In retaliation, and to slow the advance, in early June 1938 the Chinese dynamited the great Yellow River dykes, causing the river to burst its banks and sweep across the path of the advancing armies. The surging river carved a new course to the sea across the plains of Honan, drowning thousands of Japanese soldiers, miring armoured vehicles in mud and cutting rail and road communications. The loss of civilian life was massive as the floodwater swept away eleven large towns and four thousand villages. Two million people were left homeless and destitute. The number actually drowned remains a matter of controversy, but figures as high as 325,000 have been given. In military terms the tactic was a success, and the final assault on Hankow was delayed by at least three months. But, embarrassed by the civilian casualties, the nationalist government denied for years that it had deliberately breached the dykes.
As the Japanese pressed forward Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek ordered all industrial machinery in the Hankow region to be dismantled and transported further inland. This was part of a broader strategy to remove population, government, schools and factories from the vulnerable coastal areas to the interior. It was a dramatic move. China’s economic and political life sprang from her great cities on the coast and in the river valleys in the centre and south of the country. The vast provinces of the interior, Szechuan, Yunnan, Kwangsi, Hunan, Shanxi and Gansu, were now to become the base for the fight against the Japanese. Faced with Japan’s better-equipped and -trained armies, Chiang Kai-shek had chosen to use China’s vast territory and limitless supply of manpower to engage the invader in a war of attrition.
In the spring of 1938 Chiang was fifty years old, a professional soldier who had gained international recognition as the leader of the world’s most populous nation. But his control over party and country had never been complete, and was continually challenged. He had entered the army at the age of nineteen, and emerged from the anarchic years that followed the collapse of the Manchu dynasty* in 1912 as a protégé of the nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, generally acknowledged as the father of modern China. Sun Yat-sen was a Methodist Christian who had received much of his education outside China, in Hawaii. In 1912 he forged a number of revolutionary republican splinter groups into the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT), with the aim of overthrowing the old imperial order and creating a modern republic on the European model. Elected as provisional president of the republic of China a year later, Sun Yat-sen found himself powerless in the face of regional warlords, and was forced to resign within months of taking office.
The decade that followed was one of humiliation and anarchy. Lacking any kind of central government, China fell under the control of regional warlords and foreign powers. The two men whose destinies were entwined in what would prove a long and murderous struggle for supreme power emerged from the years of darkness on separate paths to leadership.
In 1921 a stocky young man who had worked as a teacher, a librarian, a bookseller and a journalist joined the new Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. His name was Mao Tse-tung, and at the age of twenty-seven he would abandon his previous careers and become a professional revolutionary.
The following year Chiang Kai-shek was sent to Moscow to seek support and funds for the KMT. He returned to report that communism was simply tsarism under a different name. Russia’s real interest, he argued, lay in sovietising China. In 1924 Chiang became director of the Whampoa Military Academy, a training school for the new class of officer in a national army. It was no surprise that when he assumed control of the KMT after Sun’s death in 1925 he consolidated power in a divided party by breaking with the communists. To enhance his political legitimacy in the eyes of his party he then married Sun’s sisterin-law Soong Meiling in the same year. Meiling’s family were Christian, and Chiang was converted and baptised in 1929. But it was not until March 1938, at an extraordinary congress of the KMT in Hankow, that Chiang was finally accorded the title of Director General. This was the office through which Sun Yat-sen had wielded dictatorial powers. Chiang’s dominance of the party, but not of the country, was complete.
The politics of the nationalist government did not, however, concern George Hogg. He and the Hankow press corps were interested in only one story – the war. The fighting was coming closer as spring turned to summer in 1938, but the conflict was still difficult to cover with any accuracy. The real front line throughout the war was anywhere Japan chose to deploy its airpower. Although thwarted in their advance on the city, the Japanese were able to bomb Hankow at will. Hogg had witnessed the after-effects of artillery and mortar fire in Shanghai. Now for the first time he found himself in the line of fire.
In May, June and July 1938 squadron after squadron of Japanese bombers flew over the three cities in the Hankow complex at heights of between ten and fifteen thousand feet, above the range of Chinese anti-aircraft batteries. The planes flew with perfect precision in parallel lines, and first targeted Hankow’s airfield and then largely, but not exclusively, the poorer Chinese areas of the three cities.
Writing from Shanghai, Hogg had been careful not to alarm his parents with stories about the violent world in which he found himself. From Hankow he began to expose them to the reality of what was happening around him. The adolescent tone of his letters began to change as he adapted to life under almost daily air attack. The golden boy who went to Oxford and the naïve young graduate who left to travel the world had been transformed into a hard-working reporter covering the grisly aftermath of air raids on a rusty bike. On one occasion he followed up a brief agency report that no damage had been done when a Japanese plane released its bombs over open countryside. In fact a small village had been hit. He sent the story, called ‘No Damage’, to the Manchester Guardian.
The little Chinese house of wattle and straw stood alone on a dry patch of ground among the rice paddies. Through years it had seen nothing but the daily lives of its farmer folk and their domestic capital. Men and women scarcely distinguishable, a succession of children, a few pigs, ducks and water buffalo, had been indiscriminately sheltered – from the oldest toothless one down to the latest baby, litter or calf. But on this sunny morning something was wrong with the old house.
Jagged cracks ran slantwise down its walls, and it was perched askew on its raised hillock like an old and disreputable hat. Evidently it had achieved sudden fame, for a crowd of excited people was milling round it, and more could be seen coming from all directions along the paths between the rice paddies.
Nicely arbored between the two projecting wings of the house and almost entirely filling the courtyard, lay the huge carcass of a water buffalo; this seemed to be the centre of interest, but some way off a small group had discovered a pair of hairy hind legs, emerging from a bundle of red crushed meat. Attention was suddenly diverted from these as a woman raised the side of an overturned wheelbarrow to reveal a mangled human body. She held the barrow up for the crowd with one hand, using the other to help her in a mumbled incantation. The crowd peered curiously at the remains and went off in little groups to swap emotions at a safe distance; some of them threw the woman a few pennies before leaving. Meanwhile the mourners’ dirge and the smoke from burning paper money came from a half-open door into the house itself where the body of a woman, perfectly unhurt save that it had no head, was lying fully clothed on the floor. The sight of her unshrouded body, headless and thick with child, excited only a sort of pitying wonder. It was at once too near the ordinary, and too far beyond the limits of ordinary experience, to bring horror.
Hogg was now working hard to win the acceptance of both his fellow journalists in Hankow and his editors in Washington. He was just twenty-three years old, and very inexperienced to have found himself a member of such a prestigious press corps. Like most young men in that position, he probably did not realise the extent of his good fortune. But he certainly made the most of it.
Many of the press corps were veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and they recognised that the Japanese tactics of ‘total