by Edgar Snow
“After a respite of only four months, Nanking launched its Second Campaign, under the supreme command of Ho Ying-ch’in, now Minister of War. His forces exceeded 200,000 men, who moved into the Red areas by seven routes. The situation for the Red Army was then thought to be very critical. The area of soviet power was very small, resources were limited, equipment scanty, and enemy material strength vastly exceeded that of the Red Army in every respect. To meet this offensive, however, the Red Army still clung to the same tactics that had thus far won success. Admitting the enemy columns well into Red territory, our main forces suddenly concentrated against the Second Route of the enemy, defeated several regiments, and destroyed their offensive power. Immediately afterwards we attacked in quick succession the Third Route, the Sixth, and the Seventh, defeating each of them in turn. The Fourth Route retreated without giving battle, and the Fifth Route was partly destroyed. Within fourteen days the Red Army had fought six battles, and marched eight days, ending with a decisive victory. With the break-up or retreat of the other six routes the First Route Army, commanded by Chiang Kuang-nai and Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai, withdrew without any serious fighting.
“One month later, Chiang Kai-shek took command of an army of 300,000 men ‘for the final extermination of the “Red bandits.”’ He was assisted by his ablest commanders: Ch’en Ming-shu, Ho Ying-ch’in, and Chu Shao-liang, each of whom had charge of a main route of advance. Chiang hoped to take the Red areas by storm—a rapid ‘wiping-up’ of the ‘Red bandits.’ He began by moving his armies 80 li a day into the heart of soviet territory. This supplied the very conditions under which the Red Army fights best, and it soon proved the serious mistake of Chiang’s tactics. With a main force of only 30,000 men, by a series of brilliant maneuvers, our army attacked five different columns in five days. In the first battle the Red Army captured many enemy troops and large amounts of ammunition, guns and equipment. By September the Third Campaign had been admitted to be a failure, and Chiang Kai-shek in October withdrew his troops.
“The Red Army now entered a period of comparative peace and growth. Expansion was very rapid. The First Soviet Congress was called on December 11, 1931, and the Central Soviet Government was established, with myself as chairman. Chu Teh was elected commander-in-chief of the Red Army. In the same month there occurred the great Ningtu Uprising, when more than 20,000 troops of the Twenty-eighth Route Army of the Kuomintang revolted and joined the Red Army. They were led by Tung Chen-t’ang and Chao Po-sheng. Chao was later killed in battle in Kiangsi, but Tung is today still commander of the Fifth Red Army—the Fifth Army Corps having been created out of the troops taken in from the Ningtu Uprising.
“The Red Army now began offensives of its own. In 1932 it fought a great battle at Changchow, in Fukien, and captured the city. In the South it attacked Ch’en Chi-t’ang at Nan Hsiang, and on Chiang Kai-shek’s front it stormed Lo An, Li Chuan, Chien Ning and T’ai Ning. It attacked but did not occupy Kanchow. From October, 1932, onward, and until the beginning of the Long March to the Northwest, I myself devoted my time almost exclusively to work with the Soviet Government, leaving the military command to Chu Teh and others.
“In April, 1933, began the fourth and, for Nanking, perhaps the most disastrous of its ‘extermination campaigns.’* In the first battle of this period two divisions were disarmed and two divisional commanders were captured. The Fifty-ninth Division was partly destroyed and the Fifty-second was completely destroyed. Thirteen thousand men were captured in this one battle at Ta Lung P’ing and Chiao Hui in Lo An Hsien. The Kuomintang’s Eleventh Division, then Chiang Kai-shek’s best, was next eliminated, being almost totally disarmed; its commander was seriously wounded. These engagements proved decisive turning points and the Fourth Campaign soon afterwards ended. Chiang Kai-shek at this time wrote to Ch’en Ch’eng, his field commander, that he considered this defeat ‘the greatest humiliation’ in his life. Ch’en Ch’eng did not favor pushing the campaign. He told people then that in his opinion fighting the Reds was a ‘lifetime job’ and a ‘life sentence.’ Reports of this coming to Chiang Kai-shek, he removed Ch’en Ch’eng from the high command.
