With Iron and Fire (A Reboot of Superpower Empire: China 1912)

[MrP]

Where are the footnotes?

Oops

There, mistake corrected. Thanks for pointing it out, old boy!

 

[Master Xion]

Awesome update

I think I said this on the As One Star Sets,Another Rises and House of the Rising Sun threads,but today my Mother was diagnosed with Cancer.If any of you guys believe in anything,please pray for her and if you don't believe in anything please keep her in your thoughts.

 

[abc123]

Great update.

 

[abc123]

Awesome update

I think I said this on the As One Star Sets,Another Rises and House of the Rising Sun threads,but today my Mother was diagnosed with Cancer.If any of you guys believe in anything,please pray for her and if you don't believe in anything please keep her in your thoughts.

I will pray for your mother.

 

[Master Xion]

Thank you.

 

[La Rouge Beret]

I have always enjoyed this TL and it was one of the reasons that I started to post on AH.com.

Great to be able to enjoy a classic TL once more.

 

[MrP]

PART 2:

JOURNEY TO THE WEST



Ten Thousand Homes in Far Shandong (I)​

Have you not heard how in far Shandong
Two hundred districts lie
With a thousand towns and ten thousand homes
Deserted, neglected, weed-grown?
Husbands fighting or dead, wives drag the plow
And the grain grows wild in the fields.

—Du Fu, “The Chariots go forth to War”, circa 756.


From Wounded Dragon: Foreign Imperialism in China 1839-1945 by Kevin C. Smith, 1994


As encroachments on Chinese sovereignty went, the Kiautschou Leased Territory was a recent one. Although Germany had long coveted a sphere of influence of its own in China, it had to wait until 1897 for the opportunity to present itself. Already in 1860, a Prussian expeditionary fleet had explored the region around Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong, and after travelling to the region in 1868 and 1871, the geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen had recommended the bay as a suitable location for a German naval base in China. Further visits by Rear Admirals von Tirpitz and von Diderichs in 1896 had resulted in even keener German interest for Qingdao’s strategic potential. Then on November 1, 1897, two German Catholic missionaries were very conveniently killed by the Big Sword Society (a local self-defense militia) in southern Shandong, providing Wilhelm II with the pretext he had been waiting for. Overruling his chancellor and admiralty, who both urged caution, the Kaiser sent Diederichs—by then promoted to admiral—instructions to “proceed immediately to Kiautschou with entire squadron”. Two weeks later, on November 14, three German warships entered the bay and disembarked an expeditionary force which swiftly overran Chinese defenses; they were joined in January by a marine battalion. In a textbook example of gunboat diplomacy, the fait accompli was formalized by a treaty signed the following March, by which China granted to Germany a 99-year lease on the Jiaozhou Bay—a territory amounting to 552 km2 and populated by some 83,000 inhabitants, to be surrounded by a neutral zone of a 50-km radius (in which any intervention of the Chinese government required German approval). For good measure, Germany also demanded exclusive rights on all coal mines in Shandong, as well as the concession for a railroad to be built between Qingdao and the city of Jinan. On April 27, 1898, Kiautschou was officially proclaimed a German protectorate. Once again, the Chinese saying “When the missionaries show up, the soldiers aren’t far behind” had proved true; and whether or not holy martyrdom had earned the two clergymen a treasure in Heaven, it had certainly earned their earthly Kaiser a handsome treasure indeed in the Son of Heaven’s backyard.

The German landing at Qingdao, 1897.​

To their credit, the Germans, who intended Kiautschou to be a “model colony”, did a remarkably thorough job of developing the leased territory. This may have been due in part to its being put under the jurisdiction not of the Imperial Colonial Office, but instead that of the Imperial Naval Office, and given a streamlined chain of authority, with the key administrative departments under the governor’s direct supervision. Qingdao was given a modern urban layout and state-of-the-art infrastructures, including complete electrification and a water purification plant; in 1910 the railroad to Jinan was completed, linking the city to the Chinese rail network and, via Beijing and Harbin, to the Transsiberian—allowing rail travel all the way to Berlin. Several German banks opened branch offices, the most prominent being the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank. The mildly continental climate allowed the building of houses in the German style, giving the place the feel of a Bavarian town somehow transplanted on the shores of the Yellow Sea; it rapidly became a fashionable summer resort for Western expatriates from Shanghai eager to escape the latter city’s humid heat. And of course, before long the leased territory boasted its own brewery, thus introducing beer to Chinese palates. By 1911 Qingdao was the fourth busiest seaport in China. The 1913 edition of the Deutscher Kolonialatlas und Illustriertes Jahrbuch by Sprigade and Moisel provides the following data:

Size: The protectorate includes the entire water body of Kiautschou Bay up to the high water mark, furthermore the northern and southern promontory at it's inlet up to suitable ridges (46,6 respectively 461,5 square km), as well as the islands located within the bay and in the sea off the bay (43,6 square km). The total land area amounts to 551,7 square km (roughly the size of Hamburg). In addition a zone has been established within which the Chinese government cannot implement any reform without German approval; the border of this line is 50 km distant from the protectorate; this zone covers roughly 1/2 the Kingdom of Saxony.

Population: According to the last census undertaken in 1910 34,180 Chinese live within the city limits of Tsingtau (in the years 1911 and 1912, because of the revolution, many Chinese have immigrated, so that the census in July 1913 counted 54,213 (an increase of 56 %) and (except military personnel) 2,069 Europeans in 1913. Another 1,621 Europeans in 1910, as compared to 1,531 in the year 1907. To these, a number of Japanese have to be added. The population of the rural district earlier has been estimated at 100,000, but it is at least 161,000; the population of the 50 km zone is unknown. Including military personnel and the population living on water, the city of Tsingtau has a population of over 60,000.

Morphology And Hydrology: On the northern promontory the Lan-Schan, up to 1,130 m high. Almost the entire peninsula of Schantung is covered by a 600 km long mountain range; it is separated from China's other mountain chains by a large plain, and by another plain connecting Kiautschou Bay with the Gulf of Tschili it is separated in two. The protectorate lacks navigable rivers. The hinterland borders on the Hwangho.

Climate: Highest temperatures 33 degrees Celsius, lowest minus 11 degrees Celsius. Average annual rainfall over 500 mm.

Flora: Cultivated plants: grain, beans, potatos, tobacco, fruit trees, also cotton. Forests, because of Chinese maladministration, destroyed. The Germans reforest the area near Tsingtau; the Chinese learn reforestation.

Fauna: The Kiautschou area has few animals. In spring and autumn many migratory waterfowl pass by. Attempts to introduce European domesticated animals failed so far. Cattle raised here are also exported.

Minerals: The Schantung-Bergbau-Gesellschaft (Shandong Mining Company) began to work the Wei-hsien coal deposit on October 1st 1902. The first coal train arrived in Tsingtau on October 30th 1902. Ever since, the exploitation of the Wei-hsien coal field progresses at the pit Fang-Tse. For the processing of the coal, a mechanical separation apparatus has been established. A second pit, Minna Schacht, located ca. 70 m distant from Fang-tse, has been opened. Work on the establishment of a second main hauling pit, Annie Schacht close to the station of Fang-tse has begun in 1904. In the coal field of Po-schan the establishment of a pit (Tse-tschwan Schacht) was begun this summer. The coal is partially suited for steamer fuelling. However, the enterprise was unprofitable and has been taken over by the Schantung Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft (Shandong Railway Company). In addition iron ore has been found; the exploitation will be begun soon.

Trade And Transportation: a large port with piers, swimming dock (capacity 16,000 tons) and shipyard facilities is, for the larger part, completed. The railway reaching from Tsingtau inland connects to the coal fields of the Schantung-Bergbau-Gesellschaft near Wei-hsien and Po-schan and further until Tsinan-fu (435 km). The first train arrived at Tsinan-fu on February 23rd 1904. The entire line, including the branch lline to Po-schan valley, operates since July 1st 1904. Tsinan-fu is located along the line Tientsin-Pu-kou. The hinterland produces many important products for the export to Europe, especially baskets etc., peanut oil, brushes, silk pongees. More than 80 % of the imports are delivered by railway into the interior. (…) Total export (…) 1911/12 : about 44 million Mark. (…) Total trade thus amounted to 94,761,304 Dollars, as compared to 89,979,420 Dollars the previous year. The most prominent import articles are cotton products and cotton yarn, petrol, anilin dyes, paper, sugar, matches, metals, railway construction material. Exported are mainly straw products, peanut oil, peanuts, silk and silk pongees, cotton, beans, skin, slaughtered animals, fruit etc.

Navigation: In 1906/07 498 steamers with a total storage of 547,000 tons entered the port of Tsingtau. (…) 1911/12: 727 / 1,136,000 tons.

Post & Telegraph Service: by the end of 1913: 10 postal offices, 8 of which with telegraph service and 2 with local telephone service, 37 km overland telegraph lines; 1160 km underwater cables. (…) In addition a radio telegraphic station near Tsingtau.​

General view of Qingdao in 1914.​

The Kiautschou Leased Territory was intended to be part of Wlihelm II’s Weltpolitik, as a naval base allowing the German Navy to operate in East Asian waters; but what he hadn’t realized is that Germany did not have the means of such ambitions. The Reich’s colonial possessions were too scattered to be defensible in case of war, and any one of them, with the homeland blockaded by the Franco-British Entente, was vulnerable to attack even from a second-tier power. So when, on June 28, 1914, Nedeljko Cabrinovic’s bomb killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the fate of the Territory was sealed. Indeed, it was not so much a question of whether Kiautschou would be wrested from German control, as by whom: both China and Japan had aligned themselves with the Entente, and had the former failed to act, the latter would definitely have made a move on the place; from the moment war was declared in Europe, the two empires were in an unspoken race against each other to determine which one issued an ultimatum first. Of course China had the advantage in that all it had to do was unilaterally revoke the leasehood, which was done on August 5, with the Chinese ultimatum to relinquish control over Kiautschou by September 10 sent on the 12th. The dice was cast. Japan, preempted out of what might have been a nice addition to its possessions on the Asian mainland, consoled itself with a sweeping confiscation of Germany’s Pacific colonies, claiming in a matter of weeks the Marshall Islands, the Carolines, the Marianas, the Palaus, Samoa, Nauru and the Bismarck Archipelago (German New Guinea was seized by Australia).

