The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (55 page)

Peng was Mao’s man, the peasant as general. On political matters he had always deferred to Mao, “first as an older brother, then as a teacher, and last, as a leader.” “Old Peng,” Mao called him. “Old Mao” was the term of endearment Peng, virtually alone among the leadership, could use with the chairman. Sometimes on military matters, when Mao seemed to be a little too theoretical, Peng might even privately refer to him as “the schoolteacher.” But he was by no means a lackey of Mao’s, and he eventually paid dearly for his independence: a few years after the Korean War was over, Peng stood up to Mao and challenged him on several political issues, and he ended up his years as an enemy of Mao, and thus an enemy of the people, imprisoned, humiliated, and systematically beaten to death. Even in the mid-1950s, he was sufficiently confident of his own role, and independent enough as a man, to talk to Mao’s doctor about what he thought were problems with the chairman’s teeth. The chairman, it turned out, never visited his dentist, never brushed his teeth, and drank endless cups of tea, thus giving his teeth a greenish pallor. “The Chairman’s teeth look like they are coated with green paint,” Peng said, but improving the dental work of Mao was by then something of a lost cause.

Peng was a peasant himself, produced by a much harder childhood than that of Mao. He was a man with a shrewd, pragmatic sense of tactics for a newly created army that was almost always going to be outgunned and outnumbered if it fought as a traditional force. On his own back in 1934 he had challenged the destructive strategy of the Party’s military leader, a rigid Prussian named Otto Braun, sent to China by Moscow. In Peng’s view, Braun’s tactics were hopelessly conventional and poorly suited for the Communists’ fragile military situation. His victory over Braun in the struggle to define tactics was probably the first great triumph of the Long March. It was the Long March that bonded Peng and Mao: it had been the supreme test, more than six thousand miles both fleeing and fighting against, in no particular order, Chiang’s troops, local warlords, backbreaking terrain, appallingly harsh weather conditions, and abiding, pervasive hunger. Of the eighty thousand who had begun the trip in southeast China, perhaps eight thousand finished it a year and three days later, in the distant, barren, impoverished north. In one of the final battles of the Long March, at a place called Wuqi, after more than twenty days of hard fighting, five regiments of Nationalist horse cavalry, about four or five thousand men, had attacked. Mao ordered Peng to defeat their pursuers and not to let them enter the base camp. That he had done, and in return, Mao had written him a poem: “High mountains, dangerous passes, deep ravines,/ The enemy cavalry sweep the length and breadth at will;/ Who dares stop them, astride a horse, gun at the ready?/ Only our general, Peng Dehuai.”(Peng said that he later changed the last line to “only our heroic Red Army,” and returned it to Mao.)

To understand Peng and why he fought so well was to understand the ordinary Chinese soldiers as well, the grievances that had driven these men, and thus to understand the success of the Communist Army. His beliefs were simple and formed by the harshest kind of life: he believed that the rich were cruel, that the poor were not just poor but utterly defenseless against them; that there was an elemental brutality to every minute of daily Chinese life; and that the struggle to change it was worth dying for. He had been born in 1898 into a peasant home of crippling poverty. His mother had died when he was a small boy. His father was unable to work because he was so sick. The family of eight lived off what was about one acre of fallow, hilly land. Peng himself had to drop out of school at a very early age because he was needed to help the family earn money. He was always aware of the basic injustice, and the sheer cruelty, of life—the youngest of his four brothers had died of starvation at the age of six months. As a boy Peng had been sent out with his grandmother to beg for food, a role he hated and refused to do a second time. Instead he went out into the forest and cut wood, which he sold for paltry sums. Years later he would
speak with great bitterness of his seventy-year-old grandmother preparing to beg once again, going out into the falling snow and biting wind, needing a stick to support herself and accompanied by two of his brothers, one of them under four years old. When his grandmother came back with some rice, as Peng later recounted, he refused to eat the food she had gotten by begging.

