Worse than Hell
‘The War of Dragons: China 1948-1953’ by Wu Long
The very word ‘Shanghai’ still haunts America today. Though it was planned to take the city in 1951, the sudden, overwhelming attack of the Red Guards put things on hold. Eisenhower spent the interim fortifying and improving his position … but the Chinese did as well. There were roughly six million people in the city when the war started, but bombing and famine had already taken a toll when the first UN and ROC soldiers reached the outskirts of the city on February 25th 1952. They were shocked at what they found. It seemed as if the whole of the PLA had camped in the city, with every brick in the metropolis seeming to have its own defender specifically for the task. The response was to flatten the city with more and more naval and aerial attack, but this just made the city even more of a nightmare to traverse. Mao, having been stung by the failure of the Qingming Offensive, had resorted to his new plan: fighting to the last Chinese. The jokes he made in the past about China’s population now became a terrifying reality. He ordered that Shanghai become ‘The Graveyard of the West’. Many of his subordinates were getting worried by his increasingly erratic behavior, which seemed much more motivated by revenge and holding onto his position than any sort of informed military strategy. Shanghai was a meat-grinder, the generals argued, at a time when the home front was growing restless from famine and bombing. Mao overruled their concerns, sending literally millions of Chinese men and boys across the Yellow River, into the depths of Hell that had once been the greatest city of China. “We don’t need to win,” Mao boasted, “all we need to do is bleed more.”
Even Eisenhower was baffled as to what Mao was doing. He knew that countless streams of men were flowing into the battle; but men did not simply materialize out of nothing. Mao was taking troops out of other areas of the map, leaving the west of China in particular exposed to further advances. As if to illustrate this, on March 7th, the first crossing of the Yangtze began, with Chungking taken on May 1st. This represented a serious strategic failure by the Communists, but Mao continued to pour more and more men pointlessly into the depths of Shanghai, sending human wave attack upon human wave attack over the last wave of corpses before them. While the battle still haunts Americans to this day, it’s the Chinese who remain most traumatised by it. The sufferings and heroism of the Red Chinese in this battle were even lauded in the darkest nights of Chiang’s dictatorship in plays, novels and films (though with the inevitable condemnation of their sociopathic superiors, which was hardly an invention of Fascist propaganda). But just like Stalingrad, Mao would not let the city fall, holding onto his Verdun strategy, even as the city was obliterated street by street. Rommel, who well knew the lessons of Stalingrad, held the flanks and made sure no one could break in and surround the UN forces, which were roughly 50% Kuomintang, 25% American, 10% Italian and 15% from other countries sworn to Chiang’s defence. On August 3rd, Rommel crossed the Yangtze and made his way to the coast to cut off any further arrival of Red Chinese. Rommel thought that the troops would pull back in face of the onslaught and try to retreat. Instead, Rommel, Eisenhower and even Patton were appalled by what they saw: as Rommel approached the Sea, Mao sent
more troops into the incoming encirclement. It wasn’t even to fight back Rommel, as they were sent south into the destroyed metropolis. The plan was, as Mao explained, to have a force that would bleed the West out, and the best way to ensure the army would fight like that was to “have the Sea at their backs”. The political commissars were ordered to shoot anyone who tried to surrender or retreat, so most units fought to near destruction. Finally on September 10th, after appalling carnage had been wrought on the world, Shanghai was declared secure.
Though the word of the Soviet Holocaust had raised a gigantic outcry, Shanghai had been a brutal snap to sobriety. The UN forces had suffered 250,000 casualties, mostly from the Kuomintang. However, in this one battle, 40,000 GIs would perish, far more than any other battle in the history of the American armed forces – Patton reportedly had to have the numbers repeated to him he was so shocked. But perhaps they would have felt better if they knew the full scope of deaths on the Communist side. Though there were wildly different reports at the time, most historians now agree that the casualties on Mao’s side were close to one and a half million. Including civilian deaths, the total number of casualties from the battle is usually estimated at two million people, making it the bloodiest battle in all of human history. Shortly after the battle, Eisenhower would have a heart attack from the amount of stress he faced in the field – though he would recover. That would finally give Douglas MacArthur his opportunity to come into the conflict, though he would ultimately only be involved in a few operations until the armistice, notably securing Nanking the day before the fighting ceased. Meanwhile, the loss of Shanghai further eroded Mao’s reputation, although it was obviously compounded by events elsewhere in the country.
On August 14th, buoyed by support from Chiang, rebellion sprang up in Xinjiang. The Muslim populace was secular and distant enough not to resolutely hate anything Western due to Israel’s victory in the First Arabian War, and they also resented Mao’s rule. The famine from Mao’s failed agricultural policies had left bitterness in all directions, but in the vast emptiness of Xinjiang, the hatred was allowed to foster. With enemy troops taken from administering the region to be sent to certain death in Shanghai and their own men armed with guns routed through Tibet, the Xinjiang populace rose in rebellion, and a successful one at that, quickly seizing Ürümqi by August 17th. By now, panic had begun to set in among Mao’s generals, who pleaded for men to be retrieved from Shanghai so that they could help with the conflict in Xinjiang. Mao said it could be resolved later – but of course it never was. Mao was convinced that whatever else, Stalin would not allow him to perish. Of course, he didn’t realise what was around the corner.
