Then, in the fall of 1938, the coastal city of Canton to the south and the industrial city of Hankou in the north, the two connected to Changsha by China’s main north–south rail line, had fallen. Refugees were streaming into Changsha and so were the wounded, straining the city’s capacity to absorb and treat them. Joseph Stilwell, at the time the American military attaché, came to Changsha accompanied by Jack Belden so he could interview hospitalized soldiers in his effort to find out which Nationalist units were actually fighting the Japanese. They were hosted by Phil Greene, an American doctor in charge of the Yale-in-China hospital.
In late October, as news of Japanese advances up the Yangzi River reached the city, it became clear that Changsha’s turn was coming. Late on the morning of October 26 “the arsenal behind the hospital blew up,” Greene wrote. “Just one big bang and the whole place was gone.” Thirty were killed in the blast and seventy wounded. “It took as long to dig them out as to fix them up.” Intensifying the mood of impending disaster, the Nationalist government had ordered that nothing was to be left in Changsha if the Japanese succeeded in taking the city. In Shanghai, Canton, Nanjing, Hankou, and other conquered cities, the Japanese had plundered the granaries and storehouses, stolen livestock and household goods, slaughtered civilians, raped women and girls, and used old men and captured Chinese soldiers for bayonet practice. The Nationalists had made it clear that they would pursue a strategy suitable to a weak but large country fighting a stronger enemy that is far from home. They would fall back into the interior, follow a scorched-earth policy in the invaded areas to deny resources to the enemy, and then counterattack when the enemy was overextended and dispersed.
On November 9, Chiang came to Changsha himself to preside at a military conference, where he spoke admiringly of the burning of Moscow during the Napoleonic wars and said that Changsha should follow that example of noble self-sacrifice. But Chiang’s speech and the visible preparations that followed it caused consternation. People began to leave, including people who should have stayed, notably members of the local government. “With the running off in fast time of many provincial officials the panic started,” Greene wrote. Changsha became “a deserted and evidently doomed city,” its streets empty except for soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets taking up positions. On the night of November 12, the provincial governor, Zhang Zhizhong, hosted a dinner for the Yale-in-China hospital staff, and after the spicy delicacies typical of the region had been consumed, no doubt with many delicate porcelain cups of warm rice wine, he ordered them all to leave the city by the next day.
But it was already too late. Just after midnight, Greene wrote, the doctor on the British gunboat anchored in the Hsiang River, the SS Sandpiper, noticed two fires near the waterfront. Within a half hour he saw three more. No one seemed to be trying to put them out. By 2:00 a.m. he realized that other fires were starting up in the south end of the city. People were desperately trying to get out. The waterfront was ablaze. “Jardines (British shipping firm) going like a bonfire; Defag (German) going hot and fast; a large fire in the center of the city.” Before dawn, Greene saw soldiers from the military police headquarters carrying oil-soaked cotton rags breaking down the doors of houses and setting them on fire before opening their windows and running away. There is no report of how these soldiers felt putting to the torch a city that was already ancient at the time of the early Han dynasty of the first two centuries bc. But they followed orders, and by morning the flames seemed to be streaking to the sky, blending with the red of the rising sun, and then, as Greene put it, “the fires blazed and munitions dumps went off singly and together.”
The great fire of Changsha burned for three days. Photographs taken at the time show two-story buildings engulfed in fire while outside them men in short silk jackets stand helplessly by. The Communist leader Zhou Enlai, who was living in Changsha, barely escaped when flames began scorching the inside of his apartment. The cultural and commercial center of the city was burned to the ground, leaving behind nothing but rubble and ash.
The fire was a consequence of the fog of war. Local officials, including the chief of police and the garrison commander, were panicked by rumors that the Japanese were outside the city’s gates and that its defenses were about to collapse, and so they lit the fires that burned Changsha down. The truth was that the Japanese advance had been temporarily stopped and Changsha was in no imminent danger, but by the time that became clear the city had been torched. Shortly afterward, Chiang flew in to try to make amends. He met with the foreigners and expressed his regret at the havoc and destruction. Soong Mei-ling, evidently trying to exonerate her husband, addressed a letter to the city saying that the intentional burning of the city “was not in accordance with the Generalissimo’s orders.” Three local officials, including the garrison commander and the police chief, were held responsible for the damage and made to pay the the ultimate price. They were executed. Even though most of the inhabitants had left ahead of the fire, teams sent in to clean up reported taking 20,000 corpses outside the city wall and burying them there. These included wounded soldiers, almost all of whom died in their hospital beds, since there had been no thought of evacuating them ahead of time. More than 21,000 buildings were completely destroyed, two-thirds of all the buildings of Changsha. These included more than 10,000 homes, fifty-five schools, and thirteen hospitals. The city’s temples, Buddhist and Taoist, the restaurants, the hotels, the government offices, and the grain warehouses, along with the grain inside them, were all gone. There was enough inside the masonry houses—the furniture, staircases, beams, doors, window frames, and paper windows—to feed the flames. When the wooden roof joists burned away, the heavy tiles that they supported dropped and flattened everything below them like so many falling stones.
