Category Archives: History

Arts, Books, China, History

Book Review: Blood Letters

REVIEW

Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao.

ON THE outskirts of Suzhou, near Shanghai, there’s a tomb in a cemetery that has a surveillance camera trained on it, keeping a perpetual eye on visitors.

Once a year, on the anniversary of the deceased, plain-clothes policemen arrive to block access to the tomb and to rough up any persistent pilgrims.

It’s the tomb of a remarkable woman called Lin Zhao, who was shot by firing squad at the age of 35 in 1968, at the height of the Mao regime.

“In death even more than in life,” writes the author of this important and significant biography, “Lin Zhao has become a nemesis of the Communist state.”

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A letter of protest that Lin wrote from her prison cell to the editor of the People’s Daily newspaper, never sent and long-suppressed, appeared on the internet in China in 2004.

It caused a sensation and became a manifesto for dissent in China that applies to this very day. Because it’s incendiary and remains a live story some of it can’t yet be told.

All of Lin’s interrogation records, which document the endless hours of questioning, probably conducted under duress and torture, are still filed away as part of the “criminal evidence” in her case.

Lin was an inveterate protestor and letter-writer. Astonishingly, the letters she wrote to her mother from prison, though they were confiscated at the time and not sent, were saved and eventually returned to the family.

Those letters were not written in ink, but in blood. As a punishment for he refusal to comply with the rules of the brutal Shanghai Municipal Prison, where she was incarcerated for being an “impatient counter-revolutionary”, Lin was deprived of ink. That was not going to stop her.

 

SHE had grasped the evils and depravities of Mao’s regime and refused to keep silent. In her cold, damp and freezing cell, she pricked her thumbs, dripped the blood into a small plastic spoon and wrote to her mother with a bamboo pick, a hair clip or the plastic handle of her toothbrush sharpened against the concrete floor, sometimes on a strip of bedsheet, rather than paper.

“Alas, Mama, they have communised China into a country of beggars.” She continued: “When the morning light of freedom shines upon the vast land of this country, we shall pour out our hearts to each other.”

But that yearned-for moment of reunion never came.

To make us appreciate Lin’s bravery and courage, Lian Xi, who has pieced together her life story, reminds us just how rare it was during Mao’s reign for anyone to dare to speak out. Lin was “the rare one who stood upright in an era when the entire country prostrated themselves”.

It was so much easier to keep quiet and go along with it all – and so much safer for the rest of the family.

There was a Chinese scholar in the prison, a once-renowned Yale Shakespeare expert, who submitted to copying and learning by heart reams and reams of Mao’s Little Red Book. He did so in order to earn remission points. Lin refused to do any such thing. When we’re most angry, it’s often because we’re angry with ourselves – and, reading between the lines, it’s clear that Lin’s fury was directed partly at herself. As a student in the early 1950s, she had fallen head-over-heals in love with Communism – to such an extent that she referred to Chairman Mao as “Dear Father” and reported her own father to the Government for illegally listening to an American radio programme.

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Chairman Mao declared. “It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Landlords were made to wear tall paper hats and paraded through the streets, denounced by jeering crowds.

Lin, at first, thought this a necessary stage towards the birth of a fairer society.

Then Mao pulled a really dirty trick. He announced a movement with the slogan: “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” Students were encouraged to voice their feelings about the less nice aspects of his regime, which many did, including Lin.

It turned out to be a ploy to “enforce the snakes out of their lairs”. All who had dared to voice protests were labelled “Rightists”. Many were sent off to exile for years of “redemption through labour” in the frozen north.

Lin managed to evade that exile; but her brief, passionate love affair with a student called Gan Cui was brutally cut off when he was banished to work on a construction battalion seven days’ journey away – an exile that would last for 20 years. The two never saw each other again.

Lin was arrested in 1960 for her contribution to an underground magazine in which she’d written a poem calling Mao’s regime “the Fascist rule of a centralised state” and ridiculing his Great Leap Forward as “a Great Leap Backward”.

On hearing of his daughter’s arrest, Lin’s father committed suicide by taking rat poison. “His darkest fear about where Lin Zhao’s adolescent pursuit of communism might lead her was realised.”

A simple and efficient method of torture was used as a matter of course in Chinese prisons: handcuffs, and not one pair but two, the upper and lower arms cuffed together behind the back. At one point, after causing trouble, Lin was put into double handcuffs for six-and-a-half months.

With no public trial or defence lawyer, she was sentenced to 20 years. Cajoled and tortured to confess, she refused.

 

MOST other inmates were soon begging for a chance to confess, so as to have an easier life. Not Lin, even though she was ill with recurring and worsening tuberculosis.

Out of handcuffs, she took five months to compose a long letter to the People’s Daily. “Mao must be the first to bear responsibility for the tragedy of our land swarming with famished refugees and the corpses of the starved filling up the valleys,” she wrote.

She predicted the course of the regime’s escalating orgy of violence brought on by Mao’s 1966 exhortation to smash “the four olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting class”.

