Red Star over China (40 page)

“Fourth, in the development of partisan warfare the greatest attention must be paid to the
min-t'uan
^*
the first, last, and most determined line of resistance of the landlords and gentry. The
min-t'uan
must be destroyed militarily, but must, if at all possible, be won over politically on the side of the masses. Unless the
min-t'uan
in a district is disarmed it is impossible to mobilize the masses.

“Fifth, in a regular engagement with enemy troops the partisans must exceed the enemy in numbers. But if the enemy's regular troops are moving, resting, or poorly guarded, a swift, determined, surprise flank attack on an organically vital spot of the enemy's line can be made by a much smaller group. Many a Red ‘short attack' has been carried out with only a few hundred men against an enemy of thousands. Surprise, speed, courage, unwavering decision, flawlessly planned maneuver, and the selection of the most vulnerable and vital spot in the enemy's ‘anatomy' are absolutely essential to the complete victory of this kind of attack. Only a highly experienced partisan army can succeed at it.

“Sixth, in actual combat the partisan line must have the greatest elasticity. Once it becomes obvious that their calculation of enemy strength or preparedness or fighting power is in error, the partisans should be able to disengage and withdraw with the same speed as they began the attack. Reliable cadres must be developed in every unit, fully capable of replacing any commander eliminated in battle. Resourcefulness of subalterns must be greatly relied upon in partisan warfare.

“Seventh, the tactics of distraction, decoy, diversion, ambush, feint,
and irritation must be mastered. In Chinese these tactics are called ‘the principle of pretending to attack the east while attacking the west.'

“Eighth, partisans must avoid engagements with the main force of the enemy, concentrating on the weakest link, or the most vital.

“Ninth, every precaution must be taken to prevent the enemy from locating the partisans' main forces. For this reason, partisans should avoid concentrating in one place when the enemy is advancing, and should change their position frequently—two or three times in one day or night, just before an attack. Secrecy in the movements of the partisans is absolutely essential to success. Well-worked-out plans for dispersal after an attack are as important as plans for the actual concentration to meet an enemy advance.

“Tenth, besides superior mobility, the partisans, being inseparable from the local masses, have the advantage of superior intelligence, and the greatest use must be made of this. Ideally, every peasant should be on the partisans' intelligence staff, so that it is impossible for the enemy to take a step without the partisans knowing of it. Great care should be taken to protect the channels of information about the enemy, and several auxiliary lines of intelligence should always be established.”

These were the main principles, according to Commander P'eng, on which the Red Army had built up its strength, and it was necessary to employ them in every enlargement of Red territory. He finished up:

“So you see that successful partisan warfare demands these fundamentals: fearlessness, swiftness, intelligent planning, mobility, secrecy, and suddenness and determination in action. Lacking any of these, it is difficult for partisans to win victories. If in the beginning of a battle they lack quick decision, the battle will lengthen. They must be swift, otherwise the enemy will be reinforced. They must be mobile and elastic, otherwise they will lose their advantages of maneuver.

“Finally, it is absolutely necessary for the partisans to win the support and participation of the peasant masses. If there is no movement of the armed peasantry, there is in fact no partisan base, and the army cannot exist. Only by implanting itself deeply in the hearts of the people, only by fulfilling the demands of the masses, only by consolidating a base in the peasant soviets, and only by sheltering in the shadow of the masses, can partisan warfare bring revolutionary victory.”

P'eng had been pacing up and down the balcony, delivering one of his points each time he returned to the table where I sat writing. Now he suddenly stopped and stood thoughtfully reflecting.

“But nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said, “is more important than this—that the Red Army is a people's army, and has grown because the people helped us.

“I remember the winter of 1928, when my forces in Hunan had dwindled to a little over two thousand men, and we were encircled. The Kuomintang troops burned down all the houses in a surrounding area of about 300
li,
seized all the food there, and then blockaded us. We had no cloth, we used bark to make short tunics, and we cut up the legs of our trousers to make shoes. Our hair grew long, we had no quarters, no lights, no salt. We were sick and half-starved. The peasants were no better off, and we would not touch what little they had.

