On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  On that November morning in 1948 just after Audrey left Nanking, I sat pensively for a time in my jeep in the courtyard of the AP compound looking eastward to the pine-covered slopes of Purple Mountain. Audrey and I had often picnicked there. Sitting beside the old observatory on the peak, sipping cold wine from a thermos jug, we would gaze down on the city that was encased in the twenty-two-mile-long brick wall built by Ming emperors. Chiang had sought hastily to dress up his capital soon after his return from Chungking. But the city lacked the grace of Peking and the dynamism of industrial Shanghai or commercial Canton. With scant planning, broad pretentious boulevards, swept every morning by Japanese prisoners of war dressed in green overalls, had been slashed across the city. They were lined with government office buildings whose blue and green tiled roofs were failed imitations of the classical Ming style. Side streets remained as they had been for hundreds of years, the only additions being two-story slapdash buildings and refugee shacks. The rich dwelled behind compound walls shutting out the misery of the impoverished living in the narrow, crooked cobbled alleys. Patches of rice fields were plowed by water buffalo. Mercifully, the stagnant ponds dotting the city came alive with color in the spring with the bloom of the giant lotus. Perched on the southern bend of the Yangtze, 150 miles from Shanghai, Nanking was accursed with a foul climate, four months of unbearably humid heat in the summer, and a dank winter of penetrating cold. Only when the spring came, when the fruit trees blossomed and the hillsides adorned with temples and shrines turned vivid green, did the successors of the emperors who resided here seem to inherit the Mandate of Heaven bestowed on the former imperial rulers.

  Atop Purple Mountain looming on the outskirts of the city, on an evening in the spring of 1948, I asked Audrey, then nineteen, a slender, beautiful blonde, to marry me. She was a student at Nanking University and taught English at Ginling Women’s College. The university had disintegrated into shambles just after Audrey left, with police agents swarming over the campus beating up and arresting militant students. They had joined with students at other universities in demonstrations demanding an end to the Civil War and termination of the American intervention in support of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. Audrey’s most disturbing memory of her last days in Nanking was an exchange with a Chinese government official. As she was being driven in the company of the official to the Canadian Embassy residence from a diplomatic reception, looking out on beggars and refugees on the streets, she exclaimed: “Seeing the suffering of these people must be very painful to you.” The official shrugged and said: “We don’t think of these as people.” It was a remark that went to the heart of the Nationalist government’s inability to rally the masses to its support in the Civil War. Apart from teaching at Ginling, Audrey worked as an assistant to Captain Wong, the dentist of the American Military Advisory Group. One of her tasks was to chat with Madame Chiang Kai-shek in a reception room while the Generalissimo was being fitted for a new pair of false teeth. In fun she once asked the dental technician to carve her initials on one of the Generalissimo’s molars. Rebuffed by Audrey when he asked for a date, the technician put aside the plot.

  Dutifully, after that evening on Purple Mountain when Audrey gave her assent to marriage, I waited for an opportunity to ask Audrey’s father to bless our engagement. Although friendly with Chester Ronning, I was still somewhat hesitant about seeking his consent—a Jewish boy born in Harlem of eastern European immigrants asking the hand in marriage of a young woman whose Lutheran family traced its ancestry to Norwegian aristocracy. Like other correspondents, I had often sought out Ronning as a source for news and political analysis. Born in China of missionary parents, Ronning spoke fluent Mandarin, his first language, and was widely regarded as Canada’s foremost expert on Asia. Serving in Chungking during General Marshall’s mediation mission, he had become very friendly with Mao’s deputy, Zhou Enlai, who, like Ronning, was first educated in a missionary elementary school. It was a friendship that through the next thirty years would have a significant influence on Western relations with China.

