Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [149]
In the first quarter of 1944, 278 American trucks in southern China simply disappeared. The report asserted that a section409 assessing the performance of Chinese commanders was endorsed by all long-serving U.S. officers in China, but the relevant pages of the National Archive copy are missing, marked “Removed on orders of the War Department.” It is reasonable to guess that this excision was made in 1944, because the report’s verdict was so damning.
IN THE SPRING OF 1944, when elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific their fortunes were in relentless decline, amazingly the Japanese found the will and the means to launch “Ichigo,” an ambitious operation which swept across central and southern China, vastly enlarging Japan’s area of occupation. Ichigo was provoked by the American air threat. B-29 bombers had begun to operate from bases in China. The Japanese initiated Ichigo to deprive the Americans of these. Half a million men, 100,000 horses, 800 tanks and 15,000 vehicles swept across the Yellow River and into Henan Province on a 120-mile-wide front. Some thirty-four Nationalist divisions simply melted away in their path. The Japanese killed forty Chinese for every loss of their own. Nationalist resistance was almost entirely ineffectual. Chiang invariably overstated his own difficulties, to extort additional aid from the Allies. But the British director of military intelligence in India reported on 17 May 1944:
It has been the lowest common denominator410 of appreciation of China’s prospects that, however much conditions depreciated, China would not capitulate…There is now a distinct possibility of China’s collapse…Conditions in occupied territory are said to compare favourably with those in KMT areas…[Its] collapse would render the Burma campaign a waste of effort…The plight of the common people is so bad that they would be apathetic and do nothing…There would be no regret for the Allies, as anti-foreign feeling is always just below the surface. The disaffection in the provinces is so great that their leaders would take a purely opportunistic view. The Generalissimo, faced with a crumbling structure, has no machinery with which to save it.
On the Japanese rolled into Hunan Province, crossing the Miluo River, killing casually as they went. Hunan had already been suffering famine for two years. Now matters grew much worse. For the Chinese people of the rice-producing regions between Hunan and Guangdong, in Guangxi and Guizhou provinces, Ichigo meant hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of new deaths from famine and disease. Peasants were reported to have revolted, disarming as many as 50,000 Nationalist soldiers, who were willing enough to abandon the war. American special forces teams from the Office of Strategic Services strove to deny the Japanese the great supply dumps and airfield facilities established at such cost. Some 50,000 tons of matériel were destroyed at one base, Tusham, by Maj. Frank Gleason and fifteen Americans, together with their Chinese cook and orphan mascot. The Nationalist retreat was punctuated by occasional stands, notably at Hengyang in June and July. The American correspondent Theodore White joined 62nd Army, which was seeking to dislodge the Japanese from the southern hills beyond the town:
It was dawn when we fell411 into the troop column, but the cloudless skies were already scorching. As far as we could see ahead into the hills and beyond were marching men. They crawled on foot over every footpath through the rice paddies; they snaked along over every ditch and broken bridge in parallel rivulets of sweating humanity. One man in three had a rifle; the rest carried supplies, telephone wire, rice sacks, machine-gun parts. Between the unsmiling soldiers plodded blue-gowned peasant coolies who had been impressed for carrier duty. There was not a single motor, not a truck…not a piece of artillery…The men walked quietly, with the curious bitterness of Chinese