into the city. Gratefully, I drove quickly back up Chungshan Road past the burning Judicial Yuan to the telegraph office, where Kuan and I flipped a coin to determine who would file first. Kuan won and sent a three-word flash: “Reds take Nanking.” My own tightly written sixty-five-word dispatch followed. Immediately after the transmission of my bulletin, Communist troops severed the cable landline between Nanking and Shanghai. When Kuan’s dispatch reached the Agence France-Presse desk in Paris, the editors waited for additional details, which did not come until morning when the radio transmission resumed. The delay denied Kuan a world beat and bestowed it on me. My own dispatch went out immediately on the AP wires. After the radio transmission resumed, Kuan and I began filing fuller dispatches. I woke my friend, Hank Lieberman, to tell him that the Communists had entered the city. He asked me to file three hundred words to the Times, which I did despite lingering resentments of the imperious Cyrus Sulzberger. By the time the sun rose over Purple Mountain, the Communists had occupied Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. A Chinese Web site has carried through the years a photograph of Mao Zedong reading the front page of a Peking newspaper citing my AP dispatch reporting the Communist occupation of Nanking. Mao had come a long way from Yenan.*
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 12