Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [286]
Li Min’s father was head of the anti-Japanese group in his village in Heilongjiang Province. During her brief period of schooling, her teacher proselytised enthusiastically about the virtues of the October Revolution in Russia. He taught them Lenin’s song: “With Lenin’s birth, a star rose in the sky, beloved of all workers, feared by every capitalist.” Min’s education ceased, along with the life of her village, after a punitive raid by Japanese troops in 1936. She found herself a young nomad in the forests with a guerrilla band. Her father and brother joined other groups—with which both were killed before she could see them again. In the early years of the Japanese occupation, such groups survived without too much difficulty, receiving help from sympathetic peasants. At its peak, Min’s band was seven hundred strong. However, as the Japanese tightened their grip, the plight of their opponents grew harsher. Peasants were rounded up into “protected villages,” which they needed passes to leave. Others were deported for slave labour. Large numbers of Japanese immigrants arrived, taking over confiscated Chinese land. Japanese military sweeps of guerrilla areas became progressively more vigorous and ruthless.
It was a fantastically primitive existence, which only the youngest and hardiest could endure. Most of Min’s group were aged between seventeen and twenty—“a man of thirty, like our commander, seemed to us incredibly old.” They planted their own maize and rice in remote stretches of wilderness, hunted deer, wild boar and bears not only for food but for skins in which to clothe themselves. Like most of the wartime French maquis, their chief concern was not with fighting the enemy—for which they possessed scant means—but with survival. They snared rabbits for food and skins with which to sew caps and cloaks. They lived in huts dug deep into the earth, so that only the roofs showed above ground level. They huddled around their fires to fight the winter cold. But fires meant smoke, and smoke brought strafing Japanese aircraft, which killed scores of their people. Of those who survived, many more perished of hunger. Finally, in 1941, they embarked on a twenty-day march which led them across the border into Russia.
Jiang De grew up with Communist guerrillas in Manchuria. Every autumn they came to his village seeking grain and recruits. His uncle, whom Jiang much admired, joined them. Jiang became a small-time spy, collecting fragments of information about Japanese movements, assisted by the fact that he had another uncle working in a local police station. “Nobody took any notice of what a kid like me was doing.” One day in July 1943, six guerrillas were in Jiang’s house when two Japanese police appeared without warning at the front door. The guerrillas bolted through the back. There was a brief scuffle, in which one policeman was killed while the other fled. A few hours later, three trucks laden with Japanese soldiers and Chinese militia drove up to the village and rapidly deployed around it. They rounded up all fifteen members of the family except Jiang, who escaped into fields with the guerrillas. In captivity, the family paid dearly for their rashness in lingering at home after the policeman’s killing. All were tortured in varying degrees, with forced infusions of chilli water, electric shocks and beatings. Jiang’s father died under the experience.
After the Japanese had departed with their prisoners, the young man and the guerrillas raided the farm of a local landlord. They seized ten horses and all the grain the beasts could carry, then set off towards the forests. After marching all night, at dawn they realised that they were being pursued. For four hours they lay in hiding with their animals, listening to Japanese voices as troops searched the area. One of the horses began to whinny. They cut its