China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (2 page)

PART I

Innocents in China

CHAPTER ONE

A Rare Victory

N
ineteen forty-five, the eighth year of the war between China and Japan, opened with a Chinese military success. It was a rare and therefore heartening event in a China that had become perhaps not inured to defeat but well acquainted with it, and with the human devastation that it brought with it.

The victory took place in western Yunnan province along the border with
Burma at a place called
Wanding, a semitropical customs station that under normal circumstances nobody outside the region would have heard of. Then as now, the town was connected to Burma by a single-lane wooden bridge over a tributary of the
Salween River. It was a not-very-charming place of small merchandise markets, customs sheds, and a frontier inspection station set in a breathtaking territory of terraced fields, swift muddy streams, and fingers of mist that crept down an endless succession of far-flung valleys. There, on January 3, 1945, two large Chinese armies, one coming across Yunnan province from the east, the other from the west across Burma, converged on some two thousand weary and hungry but battle-tested and well-dug-in Japanese troops.

Wanding’s momentary importance came from its position at the northeast exit of Burma’s Shweli Valley. Three years earlier, a Japanese army, using forced marches through the jungles and coordinated air and ground assaults, had seized all of Burma, up to then a British colony, thereby achieving two important goals as Japan sought to extend its sway across all of Asia. One, the eviction of the British from Burma completed the eradication of white European colonialism in East and Southeast Asia. Japan had already chased the British from their possessions in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, and the Americans from their only Asian colony, the Philippines (Vichy France, allied to Nazi Germany, was still nominally in control of the Indochinese countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but Japan largely dictated terms there too).

The other Japanese goal was to blockade China, in effect, lay it under siege, preventing it from getting supplies from the outside world and thereby forcing it to surrender. When Japan embarked upon its full-scale invasion of China in 1937, its expeditionary armies took control of all the country’s ports on its long Pacific coast—Dalian,
Port Arthur, Yingkou, Huludao, and Qinwangdao in the northeast; Tianjin, Chefoo (now Yentai), Qingdao, Ningpo, and Shanghai in central China; Amoy, Swatow, Canton, and the British colony of Hong Kong in the south. The Japanese also prevailed upon Vichy France to close the old railroad leading from the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi to Kunming in southwest China, so that former overland route was no more. For the early years of the war, the Soviet Union supplied substantial arms and equipment to China, but that stopped in 1941 when the Soviets became too busy with their own struggle against Nazi Germany to ship much of anything to China.

The result was that China, a continent-sized country with a population of 425 million, was in imminent danger of being entirely cut off from the rest of the world, and therefore cut off from its sources of military supplies. In response, China’s government dispatched two hundred thousand laborers from Yunnan to Burma to construct a two-lane, all-weather road that served for five years as the final segment of a very long supply route to China. Goods shipped from San Francisco came by freighter to the Burmese-British port of Rangoon (now Yangon), then inland by train five hundred miles to the town of Lashio in the Shan states of eastern Burma; from there, these shipments went by truck up the steep gradients of the Burmese tribal borderlands and over the Wanding bridge into China itself. The road continued northeast for another five-hundred-mile stretch through the corrugated verdure of rural Yunnan province, crossing a trestle bridge over the deep, steep banks of the Salween River and ending up in Kunming, the provincial capital.

With Japan’s conquest of Burma, China’s sole connection to the rest of the world was a treacherous, high-altitude air route over the
Himalayas from northeast India. Known ruefully to the pilots who flew it as “
the Hump,” this often fatally dangerous supply line provided China with all the arms, ammunition, and fuel it could get in its desperate war of resistance against the well-armed Japanese. The supply was woefully inadequate. And that is why the reopening of
the Burma Road was a constant and, in the case of one commander in particular, obsessively pursued goal. It would be a way of supplying China and thereby helping it to make a greater contribution to the main and overriding objective of the war in Asia, which was the defeat of Japan.

