The depot at Panlong handed the Reds vast stores of food, clothing, ammunition and medical supplies, while the Nationalists were left starving. Some were reduced to taking shoes from rotting Communist corpses. “No matter how we washed them,” one recalled, “we still couldn’t get rid of the horrible stench.” Many fell ill, but they had been cleaned out of medicine.
After these three victories within two months of the Nationalists taking Yenan, the Communists broadcast the news that Mao had remained in the Yenan region. The import was clear: even though he was not actually in the capital, the CCP supremo was able to survive and operate in the area, and was very much in control of events.
Mao remained within some 150 km of Hu’s HQ in Yenan city for a whole year, traveling with an entourage of 800 people, which eventually grew to 1,400, including a cavalry company. A sizable radio corps operated twenty-four hours a day, keeping contact with Red armies and bases all over China and with Russia.
Mao moved about from place to place for the first time since he had come to rule this region a decade before. A litter was kept at the ready, but Mao preferred walking and riding, unlike his custom on the Long March, and became very fit. His chef carried his favorite foods like chili and sausages. Mao almost never ate with the locals or in restaurants, for fear of poor hygiene, or poison. He slept so well that he even dispensed with sleeping pills, and was in marked high spirits. He did quite a bit of sightseeing, and posed for a newsreel crew who came from Manchuria to film him. Mme Mao acquired a stills camera, and took a lot of photographs, embarking on a hobby at which she later became quite accomplished. The Russian doctors came over frequently from the Red base east of the Yellow River to give Mao check-ups and report on his condition to Stalin.
During this year, most of the Yenan region remained under Communist control, and Hu’s vast army was sent into one large ambush after another, always following the same pattern: isolated units surrounded and overwhelmed by concentrated Communist forces while Hu’s main forces chased their own tails elsewhere. Hu’s superbly trained artillery battalion fell wholesale to the Reds, and came to form a significant part of Mao’s artillery. Yet another spectacular ambush buried one of Hu’s crack units when he ordered it back to Yenan, claiming that the city was under threat. It was trapped in a narrow mountain valley and shelled to smithereens. While Hu’s army was thus destroyed on a massive scale, Mao came across as a military genius who could pull spectacular victories out of a hat.
MAO HAD ONE CLOSE SHAVE. It came in June 1947, when he had lingered nearly two months in a village called Wangjiawan, staying with a peasant’s family, the first time he lived in intimate proximity to the locals. Here he took walks and went riding for pleasure. When the weather got hotter, he decided he wanted a shady place to read outdoors, so his bodyguards felled some trees to make pillars, weaving the twigs and leaves into a bower, where Mao read every day, studying English for relaxation.
On 8 June, one of Hu’s commanders, Liou Kan, suddenly appeared nearby with a large force. He had been tipped off about Mao’s presence by a local who had managed to escape from the Red area. Mao erupted with unprecedented rage, bellowing at Chou En-lai, and a heated discussion ensued about which way to run. The nearest safe haven was a Red base east of the Yellow River, where boats and cars were on constant standby at the crossing. But it was too far away, so Mao decided to go west, towards the Gobi Desert — after taking the precaution of rounding up a large group of villagers, who were forcibly evacuated in the opposite direction as decoys.
Mao made off through thunderstorms, carried on the backs of bodyguards along mountain paths too slippery for horses. Radio silence was imposed to minimize the chances of detection — except for one radio, which worked non-stop, almost certainly to contact Hu to call his troops off.
Which is exactly what happened. On 11 June, Liou Kan was so close on Mao’s heels that the Reds could hear his troops and see their torches. Mao’s guards said they felt their hair seemed to “stand on end.” As they were getting ready to defend him to the death, Mao emerged from a cave all smiles, predicting that the enemy would pass them by. At that instant, right in front of the guards’ astonished eyes, the Nationalist troops rushed by, and left them totally unmolested. Hu had ordered Liou Kan to drop everything and race on to his original destination, Baoan, Mao’s old capital.
This incident may well have triggered an urgent request to Stalin to get Mao out to Russia. A cable from Stalin on 15 June was clearly in reply to such a request. Stalin offered to send a plane to pick up Mao.
