Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (24 page)

But in the end the focus must be on Japanese terror, not Chinese faults. Chinese missteps were the result of a war they had never sought. In contrast, the Japanese behavior was inexcusable. As Durdin pointed out, “The Japanese appear to want the horrors to remain as long as possible, to impress on the Chinese the terrible results of resisting Japan,” adding, “Nanking today is housing a terrorized population who, under alien domination, live in fear of death, torture, and robbery. The graveyard of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers may also be the graveyard of all Chinese hopes of resisting conquest by Japan.”
⁵⁹

William Edward Dodd, the US ambassador in Berlin, noted on December 14 that his Japanese counterpart boasted of having “killed 500,000 Chinese people,” and that Tokyo expected the West would do nothing to intervene.
⁶⁰
Ambassador Johnson in Wuhan had his own theory about what the Japanese were doing. Despite the noises of peace emanating from Tokyo, he felt, the actions of the Japanese on the ground suggested that they intended to make China a purely Japanese area of influence: “I am even convinced that the actions of Japanese soldiers at Nanking . . . [were] partly motivated by a desire to convince the Chinese that they must not depend on white intervention.”
⁶¹
Western observers, both diplomatic and journalistic, saw the fall of Nanjing as a terrible blow for hopes of continued Chinese resistance to Japan. So too did some around Chiang Kai-shek, notably Wang Jingwei.

Why did the atrocity happen? Few believe that there was a preplanned conspiracy to massacre the population of Nanjing. What made it shocking was the violent manner in which the looting and killing took place, not its cold calculation. In fact, Nanjing was just one, albeit the most prominent, of a series of atrocities carried out by the Japanese during their invasion of eastern China. The Japanese Army was deeply angry. It had assumed that it would conquer China fast, and that the lack of resistance that it had met on earlier incursions between 1931 and 1937 would be repeated. The strength of opposition, and the length of time it took to secure Shanghai, had enraged troops who were already whipped up by propaganda about the rightness of their cause, and who had themselves been brutalized by their military training in Japan.

Ever since the early twentieth century, the conscript army had been at the center of Japan’s reinvention of itself as a modern state. By the 1930s, the army and navy dominated Japanese life almost to the exclusion of other more liberal sections of society; public life, business, and the media all came more and more under the military project. The Imperial Army had entered an echo chamber in which its mission to subjugate China could not be opposed either within Japan or outside it.

When the war broke out, Chiang had criticized his own countrymen for the poor state of many of China’s troops, in contrast to Japan’s sophisticated military training. But the troops who served in the CCAA were a long way from being Japan’s finest. Many of them were older soldiers (in their thirties or even forties) who were resentful at having been called up. The goal of capturing Nanjing only emerged as the temperature of the conflict rose during the summer and autumn of 1937.

The lack of external witnesses was another factor. But news reports of what had happened at Nanjing did leak out, even if the scale of the killings was not clear. The
North-China Herald
ran an editorial entitled “Nanking Horror” and lamented “If every city which may be captured by the Japanese is to be transformed into a bath of blood the world will be repelled with horror and dismay.” There was more detail, although not much: “Grim tales of massacre, looting and rape during Nanking’s capture were received yesterday,” ran the report:

. . . in two days the whole outlook has been ruined by frequent murder, wholesale and semi-regular looting, and uncontrolled disturbance of private homes, including offences against the security of women . . . any one who was caught in streets or alleys after dusk by roving patrols was likely to be killed on the spot . . . the terror is indescribable.
⁶²

Even if there was no meticulous plan for the massacre in Nanjing, the wider ideological clash between Japan and China was a central cause of the tragedy. Japanese Pan-Asianism had metamorphosed in the decades between 1900 and the 1930s, and the Japanese were seized with a sincere, if deluded, belief that they had a duty to lead their Asian neighbors, including China, in a journey of liberation from Western imperialism. The notion that China might have developed its own vision of nationalism, in which Japan was as much an aggressor as the West, did not fit into the worldview of the invaders. This cognitive dissonance did a great deal to fuel the contempt of the troops for their victims and their consequent savagery.
⁶³

