《历史学外文翻译》word版.doc

唐山师范学院本科毕业论文外文翻译题 目论抗战时期国民党的敌后游击战学 生韩为静指导教师闫永增 教授学 号061100241015年 级2006级本科专 业历史学系 别政史系唐山师范学院政史系2010年5月Deterioration I939-I945: the MilitaryJohn K.FairbankAfter the fall of Wuhan and Canton in late October 1938, the character of the war and conditions in the Nationalist areas changed profoundly. The fighting progressively entered a stalemate. Especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Nationalist leaders anticipated that the Western Allies could defeat Japan without the necessity of further Chinese sacrifices. After all, they had fought Japan alone for four and a half years already. They consequently devoted less attention to combating the Japanese than to containing the Communists, whose growing power and territorial control augured badly for national unity and stability in the postwar period. Most of all, however, the Nationalist government at Chungking found itself caught in a seemingly irreversible process of deteriorationmilitary, economic, social, and politicalthat left it by 1945 weak and demoralized.When the Nationalists did not capitulate following their defeat at Wuhan in October 1938, the Japanese leaders realized that they had misjudged the Chinese powers of resistance and that the imperial army would merely exhaust itself if it continued to pursue the elusive defenders into the hinterlands. They therefore adopted a new strategy, stressing political means to secure control of China. First, they would consolidate control of the areas overrun since July 1937. They now effectively controlled only some 10 per cent of the territory in North and Central China - primarily the major cities and areas bordering the major railways and highways. They needed to eliminate many pockets of resistance and to harness the productive capabilities of the occupied areas to the economy of the homeland.Second, the Japanese determined to wear down the Nationalists until they collapsed from internal disintegration. They thus simultaneously tightened their economic blockade of the Nationalist areas and began a destructive air war. In the spring of 1939 they seized Nanchang in Kiangsi, cutting the important Chekiang-Hunan railway. In November they landed an amphibious force at Po-hai (Pakhoi) in western Kwangtung, and advanced a hundred miles to take Nanning, the capital of Kwangsi. This was a damaging blow to the Nationalists, for it severed the new railway line from Hanoi over which the Chinese were obtaining fully a third of their critically needed imports. Then, in September 1940 the Japanese occupied the northern part of French Indo-China, closing the important rail line between Hanoi and Kunming. Thereafter the Nationalists were dependent for supplies from the outside world upon the newly opened but barely passable Burma Road, air transport from Hong Kong (which the Japanese were to occupy in December 1941), and the long caravan and truck route from Russia (see map).The Japanese air raids struck indiscriminately at military and civilian targets. Their purpose was less to destroy military installations and factories than to demoralize the population. Virtually all cities in the Nationalist area, including Kweilin, Kunming and Sian, were hit. Chungking, however, suffered most severely. Bombed 268 times during 193941, much of the city was gutted, and many thousands died (4,400 were killed in just the first two days of heavy raids in May 1939).Yet neither the air raids nor the blockade broke the Chinese will to resist. Indeed, the perseverance of the Chungking population remained firm as long as the bombings continued, and wilted only after they ceased in late 1941. The blockade was less than a complete success, in part because the Nationalists in July 1939 had legalized, and thereafter actively promoted, the trade in most goods from areas held by the Japanese. The Japanese were at a loss to stop this trade. They were incapable of guarding every foot, or even every mile, of the more than 2,000 miles of border between occupied and unoccupied China. Many Japanese also actively colluded in this commerce, so that a sizeable but indeterminate part of Nationalist Chinas imports during the war came through this so-called smuggling trade.A momentous discussion by the Japanese cabinet in July 1940 also affected their operations in China. Perceiving that success in China would continue to elude them unless they obtained access to the rich natural resources of South-East Asia, and convinced that the Western powers were preoccupied with the war in Europe, the Japanese leaders agreed to broaden the scope of imperial expansion beyond the China theatre. They hoped, although without conviction, that they could attain their goals in the south by diplomacy. This decision inevitably altered the character of the China war and also led, within little more than a year, to the attack on Pearl Harbor.On the Chinese side, strategic and political considerations had persuaded the Nationalist leadership to wage a war of attrition. Chiang Kai-shek claimed that the Japanese were spreading their resources of men and equipment too thin by advancing across the expanse of China. The longer our enemy struggles, the more he involves himself in difficulties; while the longer we struggle, the stronger and more determined we become. Chiang, like the Japanese, also wished to avoid decisive battles, because he anticipated that the Western Allies would ultimately be drawn into the struggle against Japan. Initially he looked to the Allies merely for material aid and for economic sanctions against Japan. But after Pearl Harbor-news of which was greeted joyously in Chungkinghe expected that Great Britain and especially the United States, with its enormous technological resources, would assume the major burden of defeating Japan. By 1943, the American ambassador to China, Clarence E. Gauss, observed that The Chinese have persuaded themselves that they are