Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (27 page)

The idea of using the river as a military tool was not entirely new. In 1935 Chiang’s German military adviser, Alexander von Falkenhausen, had suggested as part of a much longer general military survey that “the Yellow River is the final line of defense, and it would be a good idea to plan . . . to extend its defensive strength.”
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But the German was not the author of the suggestion, in the desperate days of 1938, to “use water instead of soldiers [
yi shui dai bing
].” Cheng Qian, commander of the First War Zone, was one of those who put the idea to Chiang, who had flown to Zhengzhou and realized that a military assault could not repel the Japanese now. The only choice was to let the Japanese capture the city within days, or else unleash the only weapon that would stop them, at least for a while: the river’s implacable force.

A leader more humane than Chiang might never have considered the dilemma, choosing to spare the dams and let the Japanese take Wuhan. But Chiang knew that if he did not break the dikes, and Wuhan fell within days, the Nationalist government might not be able to relocate to Chongqing in time and would be even more likely to surrender, leaving Japan in control of almost all China. Perhaps the nearest equivalent during the Second World War would be the decision of the French high command to surrender to the Germans in June 1940.
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As in France, Chiang’s decision was being made in the face of the most terrifying assault that the country had ever seen, and China’s armies were much weaker and less well trained than the French. The dilemma over whether to break the Yellow River dikes was the product of desperation.
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Chiang made his decision. He gave orders to General Wei Rulin to blow up the dike that held the Yellow River in place in central Henan. There was no doubt about what this meant. Floods would inundate much of central China, turning it into a vast expanse of water and mud, and the Japanese advance would be forcibly stopped. However, to make this strategy work, it had to be done fast. Nor could the government give any public warning, in case the Japanese found out and accelerated their advance.

Xiong Xianyu was chief of staff in the 8th Division at the time, and he reported the urgency of those hours in his diary. The Japanese were already on the north bank of the Yellow River. They had been temporarily delayed when the Chinese army blew up the railway bridge across the river. The destruction of the dikes was the next step: if the area became a sea of mud, then there was no way that the Japanese could even attempt to reconstruct the bridge.

Blasting the dikes proved easier in theory than in practice. To hold back as massive a body of water as the Yellow River had required very substantial engineering work, and the dams were thick and well fortified. The army made its first attempts to blow up the dike at the small town of Zhaokou between June 4 and 6, 1938, but the structure there proved too durable. Another attempt nearby failed also. Hour by hour, the Japanese were moving closer.

Then division commander, Jiang Zaizhen, asked Xiong Xianyu his opinion about where they might try and breach the dams. “I discussed the topography,” Xiong wrote, “and said that two places, Madukou and Huayuankou, were both possible.” But Madukou was too close to Zhaokou, where the attempted breach had failed, and there was a danger that the Japanese might reach it very shortly. The village of Huayuankou was further away, however, and on a bend in the river: “To give ourselves enough time, Huayuankou would be best.”
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At first, the soldiers regarded their task as purely an assignment in military engineering, and, in Xiong’s word, an “exciting” one. Xiong and Wei Rulin made their first inspection of the site after dark, late on June 6. The surroundings lent a deceptive calm to the proceedings. “The wind blew softly,” recalled Xiong, “and the river water trickled pleasantly.” But it was hard to gauge the water level, and they were not helped by the murky moonlight and the burned-out bulbs in their flashlights. They spent the night in their car so that they could work out just where to break the dike as soon as day dawned.

But daylight seemed to bring home the consequences of what they planned to do, and the soldiers became more and more worried. Wang Songmei, commander of the 2nd Regiment, told the workers about to breach the dike, “My brothers, this plan will be of benefit to our country and our nation, and will lessen the harm that is being done to the people.” He added, “In the future, you’ll find good wives, and have plenty of children.” Wang’s words were meant to reassure the men of the political necessity of what they were about to do, and that fate would not curse them—in traditional Chinese style—by denying them a family because of the enormity of the acts they had committed.