Chiang Kai-shek did not immediately know the enormity of what had been done in Nanjing in the name of the emperor. But Chiang’s departure from the city had left him deeply shaken. His attempt to turn immediately to matters of state worked for a few days. Then he was hit by a high fever. For four days he lay prostrate, and even when the symptoms had subsided a little he declared: “My spirit hasn’t recovered. I’ve had to stay in bed.”
⁶⁴
He continued to reflect on negotiations with Japan and with the CCP, even while ill. But in his diary he wrote nothing about Nanjing.

At least, not until January 22, 1938, when Chiang recorded: “In Nanjing, the Japanese dwarfs have been killing and raping. [They’re stuck where they are]—but it’s our compatriots who are in extreme suffering.”
⁶⁵
Why did Chiang not write about the massacres before this, even to himself? One scholar, certainly, has suggested that perhaps none of his subordinates had told him about what had happened. That is possible.
⁶⁶

But sometimes it is hard, even in a supposedly private diary, to admit the truth. Chiang had seen what the Japanese had done to Shanghai, even with the entire international community watching. He knew that Nanjing was a great prize; why else would he have insisted that it must be defended to the death? He would have had some inkling of what the Japanese would do to a defenseless city. And he was the one who had abandoned it. His reason for doing so was understandable. Without Chiang, the defense of Wuhan would have lost its key commander. Leaving Nanjing was just one of the horrific choices he had been forced to make. He would be forced to make many more before the war was over.

Or perhaps Chiang wrote nothing about Nanjing in his diary for a month because he simply had no idea what he could possibly say.

Chapter 8

The Battle of Taierzhuang

O
N MARCH
8, 1938, the British author Christopher Isherwood recorded the following words in his diary: “Today Auden and I agreed that we would rather be in Hankow at this moment than anywhere else on earth.”
¹
His sentiments were echoed by progressives all over the Western world. For a brief moment, the battle between the forces of enlightenment and darkness seemed to be symbolized by events in that city, which housed the temporary Chinese military headquarters located halfway up the Yangtze River.

In November 1937 Chiang Kai-shek had moved his command to the great tricity of Wuhan. For the Nationalists there could have been no more symbolic place than Wuhan to make a stand. The city was really three municipalities in one—Hankou, Wuchang, and Hanyang—which had grown prosperous over the centuries as it became a gateway for trade between coastal China and the interior. Westerners tended to refer to the whole city as “Hankow.” On October 10, 1911, the discovery in the city of a bomb plot against the government had ballooned into a nationwide protest, the revolution that would topple the last emperor and see the establishment of the republic. That revolution had been underpinned by a new phenomenon in China, the rise of politically active merchants, who were not only involved in republican politics but also helped to grow the city’s industries, including new steelworks and cotton mills. The city had developed a new modern look in the early twentieth century, with Western architects designing imposing, pillared buildings in brick and stone set alongside wide boulevards.
²

The Nationalist revolution of 1926–1928 had brought the city to wider attention when it became the capital for the Nationalist Party’s left wing, then led by Wang Jingwei in alliance with prominent Communists. The revolutionary government did not last long, as Chiang outmaneuvered Wang and sent in troops to attack his Wuhan government, which fell in late 1927. Mindful of the city’s rebellious past, Chiang made sure that the Chen brothers (leaders of the “CC Clique”) kept firm political control in Wuhan once the capital had moved to Nanjing.
³

But the disasters of autumn 1937 thrust Wuhan into new prominence, and just a decade after it had been stripped of its status as temporary capital it once again became the seat of military command and resistance. Leading Nationalist politicians had been seen in the city in the months before war broke out, fueling suspicions that Wuhan would play a major role in any imminent conflict, and by the end of the year the generals and their staffs, along with most of the foreign embassies, had moved upriver. Yet as 1937 slipped into 1938 the Japanese advance seemed practically unstoppable. From the destruction of Shanghai, to the orgy of violence in Nanjing, to the increasing vulnerability of Wuhan, the government appeared powerless against the onslaught.