too tired and too worn and too ill-equipped to make greater effort, especially when such effort may not be necessary; and that they can sit back, holding what they have against the Japanese, and concentrate their planning upon Chinas post-war political and economic problems.The chief political problem that distracted the Nationalists attention from the Japanese was the growing friction with the Chinese Communists. After the New Fourth Army incident in January 1941 (seep. 665) the united front had virtually ceased to exist. Influential Nationalist leaders most notably the minister of war, Ho Ying-chin, and the party apparatchik, Chen Li-fu-at various times stridently advocated a final extermination campaign against the Communists. Chiang Kai-shek resisted these pressures, in large part because he feared that the Allies would cease aiding the Nationalist army if it became openly involved in civil war. Yet, since mid-1939, he had committed many of his best troops - at various times between 150,000 and 500000-to blockading the Communists base in the north-west.Although both Nationalists and Japanese after late 1938 were content to wage a war of attrition, fighting by no means abated completely. Occasionally the Japanese launched an offensive to attain limited objectives. In June 1940, for example, they seized the important Yangtze River port of I-chang in order to staunch the flow of goods between the rice-bowl provinces of Central China and Chungking and to obtain an air base closer to the Nationalist area. In the summer of 1942, after General James H. Doolittles bombing of Tokyo, the Japanese struck into Chekiang and Kiangsi with 100000 troops to destroy air bases that might be used in future raids against the home islands. Periodically, too, they launched attacks against the Nationalist lines, less to occupy new territory than to ravage the countryside, seize or destroy recent harvests, prevent the Nationalists from amassing potentially dangerous concentrations of troops, or train recent recruits in actual combat. The casualties sustained in these years of so-called stalemate - particularly during the early period were considerable. The Chinese admitted to suffering 340000 dead in 1940: 145000 in 1941; 88000 in 1942; and 43000 in 1943. Yet the battle lines from 1939 to early 1944 were not significantly altered, and the strategic balance between the two enemies was little changed for nearly six years.The Nationalist army during the latter half of the war numbered more than 3500000 men. It was not, however, a united, national army, but a coalition of armies which differed in degrees of loyalty to the central government as well as in training, equipment, and military capabilities. At the heart of this heterogeneous assemblage was the Central Army (Chung-yang-chun). In 1941, it comprised some thirty divisions (about 300000 men) out of a total of over 300 divisions in the entire Nationalist army. As the war progressed, Chiang added to this force so that, by the end of the war, the Central Army counted about 650000 men. Officers in the Central Army in 1937 were typically graduates of the Central Military Academy. There they had received an introduction to modern military techniques, often during the 1930s from German instructors. Political indoctrination had bulked large in their training; officers were intensely loyal to Chiang Kai-shek.Most of the Nationalist forces, however, were direct descendants of warlord armies, commanded by men who had risen to prominence independently of the central government. Their loyalties were therefore conditional and attenuated, and they were jealous and fearful of Chiang Kai-sheks growing power. Lung Yun, governor of Yunnan, for example, resisted central government encroachments upon his provincial power, and provided a refuge for intellectuals critical of the Chungking government. Governor Yen Hsi-shan, commander of the Second War Zone in North China and vice chairman of the Military Council, ruled his native Shansi as an autonomous satrapy. He prohibited units of the Central Army from entering his war zone, and maintained his own political party (the Democratic Revolutionary Comrades Association) as a counter to the Kuomintang. Indeed, since 1941, Yen had even maintained close and amiable relations with the Japanese. Other generals with provincial origins, such as Li Tsung-jen (Kwangsi), Hsueh Yueh (Kwangtung), Yu Hsueh-chung (Manchuria) and Fu Tso-i(Suiyuan) had lost their specifically regional bases, but retained command of armies that were loyal to them rather than to Chiang Kai-shek.The relationship between those non-Central Army commanders and the central government had been altered by the outbreak of war. Throughout the Nanking decade, the power of provincial militarists had been waning. Crucial to Chiangs growing power had been his control of a politically loyal and relatively proficient army. But the destruction of Chiangs best troops at Shanghai, including the bulk of his elite German-trained divisions, caused the military balance within the Nationalist forces to shift back toward the non-Central Army commanders. Chiangs political authority diminished proportionately.Throughout the war, Chiang endeavoured to right the political and military balance between himself and the regional commanders by inserting KMT cadres into the provincial armies and by rebuilding his central forces with newly trained officers and modern equipment. These efforts excited the suspicions and animosity of the regional generals. They complained that the central government discriminated against them by sending their divisions into decimating combat with the Japanese while Chiang held his own forces safely in reserve. They were angered by inequitable allocations of fresh supplies, for Chiang distributed the bulk of new weapons and ammunition, including Lend-Lease equipment from the United States, to his own forces rather