His mother was not convinced – so many men had gone to the front and never come back. And as the Chinese say, a good man is not destined for the army, just like good iron is not for nails. She sent Huang to hide in the mountains with his uncle and twenty other men from the village, but three days later she called him back. The village had a quota of 300 recruits, and the Party secretary would be thrown in jail if he could not meet his target. He had arrested Huang's father and would not release him until either he signed up, or one of his sons did. After a sleepless night, Huang's mother decided to opt for her eldest son – the family had so many mouths to feed and could not do without the father. She packed his favourite rice cakes with ham and a padded jacket that belonged to his father. ‘Take good care of yourself. Quick like a rat and alert like a fox,’ were her last words to Huang.
He had only a week's training, on a winnowing ground. He practised shooting with a stick – every single rifle was needed for the front. Holding the wooden stick, the instructor told them to aim a bit above the target, and he could not understand why. ‘Think of your pee. It's the same idea.’ He got it, but still wasted three of his five precious bullets in the first battle. And he nearly killed himself when he pulled the pin out of his grenade, and stood there watching it fizz as if it were a firecracker. Luckily, the man standing next to him saw it, grabbed it from his hand and threw it out of the trench. It exploded seconds later.
Huang was lucky to survive his first battle. The lack of training accounted for up to 50% of the casualties suffered by the Red Army. The problem was so serious that Liu Buocheng, the Chief of Staff of the Red Army and the Commandant of its academy, felt compelled to address it in a series of articles in Revolution and War. An orderly was sent from his academy to execute a prisoner, but he misfired and shot himself. ‘As a veteran soldier, he was unable to fire accurately at a tied-up enemy! … In battle the White soldiers suffer fewer casualties than the Red Army. Why? Maybe we have braved more enemy fire, but we are also to blame: many of our soldiers do not know how to shoot accurately or use a bayonet.’1
If he had to fight, Huang wished he had more bullets. It would give him a better chance of coming through. He had only five for each assault, with three grenades. The bullets were produced in the Red Army's own workshop in a disused temple. Local craftsmen and a few engineers captured from the Nationalists recycled used shells or melted down old copper coins and wire, moulded them into shape, filed them down by hand, and then filled the cartridge with home-made explosives. Huang had trouble loading them into his rifle; when he managed to pull the trigger, it took a minute for them to explode, and even then they did not go far. Often they just tumbled out of the barrel and landed at his feet. Liu Shaoqi, the Commissar of the 3rd Corps and later President of China, called on the arsenal to do a better job. ‘The bullets were so useless. Over 30,000 of them were duds. The rifles were repaired but they went wrong again after firing a single shot.’2
Huang could also have done with a better rifle, although he knew many soldiers did not even have one or, worse, a whole platoon shared one. His was a locally made hunting gun, quite temperamental. The trigger got stuck so often that he used the bayonet more. Still, it was dearer than his life, at least in the eyes of his captain. One night they were retreating in a downpour. He slipped and fell into a puddle. Hearing the splash, the captain immediately asked, ‘Is your rifle OK?’ Huang felt really angry. Was the rifle more important than his life? He wanted to smash it, but he knew he would be court-martialled if he did.
He kept asking his captain when he could get a proper rifle. ‘Next time we have a victory,’ he said, ‘you grab whatever you like. That is how we always did it before. You know what we call Chiang Kaishek? Our head of supply.’ The captain began to reminisce about the old days. He remembered what Mao had said right before Chiang's First Campaign: ‘Comrades! With enemy guns we will arm ourselves. With captured enemy artillery we will defend the Soviets! We will destroy them with their own weapons, and if they will only keep up the war against us long enough, we will build up an army of a million workers and peasants! We will strip them of their last rifle, their last bullet.’3
The Red Army lured Chiang's troops deep into their base, where the villagers had been evacuated with all their belongings. ‘We needed porters, but none was available; we searched for guides, but none could be found; we sent our own scouts, but they could collect no information. We were groping in the dark.’4 Such was the despair of one Nationalist general in the campaign. Chiang's front-line commander, General Zhang Huizang, was keen to prove himself and pushed the furthest, cutting himself off from the flank divisions. He was ambushed by the Red Army on New Year's Eve; he and 15,000 of his men were captured, and the spoils were enormous: 12,000 rifles, light and heavy machine guns, trench mortars, field telephones, a radio set with its operators, and sacks of rice, flour, ham and bacon, as well as the funds Zhang carried for the entire campaign. There was enough medicine for the Red Army hospital for months. The spoils were carried back to the Red Army bases by horses and seven camels, also taken from the Nationalists. Three weeks later Chiang called off the First Campaign.
The Red Army continued to supply itself with the most up-to-date weapons from Chiang's defeats – 20,000 rifles in the Second Campaign; and more equipment of every kind in the Third and Fourth. In 1933 and 1934 alone, Chiang spent nearly 60 million silver dollars importing state-of-the-art rifles, artillery and planes from America and Europe, but most of these ended up in the hands of the Communists.
All the stories of success in previous campaigns were beginning to trouble Huang, as they had been stuck in trenches for weeks, with bombs falling, shells whistling overhead and bodies piling up. He wondered whether the captain made them up to get rid of the gloom, or they were fighting a new enemy altogether. The Nationalists were just like turtles: they put their heads out of their blockhouses to see if they were safe; as soon as they sensed danger, they retreated. Even when they were under attack, they stayed put and waited for reinforcements.
The captain said these were Chiang's new tactics. ‘He has learned his lesson. Instead of chasing us and falling into our traps, he is trapping us. Think of a spider's web. He is trying to catch us with this net of turtle-shells, but we'll smash them and break through.’ Huang did not think this could be done. ‘We were ordered to launch short, swift attacks on the blockhouses as soon as they were put up.’ He gesticulated with both arms as if he were pointing at his target. ‘They were near, only a few hundred metres. I could even hear the men talking. But every time we attacked, the artillery fire from the turtle-shells drove us back, leaving the fields strewn with bodies. Our covering fire was too feeble.’
The blockhouse strategy was the key. ‘The only task for troops engaged in the elimination campaign is to build blockhouses,’ Chiang Kaishek told his officers. ‘We build our bases each step of the way, and protect ourselves with blockhouses everywhere. It looks defensive but is offensive,’ Chiang wrote in his diary. ‘When the enemy comes, we defend; when they retreat, we advance … We will exhaust them and then wipe them out.’5 He turned Mao's guerrilla warfare on its head, forcing the Red Army to confront his troops in conventional trench warfare. It was a protracted war which he knew they could not win – they simply did not have the resources and manpower to compete. ‘The Reds’ areas are only 250 square kilometres. If we can push on one kilometre every day, we can finish them off within a year,’ Chiang concluded confidently.6
Chiang insisted that every battalion build at least one blockhouse a week. Initially it was one every five kilometres, but when the Red Army broke through, he demanded that the distance between the blockhouses should be no more than one kilometre. ‘Anyone who breaks the rule will be court-martialled without mercy,’ he warned. Half way through