SEVENTEEN
U.S. SOLDIERS AND MARINES fighting for their lives in the Ryukyus and Philippines, Slim’s men in Burma, Australians in the south-west Pacific, would have found it grotesque had they known how the leaders of their great Asian co-belligerent spent the spring of 1945. Both rival parties for dominance of China held national congresses. True, desultory skirmishing with the Japanese persisted while the Nationalists were meeting in Chongqing, the Communists in Yan’an. The Americans wrung their hands in despair and disgust as the Japanese continued to expand their perimeter southwestwards across the Nationalists’ Yunnan Province, resisted with conviction only by the Stilwell-trained Chinese divisions. Neither Chiang nor Mao was any longer interested in contributing to Japan’s defeat. That could be left to the Americans in the Pacific. What mattered to them now was to gird their loins, gather their political and military forces, for the civil war that must follow the expulsion of the Japanese from China. The Communist Congress lasted fifty days, from 23 April to 11 June, its ideological writhings coinciding with the agony of Okinawa. Its chief achievement was to confirm the absolute dominance of Mao Zedong. His “thoughts” were thenceforward paramount in every aspect of Chinese Communist creed and deed.
Mao had almost a million men under arms, or what passed for arms among the guerrillas—they lacked artillery, air support and heavy weapons. The question of what these forces did during the Japanese occupation baffled most Americans at the time, and has remained a focus of controversy since. For decades after their domestic victory in 1949, the Communist rulers of China asserted that their followers, unsupported by the Americans, had alone waged effective war against the Japanese. Such Western propagandists as Edgar Snow made extravagant claims for the military successes of the Communists against the occupiers. They contrasted the energy and aggression of Mao’s people with Nationalist passivity and sloth. Here is a characteristic Snow flourish: “Though their enemies denounced775 the Communists’ beliefs and attributed to them every shameful excess they could imagine, no one could deny they had wrought a miracle in arms…Rarely in the history of modern war or politics has there been any political adventure to match this in imagination or epic grandeur. The job was done by men who worked with history as if it were a tool, and with peasants as if they were raw material.”
American officers of the 1944 “Dixie Mission” to Yan’an were taken to watch showpiece operations against the Japanese, about which they reported back to Chongqing as enthusiastically as they were intended to do. Most of Mao’s forces, however, spent the war struggling to feed themselves and survive, skirmishing only spasmodically with the Japanese. Today, the myth of Communist dominance of the struggle against the occupiers is discredited even in China. If Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were less than effective on the battlefield, Mao Zedong’s guerrillas lacked either the will or the combat power to do more than irritate the Japanese. By 1944, 70 percent of Japan’s forces in China were committed against the Nationalists. A staff officer at Japan’s army headquarters in Nanjing, Maj. Shigeru Funaki, said: “The Communists operated in regions776 that were strategically unimportant to us. Their troops were much more motivated than the Nationalists, but we sought only to contain them. Our attention was overwhelmingly concentrated on confronting Chiang’s forces further south.”
“The Communists were not strong enough to offer a major challenge to the Japanese occupation,” says a modern Chinese historian, Yang Jinghua. “In the anti-Japanese war, the Kuomintang777 did most of the fighting, and killed far more of the enemy—I say this, as a Communist Party member for thirty years. Statistics tell the story. Some 1,200 KMT generals died fighting the Japanese, against just ten Communist ones.” Zuo Yong, who later became a significant figure in Mao’s China, served with the Communist New 4th Army from 1941 to 1945, latterly as a brigade chief of staff. Today, he says: “We had to adopt the strategy778 and tactics of the weak, as Mao urged in his books. We were staging raids, not serious offensives. We were guerrillas, sometimes living months at a time without fighting a battle. The enemy was too strong for us to do anything else.” Zuo is generous in acknowledging U.S. aid to China, even though Washington denied arms to the Communists: “We felt really grateful to the Americans for all their help. One of their planes came down in our area, after being damaged bombing Japan. The pilot was wounded. We helped him to get back to his own people.” Another historian, Wang Hongbin, says: “Guerrillas could not realistically engage779 large bodies of Japanese regular troops. The main achievement of the Communist armies in the war was to win the support of peasants and the respect of the Chinese people.” This seems just.