“I stood at Pa Ko T’in, the heart of downtown Changsha where the grand silk shops had been,” an American missionary later wrote, “and could see virtually without obstruction for a mile in any direction.… Several weeks after the fire rice was still smoldering where some of the big warehouses had stood.” Changsha “lay flat, wrecked, and totally vulnerable.” A person standing at the South Gate could see the silhouette of the chapel and dormitories of the Yale-in-China compound on the other side of the North Gate. Nothing remained between the two to block the view. Greene wrote to his wife, “Hospital running full ward.… Most of the city gone.” An officer aboard the Sandpiper, still anchored in the nearby Xiang River, said, “Changsha, and various industrial points outside, is now completely burned to the ground.”
It would have been bad enough if the great fire had turned out to be Changsha’s only disaster of the long war, but there were many other wounds inflicted by Japan’s invading army and air force. Because of its position on major rail lines and because it was the main depot for the agricultural wealth of Hunan province, Changsha would be a battlefield for the length of the war, and also an emblem of China’s will to resist. The Japanese mounted major attacks four times and were repulsed three of those times by Chinese armies under the command of one of the best of the Nationalist generals, Xue Yue, who had studied at the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton when Chiang Kai-shek was the commandant there. The Japanese attempted to seize Changsha in 1939, 1941, 1942, and 1944. In the battle of 1942, Xue, feigning weakness, lured a huge force of Japanese into a pocket and then attacked from all sides even as he sent mobile squads to harass the supply lines behind them. The Japanese retreat was then slowed down by a succession of necessary river crossings, and they were cut down by Chinese firing on them from high ground. It was one of the few clear defeats suffered by the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War, and it was a costly one. The official account held that 52,000 Japanese soldiers died, and while this is likely among the many exaggerations of China’s press department, the losses were certainly considerable.
But when the Japanese attacked in 1944, Changsha, the capital of a territory as large as Great Britain, fell almost without resistance, and by 1945 it typified the devast
ation that the eight years of war had wrought. It was essentially depopulated, its residents having been slaughtered or driven into exile, its economy, its institutions, and its way of life left in ruins just as much as its houses, stores, and temples. This is a key fact about China as the parties to the conflict—the Kuomintang, the Communists, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States—all faced, albeit unknowingly, the final stage of the war and the first stage of the after-war. In large swaths of China, the structures of society and government barely existed.
It is almost impossible to make an accounting of the entirety of China’s destruction as the war entered its final few months. The estimate of historians is that twenty to thirty million Chinese died in the conflict, which is an immense number, though in a population of more than four hundred million not proportionately more than the human loss that occurred in the Soviet Union, Poland, or, for that matter, Japan as a result of American bombing. But what added to the devastation of China was not just the length of the war but the poor and fragile state of the country at the conflict’s very beginning. For outsiders, Chinese suffering had always seemed expected, almost normal. For a hundred years, it had been a country where wars, famines, and oppression had been continuous and on a grand scale. It was a place whose considerable charm was, as the historian Barbara Tuchman put it, “counterbalanced by the filth, the cruelty, the indifference to misery and disregard for human life.” Staggering death tolls were lamentably ordinary in China’s history, and they added to such other immemorial Chinese afflictions as famine, official corruption, abuse of authority, forced prostitution, superstition, concubinage, female infanticide, foot-binding, opium addiction, beggary, child labor, warlordism, banditry, onerous taxation, landlessness, overpopulation, illiteracy, domestic violence, the ubiquitous stench of human waste, and astronomical rates of infanticide and infant mortality. “I felt that it was pure doom to be Chinese,” the American journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote after trekking across much of China in 1940.
No worse luck could befall a human being than to be born and live there, unless by some golden chance you happened to be born one of the .00000099 percent who had power, money, privilege (and even then, even then). I pitied them all, I saw no tolerable future for them, and I longed to escape away from what I had escaped into: the age-old misery, filth, hopelessness and my own claustrophobia inside that enormous country.
Skinny, sweaty rickshaw pullers strained at their large-wheeled contraptions to provide transportation to the rich. The scenes of nearly naked coolies towing barges up canals and rivers, leaning so far against their harnesses as to be almost horizontal to the ground, were an emblem, picturesque and horrible at the same time, of the unrelenting strain of everyday life in China, as were such other standard images as the women with leathery skin barefoot in the muck planting and weeding, the farmers covered in sweat at the foot pumps along fetid canals or carrying their loads of brick or straw on balancing poles slung over their shoulders or moving slowly and patiently behind water buffalo pulling primitive plows. The fly-specked hospitals, the skinny, crippled beggars, the thousands and thousands of villages made of baked mud whose houses, as one visitor described them, were “smoky, with gray walls and black tiled roofs; the inhabitants, wearing the invariable indigo-dyed cloth … moving about their business in an inextricable confusion of scraggy chickens, pigs, dogs, and babies.”