Unlike Japan, where all political factions had initially favored sitting out the war until Britain called on the country for help in dealing with Germany’s Pacific colonies, China had been fully intent to involve itself in the conflict right from the start—hence its promptness in revoking Germany’s leasehood and in issuing an ultimatum. The reasons for this belligerence were mainly domestic. Two years after its foundation, the Qian dynasty remained politically fragile: although the neo-imperialists had successfully dealt with any immediate threat to their hold on power, the regime’s stability depended on the acquiescence or at least the passivity of both the Beiyang faction and those former republicans who had been coopted in the government structure. Emperor Jianguo and Prime Minister Liang Qichao calculated that the war would generate an union sacrée around the dynasty, solidifying the allegiance of the Huang Xing/Song Jiaoren faction, even as it distracted the more ambitious Beiyang officers from their political manoeuvering. The gamble paid off: what all factions had in common, beyond disagreements about the type of regime they wanted for China and how much influence they would exercise in it, was a deep-seated patriotism that desperately longed to see their country vindicated for a century of foreign encroachment on its sovereignty. That the parliament, in which the republican opposition had been severely weakened after the 1913 elections, voted its approval with a quasi-unanimity, wasn’t surprising (and it is probable that the executive would have overruled it anyway in the unlikely event of a negative vote); but even the extra-parliamentary opposition either expressed its support or, at worst, remained silent. Only a few scattered voices rose against the decision to go to war, and most of them found themselves swiftly silenced by police crackdowns. It certainly helped that nearly everyone considered that the war would be a cakewalk, the trouble-free liberation of a piece of Chinese land held by a tiny force that couldn’t hope for any reinforcements from its mother country; and just as Europeans expected the war to be over by Christmas, the Chinese leadership thought that the matter of expelling the Germans from Kiautschou would be settled in a single week.

The Germans had expected all along that when the colony was attacked, it would be from the sea, and focused their attention to that side, trusting geography to protect them from a hypothetical landward threat. The natural line of defense lay along the boundary of the Kiautschou territory, from the Kaiserstuhl to the Litsuner Heights. These very rough mountains reached as high as 400 meters and plunged down into the sea abruptly, with just a few passes. The Germans estimated that they needed a full infantry corps to hold this line firmly, and Admiral Tirpitz forbade such extravagant expenditure away from his battle fleet, considering any attack by land improbable—only the Chinese could arrive this way, and Tsingtao did not need a corps to hold off ill-armed, poorly disciplined hordes. German experience with the Boxer uprising in 1900 seemed to confirm his assertions. The second line lay along 10 miles of steep hills from Prinz Heinrich Hill to Kuschan, but Tirpitz vetoed this line as well, since it would have required a division to be adequately manned. The final line lay along the inner hills, from Iltis to Bismarck to Moltke, which rose from 80 to 200 meters high over the town; this is where the defensive works were built. Qingdao's seaward defenses consisted of 4 batteries, searchlights and mines. To the landward, the German Navy built 5 redoubts. Each had positions for field guns and machine-guns, and was intended to be completely autonomous, with its own kitchen, bakery, power generator, ammunition magazines and sleeping quarters for about 200 men. In front of each lay a wall and a ditch, heavily wired, marked for range. Two hill batteries supported these redoubts. The weakest defense of all was in the air: the Germans’ only aircraft was a single unarmed Rumpler Taube.

Layout of Qingdao's military defenses.​

 
Governor Meyer-Waldeck, a naval officer, understood his duty as support of the East Asia Cruiser Squadron. When war broke out, he summoned all German forces in China to Qingdao. Gunboats Luchs and Jaguar made breathtaking escapes from under the noses of watching Allied warships, arriving in early August, as did destroyer S-90. Throughout China, German servicemen and civilians were rounded up for internment, but some escaped arrest, and a few of those found their way to Kiautschou, where they joined the war effort. Iltis, Tiger and Luchs each gave up some men and guns to arm corsairs, and landed some more to swell the garrison. The mail liner Prinz Eitel Friedrich arrived, picked up guns and left to raid shipping as an armed merchant corsair; light cruiser Emden left to join the Cruiser Squadron, but returned almost immediately with the captured Russian liner Rjasan. The prize took over all the guns and crew of refitting gunboat Cormoran, leaving the old gunboat a floating hulk; this liner, too, became a corsair, taking the name Cormoran. Emden promptly left as well, followed by a stream of eight ships in a fortnight, carrying 19,000 tons of coal and supplies to the Cruiser Squadron; most of these ships got through. Austro-Hungarian armored cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth entered harbor bewildered by conflicting orders—Vienna alternately commanded the ship to support the Germans, to intern herself, to fight the British, not to antagonize Japan. Leaving Qingdao and then returning, her crew wound up dispersed, with 100 men interned and 300 trapped in Tsingtao with the ship; the latter simply joined the Germans. After the first weeks of war, Meyer-Waldeck decided that no more ships would make it through the tightening Allied net, and prepared the town for siege, hoping that victory in Europe would ward off the overwhelming forces gathering against him. Naval and land mines were laid, positions were wired in, fields of fire were cleared. The Germans had plenty of supplies, but would have to be careful with ammunition—the annual ammunition resupply was to have arrived in September. Nonetheless, the reserves of the Cruiser Squadron lay open to them, so they only ran short at the very end. Engineers used small caliber naval shells to make hundreds of land mines and explosive charges.

Meyer-Waldeck was faced with a difficult decision, namely what to do with the colony’s Chinese population. Indeed, Kiautschou was home to a mere 7,000 Germans all included, while the Chinese inhabitants numbered some 161,000—and they were now citizens of an enemy country. Keeping them at large would have caused an evident security risk; interning them would have been logistically impossible, and that’s assuming they did not attempt to resist. The only solution was to expel them en masse from the German-controlled area, which had the added advantage of clogging eastern Shandong’s poor roads and creating a refugee problem for the Chinese, thus disrupting to some extent their military deployment. The heartless but militarily justified decision was implemented on August 21, and it took five days to clear Kiautschou of its Chinese population; no resistance took place, and the eleven civilian deaths that were deplored in the course of the evacuation were all due to accidents. Meyer-Waldeck even told his Chinese mistress to leave—little did he know that she was an informant for China’s National Security Bureau and had been sending to Nanjing valuable intelligence on the colony’s military situation for months. What he would soon find out, however, was that the NSB had been planting sleeper agents throughout Qingdao for the past two years, some of whom stayed behind in prepared hideouts while the evacuation was underway.

On the Chinese side, a full division was mobilized for the attack on Kiautschou, under the command of General Cao Kun. The troops belonged to the experienced core of the Beiyang Army, and came from Beijing. The Germans had been the instruments of their own undoing, as it was the very rail link they had built between Jinan and Qingdao that made it so easy for Chinese forces to be deployed against the colony—Beijing was since 1910 a mere two-day train ride from Qingdao, and once the ultimatum had expired on August 19, it took barely a fortnight for the 12,000 men to take position at the edge of Kiautschou (for further irony, the Chinese soldiers were armed with the Hanyang 88, a license-made copy of the Gewehr 88). A battalion was sent ahead to secure the railroad, which the Germans had started to tear up in the colony. Almost all of the brand-new Chinese Army Flying Corps, under the command of Colonel Feng Ru, was deployed—26 of the 30 Caudron G3 owned by China, and 11 of its 12 Voisin III, the rest remaining at the Pukou Flight School for training purposes. The Caudrons were to serve as reconnaissance and artillery spotter aircraft, and the Voisins as bombers. Seaward, the Chinese being aware that the East Asia Cruiser Squadron had left the base, it was deemed unnecessary to deploy a large force to effectively blockade the Germans, but no chances were taken, and Fleet Admiral Sa Zhenbing wanted to make sure the Navy wouldn’t be upstaged by the Army: the cruisers Fu An, Tong Ji, Hai Qi, Zhao He and Fei Hong were deployed, along with six destroyers, a submarine (China’s only at that point), a seaplane tender, three minesweepers, nine torpedo boats, and several support ships, under the command of Admiral Du Xigui. These were joined by British reinforcements, namely the pre-Dreadnought battleships HMS Triumph and HMS Usk, and the destroyer Kennet.

The Chinese Eighth Division about to depart Beijing.​

The overwhelming deployment of force served further purposes apart from purely military ones: the new regime intended to turn the operation into a large-scale propaganda campaign in order to show both domestic and international public opinions that the curse of Chinese weakness had finally been broken, and that after a century of humiliations, China was now in a capacity to strike back. No effort was spared to play up the event, which made the front page of every issue of the New China Herald—Kang Tongbi’s newspaper—for almost three months and those of other pro-government newspapers; even independent ones joined the bandwagon. Prime Minister Liang Qichao wrote editorial upon editorial, reacquainting himself with the role of opinion shaper he had played with such relish throughout the previous decade. Newsreels of proudly marching Chinese soldiers were played before every feature film, courtesy of Liu Zhonglun who, once an assistant to cinematic pioneer Ren Jingfeng, had started a new and fruitful career as manager of the Army’s moving picture propaganda department. After seeing an observation airplane fitted with a photographic camera, he came to the realization—obvious in hindsight—that a movie camera could just as well take to the skies, and by the time the siege started in earnest, was providing the public with breathtaking reels of aerial sights shot from the gunner’s seat of a modified Voisin III. The campaign was successful beyond all expectations, as it rode a deep undercurrent of frustrated nationalist sentiment in the Chinese population at large, and by late August the government paradoxically had to tone it down lest patriotic fervor grow uncontrollable—already on the 24th a student demonstration in front of the German embassy in Nanjing had degenerated into a near-riot, and random Westerners in the streets had found themselves harassed by groups of angry students on the suspicion that they might be Germans. Official apologies had to be issued and spontaneous patriotic demonstrations curtailed to some extent. Generally speaking, university students found themselves at the forefront of this outburst of nationalist mobilization, and were often found, dressed in the traditional scholars’ robes that marked them as members of the intellectual elite, haranguing crowds in public squares and street corners or noisily brandishing placards painted with patriotic slogans. The siege of Kiautschou had fallen like a lit match in the dry timber of pent-up nationalism, and educated urban youth were the kindle.

 

[Unknown]

Looks like the you-know-what is about to hit the fan...

 

[MrP]

Incidentally, the events in this chapter have inspired a story by Doctor What, "One flew over the Cuckoos' Nest".

 

[MrP]

Ten Thousand Homes in Far Shandong (II)​

When China had issued its ultimatum, it was under no illusions as to what the German answer would be. In anticipation of the coming battle, Nanjing had as early as August 9 ordered two battalions sent ahead of the main force to secure the Jinan-Qingdao rail line, which, as the colony’s main land link to the outside world, was critical to the Chinese deployment. By the 17th the soldiers, which had travelled by road dressed like coolies, their equipment carried under concealment in ox carts and wheelbarrows in order not to attract attention, were in place. They were spread out along the line in platoon-size groups, lying in ambush a couple of kilometers away from every bridge, rail yard and station which the Germans, in control of the railroad, might try to blow up or otherwise destroy. On the 19th at dawn, a coordinated assault was launched. The Chinese soldiers encountered only light resistance from surprised German railway workers and guards, and in a matter of hours had claimed control of the entirety of the line, rolling stock included, to a distance of a mere few kilometers of the neutral zone. In the latter, the Germans, warned by telephone calls made before the lines could be cut, hastily began tearing up the tracks, but they knew that the Chinese were now able to transport men and equipment to within striking distance of the colony—and this thanks to a railroad they themselves had built. It was put under the management of Shen Qi a.k.a. M.H. Shen, a senior technical expert at the Ministry of Communication: an alumnus of the Beiyang military academy who had specialized in railway engineering, he spoke fluent German and knew the line very well for having worked on its construction. His skills would soon be tested to their limit.

