Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [285]
The activities of these groups form a remarkable story, largely unknown in the West. Chiang Kai-shek lost much face among Manchurians when he declined to commit Nationalist forces to resist the 1931 Japanese takeover. The local guerrilla bands which formed thereafter were Communist in name, however little ideology they possessed. Stalin’s Chinese recruits were drawn from unimaginably wretched backgrounds. Li Dongguan was the child of a peasant in Heilongjiang Province, who started poor and grew relentlessly poorer. The child tended cattle for the local landlord, and quickly became radicalised by the Japanese occupation. One day when a group of boys were making a fishtrap by the river, two Japanese soldiers came by with a dog. One of the children was foolish enough to throw a stone at it. The Japanese unslung their rifles and shot dead not only the stone thrower, but three other children. “I was so shocked. After that, I cared only about fighting the Japanese.”
Not long after, a Communist guerrilla group stayed in his village for a few days. He befriended its bugler, a boy about his own age. They played together, as children do, and Li—nicknamed “Tiezi” by his family—helped tend the guerrillas’ horses. He told the bugler that he wanted to join the band. “You’ll have to talk to Liu, the commissar,” said the young warrior. Liu was dismissive: “Look at you—thirteen years old. Life as a guerrilla is no picnic. One day you’re crossing mountains in the snow, the next there’s nothing to eat. You’d never keep up. Anyway, your family need you at home.” “My mother’s dead and I needn’t tell anybody else,” said the boy. Liu shrugged, patted him on the head and said: “We can talk about this again in a couple of years.”
Next day, however, when the guerrilla column marched out, behind them in the snow trudged Li. He said nothing to his family, carried only a little rice and a few trifles in a bag. That night, when the guerrillas camped, Li slipped in among them, and slept beside his friend the bugler. It was two days before Liu, the commissar, noticed him. Then he burst out furiously: “What the hell are you doing here? We’re going into action tomorrow. Look at your hands—you’ve got frostbite already. The cold will kill you in a week. Go home where you belong!” But Li did not go home. Through the days that followed, he shadowed his young friend the bugler, helping with camp chores, fetching water, peeling vegetables, feeding the horses. After a month of this, Liu shrugged and said: “OK, you’re earning your keep. You can stay with us.” Li’s family assumed that he was dead. It was fifteen years before his few surviving relations saw him again.
In the times that followed, besides the usual privations of guerrilla life, Li took part in several skirmishes with the occupiers. Once, when his band saw two Japanese vehicles pass by on a road, they knew that they were likely to come back the same way, and laid an ambush. Sure enough, late in the afternoon the trucks reappeared. The guerrillas poured fire into them. When the action was over, they found that they had killed twenty Japanese. Only one made good his escape. There was a bonus: one truck had been carrying a garrison payroll. The guerrillas found themselves laden with cash as well as the weapons of the dead. In China, it was hard to distinguish between banditry and politically motivated resistance, and few tried to do so. Such little battles