Know Your Allies
One of the first leaders in the United Nations to realize and to be most conscious in preparing for the inevitable war against the Imperial Japanese aggression was China’s leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. But time was his chief ally, and his worst enemy—in pre-war years he needed time desperately to make a cohesive political unit of China and to strengthen her armed forces. He needed time, too, to prepare her sprawling millions, morally and materially, for the inevitable war with Japan. And in that sense, he could never win enough time to accomplish all that had to be done, though he worked feverishly with untiring energy.
Chiang Kai-shek has been at times the most honored—and most misunderstood and abused—man in all China. His motives have been misinterpreted and distorted; he has been accused of weathercock moods, has been denounced as a betrayer of friends, and has been suspected of nefarious dealing with the Japanese.
It is necessary to understand something of Chiang Kai-shek and of the record of the past years to grasp the reality of China today and her inevitable future. Those who in the past have suspected and accused Chiang have been forced to build a circuitous awkward structure of logic to bolster their words. The man’s every action has been ruled by one passionate goal—the creation of a strong, free China in the path laid out by the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Dr. Sun was the dreamer who created an ideal; Chiang was the strong, at times ruthless, man of action who gave that ideal life.
Perhaps Dr. Sun did not see as clearly as did Chiang that Japan would jealously oppose the military consolidation of China; that before it could be achieved, Japan would have to be defeated. Japan’s dream was the carving of a Pan-Asiatic empire, which in turn might be used as a springboard for world domination; and a unified, powerful China would stand as a bar to the fulfillment of Japan’s aim.
So, from the first days, Chiang was preparing for ultimate war with Japan. His was a task that required nice juggling. He must try to bring China’s political unity and her military strength to simultaneous peak, so that, when the Army was ready to fight, and not before, the political cohesion of the nation would become suddenly apparent.
Japan, too, was biding her time. She far preferred to gobble China quietly, in little bits. Japan wanted no major war if it could be avoided. But the political unity of China became apparent; Japan had to strike, and strike for all she was worth.
In the end, Chiang’s delicate balancing act became unhinged. Riding the crest of a great wave of anti-Japanese sentiment, Chinese nationalism crystallized almost overnight in two intensely dramatic incidents-— and Japan suddenly saw that she could wait no longer. Japan began her war, and Chiang was forced to fight long before he wished, long before his army and navy were ready. The break in the balance between political cohesion and military strength was almost fatal—for fantastic weaknesses still existed on the military side; weaknesses that no amount of last-minute patching could correct.
From the first, Chiang was preparing for ultimate war with Japan. It is obvious that he could not openly announce that such was his plan, but had to dissemble and sacrifice, bending to the Japanese arrogance and aggression, enduring abuse from the Chinese who did not understand his problem, fighting always to postpone the final day of reckoning.
Only in the light of these facts—and an understanding of his intense desire for Chinese nationalism—can Chiang’s career be logically and completely explained.
Japan’s aggression increased in direct ratio to China’s gathering strength. Since the Tanku Truce in 1933, a truce that gave Japan a military whiphand over the Northern Provinces, Japan had been openly attempting to mold those provinces into a new puppet state.
The Japanese garrison at Tientsin was increased, and General Tada, its commander, audaciously proclaimed that an autonomous government would be set up there. In 1935, Chiang was forced to accept an autonomous Hopi-Chahar political council, nominally responsible to the Central government, but in fact subject to Japan.
He had to smother his wrath in 1928, when Japanese troops insolently landed at Chefoo in Shantung province, seized the railroad, denied passage to Chinese troops, captured and tortured a Chinese official.
He had to stand idly by, chafing in impotent fury, in 1932, when the gallant 19th Route Army sacrificed itself in the grim farce of the first “Battle of Shanghai.” It was for time and time alone, that Chiang watched the rape of Manchuria, and saw the Japanese all but annex the five Northern Provinces.
And, over his every moment hung the shadow of Japanese aggression; aggression that Chiang had patiently to endure in his gigantic game for time.
Throughout all China, anti-Japanese outbursts grew. The nation was filled with discontent. Civil war brewed; pressure of every conceivable sort, not short of kidnapping, was used to drive Chiang to war. He was called a coward, a traitor, and still he played for time.
Why? Because he alone realized completely the sickening weakness of China’s defenses. We shall examine some of those weaknesses.