“But the peasants encouraged us. They dug up from the ground the grain which they had hidden from the White troops and gave it to us, and they ate potatoes and wild roots. They hated the Whites for burning their homes and stealing their food. Even before we arrived they had fought the landlords and tax collectors, so they welcomed us. Many joined us, and nearly all helped us in some way. They wanted us to win! And because of that we fought on and broke through the blockade.”

He turned to me and ended simply. “Tactics are important, but we could not exist if the majority of the people did not support us. We are nothing but the fist of the people beating their oppressors!”

The Chinese soldier had had a poor reputation abroad. Many people thought his gun was chiefly ornamental, that he did his only fighting with an opium pipe, that any rifle shots exchanged were by mutual agreement and in the air, that battles were fought with silver and the soldier was paid in opium. Some of that had been true enough of most armies in the past, but the well-equipped first-class Chinese soldier (White as well as Red) was now no longer a vaudeville joke.

There were still plenty of comic-opera armies in China, but in recent years there had arisen a new type of Chinese warrior, who would soon supplant the old. Civil war, especially the class war between Reds and Whites, had been very costly, and often heavily and brutally fought, with no quarter or umbrella truces given by either side. Those ten years of strife in China had, if nothing else, created the nucleus of a fighting force and military brains experienced in the use of modern technique and tactics, which would before long build a powerful army that could no longer be dismissed as a tin-soldier affair.

The trouble had never been with the human material itself. The Chinese could fight as well as any people, as I had learned during the Shanghai War in 1932. Technical limitations disregarded, the trouble had been the inability of the command to train that human material at its disposal and give to it military discipline, political morale, and the
will to victory.
Therein lay the superiority of the Red Army—it was so often the only side in a battle that believed it was fighting for something. It was the Reds' greater success at the educative tasks in the building of
an army that enabled them to withstand the tremendous technical and numerical superiority of their enemy.

For sheer dogged endurance, and ability to stand hardship without complaint, the Chinese peasants, who composed the greater part of the Red Army, were unbeatable. This was shown by the Long March, in which the Reds took a terrific pummeling from all sides, slept in the open and lived on unhulled wheat for many days, but still held together and emerged as a potent military force. It was also demonstrated by the rigors and impositions of daily life in the Red Army.

The Red troops I saw in Ninghsia and Kansu were quartered in caves, former stables of wealthy landlords, hastily erected barracks of clay and wood, and in compounds and houses abandoned by former officials or garrison troops. They slept on hard
k'ang,
without mattresses and with only a cotton blanket each—yet these rooms were fairly neat, clean and orderly, although their floors, walls, and ceilings were of whitewashed clay. They seldom had tables or desks, and piles of bricks or rocks served as chairs, most of the furniture having been destroyed or carted off by the enemy before his retreat.

Every company had its own cook and commissariat. The Reds' diet was extremely simple: millet and cabbage, with a little mutton and sometimes pork, were an average meal, but they seemed to thrive on it. Coffee, tea, cake, sweets of any kind, or fresh vegetables were almost unknown, but also unmissed. Coffee tins were more valued than their contents; nobody liked coffee, it tasted like medicine, but a good tin could be made into a serviceable canteen. Hot water was almost the only beverage consumed, and the drinking of cold water (very often contaminated) was specifically forbidden.

The Red soldier, when not fighting, had a full and busy day. In the Northwest, as in the South, he had long periods of military inactivity, for when a new district was occupied, the Red Army settled down for a month or two to establish soviets and otherwise “consolidate,” and only put a small force on outpost duty. The enemy was nearly always on the defensive, except when one of the periodic big annihilation drives was launched.

When not in the trenches or on outpost duty, the Red soldier observed a six-day week. He arose at five and retired to a “Taps” sounded at nine. The schedule of the day included: an hour's exercise immediately after rising; breakfast; two hours of military drill; two hours of political lectures and discussion; lunch; an hour of rest; two hours of character study; two hours of games and sports; dinner; songs and group meetings; and “Taps.”