Impressive as the stoicism of China was, there was no question of the magnitude of the struggle that tens of millions of people went through every day merely to survive. Theodore H. White wrote in his classic book Thunder Out of China that half the people of the country died before they reached the age of thirty. White gives no source for this stunning statistic, and it may be exaggerated, but not by much. In 1949, as the Communists were taking power, the life expectancy in China was 40.1 years. “In war and peace, in famine and in glut, a dead human body is a common sight on open highway or city street,” White wrote. “In Shanghai collecting the lifeless bodies of child laborers at factory gates in the morning is a routine affair.” The British sociologist R. H. Tawney, who conducted a survey of rural Chinese life in the early 1930s, famously likened the typical Chinese peasant to a man standing neck deep in water, so that “even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.” And ripples in the first half of the twentieth century were frequent. “What drove you to settle so far from home?” a peasant was asked in Tawney’s presence. “Bandits, soldiers and famine” came the reply. Tawney writes:
Over a large area of China, the rural population suffers horribly through the insecurity of life and property. It is taxed by one ruffian who calls himself a general, by another, by a third, and, when it has bought them off, still owes taxes to the government.… It is squeezed by dishonest officials. It must cut its crops at the point of the bayonet, and hand them over without payment to the local garrison, though it will starve without them. It is forced to grow opium in defiance of the law, because its military tyrants can squeeze heavier taxation from opium than from rice or wheat, and make money, in addition to the dens where it is smoked. It pays blackmail to the professional bandits in its neighborhood; or it resists, and a year later, when the bandits have assumed uniform, sees its villages burned to the ground.
The scholar John K. Fairbank lived in the country in the early 1930s and remembered how he would be greeted in villages by “the barking of ill-fed dogs and the stares of children covered with flies.” Scalp and skin diseases due to malnutrition were common. The farmers grew their crops on “strips of dusty farmland” with “few trees and little water.” Irrigation was done by hand, “laboriously, bucket by bucket.”
If a kind of medieval destitution was normal in China through the first half of the twentieth century, it is not difficult to imagine what the effects of seven and a half years of war on the thousands of poor villages of China would be, not only the wounds inflicted by marauding armies but the foraging for food and supplies of rival bands, the forced conscription, the banditry born of desperation, and the disappearance of able-bodied men. Only a slight disturbance was enough to put the Chinese peasant under water, and the war was far from slight. As one scholar of the period has put it: “The magnitude of the rural misery was completely beyond imagination.”
The worst came, paradoxically perhaps, during a relative lull in the fighting, between 1941 and 1943, when one of the twentieth century’s worst famines occurred in North China. It was caused by a drought in 1942 and by locusts in 1943 and intensified by the dislocation of war, the destruction of the transportation networks, and by Japanese requisitioning of merchant ships. Three million people died of starvation as a result of the famine while another three million became refugees. White, who traveled to Henan in the spring of 1943, described scenes of sickening horror—children sucking at the breasts of their dead mothers, women who killed their babies rather than hear them cry, people chipping bark off of trees and making a kind of soup out of it, people who survived by eating other people. “There were corpses on the road,” he later wrote. “A girl no more than seventeen, slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death, her eyes were open and the rain fell on them.” The famine was a coup de grâce for the provincial capital, the city of Zhengzhou, which had already been reduced largely to rubble by earlier Japanese bombing. “We stood at the head of the main street, looked down the deserted way for all its length—and saw nothing. Occasionally someone in fluttering, wind-blown rags would totter out of a doorway. Those who noticed us clustered round; spreading their hands in supplication, they cried ‘K’o lien, K’o lien’ [mercy, mercy] till our ears rang with it.”
The famine in Henan was so vast and so terrible that few took notice of a similar famine in fertile Guangdong province, though a million and a half people were said to have died in it. Guangdong, the coastal province bordering on Hong Kong, a British colony then, was a scene of only intermittent fighting, especially after the Japanese seized Canton and tightened the blockade of China. In 1940, two year
s after the fall of Canton, Graham Peck slipped into Guangdong from Hong Kong in a smuggler’s boat that ran the maze of canals at the estuary of the Xi, or West, River. The first real town he saw was Tam Shui Ko, which, though it had not been invaded, was nonetheless “a tomb of a city,” most of whose inhabitants, rich and poor alike, had fled in the panic after the fall of Canton. “Weeds and bushes were growing in the little white-colonnaded streets … and the windows and doors which were not bricked up gaped upon the blackness of charred rooms or the dazzle of the open sky.” Peck remembered anti-Japanese murals and slogans scrawled on the sides of the public buildings, signs of an earlier spirit of resistance, but now “in most streets the only living creatures besides the wild dogs and cats, and strangely tame rats, were a few ragged sidewalk peddlers with trays of flyblown wares,” which they hawked clamorously “in rough raincoats of palm fiber, like a herd of shaggy beasts among the ruins.”
In 1938, in a desperate effort to stop the Japanese advance in North China, Chiang ordered that the dikes of the Yellow River, not for nothing known as China’s Sorrow, be broken. This only delayed the Japanese advance while it created an inundation of the vast North China plain, with two or three feet of water sweeping over whole counties in several provinces. The flooding caused widespread crop failure such that at the worst of it ten thousand starving people each day were gathering in major cities seeking relief. In the end, 800,000 people died either directly of flooding or of starvation. In 1945, five million refugees were still in the places they had fled to.
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