My Memories of War in China

by John T. Ma

Joining the Army

The Japanese troops occupied Shanghai High School. I had no school to attend so I returned to Wenzhou and continued my education at Wenzhou High School. But not long afterwards, the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, located in the French Settlement, let Shanghai High School students use their classrooms in the morning. I returned to Shanghai and resumed my education at Shanghai High School.

When the Chinese troops withdrew from Shanghai, they purposely left behind one battalion in a big building across the Suzhou River north of the International Settlement in order to delay the Japanese troops’ march on Nanjing, the national capital at that time. The troops of this battalion came to be known as "800 heroes". Actually, a standard battalion has only 400 soldiers, not 800. Making pretenses of power, the defending battalion claimed to be a regiment and the Chinese government promoted the chief of the battalion to the position of Regimental Commander. The Commander’s name was Xie Jinyuan (謝晉元). He was buried in Shanghai. My father wrote the inscription on his tombstone.

Commander Xie was my regimental chief when I received military training in Zhenjiang before the war. When he and his troops were defending the building against the Japanese attack, some bullets landed in the International Settlement. In order to ensure the safety of the people in the Settlement, the authorities of the International Settlement negotiated with the Japanese for the disarming and transfer of the "800 heroes" to the International Settlement. Commander Xie and his troops were allowed to relocate to an old barrack protected by foreign soldiers. My classmates and I, who were all his trainees, would go to see him every weekend and bring him and his soldiers food and things they needed.

We also engaged in other types of patriotic and anti-¬Japanese activities. This naturally irritated the Japanese, but they could not send troops into the foreign settlements to attack us. So they began to kidnap students. One day, the newspapers reported that the Japanese had kidnapped a Chinese student and taken him to the Japanese Settlement. This worried my father. He told me that if I wanted to continue my education in Shanghai, I'd better live like an obedient citizen (dang shunmin,當順民), and that if I wanted to leave Shanghai, I would become a refugee (dang nanmin,當難民) . I told my father that I wanted to be neither an obedient citizen nor a refugee. I said I wanted to become a soldier (dang bing, 當兵）.

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