Mitter - Forgotten ally: Chinas World War II, 1937-1945

First U.S. Edition

Copyright 2013 by Rana Mitter

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-618-89425-3

e ISBN 978-0-547-84056-7
v1.0813

Malaguea by Federico Garca Lorca copyright Herederos de Federico Garca Lorca. English translation by Rana Mitter, copyright Herederos de Federico Garca Lorca and Rana Mitter. All rights reserved. For information regarding rights and permissions, please contact: William Peter Kosmas, 8 Franklin Square, London W14 9UU, England, or .

For Katharine

La muerte

entra y sale

y sale y entra

la muerte

de la taberna.

[Death

goes in and out

out and in

death

from the tavern.]

FROM FEDERICO GARCA LORCA, MALAGUEA (1921)

Chen Bijun: Wang Jingweis wife, and also a significant figure in the peace movement that ultimately led to collaboration with Japan.

Chiang Kai-shek: Leader of Chinas Nationalist Party from 1926 to his death in 1975. Chiang was Chinas leader during its war against Japan from 1937 to 1945.

Winston S. Churchill: British prime minister, 19401945, 19511955.

Archibald Clark Kerr: British ambassador in China, 19381942.

Dai Li: Chiang Kai-sheks security chief, who used torture and intimidation against enemies of the government, in particular the Communists.

Clarence Gauss: US ambassador in China, 19411944.

He Yingqin: Minister of war in the Nationalist government.

Hirota Kki: Japanese foreign minister, 19371938.

Patrick Hurley: US ambassador in China, 19441945.

Nelson T. Johnson: US ambassador in China, 19291941.

Konoye Fumimaro: Japanese prime minister, 19371939, 19401941.

Long Yun: Canny Yi (Lolo) militarist who ruled Yunnan province in southwest China for much of the wartime period, and maintained a wary relationship with Chiang Kai-shek.

Mao Zedong: Leader of Chinas Communist Party, 19431976. Mao achieved paramount power during the war years, sidelining and eliminating rivals, and preparing his party for its ultimate victory against Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists in 1949.

George C. Marshall: Chief of staff of the United States Army, 19391945.

Matsui Iwane: Japanese commander who took Nanjing in 1937 and was in overall charge of Japanese troops during the massacre of 19371938.

Song Meiling: Chiang Kai-sheks wife and a powerful political figure in her own right in the Nationalist government. She spoke fluent English and was Chiangs channel to the Americans.

Lord Louis Mountbatten: Supreme commander, Southeast Asia Command, 19431946, who clashed frequently with General Stilwell.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: President of the United States, 19331945.

T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen): Chiangs brother-in-law, foreign minister for a period, and a relatively liberal figure within the Nationalist Party.

Josef V. Stalin: General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 19221953.

Joseph W. Stilwell: Vinegar Joe, the American general sent as Chiang Kai-sheks chief of staff after Pearl Harbor, who quickly fell out with his commander.

Sun Yat-sen: Tireless revolutionary and briefly president of China, 1912, shut out of power after the overthrow of the emperor in 1912 as military leaders undermined the new republic.

Tj Hideki: Japanese prime minister, 19411944.

Wang Jingwei: Joined the Nationalist revolution early and was a close ally of Sun Yat-sen. Wang achieved high political office but little real power under Chiang, and defected to form a collaborationist government under the Japanese in 1938, based in Nanjing.

Zhou Enlai: Senior figure in the Communist movement who served as Maos representative in Chongqing for much of the war.

Zhou Fohai: Nationalist government official who would become close to Wang Jingwei and eventually help him to defect to Japan.

Most Chinese names in this book have been rendered into the internationally accepted pinyin system of romanization. While correct pronunciation of pinyin takes some training, the only sounds that are wholly different from standard English pronunciation are q (which sounds like a ch as in church) and x (which is a sh as in sheet). For more details the Internet has a wide range of pinyin pronunciation guides. In some cases, better-known alternative romanizations are used, such as Chiang Kai-shek rather than Jiang Jieshi. Also, I have preserved the older Wade-Giles system of romanization where it appears in the original document, but have generally added a pinyin version in brackets afterward.

I N THE SPRING OF 1939 Europe was still, albeit uneasily, at peace. But some seven thousand kilometers to the east, the Second World War was already well under way.

On May 3 the sky was clear above the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing. The weather was sweltering. Not for nothing is Chongqing known as one of Chinas three furnaces, where temperatures regularly rise to 104 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. At noon Zhang Xiluo, a reporter for the Xinminbao newspaper, was getting ready for lunch. In the bustling city around him, the locals were going about their usual business. On the docks, stevedores hauled boxes on and off the ships that plied the Yangtze. Passengers descending from the boats would be mobbed by dozens of sedan-chair bearers. Chongqing is famous as a shancheng, a mountain cityfar better to be carried up the steep hills that separate the river from the upper town, if you could afford it.

In the markets, traders and their clients bargained for rice, vegetables, and meat. The number of customers was greater than at any time in the citys history. In October 1937 the Nationalist government of China had announced that it could no longer defend the existing capital at Nanjing to the east against a Japanese invasion that had begun three months earlier. Chongqing therefore became the temporary capital. Millions of refugees had fled westward, and Chongqings population swelled. A city of fewer than half a million inhabitants in 1937 more than doubled in size within eight years. Aside from the crowded markets, the refugees presence was clear from the ugly, slapdash buildings, made from mud and metal girders, that had rapidly sprung up across the local landscape. These shanties gave an already slovenly-looking city an even more unkempt air.

Suddenly, as he was sitting down to eat, Zhang heard a sound whose terrifying significance he knew well. At about noon, we heard a short alarm signal, he recalled. I didnt even finish my meal, but got ready to go and hide away in the air-raid shelter in the newspaper office in Jintang Street. Half an hour passed. Then an even more urgent siren began howling in short, continuous bursts. The last few people left in the newspaper office grabbed their possessions and ran down into the shelter.

Zhang was lucky. The particular refuge where he found himself was one of the most advanced in the city, built by the government air-raid defense agency. It was outfitted with electric lights, communications equipment, and supplies of food and drink. Many of the citys poorer inhabitants had only makeshift shelters much less able to withstand a powerful blast from the sky. One man later wrote that in his household, when the air-raid siren sounded, our whole family of more than ten people just hid under our table. The British consulate in the city had placed a large Union Jack on its roof to proclaim neutrality and warn off air-raid pilots, but there were no guarantees of safety, even for the privileged. Not long before, a Japanese bomb attack on a water-treatment plant had also hit the nearby diplomatic building.