One month after my return in late November to Peking from Yenan, I traveled to Manchuria as fighting flared along the lower Sungari River front. The battles were being fought on grasslands crisscrossed by rivers and along the railway lines linking the principal cities and towns. The front extended from Communist-held northern Manchuria south to the Liao River valley, controlled by the Nationalists. From Peking I flew in an Executive Headquarters plane to Ch’angch’un, the Nationalist-occupied former capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, situated not far from the southern banks of the broad Sungari. The city, which the Japanese had built in imitation of some features of Washington, D.C., was in ruins. Its pretentious white government buildings and outlying factories had been looted, first by the withdrawing Russians and then by Chinese mobs before the arrival of Nationalist troops.
Under heavy armed escort, I visited Nationalist units dug in along the Sungari front. The soldiers in their thick padded uniforms were hunkered down in cold so bitter that they could not with bare hands touch the metal of their weapons without losing skin. At his headquarters, I interviewed the Nationalist commander, Lieutenant General Sun Li-jen, a slim handsome forty-seven-year-old graduate of the Virginia Military Academy and Purdue University who was regarded by General Stillwell as one of the ablest Nationalist field commanders. In the Burma campaign against the Japanese he had earned the sobriquet of “Rommel of the East.” In the spring of 1946, Sun’s American-trained and -equipped New First Army, which had a component of 70,000 Burma veterans, spearheaded the Nationalist drive into Manchuria. Ferried into North China aboard U.S. Air Force transports, Sun’s forces had pushed north as Russian occupation troops withdrew and took control of Mukden, the great metropolis of southern Manchuria. Sun’s troops then struck farther north against the principal Chinese Communist stronghold position at Ssuping city on the critical rail line linking Mukden with Ch’angch’un. Sun’s tanks overran Ssuping on May 19 in a hard-fought forty-day struggle against 110,000 entrenched Communists, both sides suffering extremely heavy casualties. Four days later, although his divisions had suffered 25,000 casualties in the Ssuping street fighting, Sun’s armored columns backed by the Nationalist Fifth Army went on to take Ch’angch’un on May 23. The battered Communist forces defending Ch’angch’un, which had expended virtually all their munitions, were sent reeling back across the Sungari River. Sun then established a bridgehead over the Sungari for a further advance on Harbin, the principal city of northern Manchuria and headquarters of Lin Biao, the Communist commander. His troops exhausted after their retreat from the south and having suffered 20,000 casualties, Lin Biao drafted an order on June 6 for withdrawal from Harbin. However, under pressure from General Marshall, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to a fifteen-day truce on June 7, and the Generalissimo called a halt to the Nationalist drive north. Marshall had warned Chiang, with President Truman’s sanction, that the United States would not support an advance into northern Manchuria, which Stalin held to be a sphere of special Russian interests under the terms of the Yalta Agreement and the Treaty of Alliance between the Nationalists and the Soviets of 1945. Marshall was unwilling to risk Stalin taking retaliatory military action.
Marshall was strongly criticized by some American observers for halting the Nationalist advance and depriving Sun Li-jen of the opportunity of seizing Harbin and thus dealing a crippling blow to the Chinese Communists. But the Soviet diplomat and historian Andrei Ledovsky, whom I had come to know in Peking, retorted in a retrospective essay that Marshall made the right decision, that a Nationalist advance into northern Manchuria “could have had unpredictable and dangerous consequences—not only for the Kuomintang, but also for the United States and the entire international situation in the Far East.” He said that Stalin might have sent his army back into Manchuria, justifying his action as a response to atrocities committed against Russian citizens by Nationalist troops. The abuse of the Russians, which I had reported in my own dispatches, had led to the withdrawal of Soviet specialists operating the Chinese South Manchurian Railway under the 1945 treaty arrangements.
Following the cease-fire, Sun told me, the Communists had regrouped and were preparing for a counteroffensive. He was not underestimating his Communist adversary Lin Biao, the hero of the Battle of the Ping-hsing Pass in the war against the Japanese. After his humiliating retreat from Ssuping, Lin Biao had reorganized the Northeast Democratic United Army, a ragtag force made up of Northern Chinese, Manchurians, Mongol cavalrymen, and North Korean units, into his New Fourth Army. About ten days after my departure from Ch’angch’un, Lin Biao sent 300,000 of his troops, many equipped with the newly acquired Japanese weaponry, across the frozen Sungari River in three successive thrusts on a broad front and for a short time enveloped Ch’angch’un, cutting off the power station supplying electricity and water to the city. However, Lin fell back in disarray across the river when Sun counterattacked. The armies then dug in, confronting each other across the Sungari.