The Jinan-Qingdao railway.​

On the night of the 21st of August, NSB sleeper agents who had stayed behind after the evacuation of Kiautschou’s Chinese residents sprang into action. Nine teams assembled in Qingdao’s Chinese quarter, preparing to fan out to their respective assigned targets. Unfortunately, a mishap with one of the bombs that had been smuggled in earlier on caused it to detonate while it was being hauled to its intended destination, killing over a dozen operatives and putting the Germans on alert. In the following hours, all the teams were captured or gunned down; only two managed to reach their targets, respectively the wireless station and the city’s electrical power plant, and of these only the former was successfully destroyed, the latter suffering only minor damage. Still, with its underwater telegraphic cable already severed, the colony was now cut off from any communication with the outside world, and for the rest of the siege, the Germans had to divert some of their scarce forces to patrolling the city’s deserted streets and reinforcing safety perimeters around strategic facilities. Only sixteen agents evaded capture on that night, but they kept engaging in small-scale acts of sabotage and urban warfare until getting caught one after the other: on September 9, a grenade killed the captain of the Kaiserin Elisabeth; on the 19th, a fuel tank in the secondary harbor was destroyed by arson; and on October 3, Meyer-Waldeck himself narrowly survived a sniper’s bullet which grazed his shoulder as he was standing in the open. Captured agents having been caught in civilian clothing, they were summarily tried as spies by a German military court and executed by firing squad; by the time the battle was over, only one was left. When the incident was later disclosed after the end of the siege, the Chinese government insisted that the men were in fact private citizens who had spontaneously decided to engage in armed resistance, a claim nobody believed at the time—though it would be many years until it was finally revealed that they belonged to China’s secret police rather than a “classic” spy network.

The next morning took place the first naval skirmish of the battle. The destroyer S-90, in order to cover mine-laying operations at the mouth of the bay, was patrolling far from shore when it was spotted by the Fu Bo, also a destroyer. The old and slow S-90 seemed easy game to the Chinese ship, a modern vessel purchased just two years previously. The Fu Bo opened fire at 4,000 meters and kept firing as it closed in, charging at its full speed of 35 knots. When the distance decreased to 2,800 meters, the S-90 returned fire. Aware that it would be unable to escape its much faster adversary by speed alone, the German destroyer took a gamble and veered inshore of a coastal island, over uncharted water marked as “shallow”. The pursuer took the bait and followed straight in, only to run itself on a sand bank; as it tried to free itself, the S-90 fled to safety under covering fire from shore batteries. A near-miss badly shook up the Fu Bo and tore apart its starboard propellers, though the unlucky ship finally managed to free itself and limped back to the main fleet. It had to be towed to the Jiangnan shipyards for repairs. The small victory, which wouldn’t be the S-90’s last, was a welcome morale booster for the Germans, and foreshadowed the Chinese navy’s lukewarm performance throughout the rest of the siege.

The same day—August 22—the various branches of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank throughout the country received an unwelcome visit as they opened for business. In Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou and Guangzhou, the same scene repeated itself: an official from the Chinese Ministry of the Interior showed up, escorted by a detachment of gendarmes and accompanied by a British officer, and signified to the director that his establishment was being placed under government custody for the duration of the hostilities, effective immediately. A Custodian of Enemy Property had been appointed and would take over managerial duties, and the director had no choice but to comply. All the assets of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank were thus transferred to Chinese administration without a shot being fired nor a vault forced open, and in the following weeks would be quietly transferred to the National Revenue Board. The operation not only enabled the siege of Qingdao to pay for itself, but provided a net profit to the Chinese government. The foreknowledge and token involvement of the British allayed concerns about the Chinese government’s intervention in extraterritorial enclaves, over which it technically held no jurisdiction, and full compensation was paid to DAB’s foreign partners, its main one being the British-controlled Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. All other German businesses in China knew an identical fate, including, eventually, the Qingdao branch of DAB.

When faced with the arrival of the first of the 161,000 Chinese refugees at the edge of the German-controlled zone on August 21, Cao had immediately realized he had a major logistical challenge on his hands, and wired for emergency supplies. The trains returning to Jinan after delivering their contingent of men and equipment on the future front line left crammed with distraught civilians, but even with more trains sent in, the railroad noria was unable to handle the population of an entire city. As more refugees poured in, pushed out of Kiautschou at gunpoint, temporary shelter had to be erected for those waiting to be evacuated, and tent camps were set up around the town of Jiaozhou. Field Marshal Duan Qirui, who intended the liberation of Kiautschou to be a showcase operation—mostly, his private correspondence later revealed, so he could claim credit for it to bolster an ulterior bid for high political office—reacted swiftly and ordered the supplies of the entire Beiyang Army to be sent to Cao. Two more battalions were called in specifically to deal with the refugees, so as not to deplete the main strike force, and were presently supplemented by hundreds of gendarmerie officers. Traffic on the Jinan-Qingdao railroad nearly reached saturation levels, but the tireless Shen proved equal to the task, and thanks to his engineering and managerial abilities, the logistical challenge was overcome. By the 25th, emergency relief was starting to arrive. Cao almost thought he had the situation under control when the weather came out on the Germans’ side.

In spite of the refugee problem, the deployment of the Chinese Eighth Division around Kiautschou was nearly complete when a severe storm struck on August 30 and didn’t let up for an entire week. Qingdao, variously known as the Ostende or the Riviera of the East, normally boasts a pleasantly mild, dry clime in the autumn. But 1914, a freak year in more ways than one, brought with it a wave of unseasonable typhoons that repeatedly battered Shandong and caused the heaviest rains on record in that province before or since. Flash floods washed away military encampments, mired chariots and trucks in thick mud, and turned the presence of the refugees from a headache into an impending humanitarian catastrophe. Roads throughout the peninsula were cut off by swelling rivers, entire villages were leveled by mudslides, and thousands of peasants died in what was becoming Shandong’s worst natural disaster within living memory; villagers from several neighboring districts converged on Kiautschou seeking assistance and shelter. In the refugee camps, hundreds of people came down with hypothermia, several outbreaks of dysentery were observed, and the overworked military medical personnel struggled to contain the first reported cases of typhus. As soldiers and gendarmes turned into improvised relief workers, the director of the National Gendarmerie, Qian Nengxun, personally inspected the refugee camps during a four-day tour from September 10 to 14, and the plight of the displaced civilians left a strong impression on him (he would resign his position the following year to set up with the help of philanthropist Du Bingyin a humanitarian organization modeled after the Red Cross, the International Red Swastika Society, in order to provide assistance to victims of wars and natural catastrophes). The offensive, which had optimistically been scheduled for September 7, was postponed for another two weeks while the crisis was dealt with. Field Marshal Duan, with the success of the whole operation at stake, decided to take over the preparation of the offensive, putting Cao in full-time charge of the refugee problem. Trains kept on rolling, conveying supplies in one direction and civilians in the other, despite the driving rain, but on the sea, the Chinese fleet was quite paralyzed. On the night of the 30th, the old cruiser Fu An was driven ashore by the storm and, helpless, was destroyed by artillery fire from German shore batteries. As for the aircraft, they were kept grounded and, after a gust of wind had torn the wings off a G-3, partially disassembled.

On September 5, the storm abated, and a reconnaissance airplane sent to take stock of the situation from the air. The Germans had likewise sent their own airplane, and the two met in mid-air, engaging in the first aerial dogfight in Chinese history. The Chinese G-3 attempted to intercept the German Taube and fired its machine gun, but the latter, unable to return fire, escaped back to Qingdao [1]. Weather conditions soon deteriorated again, but on the 9th, they were deemed satisfactory enough to send the Voisins on their first bombing raid over the city. Qingdao having no anti-aircraft defenses, the bombers only faced rifle and machine gun fire from the ground, meaning they could operate with virtual impunity from an altitude of 1,200 meters. Each aircraft only carried a bomb load of 150 kilos, and the bombs themselves were nothing more than 155 mm shells with fins screwed on, but at such a low altitude they could be thrown with a fair degree of accuracy even in the complete absence of sighting equipment, and the psychological effect on the Germans compounded the sheer material effect: against naval and land artillery, they could return fire, but against aerial strikes they were almost entirely helpless. Indeed, in order not to waste ammunition, the German soldiers were soon ordered not to shoot at aircraft unless they flew low enough to be in range. This first of many raids mainly targeted the Bismarck casern and the Moltke, Bismarck and Iltis heavy batteries. All bombers returned safely to base—namely the rough airstrip that had been cleared near Jiaozhou. From then on a bombing raid would take place every day, weather allowing, and target the ships as well as the land defenses. However, the Chinese Army Flying Corps suffered its first casualty a few days later: on the 11th, a new engagement between a G-3 and the Taube ended with the Chinese pilot struck by a lucky pistol shot by his German counterpart; although the bullet only wounded him, the injury caused him to lose control of his plane, and he crashed to his death (Chinese aviators would suffer two more casualties when a Voisin crashed shortly after take-off on October 6, killing both crewmen). Afterward, the Taube would only venture above Chinese lines equipped with a machine gun, a precaution that was almost as dangerous to the German plane itself as to its adversaries, since Qingdao’s short runway made take-off a delicate maneuver even with the Taube minimally loaded, and a downright reckless one with the weapon’s extra weight. A German attempt was made to hoist up an observation balloon, but it was swiftly gunned down by Chinese airplanes, and thereafter, when the Taube was unable to provide fire corrections, the batteries simply fired blind.

Gunther Pluschow in his airplane.​

In the week after the end of the storm on September 9, the Chinese moved into position batteries of heavy siege guns and made the final preparations for the assault. Duan was informed on the 17th that British reinforcements were about to leave Tianjin, but he decided not to wait for them, considering that he had more than enough men to overwhelm resistance, and that his victory would be diminished by sharing it with the British. The attack was launched on the 19th and proceeded in textbook fashion, opening with an artillery barrage from both land and naval guns that targeted German outposts on the outer mountain line until evening, and then, before nightfall in order to allow spotter planes to correct fire coordinates, shelled the redoubts of the inner defensive line as well as the German batteries. The barrage continued throughout the night and was followed at dawn by a general advance, with Chinese forces split into company-sized columns in order to flank the outposts and swamp the undermanned local defenses. The advance went smoothly at first, with German defenders falling back to avoid encirclement, but at midday, for the first time, German artillery opened up all at once, blanketing the battlefield with impressively accurate fire. Attacking columns, caught in the open, pulled back with heavy losses, and their rear was also subjected to heavy shelling. The Chinese forward command center suffered a direct hit; Cao was killed, Duan critically injured, and there were several casualties among their respective staffs. The attack proved a serious tactical defeat for the Chinese, made even worse by the loss of two of their senior officers. Cao’s subordinate, Brigadier-General Wu Peifu, ordered a pause in military operations while waiting for headquarters to send a new commanding officer. General Lu Yongxiang, coincidentally a Shandong native, arrived on the 23rd.

