3

Civil war in the north-east

The rhetorical use of ‘decisive war’ and the Manchurian gamble

In the wake of the Chongqing peace talks, a directive from Yan’an urged its regional commanders to expand their armed forces.¹ In this context, Manchuria, with its political, strategic, economic and geographical importance, became a venue for the CCP’s expansion.² While Mao and his negotiators were engaging the Nationalists at the negotiating table in Chongqing, the Yan’an leadership had already shifted the focus to Manchuria, a key area that was not part of the discussion in the negotiations.³

When the CCP forces penetrated the former Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in late 1945, they did not have an indigenous base area to launch their traditional rural-based insurgency. This was because the CCP guerrillas and party organisations in Manchuria were basically decimated in the early 1940s after suffering years of Japanese extermination campaigns. The CCP’s guerrilla teams either fled into exile in the Soviet Union or operated within enclaves at the provincial border between Hebei and Manchuria. Some of these guerrilla forces returned when Soviet invasion of Manchuria began, but they could only play supportive roles.⁴ Hence Yan’an had a pressing need for a rapid increase of its military presence there. As mentioned, the influx of the CCP soldiers from Shandong into Manchuria via the Bohai Sea had already posed a threat to the Nationalist forces, but Mao still urged his generals to send more troops to counter the arriving enemies from Qinhuangdao in late August.⁵ As an outcome, the two opposing armies clashed fiercely along the key gateway to the heartland of Manchuria in mid-November 1945. This chapter is about the two parties’ race for Manchuria against the backdrop of the peace negotiations.

Expand in the north

The CCP openly announced on 12 August 1945 that it was sending four strong combat units to Manchuria and its neighbouring provinces of Rehe and Chahar. However, the mobilisation of the CCP forces did not live up to the party’s propaganda as, almost at the same time, a classified cable from Yan’an to the regional forces clarified the propaganda purpose of the announcement and stated that only Li Yunchang’s men from the Hebei–Rehe–Liaoning Military Region was to redeploy; all other units only received a standby order.⁶ Yan’an decided to dispatch around a thousand non-military cadres into Manchuria owing to the uncertainty of securing Soviet support for a CCP military presence in Manchuria. Its armed forces would stop advancing at the Rehe border, pending further instructions.⁷ Notwithstanding that the CCP forces in China proper were overwhelmed by military engagements against the Nationalists, the commanders of these forces had to manage the ad-hoc requests of generating rank-and-file support for the Manchurian mission and the massive task of getting the conscripted fishing boats ready to enter the north-east.⁸

Yan’an therefore calculatingly set the bar low, making the CCP’s policy towards Manchuria in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender rather conservative. Mao was among the strongest supporters of this ‘under-promise and over-delivery’ approach. He admitted that Manchuria was covered by the Sino-Soviet treaty so that the Nationalist government possessed authority over the region. Meanwhile, Mao expected his generals to secure Rehe, the neighbouring province of Manchuria, and waited until the stance of the fickle Soviets became clearer.⁹

Thus, the first CCP army to depart for Manchuria was Li’s forces. With Mao’s Rehe plan in mind, Li divided his 13,000-strong forces into three detachments, advancing the first two towards Rehe’s provincial capital of Chengde and the strategic town of Chifeng, respectively; only the third contingent, totalling 4,000 men, was to form the vanguard of the CCP forces sent to Manchuria.¹⁰ On 29 August, a directive was telegraphed from Yan’an to regulate the activities of all units preparing to enter Manchuria or the adjacent areas. All units were banned from making formal contact with the Soviets or doing anything that could be seen as causing the Soviets diplomatic embarrassment. Such activities as entering the large cities by train were strictly prohibited.¹¹

The direct instruction from Yan’an was shattered by a telecommunication breakdown. Li’s scouting team en route to Manchuria did not receive the important final briefing because of inadequate army radio equipment.¹² On 25 August, Li’s men departed from their base in eastern Hebei, where Manchuria was within striking distance. The destination was the environs of Shenyang, the largest city in Manchuria.¹³

The gateway to Manchuria was Shanhaiguan. The legendary fortress of the Great Wall is situated at a narrow mountain bypass to the land corridor of Liaoxi, which connected North China and Manchuria. At the end of August, the fortified town was still under the control of Manchukuo troops, who indicated clearly that they would surrender only to the Nationalists. Zeng Kelin, the commander of Li’s scouting team, not informed of Yan’an’s instruction, led his men to stage a grand rendezvous with the Soviet forces at a small Manchurian town, some 20 kilometres to the north of Shanhaiguan.¹⁴

In an attempt to exploit the goodwill built in the name of Communist internationalism, Zeng proposed to the Soviet commanders a joint CCP–Soviet military operation to capture Shanhaiguan. The Soviets rejected Zeng’s plan, stating that the fortified town on the Great Wall line was not within Moscow’s mandate for military action. This indicates that individual Soviet Army officers might be sympathetic towards the CCP’s course in Manchuria, but as long as the goalposts kept moving, the Soviets’ attitude was unpredictable. Zeng in turn initiated hours of negotiations with the Soviets. Both parties finally struck a deal whereby the Soviet forces would be playing only a supportive role in the CCP’s offensive against Shanhaiguan. Zeng’s troops captured the town on 30 August, thanks to Soviet artillery support.¹⁵

After taking Shanhaiguan, Zeng’s men moved swiftly towards the major cities, leaving only a small force behind to defend the garrison town. With rail transportation and firepower support offered by the Soviet forces, they swept through cities along the main railway line at ease, including the industrial hub of Jinzhou.¹⁶ On 5 September, Zeng disembarked his troops from a fully loaded train and prepared to enter Shenyang. The attitude of the Soviet garrison force was rather hostile to them initially. In the end, Zeng’s unorthodox negotiation tactics of insistence and their troops’ ability to maintain a high level of discipline stunned the Soviets. With the permission of the Soviets, Zeng’s highly disciplined men proudly encamped inside the Shenyang city.¹⁷