By early 1945, the Communists claimed a combined strength of around 900,000 men for their 8th Route Army in the north and New 4th Army in central China, supported by another two million local militia members. As everywhere in the Second World War, guerrillas flourished chiefly in regions little valued by the occupiers. And like most irregular forces, those led by Mao were more concerned with proselytising for their cause and sustaining human existence in a starving countryside than with engaging the enemy. Li Fenggui, for instance, served eight months with his regiment of 8th Route Army in Shandong Province before acquiring a weapon of any kind. Most men went into action with perhaps ten rounds of ammunition apiece. Li’s battalion possessed two light and two heavy machine guns; it acquired a single 60mm mortar only in 1944, artillery never. Most of its weapons were locally made single-shot rifles. Few Communist officers possessed watches, which made the synchronisation of operations difficult.
“For us,” said Li, “1945 was not much different from 1940. Everyone was very hungry, everyone was very poor.” They led nomadic lives, of stringent austerity. A battalion of seven hundred men billeted itself in a village for a few days, fed by local people. When supplies were exhausted, the column moved on, each man if he was fortunate carrying three days’ bread and rice in a food bag. Their circumstances in 1945 had improved in only two respects: most Japanese troops had moved south from Shandong to confront the KMT; and far fewer Chinese were collaborating with the enemy. The ruthlessly pragmatic national ethic recognised that survival required bending with the wind. It had become plain even to peasants that the prevailing weather was no longer Japanese.
“Most nice people, clever people, chose to be Communists,” claimed Xu Yongqiang, who in 1944–45 was an interpreter with the Nationalist army in Burma. “They were real Communists, not selfish politicians.” He meant that many Chinese idealists and intellectuals gravitated naturally to the left in response to the Nationalists’ moral bankruptcy and the hyperinflation which ruined so many people in those years. “The professional middle classes found themselves bankrupted. The wife of the head of our university had to find work as a domestic servant. People were selling their clothes to buy food. It was the middle class who paid for the war.” Many Communists all over China languished in Japanese prisons, if they had been fortunate enough to escape execution.
Liu Danhua was a literature student in Harbin, Manchuria, when the Japanese took over. He was disgusted by everything about their behaviour, not least the fact that Japanese fellow students were so much better fed: “They had all the meat and fish. Everywhere we went, everything we did, was under Japanese control. The lives of ordinary people were wretched. I was young and angry. We tried to join the Communists, but for a long time we couldn’t find them—they were underground.” In 1940, Liu organised a student movement at Harbin University, which became known as the Left Reading Group. They made their pathetic protests by reading banned books, and urging peasants to defy Japanese orders about what crops to plant. They denounced collaborators. Liu taught his group revolutionary songs. He knew little Communist ideology, “but I could see the corruption and tyranny of the Kuomintang and the landlords. I was sure socialism must be the way forward for China.”
It was too dangerous to assemble in the university, so they met at the local tax office, where they incited tax collectors to defiance. In 1941, at last they made contact with the Communists, who began to use Liu as a courier. He was soon arrested, however, and interrogated by the usual Japanese methods—beatings, water torture, suspension by his ankles. When these refinements palled on their captors, prisoners were merely left to stand in the snow. After a trial, Liu was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, and served the first of them manacled.
Thereafter, however, his circumstances improved. He shared a cell with seven others, guarded by Chinese who proved not unsympathetic to the prisoners. He was allowed to receive a monthly visit from his wife, Yuan, who brought food wrapped in newspapers. These provided fragments of information about the outside world. He exercised constantly and took cold baths, because he was determined to be fit if he regained freedom. Some of his cellmates were Nationalists, “but there was no tension with us Communists. We were all against the Japanese.” He had no paper or pen, but composed poems in his head. Their only books were science texts and the Bible. “I read it, simply to keep my brain occupied. I can’t say I enjoyed it—it has always been abused by national rulers to serve their own purposes—but there are good things there.”