Keen competition was encouraged in broad jumping, high jumping,
running, wall scaling, rope climbing, rope skipping, grenade throwing, and marksmanship. Watching the leaps of the Reds over walls, bars, and ropes, you could easily understand why the Chinese press had nicknamed them “human monkeys,” for their swift movement and agile feats of mountain climbing. Pennants were given in group competitions, from the squad up to the regiment, in sports, military drill, political knowledge, literacy, and public health. I saw these banners displayed in the Lenin clubs of units that had won such distinctions.

There was a Lenin Club for every company and for every regiment, and here all social and “cultural” life had its center. The regimental Lenin rooms were the best in the unit's quarters, but that said little; such as I saw were always crude, makeshift affairs, and what interest they aroused derived from the human activity in them rather than from their furnishings. They all had pictures of Marx and Lenin, drawn by company or regimental talent. Like some of the Chinese pictures of Christ, they generally bore a distinctly Oriental appearance, with eyes like stitches, and either a bulbous forehead like an image of Confucius, or no forehead at all. Marx, whose Chinese moniker is Ma K'e-ssu, was nicknamed by the Red soldiers Ma Ta Hu-tzu, or Ma the Big Beard. They seemed to have an affectionate awe for him. That was especially true of the Mohammedans, who appeared to be the only people in China capable of growing luxuriant beards as well as appreciating them.

Another feature of the Lenin Club was a corner devoted to the study of military tactics, in models of clay. Miniature towns, mountains, forts, rivers, lakes, and bridges were constructed in these corners, and toy armies battled back and forth, while the class studied some tactical problem. Thus in some places you saw the Sino-Japanese battles of Shanghai re-fought, in another the battles on the Great Wall, but most of the models were devoted to past battles between the Reds and the Kuomintang. They were also used to explain the geographical features of the district in which the army was stationed, to dramatize the tactics of a hypothetical campaign, or merely to animate the geography and political lessons which Red soldiers got as part of their military training. In a hospital company's Lenin room I saw displays of clay models of various parts of the anatomy, showing the effects of certain diseases, illustrating body hygiene, and so on.

Another corner of the club was devoted to character study, and here one saw the notebook of each warrior hanging on its appointed peg on the wall. There were three character-study groups: those who knew fewer than 100 characters; those who knew from 100 to 300; and those who could read and write more than 300 characters. The Reds had printed their own textbooks (using political propaganda as materials of study)
for each of these groups. The political department of each company, battalion, regiment, and army was responsible for mass education, as well as political training. Only about 20 per cent of the First Army Corps, I was told, was still
hsia-tzu,
or “blind men,” as the Chinese call total illiterates.

“The principles of the Lenin Club,” it was explained to me by Hsiao Hua,
^*
the twenty-two-year-old political director of the Second Division, “are quite simple. All the life and activity in them must be connected with the daily work and development of the men. It must be done by the men themselves. It must be simple and easy to understand. It must combine recreational value with practical education about the immediate tasks of the army.”

The “library” of the average Lenin Club consisted chiefly of standard Chinese Red Army textbooks and lectures, a history of the Russian Revolution, miscellaneous magazines which might have been smuggled in or captured from the White areas, and files of Chinese soviet publications like the
Red China Daily News, Party Work, Struggle,
and others.

There was also a wall newspaper in every club, and a committee of soldiers was responsible for keeping it up to date. The wall newspaper gave considerable insight into the soldier's problems and a measure of his development. I took down full notes, in translation, of many of these papers. A typical one was in the Lenin Club, Second Company, Third Regiment, Second Division, in Yu Wang Pao, for September 1. Its contents included daily and weekly notices of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League; a couple of columns of crude contributions by the newly literate, mostly revolutionary exhortations and slogans; radio bulletins of Red Army victories in south Kansu; new songs to be learned; political news from the White areas; and, perhaps most interesting of all, two sections called the red and black columns, devoted respectively to praise and criticism.