China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  The United States was brought directly into the war only in 1941 when, on December 7, Japan launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. By that time, China’s military and civilian losses were staggering, yet it showed a determination to resist that should have put most of Europe to shame. In contrast to China, for example, France surrendered in six weeks in the face of the German invasion of 1940; it then established an obsequious collaborationist government, and until the D-Day invasion of 1944 remained in a state of noncombative subjugation. World War II also ended quickly in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Greece, and the other occupied countries of Europe. All of them suffered the heavy hand of the German occupation, including the mass murder of the Jews. The West experienced guerrilla opposition to the occupation and the savage reprisals that the Germans exacted whenever their troops were attacked. Britain, of course, never surrendered and was never invaded. But of the continental European countries only the Soviet Union experienced full-scale war on its own territory for more than a few months. The Soviet Union was at war for a total of nearly five years, the United States for nearly four. China’s war, excluding the initial Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, lasted eight full years.

  By the time of Stilwell’s departure and Wedemeyer’s arrival in the fall of 1944, China was exhausted, its armies decimated, its people demoralized, disoriented, and desperate, its economy in ruins, and its government, led still by Chiang Kai-shek, discredited by the depredations it had been powerless to prevent. Tens of millions of soldiers and civilians had died, many millions more were displaced, reduced to penury and desperation. Numerous cities were literally smoldering ruins, the economy of much of the countryside wrecked. Students of the war have estimated property damage at about the equivalent of one hundred billion dollars, which means that the country’s industrial capacity was one-quarter of what it had been at the beginning of the war.

  Some areas of China, a very big country, were not very adversely affected by the war, or were largely untouched by it, most conspicuously Manchuria and Taiwan, both of which were under Japan’s control and had actually benefited economically from Japan’s insatiable need for goods. Other areas, especially what was known as the dahoufang, consisting of the vast inland provinces including Sichuan, Shanxi, Guizhou, Gansu, and Yunnan, were mostly unoccupied by Japan and not directly touched by the war. Even areas that were more central and that Japan did invade, like Hunan and Henan provinces, saw little actual fighting between the initial Japanese invasion of 1937 and the ferocious Ichigo campaign that Japan initiated in the spring of 1944. In many parts of unoccupied China, the Chinese, resourceful and energetic as always, made do, as people always strive to do even under the worst of circumstances. Human creativity does not grind to a halt even in concentration camps and occupied territories. “When no outside pressure brought terror and wild dispersal, a provincial city seemed able to bumble along in peaceful autonomy just as it had during the centuries of imperial rule,” wrote the American traveler Graham Peck, who toured much of China in 1940 and 1941, just before the American entry into the war.

  Refugees created new communities. A class of newly wealthy entrepreneurs emerged. Known as “guerrilla merchants,” they packed their bags with silk stockings or fountain pens and took them by junk or on horse carts from the cities under Japan’s control to the towns and cities that weren’t. Traveling in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, Peck found “boom towns, packed with new restaurants and hotels, noisy all night with gambling and drinking games” where there had been only quiet fishing villages before, bypassed by the river steamboats. The smuggling was technically illegal but was nonetheless taxed by local military commanders and customs officials. A few months later, in 1941 in Henan province, Peck met a former official who had lost his job and become a guerrilla merchant instead. He reported that the town of Jieshou, the busiest smuggling port in Honan, had better restaurants, Chinese or western, than Chungking. Loyang, the provincial capital six hundred miles northeast of Chungking on the Yellow River, “sheltered well over a hundred thousand people, clattering about the routines of Chinese urban life in fair prosperity,” almost as if there were no war, and in striking contrast to miserable, overcrowded, rubble-strewn Chungking. The Japanese armies were fifty miles away.

  But this semi-prosperity, which existed in spite of rather than because of the activities of China’s government, could come crashing to an end at any time. Only two weeks after Peck’s arrival, regular Japanese bombings of Loyang commenced—surveillance planes in the morning, bombers at night—and suddenly panic swept the city along with rumors of an imminent invasion. The planes would appear over the Yellow River, which ran just to the north of Loyang, and suddenly thousands who had been engaged in peaceful commerce a minute earlier would be rushing helter-skelter, bumping into each other on the streets, scrambling down steep steps to bomb shelters. “After each lengthening raid, the clean-up squads carried more straw-wrapped bodies through the streets,” Peck later wrote. Business died away. The electricity failed. The schools closed. Prices of real estate went down and those of vegetables up. “The city began to have the shabby, disheveled look I had known in Chungking the autumn before, with tangled wires and scatterings of rubble on the streets, posters and paper windows hanging in shreds” and “the big streets … deserted from dawn to dusk.”