Soon after Zeng secured his troops’ deployment into Shenyang, he and his men received a rousing reception from the Soviets.¹⁸ When Zeng’s superior Li arrived at Shanhaiguan, he was soon ushered into a Soviet open-top vehicle to lead a prearranged military parade into the town centre. Meanwhile, the Soviet Army officers even allowed the CCP troops to take over a large Japanese armoury located on the outskirts of Shenyang. The quantity of the weaponry was such that Zeng’s men had to work hard for three whole days to move them out.¹⁹ However, the CCP cadres in Manchuria reported on 23 September that the Soviet forces were friendly in general but did not show a high level of trust towards their troops.²⁰ Although done in violation of orders, the capture of Shenyang marked the culmination of the CCP’s early success in Manchuria. Using weapons taken from the Japanese armouries, Zeng’s troops swiftly added to their numbers.²¹ Zeng, now the ‘commanding officer of Shenyang garrison command’, boarded a Soviet plane back to Yan’an to make his report on 14 September, accompanied by a representative of the Soviet Army.²²

The Yan’an leadership immediately held a meeting with its Soviet guest. According to PRC records, the Soviet representative requested that the CCP forces vacate the big cities, stating that any troop entry to Manchuria before the complete withdrawal of Soviet forces would be prohibited and that such an injunction was applicable to both the GMD and the CCP armies. The CCP leaders, staying attuned to the verbal cues of their Soviet guest, agreed to an immediate withdrawal of their troops from areas currently occupied by the Red Army on condition that certain units presently stationed in Rehe and the southernmost Manchurian province of Liaoning be allowed to stay where they were.²³ As the CCP leaders chose to comply with the contentious requests of their Soviet visitor, such as that the time frame of China’s troop movement into Manchuria had to be set by the Soviets, they made a gesture of goodwill that the CCP would not be an obstacle for the USSR’s treaty compliance.

The Soviet representative returned the favour by encouraging the CCP to appoint senior cadres to establish and maintain liaison with the Soviet forces in Manchuria.²⁴ Perhaps because of this, it is perceived in some quarters that both sides had reached some undisclosed understanding, and the CCP was permitted to send troops into Manchuria without revealing their real identity.²⁵ At any rate, the achievements of Zeng’s vanguard forces went far beyond the expectations of the decision-makers in Yan’an, who began to sense that they could be serious contenders in Manchuria.

Mao’s deputy Liu Shaoqi, who played a leading role in decision-making while Mao was in Chongqing, put forward a proposal to establish the North-East Bureau (NEB) of the Central Committee, the CCP’s high command in Manchuria. His plan quickly gained consensus in a Politburo meeting on 14 September 1945.²⁶ The new organisation was filled by a large contingent of upper-level cadres who constituted the Manchurian Party leadership. On 18 September, Peng Zhen, a leading member of the powerful CCP Central Committee, set up the NEB headquarters in Shenyang. Under Soviet protection, the NEB effectively accelerated the Communist challenge to the GMD’s legitimacy in Manchuria.²⁷ Taking full advantage of this development, Yan’an committed itself to a new civil war strategy summed up in Liu’s succinct expression: ‘Expand in the north.’²⁸

In a directive to his forces delivered on 19 September, Liu ordered the dispatch of 30,000 troops from Shandong to Manchuria by sea, who would proceed according to schedule, while field forces in eastern China numbering 80,000 were to move northward to fill the vacuum left by the Shandong troops.²⁹ The strategy was in accord with the concession that Zhou made in the Chongqing peace talks of withdrawing from the Liberated Areas in the south. Various army units, notably the elite 1st and 3rd Divisions of the New Fourth Army, began their Manchurian expedition soon after. The redeployment continued on a large scale for the remainder of 1945 and into 1946. The total army redeployment reached a staggering 100,000 troops, representing one-sixth of the regular forces of the CCP.³⁰

At the operational level, Liu endeavoured to undertake two different kinds of army deployment. On the one hand, he attempted to adopt a strategy that would actively seek out major battles as a means to block the GMD’s influx into Manchuria. As Liu’s approach required preclusive defence of the entire north-east to the exclusion of other parties, a massive concentration of regular forces was needed to deny Chiang the chance even to set foot in the region.³¹

Liu, who had meanwhile called for a forward defence formation of his armies, proposed to the NEB in late September that they disperse combat units into the most uninhabitable areas of Manchuria to avoid battle in the interim.³² A directive from Yan’an to the NEB revealed the reason for putting the two diametrically different strategies in place: the leadership was not confident about waging a major battle. Its decentralisation scheme was based on worst-case assumptions: if their field forces could not counter the more modernised GMD armies in the imminent battles, they could still revert to their rural base-area strategy.³³ Although Liu’s approach supported Mao’s vision of using both guerrilla and regular forces in war, the army found it difficult to prosecute two distinct military strategies.³⁴

In practical terms, Liu’s redeployment schedule was under pressure from the very beginning. In October, Liu found out that the landing operation was running well behind schedule,³⁵ although the situation at sea was overwhelmingly in the CCP’s favour by the end of 1945. The GMD navy, managing to get only one inland river gunboat (CNS Changzhi) ready for operation, was unable to stop the CCP enjoying unfettered sea access.³⁶ Given that the CCP flotillas recorded just one ship lost in two months because of bad weather, the campaign was undoubtedly underperformed.³⁷ ‘If immediate remedial measures are not taken, [you] will be condemned by history’, wrote Liu, venting his frustration to Peng.³⁸ Mao’s intervention, however, soon circumvented Liu’s blunt and disparaging criticisms.