The next day, the British reinforcements arrived as well: the 1,500 men of the Second Battalion of the South Wales Borderers, who would be joined on the 29th by two infantry companies of the 36th Sikh Regiment. Their commanding officer, Brigadier-General Richard Hutton Davies, conferred with Lu, and the two men started laying plans for a slower but surer tactic. The main outposts would be taken in a series of limited engagements while more siege artillery was brought in, then assault lines would be dug under cover of a protracted bombardment, until hardened defensive emplacements were destroyed and could be breached with a concentrated attack. The first step was the neutralization of the Prince Heinrich Hill outpost: towering over the neighboring hills, it was protected by an extremely difficult climb and offered excellent observation for miles in all directions. Connected by telephone and heliograph to the heavy land batteries, its outpost would hold even if the Chinese and British took the rest of the line, and would then direct fire onto the enemy from the rear. Sixty men with machine guns held the place, which was provisioned for a two-month siege. The attack on the strongpoint took place on the night of the 26th, with a company reinforced by an engineering platoon sent to dislodge the Germans; but once again the weather took sides, and a new storm broke out, drenching the attackers, who had to grope for safe holds as rivulets of water cascaded down the slopes. When they finally made it to the crest, it was to be pinned down by German machine gun fire; the soldiers who attempted to advance any further were mowed down within meters. Order was given to retreat: the first battle of Prince Heinrich Hill was another tactical German victory.

Although Lu and Davies got along reasonably well, cooperation between Chinese and British forces in general did not go without some problems. One was that, once the latter were deployed on the front line, German artillery always sought them out, as soldiers who might later fight against Germany in Europe. Another was that in the trenches, Chinese soldiers could not tell German from British, and many a British patrol found itself subjected to friendly fire; only poor Chinese marksmanship kept British casualties down. To avoid getting shot at by mistake, British soldiers took to wearing Chinese Army overcoats, though that didn’t altogether eliminate incidents. Poor Chinese sanitary standards, varying scales of provisions, differing staff routines, conflicting tactical doctrine all contributed to prickly relations, as did the racial arrogance of many British soldiers and officers alike, who viewed their allies as little more than coolies in uniform. Officers on the British ships deployed in the naval blockade likewise reported defective discipline and sloppy maintenance on the Chinese vessels, feeding their prejudiced perception of the Chinese as second-rate seamen.

German defensive lines in Qingdao.​

Meyer-Waldeck decided to disrupt Allied preparations. For days, the German guns had fired some 1,500 shells daily, and the Germans had wrongly convinced themselves that the shelling had inflicted large damage to the Chinese and British. Wishing to compound the blow, they planned a night raid on the enemy right flank. Late on October 2, three German companies sortied. They triggered furious fire upon reaching the enemy’s lines and retreated, leaving behind dozens of dead and nine prisoners. Intending to regain the tactical initiative and anxious to remove the thorn in his side, Lu suggested to Davies a joint Sino-British assault on Prince Heinrich Hill from two opposite directions, with the aviation providing covering fire. The clear weather, the two-pronged attack, and the ad hoc use of what wasn’t yet called close air support, made the difference: caught in a crossfire, and kept pinned by the airplanes’ strafing runs, the Germans were this time unable to prevent enemies from advancing beyond the ridge. The German CO decided to negotiate; he would surrender the peak if allowed to take his men back to Qingdao. The terms were accepted, and in the small hours of the morning of October 4, the strategic outpost was in Sino-British hands, depriving the Germans of their last forward strongpoint. Meanwhile, Davies, who had been watching the engagement from a nearby elevated spot, was wounded by the defensive artillery fire laid down by German batteries to protect the outpost; this resulted in what would become a well-known anecdote in his home country of New Zealand, where it has practically entered popular culture, and which bears retelling minus the apocryphal add-ons for the sake of our non-New Zealander readership.

Born in London, Davies had emigrated to New Zealand where he worked as a surveyor, joined a volunteer militia unit, and eventually the Army; after fighting in the Boer War, he became inspector-general of the defense forces, and in 1909 was attached to a British Army brigade. The first colonial officer to rise to the rank of brigade commander, by early 1914 he was in charge of the British contingent in Weihaiwei, on the other side of the Shandong peninsula from Qingdao. After getting wounded, he was found unconscious, his face covered with blood and caked with mud, by Chinese stretcher-bearers on their way to the hillside to pick up the wounded. In the dark, they didn’t identify him, and because he wore a Chinese officer’s coat, they carried him to the Chinese field hospital. The facility was overwhelmed with injured men from the ongoing battle and the doctors left him in the care of a nurse. That nurse was Zhang Fengyun. Zhang was born from the concubine of an impoverished Manchu nobleman; after her mother’s death in 1911 she was taken in by her former nanny, but after a year the latter could no longer afford to keep her. She considered resorting to the time-honored solution of selling the girl into prostitution, but Zhang convinced her to instead allow her to enlist in a newly-opened nursing school so she would eventually be able to pay her way without having to ply the world’s oldest trade (claims that she moonlighted in a house of pleasure for a few months under the name of Xiao Fengxian while studying by day, are romantic license at best and slander at worst). She had to lie about her age to join the school—she declared her date of birth as 1896 but it was in fact 1900—and after completing her training, started working in a Beijing hospital. Soon afterwards Chinese forces were deployed at Kiautschou and she decided, out of patriotic spirit, to join the Army’s medical staff and volunteer to serve at the front. This is how she found herself in that field hospital and got to meet Davies, who had himself ended up there due to a stretcher-bearer’s mistake. Zhang spent the night tending to him, and the older but dashing Western officer did not leave her indifferent; when Davies regained consciousness, it didn’t take long for the feeling to be mutual. When the mistake was reported the next morning, Davies was duly transferred, but he and Zhang would continue seeing each other during his hospitalization, and when he was discharged due to the severity of his wounds (shrapnel had practically shattered his left kneecap), he proposed to his own personal Florence Nightingale. A blushing Zhang accepted, and by New Year’s Eve 1915 the unlikely couple was in Davies’s hometown of Taranaki. Their second son, as every New Zealander knows, would become the country’s longest-serving prime minister, and their granddaughter is the current mayor of Auckland.

The loss of Prince Heinrich Hill was a crippling blow to the Germans, whose control now only extended to the main Iltis-Bismarck-Moltke line, barely three kilometers from the city of Qingdao itself. The Chinese and British dug an initial trench two kilometers in front of the line. Lu, chastened by the effectiveness of German defensive installations and unwilling to make the same mistake as Duan, insisted on thorough preparations, and the siegework would be complete with wavy S-shaped trenches, saps and parallels. The Germans tried to slow them down with heavy artillery fire, but its accuracy was now significantly poorer except at short ranges. The Chinese responded with counter-battery fire, even as new emplacements were readied for the deployment of more siege guns brought over from the Beijing arsenal. The aviation intensified its own raids, sinking the Kaiserin Elisabeth and the Luchs, and the Navy, not to be left out, engaged in mass bombardments at extreme range. In order to lay down more accurate fire, five Chinese ships and the Triumph moved in close to duel with the shore batteries on October 9 while the rest of the fleet kept firing from a greater distance. A heavy German gun scored a direct hit on the Hai Qi, severely damaging it; German gunners cheered as it hastily retreated and the four other ships pulled back.

On October 15, for the third and last time that autumn, yet another typhoon slammed into the coast of Shandong, causing the Chinese and British a delay of several days to fix flooded trenches, collapsed earthworks and undermined gun platforms. In Qingdao, the Germans scuttled all remaining non-essential ships and redeployed their crews as ground troops; then on the night of the 17th, Meyer-Waldeck ordered a sortie by S-90. The old destroyer slipped out of harbour unseen by the blockading fleet, and having spotted a dark shadow, launched a torpedo. The projectile hit the Fei Hong, causing the explosion of its ammunition magazine. The ship split in two and sank almost instantly; of the 272 men onboard, only seven could be rescued. Searchlights flashed on, Chinese and British ships started firing, German coastal batteries joined in the confusion, and S-90, cut off, fled into the night. Evading frantic enemy searches, it showed up in Filipino waters a week later, and scuttled itself offshore from Luzon. Its crew was interned by American authorities.

The endgame began on October 21. Chinese siege artillery was finally ready, with over 100 guns deployed, and opened fire at dawn. Each battery had a primary and secondary target, with fire correction provided by both spotter aircraft and the Prinz Heinrich Hill observation post, while the fleet took care of the eroding sea defenses and the bombers made low-altitude runs along the German trenches. The first day, the heavy artillery destroyed Qingdao's land batteries, and at night, field guns laid down shrapnel to prevent repairs, forcing the Germans to abandon the shattered works. That night, under heavy fire cover, the Chinese dug saps 300 meters forward. The bombardment continued the next day as some siege guns shifted to the oil tanks and docks while most concentrated their fire on the heavy land batteries; the fleet again overwhelmed the collapsing sea batteries. The second night, the Chinese dug their first forward assault line parallel, in textbook fashion. A Chinese patrol cutting barbed wire outside a redoubt exchanged fire with its garrison, leading the Germans to believe they had repelled a major assault. Meyer-Waldeck, thinking the end near, ordered the last ships scuttled; their crews landed to reinforce the garrison.

With Qingdao's land batteries obviously in ruins, siege artillery fire shifted to the redoubts and barbed wire covering them on October 26. That night, the Chinese dug more saps. The next day, some batteries obliterated the power station while most continued flattening wire and smashing the redoubts. The Germans began to abandon the redoubts as roofs caved in. On the night of the 27th, the Chinese dug their second forward assault line parallel. Day after day, the fleet pounded the sea batteries to rubble while the siege guns crushed wire, and saps were dug at night, 300 meters forward at a time. The British, in a difficult section of the line—on a down slope exposing them to fire while a high water table prevented digging—tried but failed to advance their saps together with the Chinese. They lost several casualties to small arms fire before giving up and falling back to the second assault parallel line. The Sikhs, however, soon restored British face: at dawn on October 29, a company of the 36th reinforced by an engineering platoon from the Borderers attacked the city’s water pumping station. It fell easily, yielding 23 prisoners: the defenders now had to make do with well water.

On October 31, the fleet closed in to point-blank range to finish off the last sea battery, though it lost a destroyer to a naval mine in the process. Meanwhile, the siege guns and the bombers crushed more wire and pulverized the abandoned redoubts. Qingdao had no defenses left, by land or sea. That night, the Chinese dug their final assault parallel line: depending on the sector, it ran as close to 100 meters from the German trenches, most of which had, in any case, caved in or got filled in by rubble; the German soldiers were reduced to using scattered shell craters as improvised foxholes. On November 1, now running out of targets, the siege artillery crushed such odd bits of barbed wire or abandoned masonry as it could still find. The fleet, with no targets left at all, joined in for moral effect, churning up the dust of former sea batteries from a safe distance, while the aviation, G-3 and Voisins alike, circled over the city, bombing and strafing targets of opportunity. Clearly, everyone was marking time, awaiting the final assault that night.

