山西平定縣西鎖簧村 李若瑗 回憶錄

 亂世紀往 [简体][手稿照相版]

 Memories of a Troubled Era

by Lee Ruoyuan

Introduction 

　

[Introduction][1][2][3][4][5][6][Addendum][Chronology]

 

I witnessed the Japanese military invasion of China

　

"Before I fled Tiayuan (provincial capital of my home province Shanxi), Japanese air raids would drive me up the East Hills to seek shelter. The sky was blue; there was not an eerie atmosphere typical of a savage battlefield, nor any premonition of pending disaster. Then the massive indiscriminate Japanese bombing of the civilians started and lasted for days and nights. This wanton bombing of commercial and residential districts was done in order to wreak havoc on the cities with important military, political and economic significance. Several friends and I ensconced ourselves in a hollow near the top of the hill, from where we commanded a bird's eye view of the city below. The raids were preceded by electric sirens across the city, followed by the steam whistles of the factories. Then an eerie silence fell over a quasi-deserted city moments before a faint rumbling of planes became louder every minute, striking terror in people's hearts. As the Japanese military aircraft swooped in over the city, the cannons and machine guns opened fire from the ground. The city did not have anti-aircraft artillery pieces at the time so that the Japanese aircraft were well outside their firing range and were able to ravage the city with impunity. After the terrible racket of the bombing runs and the ground fire died down, people became even more anxious than before because now they were starting to wonder if their homes and those who had not been able to evacuate in time survived or perished in the bombing."

"My wife and I rented a room in a building near the Erlang God Temple in the neighborhood of the Qiansi Gate. Since we both worked and ate at work, we did not use the kitchen of our apartment. Mr. Cai, another tenant, who lived upstairs, worked at a Central Bank branch in the city. He was from Canton (Guangdong) Province and lived in the apartment with his wife. Both were very nice people. In May and June, however, our peaceful life was disrupted by the intensifying Japanese bombing. Every time when my wife and I came out of the shelter after the air raid alarm was over, we would first check to see if our home near the Erlang Temple still stood. From the tall building of the China Bank we could see a corner of our apartment. One day when we came out of the shelter and turned our eyes toward our apartment, it was no longer there. We hurried to the Erlang Temple neighborhood and found our building razed to the ground by the Japanese bombs. Luckily there was no fire after the bombing and an old lady was pulled out of the rubble alive. All our clothing and belongings, however, were scattered and irretrievable. A thermos bottle miraculously survived the bombing. Our books remained intact but every page was incrusted with sand and dirt that could not be easily removed."

"I recall once seeking shelter, during a Japanese air raid, inside a cavern (grotto, tunnel), under about 10 meters of hard rock. A huge bomb fell on top of the cavern with a deafening din followed by a gust of strong air current rushing into the tunnel. Then we smelt a strong stench of gun powder and were enveloped in swirls of smoke. Several people near the entrance were not hurt by shrapnel but were killed in a collapse of rocks. Earth blown up by the exploding bombs and splattered on the walls outside and inside the cave was so incrusted that it couldn't be pried off by hand. The nearby trees and bamboos were completely flattened by the air rush generated by the bombing."

"One day I went into a shelter in Central Park (of Chongqing) during a Japanese air raid. I was holding a lit candle in my hand and as I went deeper into the shelter, the candle flame dwindled to the size of a pea because of the paucity of oxygen. As my breathing became labored I struggled my way to the entrance of the shelter. 3 hours later, before the air raid alarm had been declared over, a girl in the shelter was found dead of asphyxiation due to lack of air and excessive heat in the interior. I offered some of the "Shi Di Shui" (literally "10 drops of water") I had with me , a liquid Chinese medicine treating heat strokes, to some of the evacuees nearby, and shouted at the top of my lungs: "Fan the air toward the interior of the shelter with your hand fans!" Then we could feel a stir of fresh air flowing back into the tunnel and there were no more casualties that day in the shelter except for that poor girl.

This was the start of the Japanese "exhaustive bombing," bombing intended to overwhelm and demoralize. It was later learned that more than 160 people perished for unclear reasons at the other end of the tunnel. It was only later that the cause of death was determined to be lack of oxygen."
　

"One evening I went in a cavern located between Chuqi Gate and Wanglong Gate. In the wake of the mysterious deaths reported for days in shelters, the residents preferred natural caverns to shelter constructions. Since I witnessed the depletion of oxygen in a bomb shelter, I also decided to shun bomb shelters and opted for this cavern. This time the air raid lasted for 6 hours before the all clear siren was sounded, to the great relief of the evacuees. Those who dozed off in the cavern finally got to go home. This evening had a very different feel: not many areas were bombed, but the air raid alarm lasted for a long time. When I emerged from the cavern, I saw flares and tracer rounds lighting up the sky in an eerie silence that fell over the city. People only learned the next morning that about 10 thousand people died overnight of asphyxiation in the tunnel (bombing shelter) near the entrance of a theater. Trucks were seen carrying corpses form there to the riverside, where the dead bodies were ferried across to the south bank for burial. Often multiple bodies shared one casket, and it was not uncommon to find some bodies exposed. The bodies that I saw had an unhuman look of having been carved out of wood. It was a gruesome sight."

After our apartment near Erlang Temple was razed in the Japanese bombing, we picked up what belongings we could from the rubble and moved into the staff dormitory of the Jianye company. Shortly after, the company moved to the community of Dongjia Xi on the bank of Jialing River. I moved with my company and lodged in a small staff dormitory there, and my wife would join me during the weekend and leave on Monday for her job at the Telecommunications office. During the "exhaustive bombing" raids, I sought shelter in a small cavern on the bank of the stream. Across the river could be seen Shangqing Temple and the seat of the Nationalist government. During the raids, the Japanese planes would fly over where I sought shelter, with a frightening roar. Except for a scattering of bombs that fell near the river bank, the Dongjia Xi community proper was relatively unscathed. Sometimes the air raid alarm would last for a day and a night, but with street vendors peddling their stuff across the community, there was not a serious interruption of food supplies.

[Introduction][1][2][3][4][5][6][Addendum][Chronology]