She kept the prison guards in a state of perpetual exasperation with her shouting, her ranting and her refusal to comply.

Her cheerful spirit was never crushed: she sketched her favourite Disney characters (Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse) on a flattened toothpaste tube using a small nail. From October 1967, she was writing one blood-inked protest per day to the prison authorities.

The Military Control Committee authorised the death sentence, pronouncing her “truly a diehard, unrepentant counter-revolutionary”. Her Christian faith kept her going, to the end. “Let me turn over all my pains, hopes and dreams to my Lord,” she wrote.

Forced to wear a “monkey king cap” – a rubber hood placed over her face with slits for the eyes – she was taken out to the prison’s execution ground and shot.

The next morning, officials arrived at her mother’s door to deliver the news – and to demand a 5-cent “bullet fee”, as her daughter had “wasted a people’s bullet”. Mao’s officials knew just how to inflict the highest degree of pain on bereaved families of the condemned.

They, though, are now forgotten, while Lin Zhao is remembered; revered for her refusal to be silent in the face of Mao’s inhumane and appalling regime. This book is a worthy and credible tribute to her.

– Blood Letters by Lian Xi is published by Basic Books for £25

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Arts, Drama, History

Lateral Thinking Drama & Whodunnit: The Caryatids

LATERAL THINKING DRAMA: PUZZLE CONUNDRUM

TAKING a deep breath, Oliver James knocked on his father’s office door and went in.

“Ah, there you are, m’boy.” At 6ft Cameron James was just a little shorter than his son, but where Oliver was trim, his father had the broad power of a man who’d spent most of his life handling large amounts of stone and brick. “Come in, come in. Jacob and I were just discussing ornamentation for the Southwell building. Thought maybe you could lend a hand.”

Oliver winced, and braced himself. Cameron still hadn’t come to terms with his son’s preference for architectural design over actual construction, and the lectures about his future were getting tediously frequent.

“Do you remember Pick & Sons, Oliver?” Now in his forties, Jacob York had been his father’s right-hand man for as long as Oliver could remember. He at least was on Oliver’s side regarding architecture.

Oliver nodded.

“Cruz has a line on a couple of Roman statues at a very good price,” Cameron said.

“Maybe too good,” Jacob added.

“Maybe, maybe,” said Cameron. “But if not, they’d fulfil Southwell’s requirements for the frontispiece and then some, considerably under budget as well. You’ve got a good eye, Oliver. I thought maybe you’d give us your opinion on the matter.”

A relieved Oliver said he’d be delighted to help.

“Pull up a seat,” Cameron said, waving at the pile of paperwork on his desk.

A pair of Diocletian caryatids.

Oliver sat down and ran his eye over the details. According to the papers, the statues were a matched pair of elegant caryatid columns from the region of the Roman emperor Diocletian, in surprisingly good condition. The date of construction was clear, since the sculptor had marked the bases with his own name, Emperor Diocletian’s full titles, and the year, AD 302. That year marked the start of the emperor’s bloody persecution of the Christians, during which every Roman citizen was compelled to offer sacrifices to the Greek gods. Some venues had undoubtedly been constructed for the purpose, and caryatids – supporting columns in the form of a woman – while not common in Roman times, were not unheard of either.

From the pictures that had been included, the statues looked as if they were made from marble. There was some wear and tear – it would have been miraculous if there hadn’t been – but even so, the pieces could quite easily have been in a museum.

Oliver looked up. “Where did Pick find them?”

“He got them from a Turkish fellow,” Cameron said. “The man said that they’d been sold to him by an Ottoman pasha who’d fallen on hard times, having had them in his family since the time of the Seljuks in the 13th century.”

“There is some supporting documentation,” Jacob said.

“Well, it’s not totally impossible for a couple of Diocletian pieces to have survived in private collections,” Oliver said. “Diocletian was in Antioch for several years, up to AD 302 at least. I can see temples being raised in his name, and then statuary being purloined later, as the empire shrank. In this case, however, I feel comfortable saying that those pieces are absolutely and definitely fakes. Sorry, father.”

How can Oliver be so sure?

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Second World War

Book Review – Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944

REVIEW

This book, written in Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war. And, why, the Battle of Arnhem was so very wrong from the outset.

EVERY time a paratrooper in Britain’s airborne regiments goes to the stores to pick up his parachute as a prelude to going into action, it’s handed over with the same old corny gallows-humour banter – ‘Bring it back if it doesn’t work and we’ll exchange it.’

You could apply the same logic to the Parachute Regiment’s most famous World War II mission: the abortive attempt to capture from the Germans the bridge over the Rhine at the town of Arnhem in the north-east of the Netherlands in the autumn of 1944.

It spectacularly did not work – and, once it got under way, there was no chance of exchanging it for one that did.

In ten days of blood-letting battles along a 65-mile axis, thousands of men needlessly died, were wounded or taken prisoner, while afterwards, the Dutch people, who aided the British, were savagely punished by their Nazi occupiers with summary executions and deliberate starvation of the entire population.

