June 1944 to August 1945

CHAPTER IV

EVADING THE JAPS

Towards the end of January news was received of large Japanese forces gathering at all the surrounding garrison points. It seemed likely that there would shortly be an attack. Yu-min ordered our radio activities to cease and gave most careful and particular instructions to his radio man to see that our set was well hidden.

Trainloads of Japanese and puppet troops continued to arrive at the garrison points on the railway; everything pointed to a mopping-up on a scale hitherto unknown. The Communists had been troublesome of late and it vas optimistically thought by some that perhaps it was they that the Japs were after and not the Fifteenth.

One night just after midnight we were awakened by Yu-min's radio expert with the news that a large force of Japanese were heading in the direction of our village from the east. The radio had already been packed ready for taking away, and whilst we were collecting our things it was removed. This time we again headed for the west, but we were not alone. Practically the whole population of the village were on the move with their goods and chattels. Lightly burdened as we were, we soon led the column of refugees. After three hours of plodding along the dirt road to the west, we suddenly heard the rumble of carts coming from the direction in which we were proceeding. We gave immediate warning to those following us, and everyone moved far into the fields on either side of the road, leaving a couple of men nearby to find out whether it was our own people or the enemy.

News was soon brought to us that they were refugees like ourselves fleeing from a number of Japanese troops that had crossed the Wei River from Changyi and were moving rapidly to the east. There was much consultation and argument as to whether to go north or south, with the result that the group split, some going north and others south. We went with the group to the south. Our old friend " Clear Spring " was with us and as usual was laying plans for our entertainment when we arrived at his friend's home at a village another five miles to the south. He was a wealthy merchant, had a comfortable house, and "Clear Spring" was sure he would look after us as he would a relation.

After an hour we arrived and found ourselves installed in a truly spacious room. Too exhausted for the exchange of polite formalities with our host, we spread our quilts and fell asleep. We were soon rudely awakened with the news that the Japanese were at the south gate. We had early learned to sleep fully clothed on these occasions and, stopping only to grab our hats, we were out of the house and over the wall in but a few minutes.

Our guide, a young relative of "Clear Spring", was an active and fearless youth and he knew every inch of the surrounding country. Before long we were clear of the village and were resting in some bushes close to a graveyard. He decided the best move would be to go to a nearby village where he thought there was a garrison of our own troops. Approaching the village, and telling us to remain hidden in a clump of trees, he went forward to make sure that it was still occupied by our forces and to give the password that would allow us to enter.

In the distance we heard the challenge of the sentries and our guide's reply, followed by a conversation, and in fifteen minutes he returned and we set off for the village, to find that Yu-min himself had just arrived there. He had come down from Yangchiakou, which had been occupied by the Japanese early that evening, the Headquarters having only escaped by the skin of their teeth. In revenge for the shooting of the two Japanese delegates, this village, the scene of the incident, had been set ablaze by the Japanese. Two regiments had been left in the north to stem the Japanese attack.

Yu-min was snatching a brief rest when we arrived, so we did not see him immediately, and in the meantime had a couple of bowls of hot noodles. When he awoke, he sent for us: «I am very glad that you have arrived here. I had been worrying over what had happened to you. This attack is on an unprecedented scale and it is advisable for you to remain with Headquarters." He gave orders to one of his bodyguard to prepare horses for us. "We must leave here before dawn." Whilst he was talking to us, plain-clothes intelligence men were in and out reporting to him direct on the latest movements of the Japanese. "For days I have known this attack was coming, although reports greatly underestimated the forces involved, but now they are all here, it will be easier to keep track of their movements." In a few moments the " 43rd " Regimental Commander came in to report that the advance column had left, and we moved on, with the balance of the " 43rd " behind us, in a north-westerly direction, taking us up the western border of the area behind the Japanese, who were moving to the east to meet the column coming from that direction.

Reports continued to come in during the day. Three columns of Japanese were moving up northwards from their garrison on the railway; our troops had engaged them and intermittent fighting took place throughout the day. That evening we continued our march northwards and spent the next day amongst the ruins of Yangchiakou. The Japanese had passed, leaving half the village a mass of charred ruins, but already many of the inhabitants had returned and were rescuing what they could from the debris.

During the night news came through of the defeat of the "45th" who had been opposing the Japanese in the south. After two days of fighting, outnumbered and pressed by superior armaments, heavy casualties had reduced their morale and ability to resist. They were retreating north-wards.

Nothing further was heard of this regiment until late the next morning, when one of the Company Commanders, in dust-covered civilian attire, rode into camp to announce that during their retreat they had been intercepted by a Communist force and completely routed. Those that were not killed had fled: the "45th" as such no longer existed.

