China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein
Book: China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein
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Authors: Richard Bernstein
Tags: General, Asia, History, 20th Century, Political Science, Modern, china, International Relations
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doomed city,” its streets empty except for soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets taking up positions. On the night of November 12, the provincial governor,Zhang Zhizhong, hosted a dinner for the Yale-in-China hospital staff, and after the spicy delicacies typical of the region had been consumed, no doubt with many delicate porcelain cups of warm rice wine, he ordered them all to leave the city by the next day.
But it was already too late. Just after midnight, Greene wrote, the doctor on the British gunboat anchored in the Hsiang River, the SS Sandpiper, noticed two fires near the waterfront. Within a half hour he saw three more. No one seemed to be trying to put them out. By 2:00 a.m. he realized that other fires were starting up in the south end of the city. People were desperately trying to get out. The waterfront was ablaze. “Jardines (British shipping firm)going like a bonfire; Defag (German) going hot and fast; a large fire in the center of the city.” Before dawn, Greene saw soldiers from the military police headquarters carrying oil-soaked cotton rags breaking down the doors of houses and setting them on fire before opening their windows and running away. There is no report of how these soldiers felt putting to the torch a city that was already ancient at the time of the early Han dynasty of the first two centuries bc. But they followed orders, and by morning the flames seemed to be streaking to the sky, blending with the red of the rising sun, and then, as Greene put it, “the fires blazed and munitions dumps went off singly and together.”
The great fire of Changsha burned for three days. Photographs taken at the time show two-story buildings engulfed in fire while outside them men in short silk jackets stand helplessly by. The Communist leader Zhou Enlai, who was living in Changsha, barely escaped when flames began scorching the inside of his apartment. The cultural andcommercial center of the city was burned to the ground, leaving behind nothing but rubble and ash.
The fire was a consequence of the fog of war. Local officials, including the chief of police and the garrison commander, were panicked by rumors that the Japanese were outside the city’s gates and that its defenses were about to collapse, and so they lit the fires that burned Changsha down. The truth was that the Japanese advance had been temporarily stopped and Changsha was in no imminent danger, but by the time that became clear the city had been torched. Shortly afterward, Chiang flew in to try to make amends. He met with the foreigners and expressed his regret at the havoc and destruction.Soong Mei-ling, evidently trying to exonerate her husband, addressed a letter to the city saying that the intentional burning of the city “was not in accordance with the Generalissimo’s orders.” Three local officials, including the garrison commander and the police chief, were held responsible for the damage and made to pay the the ultimate price. They were executed. Even though most of the inhabitants had left ahead of the fire, teams sent in to clean up reported taking 20,000 corpses outside the city wall and burying them there. These included wounded soldiers, almost all of whom died in their hospital beds, since there had been no thought of evacuating them ahead of time. More than 21,000buildings were completely destroyed, two-thirds of all the buildings of Changsha. These included more than 10,000 homes, fifty-five schools, and thirteen hospitals. The city’s temples, Buddhist and Taoist, the restaurants, the hotels, the government offices, and the grain warehouses, along with the grain inside them, were all gone. There was enough inside the masonry houses—the furniture, staircases, beams, doors, window frames, and paper windows—to feed the flames. When the wooden roof joists burned away, the heavy tiles that they supported dropped and flattened everything below them like so many falling stones.
“I stood at Pa Ko T’in, the heart of
But it was already too late. Just after midnight, Greene wrote, the doctor on the British gunboat anchored in the Hsiang River, the SS Sandpiper, noticed two fires near the waterfront. Within a half hour he saw three more. No one seemed to be trying to put them out. By 2:00 a.m. he realized that other fires were starting up in the south end of the city. People were desperately trying to get out. The waterfront was ablaze. “Jardines (British shipping firm)going like a bonfire; Defag (German) going hot and fast; a large fire in the center of the city.” Before dawn, Greene saw soldiers from the military police headquarters carrying oil-soaked cotton rags breaking down the doors of houses and setting them on fire before opening their windows and running away. There is no report of how these soldiers felt putting to the torch a city that was already ancient at the time of the early Han dynasty of the first two centuries bc. But they followed orders, and by morning the flames seemed to be streaking to the sky, blending with the red of the rising sun, and then, as Greene put it, “the fires blazed and munitions dumps went off singly and together.”
The great fire of Changsha burned for three days. Photographs taken at the time show two-story buildings engulfed in fire while outside them men in short silk jackets stand helplessly by. The Communist leader Zhou Enlai, who was living in Changsha, barely escaped when flames began scorching the inside of his apartment. The cultural andcommercial center of the city was burned to the ground, leaving behind nothing but rubble and ash.
The fire was a consequence of the fog of war. Local officials, including the chief of police and the garrison commander, were panicked by rumors that the Japanese were outside the city’s gates and that its defenses were about to collapse, and so they lit the fires that burned Changsha down. The truth was that the Japanese advance had been temporarily stopped and Changsha was in no imminent danger, but by the time that became clear the city had been torched. Shortly afterward, Chiang flew in to try to make amends. He met with the foreigners and expressed his regret at the havoc and destruction.Soong Mei-ling, evidently trying to exonerate her husband, addressed a letter to the city saying that the intentional burning of the city “was not in accordance with the Generalissimo’s orders.” Three local officials, including the garrison commander and the police chief, were held responsible for the damage and made to pay the the ultimate price. They were executed. Even though most of the inhabitants had left ahead of the fire, teams sent in to clean up reported taking 20,000 corpses outside the city wall and burying them there. These included wounded soldiers, almost all of whom died in their hospital beds, since there had been no thought of evacuating them ahead of time. More than 21,000buildings were completely destroyed, two-thirds of all the buildings of Changsha. These included more than 10,000 homes, fifty-five schools, and thirteen hospitals. The city’s temples, Buddhist and Taoist, the restaurants, the hotels, the government offices, and the grain warehouses, along with the grain inside them, were all gone. There was enough inside the masonry houses—the furniture, staircases, beams, doors, window frames, and paper windows—to feed the flames. When the wooden roof joists burned away, the heavy tiles that they supported dropped and flattened everything below them like so many falling stones.
“I stood at Pa Ko T’in, the heart of
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