  On May 16, 1941, the Japanese sent 110 planes over Loyang, where they dropped over seven hundred bombs. That afternoon,

  the road to the west was filled with people slowly moving away from Loyang afoot or in carts, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, and automobiles. Over the trees by the road, the long straight snake of dust raised by their passing stretched all the miles from the towering smoke in town to the edge of the hills. In the fields a little distant from the road, their shouting, wailing, and cursing merged into a low, quavering, continuous sound, like the moan of a stricken beast pouring out its blood in a long, fatal stream.

  After the bombing ended, a semblance of normal life returned to Loyang, as did many of the refugees, and Chinese adaptability was partially restored. But the battles near the city and in the mountains across the river left behind an enduring legacy of anger and distrust. People hated the Japanese, and they lost faith in the capacity of the Kuomintang to protect them. Critics of the government were arrested and sent to prison. Newspapers were censored so the feebleness of the central government’s resistance was not publicized, though where it was not witnessed, it was suspected. The government blamed the Communists, whose armies, it said, had failed to attack the Japanese rear, which it was obliged to do under the terms of the United Front. The Communists rejected the charge, but the United Front, never a solid alliance, became ever less united. In the trek out of Loyang, as described by Peck, officers of the KMT army commandeered most of the cars and half the carts, which were “piled with the families, furniture, and files of the provincial capital’s great civil and military bureaucracy,” and this made no small contribution “to the air of hasty, brutish self-preservation which hung over the road in a miasma as choking as the dust.” The prices of food and transport quadrupled; resentment surged as those who could afford it loaded their potted palms on their carts while poorer people carried their necessities on their backs. There were fistfights on the roads.

  All of this was taking place before the United States entered the war, when hardly anyone in the outside world was paying much attention. And though they didn’t know it, the Chinese people faced four more years of war.

  Chinese life was deformed in ways small and big, collective and individual. The heavy toll in casualties taken by the Nationalist armies left the central government severely weakened and depleted and facing a Communist rival that had grown vastly in size and strength during the Japanese occupation.

  Beyond the death and economic loss was the destruction of cities, the mass migrations of people, and the decay of the country’s elites, its professional classes, adminis
trators, civic leaders, merchants, and financiers. Given the country’s poverty and backwardness, many of China’s leading citizens, always spread thin over the country’s vast territory, had lost their money and their confidence. The civil service was in shambles, the knowledge class not destroyed but dislocated, its leading figures, like the government, in internal exile. The struggle to endure had been intense and had produced an atmosphere of everyone-for-himself hostility, distrust, and cynicism. Traditional China, though poor, had cultivated a certain Confucian and Buddhist social conscience, especially through what were called benevolent associations, where people from a province or city now living in another province or city would offer a helping hand to newcomers from the same region. The Chinese had an expression, renqing weidao, meaning the flavor of human feeling, a certain perfume of virtue that cushioned the sharpest edges of life, but the suffering and desperation of the war removed much of the human feeling and left the jagged edges behind.

  Perfect virtue, Confucius said, consisted of five characteristics: gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. All of these prized characteristics atrophied as a result of the country’s long war, so that government exactions, a ruthless exploitation of the weak, the theft of food, banditry, piracy, rape, and usury trailed in the wake of Japan’s depredations. This was a phenomenon more noted by foreigners in China than by the Chinese themselves, or at least among those Chinese who wrote descriptions of the war. Peck put it this way: “The difficulty of survival, and the latent panic, encouraged rapacity and dog-eat-dog individualism in all dealings outside the family, the last surviving unit of mutual benevolence and responsibility.” Even in the best of times, China, overcrowded and poor, suffered more than most countries. But during the war, the suffering intensified exponentially. “Public spirit, generosity and even honesty were more than most people could afford,” the historian of China John K. Fairbank has written. “The strong not only trampled on the weak, they gouged one another.”

  For all the Kuomintang’s propaganda, the patriotic songs it encouraged, the posters it put up in the unoccupied cities, the image it strived to foster of valiant resistance, its constant claims that things were going according to Chiang Kai-shek’s plan, the government was held responsible for the failure to drive the Japanese out of China in the first place and for the disorder, the disorientation, the cruelty, the displacement, the sheer inhumanity, that ensued. “You have seen misery you never dreamed of before, dead eyes, sullenness, resentment, hatred, hopelessness, and all this in some of the most beautiful bodies in the world,” an American intelligence officer warned the American diplomat John Melby in 1945, who was about to embark on an assignment in Chungking. The officer was speaking of India, but, he added, “It is the perfect introduction to China.”

  Simultaneous with their invasion of North China, Japan’s armies drove up the Yangzi River Valley, and in the first year of the war they seized all the coastal cities of China, from Tianjin in the north to Canton and Hong Kong in the south, as well as the great port of Shanghai itself, then Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, and Hankou, the industrial center on the river. Not only was China’s land subjected to the shock of the Japanese blitzkrieg but its best German-trained divisions also took terrible casualties, from which the KMT armies never fully recovered.

