Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [287]
Zhou Shuling was an illiterate fourteen-year-old when one day in 1934 her Manchurian hamlet was visited by Japanese troops who murdered her grandfather by stuffing chilli plants down his throat until he choked. Her brother, aunt and two uncles were killed by simpler methods. She ran away to join a local Communist guerrilla group of the North-East Anti-Japanese Union: “I refused to become a Japanese slave.” There were eleven guerrilla groups in northern Manchuria at this time, some of them no more than bandits. She served with the 3rd Regiment, initially employed as a spy to scout Japanese positions and report where it might be possible to steal weapons or food. On one of these expeditions she met a Japanese patrol. A soldier casually lashed out with his bayonet, gashing her face. Another Japanese intervened, saying: “Oh, leave her alone. She’s harmless.” He said to Shuling: “Run for it, while you’ve got the chance.” After that encounter, fearful of rejoining her group when the Japanese were on the move and she had no papers, she took refuge for a week with a woman whom she persuaded to give her shelter in return for helping to look after her four children. Then Shuling threw herself on the mercy of a women’s religious group. After a week with them, she was able to escape back to her band.
It was a hard life, moving constantly to escape roving Japanese columns, living in caves and woods, once surviving a week without food. In 1938, when she was sixteen, she was told that she was to marry the commander of another group, an old man of twenty-nine named Li Mingshu. “What did I think of him?” She shrugged. “It didn’t matter whether I liked or disliked him. That was the way things were done.” She lived for several months in the wilderness with Li’s 32nd Battalion, until Japanese pressure became irresistible. After the Communist groups in their area had been desperately mauled, and with the loss of hundreds of men, the survivors slipped over the border into Russia, where most of them remained until 1945.
The Russians treated their Chinese guests as well as their own threadbare means allowed: “They respected us, because we had been fighting for the same thing as them,” said Li Min. They were issued Russian uniforms, armed and intensively trained for intelligence missions and guerrilla war. Min underwent courses in radio work and parachuting. Clothes to wear, roofs over their heads and a bare minimum of food to eat might seem little enough, but were more than they had known in the forests of north-east China. Min supervised the guerrillas’ little library, and acted as assistant to their group’s resident intellectual, Chen Lei. He produced a string of pamphlets and reports, and conducted briefings for the group on the state of the war, based on newspaper reading and radio listening. In 1943, Min married Chen Lei. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-five. “It was not an arranged marriage—we simply loved each other. There was somebody else who liked me a lot, but Lei was the one I really cared about.”
Marriage in such circumstances was a strange business. There was only the simplest of ceremonies before a few friends, with no spare food or alcohol with which to celebrate. In winter months, the couple were allowed to cohabit in a hut they found for themselves in a derelict Soviet army camp. In summer, however, party rules decreed that men and