As a boy he did all kinds of menial things for tiny sums of money—he chopped wood, caught fish, and carried coal. By the age of ten or twelve—he was not exactly sure which—he was working as a cowherd for a rich peasant. At about thirteen, he became, in his own words, a child laborer in a coal mine, turning a large wheel that helped drain water from the mine. He also hauled coal for a few pennies a day, backbreaking work for a young boy, an experience made all the meaner by the fact that the mine went bankrupt and he lost a year of pay. His back, he later said, remained a little crooked for the rest of his life from that work. Returning home with half the promised money in his pocket, barefoot because he could not afford straw sandals, the skin of his feet badly cracked, he was met by his father. “You are very dirty and pale,” his father had told him. “You don’t look like a human being anymore. You’ve worked two long years for that son of a bitch for nothing.” Then his father had wept.

His teenage years had been even harder. There had been a great local drought, and as he recalled, the landlords and merchants had hoarded the grain and rice in order to drive prices up. Peng took part in peasant protests against the increases, and he was forced to flee his village before he was arrested. Finally, just before his eighteenth birthday, in March 1916, he became a soldier in the Hunan Provincial Army. As a private he made six Chinese dollars a month and was able to send home three of them, just enough to allow his family a frail, subsistence living. It was his introduction to the military—he would serve for the rest of his life, first in the regular army, surviving during its struggles with the warlords, and in time with Chiang Kai-shek as its leader. All the while he became steadily more politicized—especially when the soldiers, as so often happened in Chiang’s army, were not paid. At first he had believed that Chiang was a true revolutionary and intended to create a new, more just China; as that faith faded, he gradually turned to the Communists. He and others like him, he later wrote of that time, had “enlisted to make revolution; to overthrow warlords, corrupt officials, local despots, and evil gentry and to bring about a cut in land rent and interest. But now there is neither revolution nor pay while talk of a cut in land rent and interest is heard no more. Yet we are ordered to ‘suppress Communists’ and to crack down on peasant associations. Who orders us to do such things? Chiang Kai-Shek! A soldier earns 6.50 dollars a month. Paying $3.30 for mess he has only $3.20 left—and this is withheld from us. What a miserable lot we have! We can’t even afford to wear straw or
smoke coarse tobacco, let alone provide for our parents, wives, children.” As he rose in rank, he was proud of helping to turn his troops against a particularly exploitive landlord. He was arrested for that, but managed, with the help of some troops, to escape.

His entire life had been nothing less than a radicalizing experience. In mid-February 1928, he was finally initiated into the Party. Unlettered he might be, but he was quick to understand the kind of warfare the Communist forces had to follow until their strength grew. By 1934, his thinking closely paralleled that of Mao, and as such he, along with Mao, became one of the original architects of a military strategy that called for the Communists to fight a nimble guerrilla war, never to challenge the Nationalists frontally, but to be able to move quickly and strike lethally when their enemies were most vulnerable.

WHEN MAO HAD
asked Peng if he would be willing to command the Chinese forces in Korea, there was a certain formality to the request. Mao then asked Peng to speak in favor of intervention at the politburo that afternoon, which he did. Peng had already spent a good deal of time pondering a battlefield in Korea that would match Chinese troops against Americans with their awesome firepower. There was a serious danger to all of China, he told the politburo members; if American troops reached the Yalu, they might strike across it and invade China. It was necessary to use Chinese forces to stop them. That was China’s obligation. With that, the mood of the meeting turned in favor of intervention. Peng had given Mao the critical element he needed, the agreement of the man who would lead the troops in battle. What Mao believed, it now seemed, the others believed as well—that Korea was not an isolated problem, but a focal point of larger tensions between the Communist and capitalist worlds; that the troops were not just being sent to save Korea, but to help promote a larger world revolution, especially in Asia; and that China did not want the Americans to have a massive staging area on its border. Finally, no matter what superior technology the Americans had, China, with its superior manpower and greater moral strength, would triumph. What was always in the air at these meetings—not always mentioned but very much there—was the issue of Taiwan. In effect, in the Chinese minds, their country was already at war with America, because the United States had decided to intervene there; if China was too weak to strike at Taiwan, then the American Army coming into range of Chinese ground forces in Northern Korea was the obvious alternative.