From 1944, Liu and his fellow prisoners knew that the Japanese were losing the war. Ironically, given Stalin’s indifference to China’s Communists, Liu felt passionately committed to the Soviets: “At that time, I thought the Russians were wonderful. I was sure imperialism and capitalism were doomed to collapse.” In his cell, he knew more about Stalin than about Mao. During the last months of the war, like every prisoner of the Japanese, he expected to be killed before liberation came. The tension between fear and hope became almost unbearable.
THE WAR POLICIES of Chiang and Mao had this much in common: each sought to strengthen his own power base, rather than to assist in the defeat of the Japanese. By a notable irony Mao, whose efforts to gain American support failed, profited vastly more from the conflict than Chiang, who received billions in aid, together with the wholehearted endorsement of the greatest power on earth. Mao used the war years to build popular support among the peasantry of a kind which the Nationalists never achieved. Communist forces developed a motivation, comradeship and sense of shared purpose quite unknown in Chiang Kai-shek’s army.
Li Fenggui, in 1945 a twenty-four-year-old company commander, was typical. He grew up in a village of nine hundred people near Shanghai, dominated by three “rich” landlords and a few “rich” peasants. The natural condition of others, including his own family, was destitution. After a bloody Japanese visit in 1941, Li and a few other villagers formed a little resistance group. Their first act of defiance was both primitive and ruthless. They lay in wait in the fields for a well-known Chinese collaborator who rode past daily on a bicycle. They rushed out, pulled him off his machine, wielded their machetes, and dragged the half-dead figure into the paddy. There, they finished him off and hid the body. Next day, another Chinese agent of the Japanese arrived to question the village headman about the disappearance of his colleague. Such happenings were not uncommon, however. No more was heard about the killing from the authorities.
But local Communists learned of it and approved. One day a stranger came to the village and told Li and his friends: “If you want to fight the Japanese properly, you must become a Communist.” Li said: “But I don’t know what a Communist is.” The stranger said: “A Communist is a friend to poor people. When China is ruled by Communists there will be no more landlords, no more famines, everyone will have enough to eat, proper houses to live in and electricity.” Li recalled later: “I had no idea what electricity was, because I had never seen it. But I accepted that it must be a good thing.” The visitor helped Li and three others to write applications to join 8th Route Army, one of whose units was encamped a few miles away. Li’s parents applauded. His mother made him a pair of cloth shoes. His father, poorest of the poor, nonetheless found money to buy cloth and stitch him a blanket. Thus equipped, he and the others set off one morning, accompanied for the first mile or so of their adventurous journey by a throng of admiring villagers. They were local heroes.
The years that followed were unremittingly harsh, yet Li found them rewarding: “We had such good relationships in the battalion, especially with our commanders. We were like family to each other.” He enjoyed the communal concerts, led by the divisional entertainment troupe. Together they sang the famous “Guerrilla Song”: “Marksmen all are we, when we shoot we kill!” In the summer of 1944, during the Ichigo offensive, Li’s division found itself attacked by an overwhelming force of Japanese, obliged to disperse and flee: “We told the local peasants to hide everything, poison the wells, and come with us. About five hundred joined our retreat. There were just thirty-seven soldiers in our group, three of them wounded. At last we came to the Yellow River. We had to get across it to be safe. The women put small children on their heads. Some peasants helped carry our wounded. The river was deep. Some of those women were not very tall. The water closed over their heads. Children drowned. Hardly anyone could swim. When we finally reached the other side, maybe three hundred of the five hundred who had started the crossing were still with us. We all cried and embraced each other, guerrillas and villagers together. We were supposed to be soldiers, but we were always peasants as well—one family.”