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Arnhem – codenamed Operation Market Garden – was never the partial victory that deluded and self-serving British top brass, headed by the vainglorious Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, always claimed it to be. It was a military disaster and had been one in the making from its very inception.

The idea was to catch Hitler unawares by invading Germany through the back door. But the plan was so full of holes that, like a defective parachute, it was never going to float.

 

THERE was much heroism, narrated in this absorbing new account of the battle with the eye for telling personal detail that we have come to expect from Antony Beevor. A British soldier hurls himself from the first-floor window of a house on to a German tank in an attempt to drop a grenade into the turret, but is shot down in mid-air.

There is much poignant suffering, too, endured bravely. A teenage recruit croaks the opening bars of God Save The King as he lies dying in hospital and those around him try to stand to attention in their beds until he falls silent.

At Arnhem bridge itself, where the advance party of Paras – outnumbered and battered by German tanks – hung on for four days in the vain hope of a relief column arriving, one soldier’s jet-black hair turned white with stress.

And there is much horror, epitomised by an officer in the thick of it who saw ‘Mervyn with his arm hanging off, Angus clinging to the grass in his agony and a soldier running across an opening, the quick crack and the surprised look as he clutched his neck and then convulsed as more bullets hit him.

‘I only hope the sacrifice that was ours will have achieved something – yet I feel it hasn’t.’

He was dead right. It all proved pointless. As Beevor scathingly makes clear, this was not just ‘a bridge too far’, the much-quoted epithet about Arnhem which suggests laudable over-ambition. This was a campaign that should never have been launched in the first place. One can understand the mood that encouraged it. Since D-Day, there had been months of hard fighting in Normandy before, in August, the Allied forces broke out and raced through France, with the Germans in full retreat.

But over-enthusiasm allied to war-weariness should have given way to good military sense and probably would have done if Monty had not felt slighted by the ascendancy of Eisenhower and the other American generals and been determined to put on his own tally-ho show.

With Allied forces massed in southern Holland, he proposed a dramatic thrust to the north-east, dropping airborne troops – consisting of parachutists and soldiers in gliders – behind enemy lines to seize strategic bridges and hold them until the tanks and land troops advancing overland caught up with them.

With Arnhem (the furthest away) under their belts, they could spill out into Germany itself. Next stop Berlin and goodbye Hitler.

But there was a basic flaw, as the Dutch Prince Bernhard, knowing the geography of his own country, warned Monty. It could take for ever to get those tanks 65 miles up a narrow road with water meadows on either side, rather than the two days Monty thought possible, leaving those paratroopers up ahead at risk of being stranded. The prince was ignored, as were all the other naysayers. Optimism (and Monty’s egocentricity) triumphed over reality.

It might just have succeeded if every component of the plan had worked. But, in practice, blunder after blunder compounded the original conceptual error.

The fundamental concept defied military logic, Beevor writes, because it made no allowance for anything to go wrong, nor for the enemy’s likely reaction.

Yet, as the operation collapsed into ignominy, surrender and retreat, stuffed-shirt British generals such as Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning looked round for excuses and shamefully criticised a Polish brigade to divert attention from their own failings.

It was typical of the arrogance behind the whole unfortunate Arnhem episode.

Casualty figures were colossal. Of 12,000 airborne soldiers who went into battle, 1,500 were killed and 6,500, many of them badly wounded, were taken prisoner. Only a third made it home.

In some units, the attrition was even greater. The 4th Parachute Brigade started out for Arnhem with more than 2,000 soldiers and returned with just nine officers and 260 other ranks.

Strong men wept when they saw how many of their comrades were not coming back – all the more so when they realised how little, if anything, had been gained by their sacrifice.

This, indeed, was a case of lions led by donkeys. As for its consequences, it was not just that the mission failed dismally in the boast of its instigators that it would shorten the war by six months. Hardest of all to swallow is that it worsened the fate of the people of the Netherlands, who were subjected in the aftermath to Nazi vengeance.

The town of Arnhem was evacuated at gunpoint, its entire population forced to leave on foot with what little they could carry, before it was looted and reduced to rubble and ashes.

In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the other major cities, food supplies were withdrawn, and the population lived – or, rather, died – through the harsh winter of 1944-45 on a diet of sugar beet and thin air.

Emaciated bodies lay in the streets as the death toll rose to 20,000. Thousands of resistance fighters and hostages were executed in a vicious security clampdown. This was the unseen cost of Arnhem and the author counts it out with unconcealed dismay.

But there is inevitably a noticeable change in tone from his previous much-acclaimed World War II histories on Stalingrad, D-Day and the fall of Berlin.

The uplifting drama of these was their part in the Allied road to victory. It put the undoubted horror in a sort of perspective; made some sense of the slaughter.

This time, though, he turns his adept craft as a military historian to a subject of not just defeat, but dunderheaded stupidity.

It will likely leave most readers horrified and deeply downhearted at the unnecessary waste of it all.

– Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944 by Antony Beevor is published by Viking for £25

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