It requires no naval training, no long years at Annapolis or service with a battle fleet to see that only a powerful navy could stop Japan from snatching bites at will out of that juicy pie. Without a fleet to defend them Tientsin, Chefoo, Tsingtao, Shanghai, Foochow, Amoy, Swatow, and Canton—rich prizes all—were like dangling plums, ripe for the taking.
The waters of the Gulf of Pohai to the north; the Yellow Sea, Formosa Straits, and the South China Sea are China’s weakness— or her strength. Ruled by a fighting adequate Chinese Navy, they form an impregnable bastion against attack. But ruled by an enemy, they are great, free avenues of attack; open highways which lead an invader into the very heart of China’s rich commercial centers.
Nor are those waters vital to China only in a tactical sense. China backs up on the vast, primitive heart of Asia, across which transportation is slow at best, impossible at the worst. China, emerging from medieval times, without huge industrial plants with which to arm and maintain her armies, must depend on the Western world for the tools of war; and those tools can reach China most speedily, in most adequate quantities, by sea. He who rules the waters of China can give, or withhold, the sinews of war.
Now, those are elementary geographical truths that need only a glance at a map for proof; that, and a realization that China could no longer stand in splendid isolation, snug in her contempt of foreigners, a realization that henceforth, in a modern world, all China’s policies must be governed by her position vis-à-vis that world.
Since the shameful Sino-Japanese War of 1895, in which Chinese naval ships battled with Japanese ships and lost, the spirit in the Chinese Navy had changed none in many long years. The lesson of 1895 was a sharp one—not lost on many of the most intelligent Chinese. China’s fleet was gone—in 1901 Japan listed four first-class .battleships— her only vessels of that class—as captured from the Chinese; and throughout China itself, and particularly from the Chinese in foreign lands, a cry went up for the construction of a new navy; a navy that could meet anything that Japan had; a navy that could hold China’s coast inviolate against all aggression. A great naval fund was raised, at home and abroad, designed to launch the building of such a fleet, a fund raised painfully by thousands of Chinese to whom any contribution meant sacrifice and hardship. It was born of the first small ripple of the wave of national patriotism that was to sweep on with growing force until it broke the tottering dikes of the last imperial dynasty and flooded out into the revolution of Dr. Yat-sen.
But few ships came of that hard-made fund. The money found its way into the hand of the infamous Dowager Tzu-Hsi, who used it to construct, of all things, luxurious pleasure gardens in Peking. The money that might have laid the foundations for China’s salvation in 1937 was dissipated for the vain joys of a blind, crumbling regime.
It would be well to pause here for an explanation of the administrative functions in China’s government. It is essential to understand the apparently two-headed China, with its division of authority: the civil government, headed by President Lin Sen formerly, and the military authority, vested in Chiang Kai-shek.
Under the President are the various executive departments, somewhat similar to those functioning under our President of the United States—among them the Naval Department, or Naval Ministry. Under the Generalissimo is the Chinese Military Affairs Commission, charged with the administration of China’s military activities. And, as a part of the Military Affairs Commission, directly under the Generalissimo, is the Naval General Staff.
In theory, at least, the active direction of the Navy in times of war is vested in the Naval General Staff of the Military Affairs Commission, subject to the Generalissimo; and its orders are binding upon the Naval Department, which in turn conveys them to the fleet.
There were, in pre-war China, three naval academies—at Tsingtao on the Shantung Peninsula, at Foochow in Fukien Province, and the Whampo Academy at Canton. There was no central school such as Annapolis; and there was no co-ordination of training, no centrally designed curriculum, no spirit of unity in a common tradition.
Graduates from the Tsingtao Academy went largely to the Third Squadron; and those from Canton to the Fourth. There was no provision for a special training ship or training cruise in connection with the academies. On graduation, cadets were sent to a ship for six months of theoretical “sea duty” before receiving their commissions.
China’s Navy, at the outbreak of the war, was made up of 107 vessels of various types, many of them antiquated. Its major ships, divided into four squadrons, were:
First Squadron, stationed on the Central Chinese Coast: 4 light cruisers, 7 destroyers, and 5 gunboats.
Second Squadron, also stationed on the Central Coast: 5 destroyers, 4 patrol boats, 11 gunboats. Between the first and second there was a combined training squadron.
Third Squadron, stationed in the North at Tsingtao: 3 light cruisers, 4 destroyers, 7 gunboats.
Fourth Squadron, stationed at Canton: 1 light cruiser, 5 destroyers, 24 gunboats, and 4 PT boats.
