China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein Page A

downtown Changsha where the grand silk shops had been,” an American missionary later wrote, “and could see virtually without obstruction for a mile in any direction.… Several weeks after the fire rice was still smoldering where some of the big warehouses had stood.” Changsha “lay flat, wrecked, and totally vulnerable.” A person standing at the South Gate could see the silhouette of the chapel and dormitories of the Yale-in-China compound on the other side of the North Gate. Nothing remained between the two to block the view. Greene wrote to his wife, “Hospital runningfull ward.… Most of the city gone.” An officer aboard the Sandpiper, still anchored in the nearby Xiang River, said, “Changsha, and various industrial points outside, is now completely burned to the ground.”
    It would have been bad enough if the great fire had turned out to be Changsha’s only disaster of the long war, but there were many other wounds inflicted by Japan’s invading army and air force. Because of its position on major rail lines and because it was the main depot for the agricultural wealth of Hunan province, Changsha would be a battlefield for the length of the war, and also an emblem of China’s will to resist. The Japanese mounted major attacks four times and were repulsed three of those times by Chinese armies under the command of one of the best of the Nationalist generals,Xue Yue, who had studied at theWhampoa Military Academy in Canton when Chiang Kai-shek was the commandant there. The Japanese attempted to seize Changsha in 1939, 1941, 1942, and 1944. In the battle of 1942, Xue, feigning weakness, lured a huge force of Japanese into a pocket and then attacked from all sides even as he sent mobile squads to harass the supply lines behind them. The Japanese retreat was then slowed down by a succession of necessary river crossings, and they were cut down by Chinese firing on them from high ground. It was one of the few clear defeats suffered by the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War, and it was a costly one. The official account held that 52,000 Japanese soldiers died, and while this is likely among the many exaggerations of China’s press department, the losses were certainly considerable.
    But when the Japanese attacked in 1944, Changsha, the capital of a territory as large as Great Britain, fell almost without resistance, and by 1945 it typified the devastation that the eight years of war had wrought. It was essentially depopulated, its residents having been slaughtered or driven into exile, its economy, its institutions, and its way of life left in ruins just as much as its houses, stores, and temples. This is a key fact about China as the parties to the conflict—the Kuomintang, the Communists, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States—all faced, albeit unknowingly, the final stage of the war and the first stage of the after-war. In large swaths of China, the structures of society and government barely existed.
    It is almost impossible to make an accounting of the entirety of China’s destruction as the war entered its final few months.The estimate of historians is that twenty to thirty million Chinese died in the conflict, which is an immense number, though in a population of more than four hundred million not proportionately more than the human loss that occurred in the Soviet Union, Poland, or, for that matter, Japan as a result of American bombing. But what added to the devastation of China was not just the length of the war but the poor and fragile state of the country at the conflict’s very beginning. For outsiders, Chinese suffering had always seemed expected, almost normal. For a hundred years, it had been a country where wars, famines, and oppression had been continuous and on a grand scale. It was a place whose considerable charm was, as the historianBarbara Tuchman put it, “counterbalanced by the filth, the cruelty, the indifference to misery and disregard for human life.” Staggering