Mao: Political leader and military planner

Mao overruled Liu’s decentralisation policy after he returned from Chongqing. His new ambition was to defeat the Nationalists at the metropolitan centres of Manchuria and to occupy the entire region. He instructed his generals to concentrate the main forces inside the industrialised Jinzhou–Yingkou–Shenyang triangle and prevent the Nationalists from having a quick and easy entry. The strategy would have gained more time for the NEB to establish stable base areas for the total control of the region.³⁹

Mao’s force concentration strategy was first developed against the backdrop of the Soviet–GMD dispute over Manchuria, which forced Chiang to push his troops into the north-east via an overland route and staked everything on the hope that his armies could capture the Shanhaiguan–Jinzhou land transport corridor. The CCP’s bold and successful military actions since mid-October in North China also offered Mao grounds for optimism. In the Henan–Hebei border, for instance, the CCP’s operational successes had motivated the defection of a senior GMD commander and his 10,000 followers. Further north, Fu’s Nationalist cavalry units were besieged by Mao’s armies in the strategic towns of Baotou and Guisui along the section of Beiping–Guisui railway located in the province of Suiyuan.⁴⁰ For the CCP, there would not be a more opportune time than this to strike Chiang’s isolated expeditionary forces at the gate of Manchuria. Stepping up preparations for war, Mao reorganised his Manchurian forces, establishing the North-East People’s Autonomous Army (NEPAA); at the end of October, Lin Biao, one of Mao’s best generals, was appointed its commander.⁴¹

In early November, the advanced detachments of the GMD 13A had started the assault on the CCP-occupied Shanhaiguan but were easily repulsed by the NEPAA. The CCP commanders soon discovered that the more modernised enemy forces were not as strong as they originally thought. The 13A was a US-armed army, meaning that it was an elite force equipped with a full suite of army equipment supplied by the Americans under the US wartime commitment of refitting thirty-nine GMD army divisions with advanced US weapons. However, the 39 Division Program was only about 43 per cent complete by September 1945.⁴² The US military advisers refitted the infantrymen of the 13A with US carbines as standard rifles but did not supply the bayonets and provided bullets for military exercises only. Rifles without bayonets retained only half their value to the Nationalist infantrymen, who still relied heavily on the bayonet charge as a major infantry tactic. The logistical challenge affected the combat readiness of the 13A, particularly in close-range engagement against the enemy’s bayonet charges, although it still enjoyed enormous superiority in artillery firepower over the NEPAA.⁴³

With great confidence, Mao envisaged large-scale battles in Jinzhou. He requested the NEPAA units charged with garrisoning Shanhaiguan to hold the first line of defence for at least three weeks and to inflict great losses on the enemy. His plan was that while the Nationalists procrastinated, the NEPAA’s main forces of around 70,000 men in the Jinzhou area would mount pre-emptive attacks when the GMD armies, weakened by the Shanhaiguan defenders, arrived. Mao’s war plan had quickly become a widespread article of faith among the army’s high command. Li Yunchang, now the deputy commander of the NEPAA, put forward a fairly aggressive proposal to Lin requesting a geographical expansion of the battlefield into Hebei that sought to sever the GMD’s supply line between North China and Manchuria.⁴⁴

Mao’s plan received overwhelming inner-party support for practical reasons: it was almost impossible for the CCP to launch the Maoist guerrilla-warfare-influenced protracted war at that stage in Manchuria. Manchuria, like some of the formerly Japanese-held territories in China proper, had been occupied only recently by the CCP combatants, who did not enjoy the local support they were accustomed to in their home bases. The CCP’s preferred guerrilla tactic of sabotaging railroad lines, for instance, was now facing possible local resistance. The GMD hailed the restoration of commuter rail services as a priority policy⁴⁵ and vehemently criticised the CCP’s guerrilla-style railway sabotage operations, which deprived locals of their right to return to their pre-war homes.⁴⁶ Mao subsequently urged his commanders to give away the dismantled railway timber sleepers and metal parts to the locals, hoping that this tactic would reduce the public backlash against his troops.⁴⁷

Operating in Manchuria, the CCP forces were disconnected from the self-sufficient economy of the Liberated Areas, meaning that these forces would be facing logistics problems almost immediately.⁴⁸ This had been a widespread problem for many other CCP army units operating away from their guerrilla headquarters after the Japanese surrender. In late 1945, Mao was always in an unpleasant mood when he was asked to offer supply and financial assistance to his frontline commanders.⁴⁹ For Mao and his generals, the most direct way to fix the problem was ousting Chiang’s two isolated US-armed armies from Manchuria by means of a number of force-concentrated military operations in quick succession and establishing self-sufficient permanent bases after the military success.⁵⁰ After he returned from Chongqing, Mao pitched his expectations to his armies’ force-concentrated offensives against the enemy in both Manchuria and China proper, and he sent a flurry of directives to his field commanders promoting the principle of force concentration. According to Mao, the highly concentrated CCP forces should not attempt to win the campaign with one decisive attack. Rather, the strategic goal of destroying the enemy forces should be achieved by several successive military operations within a relatively short period.⁵¹

Mao, as a military planner, could not guarantee quick operational successes at bearable cost; but as a political leader, he tried to create aura of optimism in order to persuade his generals that the war was something worth fighting for. The deliberate use of strong emotive phrases was therefore required in Mao’s directives for shoring up support. Mao’s persuasive tactics employed a variety of morale-boosting political language, which alluded to the decisiveness of the imminent battles. For example, in his exhortatory and mandatory directives to his generals, Mao regularly applied rhetorical devices, describing his forces’ combat assignments as ‘sacred’ (shensheng 神聖), of ‘great significance’ (weida yiyi 偉大意義) and as having ‘important bearing’ (guanxi zhongda 關係重大), and the battles themselves as ‘shifting the balance of the situation’ (zhuanbian jushi 轉變局勢).⁵² Since Mao’s political rhetoric frequently mingled with the actual combat instructions in his telegrams, these military telegrams sometimes pose a challenge for contemporary scholars who study them. Meanwhile, Mao was not worried about which components in his war plans were more Maoist than others. He was waiting in suspense for his frontline commanders to carry out his orders.

The insurgents and the counterinsurgents

The difficulty lay not so much in whether the CCP army high command would support Mao’s plan but whether Mao was demanding his troops do more than they were capable of. A military report revealed that the CCP defenders in Shanhaiguan had no more than 13,000 men—a force substantially outnumbered by some 70,000 incoming enemy troops. The troops were also hampered by a lack of arms. It was true that the Soviets had transferred a certain amount of Japanese weaponry to the CCP forces, but they were initially unable to bring most of the newly acquired weapons to the front lines. The reason for the delay was, among other causes, the CCP’s inferior logistic capability.⁵³ In short, the CCP army units in Shanhaiguan were equivalent only to an ill-armed militia in late 1945.