In the four squadrons there were other smaller auxiliary vessels in each squadron.
Of the cruisers, the Ninghai and Pinghai now listed in the Japanese Navy—both assigned to the First Squadron-—-were the newest, most modern ships. They were built between 1930 and 1933, the Ninghai in Japan, the Pinghai at Shanghai. Oldest and heaviest of the cruisers was the Haichi, more than 35 years old, a ship which, visiting England for the coronation of King George V, carried the Chinese naval ensign to the Western Hemisphere for the first time.
Five or six of the destroyers assigned to the First and Second Squadrons were built shortly before 1930; the other vessels, like most of the cruisers, were very old and out of date.
With such a fleet a man in the position of the Generalissimo Chiang would have been foolhardy to invite war. How clearly he was able to estimate the fleet’s weakness is an open question; but that he sensed how little he could depend upon it cannot be doubted. In the light of our knowledge of the fleet, much of his conduct in the long pre-war years becomes clearer. He did not dare to fight Japan as long as sacrifice, appeasement, and the eating of humble pie could avoid war.
And so, surveying the defense of his new, adolescent China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek knew that he must abandon his first chief line of defense, the sea; that his navy would not be a factor in a war with Japan.
What then of his second line—the coastal defense? For on them, and them alone, would rest the initial decision of the war. If the coastal defenses could fight off the invader, then Chiang could save his richest cities: Tientsin, Shanghai, Canton, and others. He could maintain his windows on the world, and might hope that even though Japanese warships sailed the waters off his coast, they would not care to risk open warfare with Britain and America by sinking ships bearing supplies to China at that time. He would be fighting the war under the optimum condition.
But if his coast was weak—if his second line of defense could not hold, then China would have to abandon all her rich coastal provinces, would have to retreat back to the rugged interior, and here, somehow, fight her war until Japan was exhausted, or the great democracies came to Chiang’s aid. War in this pattern meant tremendous suffering for millions of Chinese; it meant an invader’s rough foot on the neck of men, women, and children from Peiping to Canton with all the death and misery that a Japanese army could inflict. War in this pattern was unthinkable at that time, except as a long last resort to be undertaken only when all sacrifices and all appeasement had failed to avert it.
The fleet counted out, the focal points of coast defense were the great forts: the Woo- sung Forts at Shanghai, the Bocca Tigris Forts at Canton, the forts at Foochow and other seaports. On those strongholds would devolve the responsibility for guarding those seaports, for hurling an invader back from China, for guarding the life line for the flow of munitions and supplies to China’s ill- equipped armies.
The Woosung Forts I did not see at close range. But the Bocca Tigris Forts I did—and if the condition of Woosung Forts and the others in the year 1936 was comparable to that of Bocca Tigris—as I have reason to believe it was—then to seek war would have been criminal folly.
It was almost a year to the day before the outbreak of the war with Japan that I had the opportunity to visit, inspect, and report upon the Bocca Tigris Forts—the “Tigris’s Gate,” whose position astride the mouth of the Pearl River below Canton had given them the name of the “Gibraltar of South China.” Never before, I believe, has the weakness of those forts been made public. Yet to describe it now can do no harm, since they have long been in the hand of the Japs.
Bocca Tigris was equipped with some eight or nine 12- and 14-inch English Armstrong guns, all more than 35 years old, and critically out of date; and nearly 30 smaller guns—4, 6, 8, and 9 inches of German and English make and of equal age. The fort and its armament were equally antiquated—and ideally both fort and guns should have been replaced, though lack of time and money made that impossible.
I was amazed at the lack of power in the charges—until I found that the powder itself was as old as the fort; that it had been stored in the magazines when this fort was built, a good ten years before the Revolution. It was almost impossible to believe that in all those years no tests had been made of it, and no periodic replenishments had been insisted upon. Where it should have been necessary to use only 25 to 30 pounds to hurl a shell a given range, more than twice that amount was needed at Bocca Tigris. Such a woeful deficiency would not only consume power at too great a pace, but slowed the tempo of firing, since it was necessary to double charge the guns. The fort’s effectiveness was critically limited.
Though the fort straddles the river mouth, there was no means of communication between the two sides; no submarine telephone linking them. Communication could be established only by blinker lights; a system not only slow and awkward by contrast to telephone, but one easily intercepted by the enemy, who would undoubtedly be able to decode messages transmitted. A submarine telephone was an elementary essential to co-ordinated firing in the event of an attack; and only the utter lack of knowledge of modern naval and coast defense practice on the part of those in charge of the forts explained its absence.
