Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [280]
By 1945, Li and his comrades knew little more about Communist ideology than they had done three years earlier. Survival remained their overwhelming preoccupation. Li had risen to become a captain, though he was denied the formal rank because he could not read. Orders were issued verbally, as so few men were literate, but Li’s absence of education created problems in recording ammunition states, handling messages and taking roll calls. “Our general was the only really well-educated man in the division,” he said.
The sexual climate in the Communist ranks was puritanical. Zuo Yong, twenty-year-old son of a rich peasant, was a student in Shanghai in 1941 when the Japanese burnt down his school: “I decided I would rather fight than find another school.” He joined the Communists not for ideological reasons, but simply because their forces chanced to be closer at hand than those of the KMT. After a spell at an “anti-Japanese military school” in Hainan he was posted to New 4th Army as a platoon commander. A year or so later he was billeted in the village house of a family whose father was away at the front, serving as an officer with the Kuomintang. The man’s wife was a teacher, with two teenage sons and two daughters of eighteen and nineteen. Zuo persuaded the woman to let her daughters become nurses in a Communist clinic, because there was no longer a chance that they could study. Soon afterwards, the woman said she wanted to meet Zuo’s mother, to discuss a serious issue. “I’m afraid that’s difficult,” said Zuo. “Our village is a long way off.” The woman said: “Well, in that case, I’d better talk to you. I think you would make a good husband for one of my daughters.” Zuo explained that he could fulfil none of the three alternative criteria for being allowed to marry in the Red Army: he was under twenty-eight, he had not completed ten years’ service, and he was not a regimental commander.
Ordinary soldiers were officially denied physical contact with girls. Even the few married women in the ranks were forbidden to touch their husbands in public. Senior officers, however, were provided with arranged wives of eighteen or nineteen. Zuo said: “I remember one girl who was told she was to marry a regimental commander. She asked about him, and was told that he was brave, hard-working, kind. After their first meeting, a comrade demanded: ‘Do you like him?’ She said: ‘How can I tell? I’ve only seen him once.’” The marriage went ahead anyway. After a while, the girl ran away. Her husband remained enthusiastic, however, and eventually persuaded her to return. “A lot of couples whose marriages780 were arranged made a go of it together,” said Zuo, “but there were divorces. Some of our soldiers were pretty simple fellows from the countryside, not very nice. They took for granted the right to beat hell out of their women.”
FOR MOST of the war, Allied intelligence in China was shockingly poor. Stilwell and his successor Wedemeyer knew little about what the Nationalist armies were, or were not, achieving on the ground against the Japanese, and even less about the Communists. Until late 1944, the Communists’ base in Yan’an remained a distant lunar world, shrouded in mist. It was known that Mao Zedong and his followers controlled an area the size of France, inhabited by some ninety million Chinese people, in which they had established a radical social and economic regime. Westerners who visited Yan’an asserted that living conditions were better than those prevailing in Nationalist areas. Such