On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Ho Chi Minh, president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), whose guerrilla forces defeated the French colonial army in 1954. Ho died in 1969, not living to see the ultimate victory in 1975 over the United States and its South Vietnamese allies, which resulted in uniting all of Vietnam under Communist leadership. Courtesy New York Times

  Major General Charles Willoughby, intelligence chief for General Douglas MacArthur in World War II and the Korean War, is shown accepting the surrender of Japanese troops in the Philippines in 1945 by General Takashiro Kawabe (second from left). Willoughby’s faulty intelligence assessments in the Korean War was a key factor in some of the worst american reverses in confronting Chinese Communist troops. Courtesy Associated Press

  General Douglas MacArthur (center) being briefed on the advance of American troops in the Korean War after their successful landing on the Inchon Peninsula in September 1950. On his right is Vice Admiral Arthur Struble, Seventh Fleet commander. The bodies of three enemy North Korean soldiers lie in a gully in the foreground. Courtesy Associated Press

  Chinese Communist troops crossing the Yalu River border into North Korea in October 1950 to confront General Douglas MacArthur’s advancing divisions. The Chinese succeeded in driving MacArthur’s United Nations’ forces back into South Korea. Courtesy Xinhua, Official Chinese News Service

  13

  THE LAST BATTLE

  HAINAN ISL AND

  When the General Gordon entered Hong Kong’s magnificent Victoria Harbor on September 26, 1949, the whistles of the other vessels sounded in welcome to the first ship out of Shanghai since the fall of the city to the Communists. Having been utterly vulnerable when the Japanese seized Hong Kong in 1941, the British were taking greater precautions as the Communists approached. The aircraft carrier Triumph and the cruisers Belfast and Jamaica lay in the harbor screened by destroyers and frigates. The colony’s garrison was beefed up to about forty thousand service personnel, including crack army units, backed by artillery, tanks, and fighter planes. The troops were stationed in the New Territories two miles back from the frontier to minimize chances of a violent collision with the Communists. The British also clamped down on the fomenting of internal civil disturbances which might become a pretext for invasion of the colony.

  Tillman Durdin, of the New York Times, an old friend, was waiting for me at the dock. That night we went to a Chinese restaurant, where we encountered Ian Morrison, the Times of London correspondent, and Han Suyin, a Chinese doctor, widow of a Chinese general. Morrison, a tall, good-looking Englishman, had sometimes picnicked with Audrey and me on Purple Mountain in Nanking. He was a superb correspondent, roaming East Asia from his base in Singapore. Born in Peking in 1913, he was the son of Dr. George E. Morrison, famous as “China” Morrison, also a correspondent for the Times of London and later political adviser to the Chinese government. An avenue in Peking was named after him, the thoroughfare on which I purchased my first postwar civilian suit in 1946. I had not met Han Suyin before, but I knew that she and Ian had become lovers. She was a slim, fine-featured young woman, born in China of a Belgian mother and a Chinese father. That night she was dressed in a vivid, luminous Chinese brocade dress. She and Ian looked exuberantly happy and were full of laughter when we paused at their table. I would not see Ian again. On August 3, Morrison and Christopher Buckley of the London Telegraph, accompanied by an Indian United Nations official, Colonel M. K. Unni Nayar, were killed in Korea when their jeep ran over a mine.

  Han Suyin wrote a novel, A Many Splendored Thing, the first of her many books, about her life with Ian in Hong Kong and later in China. The book included excerpts of eighteen letters Ian wrote to her from Korea. It was common knowledge among China hands and others that the central character of the novel, Mark Elliot, was modeled on Ian. It was a fascinating book. But like many of Ian’s friends, I resented it because it bared the private emotions of a very reserved man and affronted his widow and children in Singapore. Years later, when I reread A Many Splendored Thing, I no longer reacted that way. The book had preserved a remembrance of Ian’s humanity, insights, and grace. It conveyed also what it was like to be a reporter amid the agonies of the Korean conflict. In one of the quoted letters, Ian observed: “And now, through loving you, the Koreans are much less strange to me than my own race.”

