By then, Mao was safe. The day before Stalin’s telegram, Mao had wired a cheerful message to his colleagues in the Red base east of the Yellow River: “On 9–11 this month, Liou Kan’s 4 brigades held a parade where we were … Apart from a little loss to the population, no losses. Now the Liou [Kan] army is running to and fro between Yenan and Baoan.” Mao did not take up Stalin’s offer to evacuate him this time. All the same, he ordered an airstrip built at once just east of the Yellow River, in case.
Liou Kan soon met his death. In February 1948 he was ordered to reinforce the town of Yichuan, between Yenan and the Yellow River. There were three possible routes, and the one picked for him, by General Hu, ran through a narrow wooded valley. Scouts found a heavy concentration of Communist troops, clearly indicating an ambush. Liou Kan radioed Hu for permission to attack the ambushers and then change course. Hu flatly refused.
One of Liou Kan’s division commanders, Wang Ying-tsun, later wrote: “After this order, which completely ignored the real situation and our interests, officers and soldiers lost heart … everyone marched in silence, with their heads bowed …” They walked straight into the encirclement and were virtually annihilated. Half a dozen generals were killed, and Liou Kan committed suicide. The division commander managed to escape, and later saw General Hu. According to him, the general “hypocritically expressed his regret, and said why did you press on when you did not have enough troops? I thought: it was your order, and my men were pounded and killed …” The division commander testified: “After Liou Kan’s 29th Army was wiped out, it went without saying that Hu Tsung-nan’s troops had no morale to speak of. Moreover, the state of mind of the whole Chiang area was tremendously shaken …” This defeat sealed the Nationalists’ fate in the Yenan theater, and negated Chiang’s whole aim in capturing Yenan, which had been to boost morale and confidence in the country at large.
Chiang knew that Hu wrecked everything he touched. In his diary of 2 March 1948, the Generalissimo wrote: “This catastrophe cost over one third of the main force [under Hu],” and that Hu was “following the same fatal road again and again.” And yet, when Hu disingenuously offered his resignation, Chiang turned it down, with only a lamentation: “The loss of our troops at Yichuan is not only the biggest setback in the Nationalist Army’s campaign against the bandits, but also an entirely senseless sacrifice. Good generals killed, a whole army wiped out. Grief and anguish are consuming me …” A half-hearted investigation blamed the debacle on the dead Liou Kan. The Nationalist system followed its tradition of closing ranks, especially once others saw that Hu was so secure in Chiang’s favor.
The fact that the Generalissimo allowed Hu to get away with a whole year of incredible defeats, all clearly following the same pattern, says a lot about his leadership and judgment. He trusted people he liked, and would back them come what may, often sentimentally. He was also stubborn, and would stick by his own mistakes. Chiang even allowed Hu to siphon off troops from other vital theaters. The chief US military adviser, Major General David Barr, observed that Hu “prevailed on” Chiang “to reinforce his Xian garrison to an extent which was later to prove disastrous to the Nationalists in east central China”; key losses there were “a direct result of this shift of troops to the west,” where, Barr noted, they were either useless or destroyed.
When Mao finally left the Yenan region and headed east over the Yellow River to the Red base on 23 March 1948, he did so publicly, with organized crowds of peasants seeing him off at the river crossing. And he shook hands with local cadres before he boarded the boat. This unusual openness was to demonstrate that he was not running away furtively. And the general point that the Reds were riding high was reinforced a month later when Hu abandoned Yenan altogether. Over the past year he had lost 100,000 troops. Recovering Yenan was potentially a propaganda windfall for the Reds, but Mao adopted an extremely low-key position. His assistant, Shi Zhe, expected him to make the most of the occasion: “so I waited by his side … But nothing happened.” Mao did not want to attract more attention to Hu in case he was sacked.
