Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [150]
White watched pityingly as lines of men in their yellow and brown uniforms, feet broken and puffed, heads covered not by helmets, but instead by woven leaves for protection from the sun, sought to claw a way up the hills towards the Japanese positions. For three days he awaited the trumpeted Nationalist counter-offensive. Then he understood: he had witnessed it. On 8 August, Hengyang fell. Later that month, when the Japanese had reorganised their supply lines, they resumed their advance. Chiang’s 62nd Army melted away in their path. Logistics, not resistance, was the chief force determining the enemy’s pace. “Even in late 1944,” one of Chiang’s biographers has written, “the Japanese army could still march412 where it wished and take what it wanted.” Allied intelligence officers expressed surprise that the Japanese were advancing only forty miles a week, “despite facing nil opposition.”
Chiang ordered that commanders who retreated should be shot, but this did not noticeably improve his armies’ performance. Added to the miseries of war were ghastly accidents such as one at Guilin, where a locomotive ploughed into a crowd of refugees standing on the railway tracks, killing several hundred. Chiang and Meiling chose this moment to hold a press conference at which they denied rumours that their marriage was in difficulties. Madame Chiang and her sister then set off for Brazil, exploring a possible haven for their family fortune if events at home continued to go awry. Even the most committed Americans came close to despair. China resembled a vast wounded animal, bleeding in a thousand places, prostrate in the dust, twitching and lashing out in its agony, inflicting more pain upon itself than upon its foes.
The only Chinese divisions which performed with some competence were five—equivalent in strength to two American—serving in northern Burma. These were the creations of the U.S. general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. He flew tens of thousands of men for training in India, where they were quarantined from Nationalist corruption and incompetence, then deployed them for an offensive aimed at reopening the land route into China. Equipped, fed and paid by the Americans, often receiving the benefit of U.S. air support, these units proved notably more effective than their brethren in China.
“Chinese soldiers showed413 what they could do if they were properly trained and given American equipment,” Wen Shan, a lawyer’s son who served in Burma as a truck driver, said proudly. “We had officers who did not steal men’s food, as they did in China.” Wen, like many young Chinese who served with Americans, was boundlessly impressed by their wealth and generosity, though shocked by the way white GIs treated their black counterparts. Jiang Zhen, a twenty-three-year-old landlord’s son from Shanghai who drove trucks on the Ledo road, said of his time there: “I was very lucky414. I had a great opportunity, and it became an important experience in my life.”
Wu Guoqing, an interpreter at 14th Division headquarters in Burma, enjoyed his entire experience with the army. In India and on the battlefield he marvelled at the openness of the Americans with whom he served: “They said what they liked415. They criticised their own government. That’s what they call democracy. In China we are not like that, not open in the same way.” Yet it would be mistaken to over-idealise either the Chinese-American relationship in Burma, or the performance of the Nationalist divisions there. Wu witnessed a bitter row between a young U.S. military adviser and a Chinese colonel. The American officer pressed the Nationalists to display more aggression, especially about patrolling. The KMT officer flatly refused. Likewise, when British troops in Burma began to operate with Stilwell’s force, they were unimpressed by Chinese passivity. The British official historian wrote contemptuously: “It might be said that416 never had such an army remained so inactive before so small an enemy force for so long.” The modest achievements of Stilwell’s divisions