Ma Zhanshan

Ma Zhanshan, before 1940.

Ma Zhanshan ( Chinese  馬占山  /  马占山 , Pinyin Mǎ Zhànshān , W.-G. Ma Chan-shan ; Zì 秀芳 , Xiùfāng , Hsiu-fang ; * 1885 in Gongzhuling , Chinese Empire ; † November 29, 1950 in Beijing , People's Republic of China ) was a Chinese general who fought against the Imperial Japanese Army during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria , defected briefly to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo , rebelled and fought again against the Japanese in Manchuria and other areas of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War .

Life

Young years

Ma was born in 1885 to poor parents in Gongzhuling, Jilin Province . At the age of 20, he joined the Huaide District Security Forces. Because of his shooting and riding skills, he was appointed watch officer of the 4th Battalion of the Security Forces by Wu Junsheng, commander of the Mukden garrison, in 1908.

In 1913 he was promoted to major and commander of 3rd Company , 3rd Regiment , 2nd Brigade of the Central Cavalry Army of the Army of the Republic of China . In 1920 he became a colonel under his patron Wu Junsheng.

With this he joined the Northeastern Army of the warlord Zhang Zuolin , where he led the 5th Cavalry Brigade, the 17th Cavalry Division and finally the 3rd Infantry Division of the Heilongjiang Army as a brigadier general . After Zhang's death in 1928, he was appointed anti-bandit commander and commander in chief of the provincial army's cavalry.

Invasion of Manchuria

When the Japanese Kwantung Army forcibly invaded Liaoning and Jilin provinces as a result of the Mukden incident , the governor of Heilongjiang Province, Wan Fulin, left for Beijing without appointing anyone to organize the defense against the Japanese in his place . Zhang Xueliang , the strong man in Manchuria, telegraphed to the capital, Nanjing, asking for instructions. As a result, he appointed Ma Zhanshan on October 10, 1931 as governor and commander in chief of Heilongjiang. He arrived in the provincial capital, Tsitsihar , on October 19 and took command on the following day. Over the next few days he conferred with his commanders, personally inspected the city's defenses and arrested people who pleaded for surrender to the Japanese. He justified this with the following statement: "I have been appointed governor of the province and have the authority to defend the province, and I will never be a surrendering general" .

In late October, the Japanese asked Ma for permission to rebuild a bridge over the Nen Jiang , which had been blown up during an earlier confrontation to prevent the advance of a Chinese warlord. Although Ma refused to give permission, the Japanese dispatched a repair team protected by about 800 Japanese soldiers. When 2,500 Chinese soldiers tried to drive the Japanese out, the battle at the Nen-Jiang Bridge broke out , as an indirect consequence of which the Japanese started the Jiangqiao campaign . Although Ma was forced to withdraw with his troops in the face of superior Japanese equipment such as tanks and planes, he was declared a National Hero for his early resistance, and both national and international media reported the heroic General Zhanshan. Ding Chao and other Chinese generals followed suit, resulting in numerous other acts of resistance besides the Battle of Harbin , while many Chinese civilians volunteered for the troops. On November 18, Ma evacuated Tsitsihar and withdrew to Hailun with heavy losses .

Manchukuo

Due to his renewed fame and role model function for the Chinese, the Japanese secret service colonel Doihara Kenji got in touch with Ma and offered him a large sum of money if he would go over to the newly founded Manchurian Army and support the new Manchukuo state . After some hesitation, during which he waited for the development, he agreed to the proposal on February 14, 1932. He was flown to Mukden, where he took part in an All-Manchurian Congress , at which the establishment of the Manchukuo Empire and the installation of the overthrown Qing Emperor Puyi as ruler was decided. Ma was ill when the Declaration of Independence was ratified, so he did not sign it. For this he took part in Puyi's coronation as emperor and was appointed Minister of War by him shortly afterwards . He was also confirmed that he is still the governor of Heilongjiang Province. Although they had recruited him themselves, the Japanese, like other Manchukuos, did not trust Ma, and he had to consult Japanese advisers before making any major decisions.