Mao’s main striking force, the 3rd and 1st Divisions, were in no way better equipped than their understrength comrades. The two army divisions had just arrived at eastern Hebei en route to Manchuria. In order to fulfil Mao’s requirements, they needed to reach Jinzhou well before the Nationalists so that they could fortify positions and fight the incoming enemies as defenders. Unfortunately, the 3rd Division suffered from non-combat casualties, and troop numbers dropped from 35,000 to 32,000 after arriving from northern Jiangsu. The surviving combatants were seriously underfed. Also, the army was deliberately not equipped with winter outfits suitable for the pitiless cold in Manchuria so that it could move rapidly; the strategy succeeded, but at great cost.⁵⁴

Mao showed little sympathy for his distressed troops. He required his main forces to act as combat-capable regular armies, but at the same time he advocated the guerrilla warfare principle of self-sufficiency. When Huang Kecheng, the head of the 3rd Division, telegraphed his grievances to Mao, the chairman sulked over Huang’s complaint. In his reply, Mao asked Huang to organise logistic supplies by himself. As a field commander, Lin Biao apparently did not want to do anything to ruffle Mao, but he nevertheless overruled Li’s 9 November proposal to expand operations into Hebei. In a dispatch to Mao on 13 November, Lin refined Li’s plan into a smaller-scale offensive scheme and planned a hit-and-run attack against the enemy that would employ guerrilla tactics. Although Lin Biao pandered to Mao’s opinions by endorsing the latter’s emphasis on the enemy’s weakness, his plan was entirely incompatible with Mao’s ambitious war plan.⁵⁵

Mao’s battle plan was severely challenged when the Nationalists launched the final assault on 15 November. The 13A began to storm Shanhaiguan after a light infantry unit from the 52A was dispatched to manoeuvre around the NEPAA’s north-west flank.⁵⁶ In contrast to the 13A, the 52A was a lightly armed army, half of which was armed with US weapons.⁵⁷ This meant that the infantrymen of the 52A were armed with locally made rifles, but the army was also equipped with a small number of US arms (e.g. US-made submachine guns and anti-tank guns). It is notable that the troop numbers of GMD army units were in constant fluctuation and the quantity of the weaponry in each army varied accordingly; but in general, the quantity of the US weapons in a GMD ‘half American-armed’ army was around a third to a sixth less than its ‘full’ American-armed contemporary during the Chinese Civil War. For example, the 52A was equipped with US 60mm mortars as company-level fire support but each infantry company only possessed two pieces, whereas a similar company in the Nationalist US-armed New First Army (N1A), which operated in Manchuria in 1946, had six.⁵⁸

The infiltration capacity of the light infantry of the 52A was superb as long as it was put under the command of competent officers with discretionary powers. A recent study shows that the GMD’s speedy light infantry units were the only real threat to the CCP guerrillas in the initial stage of the fighting in Manchuria. These units were capable of adopting forced night marches and employing unorthodox artillery tactics effectively against the enemy.⁵⁹ Nevertheless, the main fighting machine of the 52A, the three combat-capable infantry divisions, had been stretched thin. One division was withdrawn from the main battlefield at the beginning of the campaign under Du’s order and redeployed to eastern Hebei near Du’s command centre in Qinhuangdao.⁶⁰ The deployment was a reaction to increased CCP guerrilla activities in the south of the Great Wall line, which threatened the rear of the entire GMD Manchurian expeditionary force. At times, the 52A had to spare as much as one division to protect its supply battalions and field hospitals attached to the army’s headquarters. In short, the 52A could have been left with just one division to engage the enemies at the point of contact.⁶¹ Furthermore, both the 52A and 13A not only were scrupulous in protecting the impediments from enemy attacks but also were meticulous about following the pre-planned combat arrays in pushing the armies forward. Disordered marches of some combat units at the beginning of the campaign were quickly rectified.⁶² The conservatism poses the question of whether the Nationalists intended to win the war on its defence power alone or just aimed to repel the insurgents from the main communication line.

The Nationalists also were punctilious about confidentiality, but this was achieved at the expense of the efficiency of army staff and communication between units. During the critical stage of the battles in the Shanhaiguan–Jinzhou zone from 14 to 25 November 1945, it took about ten hours on average for a combat instruction to be passed from Du’s headquarters to the headquarters of the 52A before it moved through the chain of command down to the divisional heads. The slowest and the fastest times recorded for these orders to be sent from Du’s headquarters to the divisional heads of the 52A were, respectively, twenty-two hours on 14–15 November and three hours on 19 November.⁶³

Of the two Nationalist main forces operating in Manchuria in November, the 13A was normally sent to carry out frontal assaults, whereas the 52A was responsible for flanking attacks. Zhao Gongwu, the commander of the 52A, had to tread carefully to ensure that his troops would not complete the flanking movement too quickly and, in particular, not occupy the positions that were originally supposed to be for the 13A, as this would cause embarrassment for Shi Jue, his fellow army commander of the 13A. On one occasion, Zhao halted the pursuit in order to avoid overtaking the 13A instead of continuing the circle movement towards an NEPAA-held town.⁶⁴

As their superiors were overwhelmed by bureaucracy and politics, individual officers of the 52A had to ignore orders and perform unauthorised and audacious actions for combat success.⁶⁵ Individual acts of heroism were rare, however. The GMD elite corps could be a lethal fighting force given that their commanding officers allowed them to be. Cases like this were also rare in the history of the National Army during the Chinese Civil War. On 15 November 1945 in Shanhaiguan, however, it happened.

‘Build stable base areas in the north-east’

On 15 November in Shanhaiguan, a contingent of the 52A made an oblique thrust across the NEPAA’s unfortified flank. The Communist defenders realised that the garrison town would soon become a cut-off bastion. They received orders to retreat on 16 November.⁶⁶ The Nationalist deep-penetration corps pushed forward to overtake the withdrawing NEPAA, but their poor coordination allowed the CCP troops to slip through.⁶⁷

Also, on 15 November, Mao cabled a long epistle to Lin and Peng, enunciating a fairly ambitious war plan. At the beginning of the telegram, Mao acknowledged that there were no combat-ready units in his main forces at present as a number of combat units were still en route to Manchuria and besieged by severe fatigue. Before moving on to tactical issues, Mao tried to boost the morale of his commanders and exhausted armies. Mao, as most political leaders would have done in the same situation, expressed hope to his men that the hardships they endured in the short term would be rewarded by a decisive victory in the future.⁶⁸ In this regard, Mao’s rhetorical style in the telegram was consistent with those he sent to the frontline commanders in China proper since he had returned from Chongqing.

