Even before the Japanese occupation, Manchuria was a thriving center, and the conquerors, with characteristic efficiency, speeded its industrial and agricultural development during the fourteen years of their occupation. They developed the largest coal, iron and gold mines in Eastern Asia. From Manchuria alone they obtained more gold than from any other source, in addition to five million tons of iron and steel and thirty million tons of coal every year.
The great cities in Manchuria, of which Mukden is the capital, were modernized. New railroad lines were built into the outlying districts, and thousands of workers, heretofore purely agricultural, were taught to work in factories. For the first time, modern hotels and apartments covered city blocks, and Mukden undoubtedly boasted more bathtubs, per capita, than any other city in Asia, with the possible exception of Shanghai.
The Generalissimo had believed that Manchuria, when it was liberated, would become a part of the Nationalist Government. He had sent occupation troops there, had incorporated it into his rightful territory, and at the end of the war had already started repairing the damage caused by the final phase of the fighting. He was unaware of the fact that Roosevelt had promised Manchuria to Russia as her price for entering the war against Japan. He still firmly believed in Roosevelt’s friendship, because Roosevelt had promised that all Chinese territory liberated from the Japanese would be returned to China.
Although Russia kept a tight rein on the Prize, she did everything she could to help and encourage the Chinese Communists. Immediately upon entering the war, she began to supply them with arms and ammunition captured from the Japanese. At first this was done stealthily by the simple ruse of allowing the Chinese Communists to “find” these supplies themselves. After V-J Day Russia made no attempt to hide from the world her interest in, and her support of, the Chinese Communist regime. Besides supplying arms and propaganda material, she assisted her lusty child by hampering, in every way, the liberation of the Nationalist troops held by the Japanese. Since then she has continued to work closely with the Chinese Reds. Li Li San, the Kremlin’s Chinese agent, is in command. Russia, therefore, takes everything she desires for herself, first.
Russian Armies in the East are composed of Asiatics, closely related geographically, racially and politically to the Chinese Communists. In behavior they are as clumsy and vindicative as their forebears under Genghis Khan. Many peace-loving Chinese, after experiencing Red domination, cried out, “Six months under the Communists are worse than fourteen years under the Japs.”
As an example of what happens when these people overrun a country, let us examine Manchuria at close range. Russian troops taking over the country from the Japanese stripped nearly all the factories of machinery, but with characteristic inefficiency. When a machine to be sent to Russia was dismantled, no effort was made to keep the pieces together in numbered crates so they could be reassembled in another location. On the contrary, the machines were broken down in mass and the jumbled parts loaded into trucks or freight cars with no regard whatever to system. Where a machine could not be brought out through doors or windows, the whole side of a wall was pushed out and the rubble left where it fell. Completely ignorant of the delicate mechanism of precision instruments, they permitted them to be left out in the rain and snow to rust into utter uselessness. Somewhere east of the Urals, the Russians must have a tremendous pile of scrap, if it is not scattered along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway. This inability to appreciate and handle machinery may throw some light on Russia’s frantic desire to acquire machine tools, at almost any cost. Incidentally, the same wanton disregard of everything technical applies to the looting of Eastern Europe.
Not only were Manchuria’s factories moved out bodily, piled onto freight cars and, in a desultory manner, slowly moved into Siberia, but what the troops were unable to take with them, they maliciously destroyed. Aside from the Kremlin-activated seizure of the factories, the primitive soldiers of the occupying forces, as well as just common bandits, stripped Manchuria’s cities of everything that could, by any remote chance, be useful to them. Both Chinese and Russians followed the age old Mongolian custom and gleefully stole or destroyed all personal property that they could get their hands on. Even fixtures fastened to the walls were pulled out, and door knobs, pipes and plumbing appliances were removed and turned over to the government to be made into ammunition.
The Nationalist troops that the Generalissimo had moved in right after V-J Day found it well-nigh impossible to defend Manchurian property. The Chinese Communists used guerrilla warfare almost exclusively against the villagers, their tactics being to terrorize, kill and destroy before help could come from the Nationalist troops. “Sack and pillage” kept the people in constant panic. In an endeavor to isolate and defeat the Nationalists, the Communists tore up all the railroads. Peasants were conscripted to dig up hundreds of miles of railway track. They burned the ties, levelled the roadbeds, hid or carried away the rails, and demolished the drainage structures. Practically all the bridges were destroyed by explosives, all signal towers and sidetrack mechanisms were wrecked, and every other wanton damage that fiendish ingenuity could conceive or devise was inflicted. As a final gesture of brutality, captured locomotive engineers who were known to have Nationalist sympathies had their hands cut off.
This kind of fighting completely destroyed the economy of Manchuria. From being a food and industrial surplus area, she became poverty-stricken. The people, living in barren houses without furniture or utensils of any kind, were reduced to the level of their primitive ancestors. Water became the scarcest of commodities and, with the reservoirs destroyed, had to be brought up from the dirty rivers in buckets. City transportation was at a premium. It ranged from the luxury of a pedicab, to ancient carriage bodies or automobile chassis, hauled by men, tiny ponies and dogs. A few families found a new use for the bathtub which they had been able to salvage. Mounted on rickety wheels, it was used as a public conveyance, and men, women and children sat huddled together in it. Sometimes a huge umbrella, Chinese or foreign, protected them from a scorching sun or a driving rain. It made a grotesque picture indeed!
With the disruption of transportation and the commandeering of much of the foodstuffs for the troops, obtaining food became the major problem of the people of Manchuria. Starvation stalked the cities. Mukden families were reduced to eating dung. So precious was this commodity that every horse wore a contraption under his tail resembling a large, crude dust pan to preserve even minute droppings. The very poor mixed mud with the dung, and after baking the concoction in the sun used it as food. Hawkers sold it on the streets.