  As minister of the Canadian Embassy, Ronning was also on good terms with President Chiang Kai-shek. When Chiang learned that Ronning in his youth had been a cowboy broncobuster in Alberta, Canada, the Generalissimo invited him to ride and exercise his spirited Arabian horse. It was one of several steeds captured from the Japanese. The stable boys were Japanese prisoners of war. In the summer of 1946 Ronning was a guest of the Chiangs in their Kuling residence, a vacation retreat on Mount Lushan in Kiangsu Province. He was especially close to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who often confided in him. She once told him of her distress about being pictured in the American press as something of a snob. It had been reported that while staying at the White House she had brought her own purple silk bed sheets. She explained to Ronning that it was not hauteur but a matter of being allergic to the detergents used in the United States to wash bed linen. During the Kuling visit Ronning was startled on one occasion when Madame Chiang came to him weeping. In a burst of temper during a quarrel the Generalissimo had whipped out a pistol and shot her pet German shepherd dog. It was a rare insight into what disharmony there might have been in this celebrated marriage. The Generalissimo relied on his wife to enlist American support in the Civil War and to present a sophisticated, cultured face to the Western world that would cloak his own stiff warlord image. In 1931, on her insistence and prior to their marriage, although very much the Confucian authoritarian, he joined the Methodist Church. Madame Chiang told foreigners in later years that the Generalissimo had become a devout Methodist who read the Bible every day, neither smoked nor drank except for ceremonial toasts, the latter a dubious accolade, since her husband’s propensity for scotch whiskey was well known. The Generalissimo’s professed Christian piety and anti-Communist stand were factors in winning him support in the United States from such notables as Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, himself a son of a China missionary. Perhaps the most influential member of the “China Lobby,” a group of American supporters of Chiang Kai-shek, Luce was unremitting in his support of Chiang during World War II and throughout the Civil War.

  Pursuing Audrey, in the summer of 1948 I made my own visit to Kuling, where the Ronnings were vacationing. From Hankow on the Yangtze, where I had gone to cover the catastrophe of a great flood, I traveled by riverboat to a landing at the foot of Mount Lushan. The only means of reaching Kuling was to be carried by sedan chair up a narrow path cut into the mountainside. I felt guilty about riding a swaying sedan chair on the backs of four bearers but then persuaded myself this was work needed by them to feed their families. In Kuling, I stayed in the Ronning bungalow and strolled with Audrey among the mountain pines. One day, her father and I hiked up the mountainside, and I told him that Audrey and I wished to marry. We walked on in silence for a time, and then after posing only one question— “Do you love her?”—he gave his assent. When Audrey left Nanking for Canada, she wore my ring. She next heard of me under the most extraordinary circumstances.

  6

  BATTLE OF THE HUAI-HAI

  In the last days of November 1948, I made ready to cover what was to become one of the largest battles in history. It would affect the balance of power in world politics for generations to come. Strangely, perhaps because it was fought on distant hidden fronts, cloaked by Nationalist censorship and obscured by propaganda of the opposing sides, the Battle of the Huai-Hai would attract little notice abroad. During the climactic phase, I was the lone Western reporter with the Communist forces on a remote battlefield of the vast engagement and for a time their prisoner.

  The Battle of the Huai-Hai, upon which the fate of Nanking and Shanghai would turn, pivoted on Hsuchow, a city of 300,000 in population, 175 miles north of Nanking, on the vast Huaipei Plain. The battle, involving more than a million troops, historically took its name from the Huai River, which flowed some 100 miles north of Nanking. Chinese historians would later compare the battle with Gettysburg, the decisive campaign of the Ameri
can Civil War.

  On October 11, Mao Zedong issued to his generals the field order which heralded the start of an offensive on the Nationalist-held Hsuchow salient. “You are to complete the campaign in two months, November and December. Rest and consolidate your forces in January . . . by autumn your main force will probably be fighting to cross the Yangtze to liberate Nanking and Shanghai.” To coordinate the vast operations Mao created a General Front Committee headed by Deng Xiaoping, later to become the paramount leader of China, then serving as trusted political commissar whose role was to ensure the loyalty of the troops. Mao’s field order contained detailed instructions to his commanders for the array of their divisions. To the battle Mao committed his Eastern China Field Army of some 420,000 troops commanded by Chen Yi, who was based in nearby Shantung Province. Chen Yi’s forces had been freed for the Huai-Hai campaign the previous month with his seizure of Tsinan, the capital of Shantung Province. Tsinan fell on September 24 after eight days of continuous fighting when the Nationalist Eighty-fourth Division, under General Wu Hua-wen, guarding the western sector, defected, opening a gap that allowed a tank-led Communist column to penetrate the city walls and overwhelm the 110,000 troops of the defending garrison. Prior to the Communist attack, determining that Tsinan was indefensible, General Barr had advised Chiang Kai-shek without success to withdraw its garrison into Hsuchow.