  Soon after I reached Hong Kong, there was a letter from Audrey. We had been separated for eleven months, and I had not heard from her in many weeks. Her letter reassured me that our relationship had not changed. Her letters were coming more frequently after that happenstance, which I ascribed to a kindly Higher Being, that drew her to that discarded newspaper in Vancouver carrying the dispatch dubbing me “the loneliest Associated Press staff member in the whole world this Christmas eve.” When the AP offered me leave if I would go to Fort Worth, Texas, to speak to a newspaper managing editors’ convention, I agreed with alacrity and traveled a circuitous route to Texas via Vancouver, where Audrey was attending the University of British Columbia. At dinner she and I agreed to be sensible and delay our marriage until she graduated. I took her home to her women’s dormitory. Five hours later I climbed out of bed in my hotel mumbling, “This is ridiculous.” I took a taxi back to the dormitory and at 6:30 A.M. pounded on the door. A startled housemother in hair curlers summoned Audrey on my command. Audrey descended the stairs and agreed it was “ridiculous” and that we should be married at once. She checked out of the university while I flew to Fort Worth to speak to the newspaper editors. I then went on to Camrose, Alberta, Audrey’s hometown, and on November 10 we were married in the home of her sister, Sylvia. The lead of an AP story reporting the marriage said: “One foreign correspondent is so confident that the Communists won’t soon attempt an assault on Hong Kong that he is taking his bride back to that potential Far Eastern trouble spot.” The story also quoted me as saying that a frontal assault on Hong Kong was unlikely. In fact, when we arrived in Hong Kong some days later, the British were worried about the Communists spilling over the border into the colony.

  In Hong Kong, Audrey and I checked in at the flossy Gloucester Hotel, which we found we could not afford. Hotels were hard to get and rents astronomical. Hong Kong was booming commercially with the influx from the mainland of wealthy Chinese, many of whom had paid out fortunes in gold, jewels, or priceless antiques to unscrupulous airline pilots or ship captains to smuggle them out of China. Near Christmas time, running out of money, we moved to a small, less expensive Chinese hotel. Audrey had always treasured a tree at Christmas, so I went looking and found several that had been imported by a sharp Chinese merchant. He was selling them at outrageous prices to Western sentimentalists. The tree I bought was too tall for our small hotel room, and it stood bent against the ceiling, half blocking the entrance to the bathroom. I had to stoop beneath branches to get into the bathroom, and when inevitably a Christmas decoration went smash, I would hear Audrey sigh. On the second day, when we investigated why there was so much boisterous traffic in the corridors during the night, we learned we were living in a bordello. We fled in rickshaws, carrying our decorated Christmas tree, to Sunning House, a respectable but more expensive hostelry.

  In January 1950, not happily, I left my bride in Hong Kong and flew in one of Chennault’s CAT planes to Hainan. The island, only five hundred square miles smaller than Taiwan, off the southeastern China coast, was bracing for Communist attack. General Lin Biao’s Fourth Field Army, which had fought over the length of China from Manchuria to Guangdong (formerly Kwangtung), the most southern province, was making ready for an amphibious assault across the ten-mile-wide Hainan Strait from the Liuzhou Peninsula. After crossing the Yangtze in Central China in April 1949, Lin’s army had thrust through the heart of the country. Nationalist armies crumbled before him, at times under the shock of his hard-fighting columns, but more often because of mass defections or the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s generals. Only in General Pai Chung-hsi, the skilled and courageous commander of Central China, whom
Chiang Kai-shek never counted among his personal retainers and therefore never fully trusted, did Lin find a worthy adversary. When Lin’s troops marched into southern Hunan, Pai’s divisions counterattacked and sent them reeling back to provincial capital of Ch’angsha. However, once again the personal rivalries and the jealousies of the other Nationalist generals came into play, frustrating his efforts to exploit the victory. Pai was not able to rally the other generals into a stable defense line to shield South China. Operating in tandem with the army of General Liu Bocheng, Lin Biao was able to roll up Southeast China and occupy Canton, the Kwangtung capital opposite Hong Kong, on October 11. As Communist armies advanced on Canton, Acting President Li Tsung-jen fled to Chungking. When apprised that Chiang Kai-shek was arriving to take command, nervously pleading a need for medical attention, Li fled to Hong Kong and then to the United States, taking with him a sack containing millions in American currency purloined from the Nationalist treasury. Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Chungking (now Chongqing) in mid-November accompanied by his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, but they soon fled farther west to Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, as Communist forces under the command of Deng Xiaoping approached the city. Deng occupied the city on December 1 and was appointed by Mao Zedong as mayor and political commissar for party affairs.