than to the less trustworthy provincial armies.Domestic politics, in short, underlay Chiangs conduct of the war, and he took advantage of it to enhance his central power. No modern state, of course - as Chiangs supporters have argued - could easily tolerate subversively independent attitudes among its military commanders. Yet the means that Chiang employed to enhance central government powers may not have been the most efficacious. In any event, the antipathies of the provincial militarists grew keener as the war progressed. In 1944, a coalition of the leading provincial militarists was actually plotting to overthrow Chiangs government. Meanwhile many non-Central Army commanders simply defected to the Japanese. Twelve of these generals defected in 1941; fifteen defected in 1942; and in 1943, the peak year, forty-two defected. Over 500,000 Chinese troops accompanied these defecting generals, and the Japanese employed the puppet armies to protect the occupied areas against Communist guerrillas.One of the deepest flaws in the Nationalist army, exacerbated during the war, was the poor quality of the officer corps. General Albert C. Wedemeyer, senior American officer in China after October 1944, characterized the Nationalist officers as incapable, inept, untrained, pettyaltogether inefficient. This was also characteristic of the non- Central Army senior commanders, most of whom had gained distinction and position as a result less of their military skills than of their shrewdness in factional manoeuvring and timely shifts of loyalty. Even the senior officers who had graduated from the Central Military Academy, however, sorely lacked the qualities needed for military leadership. Most of them were graduates of the Whampoa Academys first four classes during the 1920s, when the training had been rudimentary and had lasted just a few months. By the time they were promoted to command of divisions and armies as their rewards for loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek, their comprehension of military science and technology was frequently narrow and outdated. During the 1930s, these senior officers might have taken advantage of the advanced, German-influenced training in the staff college. By that time, however, they were of such high rank that they deemed it beneath their dignity to become students again.Some of the senior commanders, of course, transcended the system. Chen Cheng, Pai Chung-hsi and Sun Li-jen, for example, stood above their peers as a result of their intelligence, incorruptibility and martial talents. Significantly, however, neither Pai Chung-hsi nor Sun Li-jen were members of Chiang Kai-sheks inner circle. Chiang used their talents but kept them on taut leash, because they were not Central Army men and displayed an untoward independence of mind. Chen Cheng, who was a trusted associate of Chiang, nevertheless spent much of the war under a political cloud as a result of losing a factional quarrel with Ho Ying-chin, the pompous and modestly endowed minister of war.When the war began, lower-ranking officers were generally more competent than their superiors. Between 1929 and 1937, the Central Military Academy had annually graduated an average of 3000 cadets, an about 2000 staff officers had received advanced training. The war however, cut deeply into the junior officer corps. Ten thousand of them had been killed in the fighting around Shanghai and Nanking at the very outset. These losses were never fully recouped, because officer training during the war deteriorated greatly, both from lowered entrance requirements and from shortened courses of study. Indeed, the percentage o officers who were academy graduates in a typical infantry battalion declined from 80 per cent in 1937 to 20 per cent in 1945. Because n army is better than its junior officers, these figures provide a rough index of the deterioration of the Nationalist army during the war.That deterioration was most evident, however, at the lowest levels, among the enlisted men. Chinas wartime army was composed largely of conscripts. All males between eighteen and forty-five - with the exception of students, only sons, and hardship cases - were subject to the draft. According to law, they were to be selected equitably by drawing lots. In fact, men with money or influence evaded the draft, while the poor and powerless of the nation were pressganged into the ranks. Frequently conscription officers ignored even the formalities of a lottery. Some peasants were simply seized while working in the fields; others were arrested, and those who could not buy their way out were enrolled in the army.Induction into military service was a horrible experience. Lacking vehicles for transport, the recruits often marched hundreds of miles to their assigned units - which were purposely remote from the recruits homes, in order to lessen the temptation to desert. Frequently the recruit were tied together with ropes around their necks. At night they might be stripped of their clothing to prevent them from sneaking way. For food they received only small quantities of rice, since the conscripting officer customarily squeezed the rations for their own profit. For water, they might have to drink from puddles by the roadside-a common cause of diarrhoea. Soon, disease coursed through the conscripts bodies. Medical treatment was unavailable, however, because the recruits were not regarded as part of the army until they had joined their assigned units. The total number of such recruits who perished en route during the eight years of the war was probably well in excess of one million.Conscripts who reached their units had survived what was probably the worst period of their military service. Yet their prospects often remained bleak. In the Central Army units, food and clothing were generally adequate. But those so unfortunate as to be assigned to some of the provincial armies - such as those