Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [145]
A characteristic January 1945 report to London from the British military attaché in Chongqing declared: “It is difficult395 to give you detailed reviews of Japanese operations…since we do not have the necessary information…Chinese…reports are usually vague and unconvincing…This is not surprising, since Chinese are usually retreating and are often, as at present, not really in contact with the enemy…They are prone to exaggerations to cover up their own reverses.” Rhodes Farmer, an Australian eyewitness, noted that many Japanese “offensives” were dismissed by Westerners as “rice bowl operations.” Farmer said: “The campaigns the Japanese396 waged between 1938 and 1944 were foraging expeditions rather than battles. They had no greater strategic objective than to keep the countryside in terror, to sack the fields and towns, to keep the Chinese troops at the front off-balance, and to train their own green recruits under fire.” When Chiang Kai-shek’s communiqués asserted that his armies were “fighting strongly” to defend a given position, the usual reality was that the Japanese had not chosen to take it.
Thirty-year-old Maj. Shigeru Funaki was the youngest of five sons of a retired Japanese army officer. His father made it plain that, since his elder siblings had declined to continue the family’s military heritage, it was Shigeru’s duty to do so. He was commissioned into the Imperial Guard in 1935, and thereafter became an unfashionable thing in the Japanese army—an armoured specialist and devotee of the British strategic guru Basil Liddell Hart. Funaki spent two of the war years in China commanding a tank unit: “As the Chinese had no weapons capable of stopping tanks, they were useful things for us to have.” He was no more impressed than any other Japanese soldier by the Nationalist army: “One Japanese division397 was worth four or five of theirs. They had no heavy artillery, no armour, and were very poorly organised. Whenever you pressed a Chinese army, it simply pulled back. They were always happy to give ground, because they had so much of it. They kept retreating and retreating.” Lt. Hayashi Inoue, who served in the theatre for eighteen months, said: “The Chinese were poor soldiers398. Their weapons and equipment were not up to much, and they were virtually untrained. We were always winning victories. Wherever we went, we won. The difficulty was that although you beat the Chinese in one place, they were still everywhere else. Every night, we were liable to be harassed by guerrillas.”
Most of the pain inflicted by each side’s operations fell upon the civilian population. When either Japanese or Nationalist soldiers approached, peasants and townspeople buried their clothes and valuables and fled into the hills, driving pigs and cattle before them, taking seed grain and even furniture. Rhodes Farmer reported a conversation with the inhabitants of a ransacked town: “One man slowly put four fingers399 on the table and then turned the hand over. I understood his meaning…the [Chinese] 44th Army had looted the city completely. He told me in a low voice that the army raped, plundered, set incendiary fires, and murdered…They [the local people] all said that the enemy was better than the Chinese troops…[Yet] on their retreat, the enemy [also] burned and killed on a large scale.” Though Farmer was an enthusiastic propagandist for the Communists, such a story was entirely credible.
Yan Qizhi, a small farmer’s son from Hebei, became a Nationalist infantry soldier