China during The Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II Through the Lens of Agnes Smedley

Agnes Smedley spent more than a decade in China as a working journalist, and her time there produced one of the most detailed firsthand records of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Born in Missouri and shaped by the poverty she saw growing up near mining communities, Smedley developed strong political convictions early. She wrote about those years in her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, published in 1929. By the time she arrived in China in 1928, she had already organized support for Indian independence during World War I and worked with Indian nationalists in Germany afterward. In China, she filed dispatches for major European papers, including the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Manchester Guardian, covering a country in the middle of a brutal foreign invasion.

The war Smedley covered was vast. Japan’s military campaigns stretched across central and northern China, and the fighting drew in regular armies, Communist guerrilla units, civilian resistance groups, and medical corps scrambling to treat the wounded. Smedley moved between all of them. In December 1936, she broadcast in English during the Xi’an Incident, when Nationalist generals seized Chiang Kai-shek to pressure him into forming a united front against Japan. After the Second United Front was established, she followed the 8th Route Army through 1937, then spent 1938 and 1939 visiting noncommunist Chinese army units across the front.

Capturing a Japanese field gun was a significant achievement for any Chinese unit, and the 124th Division of the 22nd Group Army marked the moment. They hitched oxen to haul it down from the mountains, camouflaged it with tree branches, and let soldiers take turns riding it — a rare moment of celebration amid a grinding war. The 22nd Group Army operated on the North Hubei front under Lt. Gen. Cheng Suyuan, whose division fought in rugged terrain far from the well-supplied coastal cities.

Japanese air raids were a constant danger for Chinese medical facilities. The Red Cross Training Hospital at Kweiyang (Guiyang) was bombed by Japanese planes, leaving wards in ruins and forcing patients to flee into the surrounding hills when aircraft approached. Those who could walk scattered before the bombs fell. Those who could not were brought back in on stretchers after the raid and operated on in whatever space remained.

Despite being a deliberate target, the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps kept operating. Its headquarters at Kweiyang maintained a laboratory, a supply department, and a repair shop. Young educated Chinese were trained as ambulance workers, and American support played a direct role in equipping them. General Joseph Stilwell and Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson secured the first American Red Cross appropriation to fund that training. The ambulance workers received steel helmets and dressing belts from the American Red Cross.

The hospital system behind the front lines handled enormous numbers of casualties. At the Anhwei Provincial Hospital in Lihuang, Dr. Ye received both sick and wounded soldiers, treating all of them without charge. Civilians brought gifts to field hospitals for the army’s injured. In Hankow (Hankou), military hospitals were packed with men from multiple fronts, and operating rooms worked constantly. Red Cross doctors also worked on hospital trains near Xuzhou (Hsuchow), treating the wounded as close to the battlefield as the rail lines allowed.

Getting the wounded to those hospitals was itself a deadly journey. From the central and northern fronts, injured men were loaded onto ox-carts that lurched and jolted toward the Han River. The last carts in those columns carried men who had died on the way. For men who survived but lost limbs, some found a place in cooperatives organized behind the lines. Disabled soldiers trained as tailors ran their own cooperative tailoring establishment, making uniforms for the Red Cross Medical Corps and the army while earning their own living.

Smedley’s travel across central China brought her into contact with commanders at every level of the war. She made her way to the field headquarters of General Zhang Zizhong (Chang Tze-chung), commander of the 33rd Group Army and commander-in-chief of the Chinese Right Wing during the 1939–40 offensive. Zhang was one of the most respected military figures of the war. He was killed in action at the front in May 1940. General Li Zongren (Li Chung-jen), commander-in-chief of the Fifth War Zone, told Smedley his views on Japan — and on Americans who continued supplying Japan with war materials.

Much of Smedley’s most intensive fieldwork was with the New Fourth Army Storm Guerrilla Detachment, operating north of Hankow deep in enemy-held territory. She spent a month in the field with the 4th Regiment alone, a unit made up of local peasants, fishermen, and artisans, commanded by officers sent from the 8th Route Army. She spent eight months with the New 4th Army in North Jiangsu province, north of Shanghai, helping care for the wounded in a hospital set up inside an ancestral temple. The guerrilla detachment was Communist-led and fought not only Japanese forces but also Japanese-controlled puppet troops.

The New Fourth Army also carried out offensive operations. In one raid on a Japanese airfield, the detachment returned with captured guns, bicycles, flags, and coats. The unit’s brief written history of the raid was recorded directly on the film. Women played active roles inside the Communist guerrilla structure. Commander Chen Taiji of the New Fourth Army Storm Guerrilla Detachment was a woman, and women leaders in guerrilla units north of Hankow included a former teacher from North China. Miss Li, a nurse trained by American missionaries, served as physician, surgeon, and army medical director for the detachment north of Hankow.

Discipline inside the army was enforced harshly. A New Fourth Army officer in South Anhui deserted, was captured, and was shot. A commander then addressed the troops to explain why the execution was necessary. Men arrested as Japanese spies north of Hankow were taken by the guerrilla detachment. A column of Chinese puppet soldiers — men who had been conscripted or captured and forced into Japanese service — was taken prisoner by the New Fourth Army in battle.