On Christmas Eve I left Ch’angch’un by train for Mukden, the Manchurian metropolis in the south. It was one of the last trains to leave the city. I was accompanied by Jules Joelson, a sober, rather nervous correspondent for the Agence France-Presse, and Vladimir Drozdov, a pint-sized Russian correspondent who wore a big square fur hat with a red star on it. Drozdov worked for the Russian Daily News, which served the twenty thousand Russian émigrés living in Shanghai. Not long out of Ch’angch’un on the 200-mile journey, the train jolted to a stop, and we were told that Lin Biao’s guerrillas had ripped up the rails. The guerrillas employing what they called their “sparrow” tactics were raiding the rail and highway links between the various Manchurian cities garrisoned by the Nationalists. Guarded by the Nationalist Railway Police aboard the train, we sat in a crowded, unheated coach in subzero temperatures as the rails were repaired. Drozdov huddled close to me as Chinese passengers snarled “tapitze” (big nose) at him. The Chinese, angered by maltreatment during the Russian occupation, were harassing the White Russian communities in the Manchurian cities.
Without food and growing hungrier as the hours passed, I became curious and inquired about a paper bag which Joelson kept close at his side. He confessed he had been to Harbin and was returning to Peking, and as ordered by his French wife, he was bearing a jar of the finest caviar obtained in a White Russian shop. Yielding to our piteous whimpers for food, Joelson reluctantly opened the jar and placed it between us. We dipped into the jar, eating it by the handful. (I had no taste for caviar for years thereafter.) After fourteen hours on the tracks, the rails were repaired, and the train clanked on to Mukden. I spent Christmas in the Shenyang Railway Hotel, venturing out to dine with Drozdov at the superb White Russian restaurants, whose proprietors seemed impervious to the Civil War, and returned after New Year’s to Peking.
In early March 1947, with the conflict in Manchuria shaping up as one of the most decisive battles of the Civil War, I flew to Ch’angch’un once again, this time in the company of six other correspondents: Walter Bosshard of the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, who was the dean of the press corps in Peking; Benjamin Welles, of the New York Times; Don Starr, of the Chicago Tribune; Jules Joelson; and my two news agency competitors, who had become legendary figures on the China scene, John Roderick of the Associated Press and Reynolds Packard of the United Press. In all they made up a coterie who were professionally and in lifestyle typical of the array of journalists covering the Civil War. Bosshard, the Swiss, a tall dignified man with a shock of gray hair, a correspondent in the old tradition of the adventurer and explorer, lived, of course, in the best Peking style. He rented a house in Wang-fuchien, one of sixteen owned by Prince Pu Lun, a cousin of Pu Yi, the last monarch of the Qing dynasty, who in 1934 had become the puppet emperor of Manchukuo under the Japanese. Invited to dine, I would recline in the main room under polished hardwood beams of his Chinese house beside the blazing hearth fire to listen enthralled to his tales of mandarins, revolutionaries, warlords, and famous concubines. At dinner there would be French wine and liqueurs made in a Catholic monastery near Peking, which would be served by two long-gowned servants, who moved wraithlike anticipating every wish. Beyond the red-painted front door there was a courtyard with moon gates and flower beds. His antiques came from a shop just down the road owned by Walter Plaut, a German aristocrat, who sold his treasured wares only to those appreciative clients he personally held in esteem.
Much of the social life in Peking whirled about Ben Welles, son of Sumner Welles, then U.S. Undersecretary of State, and his beautiful English wife, Cynthia. He married Cynthia while stationed in London covering World War II after she had divorced the son of Lord Beaverbrook, the British press baron. John Roderick was the very able Associated Press man who had lived for several months in Yenan before my visit there, transmitting his dispatches via the Yenan Radio to the AP listening station in San Francisco. Then there was Reynolds Packard of the United Press, celebrated for less flattering reasons. A fleshy, lusty man, Packard felt he had to write the kind of copy that would be read by the “Kansas City Milkman,” which became the title of a book he later wrote exposing the foibles of his news agency. He was fired upon our return from Manchuria after filing a story that he picked up from the imaginative Chinese press about a “human-headed spider,” which caused a sensation around the world. A jokester on my International News Service cable desk, in keeping with the agency’s concern about cable transmission costs, sent me a message instructing me not to file unless I located a spider with two human heads.
