Mao: The Unknown Story

But after one day’s fighting, Chiang ordered a halt, on the 18th. ZZZ simply ignored the order and expanded his offensives. All-out war became unstoppable as large Japanese reinforcements began to arrive on 22 August.

The Japanese inflicted tremendous casualties. In Shanghai, 73 of China’s 180 divisions — and the best one-third — over 400,000 men, were thrown in, and all but wiped out. The conflict here consumed virtually all of China’s nascent air force (which Chiang so treasured that he had not sent a single plane to the northern front), and the main warships. It significantly weakened the military force Chiang had been painstakingly building up since the early 1930s. The Japanese suffered much fewer, though still heavy, casualties: about 40,000.

Once Chiang was forced into all-out war, Stalin moved with alacrity to bolster Chiang’s capability to sustain a war. He signed a non-aggression treaty with Nanjing on 21 August, and started to supply Chiang with weapons. China could not manufacture any weapons except rifles. Stalin advanced Chiang US$250 million for arms purchases from Russia, which included some 1,000 planes, plus tanks and artillery, and committed a sizable Soviet air force contingent. Moscow sent hundreds of military advisers, headed for a time by the Chinese-speaking General Vasili Chuikov, later of Stalingrad fame. For the next four years, Russia was not only China’s main supplier of arms, but virtually its only source of heavy weapons, artillery and planes.

Moscow was exhilarated by the turn of events, as the Soviet foreign minister, Maksim Litvinov, admitted to French vice-premier Léon Blum. According to Blum, Litvinov told him that “he [Litvinov] and the Soviet Union were perfectly delighted that Japan had attacked China [adding] that the Soviet Union hoped that war between China and Japan would continue just as long as possible …” Both of the Russians who dealt with ZZZ, the military attaché Lepin and Ambassador Bogomolov, were immediately recalled and executed.

ZZZ was quickly forced to resign, in September, by an angry, frustrated and undoubtedly suspicious Chiang. But the Generalissimo continued to employ him. When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949, ZZZ stayed with the Communists, as did super-mole Shao Li-tzu.

The outbreak of full-scale war between Japan and China brought Mao immediate benefits. Chiang Kai-shek finally acceded to the Communists’ key demand, which he had till now refused to consider — that the Red Army could keep its autonomy. Mao thus kept control of his own army, even though it was supposed to be part of the armed forces of the central government. Though Chiang was supreme commander of the Chinese army, he could not give orders to the Red Army, and had to couch his commands in the form of “requests.” In addition, the CCP was now, in effect, legitimized. Communist prisoners were released and the CCP was allowed to open offices in key cities, and to publish its own papers in Nationalist areas.

And yet this was just the beginning of Mao’s gains from the Sino-Japanese War, which lasted eight years and took some 20 million Chinese lives. It ended up weakening Chiang’s state enormously, and enabling Mao to emerge in possession of a giant army of 1.3 million. At the beginning of the war, the ratio of Chiang’s army to Mao’s was 60:1; at the end, it was 3:1.

HAVING MASTERMINDED the detonation of all-out war between China and Japan, Stalin ordered the Chinese Red Army to get actively involved, telling the CCP in no uncertain terms that it must cooperate properly with the Nationalists, and not do anything to give Chiang the slightest excuse not to fight Japan.

At this time, the Chinese Red Army had some 60,000 regular troops. Of these, 46,000 were in the northwest Red region, with Yenan as its capital. These were now renamed “the 8th Route Army” (8RA), led by Zhu De, with Peng De-huai as his deputy. Ten thousand were in the Eastern Yangtze valley in the heartland of China. These were guerrillas who had been left behind by the Long March, and they now became the “New 4th Army” (N4A). Xiang Ying, the head of the stay-behinds (and Mao’s old nemesis, who had argued vigorously against Mao being taken along on the Long March), became the head of the N4A.

From late August, the three divisions that made up the 8RA began to cross the Yellow River towards the front, which lay several hundred kilometers to the east, in Shanxi province. Red Army commanders as well as soldiers were very keen to fight the Japanese. So were most of the CCP leaders.