Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (18 page)

A further memo debated the wisdom of sending the fleet to East Asia:

Had there been a powerful British fleet in Far Eastern waters in July Japan would never have dared to ride roughshod over all our established rights in Shanghai for the purpose of attacking and destroying the Chinese Government . . . Japan was admitted to share in these privileges [within the International Settlement, by the British and the Americans] and His Majesty’s government are entitled therefore to insist that she does not grossly abuse them.

This diplomat viewed the deteriorating situation purely in terms of British interests, and noted explicitly that the situation in the Yangtze valley was to be treated as part of an international situation. In particular, the establishment of “puppet” client governments serving the Japanese in the surrounding areas was a crucial part of the Foreign Office’s concern. The summary went on to state, among the six key objectives, that Britain should “restore the status quo in the Yangtze Valley and South China . . . namely a regime under the control of the Chinese Government providing for the open door,” but that they should also “protect particular British interests in North China, but otherwise stand aside [except Tianjin Customs].”
³⁶

The fate of Shanghai deeply shocked the West even after the guns ceased firing and a sullen peace returned. The British poet W. H. Auden and the writer Christopher Isherwood, both fresh from seeing the carnage of the Spanish Civil War, arrived in Shanghai some months after the fighting had ended. Isherwood recorded in graphic terms the destruction that lay before him, made more eerie by the fact that the foreign concessions remained almost intact while the Chinese-controlled parts of the city had been demolished:

The International Settlement and the French Concession form an island, an oasis in the middle of the stark, frightful wilderness which was once the Chinese city. Your car crosses the Soochow Creek: on the one side are streets and houses, swarming with life; on the other is a cratered and barren moon-landscape, intersected by empty, clean-swept roads. Here and there a Japanese sentry stands on guard, or a party of soldiers hunts among the ruins for scrap-iron. Further out, the buildings are not so badly damaged, but every Chinese or foreign property has been looted—and no kind of wild animal could have made half the mess . . . books and pictures have been torn up, electric-light bulbs smashed, wash-basins wrecked.
³⁷

Zhou Fohai, now safely in Wuhan, had been even more pithy, if no less despairing, in his assessment of the retreat from the Yangtze delta. “Our fate has been decided,” he wrote. “Where will our burial places be?”
³⁸

Chapter 6

Refugees and Resistance

T
HE PROSPEROUS CITY OF
Wuxi, about 80 kilometers west of Shanghai, like much of the Yangtze delta, was heavily bombed during the initial months of the war. Mrs. Yang, a Chinese Christian, was one of thousands who prepared for evacuation, along with her husband and children. On November 16, 1937, she set out, carrying with her only a few essentials, including two big turnips with two hundred banknotes hidden inside, and some jewelry in a hollowed-out egg. The party had to make a terrifying choice: should they flee via the Grand Canal, the most obvious route, or across Taihu Lake, and the less well-known canals? If they chose the Grand Canal, then they would be traveling parallel to the railway and main highways, which were major targets for Japanese bombers. But if they went via the lake, they would likely be robbed—and “robbery meant death, too.” A sudden sighting of a bomber overhead forced them to choose, but arriving at the Grand Canal, they “met thousands of people, rich and poor, in small fishing boats like ours fleeing from their homes . . . The Grand Canal was simply jammed with boats.” Among the horrors they saw were “dead bodies on the shore, dead babies in the river, and . . . bombed ships sunk here and there.”