Our flight to Ch’angch’un aboard a very worn C-47 of the U.S. Air Force was occasioned because the battle for Manchuria had intensified and also by a diplomatic uproar over the Communist capture and jailing of two American assistant military attachés, Major Robert Riggs and Captain John Collins. The incident had become a major source of tension between Washington and the Communists. At Ch’angch’un we were met beside the snow-packed runway by the seventeen-year-old son of O. Edmund Clubb, the U.S. consul general, driving an army ambulance. At the consulate, as we thawed out from the subzero cold before a roaring fire, the consul general told us about the rather freakish circumstances of the attachés’ misfortune which had landed them in a Harbin prison. They were touring the Sungari front and had dismounted from their jeep to survey with binoculars distant troop movements when the Chinese driver of their jeep and their interpreter suddenly panicked and drove off, leaving them stranded. The isolated officers were soon nabbed by Communist soldiers. The attachés were freed after fifty-five days in captivity. Clubb, a cool, resourceful diplomat, managed to negotiate their release by radio. Holding a white flag, Clubb went to a crossing on the tense Sungari front, where he accepted their handover. Clubb was later to become the last American diplomat to be stationed in Peking after the Communist takeover. It fell to him, as consul general, to haul down the American flag there in April 1950.*
From Clubb’s residence, we proceeded to the Chinese telegraph office, where we wrote our dispatches. Packard produced a pair of dice, which we tossed to determine the order in which we would file, a procedure of some importance given the vagaries of the Chinese telegraph. Packard came in first and Roderick fifth. Bosshard casually agreed to file last, since he said his newspaper was in no hurry. We spent the night on cots in the desolate Manchukuo parliament building on the outskirts of the city. In the morning we rendezvoused at the consulate, where I encountered Packard and Roderick in heated argument. Packard had gone alone to the telegraph and found that Roderick had cunningly marked his dispatch “urgent” so that it would go out first. Roderick was unapologetic and chagrined only when he learned that his alleged trickery had been to no avail. In Chinese fashion, the telegraph clerk had put the last dispatch handed him atop the pile, and as a consequence Bosshard’s cable had gone out first with no consideration given Roderick’s urgent stamp. The Swiss fox had triumphed again.
A telephone call from the consulate interrupted, summoning us to a meeting with General Tu Yu-ming, the commander in chief of Nationalist forces in Manchuria. We traveled to the Northeast General Headquarters huddling against the intense cold in an open weapons carrier. I had expected to see Sun Li-jen, the conqueror of Ssuping, who had also successfully defended Ch’angch’un against Lin Biao’s initial assaults, but he was not among those greeting us. He had been removed from his Ch’angch’un command, evidently having clashed with General Tu by opposing his policy of relying too much on a network of pillbox defenses and barbed wire systems around the Manchurian cities rather than engaging the Communists in offensive operations. Sun shared the view of Major General David Barr, chief of the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) in Nanking: “In modern warfare the most disastrous of all things to do is to retreat into a city behind walls and take a defensive position.”*
At the headquarters we were ushered into a map room, where we were greeted by General Tu, a forty-two-year-old officer, well turned out, his close-cropped hair carefully coiffed. He was wearing a well-tailored uniform with three rows of decorations including the U.S. Army parachutist badge awarded him at the school run during World War II at Kunming by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He had distinguished himself during the 1942 Burma campaign as the commander of the first Chinese motorized corps. The general shook hands with each of us, taking our calling cards in his left hand while his aide offered cigarettes. From his Ch’angch’un headquarters, Tu commanded seven divisions covering the city with its bridgehead over the Sungari and twelve divisions based at Mukden, guarding the approaches from North Korea and Inner Mongolia. Most of his 225,000 troops were American equipped, and he benefited from the cover of the unopposed Nationalist Air Force.
Tu told us Lin Biao was readying another assault across the Sungari but he was optimistic that he could hold his positions on the river. He would not say whether he intended to resume the Nationalist drive north to Harbin from his Sungari bridgehead or a sweep farther South down the Liaotung Peninsula, which would bring his troops close to the Russian-held port of Dairen. The previous October he had mounted an offensive with seven divisions down the peninsula to Tantung, on the Yalu River bordering North Korea, routing the Communists and inflicting heavy casualties on them. However, when two of his divisions pursued the Communists farther south, one of them was ambushed and only 1,000 of its troops escaped. Bolstered by replacement divisions, Tu renewed his offensive and secured control of the southern Manchurian railway network, but at a cost of 11,000 casualties. Tu told us his forces were ready to resume the advance on Harbin from his Sungari bridgehead but the timing turned on the outcome of diplomatic exchanges between the Nationalist government and Moscow. If the continuing threat of Russian intervention was removed, he was ready to take the offensive. Tu’s optimism about his prospects was short lived. When I returned to Manchuria in the spring of 1947, I found that the balance of forces in Manchuria had changed fundamentally from the glory days of Sun Li-jen’s march to the Sungari.