  The other major prong of the Communist offensive was to be the Central Plains Field Army of 130,000 troops, commanded by Liu Bocheng, the famous “One-Eyed Dragon.” For the Battle of the Huai-Hai, the armies of Chen Yi and Liu Bocheng were better armed than in past campaigns, having received Japanese arms made available by the Russians in Manchuria as well as American equipment captured from the Nationalist armies there by Lin Biao. For the first time the Communists deployed a special tank column, which included American-made Sherman tanks captured from the Nationalists and Japanese light tanks turned over to them by the Russians. Initially, while learning to operate the tanks, the Communists pressed captured Japanese and Nationalist tank crews into service.

  As the Communist armies trained and grouped for the attack, Chiang Kai-shek met with his generals on November 4 to 6 to plan the defense strategy. His senior military commanders pressed for the withdrawal of troops from the Hsuchow salient to a defense line south of the Huai River. American advisers were of the same view. Chiang initially offered command of his troops for the impending battle to General Pai Chung-hsi, the Central China commander, widely regarded as the ablest of the Nationalist generals. When Pai insisted with other generals on a defense line along the Huai River, Chiang decided that he would direct overall operations himself from the Ministry of National Defense in Nanking. He gave field command to Liu Chih, regarded by many military observers as a very weak general pliant to Chiang’s every wish, and as deputy appointed Tu Yu-ming, one of the generals held responsible for the Nationalist debacle in Manchuria. On November 25, as General Barr received intelligence on the concentrations of the Communist armies, he became alarmed. He urged the Generalissimo to withdraw the Nationalist divisions holding the exposed Hsuchow salient to a new defense line farther south. Chiang demurred and made the fateful decision to confront the Communists armies on the Huaipei Plain. With his unopposed air force and American-equipped and -trained divisions, he gambled that his forces could trap and destroy the advancing Communists columns. To engage the Communist armies, Chiang arrayed more than half a million of his troops in six army groups north of the Huai River, hinging their defense line on the Hsuchow salient.

  On November 25, I flew with other foreign correspondents on a Nationalist Air Force C-47 transport to Hsuchow. Our pilot was Lieutenant Joseph Chen, who was to become a Nationalist hero on Taiwan in 1958 when, leading a squadron of U.S.-supplied F-86 Sabres, he would shoot down a Communist MIG with a Sidewinder missile in a dogfight over the Taiwan Straits. Our transport circled over the Huaipei battlefield just after the Communists, employing their classic encirclement tactics, reaped their initial success. Attacking on a broad front, the armies of Chen Yi and Liu Bocheng pinned down the Nationalist divisions, commanded by General Liu Chih, which were strung out in fixed positions to the east and west of Hsuchow. One of Chen Yi’s fast-moving columns then snapped a pincer around the town of Nienchuang, thirty miles east of Hsuchow, which was garrisoned by ten Nationalist divisions of the Seventh Army Group under the command of General Huang Pai-tao. A Nationalist armored column commanded by the Generalissimo’s son, Colonel Chiang Wei-kuo, dispatched from Hsuchow to the relief of besieged Nienchuang, was blocked and immobilized by Chen Yi’s troops twelve miles west of the town. The Communists broke into Nienchuang after two of Huang Pai-tao’s generals defected to the Communists with three divisions. Huang committed suicide, and only about 3,000 of his 90,000 troops managed to break through the Communist encirclement to the protection of the Nationalist armored relief column. From our transport, circling before landing on an airfield within the Hsuchow perimeter, I looked down on the smoking ruins of Nienchuang. Corpses and abandoned equipment lay throughout a network of trenches radiating from the edge of an outer moat. The Communist tank-led assault had penetrated two brick and mud concentric walls and moats in overrunning the town. Sorties flown in support of the defenders by Nationalist bombers and fighters failed to beat back the attackers.

