The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (66 page)

Does the Long March live up to its name? How do other military movements compare? Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas barely gets its boots muddy at 700 miles.
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Hannibal’s invasion of Italy across the Alps was a stroll in the park at a mere 1,000 miles. The journey of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery squeaks past with 8,000 miles to the Pacific and back, as does Stanley’s crossing of Africa, 7,000 miles coast to coast.

The importance of the Long March is not that it saved Communism in China—there were plenty more Reds where those came from. More important is that it thinned the ranks with intensely concentrated natural selection. Setbacks and mistakes in the first few months ignited a power struggle among the leaders of various branches and factions. When the retreat began, Mao Zedong was one of a dozen prominent leaders, but he was not a member of the governing committee; he emerged at the other end as the unquestioned leader of the party. Only the most indestructible, hard-hearted, and dedicated revolutionaries survived the Long March, and these formed the core around which the movement would grow again. With these people in charge, there would be no half measures or compromise.

Sino-Japanese War

In 1937, Mao wrote
On Guerrilla Warfare
, the textbook every insurgent movement studies for lessons on how to defeat overwhelming force: “In guerrilla warfare, select the tactic of seeming to come from the east and attacking from the west; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack; withdraw; deliver a lightning blow, seek a lightning decision. When guerrillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws. In guerrilla strategy, the enemy’s rear, flanks, and other vulnerable spots are his vital points, and there he must be harassed, attacked, dispersed, exhausted and annihilated.”

The publication was timely. A powerful new enemy had attacked into the heart of China.

In July 1937, along the Yongding River outside Beijing, Guomindang soldiers exchanged shots with Japanese soldiers who were conducting maneuvers across the river. Although no one was killed, one Japanese soldier was missing at roll call the next day. The Japanese accused the Chinese of holding him and cranked their forces up to full alert. By the time the missing soldier returned from his visit to the local brothel and asked what all the fuss was about, Japanese intelligence had spotted Nationalist Chinese troops heading for the border.
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Scattered fighting broke out, and after a few weeks, the Japanese army surged into China proper across the Marco Polo Bridge.
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Communists and Nationalists quickly stopped fighting each other in order to focus on the invaders. Month after month, the Japanese pushed Chiang Kai-shek’s forces southward. In August 1937, the battle lines moved to Shanghai after a hard-fought campaign where Chiang lost 250,000 troops to death or wounds, while the Japanese had 40,000 casualties. Even with so many people to draw from, a six-to-one exchange ratio was more than the Nationalist army could take. As the Japanese pressed on, the Guomindang were driven in confusion from their capital in Nanjing.
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The general slaughter of civilians and prisoners after the Japanese took Nanjing in December 1937 may be the bloodiest well-documented single massacre in history. Almost all of the Chinese prisoners of war taken in and around the city were slaughtered, some machine-gunned beside the river for easy disposal, others strapped up and bayoneted to train and amuse Japanese recruits.

Over the next two months, the citizens of Nanjing faced death daily as they were assaulted on the street, rounded up, shot down, beaten, stabbed, drowned, and burned without mercy. Women by the tens of thousands were gang-raped, often killed afterward, mutilated, and left on display to terrify the locals. Any Chinese man of military age was assumed to be an escaped prisoner and shot down. Western witnesses reported seeing bodies lying on every block, along with occasional piles of severed heads. It got so bad that even the Nazis begged Japan to show some mercy, and a local German businessman, John Rabe, set up a safe zone where Chinese refugees could hide under international protection.

Private charities in Nanjing recorded the burial of 155,000 victims, and unrecorded tens of thousands more were dumped into the river or mass graves under Japanese supervision. According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that tried the Japanese leaders after the war, 260,000 civilians and prisoners were killed in the Rape of Nanjing. Although some Japanese shrug off the evidence and refuse to acknowledge much more than the sporadic shooting of guerrillas, looters, and escaping prisoners, even
they
usually admit to some 40,000 dead, which makes it as bad as any individual massacre of the Jews by the Nazis.

To slow the Japanese onslaught in 1938, the Nationalist Chinese blew apart the dikes on the Yellow River and flooded the land in the path of the Japanese. The river jumped into a new course, flowing into a completely different sea hundreds of miles from its old outlet. The rushing waters destroyed eleven large towns and four to five thousand villages, leaving 2 million people homeless. Although Chinese peasants had advance warning of the flood and were told to get out of the way, evacuation was haphazard and famine followed, with the loss of life estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
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In October 1938, the Chinese government retreated to Sichuan, the mountain-rimmed basin on the upper Yangtze that was the last refuge of losers in so many previous chapters. Here the Nationalists established a new capital at Chongqing. The rest of the world tried to save the Guomindang as best they could without actually going to war. The British built the Burma Road to move supplies from India to Chongqing. Soviet and American pilots formed the backbone of the Chinese air force (unofficially, of course). The British renegotiated the unequal trade treaties that had crippled previous Chinese governments, agreeing now to give China a fair shake. If Chiang Kai-shek could pull through, China might get a chance to become an equal partner in world affairs. At the moment, that was a big if.

With China knocked down, the Japanese organized their conquests into four puppet states to keep order, and then they began to consider new avenues for growth. Just to the north, big empty Siberia with its timber and gold mines was just begging to be conquered. The Japanese had tried once before, during the Russian Civil War, and now they tried again. The Japanese army poked outward across the Manchurian border to see whether Stalin was all that attached to the place. As it turned out, yes, Stalin wanted to keep it. A full armored counterattack by the Soviets in 1939 convinced the Japanese to look elsewhere for expansion opportunities. The two countries signed a non-aggression pact in order to concentrate on crises elsewhere.

