The new Communist military leaders understood clearly that the pattern of Chinese culture must be thoroughly broken before China could again assume authority in the world. With cunning, courage, and great skill, aided by a centuries-old tradition of corruption that lay across China like a gray shadow, they began to break it.
During the time of war with Japan, the Communists sought not to drive out the Japanese, but to survive. When the Japanese departed, they had an army of 600,000 entrenched across North China. Now they began to war in earnest, fighting not only the Nationalists but also for the peasants' minds. From the first, the Communists understood that in a nation almost wholly peasant, only peasants have any political importance.
Within two years, they won not only the war but the peasants' minds. For the peasants would not understand, until too late, that the Communists want-ed not justice for them, but to overthrow the entire fabric of Chinese life.
The popular morality of what the Communist Chinese have done will probably be judged only in the light of whether or not they made China a great power, and only the future will tell that. If they fail, history will condemn them for the enormous suffering they inflicted upon their land; if they succeed, their own history will largely regard them as heroes, even as Soviet history regards Peter the Great of Russia as a hero, or as the French revolutionists or the Irish Sinn Fein, who resorted to naked force and political murder, are looked upon favorably by millions of their countrymen.
In June 1950, the CCF Fourth Field Army, some 600,000 men, Lin Piao commanding, marched to the Korean border to stand ready for any eventuality. During the summer and early autumn, other field armies followed.
Shortly after United States troops crossed the 38th parallel at Kaesong, on 13 or 14 October, elements of the Fourth Field Army began to move south across the Yalu.
The 39th and 40th armies—the Chinese term 'Army' is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Corps; a CCF Army contained three divisions of approximately 10,000 men each—crossed from Antung, Manchuria, to Sinuiju. The 38th and 42nd crossed from Chi-an to Manp'ojin. Over these armies Lin Piao placed the CCF XIII Army Group Headquarters. Artillery and horse cavalry regiments crossed behind them in support.
Three of the Chinese armies deployed in front of the Eighth Army; the fourth took a position in front of the Changjin Reservoir to the cast.
Thus, on 15 October, when MacArthur and President Truman conferred at Wake, 120,000 Chinese veterans were already inside North Korea.
Ten days later, two more CCF armies crossed the Yalu, adding six divisions to Lin Piao's forward forces. Five armies were in the U.S. Eighth Army zone, one to the east in X Corp's zone.
Night after night, all during October and November, CCF armies continued to stream across the Yalu, moving into the deep Korean valleys south of the river.
By rail from Shantung Province came the IX Army Group, Third Field Army, comprising nine divisions. It was reinforced with three extra divisions, giving it a strength of 120,000 men. The IX Army Group moved across the mountains to the Changjin Reservoir area.
By the middle of November, 1950, approximately 180,000 Chinese waited in front of the Eighth Army, while 120,000 lurked in the mountains surrounding Changjin Reservoir on X Corps' flank. From Mukden, in Manchuria, Peng Teh-huai, Deputy CCF Commander, assumed direction and control.
While China broadcast to the world that Chinese 'volunteers' would enter the Korean fighting, under Kim II Sung, the leaders of the CCF never relin-quished control of their forces. And it would have been considerable news to the 300,000 Chinese soldiers massed in the cold valleys of Korea to learn that they had volunteered. Many of them did not even know in what part of the world they waited.
Lin Piao, and the major leaders of the Chinese Communist Forces, were not simple peasant leaders. The vast majority of the CCF generals were grad-uates of Whampoa Military Academy or of Russian schools. They had studied Clausewitz and Jomini and the battles of Cannae and Tannenberg as thoroughly as any West Pointer, and they had been engaged in war for all their adult lives. But if they did not act upon the field of battle as Western generals did, it was because they did not command a Western army.
The hordes of the Red Army were tough and battle-hardened, but they could not read or write. They had no radios, nor did they have much tele-phone equipment. They had no air force, or any massive artillery. They were weak in motor transport. Their arms were a miscellany of United States, Japanese, and Russian equipment. They had very few of the things a European or Western army required for war.
But the hordes of the Chinese Communist Forces were deployed on an Asian battlefield, not Europe. Peng Teh-huai and his field commanders Lin Piao and Sung Shih-lun proposed to use their forces in a manner calculated to take advantage of their own strengths while discounting those of the enemy.
They had three immense advantages: their own minds, trained to war in the vast reaches of the Middle Kingdom, which instinctively thought in terms of fluid maneuver, without regard to battle lines: the hardihood and sturdy legs of their peasant troops, who could travel long miles on very little; and the enemy's complete lack of belief in their own existence.
Many have found it incredible that American Intelligence would never accept the fact that the Chinese were in Korea in force during October-November 1950. There were reasons. Neither MacArthur nor Willoughby believed the Chinese would intervene in force; both believed the Chinese threats were purely diplomatic blackmail. All evidence that they were in Korea broke against this preset belief. Nor was it easy for subordinate officers to go against the ideas of the FECOM commander.
More important, no concrete evidence that the Chinese were in Korea could be put forth. Americans believed it incredible that any army of significant size could cross the Yalu and deploy in Korea without observation by their air forces. Daily American aircraft flew over all North Korea; and no armies were ever sighted.
Above all, in formulating his plan of maneuver to the Yalu, MacArthur believed his air cover could destroy the Chinese if they tried to intervene. This belief dominated his thinking; he expressed it many times. Upon this foundation he laid his whole campaign. Too late, he would find out what Lin Piao already knew—against a Communist army, in primitive terrain, air power could be important, but not decisive.
The example of one Chinese army, which marched from Antung, Manchuria, to its assembly area in North Korea almost three hundred miles away, explains much: after dark, not sooner than nine o'clock, the Chinese troops began to march. Singing and chanting in the manner of all Chinese, they plod-ded south, night after night, for eighteen nights.
And each night, between nine and three, they covered eighteen miles.
When light came, every man, every gun, every animal, was hidden from sight. In the deep valleys, in the thick forests, in the miserable villages huddled on the forlorn plateaus, the Chinese rested by day. Only small scouting parties went ahead by day, to reconnoiter the night's march, and to select the bivouac for the morrow. If aircraft were heard, each man was under orders to halt, freezing in his tracks, until the noise of the engines went away.
In bivouac, no man showed himself, for any reason. Discipline was firm, and perfect. Any man who violated instructions in any way was shot.
It was not only cunning and hardihood, but this perfect march and bivouac discipline that caused U.N. aircraft to fly over the CCF hundreds of times without ever once seeing anything suspicious. Even aerial photography revealed nothing.
It was a feat that Xenophon's hoplites, marching back from Persia to the sea, could have performed. Julius Caesar's hard legions could have done it, and more—the Roman manuals stated that the usual day's march for a legion was twenty miles, to be covered in five hours.
It is extremely doubtful if any modern Western army, bred to wheels, could have matched it. It was almost impossible for Western generals, even those who knew of Xenophon and Caesar, to credit it.
Half contemptuously, American military men spoke of 'elusive' Lin Piao, and of the 'poet' Mao Tse-tung. Mao Tse-tung, Premier of China, had already revealed to the world how his Communist armies operated—how they flowed from place to place, fighting when fighting was profitable, biding their time when it was not. What Mao Tse- tung had written was instructive, and intensely practical for a war in Asia—but because the Chinese wrote in poetic language, not in the military terminology popular in the West, no ambitious second-year ROTC cadet would have dared quote him seriously.
After November 1950, many men would grudgingly learn that the thought behind words is more important
