WAR IN CHINA: Eagles in Shansi

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"The Japanese looted indiscriminately and efficiently. Everything of value was stripped and taken away. Telephones, wires, clocks, soaps, bedding, objects of art were collected by the Japanese for transfer to their own supply department. On their own, the soldiers went in for simpler forms of looting. Clothes and food were what they wanted, and they were not very discriminate in their tastes: women's silk garments, peasant cotton trousers, shoes, underwear, were all stripped off the backs of their possessors whenever Chinese were unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of Japanese detachments.

"The Japanese soldiers were caked in mud, chest high; their beards were bristling with two weeks' growth; and they were ravenously hungry. The peasants, in fleeing before the approach of the Japanese, had taken their pigs, cows, grain and other food with them into the hills where the Japanese could not follow. All through the valley, tiny Japanese garrisons were mired in mud, unable to communicate with one another, and slowly starving. When off duty, simple soldiers would sneak out of their garrison posts in twos and threes and rove the countryside looking for abandoned chickens and eggs—many were caught and killed by the Chinese.

"The names of the villages (Liushe, Wangchiachuang, etc.) are meaningless 100 miles away, but in some, every single woman, without exception, was raped by the soldiers in occupation. In villages whose occupants had not fled quickly enough, the first action of the Japanese was to rout out the women and have at them; women who fled to grainfields for hiding were forced out by cavalry who rode their horses through the grain fields to trample them and frighten them into appearance.

"Male villagers were stripped naked, lashed to carts, and driven forward by the Imperial Army as beasts of burden. Japanese horses and mules were beaten to death in the mud; and on any road and all the hills of the valley, one can see the carcasses of their animals rotting and the bones of their horses whitening in the sun. The Chinese peasants who were impressed to take their places were driven forward with the same pitiless fury until they collapsed, died, or were driven mad."

The Chinese counterattacked and fought so furiously that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek gave them a bonus of $20,000, a lot of money in North China.

Sick Men. Behavior of their maddened troops is a source of great shame to responsible men in the Japanese Army and Government. Along his way, White learned some good reasons for that behavior. He was told that most of the Japanese soldiers in Shansi have been there over two years. They have had no furlough, no home leave, not even a Peking weekend.

"The fighting," White wrote, "is nerve-tearing. A Japanese soldier sits in a muddy garrison post exposed to guerrilla sniping; he camps in a muddy town hated by its people; he goes out guerrilla chasing and is probably wounded, perhaps killed. Frequently supplies fail to come through and the unit goes on short mess—or starves.