In a subsequent battle, Li was badly wounded—hit in the chest and leg. His unit had no medical supplies. They could only wash away the blood with salt water. When the rest of the battalion pulled out, he was left behind in the hut of a peasant named Li Qirong. For a week the wounded man lay undisturbed. Then one morning a Japanese collaborator appeared at the door of the house. “You seem to have visitors,” said the man suspiciously. He looked in, saw Li on the bed, and said: “He looks as if he’s from 8th Route Army.” Li Qirong said angrily: “That’s my own son, who was wounded last week when your Japanese friends shot up a lot of people.” Not satisfied, the collaborator questioned the village headman. Somehow, Li Qirong persuaded him to support the story. After the collaborator had gone, the guerrilla burst into tears: “My mother first gave me life,” he said, “but those people gave it to me a second time.” He recovered, and eventually rejoined his unit.
By 1945, Li and his comrades knew little more about Communist ideology than they had done three years earlier. Survival remained their overwhelming preoccupation. Li had risen to become a captain, though he was denied the formal rank because he could not read. Orders were issued verbally, as so few men were literate, but Li’s absence of education created problems in recording ammunition states, handling messages and taking roll calls. “Our general was the only really well-educated man in the division,” he said.
The sexual climate in the Communist ranks was puritanical. Zuo Yong, twenty-year-old son of a rich peasant, was a student in Shanghai in 1941 when the Japanese burnt down his school: “I decided I would rather fight than find another school.” He joined the Communists not for ideological reasons, but simply because their forces chanced to be closer at hand than those of the KMT. After a spell at an “anti-Japanese military school” in Hainan he was posted to New 4th Army as a platoon commander. A year or so later he was billeted in the village house of a family whose father was away at the front, serving as an officer with the Kuomintang. The man’s wife was a teacher, with two teenage sons and two daughters of eighteen and nineteen. Zuo persuaded the woman to let her daughters become nurses in a Communist clinic, because there was no longer a chance that they could study. Soon afterwards, the woman said she wanted to meet Zuo’s mother, to discuss a serious issue. “I’m afraid that’s difficult,” said Zuo. “Our village is a long way off.” The woman said: “Well, in that case, I’d better talk to you. I think you would make a good husband for one of my daughters.” Zuo explained that he could fulfil none of the three alternative criteria for being allowed to marry in the Red Army: he was under twenty-eight, he had not completed ten years’ service, and he was not a regimental commander.
Ordinary soldiers were officially denied physical contact with girls. Even the few married women in the ranks were forbidden to touch their husbands in public. Senior officers, however, were provided with arranged wives of eighteen or nineteen. Zuo said: “I remember one girl who was told she was to marry a regimental commander. She asked about him, and was told that he was brave, hard-working, kind. After their first meeting, a comrade demanded: ‘Do you like him?’ She said: ‘How can I tell? I’ve only seen him once.’” The marriage went ahead anyway. After a while, the girl ran away. Her husband remained enthusiastic, however, and eventually persuaded her to return. “A lot of couples whose marriages780 were arranged made a go of it together,” said Zuo, “but there were divorces. Some of our soldiers were pretty simple fellows from the countryside, not very nice. They took for granted the right to beat hell out of their women.”
FOR MOST of the war, Allied intelligence in China was shockingly poor. Stilwell and his successor Wedemeyer knew little about what the Nationalist armies were, or were not, achieving on the ground against the Japanese, and even less about the Communists. Until late 1944, the Communists’ base in Yan’an remained a distant lunar world, shrouded in mist. It was known that Mao Zedong and his followers controlled an area the size of France, inhabited by some ninety million Chinese people, in which they had established a radical social and economic regime. Westerners who visited Yan’an asserted that living conditions were better than those prevailing in Nationalist areas. Such reports were compromised, however, by the fact that most of their authors were ideological fellow travellers. Were Mao’s people serious Communists, or was he merely a rival warlord to Chiang? This issue mystified American and British officials in Chongqing. John Keswick, a scion of Hong Kong’s Jardine Matheson trading house, was a British political adviser. He described the Yan’an regime contemptuously as “nothing more than a provincial government781 by a group whose policy sprang from agrarian revolt…It is unlikely that they would interfere with private property.”