Conditions on the boats were bad, and made worse by the very soldiers charged with defending them. “Every boat was so crowded that it was almost impossible for us to move,” despaired Mrs. Yang. They all had to share just one basin for washing, and “sometimes a mother would almost suffocate her baby in order to stop the noise to reach the soldiers’ ears.” Chinese soldiers, supposedly there to protect them, in fact were more interested in seizing the boats for their own use, or stealing valuables from the refugee passengers.
¹

They finally reached Zhenjiang (Chinkiang), 219 kilometers northwest of Shanghai, on November 22, and managed to fight their way onto a British steamer, after an air raid had interrupted boarding. The group of refugees were sprayed with water to prevent the crowd rushing forward (“we were as wet as ducks”), but they were still lucky, as they did at least manage to board: “Thousands who were left on the pontoon were in despair and many got aboard by throwing away all of their possessions and even children.”
²

They then traveled over four days around 520 kilometers to the southwest from Zhenjiang to Wuhan. In mid-November the Nationalists were making preparations to leave Nanjing and move the military headquarters there, and Wuhan was in a frenetic state.
³
But for Mrs. Yang the visit was a brief respite, before the strains of refugee life hit once more. As the capital moved, and the foreigners were evacuated in large numbers to Wuhan, Mrs. Yang was among the many Chinese refugees who felt pressured to move further inland. The next stage of their journey, by rail, was to Changsha in Hunan province, 350 kilometers south of Wuhan, but they soon found that the chaos of the boats was to replay itself on the train:

After staying at the station for seven hours the train arrived at eleven o’clock in the night. Being so unfortunate that we were waiting at the place where the first class car stopped, that when we ran to the third class many of us were almost overtrodden to death and especially with those [
sic
] children and old ladies even with people helping them. I found I missed three people in my family, then I feared that they might have been hustled down to the railway track [that is, denied the chance to board the train] after my husband and servant came back to say that no response came to their calling in each car “Is there any Wusih [Wuxi] people here?” I worried until the next morning when the lost people came to look for us.
⁴

Having suffered ordeals by water and rail, the Yangs entered the final stage of their nightmare once they made it onto the roads. Members of the group negotiated to hire trucks to take them to Guangxi, around 500 kilometers southwest of Changsha, but the vehicles were endlessly delayed. Eventually, the trucks arrived on January 3, 1938, and the refugees were ordered in at once. Salvation came with its own discomforts. “I felt that I was not used to the smell of the gasoline,” Mrs. Yang remembered, “and the jolting of the truck upset me so much that I could not suppress myself from vomitting [
sic
]. I opened my eyes and poured out all what [
sic
] I ate and
[
another passenger] immediately followed. Now only five persons out of twenty one [
sic
] on our car behaved themselves.”
⁵
Chiang Kai-shek and his government might have decided on an orderly retreat in the autumn of 1937, but for Mrs. Yang, like millions of others, there had been no warning. Nor was it just China’s cities that were under attack. More than nine out of ten Chinese at the time lived in rural areas, following a way of life that had changed only gradually over hundreds of years, focused on religious rituals, agriculture for subsistence and sale, and ever-continuing struggles against taxation or other requirements of the state. Chiang’s plans for resistance centered on the idea of a unified national effort, but the circumstances of war seemed to be destroying everything that had defined the Chinese sense of shared stability and community.

Once the Japanese had captured Beiping and Tianjin at the end of July 1937, they drove westward, scattering ill-equipped and loosely coordinated local Chinese armies. The railways were also shaping the pattern of war in northern China. The Japanese military depended on its ability to move large numbers of troops fast, along with their technologically superior weaponry. To do this, they had to dominate the railways in the north, which they did with increasing success through the summer of 1937.
⁶

There were two wars being fought in the autumn of that year. In central China, the struggle for power was between the Nationalists and the Japanese, mainly in Shanghai, but stretching down as far south as Guangzhou (Canton). In northern China, the situation was much more complex: armies aligned with Chiang, but not under his control, dominated the area. In addition, the Communists were a powerful presence. Their armies had not been involved in the battle for Shanghai, but their leaders were deeply concerned with the defense of other cities in northern China, which were nearer to their Yan’an base in Shaanxi province. Theoretically, Chiang Kai-shek was now their supreme commander, but in practice he had no control over their actions. Mao had little to say about events in the Yangtze delta, but he issued a string of commands from Yan’an in an attempt to shape events in the north. The city of Taiyuan, 350 kilometers to the northeast in Shanxi province, now became a center of resistance as the local militarist, Yan Xishan, tried to defend it against the ever-increasing numbers of Japanese troops pouring into north China. Through the autumn of 1937 the fate of Taiyuan and Datong (250 kilometers further north), the major cities of Shanxi province, would dominate the battle for the north. Taiyuan had a major arsenal and Datong had crucial coal mines: both were important prizes for the Japanese.

