Thanks Biermkr, my Great Uncle was a veteran of that War and also a veteran of the Long March of 1935. He suffered many illnesses, and severe malnutrition due to hypothermia and lack of food while the Red Army crossed the Great Snowy Mountains. There was so little food during that excruciating march that the soldiers would try to drink water that had been boiled with rocks and soil, hoping to get at least some minerals. More than half of the army died during the campaign and out of those, more died from frostbite, disease, and malnutrition than from combat with the Guomingdang Army.
After 1935, Japanese hostilities began to escalate at an alarming scale. In the spring of 1937, months before the Luguochiao incident, the warning bells have already sounded. Japanese warships and planes shelled Shanhaiguan, killing many innocent civilians. However, the Zhongyang Zhenfu (Guomingdang) paid little attention to these aggressive acts because their high command apparently believed that the Communist Party was a much greater threat than the Japanese. In fact, General Chiang Kai-Shek actually planned to ally with the Japanese and use the combined forces to defeat the CCP and finally, divide China between the Guomingdang, and Japan. Since 1927, he held regular summit meetings with Japanese diplomats, hoping that they would join his side. Little did he know that the vicious hound that he tried to train to bite in his favor would come back and tear massive chunks of flesh out of him.
On September 18th, 1937, Japanese troops swarmed from Manchukuo Province into the mainland, backed by overwhelming armor and aerial support. Within days of fierce fighting, over 6 entire divisions of Guomingdang military forces securing the border were wiped out. At Luguochiao, the 29th Army held off the Japanese for three bloody days, before they were broken, and the survivors scattered into the mountains. Then came Nanjing, the atrocity that shocked the world, the orchestrated and cold blooded massacre of over 300,000 innocent civilians and disarmed Chinese army troops at the capital city of the Guomingdang regime.
When the Japanese assault reached Beijing and continued to push west, the CCP in Yunan decided that it would wage a full scale war against the aggressors, despite the fact that they were almost completely unprepared. The Red Army was now divided into several different field army groups. The 8th Route Army commanded the north, while the New 4th Army took up positions in the southern provinces. Also the uniform of the regular field army was changed to resemble the standard attire of a railroad worker, since most of the Red Army soldiers were heavy industry veterans before they joined the Communist Party. However, what the CCP really focused on was the creation of an elite corps of special operations and tactical agents, trained to carry out rescue missions, espionage, and assassinations behind Japanese lines.
My Great Uncle was offered a position as an agent since he has been a veteran of the campaign since 1927. However, he chose to fight on the front lines and wear the grey uniform, he was especially skilled with the broadsword and he offered not only to command the men on the field, but to train new recruits on martial arts and swordsmanship.
There were actually more underground agents than there were soldiers in the field units during the war. Most of these agents were stationed in large cities, places with high Japanese covert activity. Communication by telegraph is extremely dangerous, so tehse agents communicated with the headquarters at Yunan through a messenger service. They could be anything, coolie wagon pullers, sreet vendors, and runners disguised as tramps and vagabonds. Using such a network, the agents established a strong communications network with the top CCP war planners such as Lin Biao, Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai, and Mao Zedong. The messages traveled slowly but it was extremely effective. Capture was almost impossible unless a member of the underground turned traitor and told the Japanese about the goings-on.
With such a division of operatives scattered almost everywhere, not even the Japanese high command living in luxury in large cities such as Shanghai and Wuhan, surrounded by bodyguards were safe from the war. Assassinations were daily, it was just a matter of how many were killed each day. By 1942, it became so frustrating for the Japanese war cabinet at home, that they were forced to transfer almost all of their best commanders from the Phillippines, the Pacific Islands, and elsewhere to mainland China to deal with the insurgency there. So many of their most valuable officers were killed in China that the top brass, including Hideki Tojo himself, had no choice but to continue sending their limited number of highly trained commanders there. At almost the same time, the United States military began to engage the Japanese forces in the Pacific, but Hideki Tojo chose to deal with the Chinese first.