A week passed and the Japanese were still with us, methodically combing the area from north to south and from east to west in their search for Yu-min and his Headquarters. Pamphlets had been issued with photographs and descriptions of Yu-min, ourselves and other members of the organisation. It had been announced that they would not leave the area until they had either captured or killed him and achieved the destruction of the Headquarters organisation.

The strain was now beginning to tell on most of us. Lack of sleep and food frayed the nerves. Yu-min, however, was standing the strain well: "The devils cannot keep this up much longer. Already they are having difficulty in finding food. We can do without sleep better than they, and as long as we have sufficient troops left to harass them at night and allow them no time to sleep, we can wear them down. As for the puppet bastards, to see the way they are joining in with the Japanese, one would think that the dragon was already dead. In many respects they are worse than their Japanese masters. It has taken the Japanese months of preparation for this attack; units have been brought from Taiyuan in Shansi, and from Tientsin. With the puppet troops there are twelve to fifteen thousand of them."

For the first ten days Japanese observation planes appeared two or three times a day. They machine-gunned not only any movement of troops that they came across, but also villages and individual peasants working in the fields. In the south, nearer to the railway, they had several small tanks in operation, but these never penetrated deeply into the area.

The beginning of the second week found us again in the south. We had been on the move most of the previous night and had arrived in a village shortly after sun-up. Here we had planned to spend the day. Dismounting, we followed Yu-min into a room and stretched out on the k'ang while various people were interviewed. Presently in came the radio expert. In a faltering and extremely nervous manner, he announced that the Japs had found our radio. Yu-min, not waiting for any further explanation, pushed back his chair. "Get out! Get out, you worthless offspring of a turtle's egg, before I shoot you." Wasting no time in apologies, the wretched man fled from the room. "Now what are we going to do? We must persevere with our own radios, using your stations and schedules. When this is over, we will send messengers again to Chungking."

An orderly appeared carrying a tray of hard dry bread, bowls of hot water and a few raw onions. "Commander, this is all I can find, but it's something; the soldiers have nothing to eat and only warm water to drink." For weeks now this had been our daily fare. We had hardly started to eat before the alarm was given. An undetected column of Japanese and puppet troops had approached to within a few hundred yards of the south gate by means of a sunken road. Halting at a distance of four hundred yards from the wall, they deployed their forces preparatory to an attack.

Yu-min ordered fifty men to accompany him and instructed the Commander of the "43rd" regiment to station his troops along the walls and prepare for the attack. As our ponies were brought the Headquarters staff galloped off down the main street to the west gate, and at the same moment the enemy opened fire on the village with trench mortars.

The west gate was barred and padlocked and no one knew who had the key. It was impossible to see what was going on in the mass of men and horses milling around the gate, with everyone shouting advice as to what to do. Finally an axe was produced, the locked cross-bar hacked through and one side of the gate forced open. Men and horses poured through — each man for himself — and galloped towards the cover of trees lining the river-bank. The first couple of hundred yards were covered from the Japs by the village wall, but as we drew into the open, so the Japs opened up on us with machine-guns and rifles. We dashed off, bending low and whipping the hell out of our horses. It was certainly the most exhilarating ride I ever hope to have. Here and there I saw an odd pony stumble and fall, or a rider slip from the saddle. We did not stop until we had crossed the frozen river and had reached the walls of a village on the other side.

We were now in puppet-controlled territory. From the vantage point of the village wall we watched the somewhat half-hearted progress of the battle. The Japanese forces spread out and surrounded the village but made no attempt to attack, being content to keep up a spasmodic trench-mortar bombardment, interspersed with machine-gun fire. "It looks to me as if they have radioed for reinforcements and are awaiting their arrival before attacking," said Yu-min.

At about 11 A.M. two columns of reinforcements arrived. In less than half an hour we saw our troops emerge from the west gate and, in small scattered groups, make a dash for the cover of the ravines some three or four hundred yards from the walls. Many fell before they reached the Japanese lines; here their flight appeared to be checked for five or ten minutes, and then, evidently overcoming the resistance, they flowed on over the Japanese lines heading for the river-bank north of us. We moved on up the river to await them.

Yu-min was furious. They appeared to have lost a fair number of men. "If they had only waited until dark, they could have got out with half the losses." The Regimental Commander, leader of the "43rd", had felt that rather than leave Headquarters unprotected, he would have to risk the break. The dead were left where they had fallen and those whose wounds prevented them accompanying us were sent down to the village we had just left, together with a few men and sufficient funds with which to induce the villagers to look after them until they could be moved back to our area.

