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

planes in the morning, bombers at night—and suddenly panic swept the city along with rumors of an imminent invasion. The planes would appear over the Yellow River, which ran just to the north of Loyang, and suddenly thousands who had been engaged in peaceful commerce a minute earlier would be rushing helter-skelter, bumping into each other on the streets, scrambling down steep steps to bomb shelters. “After each lengthening raid, the clean-up squads carried more straw-wrapped bodies through the streets,” Peck later wrote. Business died away. The electricity failed. The schools closed. Prices of real estate went down and those of vegetables up. “The city began to have the shabby, disheveled look I had known in Chungking the autumn before, with tangled wires and scatterings of rubble on the streets, posters and paper windows hanging in shreds” and “the big streets … deserted from dawn to dusk.”
    On May 16, 1941, the Japanese sent 110 planes over Loyang, where they dropped over seven hundred bombs. That afternoon,
    the road to the west was filled with people slowly moving away from Loyang afoot or in carts, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, and automobiles. Over the trees by the road, the long straight snake of dust raised by their passing stretched all the miles from the towering smoke in town to the edge of the hills. In the fields a little distant from the road, their shouting, wailing, and cursing merged into a low, quavering, continuous sound, like the moan of a stricken beast pouring out its blood in a long, fatal stream.
    After the bombing ended, a semblance of normal life returned to Loyang, as did many of the refugees, and Chinese adaptability was partially restored. But the battles near the city and in the mountains across the river left behind an enduring legacy of anger and distrust. People hated the Japanese, and they lost faith in the capacity of the Kuomintang to protect them. Critics of the government were arrested and sent to prison. Newspapers were censored so the feebleness of the central government’s resistance was not publicized, though where it was notwitnessed, it was suspected. The government blamed the Communists, whose armies, it said, had failed to attack the Japanese rear, which it was obliged to do under the terms of theUnited Front. The Communists rejected the charge, but the United Front, never a solid alliance, became ever less united. In the trek out of Loyang, as described by Peck, officers of the KMT army commandeered most of the cars and half the carts, which were “piled with the families, furniture, and files of the provincial capital’s great civil and military bureaucracy,” and this made no small contribution “to the air of hasty, brutish self-preservation which hung over the road in a miasma as choking as the dust.” The prices of food and transport quadrupled; resentment surged as those who could afford it loaded their potted palms on their carts while poorer people carried their necessities on their backs. There were fistfights on the roads.
    All of this was taking place before the United States entered the war, when hardly anyone in the outside world was paying much attention. And though they didn’t know it, the Chinese people faced four more years of war.
    Chinese life was deformed in ways small and big, collective and individual. The heavy toll in casualties taken by the Nationalist armies left the central government severely weakened and depleted and facing a Communist rival that had grown vastly in size and strength during the Japanese occupation.
    Beyond the death and economic loss was the destruction of cities, the mass migrations of people, and the decay of the country’s elites, its professional classes, administrators, civic leaders, merchants, and financiers. Given the country’s poverty and backwardness, many of China’s leading citizens, always spread thin over the country’s vast territory, had lost their money and their confidence. The civil service