What made the CCP operatives even more successful was that the general population resented both the Japanese and the Guomingdang and after seeing that the Communists were actually campaigning to preserve the nation and expel the invaders, most of the peasants turned to help the CCP. Millions of people, including the shoe-shiner boy right down the alley of Chenghuang Miao in Shanghai, is a potential agent. They would tell the operatives of the latest Japanese troop movements, or the sightings of a high ranking officer. Within hours, the guerilla units would spring into action. Suddenly a convoy of trucks rumbling down a dusty country road was riddled with a vicious hail of machine gun fire and grenades. By the time the main army arrived, the guerillas are already gone. However, each detachment that were sent into the countryside to locate the insurgents would be eliminated, one by one, over the next few days. The Japanese did not know what was happening, for the first time since they landed in China, they began to show genuine fear.
At the same time an army unit in Huabei was being ambushed, 5 or more Japanese officers in Shanghai might be assassinated. The activities of the officers directly linked to the field operations of various units elsewhere were carefully tracked by CCP operatives in those areas. The operatives in these rural areas would transmit the messages to the high command at Yunan. In turn, Yunan would then send orders to agents in Shanghai and Suzhou to carry out hits on 'named officers' within the primary report.
Sometimes, the operatives went in teams to carry out missions. Attacks on military compounds were especially dangerous, since armed guards were everywhere. Usually disguised as vegetable sellers or farmers, a team of operatives would stake out the compound for hours, keeping tabs on the number of guards and movement into and out of the compound. Finally, as dusk fell, the operatives would aim their guns. Usually, these skilled marksmen would decide upon taking out the armed guards, one to each, meaning that one single operative would focus on one enemy guard. 7 operatives would take aim at 7 separate guards. Once the order to fire was given, the volley would cut down all of the enemy at once, with brutal and unsurpassed accuracy and efficiency. Once the gates are clear, the operatives would go in, finding the path of least resistance, and clear all rooms and pathways on their way, and take out the intended target as fast as possible.
Plans of escape were always the main priority in these missions, as the agents were eqipped with various tools of confusion and panic just in case they were threatened to be surrounded. Grenades was a favorite, but skilled marksmanship is their main weapon. That is the reason they were armed with semiautomatic pistols and revolvers rather than Thompsons and MP44s. Making each shot a killing shot is what these agents were trained from the beginning. Ammunition is costly and too valuable to waste in wild-firing.
Lastly, the cyanide pistol was perhaps one of the most feared weapons during the War of Resistance. Most of the high ranking enemy killed in Shanghai and elsewhere were killed by covert agents acting solely instead of coordinated guerilla warfare and tactical missions. Even a convoy passing by a seemingly abandoned building is prone to a devastating attack. The little primer operated pistols still packed skin-penetrating power at over 25 -50 yards, depending on the thickness of the enemys' uniforms. Once the pellet comes into contact with blood, it is usually over. The cyanide acts within seconds. By the time an officer realizes that he had been 'pin-pricked', he is usually toppling over, retching and choking in agony and bleeding from the nose and eyes.
Whenever a field army commander carries out an act of cruelty, such as the massacre of entire towns, or the torture of women and children, or is involved in biological warfare campaigns agents would relay all possible information to Yunan, where the top brass would then orchestrate the extermination of that officer.
When the CCP first began to use these weapons, the Japanese were bewildered. They could not find out why so many of their members were dropping dead all over the road, and in their offices. Soon, autopsies revealed that all of the dead were in fact, killed by cyanide poisoning, but they were not sure how they came into contact with the deadly toxin. Attempts to safeguard their food and water and alcohol supply were useless, the poison was not put into their drinks at all. And whenever one finally realized that he had been shot with something small, he is already suffocating, and could not communicate the fact to the other officers gathered around him.
