AFTER PEARL HARBOR, Chiang’s armies began to receive massive American support in kind and in cash, much of which the generalissimo and his supporters pocketed. Since there was no overland link between British-ruled India and Chiang’s territories between 1942 and early 1945, all supplies had to be flown five hundred miles “over the Hump” of 15,000-foot mountains to Kunming, the nearest accessible landing ground in China, at staggering cost in fuel, planes and American pilots’ lives. In December 1942, the Hump air shuttle shifted a mere thousand tons a month. By July 1944 it was carrying 18,975 tons. This was an extraordinary logistical achievement, but remained a negligible contribution to the Chinese war effort; especially so as most of these supplies were stolen and sold long before they reached Chiang’s soldiers. Much of the matériel which remained was absorbed by the needs of the U.S. air forces in China. It was simply not feasible to airlift arms and ammunition on the scale needed to equip a Chinese army. From beginning to end, Chiang’s formations lacked indispensable heavy weapons to match those of the Japanese. For all the strivings of American generals, diplomats and military advisers, most of the fourteen million men drafted into the Nationalist army between 1937 and 1945 served as hapless victims rather than as effective combatants.
Xu Yongqiang, in 1944 an interpreter with the Nationalists, watched new intakes of men herded in from the provinces: “Most recruits came simply as prisoners393, roped together at bayonet point. They had so little training that it was easy to see why they were no match for the Japanese, who for years had been schooled to kill. It was inhuman! Inhuman! There were no such things as civil rights in China. For eight years, it was the peasants who had to fight the Japanese, both for the Communists and the Kuomintang. The middle class stayed at home and made money. The big families did nothing at all.” Chiang Kai-shek once encountered a column of recruits roped together. With his own cane he beat the officer responsible, and later summoned the general in charge of conscription to beat him also. The episode highlighted one of Chiang’s many weaknesses. He identified problems, but failed effectively to address them. Recruitment remained chronically corrupt. The rich always escaped. Press gangs waylaid wanderers. Gunner officer Ying Yunping said bitterly: “If only more people394 had been willing to fight! There were all those intellectuals, who spoke endlessly about how much they loved their country, but wouldn’t themselves lift a finger to defend it. They just talked a good game.”
The war in China baffled foreign observers, because it bore so little resemblance to conventional military operations. Huge bodies of soldiers straggled hither and thither across great tracts of landscape. Guns were sometimes fired. Towns and villages were occupied or abandoned. Chinese movements, however, seemed to be conducted without reference to those of the enemy. Officers treated their men as mere beasts of burden or sacrifice. Gen. Dai Li, known to Westerners as “Chiang’s Himmler,” headed the Nationalists’ huge and effective intelligence network. Dai detested foreigners without distinction, and employed his energies against Chiang’s domestic enemies rather than against the Japanese. It became progressively apparent to the Western Allies’ representatives in China that they were witnessing a grotesque tattoo, rather than a campaign capable of causing serious trouble to the Japanese.
A characteristic January 1945 report to London from the British military attaché in Chongqing declared: “It is difficult395 to give you detailed reviews of Japanese operations…since we do not have the necessary information…Chinese…reports are usually vague and unconvincing…This is not surprising, since Chinese are usually retreating and are often, as at present, not really in contact with the enemy…They are prone to exaggerations to cover up their own reverses.” Rhodes Farmer, an Australian eyewitness, noted that many Japanese “offensives” were dismissed by Westerners as “rice bowl operations.” Farmer said: “The campaigns the Japanese396 waged between 1938 and 1944 were foraging expeditions rather than battles. They had no greater strategic objective than to keep the countryside in terror, to sack the fields and towns, to keep the Chinese troops at the front off-balance, and to train their own green recruits under fire.” When Chiang Kai-shek’s communiqués asserted that his armies were “fighting strongly” to defend a given position, the usual reality was that the Japanese had not chosen to take it.
Thirty-year-old Maj. Shigeru Funaki was the youngest of five sons of a retired Japanese army officer. His father made it plain that, since his elder siblings had declined to continue the family’s military heritage, it was Shigeru’s duty to do so. He was commissioned into the Imperial Guard in 1935, and thereafter became an unfashionable thing in the Japanese army—an armoured specialist and devotee of the British strategic guru Basil Liddell Hart. Funaki spent two of the war years in China commanding a tank unit: “As the Chinese had no weapons capable of stopping tanks, they were useful things for us to have.” He was no more impressed than any other Japanese soldier by the Nationalist army: “One Japanese division397 was worth four or five of theirs. They had no heavy artillery, no armour, and were very poorly organised. Whenever you pressed a Chinese army, it simply pulled back. They were always happy to give ground, because they had so much of it. They kept retreating and retreating.” Lt. Hayashi Inoue, who served in the theatre for eighteen months, said: “The Chinese were poor soldiers398. Their weapons and equipment were not up to much, and they were virtually untrained. We were always winning victories. Wherever we went, we won. The difficulty was that although you beat the Chinese in one place, they were still everywhere else. Every night, we were liable to be harassed by guerrillas.”