Mao told Lin and Peng to take prudent measures to ensure that these main forces would be sent to fight only when they were combat-ready and ‘in the hope that the problems will be solved in a decisive battle in the future’.⁶⁹ Although Mao did use the phrase ‘decisive battle’ (jue zhan 決戰) twice in his ambitious war plan, his explication was so clear that Lin and Peng could not be under any misapprehension that they were being pushed to accomplish one final, decisive victory over the GMD in Manchuria. Put simply, Mao’s rhetorical use of ‘decisive battle’ was nothing but one of the magic terms from his political language intended to create an atmosphere of war-eve optimism.⁷⁰ As Mao’s subordinates, Lin and Peng certainly knew that it was not up to them to make judgements on the decisiveness of a military victory because it was a political issue to be determined by politicians. As Colin Gray puts it, such a judgement was ‘above their pay grade’.⁷¹ What really mattered was what Mao would order Lin to do under the circumstances.

Mao delivered his combat instruction to Lin in the second half of the telegram, calling for force-concentrated counter-attacks against the Nationalists at the time and place of Lin’s choosing: ‘to split the offensive into a number of combats, eliminate two to three enemy divisions one at a time and finally accomplish the annihilation of the enemy’s three armies [emphasis added]’.⁷² Mao envisaged that when Lin’s main force conducted the decisive future war, it would be bolstered by two new brigades, albeit these anticipated reinforcement units were still deployed in eastern Hebei at that time.⁷³ In short, Mao overruled Lin’s guerrilla-minded hit-and-run and Liu’s decentralisation plans, but his ambitious war plan was in line with the instructions he had sent to other forces fighting in China proper: achieving operational successes via several force-concentrated offensives, securing self-sufficient Communist bases in the aftermath of the battles and embracing a decisive victory in the future.

Notably, Mao stated at the opening of the telegram that Chiang was currently sending two armies (i.e. the 13A and the 52A) to the north-east, but he speculated that there would be at least one more enemy army to come, and the timing of its arrival remained uncertain.⁷⁴ Even if Lin won the current battles against the existing two enemy armies, Chiang would send another one to fight them. In other words, Mao had predicted that the war would drag on. Mao micromanaged Lin’s battle plans, but he considered military victory from a strategic perspective even though it might affect Lin’s tactical decision-making. In the strategic level of war, victory is not likely to be achieved before a series of attritional battles have been waged. Gray has argued that a strategically decisive victory does not need to be ‘a single climactic clash of arms, but may rather be the outcome of an attritional struggle’ for policy-makers.⁷⁵

Mao’s ambitious plan wilted quickly as the GMD armies surged forward in force along the main railway before Lin could concentrate his forces. With only token resistance, they allowed the GMD to seize towns between Shanghaiguan and Jinzhou on 22 November.⁷⁶ In the environs of Huludao, several retreating NEPAA detachments were outpaced by a contingent of the 2nd Division of the 52A waiting for its enemies to arrive after completing an unauthorised pursuit with crushing momentum the night before. More than 150 NEPAA combatants were taken prisoner by the Nationalists when they fronted the machine-gun formations of the 2nd Division.⁷⁷

While the CCP war machine was thrown out of gear, its supreme leader also endured an enforced layoff. Mao was hospitalised from mid-November for neurasthenia. Liu took charge again. Guerrilla tactics (e.g. hit-and-run attacks and night-time raids) and in-depth defence were once again the priority of the Yan’an leadership. The CCP’s misfortunes were exacerbated when the Nationalists launched a diplomatic offensive. In mid-November, the GMD ordered the withdrawal of its delegation from Changchun in protest against Moscow’s uncooperative attitude—a major event that is discussed further in chapter 5. The Soviets, caught in a barrage of diplomatic criticism, resorted to sacrificing the CCP. The Red Army therefore informed the NEPAA that it would hand over the cities along the Chinese Changchun Railway to the Nationalists, and the NEPAA would be required to retreat. Liu immediately instructed the NEPAA to evacuate the big cities, apparently trying to avoid ruffling the Soviets.⁷⁸

Lin was acutely aware that the change in the political status quo would inevitably entail modifications to the CCP military strategy. On 21 November, he dispatched a telegram from the front line to both Yan’an and the NEB requesting permission to withdraw his forces northward away from Jinzhou in order to avoid being crushed by the enemy. An unpalatable subtext of Lin’s idea was that unless the enemy’s units stretched out in a battle line and made themselves vulnerable, an offensive would be pointless.⁷⁹ While acknowledging Lin’s tactics, Liu was slowly but steadily moving towards reinstating his policy of force decentralisation and gradually abandoning Mao’s more ambitious war plan. This trend was evident in an oft-quoted precept delivered on 22 November: ‘Leave the high road alone and seize the land on both sides.’⁸⁰

The NEB was evacuated from Shenyang on 23 November under pressure from the Soviets and moved to Benxi, a town in the south-east of Shenyang.⁸¹ The Nationalists continued to orchestrate the proceedings on the battlefield. On 26 November, the GMD armies took Jinzhou after subduing the NEPAA’s token resistance. When Jinzhou fell to the Nationalists, Huang’s division was still lumbering through the periphery of the city. The fall of Jinzhou dashed Mao’s hopes for the chance of an early operational success. Huang’s troops finally retreated from the outskirts of Jinzhou after gaining Lin’s permission.⁸²