Any CCP operative captured by the Japanese endured perhaps the most horrific tortures ever inflicted upon human beings in the history of warfare. The Japanese were almost maddened in their attempt to find out why so many of their commanders were dying off, the more frustrated they got, the more brutal they became. Entire towns being burned alive or placed in barbed wire pits and infected with plague bacteria were not uncommon, as the Japanese used all methods possible to force the civilian population to give up covert agents and guerrillas hiding amongst them.
Such brutalities only strengthened resistance against them, and more and more people joined the guerrilla movement. Some individuals like the hero and marksman Ling Jienfong took up arms against the Japanese on their own terms, not affiliated with any CCP or other resistance unit. Ling Jienfong was especially skilled with his two pistols, and his favorite method of attack was to ride his horse straight into the midst of a Japanese encampment, firing left and right, usually at one shot one kill ratios, before riding off into the night again. He was not affiliated with the CCP and the only accounts of his missions were recorded in his diary entries. According to his diaries unearthed from their hiding place by the Chinese government in the 1990s, he had amassed over 300 enemy kills over a particular 1 year period. From 1940-1944 he has killed over 700 enemy soldiers and officers. Always operating by night, always riding by night, always as fast and elusive as a ghost. Ling Jienfong died before the war ended, but even to this day, historians were not sure how he died. Some say he was killed in action, but the most probable cause of death was probably cholera or typhoid fever, since his last entries often talked about a debilitating illness, and high fever.
Like Ling Jienfong, there are so many unnamed heroes who perished during the war. However, after the liberation of China by the Communists in 1949, throughout the Great Leap Foward and the Cultural Revolution years, these unnamed heroes were seldomly discussed, since the top priority of the new government was to rebuild the war ravaged nation and focus aid and benefits for it's citizens. However, after the Cultural Revolution, when Comrade Marshal Deng Xiaoping came into power in the 1980s, the stabilization of the nation is complete, and more time can be put into historical and archival research. So much information was unearthed, that historians weren't sure of how to broadcast their findings to the public. Since the late 1990s to today, a wide variety of stunning and emotional, often heart-wrenching TV series were made, based on the unnamed heroes of China during World War II and the Motherland Liberation War of 1946-1949, and the unspeakable horrors and tests of the soul and body that they faced, as well as their success in fighting and destroying the enemy. I wish I could put up some of these TV serials up here so I can share them with everybody, but I am not that good at computers, perhaps someone can enlighten me.
Today, if you go to Beijing, and enter the People's Liberation Army Museum, in one corner of the exhibit on World War II military campaigns, rests a velvet covered table. On that table is a tiny artifact that saved so many lives during the war and created such a huge impact, although most historians outside of China seldomly know about it. It looks like a pistol, in fact, it is a projectile weapon, although it is tiny, so tiny it might pass off as an odd-looking cigarette lighter of the 1930s, but the missions it carried out is tremendous and decided the fate of a nation. There, on it's velvet table, it sits, every night, waiting for the dawn of the new day when people of all ages could come in, look at it, hear it's stories being told by an orator, and learn history from their visit. Hopefully, they might meet some veterans from the War as well, such as my Great Uncle, and learn about things that even college level classrooms do not fully teach, or even understand.
Somewhere outside, the sky is beginning to turn blue, silhouetting the massive towers of Tiananmen Square and the Renmin Dahuae Chang. In the predawn silence, a lone bugler blows a long and beautiful note. From the gates of Tiananmen, right underneath the portrait of Comrade Mao Zedong, a company of People's Liberation Army soldiers marched, slowly, solidly, and firmly, carrying in their gloved hands, the sacred Five Starred Red Flag.
Within minutes, that flag would be flying high in the cool northern breeze. A new day has began.................................................................
For us, the human race to succeed in conquering both evil within and outside of us, and truly succeed in our quest for freedom and freedom for our future generations, the continuing study and research of history is a priceless goal. Without understanding it, we would wallow in darkness forever.
WEI DA DE ZHONG HUA RENMIN WANSUEI!!!
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