When the Japanese struck out against the Western powers in December 1941, bringing themselves and the Americans into the Second World War, they seized the foreign concessions in Hong Kong and Shanghai. After the Japanese diverted their attention to the Pacific war against the West, the Chinese front settled into a stalemate. Its main contribution to the global war effort was tying down two-fifths of available Japanese manpower and providing airfields for long-range American bombers.
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As a full partner in the grand alliance against the Axis (the coalition of fascist countries), Chang Kai-shek received money, guns, and a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations; however, as the war dragged on, the American mission to China grew disgusted at the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist government. Although this disillusion had little impact on American assistance during World War II, it squashed Western enthusiasm for supporting the Nationalists much longer than necessary.

With the fall of Germany in May 1945, the Soviets declared war on Japan and shifted their units east. Over a million veterans fresh from beating Hitler massed along the border of Manchuria, facing a garrison that had been stripped of its best troops for the Pacific war. On August 9, after a short devastating bombardment, the Red Army rolled over the Japanese and conquered Manchuria within a week, taking 600,000 prisoners. Together with the simultaneous atomic strikes by the Americans against the home islands, this convinced Japanese Emperor Hirohito that further resistance was useless. Over the objections of his military staff, he commanded his nation to surrender to the Americans.

Chinese Civil War, Second Phase

The fall of Japan left Manchuria in the hands of the Soviets, who dawdled long enough to put their own people in charge. Although the Soviets had a history of cooperating with and supporting the Nationalists, the opportunity to put real Communists in control was too tempting to pass up. With Soviet encouragement, Mao’s army struck north on a forced march to establish Communist control over the countryside as quickly as possible. The Soviets allowed all of the captured Japanese armaments to fall into the hands of the Red Chinese, including hundreds of aircraft and tanks and thousands of artillery pieces and machine guns.
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Even without the increase in weaponry, the Communists had done quite well in the war with Japan. Appealing to patriotism and freed from harassment by the Nationalists, they had boosted party membership from 100,000 to 1.2 million between 1937 and 1945.

As part of the surrender terms, the Americans instructed the Japanese in China to surrender only to the Nationalist forces. To expedite this, the Americans airlifted Nationalist forces into the big cities, while U.S. marines landed in Tianjin and hurried inland to take Beiping for the Nationalists. The United States advanced loans to Chiang and sold him weaponry at bargain prices, but the old frustration over wartime corruption had seriously eroded Western sympathy. The American Mission that coordinated military aid was closed in 1947, effectively leaving China to its own fate.

The Communists kept the Nationalist cities in Manchuria under loose siege for a couple of years without causing great hardship. Finally the Reds became serious and cut the railroads supplying them.

In May 1948, the Communists isolated the Manchurian city of Changchun in a merciless siege, trapping a half-million citizens, only 170,000 of whom survived to the end.
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As more sieges sprouted all over north China, the trapped Guomindang soldiers were forced to lower their expectations. Tree bark was a good meal, and a dead rat was “Delicious! It was meat.” In Changchun, where 500 civilians starved to death every day, human flesh sold for $1.20 a pound.
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The Manchurian war kicked up 30 million refugees who flooded south, away from the battle lines. A reporter for
Time
magazine traced the long, tortured path many had to make to safety. Those who fled Changchun were gladly sent on their way by the defending Nationalists because it reduced the strain on provisions, but only after the refugees were searched for salt, hard currency, and any metal objects that could be melted down for bullets. Then they passed the outer line of defending pillboxes to enter the no-man’s-land called
san-pu-kuan
, “three-don’t-care,” where neither Communists nor Nationalists nor local governments bothered with enforcing order. Here bandits—usually deserters—preyed on the refugees and removed anything useful or valuable, even untattered clothes. Those who resisted—or were discovered trying to hide a bracelet or earring in a seam of clothing—were beaten or shot. Eventually, the refugees arrived back in Nationalist lines at the besieged city of Mukden, where they were registered and searched, this time for opium, weapons, and Communist currency. Loaded on cattle cars, they were shipped southward. Beyond the end of the rail line was another three-don’t-care, where the refugees were stripped of whatever valuables could be shaken loose. Frustrated bandits left many more shot and beaten. Finally, the Daling River, last barrier before the end of the war zone, loomed ahead. To prevent Communist infiltration, Guomindang soldiers fired on boats, swimmers, and waders trying to cross the river, only allowing the refugees to walk over the twisted girders of a blasted railroad bridge. Finally, in Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea, the refugees were safely stashed in a proper camp.

“Its restroom is bare earth covered with canvas to keep out the rain. The washroom is one pipe of running water. The cloakroom will mend patched garments, or exchange better rags for those beyond mending. A free milk line serves half a bowlful to each child under five; then, if the child does not vomit from an unaccustomed stomach, he may have another half bowlful.”
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Finally, in October, the two Nationalist armies defending Changchun planned a breakout. The Seventh Army, American-trained veterans of the Burma front, attacked outward, but the dispirited Yunnanese conscripts of the Guomindang’s Sixtieth Army mutinied instead. When the Seventh Army failed to break the Communist lines and retreated back to Changchun, the Sixtieth opened fire on them and then surrendered the city to the Reds. Mukden surrendered the same month.