The maneuvering among the Nationalists, the militarists, the Communists, and the Japanese had real and devastating effects on the wider population. Should they remain where they were, at the mercy of clashing armies? Or should they gather all their belongings and flee to places unknown for a life lived out of a suitcase, with no clear means of support? For the very poor, there was often no choice at all; they simply had too few resources to leave their homes. For the middle classes, the question was often more pressing.

Not all those traveling around China at this time were so helpless. One person who found himself absolutely in his element was the journalist Du Zhongyuan, who had been imprisoned in 1935 for publishing anti-Japanese screeds. Upon his release in 1936, he had been adopted by powerful Nationalists who had admired his stance. The outbreak of war gave Du his chance to use his skills where they were most valuable: in reporting the unfolding war against Japan. As the north collapsed and the Nationalists tried desperately to hold onto territory between the autumn of 1937 and the spring of 1938, Du traveled extensively in northern and eastern China, telling his readers the story of the war in near real time. He had arrived in Shanghai on the afternoon of August 13, the day that fighting in the city had started in earnest. Du’s writing, sent in regular dispatches to the
Resistance
[
Dikang
] newspaper, gives a powerful sense of the chaos that was enveloping China as the invasion started. Ironically, Du himself was clearly having the time of his life, exhilarated and shocked in equal measure by what he saw. Free now to report on the resistance to Japan as he wished, he haggled for rides in military convoys or hitched rides. As he said himself, when the enemy was invisible and the day was clear and cloudless, it was as if they “were all going for a holiday in the hills.”
⁷
But the most notable part of Du’s wartime odyssey was his reporting from China’s besieged rail network.

He started in central China, and began a tortuous journey that would first take him to the battlefields of the north. In mid-August, Du and his traveling companion Li Gongpu were unable to find a train to take them out of Shanghai and had to get a ride to the nearby city of Suzhou, 120 kilometers to the west, avoiding the attention of enemy aircraft along the way. When they reached Suzhou station, Du and Li looked for the stationmaster to find their prearranged booking, only to be told that “there were no more passenger carriages [coaches], and he could only prepare an iron-roofed carriage, which was normally used for cattle.”
⁸

Over and over again, Du would find himself dealing with trains that were delayed, or missing a connection, or canceled. His detailed accounting was more than a diary of personal frustration. (In fact, Du seemed to take some delight in finding ingenious alternative ways of getting to his destination.) It was evidence of the wider disruption that the war had brought to China. Railways were one of the most potent and glamorous representations of modernity in early twentieth-century China. They had only been operating on a wide scale for some quarter of a century by the time war broke out, and their speed and power were widely used as a metaphor for development in the region. The Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway regularly used advertising that featured modernist images of speeding coaches, a symbol of the sleek, futuristic face of the Japanese Empire, which was, by implication, superior to backward Chinese society. The Nationalists too had taken pride in the great increase in railway tracks that had been laid during their decade in power—doubling from 30,000 to 60,000 kilometers. Now modernization was under siege.

Enough of the system was working for Du to see how the country was preparing for war. One notable feature of the landscape was the air-raid shelter. In the mid-1930s air war was still relatively new, although there was plenty of evidence of what it could do. The Spanish Civil War was still under way, but it was already clear by 1937 that German and Italian bombers were providing powerful assistance to General Franco against the Republicans. Among Western politicians, including British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, the fixation on the idea that “the bomber will always get through” provided a powerful motivation to pursue policies of appeasement. And for China in the 1930s, even less used to technologically advanced warfare than was Europe, it was shattering to have to deal with death from the sky.