Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [279]
Li Fenggui, in 1945 a twenty-four-year-old company commander, was typical. He grew up in a village of nine hundred people near Shanghai, dominated by three “rich” landlords and a few “rich” peasants. The natural condition of others, including his own family, was destitution. After a bloody Japanese visit in 1941, Li and a few other villagers formed a little resistance group. Their first act of defiance was both primitive and ruthless. They lay in wait in the fields for a well-known Chinese collaborator who rode past daily on a bicycle. They rushed out, pulled him off his machine, wielded their machetes, and dragged the half-dead figure into the paddy. There, they finished him off and hid the body. Next day, another Chinese agent of the Japanese arrived to question the village headman about the disappearance of his colleague. Such happenings were not uncommon, however. No more was heard about the killing from the authorities.
But local Communists learned of it and approved. One day a stranger came to the village and told Li and his friends: “If you want to fight the Japanese properly, you must become a Communist.” Li said: “But I don’t know what a Communist is.” The stranger said: “A Communist is a friend to poor people. When China is ruled by Communists there will be no more landlords, no more famines, everyone will have enough to eat, proper houses to live in and electricity.” Li recalled later: “I had no idea what electricity was, because I had never seen it. But I accepted that it must be a good thing.” The visitor helped Li and three others to write applications to join 8th Route Army, one of whose units was encamped a few miles away. Li’s parents applauded. His mother made him a pair of cloth shoes. His father, poorest of the poor, nonetheless found money to buy cloth and stitch him a blanket. Thus equipped, he and the others set off one morning, accompanied for the first mile or so of their adventurous journey by a throng of admiring villagers. They were local heroes.
The years that followed were unremittingly harsh, yet Li found them rewarding: “We had such good relationships in the battalion, especially with our commanders. We were like family to each other.” He enjoyed the communal concerts, led by the divisional entertainment troupe. Together they sang the famous “Guerrilla Song”: “Marksmen all are we, when we shoot we kill!” In the summer of 1944, during the Ichigo offensive, Li’s division found itself attacked by an overwhelming force of Japanese, obliged to disperse and flee: “We told the local peasants to hide everything, poison the wells, and come with us. About five hundred joined our retreat. There were just thirty-seven soldiers in our group, three of them wounded. At last we came to the Yellow River. We had to get across it to be safe. The women put small children on their heads. Some peasants helped carry our wounded. The river was deep. Some of those women were not very tall. The water closed over their heads. Children drowned. Hardly anyone could swim. When we finally reached the other side, maybe three hundred of the five hundred who had started the crossing were still with us. We all cried and embraced each other, guerrillas and villagers together. We were supposed to be soldiers, but we were always peasants as well—one family.”
In a subsequent battle, Li was badly wounded—hit in the chest and leg. His unit had no medical supplies. They could only wash away the blood with salt water. When the rest of the battalion pulled out, he was left behind in the hut of a peasant named Li Qirong. For a week the wounded man lay undisturbed. Then one morning a Japanese collaborator appeared at the door of the house. “You seem to have visitors,