‘Patton: The Man’ by George Wallaby
Coming into the 1952 election, who was going to win wasn’t a question: everyone knew it was going to be Patton. It was so obvious that Patton joked that even if he died he’d still get at least 300 electoral votes. What observers were most interested in was: who would come in second? The main contenders for the honour were the Democrats and the Freedom Party. Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey, who had wisely decided against running for Senate in 1948 and thus avoided the obliteration that befell most of his colleagues, represented the former. It was also fortunate as he was low-profile enough that McCarthy hadn’t dragged him before a committee to publicly humiliate him. The Democrats by now had been reduced mostly to a regional party in the Rust-Belt, only without the ironclad control of their home-region that the Freedom Party boasted. They were by now mostly made up of Union loyalists and African-Americans. It had been crippled by the loss of funding, party division and a sense that it was finished as a political movement. The goal of the Democrats was to try and reassert their national position.
The Freedom Party, equally as determined to get second place in the Presidential election to solidify themselves as the main opposition to the Republicans, would nominate the Governor of Alabama, Bull Connor. A former baseball announcer, Connor would quickly rise through the ranks of politics following the expulsion of the Democrats from the South and became a leading figure in the party. He had passed publicity grabbing measures as governor, infamously banning ‘Communism’ until being informed by the Supreme Court that his ruling had no Constitutional backing – a ruling he was sure to demand a court overhaul for. The Freedom Party stood in every state, but Connor and leading figures only campaigned in the states claimed by the Confederacy during the Civil War. This wasn’t even enough to win the election, but that wasn’t the point. The goal was to ensure that the Freedom Party became a self-standing movement. Virginia, Patton’s birth state, would become a particularly contentious area owing to its sympathies with Connor’s pro-segregation message.
With the only two major opposing parties either considered a den of traitors or a nest of bigots, Patton was considered the only choice for moderate Americans. A Gallup poll in August 1952 recorded Patton as being on 60%, with Connor and Humphrey on 20% each (though in terms of the electoral college, Connor was crushing Humphrey). Patton paid little time to his opponents, focusing his campaign on the rebounding economy and progress in China. Connor condemned Patton for ‘not being aggressive enough’ in China and for ‘leaving the working class behind’ in the current economic growth (by which he naturally exclusively referred to the White population). Humphrey condemned the erosion of Civil Liberties under Patton and proposed a ‘New New Deal’, which observers were apt to point out was likely to fall afoul of the new Balanced Budget amendment. Nevertheless, it was a mostly quiet campaign with very little serious disruptions. That was until a pair of October surprises grabbed the attention of the world: one in the darkest halls of the Kremlin, the other in the darkest regions of the South.
The Death Spiral: Stalin 1941-1953 by Alexi Ivanovitch
Upon the revelations of Stalin’s treatment of the Jewish population, the dictator’s mental health deteriorated further. He ordered another round of purges, murdering yet more members of the Poliburo, including but not limited to: Alexi Kosygin, Nikolay Shvernik, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrey Andreyev and Nikolai Bulganin. In the regional SSRs, sometimes as many as 70% of the members who existed before the revelations were dead before Stalin’s time had come. Upon the arrest of Leonid Brezhnev, just weeks before he was appointed to the central committee, he reportedly sighed in relief despite the obvious punishment that awaited because, “now I don’t have to worry about whether or not it will happen anymore”. Observers reported that he was indifferent at his trial, taking his execution with as much fear and apprehension as if he was waiting for a bus to arrive. That was what Stalinism had created by 1952 – it had created a culture where fear and murder were so common that people looked forward to their deaths as a means to escape the hell that Stalin had created.
The harvest had likewise been poor, and with resources tight and being sent to China to be destroyed by American bombs, everyone knew it would be a hard winter, and one without foreign trade. With 10% of the Eastern Bloc’s population in some form of work camp by the end of the year, productivity was as low as it had been during the worst days of the war. Stalin had met all of this with cold indifference, which is what makes the events of September 28th all the more interesting. That was the day Mao had sent a letter to Stalin, saying that the situation in Xinjiang was troubling. Mao asked if it could be possible Stalin could send some fifty thousand “volunteers” to aid in the subjugation of the Xinjiang Rebellion. Then Stalin lost his temper. In full view of Molotov, Khrushchev and Malenkov (in which the foremost former recalled that he was sure they were all dead as Stalin would kill them in a fit of rage), Stalin cursed Mao for his military failures. He even went as far as to suggest that Mao had been a Western agent sent to suck out his resources and leave the USSR weak. Stalin got more animated with every second, getting redder and redder, until …
Molotov was the first to react, rushing to Stalin just after he fell to the floor. Khrushchev called a doctor. Medics arrived instantaneously, as Stalin had needed a lot of medical attention in recent months and years due to stress. They quickly took him to a hospital, despite the bad signs. Finally, on the morning of September 29th, they had their report: Stalin’s condition had stabilized, but he had entered a coma and they were unsure how long he would be in that condition, or if he’d even wake up. As Molotov recalled, “I thought it had been dangerous to deal with Stalin before … now I realised we were in the middle of something far more dangerous than we could ever have imagined. If we had been in hell, now we were somewhere even worse.”