  It was a war without mercy, as the historian John Dower has called it. After the three-month battle of Shanghai in 1937, during which the Nationalist forces put up fierce and, to the Japanese, utterly unexpected resistance, fighting desperate house-to-house battles while under artillery fire from Japanese ships in the harbor, a photograph appearing in newspapers around the world aroused indignation as perhaps no other piece of information from the entire war in Asia did either before or after. It showed an infant sitting upright on some railroad tracks after a Japanese attack, his skin either burned or covered in ash. A pedestrian bridge crosses the tracks just behind him. Jagged shards of corrugated metal litter the ground as if somebody had scattered a deck of huge, half-torn cards. The child’s mouth is open. His head seems large for his body. He is strangely upright, his arms at his sides, like a small, battered Buddha, a picture of perfect vulnerability sitting helplessly amid an apocalyptic wreckage, an embodiment of innocent suffering, of the cruelty of the invader, and of Chinese victimhood.

  But the world stood by as the massacre continued, and it stood by until the end of 1941 when only the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States and its allies into the conflict on China’s side.

  Some places in China weren’t just damaged; they were destroyed in their entirety, wiped out, depopulated and left in a state of Carthaginian ruin. Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, was such a place. In 1938, it was a city of half a million people, its massive gates and encircling wall testimony to its age and its importance. It lay along the Xiang, or Fragrant, River, a major tributary of the Yangzi in the midst of Hunan’s plains and rolling hills, a rich agricultural terrain for which Changsha served as a commercial hub. Its narrow alleys meandered among two-story brick houses with slanting gray-tiled roofs. Its broader commercial thoroughfares were lined by columned arcades and jammed with traffic, rickshaws, donkeys, water buffalo pulling carts, and peddlers chanting the virtues of their spicy snacks. “Everything went on in the streets,” a wife of a foreign missionary doctor wrote, “the oiling of paper umbrellas and the filling of cotton comforters, the pouring of candles, and the carving of coffins.… Babies were fed in the streets, children spun tops in the streets, and old men dozed in whatever spots of sunlight a wall might offer.”

  Changsha was famous for its two-thousand-year-old Han dynasty tombs, its many schools, and its Buddhist temples, and also for its experience of the violence of China’s recent history. It was besieged during the mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, when a charismatic visionary making the unlikely claim that he was the younger brother of Jesus almost overthrew the reigning Qing dynasty. More recently, in 1930, Changsha had been the site of violent clashes between the Communists and the Nationalists. It was, like many cities in China’s heartland, a mixture of the charming and the horrible, the elderly men with wispy beards who aired their caged songbirds early in the morning and the beggars who died on the streets in winter. After the Japanese campaign in Shanghai in 1937 and the capture of Nanjing in 1938, three major Chinese universities had transferred to Changsha, so the intramural population had swelled to half a million.

  There was also a substantial foreign population, a few hundred or so, including a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, a Mr. Lieberthal, who studied and measured the city’s monuments and translated its ancient texts. Two dozen idealistic Americans belonged to the Yale-in-China program, whose middle school, hospital, and medical school occupied a twenty-acre compound just outside the North Gate. It was a quiet, privileged campus where the chapel, the dormitories, and the administration buildings were surrounded by chrysanthemum gardens, stands of bamboo, and groves of camphor trees where magpies nested. The more numerous foreign businessmen, with whom the missionaries didn’t mingle much, occupied a narrow island in the middle of the Xiang River, where they enjoyed the splendid isolation of foreign traders of those times, with their club (for Caucasians only) and their lives “as foreign eccentrics, with too much money and influence, too easy alcohol and sex.”

  For the foreigners, Changsha was an example of the kind of Somerset Maugham idyll that China offered during the decades of foreign concessions and extraterritorial rights. There were ten-course banquets featuring dishes from one of China’s greatest cuisines; excursions by sedan chair to the not-too-distant Buddhist temple in the mountains, or to famous Han tombs; cocktails, snooker, and gossip at the club. The late 1930s, when the Nationalists enjoyed their few years of political ascendency in China, was the end of the time when China’s poverty, disorder, and aspirations provided for exotic slumming, antiquarian aestheticism, and sensual pleasure, a self-indulgent, servant- and banquet-rich style of life that came
along with the profits of the China trade. Even the missionaries had the services of one Chinese servant for every two members of their households; the foreign businessmen enjoyed a ratio of one to one. And it was all so cheap. “In China,” one missionary allowed, “we all live like lords and kings on fifty-five dollars a month.”

  But the Sino-Japanese War was crowding in. On Thanksgiving Day 1937, the first of many Japanese bombings occurred. The planes came in the middle of the afternoon and were followed, rather than preceded, by air raid sirens. Within a few minutes Changsha was pockmarked by craters and devastation. Two small hotels packed with refugees from Shanghai and Nanjing suffered direct hits, resulting in a hundred dead. Charred, dismembered corpses lay in the streets. A woman crouched next to the body of her dead husband and wailed. She had already started burning paper money for his use in the afterlife. Three smoldering joss sticks were stuck in the dirt near his feet.