Mao: The Unknown Story

It was thus to Mao’s advantage for Chiang to know that only a small branch was now going north, and that the CCP leadership was with it. Sure enough, within hours of Mao’s splitting, the Nationalists knew both these facts, and exactly which troops had gone with Mao, and how debilitated they were. On 11 September, the day after Mao bolted, Chiang told his governor in the area that he had “received information that Mao, Peng, Lin and their bandits are fleeing north, and they are all totally starved and worn out …”

Kuo-tao seems to have had no doubt that the information was deliberately leaked by Mao, as a cable he sent to Mao and Co. next day read: “The morning after you left, [the enemy] knew straight away that Peng De-huai’s unit had fled northward. Please beware of reactionaries … leaking secrets. No matter what differences we have, we must not reveal military movements to our enemy.”

This leak ensured Mao a smooth run for himself all the way to his destination — the Yellow Earth Plateau. There in North Shaanxi the only secure base in the whole of China awaited him, courtesy of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao and the core leaders had known about this base before the Long March, and Moscow had told them to expand it as far back as 3 May 1934, well before the March set off.

MAO ENJOYED A helping hand from Chiang, and the next thousand kilometers were virtually obstacle-free, militarily. “Except for native snipers,” Braun recorded, “this stretch was void of enemies.” Chiang’s forces shadowed them, but only to prevent Mao straying back into the heartland of China.

This final stretch was a cakewalk compared with before. Instead of snow and hail, and Tibetans sniping from the woods, here in south Gansu the Reds saw golden ears of grain in glorious sunshine, sheep at pasture and farmers tending fields. The locals were friendly, and Mao made an effort to keep them that way. He did not want another reception like the one from the Tibetans, and enjoined “strict discipline.” Muslims made up 60 percent of the population, and the Red Army was forbidden to slaughter or eat pigs, and ordered not to rob any Muslims, even the rich.

The locals allowed the Red Army into their homes, where the men had a hot bath for the first time in months, enjoyed a shave and a haircut, and ate hearty Muslim meals, with pancakes and noodles, mutton and chicken, garlic and pepper. The hospitality, Braun remembered, “astonished me greatly.”

But this friendly atmosphere became the cause of a major headache for Mao, as desertions soared. A Nationalist report showed that while Mao’s troops were in one county alone, Minxian, over 1,000 Red Army men gave themselves up. On 2 October Mao ordered the security forces to “collect” stragglers. “Collect” often meant execution. One senior officer (later army chief of staff in Communist China) recalled: “During the march to north Shaanxi, there were continual stragglers. The army political security organization … adopted cruel means of punishment again.” He was scared: “I followed the troops carefully, worried all the time that I might fall behind and be dealt with as a straggler.” “Deal with” was akin to the Mafia’s “take care of,” a euphemism for killing. One day, “on the verge of collapse,” he thought he might not make it: “my heart only settled back to its place when I got to quarters at 11 o’clock at night.”

When Mao finally arrived at the Red area in north Shaanxi that was to be his base, his army was down to well below 4,000. In the last — and easiest — month of the journey, he actually lost more than half his remaining men, between deserters, stragglers, and deaths both from illness and at the hands of his own security men. His force was just about the same size as when he had left the outlaw land back in January 1929, seven years earlier. And the troops were in the worst possible shape. One officer recalled:

We were famished and exhausted. Our clothes, in particular, were in shreds. We had no shoes or socks, and many people wrapped their feet with strips of blanket … Wuqi [where they arrived] was already a very poor place, but even the … local comrades kept questioning me: how come you got into such a sorry state? You really looked like nothing but a bunch of beggars.

But Mao was not feeling at all defeated when he set foot in the Red territory on 18 October 1935. “The darkest moment” in his life — as he described the threat from Kuo-tao — was over, and he was the winner. The Red Army might be on its last legs after a trek of some 10,000 km, lasting an entire year, of which four months were extra, thanks to him, but the Party was now, to all intents and purposes, his.