Most of the pain inflicted by each side’s operations fell upon the civilian population. When either Japanese or Nationalist soldiers approached, peasants and townspeople buried their clothes and valuables and fled into the hills, driving pigs and cattle before them, taking seed grain and even furniture. Rhodes Farmer reported a conversation with the inhabitants of a ransacked town: “One man slowly put four fingers399 on the table and then turned the hand over. I understood his meaning…the [Chinese] 44th Army had looted the city completely. He told me in a low voice that the army raped, plundered, set incendiary fires, and murdered…They [the local people] all said that the enemy was better than the Chinese troops…[Yet] on their retreat, the enemy [also] burned and killed on a large scale.” Though Farmer was an enthusiastic propagandist for the Communists, such a story was entirely credible.
Yan Qizhi, a small farmer’s son from Hebei, became a Nationalist infantry soldier at sixteen, and fought his first actions with a locally made Wuhan rifle which always jammed after four shots. His ambition was to arm himself with a sub-machine gun. In one of his regiment’s first battles as part of Chiang’s 29th Army, it lost almost half its sixteen hundred men. There were only rags to bandage the wounded. “The Japanese had so much more400 of everything,” Yan said, “and especially aircraft. By 1944, life was pretty wretched. We had just enough to eat, but the food was very poor. We went through the whole winter with only summer uniforms. Most of us, like me, simply had no idea what had happened to our families.” His only notable compensation for service in 29th Army, he said, was that he received his pay. In many of Chiang’s formations, senior officers stole the money. “I hated the war: so many battles, so many dead and maimed friends. When I close my eyes, I can see them now. An army is not just weapons and equipment, it is spirit. The Kuomintang army lost its spirit.”
The lives of Nationalist soldiers—notionally some two million of them in 1944, organised in two hundred divisions—were relentlessly harsh. Bugles summoned them to advance, to retreat, to die. Their weapons were an erratic miscellany: old German or locally made pistols and rifles; a few machine guns, artillery pieces and mortars, invariably short of ammunition, often rusting. They had no tanks and few vehicles. Commanders might have horses, but their men walked. Only officers had boots or leather shoes. Fortunate soldiers possessed cotton or straw sandals, but were often barefoot beneath the long cotton puttees which covered their legs. If they had a little kerosene, they used it to bathe chronic blisters.
Gunner captain Ying Yunping found himself walking more than two hundred miles during an epic retreat to Mianyang. One night, accompanied only by his batman, he staggered into a village and begged shelter and food. He was grudgingly given a few salted vegetables. His suspicions were roused, however, when he noticed that many of the people around him were carrying guns. His batman finally muttered: “They’re bandits. They want your sub-machine gun. They say they hate the Kuomintang, and they’re going to kill you.” Ying’s skin was finally saved by the eloquence of his batman, who parleyed with the bandits for the officer’s life, saying: “He’s not one of the corrupt bastards. He’s not a bad fellow.” Finally, a villager came to Ying and said: “Forgive us.” The captain shrugged: “There’s nothing to forgive401. You have given me my life.” Next day, he and his batman trudged onwards, away from the Japanese, towards Mianyang. When they rejoined the army, officer and soldier were separated. “In wartime, it was very hard to stay in touch. I never saw him again. But in my thoughts, for the rest of my life he has been ‘my Mianyang brother.’”
Off-duty, officers drank the fierce maotai spirit, played mahjong, visited brothels or attended the occasional show put on by a “comfort party” of actors and singers. Few rankers enjoyed such indulgences. Soldiers smoked “Little Blue Sword” cigarettes when they were fortunate enough to be able to get them. John Paton Davies described the pathetic pleasures on which Chiang’s men depended to relieve a life of otherwise unbroken hardship and oppression: “a cricket in a tiny straw cage402, a shadow play manipulated by an itinerant puppeteer, gambling a pittance on games of chance, or listening to the fluted tones of flights of pigeons, each with a whistle tied to a leg—any one of these was enough to make an off-duty afternoon.”