The few puppet troops, who had not fled from the villages that we passed, came out in a most obsequious manner to offer any assistance necessary. Here and there we gathered grain and at last descended on a comparatively large village where we halted for a meal and a rest.

This was the first visit that Arthur and I had paid to the Japanese-controlled areas and we were amazed at the poverty of the village and of the people. Many of the houses were deserted. Those of the inhabitants that remained were listless and undernourished to such an extent that they showed little interest in anything. Completely devoid of any expression of welcome or hate, they prepared food and waited on our soldiers.

We had become accustomed to sleep anywhere and at any time, whether for ten minutes or three hours. We had no bedding and slept wherever there was space to lie down, some-times one of twenty or more crowded on a brick k'ang, perhaps on a pile of grass fuel lying by the side of the cooking stove, slumped over a table, or sitting with half a dozen others on a wooden bench leaning against neighbours or the wall.

Before dark we moved on in an easterly direction and, turning north, followed the river. By midnight we crossed on the ice and, entering Chingpu, Yu-min's native village, settled down for the night.

Reports were favourable and we spent the whole of the next day there. Needless to say, everyone slept, getting up only to take food and then going back to sleep.

That evening we set off in a snowstorm for the north. It was colder than we had ever felt it before, and, restricted to the pace of the foot soldiers, the majority of us on ponies ended up by walking to keep warm. About midnight the advance column lost the way and we spent over two hours standing around waiting for them to be located. The wind seemed to sweep through our cotton-padded garments; we were practically wet through, and without gloves our hands had lost all sense of touch; our feet were frozen by the chill of the clumsy iron stirrups. Never in my life have I been more uncomfortable.

By two we were on the move again, having located the advance party, and at six in the morning we had arrived at the northernmost garrison point.

We were lucky enough to find a room with a warm k'ang and a couple of torn and filthy lice-infested quilts. Taking a chance, we removed our padded gowns, jackets and trousers and hung them up to dry. They would certainly get smoked, but whether they would dry much was doubtful. The old housewife was feeding the fire with straw-like grass, and clouds of smoke filled the room, even leaking out in grey wisps from cracks in the k'ang. But we were warm, we wanted nothing else. In less than half an hour our brick bed was full — an odd soldier or two, some of Yu-min's bodyguard, an officer and his orderly; some sleeping, others talking. Someone produced a packet of cigarettes — there were not enough to go round, so they were broken in half and shared.

Several more days passed in moving here and there with little sleep, sometimes with but a few pieces of hard bread and hot water or a bowl of beans during the day.

In spite of the turmoil, the almost continuous movement of the peasants from one village to another in their attempt to avoid the Japanese and their puppet hordes, somehow the Chinese New Year was celebrated. There was none of the customary ceremony, with fire-crackers, visiting and feasting; there were no new clothes; no one had the time or the inclination to go through with the annual cleaning of the home. Many spent the New Year as refugees, tired to the point of exhaustion, two or three families perhaps sharing one small room, with the children and the old grandparents on the k'ang, and their sons and daughters lying on the floor. But somehow they had obtained a few sticks of incense which they burned before a hastily written strip of calligraphy. Perhaps they also had a small bag of white flour, saved for months, to be made into dumplings and eaten on New Year's Day. After eating the first dumpling, one could ask the Gods to fulfil one's dearest wish. The dumplings must of necessity be small so that everyone could have at least one . . . maybe before dawn they would have to gather their few belongings and flee once more before the Japanese, but for the moment sleep . . . sleep . . . they had done all they could, the incense was burning, perhaps the New Year would bring an end to all this suffering.

Headquarters was on the move throughout New Year's Eve and during the course of the night we pulled into three villages where Yu-min stayed half an hour or so with friends. One of the houses at which we rested for a while was that of Li Tze-lien, who was now the Fifteenth's representative in Chungking. Here New Year was being celebrated in a much more impressive style. The ancestral portraits had been hung on the walls of the central hall and below the portraits was a long altar table. The air was thick with the heavy aroma of incense burning in a pewter container, flanked by pewter flower vases and candlesticks with immense red tallow candles. Before the altar, the square dining-table was piled high with sacrificial delicacies, meat, vegetables, fresh and candied fruits, sweets and nuts, spiced bean-curd and whole fish. In the centre of the table, surrounded by these appetising dishes, was a chicken. Plucked of every vestige of feathers except for the head, it was placed in a sitting position on its tail end with its legs hunched before it, and with the wings folded like arms across its breast. It was naked and revolting in the candle-light, for all the world like a shrivelled old woman.

Although the Japanese enthusiasm seemed to have lessened, it appeared that they were not going to give up. Taking it in turn, they were sending one or two columns off at a time to their nearest garrison point for twenty-four hours' rest.