In the evening, several Chinese companies were sent over the trenches to probe the German line for weak points. A garrison that was still manning the ruins of Redoubt 3 spotted the advancing enemy troops and opened fire; the surprised Chinese soldiers withdrew. Meyer-Waldeck concluded that the intruders were the first elements of the main assault force, and ordered reinforcements to be sent to the redoubt and field artillery to lay down fire just in front of it, prompting a response from Chinese field guns. As the firefight escalated, Lu took advantage of the diversion to send other troops on a flanking attack of Redoubt 1. The defending garrison briefly tried to lay suppressing fire but, unable to find adequate protection in the half-destroyed structure, was rapidly neutralized with mortars and grenades, and its survivors surrendered. Having heard that his forces had captured a redoubt, Lu ordered a general assault, and the Chinese attackers fanned out behind the German line from the breach, overwhelming the dazed defenders of Redoubt 2 and engaging the reinforcements that had just reached Redoubt 3. A company charged up straight ahead up Iltis Hill, where a German lieutenant was rallying his men with drawn sword; the Chinese captain, seeing him, drew up his own sword and the two men engaged in an anachronistic melee fight between their respective troops. The duel was a short one: the German ceremonial sword was no match for the Chinese dadao, a crude and no-nonsense weapon designed to simply hack one’s adversary to pieces. The defenders of Iltis Hill surrendered, soon followed by those on Bismarck Hill. In the early morning, with the first Chinese soldiers on the outskirts of Qingdao, Meyer-Waldeck surrendered. Three hours later, Chinese and British troops marched into the defeated city; after 17 years, the German colonial presence in China was brought to an end.

German propaganda poster on the fall of Qingdao.​

The battle, apart from the liberation of a chunk of Chinese land from foreign control, had achieved China’s broader objective of becoming a full-fledged ally of the British, French and Russians, bolstering its position in prevision of the voicing of diplomatic grievances at the peace conference—which everyone expected to be a few months away. Meanwhile, the immediate aftermath of the battle was anticlimactic. The Second Battalion of the South Wales Borderers and the two infantry companies of the 36th Sikh Regiment sailed to Europe—minus their wounded commander—where by early 1915 they would find themselves deployed on another, larger battlefield. The Eighth Division of the Chinese Army returned to Beijing, and General Lu was promoted to the vacant position of field marshal. The Chinese regime exploited the propaganda value of the dearly paid victory for all it was worth, now that it could legitimately claim to have broken the curse of Chinese military weakness. After the German defenders were convoyed to a detention camp in Jinan where they spent the next four years as prisoners of war, the Chinese inhabitants of Qingdao trickled back in from the various camps where they had languished since August, finding their home city disfigured by the fighting and its infrastructures wrecked. One of the buildings that had gone through the siege relatively unscathed was the brewery, and as it got started again by a local entrepreneur, it became an unlikely symbol of hope to the population; to this day, Qingdao natives are fiercely proud of the eponymous brand of beer, which is consumed the world over.


[1] See Doctor What’s “One flew over the Cuckoos’ Nest”.

 

[Master Xion]

Nice update.

 

[Unknown]

Good update.

Waiting for more...

 

[MrP]

Born in London, Davies had emigrated to New Zealand where he worked as a surveyor, joined a volunteer militia unit, and eventually the Army; after fighting in the Boer War, he became inspector-general of the defense forces, and in 1909 was attached to a British Army brigade. The first colonial officer to rise to the rank of brigade commander, by early 1914 he was in charge of the British contingent in Weihaiwei, on the other side of the Shandong peninsula from Qingdao. After getting wounded, he was found unconscious, his face covered with blood and caked with mud, by Chinese stretcher-bearers on their way to the hillside to pick up the wounded. In the dark, they didn’t identify him, and because he wore a Chinese officer’s coat, they carried him to the Chinese field hospital. The facility was overwhelmed with injured men from the ongoing battle and the doctors left him in the care of a nurse. That nurse was Zhang Fengyun.

Incidentally, it was I who, back when Hendryk was writing this chapter and looking for someone to replace Nathaniel Barnardiston (OTL commander of the British contingent at the siege of Tsingtao), suggested Richard Hutton Davies. In OTL, the poor chap was sent to the Western Front, broke down under the strain, and killed himself in '18. I have a soft spot for rescuing suicides and depressives, so I'm glad that in TTL he got a chance to live a longer and happier life

 

[Some Bloke]

Like I said in an earlier version of the timeline, the Commonwealth probably doesn't abolish the rank of Brigadier General, which sounds cooler anyway.

 

[MrP]

Like I said in an earlier version of the timeline, the Commonwealth probably doesn't abolish the rank of Brigadier General, which sounds cooler anyway.

I completely agree, old boy, that rank needs to stay

 

[MrP]

Gallant Men from the Eastern Lands​

Gallant men there were, from the Eastern lands,
Rallying against the nefarious foe…
Though their forces were one, their minds were divided.

—Cao Cao, Hao Li Xing, 192 CE


Nineteen-fifteen had begun, and it was becoming obvious to all concerned that a war started on the premise that it would be over by Christmas was going to continue into the foreseeable future. From the Swiss border to the North Sea, France and Belgium were bisected by a front line that, after the frantic initial phase of the fighting, now refused to budge no matter how much ordnance, and how many men, were thrown at it. As early as October 1914, while the siege of Qingdao was still underway, the Chinese government had approached its Entente partners about the possibility of sending some troops to the European theater. The proposal had been met with polite interest, and quietly dismissed: Britain and France were still confident in their ability to win without outside reinforcements—a perception supported by apparent early successes in the First Battle of Ypres being fought at the time—and Russia, for its part, was deeply wary of allowing any deployment of Chinese forces on its territory, especially as it already relied on hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrant laborers which were viewed in some circles as a Fifth Column (though the phrase had not been coined yet). But as the war turned into a bloody stalemate and the body count rose to ever-more staggering heights—Ypres alone had seen over 100,000 men die, virtually wiping out the entire British Expeditionary Force for no discernible result—the idea of bringing foreign reinforcements appeared more and more reasonable. Not that the Western front was a white man’s war to begin with: both France and Britain had been bringing colored troops from their respective colonies right from the start, and as early as August 1914 the first Senegalese skirmishers had fallen on the battlefields of Flanders, to be followed by many more; Colonel Charles Mangin had, back in 1910, theorized in his book La Force noire the massive use of nonwhite soldiers in a future European war to make up for France’s faltering demography.

Former Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon started privately lobbying in favor of taking up the Chinese on their offer in the last weeks of 1914, and in January 1915 an editorial in the popular weekly newsmagazine L’Illustration brought the idea to French public opinion: penned by the influential columnist André Chéradame, it called for the deployment of no fewer than 800,000 Chinese soldiers on a new front to be opened in central Europe, half of them brought in via the Transsiberian and the other half by ship, to march on Budapest and then into southern Germany. Whether the article was being deliberately fanciful, or merely followed the trend of hyperbolic propaganda common at the time, it resulted in the question gaining public traction and being raised at the French National Assembly; although the British remained lukewarm and the Russians hostile, from then on the French were increasingly keen on bringing in what was unofficially referred to as “yellow cannon fodder” to help mitigate the slow obliteration of an entire generation of young Gallic males in the relentless meat grinder of trench warfare. Chinese motivations for volunteering military assistance were no less hard-headed: having reclaimed the German leased territory in Jiaozhou, China had a stake in the Entente’s final victory, lest a victorious Germany demand its colonial enclave back (to say nothing of reparations for the confiscation of German assets, which Nanjing was now using as collateral to renegotiate its foreign debt); and it calculated that direct involvement in the main theater of the war would bolster its credentials at the post-war negotiating table, allowing it to seek redress for pending grievances, from the extraterritorial privileges enjoyed by foreign powers on its soil to the exorbitant Boxer indemnities.

On February 13, Président du Conseil René Viviani gave his approval to begin talks with the Chinese government in order to implement the proposal in a mutually agreeable way. The chief negotiator on the French side was General Albert d’Amade, who had recently been reassigned as military governor of Marseilles following a debacle in Flanders the previous August. An indifferent strategist, d’Amade nevertheless had precious skills that allowed his latter wartime career to recover from his 1914 mishap: a former military attaché of the French diplomatic representation in China, he had spent the years 1887 to 1891 travelling throughout the Middle Kingdom and appraising himself of its military situation, becoming a fluent Mandarin speaker in the process. On Pichon’s advice, he was assisted by the latter’s protégé, Paul Pelliot, a gifted young Sinologist who had sojourned in China from 1899 to 1909. The two men met with the Chinese ambassador to France, Liu Shixun, himself a talented negotiator who had, in 1902, resolved to general satisfaction a border dispute between French Indochina and the province of Yunnan and had been serving in his current position since 1906. Over a four-day parley the details of the operation were worked out.

The Chinese troops, it was agreed, were to be provided with French equipment and wear the French uniform (in its colonial variant)—a condition that both made logistical sense and allowed France to maximize the propaganda value of China’s help, even as it saved the Chinese government from the organizational headache of keeping soldiers supplied half a world away. Likewise, France would take charge of their transportation, since China lacked the necessary shipping capabilities. They would be provided with training prior to operational deployment, which made it possible for China to pick them from second-line units instead of depleting its (still relatively small) core of first-line divisions, most of them from the former Beiyang Army; to facilitate adaptation to the climatic conditions of northeastern France, it was decided to select them in northern provinces, primarily Hebei and Shandong (though in practice, some would come from central and southern China as well). Their place in the order of battle, however, proved harder to agree on: d’Almade and Pelliot wanted them integrated in the French army at the regiment level, with Chinese officers only up to the rank of Colonel; but Liu made it a sine qua non requirement that the soldiers be deployed as a single Expeditionary Corps under Chinese overall command, subordinate only to the French Generalissimo, namely Joffre; finally, it was agreed to integrate the Chinese troops as Army Corps, giving them equal status to the Colonial Army Corps which was part of the Fourth Army. The first Chinese Army Corps would go to in the Second Army under General Edouard de Curière de Castelnau. Liu having been instructed to impose Lu Yongxiang as commander of the Corps, creative fudging had to be resorted to in order to solve seniority issues caused by making a Field Marshal subordinate to a General—Castelnau’s rank was referred to as Great Marshal (Tai Yuanshuai) in Chinese for face-saving purposes. The liaison between Lu and the French high command would be d’Amade himself, there being no other French officer of requisite seniority who could speak and read Chinese.

Lu Yongxiang.​

On May 7, 1915, the French steamers Polynésien, Himalaya and Latouche-Tréville sailed from Tianjin, carrying a total of 2,500 Chinese soldiers bound for the Western front: the first three battalions of the Third Tianjin Regiment, part of the First Division of the Chinese Expeditionary Corps. Over a 60-day sea journey, they stopped at Saigon, Singapore, Colombo, Djibouti and Suez, before finally disembarking at Marseilles on July 6. Coincidentally, a few years previously the cook onboard the Latouche-Tréville had been a young Vietnamese man named Nguyen Sinh Cung, later to become famous under the name of Ho Chi Minh. In his memoirs, General Wang Chengpin (then a colonel) would later claim that he spotted on a wall of the ship’s kitchen, scrawled in Sino-Vietnamese characters, the words “Let the French eat my sh*t”, but the anecdote was never corroborated by Ho himself, and the Latouche-Tréville was scrapped in 1929. The arrival of the first Chinese reinforcements was lavishly covered by the press, and along with d’Almade, Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé came in person to greet General Xu Lanzhou. The event came at an opportune time for Delcassé, who was still reeling from the diplomatic fiasco of Bulgaria’s recent entry into the war alongside the Central Powers, and he played it up for all it was worth. In a rambling speech, he waxed lyrical about “the multisecular bounds of friendship, dating back to Saint Louis, between the two sister civilizations of France and China”, never mind that in the previous eighty years, French soldiers had fought Chinese ones on no fewer than four occasions. After a wildly acclaimed march down the Canebière, the troops were sent by train to Paris, where they took part in the Bastille Day military parade. Finally they arrived in their training camp at Mailly.