Lt.-Gen. Adrian Carton de Wiart was Churchill’s personal emissary to Chiang, an appointment which reflected the prime minister’s weakness for battlefield heroes, heedless of their other limitations. De Wiart was absurdly brave, veteran of campaigns innumerable, wounded eight times. He neglected to mention his Victoria Cross in his autobiography, presumably on the grounds that a self-respecting soldier should scorn such trifles. He lacked an eye, a hand (after being hit in France in 1915, he bit off his own mangled fingers when a doctor declined to remove them) and any hint of intellect. De Wiart despised all Communists on principle, denounced Mao as “a fanatic,” and added: “I cannot believe he means business782.” He told the British cabinet that there was no conceivable alternative to Chiang as ruler of China.
A British diplomat delivered a shrewder and more nuanced verdict: “The Communists do not, any more783 than the Kuomintang, think of ‘democracy’ as a system which gives a chance to opposition parties. What is really meant by the ‘democracy’ of the Communists is that they are strongly supported by the poorer peasantry.” British agents proved wiser than some Americans, dismissing any possibility of a deal between Chiang and Mao. By contrast Patrick Hurley, who became U.S. ambassador in October 1944, for months pursued the chimera of reconciliation. His first actions on arrival were to have a Cadillac appropriate to his status flown to Chongqing, and the ambassadorial residence redecorated. Then he set out to broker a deal between the Kuomintang and the Communists. In Hurley’s first weeks, this foolish man confided to his own staff that he could perceive little to choose between Mao and Chiang.
The Nationalists, unsurprisingly, were implacably hostile to any Anglo-American dealings with Mao, and for most of the war the Americans indulged them. But late in 1944, as Washington’s disillusionment with Chiang hardened, some contacts developed. John Service, a U.S. diplomat who shared with John Paton Davies a growing respect for the Yan’an regime, met the Communist leaders in August. After years of contending with Chiang’s self-importance, pomposity and duplicity, Service was captivated by the charm, humour and apparent frankness of the Communists in general, and Mao Zedong in particular. Mao told him that he had thought of abandoning the name “Communist” for his party, to assuage capitalist fears about its nature: “If people knew us they would not be frightened.” He said that China would need American investment after the war: “We must cooperate and we must have American help. This is why it is so important to us Communists to know what you Americans are thinking and planning. We cannot risk crossing you—cannot risk any conflict with you.” Mao pleaded for American amphibious landings on the coast of northern China, to open a direct supply route to Yan’an. So eager were the Communists for aid that Zhou Enlai, while acting as Mao’s emissary in Chongqing, told Service they were willing to place their troops under American command if the U.S. would arm them. Service, impressed and even entranced, formally recommended to Stilwell that weapons should be sent to the Communists. The general was not unsympathetic.
The idea got nowhere. More than sixty years later it is easy to convict of naïveté those Americans—some in Chongqing, some in Washington—who frustrated Chinese Communist advances. They persisted in backing Chiang Kai-shek when it was plain that his regime was incorrigibly corrupt. Yet the advocates of Mao also showed themselves imperceptive. American visitors, arriving from Chongqing with the rotten taste of Nationalism still fresh in their mouths, were absurdly easily seduced by the Communist leaders. Davies, who flew to Yan’an in October 1944, was enchanted by the “direct, friendly manner” in which Mao strode up to each visitor in turn and shook hands. His physical presence impressed them: the strong chin and prominent mole; long, thick black hair; wide lips. Davies noted Mao’s slow gestures, big, soft, heavy frame, mastery of dialectic argument, “the incandescence of personality784 which develops not in the twinkling of an eye but of easy perception. There is an immense, smooth calm and sureness to him.”