There was no mechanical equipment to transfer shells and powder from the magazines to the guns, and the job was done slowly and painfully by hand; a snail’s pace tempo in an age of speed.
The men themselves were good gunners, after the fashion of their training and equipment; but that was farcically inadequate. Heavy 14-inch guns were slowly and laboriously sighted and trained by hand; a system used today mostly in field guns. To each gun there was a gunner who actually sighted through a telescope at his target, and with spoken commands or movement of his hands, guided other members of the crew who elevated or depressed, or traversed the huge weapon with manually operated wheels and gears. The system was slow, under such a system its efficiency subject to the human limitations of its crew. Anything like concerted, controlled firing was not possible. In this age of fast-moving battleships, of electrical fire control and sighting, such guns were hopelessly outclassed; almost certain to be knocked out of action by a naval power like Japan.
And finally, there was no concealment of Bocca Tigris against observation from the air. Camouflage had been an unknown art when the forts were built; and they were dangerously subject to bombing.
And that was Bocca Tigris, the “Gibraltar of South China”-—a 1900 fort facing a modern war; a fort that had stood still while the deadly science of war had marched forward in tremendous strides.
We have spoken here of Bocca Tigris of Canton. Yet the story throughout all China would vary only in chapter and verse.
China’s air force was a child of the revolution; a gallant knightly child and one whose glorious traditions will long serve to buoy the spirit of their nation. By its undaunted devotion to China, it has helped more than any single factor within China itself to fan the flame of national patriotism.
Its pilots were almost entirely “Returned Students” in the beginning—young men who, either natives of China or born abroad, had studied in foreign countries; had won their pilot’s licenses across the sea, and had returned to aid their country. Theirs was the fresh, flaming spirit of the new China that Chiang had hoped for.
The number of airplanes was woefully inadequate; when war came China had scarcely more than 300 available fighting ships. The quality of these ships in turn was deficient; most were outclassed by the Japanese Zero.
China’s fighting has depended more on land forces. The army was more nearly ready than Japan and the rest of the world realized. German-drilled divisions of the central government had been crystallized into something closer to a national army than China had known before.
It had been Chiang’s purpose to weld all China’s fighting forces into a standardized army similar to that of any Western power, a purpose that had not altogether been achieved.
Such was China’s military situation in the pre-war day-—the material condition that might have discouraged a lesser man.
Time had played a trick on Chiang Kai-shek in 1937. It had been his hope to see China’s political unity and her military strength reach a peak at the same moment, so that when the nation’s apparent unity made a Japanese attack inevitable, the military establishment would be ready to meet that attack.
He was secretly rushing his military preparations; but there was still much to be done when the dramatic events crystallized the loyalty and nationhood of China. Chiang knew what war in 1937 would mean; gallant men armed with rifles and machine guns fighting tanks, and planes, and bombs; men marching heroically to certain death in the face of machine warfare. He knew that China must lose the vast coastal regions, that she must retire to the interior and fight a fluid, and long defensive war.
But for the first time since 1937, he was no longer ready to seek peace at any cost, and he could not have done so even had he wished. For the newly achieved unity was an unstable thing-—might as readily be upset by a vacillating policy. China was no longer willing to accept appeasement; and frustration of the goal of the newly united forces would certainly have cast the country into another, more terrible, and fatal civil war.
And so there were still weaknesses in China in the winter of 1936. But there was also great strength, and great determination. China did not fear suffering; her people had known that for centuries, the suffering of wars, famines, floods, and plagues in which millions had died. The power of the Chinese to endure is greater, perhaps, than that of any other race—and that, too, the Generalissimo knew.
Throughout that long winter the tenseness grew, and in the early spring, addressing his officers at the Summer Headquarters in the Kuling Camp, Chiang was able to say:
If our hope for peace can be maintained, we will not abandon it. But, to maintain our national honor, and to protect our national existence, we will not hesitate to make the deepest sacrifices. We will defend them at any cost.
It was a fighting speech, and it was not lightly spoken. Chiang and China were prepared to back it to the hilt. China is fighting —in her seventh year—against aggression. In a war that has encompassed the world, it is difficult to comprehend what, seven years of unceasing struggle against tremendous odds have meant for China.