The occupation of Jinzhou kick-started the Nationalists’ campaign to recover the vast territory of the north-east, but it also began to show in this early stage that the increasing logistics and communication difficulties had already stretched Du’s armies to the limit. The logistics simply failed to keep up with the needs of the armies, and Du was forced to halt the pursuit in order to recuperate.⁸³ The Americans agreed to provide immediate relief for ammunition shortage, but even modern US military transport aircraft struggled to deal with the poor conditions of the Jinzhou airfield.⁸⁴ The GMD’s US-equipped armies, like their CCP enemies, were faced with communication problems. When his command centre headed north, Du was unable to maintain direct radio communication with Chongqing because of poor radio reception. Chiang Kai-shek was left in disbelief after receiving a three-day delayed telegram from Du.⁸⁵

The inadequacy of radio equipment might take Chiang by surprise, but he was well informed that his expeditionary force had been stretched thin and that its left flank was vulnerable to enemy attack across provincial borders from Rehe.⁸⁶ In early December, Chiang sent two consecutive instructions to Du, prohibiting the latter from pushing the armies north-east towards Shenyang.⁸⁷ On 6 December, Du was summoned back to Chongqing to receive confidential briefings from Chiang.⁸⁸ As it turned out, the GMD armies were tied at the first line of defence in Jinzhou for a month, providing the NEPAA with a long lull in which to consolidate its newly occupied territories.

Liu tried to turn disappointment into success by shifting the focus from Manchuria to North China.⁸⁹ The military picture there, however, led to further disappointment. Successful Nationalist counter-attacks started in mid-November brought the CCP campaign in Suiyuan Province to a sorry end in early December.⁹⁰ The developing situation in North China strengthened Liu’s determination to restore his force decentralisation scheme in Manchuria. He dispatched a deluge of telegrams to both the NEB and the NEPAA pressing for decentralisation and strategies focused on small towns from late November onward.⁹¹

While Liu was making decisions in a fluid and fluctuating environment, he kept imposing minor changes on his plans, although he and the leadership did not back away from the idea of building permanent rural bases. For example, Liu instructed the NEB to gain the initiative in the big cities on 19 November but revised it a day later by asking for the NEB to control the secondary cities after evacuating from the metropolis.⁹² Liu’s decision-making style was not unusual for leaders in modern Chinese history, who kept changing their mind on decisions they had made. It nonetheless provides a niche for a claim that the Yan’an leadership ‘rejected a strategy of building countryside bases’ and adopted the so-called three large cities strategy (i.e. capturing Shenyang, Changchun and Harbin) allegedly proposed by Peng, the NEB boss.⁹³

Such a claim is made primarily on the basis of a speech that Peng delivered on 26 October 1945.⁹⁴ In that policy speech to the cadres, Peng unveiled a variety of policies, including the rural base areas development and a northward decentralisation scheme. The urban area was only one of many focuses in Peng’s speech. He asserted that his bureau was committed to taking over all the provinces, cities and counties in Manchuria.⁹⁵ Contrary to the aforementioned argument, Peng did not advocate a ‘city first’ or the ‘Three Large Cities Strategy’ to the extent that it ‘represented a radical departure from the party line’.⁹⁶ Notably, Peng did not even mention the names of the three biggest Manchurian cities during his speech. The full text shows that Peng, the NEB’s top bureaucrat, did not want to go rogue in relation to Yan’an’s policies. Rather, he followed them all in a broad sense—trying to motivate his forces to overrun the whole north-east.⁹⁷

In his recollections, Peng insisted that he merely followed instructions from Yan’an together with the party’s campaigning zeal at that stage. Peng also remembered that the orders he received from Yan’an between late September and mid-October 1945 were plans for both decentralisation and force concentration. Peng maintained that he did not in any way act against orders from the top.⁹⁸

As well as a lack of consistent advice from Yan’an on operational priorities, the tactical difficulties caused an added burden to Peng in executing Liu’s decentralisation plan. In Manchuria, most of the population and industrial infrastructure were concentrated in a few industrial belts along the main railways. Away from these urban centres were areas of primitive wilderness and inaccessible mountainous terrain.

A Japanese military analyst of the 1930s, Shinsake Hirata, once used the phrase ‘uncivilised war zone’ to describe conducting military operation in the Manchurian backcountry. This was a mission to be feared even by the best-equipped corps.⁹⁹ The harsh conditions of the bandit-plagued rural areas made it all but impossible for the ill-equipped CCP forces to live off the country without establishing strong ties with the local population. However, the territories that Liu required the NEB to penetrate in September were the remote and sparsely inhabited parts of southern and northern Manchuria.¹⁰⁰

Most importantly, as Liu’s initial plan was to occupy the entire north-east, which required control of the cities, the NEB had developed certain affiliates to further that purpose; these organisations could survive only in urban areas. The North-East Bank, for example, was established as an agency to expand the CCP fiscal–military state to Manchuria. It issued currency by using the industrial plants in Shenyang as fixed assets, but it was now facing bankruptcy after evacuating from the city. Once they abandoned all they had already done, the NEB headquarters argued, they would find themselves holding only a few enclaves in the mountainous regions and would be reduced from a position of superiority to being in dire straits.¹⁰¹ Peng was therefore in agreement with Liu that, while it was important to develop rural bases through the decentralisation of forces, it was equally important that enough troops remained in the small towns and minor communication lines and that they stayed close enough to ramp up pressure on the big cities, which the enemies would occupy.¹⁰² The resulting ambiguity and obscurity of Liu’s approach nonetheless gave rise to an internal debate between Liu and his NEB comrades over the most appropriate level of force decentralisation.

Amid his unceasing worries, Liu sent exhortative telegrams to the NEB in late December pressing for the development of rural bases in the most remote areas near the border. The gist of the telegrams was basically identical to that which Liu and the leadership delivered in late September, only the tone was much stronger. In one occasion, Liu badgered Peng to give up hopes of seizing the major cities, criticising Peng’s move as ‘risky’ and advising him to take precautionary measures to avoid being attacked by both the Nationalists and the bandits in the event of real war.¹⁰³ The debate abruptly ended when Mao broke his silence and made the final ruling from his hospital bed. On 28 December, he sent a lengthy telegram to the NEB to rehabilitate the old base-area strategy as his new plan. ‘Our party’s present task in the north-east is to build base areas … The regions in which to build stable bases are the cities and vast rural areas comparatively remote from the centres of Kuomintang occupation’, Mao wrote.¹⁰⁴ Mao’s expectations for force-concentrated operational successes seemed at that moment to be no more than a distant memory.

