Mao: The Unknown Story

Normal procedure on the March was to leave the wounded with local families, with some money. The fate of those left behind was a matter of luck. Chang Kuo-tao’s branch left behind some women soldiers who were too ill and weak to go on. When Party historians went looking for them half a century later, they found they had endured atrocious experiences. The locals, whose families had suffered at the hands of the Reds, took it out on them, and tortured some of the women to death by driving wooden stakes into their vaginas and cutting off their breasts. To survive, some women married more affluent peasants. But when their own Party came to power they were designated as “landlords,” and denounced, humiliated and discriminated against for life. In 1985, in bitter November cold, the few seen by Party historians, by then in their sixties and seventies, were so poor that they did not wear shoes to the encounter, as these were considered too valuable to endanger for such a non-essential occasion.

Chiang and his officers were so mystified that they thought Mao wanted to attack the capital of Guizhou, where Chiang was, to try to get Chiang himself. But the Reds sped past without stopping.

^†In Guizhou, where the population was dirt-poor, the Reds had recruited many thousands of young men.

Giving birth on the March was a nightmare. One woman who had gone into labor had to walk to the night’s destination with the baby’s head dangling out. Next day before dawn, weeping at leaving her baby in a bundle of straw in the empty hut, she had to walk on, and fainted wading through an icy river. Her women comrades found a table to carry her on. The wife of Teng Fa, the then head of the Chinese KGB, had a most painful delivery. Writhing in agony, she cursed her husband for making her pregnant. Teng Fa was fetched, and stood uncomfortably in the little hut, hanging his head. Mrs. Po Ku would say half jokingly: “On the march, I prefer a donkey or a horse to an old Male!”

A picture of it features on the cover of the 1985 book The Long March, by Harrison Salisbury, which purveys the official post-Mao version.

Nationalist plans on the 28th described the task of the unit, under Yu Song-lin, as “to defend Kangding,” a city about 50 km away as the crow flies. The fact that Yu’s troops were not at or near the bridge is demonstrated in a report of 3 June by the governor of the region.

When Peng De-huai, the most honest of all the Communist leaders, was asked about the Dadu crossing by a British writer in 1946, he gently, but very clearly, refused to endorse the myth. “It’s a long time ago, and I cannot remember all of it. There were so many rivers — the Gold Sand river, the Hsiang river, the Wu and the Yangtse … I cannot remember very much, but I remember the people falling into the water …” He did not say one word about fighting, or a burning bridge. It seems that two or three people did die at the bridge, but only when they fell off while repairing it, when one old plank suddenly snapped, as Mrs. Zhu De and the 93-year-old local we interviewed remembered. For good measure, the Reds constructed an ancillary myth about more heroism around the other crossing of the Dadu River, at Anshunchang, some 75 km to the south. Although this ferry crossing was extremely exposed and it took the troops a whole week to cross, with spotter planes circling overhead, there was not a single battle casualty here, either.

14. LONG MARCH III: MONOPOLIZING THE MOSCOW CONNECTION (1935 AGE 41)

WHEN THE TWO Red armies joined up in June 1935, Mao’s force — known as the Central Red Army, as it came directly under the Party leadership — was in a state of ruin. It had started the Long March with 80,000 men. Now it was down to some 10,000—one-eighth its original strength. The surviving remnant was on the verge of collapse. It had lost nearly all its heavy weapons, and its rifles had an average of only five bullets each. As Zhu De lamented to Chang Kuo-tao, who was an old friend, this army “had been a giant before, but now it’s only a skeleton. It can no longer fight.”

In contrast, Kuo-tao’s army, 20,000 at the outset of their own march, had quadrupled to an impressive 80,000. They were well fed, well equipped with machine-guns and mortars and ample ammunition, and superbly trained.

It was thus from a position of considerable strength that Kuo-tao met his colleagues. He was “a tall, stately man about forty,” Otto Braun recalled, who “received us as a host would his guests. He behaved with great self-confidence, fully aware of his military superiority and administrative power … His cadres … controlled most of the area’s meager resources, which were essential for the care of tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers … He was every bit as ambitious as Mao …”