Red Star over China (16 page)

Question: “What demands would the Communist Party make in return for such cooperation?”

Answer: “It would insist upon waging war, decisively and finally, against Japanese aggression. In addition it would request the observance of the points advanced in the calls for a democratic republic and the establishment of a national defense government.”
^*

Question: “How can the people best be armed, organized, and trained to participate in such a war?”

Answer: “The people
must
be given the right to organize and to arm themselves. This is a freedom which Chiang Kai-shek has in the past denied to them. The suppression has not, however, been entirely successful—as, for example, in the case of the Red Army. Also, despite severe repression in Peking, Shanghai, and other places, the students have begun to organize themselves and have already prepared themselves politically. But still the students and the revolutionary anti-Japanese masses have not yet got their freedom, cannot be mobilized, cannot be trained and armed. When the contrary is true, when the masses are given economic, social and political freedom, their strength will be intensified hundreds of times, and the true power of the nation will be revealed.

“The Red Army through its own struggle has won its freedom from the militarists to become an unconquerable power. The anti-Japanese volunteers have won their freedom of action from the Japanese oppressors and have armed themselves in a similar way. If the Chinese people are trained, armed, and organized they can likewise become an invincible force.”

Question: “What, in your opinion, should be the main strategy and tactics to be followed in this ‘war of liberation'?”

Answer: “The strategy should be that of a war of maneuver, over an extended, shifting, and indefinite front: a strategy depending for success on a high degree of mobility in difficult terrain, and featured by swift attack and withdrawal, swift concentration and dispersal. It will be a large-scale war of maneuver rather than the simple positional war of extensive trench work, deep-massed lines and heavy fortifications. Our strategy and
tactics must be conditioned by the theater in which the war will take place, and this dictates a war of maneuver.

“This does not mean the abandonment of vital strategic points, which can be defended in positional warfare as long as profitable. But the pivotal strategy must be a war of maneuver, and important reliance must be placed on guerrilla and partisan tactics. Fortified warfare must be utilized, but it will be of auxiliary and secondary strategic importance.”

Here it may be inserted that this sort of strategy in general seemed to be rather widely supported also among non-Communist Chinese military leaders. Nanking's wholly imported air force provided an impressive if costly internal police machine, but few experts had illusions about its long-range value in a foreign war. Both the air force and such mechanization as had taken place in the central army were looked upon by many as costly toys incapable of retaining a role of initiative after the first few weeks, since China lacked the industries necessary to maintain and replenish either an air force or any other highly technical branch of modern warfare.

Pai Chung-hsi, Li Tsung-jen,
^*
Han Fu-chu, Hu Tsung-nan, Ch'en Ch'eng, Chang Hsueh-liang, Feng Yu-hsiang, and Ts'ai T'ing-k'ai were among the leading Nationalist generals who seemed to share Mao's conviction that China's sole hope of victory over Japan must rest ultimately on superior maneuvering of great masses of troops, divided into mobile units, and the ability to maintain a protracted defense over immense partisan areas.

Mao Tse-tung continued:

“Geographically the theater of the war is so vast that it is possible for us to pursue mobile warfare with the utmost efficiency and with a telling effect on a slow-moving war machine like Japan's, cautiously feeling its way in front of fierce rear-guard actions. Deep concentration and the exhausting defense of a vital position or two on a narrow front would be to throw away all the tactical advantages of our geography and economic organization, and to repeat the mistake of the Abyssinians. Our strategy and tactics must aim to avoid great decisive battles in the early stages of the war, and gradually to break the morale, the fighting spirit, and the military efficiency of the living forces of the enemy. …

“Besides the regular Chinese troops we should create, direct, and politically and militarily equip great numbers of partisan and guerrilla detachments among the peasantry. What has been accomplished by the anti-Japanese volunteer units of this type in Manchuria is only a very minor demonstration of the latent power of resistance that can be mobilized from the revolutionary peasantry of all China. Properly led and
organized, such units can keep the Japanese busy twenty-four hours a day and worry them to death.

“It must be remembered that the war will be fought inside China. This means that the Japanese will be entirely surrounded by a hostile Chinese people. The Japanese will be forced to move in all their provisions and guard them, maintaining troops along all lines of communications, and heavily garrisoning their bases in Manchuria and Japan as well.

“The process of the war will present to China the possibility of capturing many Japanese prisoners, arms, ammunition, war machines, and so forth. A point will be reached where it will become more and more possible to engage Japan's armies on a basis of positional warfare, using fortifications and deep entrenchment, for, as the war progresses, the technical equipment of the anti-Japanese forces will greatly improve,
and will be reinforced by important foreign help.
Japan's economy will crack under the strain of a long, expensive occupation of China and the morale of her forces will break under the trial of a war of innumerable but indecisive battles. The great reservoirs of human material in the revolutionary Chinese people will still be pouring men ready to fight for their freedom into our front lines long after the tidal flood of Japanese imperialism has wrecked itself on the hidden reefs of Chinese resistance.

“All these and other factors will condition the war and will enable us to make the final and decisive attacks on Japan's fortifications and strategic bases and to drive Japan's army of occupation from China.

“Japanese officers and soldiers captured and disarmed by us will be welcomed and will be well treated. They will not be killed. They will be treated in a brotherly way. Every method will be adopted to make the Japanese proletarian soldiers, with whom we have no quarrel, stand up and oppose their own Fascist oppressors. Our slogan will be: ‘Unite and oppose the common oppressors, the Fascist leaders.' Anti-Fascist Japanese troops are our friends, and there is no conflict in our aims.”
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It was past two o'clock in the morning and I was exhausted, but I could see no signs of fatigue on Mao's thoughtful face. He alternately walked up and down between the two little rooms, sat down, lay down, leaned on the table, and read from a sheaf of reports in the intervals when Wu translated and I wrote. Mrs. Mao also was still awake. Suddenly both of them bent over and gave an exclamation of delight at a moth that had languished beside the candle. It was a really lovely thing, with wings shaded a delicate apple-green and fringed in a soft rainbow of saffron and rose. Mao opened a book and pressed this gossamer of color between its leaves.