‘Wipe out the enemy forces one by one’

During the battles of Shanhaiguan–Jinzhou zone, Mao and Liu were fighting their own battle against competitive military priorities. As political leaders, Mao and Liu needed their frontline commanders to realise combat successes in order to force Chiang to pull his troops out of Manchuria and concede at the negotiating table. Nevertheless, as Lawrence Freedman notes, war’s political character attracts politicians who wish to run it themselves,¹⁰⁵ and Mao and Liu were not immune to the behaviour of micromanaging the military, which is commonly seen among political leaders in war. In the critical stage of battles, Mao had a proclivity for meddling in key operational matters, ranging from force deployments and the duration of maintaining an area defence to the scale of the offensive. In other words, Mao and Liu, in addition to their roles as political leaders, had to find a way to connect the political objective and military power through the ‘highly imprecise art’ of strategy.¹⁰⁶

Lin and Peng, the CCP’s top leaders in the north-east, were labouring under pressure from Liu and Mao. While Peng tried in vain to follow the party line, Lin attempted to advise Mao as to what the armies could and could not achieve by imposing major revisions on Li’s ambitious battle plan instead of testing Mao’s tolerance to his recalcitrance. As a soldier, it was hard for Lin to deny reality: the enemy suffered from political and diplomatic difficulties at the top and military incompetence on the field. In addition, his fellow commanders in China proper had enjoyed a recent successful experience in annihilating the GMD’s US-armed armies.¹⁰⁷ These occurrences provided more justification for quick and large-scale military actions than risk-averse measures. This is because the lesser the aggressiveness of the battle plan, the more modest the political objective, thus allowing the enemy more leeway to manoeuvre.¹⁰⁸ As a field commander, Lin’s position was even more awkward, particularly when he could not find a unified view among his subordinates about the conduct of battles. Freedman has argued that ‘war management is political through and through’ and that civilian leaders should accept the responsibilities of making crucial decisions in war.¹⁰⁹ When their generals disagreed among themselves, Mao and Liu’s political guidance seemed not a violation of common sense.

Yet political interference with military affairs is a daunting task for politicians, and the quality and consequences of such meddling cannot be guaranteed.¹¹⁰ As shown, Mao and Liu had to come to terms with the error-prone human calculation of logistical supplies of their armies and cope with the usually conservative, sometimes vulnerable and yet potentially dangerous US-armed enemies. The exhortatory telegrams from Mao and Liu to their generals vividly demonstrate the contradictory role of both men as political leaders and military planners. Mao’s discourse on force-concentrated operations in quick succession was constructed as part of the war atmosphere rather than an act of sheer folly. As a military planner, Mao surely was not a perfect man who was able to design an ideal war plan ahead of time. Helmuth Graf von Moltke once asserted: ‘No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main force.’¹¹¹ The ability to adjust and adapt seems to be more important to military planning.¹¹² This perhaps explains why the party historians of the CCP have been extolling Mao’s virtues for his change of heart over the party’s Manchurian strategy.¹¹³

Mao never would have thought his rhetorical use of the term ‘decisive war’ would prompt later generations to assume that he asked his generals to deliver victory via a single, decisive and climactic battle against the Nationalist elite corps at Jinzhou in November 1945. However, Mao would have agreed that, in a sense, the decisive battle characterisation of his military thoughts acknowledges his courage in making tough decisions. One of Mao’s military treatises written in 1946 nevertheless seems to provide a good summary of his directives delivered at the end of 1945: he asserted that the attacking CCP combat units should not attempt to annihilate ‘all the encircled enemy simultaneously at one swoop’. Rather, they should ‘wipe out the enemy forces one by one’, as this ‘has been a fine tradition of our army ever since its founding more than a decade ago’.¹¹⁴

China without tears?

While his armies halted at the first line of defence at Jinzhou, Du hurriedly flew to Chongqing to meet Chiang on 8 December. Chiang ordered Du to push his armies to the environs of Shenyang, where he would be liaising with the Soviet forces for the takeover of the city. Du would also wage a northward offensive, at Chiang’s behest, to secure the Manchuria–Rehe–Hebei cross-border transport links.¹¹⁵ Meanwhile, the Soviets dropped heavy hints that the Nationalists would be requested to negotiate an agreement with the Soviet forces before advancing troops to cities still under Soviet occupation.¹¹⁶ The Soviets’ attitude forced Chiang to review his troop deployment planning. He began to consider temporarily delaying the deployment of extra troops to Manchuria in mid-December.¹¹⁷

Chiang’s decision leads to a view that he adopted a temporary do-nothing policy on Manchuria, but the plan fell flat and a serious opportunity to defeat the CCP forces in the north-east was lost.¹¹⁸ This assumption is linked to a ‘what-if’ discussion that has emerged in recent years regarding whether Chiang should sent his best troops to Manchuria. The most prominent popular belief is that the Nationalist Manchurian troop surge was Chiang’s fatal decision. Arthur Waldron, in particular, speculates that the better trained and equipped Nationalist armies could have won the civil war in China proper without Chiang’s Manchurian gamble. Had this occurred, Waldron argues, Chiang’s rule in China might have been extended and the subsequent Korean War would never have been fought.¹¹⁹

However, others have suggested that Chiang would have been better off had he committed his troops to Manchuria without delay, as the Nationalists’ armies were unlikely to achieve anything in China proper. One concludes that Chiang’s order to halt the advance of his force after the occupation of Jinzhou was a case of missed opportunity.¹²⁰ In sum, there are disagreements among scholars about what would have been the best civil war strategy for the Nationalists. On one side are those who believe that GMD forces should not have been deployed to Manchuria before China proper was secured. Against this are those who argue that if Chiang had taken early and decisive military action, the GMD could at least have cut its losses in Manchuria.