The commander for whom Burma was an obsession was Lieutenant General
Joseph W. Stilwell, a legendary figure, much written about at the time, who subsequently served as chief of staff to the supreme Chinese leader,
Chiang Kai-shek, and as commander of all American forces in the entire China-Burma-India theater. The only problem with the latter designation was that, with the important exceptions of teams of advisers, some very effective army air force units, and a famous guerrilla battalion known as Merrill’s Marauders, there were hardly any American combat forces in the theater. Stilwell commanded Chinese troops almost exclusively, deployed reluctantly by Chiang, who had many fronts, military and political, to contend with, Burma relatively minor among them. In 1942, when the Japanese first invaded Burma, Stilwell had gotten separated from the main body of the Chinese troops he was commanding, and narrowly escaped the pursuing Japanese by walking to India, where he minced no words to the journalists who met him there. “
We got a hell of a beating,” he said. “We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.”

Now, at the beginning of 1945, the United States and China were retaking it, and even though Stilwell, relieved of his command four months earlier at Chiang’s insistence, was no longer on the scene, the two armies converging on Wanding had been largely created and trained by him, and they were carrying out his tactical plan. One arm of the pincer, made up of twelve Chinese divisions known as the
Y-Force, had moved the five hundred miles toward Burma through Yunnan province from Kunming, commanded for that long march by the Nationalist general
Wei Li-huang—aka “Hundred Victories Wei”—but prodded into action every hard-earned mile of the way by American liaison officers who were assigned to every large Chinese unit. Wei, ordered by Chiang to “
succeed—or else,” began fighting his way through Yunnan in April 1944.
He ferried his seventy-two thousand troops, his pack animals, and his weaponry by moonlight across the treacherous Salween, which cuts north–south through central Yunnan province. He fought in torrential monsoon rain and thick fog that turned to sleet in Yunnan’s higher elevations, building bridges over innumerable mountain streams, receiving supplies by air drop, and keeping the Japanese on the defensive. Wei got crucial help from the American 14th Air Force, aka the Flying Tigers, the storied unit led by General Claire Chennault, which relentlessly strafed and bombed Japanese troops during the entire Salween campaign. Still, Wei’s forces took heavy casualties from an enemy always ready to fight and die rather than surrender. Colonel John H. Stodter, a liaison officer attached to the Y-Force, recalled the Chinese practice of attempting “to climb up through inter-locking bands of machine gun fire,” a “sheer bravery” that seemed “
sickeningly wasteful.”

The other arm of Stilwell’s pincer was the
X-Force, five divisions of Chinese troops, these under the command of an American, Lieutenant General
Daniel I. Sultan, who had spent the better part of a year fighting their way from India over a succession of ridges and valleys across Burma in the direction of China. In November, Wei took Mangshi, a town in western Yunnan that had a landing field, permitting supplies to be flown in rather than air-dropped. On December 1, 1944, Chefang fell to the Chinese. On the other side of the border, the X-Force had taken the town of Bhamo on the Irrawaddy River, just fifty miles as the crow flies from Wanding.

Wei attacked there on January 3. Detachments of the Chinese Second Army climbed the dominant local peak, known as the Huilongshan, which commanded the approaches to the town. Colonel
Stodter had a clear view of the action from an observation post, as did
Theodore H. White,
Time
magazine’s correspondent in wartime China, who described the unfolding battle “as one of those vignettes that mark a turning point.”

“It was
a long, hot day of mountain climbing,” White wrote in his memoirs,

Artillery salvos, lasting eight minutes every hour, blasted the Japanese positions, and “after each salvo a rush of Chinese infantrymen to the next height through the shell-shredded trees; then another salvo, and one could see the Chinese in their blue-gray uniforms tumbling into trenches or circling Japanese blockhouses and dropping on them from the top.” Afterward, the vultures flew over the slopes of the mountains, where they picked at the corpses of the Chinese and Japanese dead.

A convoy of American trucks and jeeps rolls through the Chinese town of Baoshan after the reopening of the Burma Road at the beginning of 1945.
(illustration credit 1)