In January 1938 there was a new escalation of hostilities. Until that point, Japan had not officially declared war, even during the Shanghai campaign and the massacre at Nanjing. But on January 11 an Imperial Conference was held at Tokyo in the presence of Emperor Hirohito. Prime Minister Konoye set forth a “Fundamental Policy” to deal with the “China Incident.” In fact, it was an ultimatum to the Nationalist government. Its terms were harsh, including reparations payable to Japan, and new political arrangements that would formalize the separation of north China under Japanese control. Chiang’s government would have seventy-two hours to accept the demands. If they refused, then Tokyo would no longer recognize the authority of the Nationalist government and would seek to destroy it. The Chinese government was still considering its response when at noon on January 16, Konoye publicly declared that “Hereafter, the Imperial Government will not deal with the National Government.” In Japanese, this became notorious as the
aite ni sezu
(“absolutely no dealing”) declaration. Over the next few days, the Japanese government made it clear that this was a formal breach of relations, “stronger even than a declaration of war,” according to Foreign Minister Hirota Kôki. The Chinese ambassador to Japan, who had been sitting ineffectively in Tokyo for six months since hostilities broke out, was finally recalled.
⁴

At the end of January, Chiang summoned a military conference, at which he declared that the top strategic priority would be to defend the east-central Chinese city of Xuzhou, about 500 kilometers north of Wuhan. This was yet another decision, like the one to mobilize troops near Lugouqiao, that was influenced by the railway: Xuzhou was located at the midpoint of the Tianjin–Pukou (Jinpu) line, and if seized, would give the Japanese mastery over north–south travel in the populous area of central China. The Jinpu line also crossed the Longhai line, China’s main cross-country rail artery, running from Lanzhou in the west to the port of Lianyungang in the east, north of Shanghai. The Japanese military command marked the Jinpu line as a target in the spring of 1938.

Control over Xuzhou and the railway lines that ran through it were key to the defense of Wuhan, to the city’s south. Chiang’s defense was part of a larger strategy that had been evolving since the 1920s, when the military commander and thinker Jiang Baili had first introduced the idea of a long war against Japan. His foresight earned him a position as an adviser to Chiang in 1938. Jiang had run the Baoding military academy, a predecessor of the more famous Whampoa academy, which had trained some of China’s finest young officers in the first decade of the republic (1912–1922). Now, many of the generals who had trained under Jiang had gathered in Wuhan, and they would play a crucial role in defending the city: among them, Chen Cheng, Bai Chongxi, Tang Shengzhi, and Xue Yue. They were loyal to Chiang, but also sought to avoid his tendency to micro-manage all aspects of their strategy.
⁵

Nobody knew whether Wuhan would be able to resist the Japanese advance, and the predictions of outside observers were gloomy. Yet the uncertainty in Wuhan created a remarkable, and perhaps unique, oasis of freedom in modern China. The writers Lao She, Mao Dun, and Guo Moruo, along with artists such as Xu Beihong and Feng Zikai, had all been deeply affected by the liberal moment of freethinking that had emerged around the time of the May Fourth demonstrations in 1919. In the years that followed, the increasing censorship and centralization of the Nationalist government had had a stifling effect on their ability to work creatively, but now the disintegration of political power caused by the war had, paradoxically, given them a new arena. Many of China’s most important cultural figures had retreated to Wuhan. Lao She spearheaded a movement through the All-China Writers’ Association to spread what he termed “old wine in new bottles,” using traditional forms such as folk songs and popular stories to embody a message of resistance against the Japanese. He found a willing audience for his work, such as the play
Defend Wuhan
.
⁶
It was this spirit of resistance that had also attracted Western writers such as Isherwood.