Among Nationalist soldiers leave was unknown, desertion endemic. Eight hundred recruits once set off from Gansu to join a U.S. Army training programme in Yunnan. Two hundred died en route, and a further three hundred deserted. Tuberculosis was commonplace. Wounded men often had to pay comrades to carry their stretchers, for otherwise they were left to perish. In battle or out of it communications, mail, tidings of the outside world, were almost non-existent. Ying Yunping, a thirty-year-old403 born in Manchuria the son of a salt merchant, was a married man with a baby daughter. During the early battles for Nanjing, his wife left him to return to her family. Ying never saw or heard of her and their daughter again.
If men received their rations, these might consist of fried pancakes, pickles, soup. The fortunate carried a sack of dried fried rice. In a town, in the unlikely event that a man possessed money, he might buy from a street seller a bowl of “congress of eight jewels,” or youtiao—a stick of fried batter. More often, desperate soldiers were driven to seize whatever they could extort from hapless peasants or townspeople. The official ration allowance of twenty-four ounces of rice and vegetables a day was seldom issued. GIs laughed to see Chinese soldiers carrying dead dogs on poles to their cooking pots. Yet what else was there to eat? “Even junior officers could not survive or feed their families without corruption,” said Xu Yongqiang, who served in Burma. Luo Dingwen, an infantry platoon commander with 29th Army, saw peasants lying by the roadside as his regiment marched past, dying or dead of starvation. “We usually relied on what food404 we could find in villages in our path,” he said. Despairing American military advisers reported that many Chinese soldiers were too weak even to march with weapons and equipment. Most were clinically malnourished. Not even the U.S. could feed two million men by air over the Hump.
A prominent American soldier in China wrote of his Nationalist counterparts: “Senior officers were suspicious405 of all foreign officers, totally callous to their subordinates and would not voluntarily assist other Chinese units in trouble.” General Sun in northern Burma refused to loan mules to take food and drugs to another formation, even though he knew its men were starving. A Chinese divisional finance officer casually asked an American: “How are you getting yours?” He was curious about his U.S. colleague’s route to “squeeze.”
There is no dispute—outside modern Japan, anyway—about the atrocities carried out by the Japanese in China, merely about their scale: for instance, Japanese historians make a plausible case that “only” 50,000 Chinese were killed in the 1937 Nanjing massacre, rather than the 300,000 claimed by such writers as Iris Chang. Yet the overall scale of slaughter was appalling. In 1941 the Japanese launched their notorious “Three All” offensive, explicitly named for its purpose to “Kill All, Burn All, Destroy All.” Several million Chinese died. The survivors were herded into “protected areas” where they were employed as slave labourers to build forts and pillboxes.
It was an extraordinary reflection of the cult of bushido that many Japanese soldiers took pride in sending home to their families photographs of beheadings and bayonetings, writing letters and diaries in which they described appalling deeds. “To the Japanese soldier406,” an American foreign service officer reported to Washington, “the resistance from armed peasants…and the unmistakable resentment or fear of those whom he does not succeed in ‘liberating’ are a shocking rejection of his idealism…The average Japanese soldier…benightedly vents the conflict in vengeful action against the people whom he believes have denied his chivalry.”
The Japanese argued that the Chinese were equally merciless to foes, and it is true that the Nationalists frequently shot prisoners. The Communists, at this period of the war, sought to spare the peasantry and customarily recruited KMT prisoners into their own ranks, even if officers were unlikely to survive. But beheadings of political enemies were familiar public spectacles in China. Most Japanese soldiers were no more willing to accept captivity in Chinese hands than in those of the Western Allies. “Once in 1944, we had a Japanese post surrounded,” said Communist guerrilla Li Fenggui of 8th Route Army. “The defenders fought until their ammunition was gone. Even then, one man ran towards four of us, brandishing his rifle. This Japanese and one of our men went at each other with bayonets. They thrust and parried until I managed to get behind the Japanese and give him a stroke which took his arm off. He fell to the ground quick enough, but we had to keep stabbing again and again until he lay still and died. That was a brave man!”
A Nationalist soldier found his unit unexpectedly under fire while escorting sixty Japanese POWs. “At such a moment [our commander]407 was in no position to consider his orders to treat prisoners well. He had to take resolute action. At the word, our machine gunners opened fire, and we rid ourselves of the encumbrance.” Rural areas feared the depredations of the Nationalist army at least as much as those of the Japanese. Peasants had a saying: “Bandits come and go. Soldiers come and stay.” Modern Chinese historians argue, however, that the fact that their own people inflicted atrocities upon each other was, and remains, a domestic matter of no rightful concern to foreigners; that nothing done by Chiang or Mao mitigates the crimes of the Japanese.