The Latouche-Tréville.​

One innovative feature of the CEC was that, for the first time, a Chinese military detachment was provided with ordained ministers serving as officers and specifically tasked with providing spiritual guidance—in other words, chaplains. Up to then in China’s long history, imperial armies had never concerned themselves with soldiers’ spiritual well-being, leaving them to seek spiritual solace whichever way they saw fit. But with the new regime having formally instituted Kongjiao as the state religion, Great Priest Chen Huanzhang requested that soldiers being sent abroad should be accompanied by ministers, on a similar system to that of Britain’s Royal Army Chaplains’ Department. Soldiers remained free to practice any faith of their choice—and most did, usually the traditional blend of Buddhism, Taoism and folk religion, while some came from Hui Muslim communities or had converted to Christianity—but they were expected to attend regular services by the Kongjiao priest attached to their unit, who was also available for personal guidance on request. Like Christian chaplains in the British army, Kongjiao priests wore uniforms but were not armed. Also accompanying the Corps were members of the Red Swastika Society, recently created by former Gendarmerie director Qian Nengxun and philanthropist Du Bingyin, to assist with providing medical care to Chinese soldiers and to the civilian guest workers of the Chinese Labor Corps, as well as anyone who needed it regardless of nationality; to that end, the RSS hired a number of language students and recent graduates of foreign universities as interpreters (one of them was Chen Yinke, who would later become China’s foremost authority in classical historical studies).

The original plan had called for a total of 120,000 Chinese troops, but it soon proved overly optimistic: between attrition and the unavailability of sufficient shipping, the Chinese Expeditionary Corps would only count four divisions and three regiments, amounting to some 57,000 men, at its peak in late 1917. Of these only 48,000 were actually deployed on the Western Front; the remainder, under the command of Major General Li Houji, were instead sent to the Balkan Front. The CEC’s baptism of fire came in September 1915, when its first complete division, whose level of training was considered acceptable, was included in the order of battle for the planned offensive in Champagne. The engagement, which went down in history as the Second Battle of Champagne, gave the Chinese their first taste of trench warfare as the attack, after an initial success, ground to a halt as the Germans poured in reinforcements and drove the Entente forces back to their starting point: six weeks of fighting and 210,000 casualties had resulted in the front budging a mere few hundred meters. The battle cost the CEC’s First Division nearly 15% of its men and a high proportion of officers, including Colonel Long Yun. In November, the division was sent back to Mailly for rest and reconstitution, and General Xu made sure that its painful experience was used for preparing the fresh troops to the realities of the front.

The Germans considered the Chinese intervention on the Western Front particularly offensive, and the fact that the CEC was commanded by the victor of Qingdao added insult to injury. Wilhelm II had long been a notorious Sinophobe; he had allegedly coined the phrase “Yellow Peril” in 1895, had ordered the infamous painting Peoples of Europe, Protect Your Most Sacred Possessions (depicting allegorical depictions of European nations gazing with horror at a distant, smoke-shrouded Buddha) as a gift to Nicholas II, and had declared to the troops departing to fight the Boxer uprising:

You know full well that you are to fight against a cunning, brave, well-armed, and cruel enemy. When you encounter him, know this: no quarter will be given. Prisoners will not be taken. Exercise your arms such that for a thousand years no Chinese will dare to look cross-eyed at a German.

Yet not only had the Chinese dared to retake the Jiaozhou leased territory; now they were bringing the fight to Germany’s very doorstep. German propaganda, which already made a point of depicting the Entente’s colonial troops as subhuman savages, played every possible variation of the “Yellow Peril” theme, and Chinese soldiers were depicted sometimes as effete, decadent weaklings, sometimes as the bloodthirsty descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes, with no concern whatsoever for coherence. As for Field Marshal Lu, he was systematically portrayed as a sinister, Fu Manchu-like figure, with skeletally-thin grasping hands and torture implements dangling from his belt. As a result of such race-baiting, several cases were reported by the International Red Cross of captured Chinese soldiers being summarily executed, and numerous instances of mistreatment of Chinese prisoners-of-war in German camps.

The next frontline deployment of the CEC, which by then had reached a strength of three divisions and one brigade, took place in February 1916. Throughout January, intelligence analysis by the Second Bureau and French aerial reconnaissance had detected important concentrations of German troops near Verdun, but general headquarters refused to divert units kept in reserve for a planned Franco-British mass offensive in the Somme; among the token reinforcements which Joffre consented to send to the Verdun sector was the First Regiment of the CEC’s Second Division. Commanded by Colonel He Peihong, it was assigned the undermanned Bois des Caures sector to the North of Verdun, to reinforce the 56th and 59th Bataillons de Chasseurs à pied (72nd Infantry Division) under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Emile Driant. Driant was incensed that he would have to rely on “Chinks” to watch his flanks, but General Herr, who was in charge of the Verdun military region, ignored his complaint. The uneasy coexistence of Driant and He’s forces was cut short on February 22 by the beginning of the German onslaught. Caught under an intense artillery barrage, the 56th and 59th as well as the First Regiment suffered over 70% casualty rates in just a few hours, and the stunned survivors then found themselves facing the 81st, 87th and 115th German infantry regiments. Scattered in small groups in the now-devastated terrain, they miraculously managed to slow down the German advance. Colonel He and most of his officers were dead; a severely wounded Driant was carried by a Chinese soldier back to the Verdun fortress, where he was stabilized and evacuated to a rear hospital. Driant, it should be said, was no ordinary officer: a member of the National Assembly and the son-in-law of General Boulanger, he had become famous under the pen name of Capitaine Danrit (a transparent anagram) as the author of anticipation stories and political thrillers, blending the influences of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells into his own, deeply xenophobic and paranoid, world view. His novels mostly dealt with apocalyptic depictions of wars taking place in the near future and involving advanced technology, and his officer’s instincts sometimes turned out to be surprisingly accurate, as when he predicted a surprise Japanese aeronaval attack on Pearl Harbor—in a novel published in 1910. He was the most high-profile French advocate of the “Yellow Peril” claim, and in his 1905 novel L’Invasion jaune imagined how the advent of a new Chinese imperial dynasty in 1912 would trigger a cataclysmic war between a Sino-Japanese coalition (allied with Persia and the Ottoman Empire) and Western civilization; the novel ended with Chinese soldiers marching down the streets of Paris. Discharged from his military duties after the wounds sustained at Verdun, he wrote one last war-oriented novel in 1919, Notre guerre, and in the 1920s changed his focus to mostly non-political science fiction, with his Venus Trilogy becoming an enduring best-seller. Though he never publicly disavowed his earlier racist views, literary critics consider that the very absence of racial themes in his later oeuvre amounted to a tacit recant, and he dedicated his last book, Les Anneaux de glace, “to the one who carried me”.

Cover of the first edition L’Invasion jaune.​

The rest of the CEC was also sent to Verdun along with the Second Army on February 25, but thanks to the noria system devised by General Pétain, its units were rotated in and out and avoided the fate of the First Regiment, which had to be almost entirely reconstituted. The second-most devastating engagement after that of Bois des Caures for the CEC took place in May 1916 at the village of Mort-Homme, where the Third Regiment of the Second Division suffered over 50% casualty rates; some of the survivors privately confided that they were not surprised by the body count given the location’s highly inauspicious name. When the Battle of Verdun ended—inconclusively—after nine months of fighting, over 700,000 men had died, some 6,900 of them Chinese.

Driant’s xenophobia notwithstanding, members of the CEC encountered fairly little racism whether from French soldiers or civilians, the prevailing initial attitude being one of curiosity, and later on tentative camaraderie. Although the language barrier was an obstacle to fraternization, an informal pidgin soon evolved to allow basic communication, some elements of which ended up In the French lexicon: tchefanne (a snack), tchiou (booze), koaï-koaï (hurry up), etc.

China’s contribution to the Entente’s war effort did not limit itself to sending soldiers; in a total war, in which the home front is as critical to victory as the actual front, labor is a strategic resource, and one that France and Britain were beginning to run out of by early 1916. With millions of men fighting in the trenches, the French and British economies were in dire need of replacement manpower. In April 1916 the Chinese Labor Corps was set up, with recruitment offices opened throughout Shandong and Hebei (as with the CEC, it was considered that northerners would adapt more easily to the French climate), and the main facilities at the British base in Weihaiwei. While some members of the Chinese Labor Corps traveled to Europe by sailing westward across the Indian Ocean like the CEC, the majority traveled to France by crossing the Pacific Ocean. Pacific-bound ships were boarded at Weihaiwei and Qingdao, and sailed across the Pacific disembarking at the Quarantine Station at William Head on Vancouver Island. From William Head, members of the CLC sailed on to Vancouver, then were transported across Canada by rail to Halifax, where once again they boarded ships and sailed to Europe. Numbering some 160,000 by mid-1918, they were employed in all manner of manual work both at the rear (as stevedores, railway workers and in factories) and on the front line, digging trenches and maintaining earthworks. Because their contracts ran for three years, they stayed past the end of the war, being used for reconstruction. Around 4,000 of them chose to stay in France after the expiration of their contracts, and formed the nucleus of the French Chinese community; some married Frenchwomen (one of them, Zhang Cengsong, would join the French Resistance during the German occupation).

