The Long March. Sun Shuyun

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      Huang and I came out of Mao's bedroom and sat down under the huge camphor tree in the courtyard. He drew my attention to the situation that Chiang had to face at the time. Chiang was the head of the Nationalist government, but he did not control the country. Much of it was in the hands of warlords who hated him as much as the Communists did. Each warlord occupied a territory where they levied taxes on peasants’ harvests, even twenty years ahead; they were the largest growers and traffickers of opium, which they sold to raise their armies. In their eyes, Chiang was just another warlord like them who had tried to unify the country with the help of the Communists in 1927, but started killing them too when he realized they were going to challenge him. They pledged loyalty to him when he promised them millions of silver dollars a month, but changed their allegiance whenever it suited them.

      The warlords’ internecine wars, their lack of any moral values and ideals except for keeping their power and territory, and the damage they inflicted on the nation, were among the curses of 20th-century China. I had learned all about them in school, but usually we did not associate them with the rise and expansion of Communism. While Chiang was battling it out with them – the biggest battle lasting five months, costing 200 million silver dollars and displacing 2 million people from their homes – the Communists were free to grow and grow. The Red Army in the Jiangxi Soviet expanded its territory, at its peak controlling twenty-one counties with over 3 million people, and built itself up from a guerrilla force of 9,000 men to 100,000. They even created a state within a state. Mao was grateful for the intervention of the warlords and admitted that this was uniquely helpful for the Chinese Revolution. They had a powerful impact on the energy and resources Chiang could put into his campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet. He had to call off one of his campaigns when the warlords of Guangdong and Guangxi mutinied, almost forcing him out of office.

      If Chiang had enough headaches domestically, the Japanese gave him more. Japan had set its eyes on China as if it was its due, an integral part of its imperial ambitions. On 18 September 1931 Japan took China's three north-eastern provinces. A month later, Chiang had to abort his Third Campaign, and his Fourth Campaign eighteen months later, when the Japanese threatened to march on Beiping, today's Beijing. Chiang chose to appease the Japanese – for the time being at least. He knew the country was not ready for a war, but more importantly, he regarded the Japanese as a disease of the skin, and the Communists as one of the heart. ‘If there is no peace within, how can we resist the enemy from outside?’ he appealed to the nation. To the outrage of all Chinese, he allowed Japan a free hand to run China north of the Great Wall. However necessary as a strategy, it set people against him; it would almost cost him his life, and finally it lost him China.

      For the time being, though, with this decision Chiang could concentrate on his Fifth and final campaign against the Jiangxi Communists in earnest. He threw in his best troops, 200,000 of them. He assembled his 7,500 senior officers in Lushan Mountain in northern Jiangxi, telling them: ‘The only purpose of this training is for the elimination of the Red Bandits. They are our sole target, and all your preparation, tactical, strategic and operational, is to serve this need.’¹² He gave every officer a copy of handbooks on Eliminating the Red Bandits, Keys to Eliminating the Red Bandits, and The Principles of Training for the Army Engaged in the Elimination Campaign.

      As Soldier Huang experienced it, the blockhouse strategy was the key to this campaign. Why then had Chiang not used it earlier? It would have saved him four years, and a lot of money and lives. ‘Blockhouses were not his idea. Chiang admitted himself there was nothing new about his strategy – a 19th-century Chinese general used the very same method to put down a peasant rebellion,’ Young Huang said. ‘But for the strategy to work, it needed time and security, neither of which Chiang had before. This time he did.

      ‘But contrary to the criticism heaped on Braun, he did not make the mistake of ordering the Red Army to sit in the trenches and wait for the enemy,’ Huang went on. I remembered how he had argued this so convincingly in his thought-provoking articles. The Comintern had in fact instructed the Red Army to play to its strength of mobile and guerrilla warfare.

      From past experiences, the Red Army has achieved many victories in mobile warfare, but suffered considerably when it forced frontal attacks in areas where the enemy had built blockhouses … You should not engage in positional warfare, and should move behind the enemy …¹³

      Braun agreed entirely: ‘As to positional warfare, whatever form it took, it was not suitable. We were all absolutely clear about it.’¹⁴ He tried to draw the enemy out of their turtle-shells and then launch short, sharp blows to wipe them out. But the trouble was that the enemy refused to come out unless they had full covering fire on the ground and from the air, often with three or four divisions together within 10 kilometres. This made it hard for the Red Army to concentrate enough men and deal them a fatal blow, hard though it tried. Even Chiang noticed this tendency: ‘When we fight the bandits now, they rarely confront us in positional warfare; they frequently attack us by guerrilla tactics.’¹⁵ The battle of Guangchang in April 1934 was an exception, when Soldier Huang and almost the entire Red Army were stuck in their trenches for a month up against the blockhouses. It was the first time this happened, but the battle was not Braun's idea, as he made very clear in his memoir:

      The Party leadership considered it a strategically critical point because it barred the way into the heart of the Soviet area. The leadership also believed that unresisting surrender would be politically indefensible.¹⁶

      Zhou Enlai agreed with Braun:

      Every comrade must realize, the plan by the enemy to take Guangchang is different from the previous four campaigns. It is a strategic step in their penetration into the heart of the Soviet base; it is the key to their overall offensive. We must fight to defend Guangchang.¹⁷

      I had talked to the veterans and the expert, and it was clear to them why they lost, but in seventy years, with so many books on the subject, the same argument is still used: if Mao did not lead it, the Revolution would fail. To support this theme, history had to be made to fit the theory. At least militarily, even Mao learned from mistakes, as his memoirs make clear. The Party was only twelve years old, the Red Army half that, the Soviets only three years. The guidance coming from the Comintern was often not based on Chinese reality. Naturally there were mistakes, but a scapegoat was found on whom all the blame for losing the Fifth Campaign was dumped.

      Soon after the Guangchang battle, the Party made its decision to launch the Long March; it knew it could no longer defend the Jiangxi base – in fact it informed Moscow so in May 1934 – but some units had to hold the line so the preparations for the Long March could get under way. ‘When we moved house, it would take a few weeks. The Long March was a state on the move, with everything it might need,’ Young Huang said. ‘They had to replenish the troops, to find homes for the sick and wounded, to get together food, money and other supplies. Also where would they go? Nobody knew for sure. That was why they sent out the 6th Corps to blaze the trail, and the 7th Corps to divert the Nationalists’ attack.’

      The decision to abandon the Jiangxi Soviet was made in the strictest secrecy. Only the top leaders and military commanders knew about it – Mao himself did not learn of it until August, two months before the departure. There were two fears: firstly that morale would disintegrate, and secondly that the Nationalists would find out. As late as 3 October, two weeks before the Long March, Zhang Wentian, the Chairman of the Soviet Government, continued to call on the people to fight to the end:

      For the defence of our regime and of our lives, our children and babies, our land and grain, our cows, hogs, chickens СКАЧАТЬ