  In Chengdu, the Generalissimo gave over the defense of the city and command of the remnant Nationalist forces on the mainland to his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who established his headquarters in the Chengdu Central Military academy. When advancing Communists troops laid siege to the city, the Generalissimo and his son, in the early morning of December 10, 1949, boarded an aircraft, named Mei-ling after Madame Chiang, and flew to Taiwan. There, Chiang Kai-shek reassumed office as president on March 15, 1950, with Taipei as his capital, still claiming sovereignty over all of China. The impending struggle for Hainan Island was to be the last major battle of the Civil War.

  When I arrived in Haikhou, the provincial capital of Hainan, in January 1950, I found there were only a few foreigners left on the island. I was the sole correspondent. I stayed in a French Jesuit mission. On the first day, the French bishop, Dominique Desperben, took me up to the flat roof of his mission, where we looked out over Haikou, a dirty sprawling city of 250,000 people, in which most residents lived in old two-story buildings made of mud and white plaster. The Communist-held coast was visible across the narrow Hainan Strait. Nationalist Air Force fighters and bombers based on Hainan Island whipped low overhead, and we observed puffs of smoke where bombs were falling on coastal positions held by Lin Biao’s troops. The planes were also striking within Hainan along the mountainous spine of the lush, green island at the guerrilla bases of the local Communist leader, Feng Baiju. Feng had held sway in the center of the island for more than twenty years, well before the Japanese invasion in February 1939. With his land reform program, he had drawn the support of many of the island’s 2.5 million peasants. His political commissars administered villages only a few miles from some of the enemy Nationalist army camps. In anticipation of the coming of Lin Biao’s troops, Feng’s army of some twelve thousand had taken the offensive, seizing a section of the southwestern coast. Agents and arms were being landed there from junks which slipped by the blockading Nationalist Navy patrols during the night.

  At the Nationalist military headquarters, I met with the top commander, General Hsueh Yueh, the former governor of Kwangtung Province, who was known as the “Little Tiger.” The general, an energetic man, dressed in a flashy tailored American-style uniform, complained he was receiving only meager aid from Chiang Kai-shek. He was frantically trying to organize a defense force out of some 140,000 troops, about 80,000 of them combat veterans, evacuated from the mainland. About forty bombers and fighters were based at the Haikou Airport and at Sanya in the southern part of the island, both fields built by the Japanese, to strike at Allied positions in China and Southeast Asia. Nationalist gunboats were operating out of Haikou and Yulin, the excellent natural ports also developed by the Japanese.

  Amid these preparations for battle, some three dozen foreigners were living fairly comfortably on the island, determined to remain no matter what the outcome of the impending battle. I visited the garden compound in Haikou of the American Presbyterian Mission, an oasis of order amid the decay of the city. There were ten women and four men in the mission, sturdy, dedicated people, who were supporting a church, schools, and a 180-bed hospital. With the Catholic missionaries, the Presbyterians administered a leprosarium where about 175 lepers lived, among them one foreigner, a man of German and French ancestry who was suffering the advance state of the disease. There were about 3,000 lepers on the island.

  The most elegant foreign residents were the French consul, Hughes Jean de Dianous of Avignon, and his wife. Their fifty-two-year-old consulate, housed in a building constructed of yellow lava stone from the island’s extinct volcanoes, was sited on a sliver of land separated from Haikou by a slender narrows. The couple commuted to the city by native sampan. I found them clinging to the ambience of their native land by offering the finest French wine and cuisine to their guests.

  The consul’s job was to report on Chinese activities that could affect Indochina. When I called on him, he was busy relaying pleas to Paris from the Nationalist government for the right of passage through Indochina of the remnants of General Pai Chung-hsi’s army that were holding out against the Communists up against the border. From Haikou, the Nationalist Air Force was making two flights a day to drop munitions and other supplies to the isolated units, totaling some twenty-five thousand troops. Eventually they managed to cross the Indochina border at Mon Cay and were interned by the French, who confiscated their excellent American equipment. I visited the troops in Mon Cay in March 1950 and found them in good condition. Pai offered the use of the troops against Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerrillas, but the French, fearful of Chinese Communist retaliation, declined. The troops that crossed into Mon Cay and other survivors who had escaped to Hainan were all that remained of Pai Chung-hsi’s 350,000-man army. Three months before, it had been the single most powerful force remaining to the Nationalists on the mainland.

