Hu went on to cause even more spectacular catastrophes for Chiang, ultimately losing many hundreds of thousands of troops. When Chiang got to Taiwan, Hu went too. There he was immediately impeached, on the charge that he had “brought about the greatest damage to our army and country” of all the Nationalists. But the impeachment failed, thanks to Chiang’s protection. Chiang even put Hu in charge of operations to infiltrate the Mainland: they all came to grief. Hu died in Taiwan in 1962. Chiang may have come to doubt his judgment in his later years. His chief of guards (and subsequently prime minister of Taiwan), Hau Po-tsun, told us that Chiang showed an aversion to the mention of the Whampoa Academy, which is generally assumed to have been his base. Many moles had hailed from there.
MOLES CONTINUED to play a key role in the defeats Chiang suffered in the three military campaigns in 1948–49 that clinched the civil war. The first was in Manchuria, where Chiang picked as his supreme commander a general called Wei Li-huang. In this case, Chiang had not only been told that Wei was a Communist agent, but actually suspected this to be true. Even so, he put Wei in charge of all the 550,000 best troops in this critical theater in January 1948.
Wei had asked to join the CCP in 1938. Mao passed the news to Moscow in 1940, telling the Russians that the CCP had instructed Wei to stay undercover with the Nationalists. It seems that Wei decided on his betrayal out of a mighty grudge against Chiang for not promoting him as high as he felt he deserved. Wei had told cronies then: “I am going for the Communists … Yenan is nice to me … Let’s work with the Communists to bring him [Chiang] down.”
Chiang had been told about Wei’s secret liaisons by a Communist defector at the time, and so he passed Wei over again for a top army post after 1945, even though Wei had fought well in Burma against the Japanese, and earned the title “Hundred Victories Wei.” Wei became even more disgruntled, and went into self-imposed exile abroad.
The reason Wei was brought back in 1948 and given such a crucial job was that Chiang was frantically trying to woo the Americans, who thought highly of Wei’s performance in Burma and regarded him as an important “liberal.” The then US vice-consul in Shenyang, William Stokes, told us that Chiang appointed Wei “in a futile attempt to gain more American equipment and funding, because Wei was recognised by the Americans as a proven military leader.”
The moment Wei received the call from Chiang, he let the Russian embassy in Paris know, and thenceforth coordinated his every move with the CCP. First of all, he pulled his troops back into a few big cities, thus allowing the Communists to take control of 90 percent of Manchuria without a fight and then to surround these cities.
Mao wanted Wei to make sure that all the Nationalist troops under him stayed in Manchuria so that they could be wiped out there. Wei therefore ignored repeated orders from Chiang to move his troops to Jinzhou, the southernmost railway junction in Manchuria, preparatory to withdrawing from Manchuria completely (a move the chief US adviser, Major General Barr, had also recommended). Instead of sacking Wei, Chiang went on arguing with him for months — until the Communists took Jinzhou, on 15 October, trapping most of the hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops in Manchuria. Mao’s troops then swiftly isolated Wei’s forces in the remaining Nationalist-held cities, and attacked them one by one. With the fall of Shenyang on 2 November, the whole of Manchuria was in Mao’s hands.
For his performance in Manchuria, Chiang put Wei under house arrest, and there were calls for him to be court-martialed. But the Generalissimo, who rarely executed, or even imprisoned, any of his top commanders or opponents, let Wei go, and he sailed off unmolested to Hong Kong. A year later, two days after the proclamation of Communist China, Wei cabled Mao, wagging his tail: “wise guidance … magnificent triumph … great leader … rejoice and cheer and whole-hearted support … Am leaping up ten thousand feet like a bird …” But he cynically declined to go and live under Mao, and tried to contact the CIA in 1951 to back him to lead a third force. He finally moved to the Mainland in 1955.
Mao spoke to his nephew about Wei in withering terms: “Wei Li-huang didn’t return until he went bankrupt doing business in Hong Kong. A man like Wei Li-huang is contemptible …” And Mao made sure his contempt was demonstrated. Wei’s old Communist contacts were told to turn down his invitations to dinner, and the snubbing lasted until Wei’s death in Peking in 1960. His critical help for Mao is still hushed up, as Mao’s military genius would look a lot less brilliant if it were known that the enemy’s top commander had offered up much of his force — and many of Chiang’s best troops — on a platter.