Could such people really be thinking seriously of war?

There were many things unique about the Red Army University.

Its president was a twenty-eight-year-old army commander who (Communists said) had never lost a battle. It boasted, in one class of undergraduates, veteran warriors whose average age was twenty-seven, with an average of eight years of fighting experience and three wounds each. Was there any other school where “paper shortage” made it necessary to use the blank side of enemy propaganda leaflets for classroom notebooks? Or where the cost of educating each cadet, including food, clothing, all institutional expenses, was less than $15 silver per month? Or where the aggregate value of rewards offered for the heads of various notorious cadets exceeded $2,000,000?

Finally, it was probably the world's only seat of “higher learning” whose classrooms were bombproof caves, with chairs and desks of stone and brick, and blackboards and walls of limestone and clay.

In Shensi and Kansu, besides ordinary houses, there were great cave dwellings, temple grottoes and castled battlements hundreds of years old. Wealthy officials and landlords built these queer edifices a thousand years ago, to guard against flood and invasion and famine, and here hoarded the grain and treasure to see them through sieges of each. Many-vaulted chambers, cut deeply into the loess or solid rock, some with rooms that held several hundred people, these cliff dwellings made perfect bomb shelters. In such archaic manors the Red University found strange but safe accommodation.

Lin Piao, the president, was introduced to me soon after my arrival,
and he invited me to speak one day to his cadets. He suggested the topic: “British and American policies toward China.” When he arranged a “noodle dinner” for the occasion it was too much for me, and I succumbed.

Lin Piao was the son of a factory owner in Hupeh province, and was born in 1908. His father was ruined by extortionate taxation, but Lin managed to get through prep school, and became a cadet in the famous Whampoa Academy at Canton. There he made a brilliant record. He received intensive political and military training under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang's chief adviser, the Russian General Bluecher. Soon after his graduation the Nationalist Expedition began, and Lin Piao was promoted to a captaincy. By 1927, at the age of twenty, he was a colonel in the noted Fourth Kuomintang Army, under Chang Fa-kuei. And in August of that year, after the Right
coup d'état
at Nanking, he led his regiment to join the Twentieth Army under Ho Lung and Yeh T'ing
^*
in the Nanchang Uprising, which began the Communists' armed struggle for power.

With Mao Tse-tung, Lin Piao shared the distinction of being one of the few Red commanders never wounded. Engaged on the front in more than a hundred battles, in field command for more than ten years, exposed to every hardship that his men had known, with a reward of $100,000 on his head, he was as yet unhurt.

In 1932, Lin Piao was given command of the First Red Army Corps, which then numbered about 20,000 rifles. It became, according to general opinion among Red Army officers, their “most dreaded force,” chiefly because of Lin's extraordinary talent as a tactician. The mere discovery that they were fighting the First Red Army Corps was said to have sometimes put a Nanking army to rout.

Like many able Red commanders, Lin had never been outside China, and spoke and read no language but Chinese. Before the age of thirty, however, he had already won recognition beyond Red circles. His articles in the Chinese Reds' military magazines,
Struggle
and
War and Revolution,
had been republished, studied, and criticized in Nanking military journals, and also in Japan and Soviet Russia. He was noted as the originator of the “short attack”—a tactic on which General Feng Yu-hsiang had commented. To the Reds' skillful mastery of the “short attack” many victories of the First Army Corps were said to be traceable.

With Commander Lin and his faculty I journeyed one morning a short distance beyond the walls of Pao An to the Red Army University. We arrived at recreation hour. Some of the cadets were playing basketball on the two courts set up; others were playing tennis on a court laid down on the turf beside the Pao An River, a tributary of the Yellow River. Still
other cadets were playing table tennis, writing, reading new books and magazines, or studying in their primitive “clubrooms.”

This was the First Section of the University, in which there were some 200 students. Altogether, Hung Ta, as the school was known in the soviet districts, had four sections, with over 800 students. There were also, near Pao An, and under the administrative control of the education commissioner, radio, cavalry, agricultural, and medical-training schools. There was a Communist Party school
^*
and a mass-education training center.

Over 200 cadets assembled to hear me explain “British and American policies.” I made a crude summary of Anglo-American attitudes, and agreed to answer questions. It was a great mistake, I soon realized, and the noodle dinner hardly compensated for my embarrassment.

“What is the attitude of the British Government toward the formation of the pro-Japanese Hopei-Chahar Council, and the garrisoning of North China by Japanese troops?”

“What are the results of the N.R.A. policy in America, and how has it benefited the working class?”

“Will Germany and Italy help Japan if a war breaks out with China?”

“How long do you think Japan can carry on a major war against China if she is not helped by other powers?”

“Why has the League of Nations failed?”

“Why is it that, although the Communist Party is legal in both Great Britain and America, there is no workers' government in either country?”

“What progress is being made in the formation of an anti-Fascist front in England? In America?”

“What is the future of the international student movement, which has its center in Paris?”

“In your opinion, can Leith-Ross's visit to Japan result in Anglo-Japanese agreement on policies toward China?”

“When China begins to resist Japan, will America and Great Britain assist China or Japan?”

“Please tell us why America and Great Britain keep their fleets and armed forces in China if they are friends of the Chinese people?”

“What do the American and British workers think of the U.S.S.R.?”

No small territory to cover in a two-hour question period! And it was not confined to two hours. Beginning at ten in the morning, it continued till late in the afternoon.