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美国史家对豫湘桂会战的描述

已有 7356 次阅读2015-8-31 08:15 |个人分类:历史|系统分类:个人交流| 美国

Yet the most chilling aspect of Jiang Dingwen’s account was his description of the reaction of the local civilian population:
 
During this campaign, the unexpected phenomenon was that the people of the mountains in western Henan attacked our troops, taking guns, bullets, and explosives, and even high-powered mortars and radio equipment . . . They surrounded our troops and killed our officers. We heard this pretty often. The heads of the villages and baojia (village mutual-responsibility groups) just ran away. At the same time, they took away our stored grain, leaving their houses and fields empty, which meant that our officers and soldiers had no food for many days.17
 
Jiang grudgingly admitted that the army’s own behavior may have played a role. “There were certainly a minority of soldiers who did not keep discipline and harassed the villagers,” he conceded, “but it was the lack of civilian administration that meant that they could not compete with the military.” However, Jiang did see how damaging the breakdown of trust had been. “Actually this is truly painful for me to say: in the end the damages we suffered from the attack by the people were more serious than the losses from battles with the enemy.”18

Jiang’s account was self-serving, placing the blame on Tang, Chiang, and anyone but himself. A document submitted to the government indicting the commanders was unsparing in its accusations. The reason for the failure of the campaign in the First War Zone, they declared, was that “Jiang Dingwen and his deputy Tang Enbo paid no attention to political and military matters,” and had instead diverted their time to enriching themselves, thereby encouraging their subordinates to act in the same way. Jiang and Tang’s troops had had various advantages, for instance, Czech weapons that might actually have been superior to some of those used by the enemy, yet they were never properly used. They had taken a cut from the ordinary soldiers’ salaries, the accusation went, and had padded the official rolls with nonexistent soldiers to claim their salaries, so the divisions were actually undermanned.

While Jiang Dingwen was nominally in command, most observers believed that Tang Enbo was the real authority, and his accusers aimed their fire squarely at him. Heroics at Taierzhuang six years previously now carried no weight. “Tang Enbo had the major responsibility for defeating the enemy in central China,” declared his critic, Guo Zhonghuai. “But when the enemy were crossing the Yellow River . . . he didn’t himself lead from the front, but retreated . . . relaxing and taking a dip in the hot springs.” With the lead officer taking a long soak some 400 li away (perhaps 800 kilometers) from the battlefront, the troops scattered and ran: “No wonder they didn’t fire even one bullet.” Tang’s troops, supposedly among the elite of the Nationalist forces, were used alongside civilians to carry the baggage of officials who wanted to escape the combat zone. Tang himself fled, taking with him two telegraphists and about 20–30 personal bodyguards, “running like a rat . . . and completely losing contact with his army.” The accusations sharpened: Tang, they said, had faked reports claiming that he had engaged with the enemy, or was going to attack. ...

The indictment against Tang and Jiang went on. Because the soldiers lacked supplies, they had to “borrow” grain from the farmers, and they were distracted from training by the need to find the grain and mill it. Even when they had done this, the poor quality of the grain meant that they were undernourished, and “their will to fight was exhausted.”20 The relationship between the population and the military was now utterly hollow. When the northern part of Henan fell to the Japanese, the invaders seized much of the grain that had been left in the official government granaries: the million bags of flour captured could have nourished 200,000 soldiers for five months.

Tang’s excuse—that the Henan peasants had been deceived by collaborators and were seizing the Nationalist army’s weapons—was dismissed by Guo Zhonghuai: “Everyone knows that the Henan people are loyal and brave, and even at a time of drought and famine they offered men and grain.” In fact, Tang was right. The locals had simply picked up the weapons that the Nationalist troops had abandoned when they fled, to defend themselves against the Japanese. “Even if there is an Allied victory which changes the war situation, it will still be very difficult to recover the northern provinces and the important area of Henan,” Guo admitted.

...

Everett F. Drumright, one of the US embassy staff based in Xi’an (and a future ambassador to Chiang’s government on Taiwan), had sent an account of the battle to Gauss, who in turn forwarded it to the State Department. Some 60,000–70,000 Japanese troops had been met with only “token resistance,” and the First War Zone was now “shattered,” along with the reputations of Jiang Dingwen and Tang Enbo. “Chinese suffered heavy losses in men, material, and crops. Loss of wheat crop, best in years, most serious loss.” Shaanxi, the next province to the west, now lay open.23 Theodore White also observed all the features that had made the defeat in Henan such a rout—commanders absent from the field, officers using military facilities to evacuate their private property, and the seizure of oxen from the peasants—as well as the result: soldiers being disarmed by their fellow Chinese. “Within three weeks the Japanese had seized all their objectives; the railway to the south lay in their hands, and a Chinese army of 300,000 men had ceased to exist.”24

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