On October 8, Mao notified Kim Il Sung that the Chinese would indeed dispatch troops to help him. On the same day, an order was issued to send Chinese troops to Korea: “In order to assist the Korean people’s war of liberation, repel the invasion launched by the American imperialists and their running
dogs, and to defend the interests of the Korean people, the Chinese people, and of all Eastern countries, it has been ordered that the Northeast Border Defense Army be turned into the Chinese People’s Volunteers and the Chinese People’s Volunteers move immediately into the territory of Korea to assist the Korean comrades in their struggle against the invaders and to strive for a glorious victory.” The date for the invasion was still to be October 15.

Peng immediately returned to his border headquarters and started surveying his needs. He believed from his intelligence that there were four hundred thousand UN troops in country, including the equivalent of ten combat divisions in the front lines, or roughly 130,000 men. Peng then decided he needed more combat troops if he was going to use overwhelming force as the key instrument of victory. Instead of crossing the border with two armies and two artillery divisions, he now planned to begin with four armies and three artillery divisions, which meant he also needed at least seven hundred more trucks and six hundred more drivers.

Soviet air cover was central to Chinese military plans. But the details of Russian military help were surprisingly foggy, especially with D-day so near. On October 9, Peng had attended a meeting of the commanders of the different armies that would serve in his force, and they had questioned him closely on the subject. Their questions were tough and specific, but neither he, nor Gao Gang, the political operative who was working with him, had been able to answer them. In the middle of the meeting they had cabled Mao, asking, “How many bombers can the Command send to Korea after our troops are engaged in operations there? When will [the Air Force] be dispatched, and who will be in charge?” Certainly, those questions were on the minds not just of division and regimental commanders, but of every company commander and platoon leader in the Chinese Army as well. They were, in fact, questions that the Chinese leaders still were trying to get the answers to themselves.

The Chinese troops were in place, poised to cross the border, but still there was no hard word from the Russians. And then the Russians reneged. At virtually the same time that Peng’s commanders were demanding answers from him, his civilian peers were pressing the Russians for answers to the same questions. On October 8, Zhou Enlai and Mao’s principal interpreter, Shi Zhe, flew to Moscow to discuss the terms of Russian assistance. They arrived there on October 10 with a few other Chinese colleagues, including Lin Biao. Once in the Soviet Union, they immediately flew on to Stalin’s home on the Black Sea. There they conferred with the top Soviet leadership: Stalin, Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Lazar Kaganovich, Nikolai Bulganin, and Anastas Mikoyan, as well as Molotov.

Now the stakes in the big-time poker game that had been going on for sev
eral weeks were raised again. What ensued was a very complicated byplay among tough, cynical men. Neither side trusted what the other side was saying. When, for example, the Chinese told Stalin that they did not really want to send troops to this war, that their country was exhausted from its civil war, Stalin knew that the reverse was true, that the Chinese had already assured Kim Il Sung they would come to his aid. Stalin began the meeting by saying how perilous the Korean situation was. What, he asked, did his Chinese comrades think? Zhou, who knew better than anyone the degree of commitment Mao had made and intended to sustain, replied that it would be much better for China if it did not have to intervene. The civil war, he said, had been very costly, and China was still recovering.

But if the North Koreans did not get aid quickly, Stalin responded, they could not survive for more than a week. The Chinese should ponder what it might do to China’s national security if the Americans controlled North Korea (as if the Chinese had not been thinking about this for months). The Soviets, he then informed his guests, would not and could not send troops, in no small part because they did not want a direct confrontation with the Americans. The Chinese, he suggested, could and should go ahead. The Russians would give them a great deal of materiel left over from World War II and would provide air protection over China’s northeast territory and coastal regions, including all Chinese forces on the northern side of the Yalu. That was hardly what the Chinese had hoped to hear, since the fighting was going to take place on the
southern
side of the river. As for sending his Air Force south of the Yalu, Stalin said the Russians would need more time to prepare for an air war against the Americans. The marathon meeting, which went from 7
P.M.
to 5
A.M.
, was not a great success. The Chinese long remembered that the Soviets had reneged on their promise at the most critical moment. The limits of comradeship had been discovered rather early in the game.