At the cost of deploying a million men, the occupiers maintained almost effortless military dominance over the forces of Chiang, and never sought to challenge Communist control of Yan’an Province. At the November 1943 Cairo Conference, President Roosevelt insisted upon anointing China as one of the four great Allied powers, assisted by Stalin’s acquiescence and in the face of Churchill’s contempt. Yet Roosevelt’s crusade to make China a modern power languished in the face of poverty, corruption, cruelty, incompetence, ignorance on a scale beyond even U.S. might and wealth to remedy. It was characteristic of the cultural contempt which China harboured towards other societies that even in the darkest days of the Japanese war, almost all Chinese retained a profound disdain for the Americans and British. Additionally, as Christopher Thorne has argued408, the U.S. never satisfactorily resolved its purpose. Did it seek to help China win its struggle against the Japanese? To create a strong China? Or to support the regime of Chiang Kai-shek? These objectives were probably unattainable, and certainly irreconcilable. Thorne omits a fourth, which weighed far more heavily with the U.S. chiefs of staff than any altruistic desire to aid the Chinese people. Just as in Europe Soviet soldiers were doing most of the dying necessary to destroy Nazism, Washington hoped that in Asia the expenditure of Chinese lives might save American ones.
All these aspirations foundered amidst the chaos and misery of China, and the inability of Chiang Kai-shek to fulfil the role for which Washington cast him. In 1944, Chiang’s economic recklessness and a Japanese initiative which flooded southern China with $100 billion of counterfeit money created catastrophic inflation, which ruined the middle class. A quarter of the population of Nationalist areas were by then refugees, victims of the forced mass migrations which characterised the wartime period. A drought in the south is thought to have killed a million people. Some American personnel were making fortunes running a black market in fuel and supplies. Even as Chinese people were dying of starvation, some Nationalist army officers sold food to the Japanese.
A visiting American intelligence officer delivered a devastating report to the War Department in May 1944:
Chinese troops are underfed, improperly clothed, poorly equipped, poorly trained, lacking in leadership…Because of “squeeze,” men are lucky to get 16 oz of their 22 oz daily rice ration. Almost all are illiterate. Motor maintenance is a problem, as they run a vehicle until it stops before any inspection is conducted. Trucks are usually overloaded 200%. Most drivers operate at an excessive rate of speed at all times. Along the Salween river, I was informed that not a shot had been fired since last November…that not over 2000 Japanese opposed fifteen Chinese divisions. Most of the troops appeared to be loafing. A Chinese army subsists locally and lives off the country…During the first week of February 1944 Lt. Budd, railhead officer at Kunming, dispatched 250 trucks for Kweiyang. Of this number 192 trucks failed to report and were either hijacked or stolen outright by Chinese drivers.
In the first quarter of 1944, 278 American trucks in southern China simply disappeared. The report asserted that a section409 assessing the performance of Chinese commanders was endorsed by all long-serving U.S. officers in China, but the relevant pages of the National Archive copy are missing, marked “Removed on orders of the War Department.” It is reasonable to guess that this excision was made in 1944, because the report’s verdict was so damning.
IN THE SPRING OF 1944, when elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific their fortunes were in relentless decline, amazingly the Japanese found the will and the means to launch “Ichigo,” an ambitious operation which swept across central and southern China, vastly enlarging Japan’s area of occupation. Ichigo was provoked by the American air threat. B-29 bombers had begun to operate from bases in China. The Japanese initiated Ichigo to deprive the Americans of these. Half a million men, 100,000 horses, 800 tanks and 15,000 vehicles swept across the Yellow River and into Henan Province on a 120-mile-wide front. Some thirty-four Nationalist divisions simply melted away in their path. The Japanese killed forty Chinese for every loss of their own. Nationalist resistance was almost entirely ineffectual. Chiang invariably overstated his own difficulties, to extort additional aid from the Allies. But the British director of military intelligence in India reported on 17 May 1944:
It has been the lowest common denominator410 of appreciation of China’s prospects that, however much conditions depreciated, China would not capitulate…There is now a distinct possibility of China’s collapse…Conditions in occupied territory are said to compare favourably with those in KMT areas…[Its] collapse would render the Burma campaign a waste of effort…The plight of the common people is so bad that they would be apathetic and do nothing…There would be no regret for the Allies, as anti-foreign feeling is always just below the surface. The disaffection in the provinces is so great that their leaders would take a purely opportunistic view. The Generalissimo, faced with a crumbling structure, has no machinery with which to save it.