By the end of the second week we were again up north, where Yu-min held a council with several of his regimental leaders and decided to move to the south and attack the railway garrisons in the hope that it would induce the Japanese to withdraw a portion of the attacking forces to guard the railway.

That night Yu-min moved south to be near the scene of action. It was a long and tedious ride. We passed a village just north of our former home, the road running around the north and west wall, little knowing that a small Japanese column had just occupied it and that they were covering us with machine-guns and rifles as we passed. We were too large a unit for them to risk an encounter, but on the other hand, had we known, they would have been easy meat for us.

We had been on the move continuously for nearly twelve days, but usually every five or six hours we had been able to snatch a little sleep, while tonight we had already been on the march for seven hours and still had at least four hours to go. One could think of little else -- it seemed as if we were doomed to an eternal march. Time had no meaning; one's mind was a hot, searing blank, drugged by lack of sleep. Unable to keep his balance, occasionally someone would fall from his pony and be shaken into a temporary state of consciousness, or perhaps a foot soldier, no longer able to move one leg before the other, would lie down by the side of the road, but somehow there was always someone sufficiently awake to beat the hell out of him until he started moving again. Here and there we would pass a corpse pushed to one side of the road, and the monotony of the march was momentarily broken on one occasion by a sergeant who, mistaking one such corpse for a straggler, spent much energy and many curses on trying to beat it into action.

The monotonous clip-clop of the ponies' hooves on the frozen ground, the soothing motion of the slight swaying of one's body, had a hypnotic effect. If one opened one's eyes, the effort required to focus them on anything was too much of a strain, so one closed them again; then there would be blissful moments of unbelievable oblivion. I gave in once too often and woke with an unpleasant jolt at the feet of the following pony, after that I decided it was safer to walk.

By the third week we were a sorry-looking crowd: dirty, haggard and be whiskered, with deep circles under our red, swollen eyes. It could not go on much longer, everyone knew that. It was just a matter of which side would call it off first. All indications pointed to a weakening of the Japanese effort; already some of their troops had been withdrawn, and Yu-min decided to carry through his original plan of attacking the railway garrisons. It was not a very fierce attack, no attempt was made to enter the garrison towns, but the fortifications were peppered with machine-gun fire and a few high-explosive shells were lobbed over the walls into the towns. The following day there was a further withdrawal of the Japanese and their puppets and within the next few days they gradually withdrew completely.

For the next two or three days the inhabitants of the whole area did nothing but sleep, and it was almost a week before the full extent of the damage was known to Headquarters. At least a third of their troops had been lost, together with their equipment. A large number of domestic animals, mules, donkeys and oxen, had been either eaten on the spot or driven off to the puppet areas. Large amounts of grain had been looted and some of the machines used in the armament factories had been located, dug up and taken away. A number of soldiers and civilians had been captured, taken to the railway points and shipped off to Manchuria in forced-labour gangs. After a period of rest and recuperation, the people soon put this experience behind them. The Japanese had not, after all, achieved their objective. The Fifteenth was still in existence, although battered and bruised.

The rigours of the past few weeks had proved too much for the Vice-Commander, old Yang. Lack of sleep and exposure to the elements had combined to reduce the old soldier to a state of complete exhaustion, and within a couple of weeks he passed quietly away. The most genuine and kindly figure of the whole unit, his death was mourned by soldier and peasant alike.

Yu-min decided that there should be a "state" funeral. There had long been a "Heroes' Burial Ground" on the southern slopes of San Hu Hill where all those killed in battle were buried. The lower slopes of the hill, levelled into terraces, were planted with evergreens and fruit trees, and at the foot of the hill a memorial hall and rest-house had been built. Work was soon started on a suitable tomb on the highest terrace. A concrete chamber ten feet deep, five feet wide and ten feet long was constructed, the two end walls moulded by perfect workmanship to resemble the façade of a dwelling-house and a temple. The open doors of the former revealed a complete set of miniature furniture, and those of the temple sacrificial altars and vessels. 'Elie whole was brilliantly decorated and the two side walls were painted with the dragon and cloud design.

Invitations to the funeral had been issued to officials throughout northern Shantung and several hundred guests were expected. Enormous mat pavilions were erected, to house the guests. There was much appreciative talk of the manner in which Yu-min was honouring the old soldier. But Yu-min was not solely concerned with the burial honours; he had taken this opportunity of showing his neighbours that the Fifteenth, in spite of the recent Japanese attack, was still a power amongst the guerrilla forces. It was excellent propaganda and served the double purpose of giving Yu-min a great deal of " face " from the elaborate show and expense of the funeral, and quashing idle talk to the effect that the Fifteenth as a power had ceased to exist.

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