The guerrilla war produced unusual alliances. A Korean soldier from the Japanese Army was captured by the New Fourth Army and immediately joined the Chinese side as a political worker, trying to persuade other Korean and Japanese soldiers to switch. Resistance to Japan took other forms too. Railway workers at Zhumadian in Henan stripped steel rails and girders from the destroyed town and beat them into big swords for the armies. Workers on the Beijing-Hankow railway did the same. The ancient “big sword” society Huang Shihui in North Hubei, which had both men and women members, guided Chinese armies through enemy territory.

Supply lines to the front moved entirely by human and animal labor across the paths of central China. Men and pack animals carried ammunition forward, while Smedley traveled with armed escorts drawn from regular army units. She stopped in villages along the way to speak directly with civilians and spent time in the Ta Hong mountain range, where the guerrillas fought. Canossian nuns in Nanyang, Henan, were caring for the wounded when Smedley passed through, and they gave her shelter and food.

In the areas controlled by the New Fourth Army, local governance was being reorganized from the ground up. The army held its first democratic elections for lower officials in the territory it controlled. Votes were cast by secret ballot in town and village assemblies. A wall newspaper posted during the elections kept the population informed. An Administrative Training School in Lihuang trained men to serve as administrators in Anhwei Province, and students there lived in basic conditions while learning how to run local government in territory the Japanese still contested. Smedley gave lectures at a training camp there.

Civilian life behind the lines carried its own suffering. Government orphanages in Henan held children left by the war — underfed, often untreated — who had lost their families to the fighting. Some of those orphans were later organized into a Children’s Army and sent a message to American children. Famine drove some families to sell their children. The price in flour could be two sacks, or one, or even half a sack. In Shanghai, before the war’s full escalation, official figures from the Shanghai Municipal Council showed that between 32,000 and 35,000 dead bodies were collected from the city’s streets each year and buried in paupers’ graves.

Child labor existed alongside the war’s other horrors. In Beijing, child workers in a match factory slept in crowded conditions that Smedley photographed directly. Political violence was a fact of daily life throughout the conflict. Thousands of workers, peasants, soldiers, and students were killed in the counter-revolution that followed the Canton Commune of December 1927. In the years that followed, workers, peasants, and Communists were publicly beheaded in the streets.

The civilian population actively resisted Japan in ways that extended well beyond armed combat. A secret anti-Japanese “Ten Man Group” captured the head of a Japanese-controlled puppet government, who then tried to bribe his captors and the military court that tried him. The Women’s National Salvation Association held its first delegate meeting in enemy-controlled central China, with representatives from eleven districts. These were ordinary village women who, as the caption noted, had learned to speak and think independently since the war began.

Cultural and propaganda work ran alongside military operations at every level. A guerrilla dramatic theater performed plays for soldiers about the Japanese and their puppet forces. Soldiers in the 84th Guangxi Army carved Chinese characters from bamboo and posted anti-Japanese slogans along building walls, leaving the bamboo unpainted except for touches of red at the edges. A Children’s Dramatic Corps of the New 4th Army performed in Central Hubei. Students who had been cultural workers in the 21st Group Army in Anhui eventually deserted and joined the Communist guerrillas because they refused to follow orders they saw as reactionary.

Smedley’s contacts included several American military officers stationed in China. She is photographed with Major Frank Dorn, General Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), Lieutenant Evans F. Carlson, and American consular official Robert Jarvis in Hankow. She encountered Lieutenant Colonel Carlson again with the 8th Route Army. General Joseph Stilwell, later known widely as “Vinegar Joe,” was photographed separately. Zhu De (Chu Teh), commander-in-chief of the Red Army, had been declared dead in press reports more than a dozen times over the previous decade. He is photographed alongside Lin Biao (Lin Piao), amused at the repeated headlines announcing his death.

Smedley’s photographs and dispatches also documented Xi’an, the city where the 1936 incident occurred. She photographed the old Confucian Temple there, including ancient bas-reliefs along its walls, and the tomb of Qin Shi Huang Di in the background hills. Demonstrations in Xi’an’s streets had called for an end to civil war and a united front against Japan. In Lihuang and across Anhwei, civilian and military life intertwined as the war reshaped every institution. A Buddhist monk, Hung Shan, managed government refugee relief work across the province. Shoe manufacturing shops produced footwear for the army.

The front lines themselves stretched across hundreds of miles. General Tang Enbo’s army moved up toward the fighting, and the 173rd Division was drawn up for inspection by officers from the Central Military Council in preparation for the 1939–40 winter offensive. Soldiers marched in long columns through central China’s towns and countryside. Air-raid victims from Japanese bombing of Changsha were brought into Red Cross headquarters there. The war’s reach covered every province Smedley passed through.

Smedley was welcomed wherever the guerrillas and wounded could line the paths to receive her. Maimed soldiers from the New Fourth Army in central Anhui told her their stories. Peasants came out of villages to meet her. She addressed mass meetings in the enemy rear. Tao Chu, a veteran Communist political leader and educator, was among the figures she encountered. Mr. Song Yi, a seventy-year-old magistrate and former general who had been removed from office for being too progressive and refusing to conduct an anti-Communist campaign, sat for a photograph in central Hubei.