  On Hainan, the governor of the island, Marshal Ch’en Chi-tang, received me for an interview at the Haikou Airport, where he was awaiting the arrival from Hong Kong of his young, pretty wife. The fifty-eight-year-old Cantonese marshal, a lively, outspoken man dressed in a brown tunic and white Panama hat, sat with me on the veranda of the airport’s passenger shack gazing out to the Communist-held coast. The governor complained angrily about the sparse assistance he was getting from Chiang Kai-shek. “We have not received the money or supplies we need. Only some air force planes and navy ships have been sent to help us,” the governor said. In lieu of funds from Taiwan, his government was turning out silver dollars at the provincial mint, but their silver content was diminishing rapidly. When Ch’en assumed civil control of Hainan the previous April, he found that the corrupt, inefficient Nationalist rule imposed after World War II had virtually wrecked the industrial foundation built by the Japanese. Of 170 factories erected by the Japanese, only about a dozen were operating. The port installations were a shambles, and steel rails of the new railroad had been hauled away. Little also remained of the projects initiated by the Japanese, which were designed to develop the rich mineral deposits and agricultural resources. It was estimated that the island could support more than triple its population of 2.5 million. Trying to salvage something from the wreckage, Ch’en reopened the high-grade iron mines and built a broadcast station, two hospitals, a weaving mill, and four schools. Now, bracing to resist a Communist invasion, he was reequipping troops of the island garrison and paying them with silver dollars from the mint.

  I flew back to Hong Kong on February 2, the last correspondent to visit Hainan prior to the Communist invasion. The day before, the French bishop, dressed in his long black habit, had brought me again to the roof of the mission. The sun, a huge bright orange orb, was settling below the horiz
on as we looked out to mainland. The bishop tugged his long graying beard and said softly:” I have lived happily among the Chinese for thirty years, but now I am afraid.”

  In Hong Kong, there were new travel orders awaiting me from the AP. While in the United States on leave, I had been assigned to open a bureau in Peking as soon as the Communists would admit us. Following the negotiations of J. C. Jao, my former deputy in Nanjing, with officials in Peking, we speculated that it would be only a matter of months before I was granted a visa, although American recognition of the Maoist government did not appear to be an immediate prospect. The White House seemed more intent on withdrawing from the China morass than anything else. On December 23, an internal State Department policy paper was issued saying that the Communist seizure of Taiwan was anticipated and that American missions abroad should play down the importance of Taiwan to U.S. interests so as minimize the damage to Washington’s prestige if it should fall. Secretly, Secretary of State Dean Acheson drafted a plan involving recognition of the Maoist government and withdrawal of American support from Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan. It was conceived as a Cold War stratagem to lure Mao away from close alliance with Stalin. Hints dropped by Communist officials that the Maoist government was interested in trade and technical assistance from the United States suggested that the plan might win acceptance in Peking.

  On January 5, 1950, President Truman issued a statement which seemed to make possible an accommodation with Mao. “The United States has no military bases on Formosa [Taiwan] at this time. Nor does it have any intention of utilizing its armed forces to interfere in the present situation. The United States Government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China. Militarily, the United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa.” Surprisingly, in what was in effect a rebuff to these American overtures, the Chinese Communists on January 14 arbitrarily requisitioned a part of the grounds of the American Consulate General in Peking. At the time, Mao was in Moscow seeking aid and negotiating a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. The sudden move in Peking might very well have been a gesture intended to demonstrate loyalty to Stalin and put to rest his suspicions that the Chinese Communists were open to dealings with the United States. Acheson reacted by promptly ordering the withdrawal from the China mainland of the remaining diplomatic personnel on January 18, asserting that the action in Peking, and previous harsh treatment in Mukden of the staff of the American consulate during which Angus Ward, the consul general, was confined for a time, made it appear that the Communists were not interested in American recognition.