“For his fifth and last campaign, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized nearly one million men and adopted new tactics and strategy. Already, in the Fourth Campaign, Chiang had, on the recommendation of his German advisers, begun the use of the blockhouse and fortifications system. In the Fifth Campaign he placed his entire reliance upon it.
“In this period we made two important errors. The first was the failure to unite with Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai’s army in 1933 during the Fukien Rebellion. The second was the adoption of the erroneous strategy of simple defense, abandoning our former tactics of maneuver. It was a serious mistake to meet the vastly superior Nanking forces in positional warfare, at which the Red Army was neither technically nor spiritually at its best.4
“As a result of these mistakes, and the new tactics and strategy of Chiang’s campaign, combined with the overwhelming numerical and technical superiority of the Kuomintang forces, the Red Army was obliged, in 1934, to seek to change the conditions of its existence in Kiangsi, which were rapidly becoming more unfavorable. Second, the national political situation influenced the decision to move the scene of main operations to the Northwest.5 Following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and Shanghai, the Soviet Government had, as early as February, 1932, formally declared war on Japan. This declaration, which could not, of course, be made effective, owing to the blockade and encirclement of Soviet China by the Kuomintang troops, had been followed by the issuance of a manifesto calling for a united front of all armed forces in China to resist Japanese imperialism. Early in 1933 the Soviet Government announced that it would cooperate with any White army on the basis of cessation of civil war and attacks on the soviets and the Red Afmy, guarantee of civil liberties and democratic rights to the masses, and arming of the people for an anti-Japanese war.6
“The Fifth Extermination Campaign began in October, 1933. In January, 1934, the Second All-China Congress of Soviets was convened in Juichin, the soviet capital, and a survey of the achievements of the revolution took place. Here I gave a long report, and here the Central Soviet Government, as its personnel exists today, was elected. Preparations soon afterwards were made for the Long March. It was begun in October, 1934, just a year after Chiang Kai-shek launched his last campaign—a year of almost constant fighting, struggle and enormous losses on both sides.
“By January, 1935, the main forces of the Red Army reached Tsunyi, in Kweichow. For the next four months the army was almost constantly moving and the most energetic combat and fighting took place. Through many, many difficulties, across the longest and deepest and most dangerous rivers of China, across some of its highest and most hazardous mountain passes, through the country of fierce aborigines, through the empty grasslands, through cold and through intense heat, through wind and snow and rainstorm, pursued by half the White armies of China, through all these natural barriers, and fighting its way past the local troops of Kwangtung, Hunan, Kwangsi, Kweichow, Yunnan, Sikang, Szechuan, Kansu, and Shensi, the Red Army at last reached northern Shensi in October, 1935, and enlarged its base in China’s great Northwest.*
“The victorious march of the Red Army, and its triumphant arrival in Kansu and Shensi with its living forces still intact, was due first to the correct leadership of the Communist Party, and second to the great skill, courage, determination, and almost superhuman endurance and revolutionary ardor of the basic cadres of our soviet people. The Communist Party of China was, is, and will ever be faithful to Marxism-Leninism, and it will continue its struggles against every opportunist tendency. In this determination lies one explanation of its invincibility and the certainty of its final victory.”7
Part Five
The Long March1
1
The Fifth Campaign
Here I could not even outline the absorbing and then only fragmentarily written history of the six years of the soviets of South Chin
a—a period that was destined to be a prelude to the epic of the Long March. Mao Tse-tung had told briefly of the organic development of the soviets and of the birth of the Red Army. He had told how the Communists built up, from a few hundred ragged and half-starved but young and determined revolutionaries, an army of several tens of thousands of workers and peasants, until by 1930 they had become such serious contenders for power that Nanking had to hurl its first large-scale offensive against them. The initial “annihilation drive,” and then a second, a third, and a fourth were net failures. In each of those campaigns the Reds destroyed many brigades and whole divisions of Kuomintang troops, replenished their supplies of arms and ammunition, enlisted new warriors, and expanded their territory.