  We circled over Hsuchow to learn whether the airfield was secure before landing there. The city was laid out in a hilly region on the shores of the large Dragon Cloud Lake. Strategically located, it had been the site of many great battles fought during its 2,500-year history. It was a city revered for its rich cultural heritage dating from the Han dynasty (202 B.C.–A.D. 220). But savoring its culture by visiting the nearby imperial Han tombs was not our interest when we landed in the Communist-besieged city whose defense perimeter was being raked with artillery fire. The city was totally disheveled, its rows of dilapidated two-story buildings jammed with refugees, the hospitals filled with untended wounded, the airfield crowded with panicky civilians mobbing and bribing pilots to be given seats on outgoing transports.

  At the Nationalist headquarters, our party of correspondents was loaded into a truck and driven over the rutted roads to the perimeter as artillery shells fired by Nationalist batteries whined overhead, targeted on the Communist forces in the outskirts. We were taken to a perimeter village where a Communist thrust had been repulsed nearby during the night. The bodies of some twenty Communist soldiers lay in a field. The bodies, lashed behind ponies and the bumpers of trucks, had been dragged in from the outlying Nationalist entrenchments. In their yellow padded tunics and leg wrappings, the dead men, their features gray and frozen, looked no different from the Nationalist soldiers gathered about us. Some of them had been shot in the back of their heads. When Henry Lieberman, the correspondent for the Times, asked about these executions, a Nationalist officer only shrugged. There were no adequate medical facilities for the Nationalist wounded, certainly not for Communists found on the battlefield.

  The next day, we left Hsuchow bound for Shanghai on one of General Claire Chennault’s Civil Air Transport planes that was loaded with wounded Nationalist soldiers.* As we were leaving Hsuchow, as I would be told subsequently, Chen Yi’s columns were racing southwest from conquered Nienchuang to join with the troops of Liu Bocheng in executing an encirclement of the Nationalist Twelfth Army Group, commanded by General Huang Wei. The Nationalist group, composed of eleven divisions and a mechanized column, totaling about 110,000 men, had been ordered up from Hankow in the southwest to cover the withdrawal of the Hsuchow garrison. Chiang Kaishek, recognizing belatedly the untenable position of the Hsuchow garrison, had ordered its retreat to the cover of the Huai River line, the strategy proposed to him initially by his general staff and American advisers, which he had earlier rejected. Anticipating the maneuver, the Communists threw a blocking force of about 250,000 troops across the line of retreat to the south. Chiang then ordered the Hsuchow garrison to break out and go to the relief of
Huang Wei’s Twelfth Army Group, which had been encircled sixty-five miles to the southwest. Short of food and munitions, which were being supplied by air, the Twelfth Army Group was being decimated by a ring of Communist artillery. Responding to Chiang’s order, the Sixteenth Army Group, which had been holding the southern sector of the Hsuchow perimeter, moved out on November 27 but was quickly enveloped by the Communists and surrendered after six of its regiments defected. In the engagement some 30,000 troops of the Sixteenth Army Group were killed or captured. The commander, General Sun Yuan-liang, escaped dressed as a beggar.

  The following day, with his forces disintegrating, the Nationalist commander in chief, General Liu Chih, flew out of Hsuchow to the safety of Pengpu, a rail town on the southern bank of the Huai River. This was only four days after he told me and other correspondents in our briefing in Hsuchow that he would never surrender the city. He took with him the Generalissimo’s son, who turned over the command of the Armored Corps to his deputy. Two days after their flight, Liu Chih’s deputy, General Tu Yu-ming, carried through the evacuation of Hsuchow. Huge gasoline and munitions dumps around the city were blown up, sending up clouds of smoke hundreds of feet into the air. Outside the city, Tu formed up the remnants of the Hsuchow force, which included the Armored Corps and the Thirteenth and Second Army groups, into a column of some 250,000, including about 130,000 combat effectives. The column then moved south slowly, weighed down by heavy equipment. It was made up of the combat effectives, thousands of lightly armed service troops, as well as families of army officers, local officials, and students. The troops, buffeted by the sharp, cold winds of the approaching winter, marched across the desolate plain alongside American six-by-six wheeled trucks, halting at times to fight off repeated Communist guerrilla attacks on their flanks.