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.The main Communist army lost 100,000 men to casualtiesand desertion; the population in areas under CCP control plummeted from44 million to 25 million.Yet the Chinese still did not surrender.The stalemate that then ensued was not exactly stable.Chinese cities weresystematically bombed in order to shake civilian morale.Chongqing was The War of Resistance, 1937 45 315bombed 268 times between 1939 and 1941; 4,400 people were killed in the firsttwo days of the campaign in May 1939.Casualties subsided when theNationalists built underground shelters, and Chinese behind the Japaneselines would radio warnings when Japanese planes took off.Fierce fightingflared on several occasions, then ebbed.Both the Nationalists and theCommunists understood that guerrilla actions were an important means ofharrying Japanese troops and countering their great advantages in matérielwith minimal losses to China.Such harassment never amounted to a signifi-cant military threat to Japanese positions, but it made the war more expensivefor them.More importantly, it also prevented them from advancing furtherinto the countryside.In 1942, then, the nature of the war changed fundamentally.It is true thatlittle changed on the ground: the stalemate persisted.And for the Allies, theimportance of the China theater lay in bleeding Japan rather than in itsimmediate defeat.But US aid to Chiang Kai-shek soon amounted to $630million in supplies and a $500 million loan.China fulfilled its end of thebargain, preventing a million and a half Japanese soldiers from fighting inSoutheast Asia, the South Pacific, and Australia over the next three years.At the same time, US military men in China were disappointed that morewas not done to attack the Japanese front lines.What they did not under-stand was that Chiang needed to disperse Nationalist troops to defendterritories from local rivals as well as the Japanese.With the United States inthe war, he also wanted to preserve his best troops for the future strugglewith the CCP.Chiang s was a defensive strategy, including an economicblockade against the CCP bases.Japan s main goal was to conquer Southeast Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore,the Philippines, and Burma, as well as the Western Pacific islands.TheJapanese conquest of Burma was completed by June 1942, thus severingChongqing s main link with its allies and threatening it from the south.Given Britain s weakness, the defense of Burma had been largely in thehands of Chinese troops under the command of the American generalJoseph Stilwell.Chiang, who had basically opposed the campaign from thebeginning, was bitterly disappointed and blamed both the British andStilwell for the defeat (with some justification, since the British, fearful ofweakening their authority, initially refused to cooperate with the Chineseand then preferred to abandon Rangoon rather than risk forces that mightbe needed to defend India).Stilwell, in turn, formed a very low opinion ofChinese army officers up to and including Chiang.According to Stilwell,too many Chinese officers were guilty of corruption, padding their trooprolls to steal the rations and wages of non-existent soldiers, stealing directlyfrom their soldiers, and practicing extortion on civilians, as well asgambling, cruelty, and commercial sidelines.The relations between Stilwell and Chiang went from bad to worse, andStilwell was eventually recalled to Washington.At the end of 1943 Stilwell spolitical adviser, John Paton Davies, wrote to Washington that Chiang was 316 War and revolution, 1937 49 probably the only Chinese who shares the popular American misconceptionthat Chiang Kai-shek is China.& His philosophy is the unintegrated productof his limited intelligence, his Japanese military education, his former closecontact with German military advisers, his alliance with the usurious banker-landlord class, and his reversion to the sterile moralisms of the Chineseclassics. 14 None the less, good US Chinese relations were key to the wareffort.It was no accident that Chiang appointed his former critic, theAmerican-educated intellectual Hu Shi, to be ambassador to Washington,and that Washington preferred to recall a capable general rather than riskChiang s cooperation.The Japanese poured men into China in order to prevent the allies fromgaining access to airfields there close enough to bomb Japanese cities.Butthe American advance was inexorable, and Japan faced steady bombard-ment from 1944.Although the Allies were doing well by 1944 5, Chiang hadpermanently lost a significant number of quality troops which would hurtthe Nationalists in the coming civil war against the Communists.Germanywas defeated in June 1945.Preparations immediately began for a finalassault on Japan that might involve massive numbers of Chinese troops.Instead, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August forcedJapan s sudden surrender, which took most of the world, including China sleaders, by surprise.Even in defeat Japan had achieved, at least partially, one of its propa-ganda goals.Western colonialism had received a fatal blow.Attempts by theBritish, the Dutch, and the French to regain control of their possessions inSoutheast and South Asia after 1945 met with renewed nationalist opposi-tion.The surrender of the impregnable Singapore with its 130,000 troopsafter just one day s fighting in February 1942 was a severe blow to Britishprestige [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] |
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