Members of the Chinese Labor Corps assembled at Weihaiwei.​

By November 1917, the CEC had grown to 57,000 men, still far short, as seen above, of the original plan. With the war showing no sign of ending soon, one might have expected its size to grow further, but worrying developments in Russia convinced the Chinese government to cancel the sending of more units, and instead request from its Entente allies the gradual repatriation of the Corps. Indeed, with Russia now in the throes of Bolshevik revolution, Nanjing expressed concerns about the destabilization of the Sino-Russian border and possible revolutionary contagion on its own soil, especially in Manchuria where the Russian-managed Chinese Eastern Railway enjoyed extraterritorial status. France and Britain did not gladly welcome the prospect of China’s disengagement from the Western Front, but both feared that with the Russian army in a state of complete decomposition, they may soon have to send troops on their own to keep the Eastern Front open and prevent Germany from concentrating its entire might on the Western Front; should it come to that, China was in a comparatively better position than they were to keep the Central Powers busy in the East. Further, by then the First Division of the American Expeditionary Force had been deployed, with four more divisions completing their training, and yet more on the way. The Fourth Division under Major General Wu Peifu's command was repatriated in December 1917, with the rest of the Corps staying on; reaching Tianjin in February 1918, it would soon find itself deployed to a new theater of operations in Russia. In the following years, many of the CEC’s officers rose to positions of influence in the Chinese military, bringing with them lessons learned (and mis-learned in some cases) on the Western Front: in the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, they would become proponents of the so-called Verdun School, which emphasized static linear defense along a strongly fortified front, as opposed to the Siberian School, based on defense in depth and elastic retreat. The Verdun School also insisted on strict application of battle plans, limiting tactical flexibility, on careful logistical preparation, and, lastly, on issuing adequately protective headgear to soldiers, since a high proportion of casualties were the result of wounds to the head caused by low-velocity shrapnel. Although the simplest option to address the issue would have been to keep the Adrian-style helmet already worn by CEC troops, General Xu in particular lobbied in favor of a superior design, the Hale & Kilburn Model 5 (brainchild of Bashford Dean, an American expert on medieval armor) which had seen some small-scale field testing among selected units of the AEF and caught his attention. The Model 5, nicknamed the “salad bowl” due to a translation error (Dean had called it the Deep Salade, after the medieval sallet), would become the standard Chinese military helmet from 1920 to the 1960s.

 

[Unknown]

After reading the latest update, I have this to say: this is awesome!!!!

 

[MrP]

A Test for Men from Europe (I)​

…somewhere ahead
A septic East, odd fowl and flowers, odder dresses:
Somewhere a strange and shrewd To-morrow goes to bed,
Planning a test for men from Europe; no-one guesses
Who will be most ashamed, who richer, and who dead.

—W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War


Even as China was involving itself in European affairs, trouble started brewing much closer to home. Russia’s Tsarist regime, which had a decade earlier nearly collapsed after a military defeat and bought itself time with the appearance rather than the substance of reform, had disintegrated under the hammer blows of German victories on the Eastern Front. All the instruments of Tsarist rule had simply fallen to pieces, and in February 1917 Kerensky’s Provisional Government had taken over. From a Chinese perspective the situation presented similarities to the inglorious end of the Qing dynasty, prompting Nanjing to speculate that Kerensky’s rule would prove as short-lived as that of Sun Yixian, and to weigh which outcome was more likely, the emergence of a strongman à la Yuan Shikai, or a neo-imperial restoration by some monarchist cabal. Chief of Staff Lavr Kornilov’s attempted August putsch seemed to tilt the balance in favor of the former, but his subsequent arrest, and then execution by Bolshevik sympathizers while in custody, put paid to that possibility. Meanwhile the disintegration of the Russian apparatus of state continued as the Provisional Government proved unable to pull the country back together, until in November Lenin convinced the Bolsheviks to stage their own coup. Suddenly, the frame of interpretation of Chinese observers changed; as they perceived it, the analogy was no longer with the fall of the Qing, it was with the Taiping Rebellion, and although Lenin’s holy book was the Communist Manifesto rather than the Bible, as seen from Nanjing he made a credible Russian version of Hong Xiuquan—a visionary, charismatic revolutionary leader willing to tear his country asunder to build his utopian society on a pile of dead bodies. The fact that, as China struggled to quell the rebellion, Russia had taken advantage of its neighbor’s travails to annex a slice of territory had not been forgotten by anyone in the Qian government, and now that the tables were turned, thoughts swiftly drifted towards redress. But an even more immediate concern was the containment of revolutionary unrest, which was already beginning to spill over in Russia’s Manchurian sphere of influence, when Bolshevik agitators attempted to seize control of the Chinese Eastern Railway headquarters in Harbin: Chinese passivity in the face of Russian upheaval wasn’t an option. Then there was the fact that for the previous three years, Vladivostok had been one of the main ports of entry for Western supplies to Russia: due to the worsening disorganization of the transportation network in the course of the war, by November 1917 a staggering 725,000 tons of supplies (including barbed wire, cars, trucks, tools, weapons, and ammunition) valued at over $750 million were piled up in the city’s warehouses, awaiting delivery to the troops; and now that literal mountain of materiel was at risk of falling in Bolshevik hands. In fact, the Bolsheviks had claimed control of Vladivostok on November 18, mere days after the proclamation of Soviet rule in Petrograd. Preventing them from confiscating supplies intended for Russia’s war effort was a priority for the Entente, and France formally requested China to send troops to the restless city. As Army Sustainment, the professional bulletin of US Army sustainment, put it in a 2012 article,

Historically, the sequence of events in a military expedition starts with the deployment of combat forces and is followed by a buildup of the logistics and distribution capability required to support those forces. What was taking place in Russia was just the opposite: War materiel was already in place, and the combat forces were being deployed to ensure the safety and proper distribution of that materiel.

Complicating the mission further was the fact that, with the signing of a peace treaty between Germany and the provisional revolutionary Russian Government, the Allied soldiers were not exactly sure to whom they were supposed to issue the supplies.

Vladivostok harbor in 1917.​

Chinese and Yakutian historiography—and, in many cases, Western historiography as well—long presented a skewed view of the beginning of the Russian civil war, downplaying the fact that in its initial phase, from November 1917 to January 1918, Soviet rule appeared to spread with ridiculous ease throughout the former Russian empire: in the six weeks that followed the coup in Petrograd, Bolsheviks were able to claim power in all but a handful of territories, the exceptions being the Transcaucasus, Finland, four Ukrainian provinces, and the Don, Kuban and Orenburg Cossack Regions. The forces that could provide organized resistance to Bolshevik rule would only emerge in the first months of 1918, and they were, at that point, mainly concentrated in Southern Russia, where a trickle of disgruntled military officers led by former Chief of Staff Mikhail Alekseev formed the nucleus of what would become the Volunteer Army in Novocherkassk. Although it is true that Bolshevik control was strongest in the industrial cities of central European Russia, it was, in these early months, at least nominally present in most of the country. And although Entente powers stood ready to step in, what prompted their actual deployment in Russia was the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 6, 1918: an armistice between the Central Powers and the Soviet government was already in effect, but the peace treaty made the latter an objective enemy of the Entente. From then on foreign intervention in Russia was inevitable, and Britain, France, the US, Japan China proceeded to implement their respective contingency plans. Five days after the signing of the treaty, Chinese Minister of War Wang Shizhen travelled to the Manchurian city of Harbin for a discreet meeting with the general manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway. His name was Dmitry Horvath.

General manager of the CER and governor of the Railway Zone since 1902, Horvath was arguably the most powerful Russian between Irkutsk and Vladivostok. Nearly seven feet tall, with a bald pate and a patriarch's long white beard, he cut an arresting figure. Distantly descended from Serbian nobility, an engineer by training, he had been put in charge of the construction of the Transcaspian Railway between 1885 and 1889, then of the Ussuri Railway between 1895 and 1899, and served for three years as general manager of the former before being assigned in Harbin. Already before 1917 he had become used to treating the CER as his personal satrapy, with his own private army to maintain order in the Railway Zone and a large security detail of Chinese bodyguards; now with the creeping collapse of government authority since the February Revolution, compounded by the chaos of the Bolshevik coup the previous November, he no longer submitted to any authority but his own, and the CER, from a state-within-the-state, was turning into an independent quasi-state. The Provisional Government had not even attempted to remove him, and instead simply renamed his position “Commissar to the Chinese Eastern Railway”, a purely cosmetic change that made no difference for him. A deeply conservative aristocrat, with family ties to the Romanovs and quite comfortable with the power and privileges he enjoyed, Horvath had watched with dismay the fall of the Tsar in February 1917; and when Kerensky’s shaky Republic was itself overthrown by what he viewed as loathsome “Leninist rabble”, he had swiftly broken all ties, tenuous though they already were, with Petrograd. A ham-handed Bolshevik attempt to arrest him in December 1917 only cemented his hatred of the new Russian regime. It was this potentate, jealous of his power and concerned above all else with its preservation, whom Wang Shizhen met in his palatial Harbin residence. And aside from his extensive experience with railroad management and his anti-Bolshevik credentials, Horvath had a trait that made him especially valuable to the Chinese: he was thoroughly corruptible. Over the years a number of informal arrangements had taken place between the Chinese government and the management of the CER, which always concluded with large amounts of money ending up in Horvath’s private coffers. This time would be no different, save for the size of the kickback; when Wang left the next day, he had secured Horvath’s agreement to declare himself leader of the White forces in Siberia—and, as such, to allow the deployment of Chinese troops on Russian territory. Thus was the chain of events that would lead to the Siberian Campaign and ultimately the creation of Yakutia set in motion.

Dmitry Horvath and representatives of the Entente powers in Harbin, 1918.​

Although the Chinese intervention in Russia officially began on March 18, 1918, Nanjing already had a token military presence there since the previous December, with the cruisers Hai Rong and Hai Qi (the latter a veteran of the siege of Qingdao in 1914), anchored at Vladivostok alongside various warships from other Entente powers. On that day the Seventh Cavalry Regiment, under the command of Colonel Ma Zhanshan and accompanied by a battalion of CER guards, crossed the Amur River and seized the Blagoveshchensk city hall, arresting local Bolshevik authorities and putting the city under military occupation; two days later, the Fifth Cavalry Regiment (Colonel Zhao Chengshou) likewise crossed the Ussuri and took control of Khabarovsk, though by then the local Bolsheviks had had time to assemble a militia and put up a more serious fight. The choice of Blagoveshchensk as the first place to be “liberated” was not just because of its location right across the border with China; it was also a symbolic retribution for the anti-Chinese pogrom that had taken place in 1900, when the city’s entire Chinese community had been rounded up and drowned in the river. As Louis Livingston Seaman wrote in 1904:

The Chinaman, be he Hung-hutze or peasant, in his relation to the Russians in this conflict with Japan has not forgotten the terrible treatment accorded him since the Muscovite occupation of Manchuria. He still remembers the massacre at Blagovestchensk when nearly 8,000 unarmed men, women, and children were driven at the point of the bayonet into the raging Amur, until—as one of the Russian officers who participated in that brutal murder told me at Chin-Wang-Tao in 1900—" the execution of my orders made me almost sick, for it seemed as though I could have walked across the river on the bodies of the floating dead." Not a Chinaman escaped, except forty who were employed by a leading foreign merchant who ransomed their lives at a thousand roubles each.*

In Japan, Prime Minister Tokugawa Iesato was reluctant to commit troops to the Siberian theater, which threatened to be a human and financial drain that Japan could little afford; but he had to contend with the influential pro-intervention faction led by Foreign Minister Goto Shinpei, a former manager of the South Manchuria Railway who had long advocated an expansionist policy in Northeast Asia, and considered the Russian crisis an ideal opportunity for Japan to enlarge its sphere of influence into Siberia. Goto had the backing of a number of senior Army officers and the ear of powerful industrial and banking interests, and as 1918 began it was obvious to observers of the Japanese political scene that his position would soon prevail. A clear signal had been sent in December 1917 when the Japanese battleship Mikasa threw anchor in Vladivostok at the pier next to that used by the Hai Qi: the Chinese surmised that if they failed to intervene, the military vacuum would surely be filled by Japan.