As surviving historical records attest, the Nationalists and their American advisers had already considered the above two scenarios in the winter of 1945. The opinions from Chiang’s generals and his American facilitators at the time unanimously supported the first view. The US Army Liaison Group based in Chongqing claimed that Chiang’s government was totally unprepared for occupation of Manchuria against the CCP’s opposition. The recommendation from this group was that Chiang should consolidate China proper first before moving the bulk of his forces into the north-east. According to the Americans, the Nationalist elite corps was more than capable of securing North China, if they did not disperse to Manchuria.¹²¹ Wedemeyer was quick to support his subordinates’ China proper first strategy. As the US chief of staff to the generalissimo, he reminded Chiang that the size of the forces sent into Manchuria and North China should not exceed the combined US and Nationalist logistical capabilities. In his memorandum, Wedemeyer noted clearly that the Americans could only maintain ‘a steady flow of ammunition and other equipment’ supplies to five more armies in North China and another army (i.e. in addition to the 13A and the 52A) in Manchuria.¹²²

Although Wedemeyer’s recommendations looked like a deliberate diminution of Du’s earlier call for an urgent increase in the number of GMD troops in Manchuria to ten armies in order to battle Lin Biao’s forces,¹²³ Chiang’s deputy chief of general staff, Bai Chongxi, unexpectedly echoed the Americans’ opinion. Bai, who was believed by some to be the GMD’s best strategist, recommended that the order of priorities in the Nationalist counterinsurgency operations against the CCP should be the Rehe–Chahar areas, the Beiping–Tianjin region and Manchuria.¹²⁴ After discussions with the Americans, the Nationalists came to a conclusion in favour of Bai’s plan: the control of the major rail lines in Rehe–Chahar and the rest of North China should come first and, even if China proper was secured, the GMD could support no more than five infantry armies operating in Manchuria at the same time.¹²⁵

The question is, had Chiang taken heed of his advisers and sent more troops to North China instead of Manchuria, would that have made his armies’ mission improbable a little bit more possible? Available archival materials demonstrate that even Wedemeyer, who lobbied hard for the GMD forces to stay in China proper, did not believe that was possible. In a situation report to Washington, the American stated:

The Generalissimo has asked the United States to move five more armies to North China. I feel that this would not give him sufficient strength to cope with the Communists … I question the ability of the Chinese Central Government to support logistically an additional five armies in that area.¹²⁶

According to Nationalist documents, the situation was much worse than Wedemeyer reported. The CCP combatants had moved to choke off supply lines into Beiping since late October, leaving the Nationalists in a grinding struggle for subsistence. While Huludao and Qinhuangdao were the centres of Nationalist sea-based logistics to the north-east, Beiping became the GMD military’s North China headquarters by the end of 1945 and later the Nationalist Air Force base for airlifting supplies to its forces in Manchuria.¹²⁷ The devastating impact of the blockade spread across the entire Beiping–Tianjin region in December, and the authorities began to ration food to policemen, school teachers and students and were forced to adopt a food price control policy.¹²⁸ The situation in Beiping questioned the wisdom of using resources in China proper to support the GMD’s war efforts in Manchuria simply because its military headquarters and rear logistical base was itself in dire need of food rations and virtually under siege by the CCP. This perhaps explains Wedemeyer’s lukewarm attitude in helping Chiang to increase the GMD troop numbers in North China: he was even less inclined to send additional Nationalist armies to Manchuria and cart supplies to the battlefield.

Chiang’s generals and American advisers were free to make their own comments, but it was Chiang who put words into action. The critics might be right: sending troops to either Manchuria or North China was logistically untenable for the GMD. However, Chiang’s success might be contingent upon how fast Du’s troops could secure the key Manchurian railway lines and big cities. If Du’s forces could enter the major cities soon enough, the Central Bank of China could set up its branch offices there to enhance the circulation of Circulating Currency for the Nine Provinces of the North-East (CCNE)—a local currency specially issued for the north-east. Notably, the GMD government issued CCNE at the end of 1945 as the official regional currency of Manchuria. The currency was to circulate only within the north-eastern provinces under GMD government legislation.¹²⁹ The advice that Chiang received from his bankers was that the value of the GMD-issued currency would be stabilised given that an inter-city commodity money system could be established quickly.¹³⁰ This meant that Du’s armies could use bank notes to purchase food supplies locally and the logistical problems could be at least partially solved. In sum, the control of big cities and major communication lines in Manchuria was important to the war economies of both the CCP and the GMD.

On the other hand, the Nationalist armies were riddled with poor morale and discipline. Many of those who had been previously deployed in Vietnam (where the 52A was before Manchuria) were involved in illegal opium and gold trading.¹³¹ Chiang could either put these combat units through an army reorganisation program or dispatch them straight to Manchuria, where he could gamble them for the highest payoffs on operational success. Chiang chose the latter. He would rather stick to his beating-a-dead-horse approach while he still thought he had an outside chance. Chiang rued that he could not give up the attempt to recover Manchuria, even though he knew that sending the troops in was unlikely to stem the Communist movement in the region.¹³² If Chiang knew anything, it was that the Nationalists were trapped in a passive political position in which they could only halt the troop advance for logistics and diplomatic reasons but by no means could they call off the military campaign in the north-east altogether.

After a month-long recuperation in Jinzhou, Du launched a multipronged offensive on 23 December against the areas where the Soviet forces had already withdrawn. Du ordered a troop contingent to advance in the direction to Shenyang.¹³³ To the north, Du’s armies advanced towards key Rehe towns.¹³⁴ The third contingent of Du’s troops attacked south-eastward towards Yingkou and occupied the port city on 10 January.¹³⁵

While the Nationalist offensive continued apace, Du struck an agreement with the Soviets for a non-hostile takeover of Shenyang scheduled for 15 January; however, as the fighting stretched further, Du did not have enough troops to occupy the city.¹³⁶ Much to Du’s chagrin, although the Nationalists were fighting some poorly trained CCP troops, the enemy resistance was getting stronger all the time. In some combat situations, the Nationalists needed to employ improvised and risky measures, such as using burning sorghum straws, to overcome stiff enemy resistance.¹³⁷ The following chapters will show that the escalation of military confrontation in Manchuria became a threat multiplier to the US-sponsored peace negotiation. Du might have had no idea how to protect his overstretched armies, but the Americans were about to help him with a ceasefire proposal.