The American reported to Washington: “I got the impression that here785 we were dealing with pragmatists—men who knew their limitations as well as their strengths. And they were confident—confident and patient. They have waited a long time to get where they are now. They are willing to wait much longer.” Likewise Raymond Ludden and the five military members of the U.S. Yan’an Observers’ Group—the “Dixie Mission”—who travelled on foot and by mule to visit guerrillas. “8th Route Army has a legendary fame in North China as friend and champion of the people,” Ludden enthused in February 1945. After years of cynicism and frustration in the Nationalist camp, such men as Service and Davies found the Communists intensely romantic. They swallowed claims for the decency and moderation of Mao’s leadership, when shrewder observers recognised that the Communist leader, like Chiang, was engaged in the ruthless pursuit of power. Soft words offered to American emissaries were meaningless.
Mao’s personal vices are starkly depicted by modern writers. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in an unremittingly dark portrait, highlight his maltreatment of his first two wives, and of a host of unfortunate young women whom he exploited. Many Western as well as Chinese scholars argue contrarily, however, that whatever Mao became after he achieved power, in the wartime years his excesses had not yet manifested themselves. What seems indisputable is that Mao had no interest in liberal socialism. American visitors to Yan’an were foolish to be deluded by the warmth of Communist greetings. They saw, or thought they saw, a group of austere, dedicated patriots committed to fighting the Japanese and creating a better life for China’s starving millions. This was fanciful. It is no longer denied in China that Mao’s regime in Yan’an engaged in large-scale opium trafficking, and almost certainly also made tactical truces with the Japanese. “Mao and the Communists786 engaged in the opium trade,” says Yang Jinghua, a historian of Manchuria. “How else could they pay their troops? Nothing else that would grow in Yan’an was marketable. In such a situation, you do what you must.”
Evidence about Communist parleys with the Japanese is circumstantial, but persuasive. It suited both parties to trade opium, a major industry for the occupying regime. Japan’s China Affairs Board, established by Prince Konoe, controlled a $300-million annual traffic, deliberately revived by the Japanese army to weaken the Chinese and raise cash. This was the body whose agents negotiated with Mao’s people for supplies. Several of the largest Japanese corporations administered distribution—Mitsubishi in Manchuria, Mitsui in the south. There was intense rivalry over markets, though all the interested parties sought to conceal their roles. By 1944–45 it also suited Communists and Japanese alike to avoid headlong military confrontation. “China was so fragmented at that time, that it remains hard to say with certainty what did or did not happen,” shrugs Yang.
Mao’s suppression of dissent, however, is undisputed. A young intellectual named Wang Shiwei had languished under house arrest since 1942 for denouncing in an essay the “dark side of Yan’an,” the “three classes of clothing and five grades of food,” of which the best went to senior cadres while “the sick can’t get a bowl of noodles and the young have only two bowls of congee a day.” While the rest of the politburo walked everywhere, Mao rode in a Chevrolet van, prominently labelled “Ambulance: Gift of the New York Chinese Laundrymen’s National Salvation Association.” Young girls are alleged by Chang and Halliday to have suffered chronic sexual predation from party bosses. Dissidents were ruthlessly purged. Wang Shiwei was eventually beheaded. Spies and counter-revolutionaries were identified by torture and confessions. Among denounced intellectuals, suicides were not unknown.
Western visitors were charmed787 by the apparent casualness of Yan’an, the charm and fluency of Zhou Enlai, the manner in which Mao dropped by people’s quarters for cards or gossip, danced energetically though with absolute absence of rhythm at Saturday-night hops. Foreigners joined the cadres to drink baicha, “white tea”—hot water. They witnessed a brilliantly staged pantomime. The choice for China was not between a corrupt, brutal, incompetent dictatorship and libertarian socialism. It lay between two absolutist systems, of which that of the Communists was incomparably more subtle and effective, possessed of wide appeal for peasants and intellectuals.
