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By Root 1097 0

“Dixie Mission” to Yan’an were taken to watch showpiece operations against the Japanese, about which they reported back to Chongqing as enthusiastically as they were intended to do. Most of Mao’s forces, however, spent the war struggling to feed themselves and survive, skirmishing only spasmodically with the Japanese. Today, the myth of Communist dominance of the struggle against the occupiers is discredited even in China. If Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were less than effective on the battlefield, Mao Zedong’s guerrillas lacked either the will or the combat power to do more than irritate the Japanese. By 1944, 70 percent of Japan’s forces in China were committed against the Nationalists. A staff officer at Japan’s army headquarters in Nanjing, Maj. Shigeru Funaki, said: “The Communists operated in regions776 that were strategically unimportant to us. Their troops were much more motivated than the Nationalists, but we sought only to contain them. Our attention was overwhelmingly concentrated on confronting Chiang’s forces further south.”

“The Communists were not strong enough to offer a major challenge to the Japanese occupation,” says a modern Chinese historian, Yang Jinghua. “In the anti-Japanese war, the Kuomintang777 did most of the fighting, and killed far more of the enemy—I say this, as a Communist Party member for thirty years. Statistics tell the story. Some 1,200 KMT generals died fighting the Japanese, against just ten Communist ones.” Zuo Yong, who later became a significant figure in Mao’s China, served with the Communist New 4th Army from 1941 to 1945, latterly as a brigade chief of staff. Today, he says: “We had to adopt the strategy778 and tactics of the weak, as Mao urged in his books. We were staging raids, not serious offensives. We were guerrillas, sometimes living months at a time without fighting a battle. The enemy was too strong for us to do anything else.” Zuo is generous in acknowledging U.S. aid to China, even though Washington denied arms to the Communists: “We felt really grateful to the Americans for all their help. One of their planes came down in our area, after being damaged bombing Japan. The pilot was wounded. We helped him to get back to his own people.” Another historian, Wang Hongbin, says: “Guerrillas could not realistically engage779 large bodies of Japanese regular troops. The main achievement of the Communist armies in the war was to win the support of peasants and the respect of the Chinese people.” This seems just.

By early 1945, the Communists claimed a combined strength of around 900,000 men for their 8th Route Army in the north and New 4th Army in central China, supported by another two million local militia members. As everywhere in the Second World War, guerrillas flourished chiefly in regions little valued by the occupiers. And like most irregular forces, those led by Mao were more concerned with proselytising for their cause and sustaining human existence in a starving countryside than with engaging the enemy. Li Fenggui, for instance, served eight months with his regiment of 8th Route Army in Shandong Province before acquiring a weapon of any kind. Most men went into action with perhaps ten rounds of ammunition apiece. Li’s battalion possessed two light and two heavy machine guns; it acquired a single 60mm mortar only in 1944, artillery never. Most of its weapons were locally made single-shot rifles. Few Communist officers possessed watches, which made the synchronisation of operations difficult.

“For us,” said Li, “1945 was not much different from 1940. Everyone was very hungry, everyone was very poor.” They led nomadic lives, of stringent austerity. A battalion of seven hundred men billeted itself in a village for a few days, fed by local people. When supplies were exhausted, the column moved on, each man if he was fortunate carrying three days’ bread and rice in a food bag. Their circumstances in 1945 had improved in only two respects: most Japanese troops had moved south from Shandong to confront the KMT; and far fewer Chinese were collaborating with the enemy. The ruthlessly