Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [141]
Political power in China was attainable only with the support of bayonets. Chiang exploited his skills as a military organiser to become the most powerful of all warlords, also having pretensions to a revolutionary ideology. “Fascism is a stimulant for a declining society,” he declared in an address to his “Blue Shirt” followers in 1935. “Can fascism save China? We answer: ‘Yes.’” He described liberal democracy as “a poison to be expelled from the country’s body politic.” Yet his professed Christianity and enthusiasm for the West caused many Americans to overlook the absolutism, brutality and corruption of his regime. Thus, for instance, former China medical missionary Congressman Walter Judd in 1944, comparing Americans and Chinese: “The two peoples are nearer385 alike, we are nearer to the Chinese in our basic beliefs, our basic emphasis on the rights of the individual, and in our basic personal habits of democracy, than we are to most of the countries of Europe.”
Indian political leaders admired Chiang as a nationalist, and applauded his outspoken opposition to colonialism. Nehru and the Congress Party described him as “the great leader.” Many modern Chinese scholars are far less dismissive of Chiang than might be expected. Yang Jinghua, a historian of Manchuria who has been a Communist Party member for more than thirty years, today regards the generalissimo as a great man: “We say about Mao that he was 30 percent wrong, 70 percent right. Despite the fact that Chiang was a profoundly corrupt dictator, I would say the same about him.” Such assertions do not signify that Chiang Kai-shek was a successful or admirable ruler; merely that some of his own people retain respect towards his aspirations for a modern, unified China.
Many Japanese politicians and soldiers learned to regret their entanglement in China as they struggled to stem the American tide in the Pacific. Occupation delivered nothing like the economic benefits which the invaders had expected. Had the huge Japanese forces committed in China—amounting to 45 percent of the army even in 1945—been available for service elsewhere, they might have made an important contribution. That year, Hirohito and army chief of staff Field Marshal Hajime Sugiyama held a conversation which became legendary. The emperor enquired why the China war was taking so long to finish. “China is bigger than we thought,” said Sugiyama. Hirohito observed: “The Pacific is also big.” In 1943 or 1944, Tokyo would have been happy to withdraw from most of China if the Nationalists had been willing to abandon hostilities and concede Japanese hegemony in Manchuria. This, however, Chiang would never do. And as America’s commitment in China grew, the Japanese could not permit U.S. forces or their Nationalist clients to gain control of the coastline. They perceived no choice save to use a million soldiers to hold their ground.
The occupation of Manchuria and eastern China was mercilessly conducted. Unit 731, the biological warfare386 cell based near Harbin, was its most extreme manifestation. Beyond hundreds of Chinese prisoners subjected to experiments which invariably resulted in their deaths, often by vivisection, the unit sought to spread typhus, anthrax and other plagues indiscriminately among the Chinese population, sometimes by air-dropping of germ cultures. Post-war Japanese claims that reports of atrocities were exaggerated, and that soldiers’ misdeeds were unauthorised, are set at naught by the very existence of Unit 731. Its activities matched the horrors of some