Those Americans in Chongqing and Washington who opposed an alliance with Yan’an made the right call for the wrong reasons. They disdained Mao because they were fearful of undermining Chiang Kai-shek. The proper grounds for refusing aid to the Communists were that war matériel would not have been employed to assist the defeat of Japan. The Soviets took the same view. Moscow’s emissaries in Yan’an reported most unfavourably to Stalin on the discipline, battlefield performance and alleged successes of Mao’s troops. The Communists had indeed created a remarkable political edifice. The problem from an Allied viewpoint was that their achievement had everything to do with the future of post-war China, almost nothing to do with defeating Japan.
Yet in the wartime years, millions of Chinese peasants passionately believed that Mao held out the promise of a better life. To this day, many of those who served with the Communist guerrilla forces in World War II remember the experience with romantic enthusiasm. For all his shortcomings, Mao was a profoundly inspirational leader. Those modern biographers who claim that his achievement and long maintenance of power in China were founded exclusively upon terror seem drastically to understate the popular support which he mobilised. “The Communists were so much better organised than the KMT,” said Wei Daoran, son of a famous Nationalist general, Wei Lihuang, who as a teenager accompanied his father on wartime campaigns. “They had an infrastructure788 that stretched right through the countryside. When Communist troops passed through a region, they left behind much better memories than the KMT. They offered the peasants some education. If you were talented, the party offered opportunities for advancement. They treated women as equals.”
Many women found a fulfilment in the ranks of Mao’s Communists which had been wholly unattainable in pre-war China. Bai Jingfan was the daughter of a prosperous merchant from Henan Province who dealt in grain and oil. When the Japanese stormed their village in 1934, the family fled. Bai herself, sixteen at the time, set off alone in determined search of the Communists, whom she perceived as the only convincing opponents of occupation. Initially, she took an eight-day bus journey to Xian. From there, she travelled to Yan’an, where she enrolled in the Party’s Women’s University. On graduation she became a propaganda officer. The hardships of her new life counted for nothing beside the exhilaration of working for the cause. She married a rising star of the Communist military hierarchy, and followed him to fight with a guerrilla regiment in Hebei Province.
By May 1944 she had grown accustomed to a wholly nomadic existence, playing cat-and-mouse with Japanese forces. One night, camped in a village, they were awakened at midnight by scouts. An enemy search-and-destroy column was approaching. “It was pitch dark and blowing a gale. Our commander said: ‘We’ve got to get out—fast.’” Hastily seizing weapons and equipment, they set off towards another village, nine miles distant. They had marched barely a mile when the night erupted into gunfire. Somebody said: “The lead platoon has run into the Japanese.” Bai’s companions said: “We’ll have to make a run for it.” She had a special problem of her own, however. She was heavily pregnant. After struggling across country for two miles, she felt she could not run another step. In the midst of the fields, she told the others: “Leave me here—I’ll find a place to hide.” They argued fiercely for a few moments, then took her at her word. After a cold and frighteningly lonely night, early next morning she was able to struggle on to the village rendezvous where she joined her company. The Japanese were still close behind, however. The guerrillas had to keep going. In a few hasty exchanges with the villagers, they found a refuge for Bai, in the hut of a widow with no reason to love the enemy, for they had killed her husband.
For two weeks, they lived peacefully enough. Then, one morning, a boy dashed in shouting: “Japanese come! Japanese come!” At first they were disbelieving. Then they saw enemy soldiers approaching. Once again, Bai had to stumble into flight with her unborn burden. She lasted six miles, as far as another village, before again collapsing exhausted. She threw herself on the mercy of the peasants. They showed her into a deep, narrow hole. In stifling heat and total darkness, she lay secreted when the enemy column arrived. The Japanese announced that they knew people from 8th Route Army were in the village, and proposed to find them. After a search, which came close to Bai’s hole but did not discover it, they interrogated a ten-year-old boy and an old man. Both denied all knowledge of any fugitives. After raping the old man’s niece in front of the entire village, the Japanese marched on. Bai said: “I felt so guilty, completely powerless to interfere with anything the Japanese did.” She was safe, and rejoined her regiment. Soon afterwards, she gave birth to a son. She cherished the profound gratitude, common to all fugitives, of owing her life to strangers who suffered much and risked more.