The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam

Author:David Halberstam
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-05-21T21:40:14+00:00

c r o s s i n g t h e p a r a l l e l a n d h e a d i n g n o r t h 3 5 7

Peng was a peasant himself, produced by a much harder childhood than that of Mao. He was a man with a shrewd, pragmatic sense of tactics for a newly created army that was almost always going to be outgunned and outnumbered if it fought as a traditional force. On his own back in 1934 he had challenged the destructive strategy of the Party’s military leader, a rigid Prussian named Otto Braun, sent to China by Moscow. In Peng’s view, Braun’s tactics were hopelessly conventional and poorly suited for the Communists’

fragile military situation. His victory over Braun in the struggle to define tactics was probably the first great triumph of the Long March. It was the Long March that bonded Peng and Mao: it had been the supreme test, more than six thousand miles both fleeing and fighting against, in no particular order, Chiang’s troops, local warlords, backbreaking terrain, appallingly harsh weather conditions, and abiding, pervasive hunger. Of the eighty thousand who had begun the trip in southeast China, perhaps eight thousand finished it a year and three days later, in the distant, barren, impoverished north. In one of the final battles of the Long March, at a place called Wuqi, after more than twenty days of hard fighting, five regiments of Nationalist horse cavalry, about four or five thousand men, had attacked. Mao ordered Peng to defeat their pursuers and not to let them enter the base camp. That he had done, and in return, Mao had written him a poem: “High mountains, dangerous passes, deep ravines,/

The enemy cavalry sweep the length and breadth at will;/ Who dares stop them, astride a horse, gun at the ready?/ Only our general, Peng Dehuai.” (Peng said that he later changed the last line to “only our heroic Red Army,” and returned it to Mao.)

To understand Peng and why he fought so well was to understand the ordinary Chinese soldiers as well, the grievances that had driven these men, and thus to understand the success of the Communist Army. His beliefs were simple and formed by the harshest kind of life: he believed that the rich were cruel, that the poor were not just poor but utterly defenseless against them; that there was an elemental brutality to every minute of daily Chinese life; and that the struggle to change it was worth dying for. He had been born in 1898 into a peasant home of crippling poverty. His mother had died when he was a small boy. His father was unable to work because he was so sick. The family of eight lived off what was about one acre of fallow, hilly land. Peng himself had to drop out of school at a very early age because he was needed to help the family earn money. He

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