Sat, Aug 13, 2005 page9

• Elderly Chinese remember the horrors of war against Japan

  • AFP
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  Kang Zhenghua remembers the first time she emerged from an air-raid shelter to see severed arms and legs hanging from the treetops.

  A biology student in Chongqing, China's capital during most of the war with Japan from 1937 to 1945, she eventually grew numb to the horrors of incessant aerial bombing.

  "We gradually got used to the sight of dead bodies," said Kang, now 83 and still living in Chongqing. "Young people don't get scared so easily."

  There was plenty to be scared about. The war between Asia's two largest powers was fought with a ferocity rivaled only by the battles on the Eastern Front.

  No distinction was made between soldiers and civilians, and by the end of the war, some 35 million Chinese were dead or wounded.

  Sixty years ago, the bustling southwest metropolis of Chongqing was known as Chungking and stood as the symbol of free China in its life-and-death struggle with the Japanese empire.

  It was the center of the allied war effort in a vast theater of operations stretching from China across Burma -- modern day Myanmar -- as far west as India.

  But it was also the seat of a deeply corrupt regime, run by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which was slowly losing the fight for the hearts and minds of the Chinese people.

  Kang remembers how Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) visited her school twice to boost morale, but recalls none of the words he spoke.

  Instead, what has stuck in her memory over the gulf of six decades is the hassles of daily life in a world at war.

  With a slight shiver, she remembers how students at Chongqing University lived on a daily diet of watery rice gruel with all-to-easily recognizable mouse excrement. Meat was a monthly event for most.

  "Luckily I was in the biology department, and the boys in my class were the only ones at university who knew how to cook frog meat," she said. "The students in the other departments didn't have that."

  Kang and her classmates typically went to their exams by candlelight from three until seven in the morning.

  "That was the only time of the day we could be reasonably sure there would be no air attack," she said.

  The Imperial Japanese Army, which had occupied much of east China, could not reach Chongqing by land, and instead sought to break it from the air through often indiscriminate bombing.

  `One attack after the other'

  Kang's later husband, Xu Xianggu, a fugitive from the east who enrolled in the engineering department, recalls how Japanese bombers drove the city to the brink of exhaustion.

  "When you were about to eat, they would attack. Before you finished eating, they would attack again," said Xu, also 83 and now a retired professor. "It was one attack after the other throughout the day."

  One of his best friends was killed by a piece of shrapnel during a raid, but Xu still has many fond memories of the war.

  He remembers long hours of chatting with his classmates in the shelters, waiting for air raids that never came.

  Or weekend trips into the countryside, ostensibly meant to rally illiterate peasants to the patriotic cause, but just as much an opportunity to mix with students of both sexes.

  Even so, 60 years later he cannot forget the squalid, undignified side of war.

  "People would carry their valuables -- jewelry and watches -- into the shelters before the air raids," he said.

  If the shelter took a direct hit, it would soon swarm with looters searching the dead bodies, he added.

  It was only after the war that the young couple learned the full scale and horror of Japan's atrocities in China.

  "We didn't know at the time about the biological experiments conducted in the north," said Xu, referring to how Japanese doctors used humans as guinea pigs, cutting open live prisoners to see the effects of germs.

  Other Japanese crimes that became known to the public little by little included the gang raping of women of all ages, burying civilians alive and throwing babies into bonfires.

  In 1944, China's US allies wanted translators to act in areas where troops from the two countries were together fighting the Japanese.

  `They refused to surrender'

  Xu was drafted and assigned to the border area with Burma, humid and mosquito-infested jungle country where small pockets of Japanese resistance still held out.

  The Japanese soldiers were holed up in nearly impregnable bunkers placed at tactical locations, and to avoid bloodshed, US interpreters with loudspeakers tried to persuade them to give up.

  But Japan's warrior code rendered the exercise futile, and instead the Americans and Chinese dug tunnels under the bunkers to blow them up from beneath. Xu never saw a single Japanese survivor.

  "They refused to surrender," he said. "They thought it was the most humiliating thing that could possibly happen to them."

  Xu's military career lasted three months until he was struck down with malaria and sent back to Chongqing.

  Despite its shortness, his holiday in hell served as an eye opener to the rot at the core of the regime that ruled China.

  He saw how Chinese soldiers sometimes went into battle without boots, because corrupt KMT officials had sold military equipment on the black market.

  The shelves of pharmacies in the city of Kunming, a logistical center late in the war, were brimming with medical equipment that should have been used to save lives on the frontline.

  "I was so disappointed. I was thinking, the Kuomintang is that corrupt. It can't possibly have a future," he said.

  The war took up eight years of Xu's life and stole his youth, but some Chinese were never affected. The country was so vast that Japan had to leave large areas to their own devices.

  Once hostilities were over, Xu returned to the eastern province of Anhui, nominally in the Japanese zone of occupation.

  He found to his astonishment that his old home was exactly as he had left it, untouched by the greatest conflict in the history of mankind.

  "During the eight years that the war had lasted, they had not seen one Japanese soldier," he said.
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