Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [147]
If men received their rations, these might consist of fried pancakes, pickles, soup. The fortunate carried a sack of dried fried rice. In a town, in the unlikely event that a man possessed money, he might buy from a street seller a bowl of “congress of eight jewels,” or youtiao—a stick of fried batter. More often, desperate soldiers were driven to seize whatever they could extort from hapless peasants or townspeople. The official ration allowance of twenty-four ounces of rice and vegetables a day was seldom issued. GIs laughed to see Chinese soldiers carrying dead dogs on poles to their cooking pots. Yet what else was there to eat? “Even junior officers could not survive or feed their families without corruption,” said Xu Yongqiang, who served in Burma. Luo Dingwen, an infantry platoon commander with 29th Army, saw peasants lying by the roadside as his regiment marched past, dying or dead of starvation. “We usually relied on what food404 we could find in villages in our path,” he said. Despairing American military advisers reported that many Chinese soldiers were too weak even to march with weapons and equipment. Most were clinically malnourished. Not even the U.S. could feed two million men by air over the Hump.
A prominent American soldier in China wrote of his Nationalist counterparts: “Senior officers were suspicious405 of all foreign officers, totally callous to their subordinates and would not voluntarily assist other Chinese units in trouble.” General Sun in northern Burma refused to loan mules to take food and drugs to another formation, even though he knew its men were starving. A Chinese divisional finance officer casually asked an American: “How are you getting yours?” He was curious about his U.S. colleague’s route to “squeeze.”
There is no dispute—outside modern Japan, anyway—about the atrocities carried out by the Japanese in China, merely about their scale: for instance, Japanese historians make a plausible case that “only” 50,000 Chinese were killed in the 1937 Nanjing massacre, rather than the 300,000 claimed by such writers as Iris Chang. Yet the overall scale of slaughter was appalling. In 1941 the Japanese launched their notorious “Three All” offensive, explicitly named for its purpose to “Kill All, Burn All, Destroy All.” Several million Chinese died. The survivors were herded into “protected areas” where they were employed as slave labourers to build forts and pillboxes.
It was an extraordinary reflection of the cult of bushido that many Japanese soldiers took pride in sending home to their families photographs of beheadings and bayonetings, writing letters and diaries in which they described appalling deeds. “To the Japanese soldier406,” an American foreign service officer reported to Washington, “the resistance from armed peasants…and the unmistakable resentment or fear of those whom he does not succeed in ‘liberating’ are a shocking rejection of his idealism…The average Japanese soldier…benightedly vents the conflict in vengeful action against the people whom he believes have denied his chivalry.”
The Japanese argued that the Chinese were equally merciless to foes, and it is true that the Nationalists frequently shot prisoners. The Communists, at this period of the war, sought to spare the peasantry and customarily recruited KMT prisoners into their own ranks, even if officers were unlikely to survive. But beheadings of political enemies were familiar public spectacles in China. Most Japanese soldiers were no more willing to accept captivity in Chinese hands than in those of the Western Allies. “Once in 1944, we had a Japanese post surrounded,” said Communist guerrilla Li Fenggui of 8th Route Army. “The defenders fought until their ammunition was gone. Even then, one man ran towards four of us, brandishing his rifle. This Japanese and one of our men went at each other with