When he realized that he did not have the same powers that he had as a relatively independent governor, Ma decided to rebel. In secret, using Japanese money and equipment, he assembled an army of volunteers. Outwardly, this was done in order to take part in the pacification of Manchukuo with her . He secretly put aside weapons and ammunition and brought the families of his soldiers to safety before setting out on April 1, 1932 from Tsitsihar on an anti-partisan campaign. On April 7th, he dropped the mask in Heihe and declared Heilongjiang Independent Province to be restored. He reorganized his troops into 9 brigades and from the volunteers who poured in to him, set up 11 further groups in his entire sphere of influence. This army was called the Northeastern Anti-Japanese National Liberation Army , which was soon joined by most of the region's anti-Japanese armies, so that, according to Japanese estimates, Ma had up to 300,000 fighters.

After sending some detachments to the lower Sungari to support Ding Chaos, Ma and the rest of his troops set off for Harbin. Among other things, they carried 20 howitzers and were supported by a small squadron of seven aircraft. Ma was able to lure and smash smaller enemy groups that were sent towards him, but had to realize that he could not do anything against the Manchurian and Japanese troops that were gathering in front of Harbin, and therefore turned southwest towards Tsitsihar.

At about the same time, smaller independent partisan groups began raiding Japanese and Manchurian facilities throughout Heilongjiang Province. The troops of the Imperial Manchurian Army sent to contain the unrest either did not dare to leave the immediate vicinity of the railway lines on which they were advancing, or they went directly to the partisans or the troops of Mas. This absence of troops led to bandit gangs, particularly along the Chinese Eastern Railway, reuniting and attacking towns and villages.

To regain control, the Japanese Army began an April to July 1932 operation to overthrow Ma Zhanshan. The Japanese advanced along the Harbin-Hailung and Tsitsihar-Keshan railways to halt the advance of Ma’s troops. Wherever possible and where the opportunity existed, the Japanese troops split up in order to encircle and crush smaller units of Ma's army. As the Japanese became more and more successful with this tactic, General Ma ordered his troops on June 8, 1932, not to face the enemy and to use guerrilla tactics. Only his personal guard of 1,000 men continued to fight as a firmly organized association. However, this loose tactic with no real commanders ensured that many of the volunteers withdrew from the resistance and simply returned to their families. The remaining troops were only able to offer little resistance to the Japanese, and after his bodyguards had shrunk to a few men by July and Ma had barely escaped Japanese encirclement, he retired to the Hinggan Mountains on the Amur .

In the far west of Heilongjiang, on the Soviet border, General Su Bingwen had hitherto avoided taking himself and his troops openly on the side of Manchukuo or Ma Zhanshan, and so far had remained unmolested on both sides. This enabled the farmers in the area he controlled to bring in their harvest undisturbed in late summer and thus created a supply base for later operations.

When the Japanese began to move their troops south in late September 1932 to protect the industrial facilities there from the volunteer armies, Su Bingwen openly sided with the insurgents on September 27 and took hundreds of Japanese settlers and soldiers from isolated Japanese bases as hostages. He then moved east with his troops, called Heilongjiang's National Liberation Army , to join forces with the scattered remnants of Ma Zhanshan. When he heard of Sus revolt, he left the mountains and united with Su in Longmen County.

In Heilongjiang, in addition to the restrictions caused by the ongoing partisan war, the summer suffered the worst floods in years, which had destroyed a large part of the already small harvest, so that there was not enough food to supply larger troops and because of the poor infrastructure Su Bingwen couldn't get enough food from his area. As a result, the revolt increasingly took the form of a rampage from town to town to plunder the peasants' granaries.