On the Japanese rolled into Hunan Province, crossing the Miluo River, killing casually as they went. Hunan had already been suffering famine for two years. Now matters grew much worse. For the Chinese people of the rice-producing regions between Hunan and Guangdong, in Guangxi and Guizhou provinces, Ichigo meant hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of new deaths from famine and disease. Peasants were reported to have revolted, disarming as many as 50,000 Nationalist soldiers, who were willing enough to abandon the war. American special forces teams from the Office of Strategic Services strove to deny the Japanese the great supply dumps and airfield facilities established at such cost. Some 50,000 tons of matériel were destroyed at one base, Tusham, by Maj. Frank Gleason and fifteen Americans, together with their Chinese cook and orphan mascot. The Nationalist retreat was punctuated by occasional stands, notably at Hengyang in June and July. The American correspondent Theodore White joined 62nd Army, which was seeking to dislodge the Japanese from the southern hills beyond the town:
It was dawn when we fell411 into the troop column, but the cloudless skies were already scorching. As far as we could see ahead into the hills and beyond were marching men. They crawled on foot over every footpath through the rice paddies; they snaked along over every ditch and broken bridge in parallel rivulets of sweating humanity. One man in three had a rifle; the rest carried supplies, telephone wire, rice sacks, machine-gun parts. Between the unsmiling soldiers plodded blue-gowned peasant coolies who had been impressed for carrier duty. There was not a single motor, not a truck…not a piece of artillery…The men walked quietly, with the curious bitterness of Chinese soldiers who expect nothing but disaster.
White watched pityingly as lines of men in their yellow and brown uniforms, feet broken and puffed, heads covered not by helmets, but instead by woven leaves for protection from the sun, sought to claw a way up the hills towards the Japanese positions. For three days he awaited the trumpeted Nationalist counter-offensive. Then he understood: he had witnessed it. On 8 August, Hengyang fell. Later that month, when the Japanese had reorganised their supply lines, they resumed their advance. Chiang’s 62nd Army melted away in their path. Logistics, not resistance, was the chief force determining the enemy’s pace. “Even in late 1944,” one of Chiang’s biographers has written, “the Japanese army could still march412 where it wished and take what it wanted.” Allied intelligence officers expressed surprise that the Japanese were advancing only forty miles a week, “despite facing nil opposition.”
Chiang ordered that commanders who retreated should be shot, but this did not noticeably improve his armies’ performance. Added to the miseries of war were ghastly accidents such as one at Guilin, where a locomotive ploughed into a crowd of refugees standing on the railway tracks, killing several hundred. Chiang and Meiling chose this moment to hold a press conference at which they denied rumours that their marriage was in difficulties. Madame Chiang and her sister then set off for Brazil, exploring a possible haven for their family fortune if events at home continued to go awry. Even the most committed Americans came close to despair. China resembled a vast wounded animal, bleeding in a thousand places, prostrate in the dust, twitching and lashing out in its agony, inflicting more pain upon itself than upon its foes.
The only Chinese divisions which performed with some competence were five—equivalent in strength to two American—serving in northern Burma. These were the creations of the U.S. general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. He flew tens of thousands of men for training in India, where they were quarantined from Nationalist corruption and incompetence, then deployed them for an offensive aimed at reopening the land route into China. Equipped, fed and paid by the Americans, often receiving the benefit of U.S. air support, these units proved notably more effective than their brethren in China.
“Chinese soldiers showed413 what they could do if they were properly trained and given American equipment,” Wen Shan, a lawyer’s son who served in Burma as a truck driver, said proudly. “We had officers who did not steal men’s food, as they did in China.” Wen, like many young Chinese who served with Americans, was boundlessly impressed by their wealth and generosity, though shocked by the way white GIs treated their black counterparts. Jiang Zhen, a twenty-three-year-old landlord’s son from Shanghai who drove trucks on the Ledo road, said of his time there: “I was very lucky414. I had a great opportunity, and it became an important experience in my life.”
Wu Guoqing, an interpreter at 14th Division headquarters in Burma, enjoyed his entire experience with the army. In India and on the battlefield he marvelled at the openness of the Americans with whom he served: “They said what they liked415. They criticised their own government. That’s what they call democracy. In China we are not like that, not open in the same way.” Yet it would be mistaken to over-idealise either the Chinese-American relationship in Burma, or the performance of the Nationalist divisions there. Wu witnessed a bitter row between a young U.S. military adviser and a Chinese colonel. The American officer pressed the Nationalists to display more aggression, especially about patrolling. The KMT officer flatly refused. Likewise, when British troops in Burma began to operate with Stilwell’s force, they were unimpressed by Chinese passivity. The British official historian wrote contemptuously: “It might be said that416 never had such an army remained so inactive before so small an enemy force for so long.” The modest achievements of Stilwell’s divisions in northern Burma counted for little, set against the strategic paralysis prevailing in Chiang’s own country.