Meanwhile, what sort of life went on beyond the impenetrable lines of the Red irregulars? It seemed to me one of the amazing facts of our age that during the entire history of the soviets in South China not a single “outside” foreign observer had entered Red territory—the only Communist-ruled nation in the world besides the U.S.S.R. Everything written about the southern soviets by foreigners was therefore secondary material. But a few salient points seemed now confirmable from accounts both friendly and inimical, and these clearly indicated the basis of the Red Army’s support. Land was redistributed and taxes were lightened. Collective enterprise was established on a wide scale; by 1933 there were more than 1,000 soviet cooperatives in Kiangsi alone. Unemployment, opium, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage were reported to be eliminated, and the living conditions of the workers and poor peasants in the peaceful areas greatly improved. Mass education made much progress in the stabilized soviets. In some counties the Reds attained a higher degree of literacy among the populace in three or four years than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries. In Hsing Ko, the Communists’ model hsien, the populace was said to be nearly 80 per cent literate.
“Revolution,” observed Mao Tse-tung, “is not a tea party.” That “Red” terror methods were widely used against landlords and other class enemies—who were arrested, deprived of land, condemned in “mass trials,” and often executed—was undoubtedly true, as indeed the Communists’ own reports confirmed.2 Were such activities to be regarded as atrocities or as “mass justice” executed by the armed poor in punishment of “White” terror crimes by the rich when they held the guns? Never having seen Soviet Kiangsi, I could add little, with my testimony, to an evaluation of second-hand materials about it, or to the usefulness of this book, which is largely limited to the range of an eyewitness. For that reason I decided to omit from this volume some interview material concerning Soviet Kiangsi which the reader would be entitled to regard as self-serving, in the absence of independent corroboration.3 Speculation on the southern soviets in any case was now a matter chiefly of academic interest. For late in October, 1933, Nanking mobilized for the fifth and greatest of its anti-Red wars, and one year later the Reds were finally forced to carry out a general retreat. Nearly everyone then supposed it was the end, the Red Army’s funeral march. How badly mistaken they were was not to become manifest for almost two years, when a remarkable comeback, seldom equaled in history, was to reach a climax with events that put into the hands of the Communists the life of the Generalissimo, who for a while really had believed his own boast—that he had “exterminated the menace of communism.”
It was not until the seventh year of the fighting against the Reds that any notable success crowned the attempts to destroy them. The Reds then had actual administrative control over a great part of Kiangsi, and large areas of Fukien and Hunan. There were other soviet districts, not physically connected with the Kiangsi territory, located in the provinces of Hunan, Hupeh, Honan, Anhui, Szechuan, and Shensi.
Against the Reds, in the Fifth Campaign, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized about 900,000 troops, of whom perhaps 400,000—some 360 regiments—actively took part in the warfare in the Kiangsi-Fukien area, and against the Red Army in the Anhui-Honan-Hupeh (Oyuwan) area. But Kiangsi was the pivot of the whole campaign. Here the regular Red Army was able to mobilize a combined strength of 180,000 men, including all reserve divisions, and it had perhaps 200,000 partisans and Red Guards, but altogether could muster a firing power of somewhat less than 100,000 rifles, no heavy artillery, and a very limited supply of grenades, shells, and ammunition, all of which were being made in the Red arsenal at Juichin.
Chiang adopted a new strategy to make the fullest use of his greatest assets—superior resources, technical equipment, access to supplies from the outside world (to which the Reds had no outlet), and some mechanized equipment, including an air force that had come to comprise nearly 400 navigable war planes. The Reds had captured a few of Chiang’s airplanes, and they had three or four pilots, but they lacked gasoline, bombs, and mechanics. Instead of an invasion of the Red districts and an attempt to take them by storm of superior force, which had in the past proved disastrous, Chiang now used the majority of his troops to surround the “bandits” and impose on them a strict economic blockade.
And it was very costly. Chiang Kai-shek built hundreds of miles of military roads and thousands of small fortifications, which were made connectable by machine-gun or artillery fire. His defensive-offensive strategy and tactics tended to diminish the Reds’ superiority in maneuvering, and emphasized the disadvantages of their smaller numbers and lack of resources.
Chiang wisely avoided exposing any large body of troops beyond the fringes of his network of roads and fortifications. They advanced only when very well covered by artillery and airplanes and rarely moved more than a few hundred yards ahead of the noose of forts, which stretched through the provinces of Kiangsi, Fukien, Hunan, Kwantung, and Kwangsi. Deprived of opportunities to decoy, ambush, or outmaneuver their enemy in open battle, the Reds began to place their main reliance on positional warfare—and the error of this decision, and the reasons for it, will be alluded to further on.