In mid-October, Ma’s soldiers captured the town of Antachen, west of Harbins, and forced the residents to give them the equivalent of $ 50,000 and all of their horses before moving on. On October 26, they attacked the city of Laha, 110 kilometers north of Tsitsihar. When they realized that there was a Japanese garrison in the city, they bombed it with their remaining artillery and destroyed much of the city itself in the process.

The Japanese got a first impression of the strength of Su Bingwen's and Ma Zhanshan's troops on November 8th, when Sergeant Iwakami arrived in Tsitsihar and reported how around 4,000 insurgents had wiped out his entire unit at Yi'an .

In response, the Japanese dispatched around 30,000 soldiers from their 14th Infantry Division and cavalrymen from the Manchurian Xing'an Army. On November 28, the troops clashed for the first time near Tsitsihar. At the same time, Japanese planes bombed Ma's headquarters, which the latter had set up in Hailar . On December 3rd, the Japanese attacked the city directly, forcing Ma and Su to withdraw from it. They both crossed the Soviet border on December 5th while many of their troops withdrew in small groups into Jehol Province .

Second Sino-Japanese War

Ma stayed abroad for some time and toured the Soviet Union , Germany and Italy before returning to China in June 1933 and asking Chiang Kai-shek for an army to fight the Japanese. When he was denied this, he settled in Tianjin disappointed before Chiang called him back into the army in October 1936 to fight in the Chinese Civil War. When he was in the city at the time of the Xi'an incident , he appealed to Zhan Xueliang not to kill Chiang, as doing so would plunge the already broken country into chaos. He then signed the declaration on the current political situation , which was initiated by Zhang and General Yang Hucheng. Subsequently, Zhang Ma sent as commander in chief to the Anti-Japanese Cavalry Group of Suiyuan Province . However, he was quickly withdrawn from this post when Chiang arrested Zhang.

After the Marco Polo Bridge incident , Ma was appointed commander of the Advanced Northeastern Army, which was to advance to the four northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang and Rehe. When he did not succeed in this, Ma set up his headquarters in Datong and led his groups into several defensive battles. In defense of Suiyuan , he joined forces with General Fu Zuoyi .

Ma loathed the policy of non-resistance of the Kuomintang government and agreed with the communist anti-Japanese policy . In 1939 he visited Yan'an to seek an accord with the Chinese Red Army and secretly joined the communists there. In 1940 he was appointed chairman of the Provisional Communist Government of Heilongjiang Province and held that title in secret until the end of the war.

After Japan surrendered , Ma was appointed security chief of the northeastern provinces by the Kuomintang government, but retired to his home in Beijing six months later on the grounds that he was seriously ill. In January 1949, after General Fu Zuoyi surrendered the city to the communists without a fight, Ma officially joined the Communist Party. After the founding of the People's Republic of China , Chairman Mao Zedong personally invited him to the Political Consultative Conference of the Chinese People in June 1950. However, his illness was so advanced that he could not take part in it. He died in Beijing on November 29, 1950.

See also

• Pacification of Manchukuo

literature

• Trevor N. Dupuy : Encyclopedia of Military Biography . IB Tauris & Co. Ltd., London et al. 1992, ISBN 1-85043-569-3 .
• Bruce A. Elleman: Modern Chinese Warfare. 1795-1989 . Routledge, London et al. 2001, ISBN 0-415-21474-2 , ( Warfare and history ).
• Phillip S. Jowett: Rays of The Rising Sun. Armed Forces of Japan's Asian Allies 1931-45 . Volume 1: China & Manchuria . Helion & Co. Ltd., Solihull 2004, ISBN 1-87462-221-3 .
• Rana Mitter: The Manchurian Myth. Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China . University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 2000, ISBN 0-520-22111-7 .
• Ke-Wen Wang: Modern China. An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism . Garland, New York NY et al. 1998, ISBN 0-8153-0720-9 , ( Garland reference library of the humanities 1519).

Web links

• Ma Zhanshan with photo
• The volunteer armies of northeast China

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Zhanshan is the family name here, Ma is the first name.