General Wei confirmed that Huayuankou was the right spot, and on June 8 the work began, with some 2,000 men taking part. The Nationalist government was keen to make sure that it was done quickly. Xiong recorded that the “highest authorities” (
zuigao dangju
—undoubtedly a reference to Chiang or his immediate colleagues) kept making telephone calls from Wuhan to check on progress. In addition, the party sent performers to sing and play music to give heart to the workers. Senior general Shang Zhen announced to the laborers that if they could break the dam by midnight on June 8, they would each earn a reward of 2,000 yuan. If they managed it by six the next morning, they would still be given 1,000 yuan. They needed encouragement, for the diggers were given no artificial assistance. After the failure of explosives to open the dikes at Zhaokou, Wei’s troops used “not an ounce of explosive:” all the backbreaking excavation was done by hand. But the workers earned their 2,000 yuan payment. The dike was breached in just a few hours.

On the morning of June 9, Xiong recorded, the mood had changed rapidly, and the atmosphere was tense and solemn. At first, the flow of water was small, but by around 1:00 p.m. the water was “fierce,” flowing “like 10,000 horses.” Looking into the distance, Xiong felt as though a sea had appeared before him. “My heart ached,” he wrote. The sheer force of the water widened the breach in the dike, and soon a deadly stream, hundreds of feet wide, making up some three-quarters of the volume of the river, flowed southeast across the plains of central China.
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“We did this to stop the enemy,” reflected Xiong, “so we didn’t regret the huge sacrifice, as it was for a greater victory.” But as he and other soldiers began to talk, they made a crucial observation. The troops had taken on the task of destroying the railway bridge and the dikes, but it would be for “the government and the compatriots of the whole country” to provide relief for the countless people whose houses and property would be destroyed by the flood. In fact, on the previous evening, commander Jiang had telephoned to ask that assistance be sent for the local people who would be flooded out of their homes.

Wei, Xiong, and their troops managed to escape in wooden boats. Hundreds of thousands of farmers caught in the floods were not so fortunate.
Time
magazine’s correspondent Theodore White reported on the devastation just a few days later:

Last week “The Ungovernable” [i.e. the Yellow River] lashed out with a flood which promised to change not only its own course but also the course of the whole Sino-Japanese War. Severe breaks in the dikes near Kaifeng sent a five-foot wall of water fanning out over a 500-square-mile area, spreading death. Toll from Yellow River floods is not so much from quick drowning as from gradual disease and starvation. The river’s filth settles ankle-deep on the fields, mothering germs, smothering crops. Last week, about 500,000 peasants were driven from 2,000 communities to await rescue or death on whatever dry ground they could find.
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Chiang’s government had committed one of the grossest acts of violence against its own people, and he knew that the publicity could be a damaging blow to its reputation. He decided to divert blame by announcing that the dike had been broken, but blaming the breach on Japanese aerial bombing. The Japanese, in turn, fiercely denied having bombed the dikes. White’s reporting reflected the immediate response of most foreigners; having heard about the atrocities at Nanjing and Xuzhou, he was disinclined to give the Japanese the benefit of the doubt. Furthermore, at the very time that the Yellow River was flooding central China, the Japanese were heavily bombing the city of Guangzhou (Canton) in the south, causing thousands of casualties. To White, the Japanese counterargument—that the Chinese themselves were responsible—seemed unthinkable: “These accusations, foreign observers thought, were absurd. For the Chinese to check the Japanese advance at possible sacrifice of half a million lives would be a monstrous pyrrhic victory. Besides, dike-cutting is the blackest of Chinese crimes, and the Chinese Army would hardly risk universal censure for slight tactical gains.”
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But, of course, that is exactly what they had done.