In order to preempt this, on April 2 the Chinese rushed its Eighth Infantry Division to Vladivostok, a deployment greatly facilitated by the reliance on CER rolling stock, itself the first concrete result of the agreement with Horvath. Its commander, Major General Che Qingyun, had been selected due to his extensive knowledge of the Russian military, acquired through intelligence work in Siberia before and during the Russo-Japanese War. It was followed on April 17 by Major General Wu Peifu’s Fourth Division, which had returned from the European theater two months earlier, and preparations were made for the deployment of more forces: by June 16 the Expeditionary Corps to Siberia had been assembled, consisting of two army corps under General Jiang Chaozong, and within days its deployment was under way: by then it was not just a question of preempting the Japanese, but also of catching up with the accelerating developments in Russia itself, where the situation had come to a sudden boil in May with the mutiny of the Czech Legion.

General Jiang Chaozong.​

The epic tale of the Czech Legion began, as tales often do, with humble origins, namely an ad hoc corps of Czech and Slovak expatriates living in Russia who decided to take up arms on the side of the Entente in 1914, hoping that the defeat of the Central Empires would create the right conditions for the national independence of their homeland of Bohemia-Moravia. At the other end of Europe, their compatriots living in France had likewise set up volunteer units to fight on the Western Front, imitated from 1915 by Czechs living in Italy; acting as liaison and international coordinator was Milan Stefanik, an astronomer who had acquired the French citizenship in 1912 and soon became the de facto foreign affairs minister of the Czech national movement. Initially of company size, the Czech corps in Russia grew by leaps and bounds, through the absorption of Czech POWs and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army: sometimes entire regiments would defect at a time, swelling the ranks of the Druzhina (the “Brotherhood”, as they called themselves) with thousands of battle-hardened men. By 1917 what was now referred to as the Legion numbered some 70,000; and as the Russian army fell apart around them in the chaotic months following the overthrow of the Tsar, it retained its operational cohesion, making it by default the largest organized military force in Russia. They had no choice: they could not drop their weapons and go home as Russian soldiers did by the millions, nor could they allow themselves to get captured by the rapidly advancing Central Power troops, since as deserters and traitors they would be sentenced to death. They had to find a way out of the chaos that revolutionary Russia was turning into, peacefully if possible, by force if necessary. The Entente powers and especially France were eager to assist in their evacuation, so that they could be shipped to Europe and redeployed on the Western Front the sooner; but as the year ended and the new Bolshevik regime appeared either unable or unwilling to resist the advance of Austro-Hungarian and German forces into Russia, the relations between the Czechs and the Bolsheviks went from mutual mistrust to mutual hatred: to the Czechs, the Bolsheviks were the Central Powers’ useful idiots, and to the Bolsheviks, the Czechs were “bourgeois nationalists” and pawns of capitalist powers. Compounding the complexity of the situation was the fact that France and Britain worked at cross-purposes, with the former attempting to evacuate the Legion through Vladivostok, and the latter insisting that they ought to go through Arkhangelsk instead. Meanwhile the Central Powers demanded that the Bolsheviks neutralize the Legion or at least impede its departure. Then a further organizational headache was added by the desperate state of Russia’s transportation infrastructure; and finally, there was the problem of bitter hostility between the Legion and the non-Czech or Slovak POWs in Russia, who faced each other in tense confrontations at many stations of the Transsiberian railroad. That the explosive situation eventually blew into everyone’s faces should therefore have come as no surprise.

The incident that sparked the Legion’s mutiny took place in Chelyabinsk on May 11, but it could have happened at any time in any other dozen cities along the Transsiberian: on that day a brawl between Legionaries and Hungarian POWs ended with several deaths on both sides, prompting the furious Czechs to take outright control of the city. The Soviet War Commissariat, upon learning of the incident, ordered that all Legionaries throughout Russia be disarmed, disbanded, and forcibly incorporated into labor battalions. The last straw came on May 22 when Trotsky ordered every Legionary found with arms to be shot on the spot. The only result was to make the Soviet regime a mortal enemy of the Legion: suddenly the largest organized military force in the country threw its weight in the balance on the side of the counter-revolution. What followed has been called “one of the most remarkable feats in military history”: in the span of two and a half months, the Czech Legion captured the Transsiberian from the Urals all the way to the Transbaikal, giving it virtual control over nearly two thirds of Russia’s land mass—more territory than any World War I belligerent had ever captured. After Chelyabinsk on the 23rd, Penza fell on the 27th and Simbirsk on the 30th; then Samara on June 5 and Ufa on the 19th; racing along the railway, the Legion then captured Omsk, Novonikolayevsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkustk and Verkhneudinsk—sweeping aside all resistance as it went—and linked up with the Sino-Whites at Chita on August 3. The single existing modern means of transportation for men and equipment through Siberia was the Legion’s to use as it chose.

The Orlik, an armored train captured by the Czechs from the Bolsheviks. In the foreground is the rail cruiser Zaamurets.​

It chose, paradoxically, to stay and fight rather than leave as initially intended: the Entente powers now wanted it to keep the Eastern Front active in order to prevent Germany from focusing its strength on the Western Front, the Bolsheviks had proved surprisingly easy to overpower, and in the course of their frantic anabasis the Czechs had come to sympathize with the anti-Bolshevik forces they encountered. On August 28, following an agreement between the Czech National Council and the French government, the Legion was put under the authority of General Maurice Janin, in Russia since 1916 as head of the French Military Mission, and now official commander of Allied forces on the Siberia front. Janin’s leadership, however, would always remain purely nominal; already three weeks earlier Jiang Chaozong and General Mikhail Khanzhin, whom Horvath had recently appointed as his Commander-in-Chief in order to focus his attention on political issues (and personal intrigues), had met with General Mikhail Diterikhs, the Legion’s actual commander, and agreed between them on the coordination of Czech, Chinese and PSG military operations in Siberia. All that was left for the bumbling Janin to do was acknowledge the fait accompli.

Meanwhile, a plethora of provisional governments (19 of them by one count) had risen in non-Bolshevik Russia, but east of the Volga, PSG aside, the only significant political organization was the Samara-based KOMUCH (Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly), which as its name implied had been set up by members of the Constituent Assembly forcibly dissolved on Lenin’s orders in January. Indeed, KOMUCH had a credible claim to both legitimacy and popular approval, since it was mostly made up of Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had won a relative majority (41%) of the votes in the November 1917 elections, way ahead of the Bolsheviks themselves (23%), and had been particularly successful in the rural regions of Trans-Uralic Russia thanks to their platform of agrarian reform. However, in the brutal political environment of revolutionary Russia, neither legitimacy nor popularity could make up for the lack of raw power, and KOMUCH’s military strength at its peak in August 1918 would only amount to some 30,000 untrained and poorly-equipped local recruits (though it did successfully enlist a first-rate officer in the person of Colonel Vladimir Kappel). After a few initial successes, it faced a string of defeats against the newly energized and reorganized Red Army in the late summer. At a conference held in Ufa from September 6 to September 19, caving in to political pressure, it consented to fusion with the PSG, and by the end of the year had ceased to exist as an autonomous executive body. Most of its military and political personnel, including Kappel but also General Vasily Boldyrev and former Duma member Pyotr Vologodsky, was co-opted by Horvath.

Even as it raced East to the Transbaikal, the Legion pushed West into European Russia, cutting like a knife into the ill-organized Red Army. On July 23 it reached Yekaterinburg, where the Tsar and his family were being held prisoner and were hastily executed by panicked Bolsheviks prior to the evacuation of the city. On August 5 the Czechs reached Kazan. This allowed them to capture the main bridge on the Middle Volga, clearing the last natural obstacle on the road to Moscow and interposing themselves between the Red First and Second Armies. The strategic catastrophe threw the Bolsheviks in such disarray that Red Army Eastern Front Commander Ioakim Vatsetis was killed by his own men, and Colonel Nikolai Stogov, Chief of the Main Staff and in charge of all the Red Army’s administrative services, defected to the White side along with several army commanders and many junior officers, including the instructors and students of the General Staff Academy. But what’s more, in Kazan a stunning surprise awaited the Czechs: it was there that Russia’s gold reserves had been transferred the previous spring, and, amazingly, abandoned unguarded in the vault of a local bank. It was a colossal war chest, the deposed Tsarist regime’s entire stockpile of gold: the astronomical booty amounted to 670 million gold rubles (about 25 billion current US dollars), or 505 metric tons of gold; when the Czechs proceeded to transport it to safety, it filled 28 railway cars. It is no small testament to the Czechs’ integrity that, instead of hoarding this dizzying fortune, they dutifully handed it over to the Sino-Siberian forces in Chita, where Horvath had in the meantime relocated his seat of government from Harbin.

The Czech Legion's First Regiment in Kazan, August 1918.​

The loss of Kazan—and the gold stockpiled there—gave the Bolsheviks a jolt, and Trotsky, as War Commissar, took matters in his hands. Setting up his forward headquarters in Sviazhk, a railway station 60 km west of Kazan, he set out to thoroughly reorganize the Red Army, turning it from a glorified militia into a professional fighting force. Sergey Kamenev was appointed in replacement of Vatsetis, and to make up for the dearth of experienced officers, Trotsky proceeded to recruit what he termed “specialists”, namely former members of the Tsarist officer corps, a surprising number of whom accepted (just to be on the safe side, they were shadowed by political officers and their families kept hostage). Within a month his reforms, brutally implemented though they were—every tenth soldier of the forces that had failed to defend Kazan was executed—were beginning to bear results, starting with the retaking of Kazan on September 12. Further south, the heavy fighting against Alekseev’s Volunteer Army which was laying siege on Tsaritsyn showed that the Red Army could now give blow for blow; the Bolsheviks had now blunted the momentum of their two most dangerous external enemies, but they would soon have to turn their attention to internal ones as well. In early July the Socialist-Revolutionaries had attempted a counter-coup to oust the Bolsheviks, and only the swift intervention of the Latvian Riflemen—along with the Kronstadt sailors the most committed organized force the Bolsheviks could rely on—prevented the SRs to take control of Moscow. The SR party was banned, but its members nonetheless continued their acts of violent resistance against the Bolsheviks on an individual basis: on August 19, Cheka commander Felix Dzerzhinsky was lightly wounded when Grigory Semenov fired on him (Semenov was killed in the ensuing firefight), and on September 3 Fanya Kaplan shot Trotsky, who was hit by three bullets and severely wounded. She was immediately arrested and put on trial, during which she calmly admitted that she would even have shot Lenin himself if she had had the chance. Trotsky, to her disappointment, recovered from his injuries, and even, in a typically dramatic gesture, kept wearing his bullet-riddled leather coat, blood stains and all. In reaction to the two assassination attempts, Lenin decreed the “Red Terror”, a policy of indiscriminate repression and physical elimination of suspected enemies of the Revolution.


* From Tokio through Manchuria with the Japanese, Appleton Press, New York, 1904.

 

[Master Xion]

Nice update.

 

[Archangel]

Keep posting, Pete!