The Fifth Campaign was said to have been planned largely by Chiang Kai-shek’s German advisers, notably General von Falkenhausen of the German Army, who was then the Generalissimo’s chief adviser. The new tactics were thorough, but they were also very slow and expensive. Operations dragged on for months and still Nanking had not struck a decisive blow at the main forces of its enemy. The effect of the blockade, however, was seriously felt in the Red districts, and especially the total absence of salt. The little Red base was becoming inadequate to repel the combined military and economic pressure being applied against it. Considerable exploitation of the peasantry must have been necessary to maintain the astonishing year of resistance which was put up during this campaign. At the same time, it must be remembered that their fighters were peasants, owners of newly acquired land. For land alone most peasants in China would fight to the death. The Kiangsi people knew that return of the Kuomintang meant return to the landlords.
Nanking believed that its efforts at annihilation were about to succeed. The enemy was caged and could not escape. Thousands supposedly had been killed in the daily bombing and machine-gunning from the air, as well as by “purgations” in districts reoccupied by the Kuomintang. The Red Army itself, according to Chou En-lai, suffered over 60,000 casualties in this one siege. Whole areas were depopulated, sometimes by forced mass migrations, sometimes by the simpler expedient of mass executions. Kuomintang press releases estimated that about 1,000,000 people were killed or starved to death in the process of recovering Soviet Kiangsi.
Nevertheless, the Fifth Campaign proved inconclusive. It failed to destroy the “living forces”* of the Red Army. A Red military conference was called at Juichin, and it was decided to withdraw, transferring the main Red strength to a new base.
The retreat from Kiangsi evidently was so swiftly and secretly managed that the main forces of the Red troops, estimated at about 90,000 men, had already been marching for several days before the enemy headquarters became aware of what was taking place. They had mobilized in southern Kiangsi, withdrawing most of their regular t
roops from the northern front and replacing them with partisans. Those movements occurred always at night. When practically the whole Red Army was concentrated near Yutu, in southern Kiangsi, the order was given for the Great March, which began on October 16, 1934.
For three nights the Reds pressed in two columns to the west and to the south. On the fourth they advanced, totally unexpectedly, almost simultaneously attacking the Hunan and Kwangtung lines of fortifications. They took these by assault, put their astonished enemy on the run, and never stopped until they had occupied the ribbon of blockading forts and entrenchments on the southern front. This gave them roads to the south and to the west, along which their vanguard began its sensational trek.
Besides the main strength of the army, thousands of Red peasants began this march—old and young, men, women, children, Communists and non-Communists. The arsenal was stripped, the factories were dismantled, machinery was loaded onto mules and donkeys—everything that was portable and of value went with this strange cavalcade. As the march lengthened out, much of this burden had to be discarded, and the Reds told me that thousands of rifles and machine guns, much machinery, much ammunition, even much silver, lay buried on their long trail from the South. Some day in the future, they said, Red peasants, now surrounded by thousands of policing troops, would dig it up again. They awaited only the signal—and the war with Japan might prove to be that beacon.
After the main forces of the Red Army evacuated Kiangsi, it was still many weeks before Nanking troops succeeded in occupying the chief Red bases. Thousands of peasant Red Guards continued guerrilla fighting. To lead them, the Red Army left behind some of its ablest commanders: Ch’en Yi, Su Yu,* T’an Chen-lin, Hsiang Ying, Fang Chih-min, Liu Hsiao,* Teng Tzu-hui, Ch’u Ch’iu-pai, Ho Shu-heng, and Chang Ting-ch’eng. They had only 6,000 able-bodied regular troops, however—and 20,000 wounded, sheltered among the peasants.4 Many thousands of them were captured and executed, but they managed to fight a rear-guard action which enabled the main forces to get well under way before Chiang Kai-shek could mobilize new forces to pursue and attempt to annihilate them on the march. Even in 1937 there were regions in Kiangsi, Fukien, and Kweichow held by these fragments of the Red Army, and that spring the government announced the beginning of another anti-Red campaign for a “final clean-up” in Fukien.5