During the war the Nationalists never admitted that they, not the Japanese, had breached the dikes. But the truth quickly became widely known. Just a month later, on July 19, US Ambassador Johnson noted, in private communication, that the “Chinese blocked the advance on Chengchow [Zhengzhou] by breaching the Yellow River dikes.”
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Eventually some 54,000 square kilometers of central China were inundated by the floods. If the Japanese had committed such an act, it would have been remembered as the prime atrocity of the war, dwarfing even the Nanjing Massacre or the Chongqing air raids in terms of the number of people who suffered. Accurate statistics were impossible to obtain in the midst of wartime chaos and disaster, but in 1948 figures issued by the Nationalists themselves suggested enormous casualties. For the three affected provinces of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu, the number of dead was put at 844,489, with some 4.8 million becoming refugees. More recent studies place the numbers lower, but still estimate the dead at around 500,000, and 3 million–5 million refugees.
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In contrast, the devastating May 1939 air raids on Chongqing killed some thousands.

Xiong reflected in his diary that the breaching of the Yellow River dikes was a sacrifice for a greater victory. Even to some Japanese it seemed that the tactic had been successful in the short term. The first secretary at the US Embassy in Wuhan reported that the flood had “completely checked the Japanese advance on Chengchow” and had prevented them taking Wuhan by rail. Instead, he predicted, the attack was likely to come by water and along the north shore of the Yangtze.
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Supporters of the dike breaches could argue that these acts saved central China, and Chiang’s military headquarters in Wuhan, for another five months. The Japanese were indeed prevented from advancing along the Long–Hai railway line toward Wuhan. In the short term the floods did what the Nationalists wanted. But the flooding was a tactic, a breathing space, and did not solve the fundamental problem, that China’s armies needed strong leadership and rapid reform. Some historians suggest that Chiang’s decision was pointless anyway, since it merely delayed the inevitable.
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Theodore White was right: no strategic advantage could make the deaths of 500,000 of China’s own people a worthwhile price to pay. However, Chiang Kai-shek’s decision can be partly explained, although not excused, by the context. We can now look back at the actions of the Nationalists and argue that they should not have held on to Wuhan, or that their actions in breaching the dam were unjustifiable in the extreme. But for Chiang, in the hot summer of 1938, it seemed his only hope was to deny Japan as much of China for as long as possible, and create the best possible circumstances for a long war from China’s interior, while keeping the world’s attention on what Japan was doing. The short delay won by the flooding was itself part of the strategy. In the struggle raging within the soul of the Nationalist Party, the callous, calculating streak had won, for the time being. The breaking of the dikes marked a turning point as the Nationalists committed an act whose terrible consequences they would eventually have to expiate.

In the summer of 1938, in the midst of all this turmoil, one of Chiang’s most important alliances ended. On June 22 all of the Nationalist government’s German advisers were called home; any who disobeyed would be judged guilty of high treason. Ever since the First World War, there had been a special relationship between those two fledgling republics, the German Weimar and the Chinese. Both were weak and not in full control of their own sovereignty. As part of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, the Germans had lost their extraterritorial rights on Chinese soil, but that disadvantage meant that they could deal with the Chinese as noncolonialist equals, and therefore found themselves more welcome in many business and political circles than other Westerners. Chiang’s military reorganization had been dependent on von Seeckt, then von Falkenhausen, and even the rise to power of Hitler in 1933 had not immediately broken the bond between the two countries. Chiang had no ideological affinity with Nazi Germany, but his government regarded it as a potential ally, and put significant efforts into trying to persuade Berlin to choose China and not Japan as its principal East Asian, anti-Communist partner. In June 1937 H. H. Kung had led a delegation to Berlin that had met Hitler and made the case for an alliance with China. But the outbreak of war and the retreat of the Nationalists to Wuhan convinced Hitler’s government that they should throw their lot in with Japan, and the recall of all German advisers was one immediate consequence. Chiang gave a speech praising von Falkenhausen, declaring that “our friend’s enemy is our enemy too,” and declaring that the loyalty and ethics of the German Army were an example that the Chinese Army should follow. “After we have won the War of Resistance,” Chiang declared, “I believe you’ll want to come back to the Far East and advise our country again.”
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(Von Falkenhausen would go on to become the governor of Nazi-occupied Belgium during the Second World War, but would be praised after the war for having clandestinely saved the lives of many Jews.)
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