CHINA’S EIGHTH ROUTE ARMY

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 17, 28 August 1944, Page 25

CHINA’S EIGHTH ROUTE ARMY

Communists Considered Valuable Partisan Force for Allies

By

in the Sydney Morning Herald, July 12, 1944

From Yenan, centre of the Communist-controlled regions in North China, Selwyn Speight visited the Eighth Route Army and concluded that the Chinese Communists are valuable allies in the war against Japan in the same way that the Balkan Partisans are valuable allies against Germany. At Yenan he interviewed the Japanese leader of the Japanese People’s Emancipation League, who expressed the view that the bombing of Japan would affect the morale of the Japanese people, and who expressed the hope that by destroying Japanese militarism themselves the Japanese people would make occupation of Japan unnecessary.

Yenan, directing centre of the Chinese Communists’ areas, stretches from northern Shensi beyond the Great Wall northward, to the Shantung Peninsula and the sea eastward, and to the Yangtze southward. The first foreign correspondents to visit Yenan found the city and surrounding countryside, through which we travelled on horseback and by truck for several days, characterized by an intensive atmosphere of hard work, hatred for the Japanese invaders, determination to defend their achievements against all interference, and an urgent sense of the nearness of an Allied counter-offensive against Japan, in which the Communist armies and guerrillas want to participate to the fullest, and for which they are preparing. The Yenan area—“ Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, and the border region ” —is regarded as the rear base for armies operating behind the Japanese lines,

whose intense activity is attested to not only by local people, but by the few foreign residents such as Mr. Michael Lindsay, son of the famed British savant. Professor A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Mr. Lindsay, who was previously Press Attache to the British Embassy at Chungking, and was teaching in Yengching University, Peiping, at the outbreak of the Pacific War, escaped from Peiping immediately after war was declared, and worked for two years in the guerrilla base of western Hopei Province before coming to Yenan—after crossing many Japanese lines—three weeks ago. A radio network which he helped to set up links Yenan with numerous guerrilla pockets, from one of which is just reported the rescue of two American Psl pursuit pilots by guerrilla Communists of the new Fourth Army after they were forced down behind the enemy lines during attacks on Hankow.

Educational Work We have had an opportunity to convince ourselves of the remarkable effective educational work which has led every soldier, farmer, and workman with whom we —whether literate or illiterate—to know already of the opening of the European second front and its direct bearing on the speeding-up of the offensive against Japan. We have also seen how the predominantly barren north Shensi country, which had not recovered from a series of civil wars, culminating in the Japanese attack on China, has now been transformed into an area of intense cultivation, stock-breeding, handicraft, and industry, which has created sufficient food and clothing to make the Eighth Route Army units among the bestclothed and best-fed troops I have seen anywhere in China. Reclamation of the great expanses of wasteland was accomplished not only by the people, but also by the local garrison of troops who work on the land throughout the summer and train as military throughout the winter. They are now able to feed themselves, and the commander, General Wang Chen, of the Eighteenth Group (Eighth Route Army), who dresses in an old uniform and rope sandals, shabbier than those of many of his soldiers, and who rode with us over more than a hundred miles of this country, explained both the production movement and the military training, which he summed up in the phrase “ We study our enemy.” Japanese prisoners here are not held in camps, but are impressed with the belief that, by helping this Army, they are helping to liberate Japan from the military caste. They are also set the task of duplicating Japanese fortifications for training purposes —including one fort for a garrison of two hundred, which we saw. Even the present Communist Army ration has been reformed on the basis of an Army nutrition chart which was captured from the Japanese and found good after careful investigation. Elsewhere in China we have seen numbers of Japanese trophies kept on exhibition at Army Headquarters. Here,

every soldier carries a trophya Japanese rifle, an officer’s sword, or a pistol which uses captured Japanese ammunition. In the artillery units we saw ten captured Japanese 75’s, which their crews themselves took in Hopei, and whose history they avidly describe. There is no doubt that the armies, which have been largely a mystery to the outside world for five years, are good valuable allies in the war against Japan. Before leaving Yenan after this tour, I interviewed Mr. Shushumu Okamo, who is the most important member of the Central Committee of the Japanese Communist Party and leader of the nonpartisan anti-Fascist Japanese People’s Emancipation League. Some league members are already serving in uniform with the Eighth Route Army as psychological warfare staff and instructors in Japanese methods of war. But Mr. Okamo hopes that next month the first Japanese combat group, under the colours of the Japanese People’s Emancipation League, will begin operations to prove his contention that the Japanese people increasingly realize that their real interests place them on the side of the United Nations against thenown Fascists and that those who already understand this are willing to fight and die for their convictions. When I saw Mr. Okamo, he was full of the Allied air raids on Japan proper, the significance of which was that they started from bases in China from which they could be repeated with regularity. “ The international situation and the Pacific military situation are both widely different from 1942, when the Axis was still gaining ground,” he said. The effect on Japanese morale, therefore, is more serious. The prestige of militarists will tend to fall. People who are already tired will become more anxious regarding the war’s future. This is bound to affect the spirit of the soldiers also. “ In ruling circles the bombings will stimulate the rise of the anti-Tojo group. This group is still not strong enough, but will grow with Tojo’s defeats.”

Anti-war League Regarding the Emancipation League (which has existed since 1938 as an anti-war league, but has now changed its name to cover the new prospects), Mr. Okamo explains that it does not aspire to become the future Government, but merely aims to be the organ of those Japanese who oppose the ambitions of the military caste. Slogans of the league, which has more than two hundred members, many of whom are working here in North China in the guerrilla areas and in Chungking do not demand the downfall of the Emperor and do not attack the great Mitsui and Mitsubishi trusts, but call for immediate cessation of the war and withdrawal of Japanese troops from all occupied territories, including " Manchukuo," and the establishment of democratic government. Regarding the Allied occupation of Japan, the league hopes that the Japan-

ese people will make it unnecessary by destroying • militarism first, but favours it if the people fail to do the job unaided. With Japanese single-mindedness, Okamo’s students are now as devotedly anti-militarist and as convinced of a Japanese revolution as they formerly—they frankly frantically favoured militarism when in Japan. One proof of their convictions is that they successfully detected six spies who were commissioned by the Japanese secret service to "surrender to the Eighth Route Army in order to destroy the Emaricipation League from within. Another sign is that they all want to go back to Japan to carry on revolutionary activity, while scores of the prisoners I have seen on other Chinese fronts invariably said that they never wanted to return home, but wanted to start life anew in China and be forgotten—because the Japanese Army punished and holds up to lasting disgrace any man who has been in the enemy’s hands.