It Is Dark Underground

By Pin-fei Loo

It is Dark Underground, first published in 1946, is the first hand account of student Loo Pin Fei in the Chibna of the 1930. The books details the efforts the students made to resist the Japanese occupation of their country, including non-violent means such as distributing leaflets as well as violent means such as bombings of theaters, setting fire to supply warehouses, and carrying out assassinations of pro-Japanese Chinese. The students also worked diligently to change public opinion toward the Japanese. Their efforts were set in a time of dramatic and sweeping change in China as the Nationalist and Communist movements grew and World War Two loomed on the horizon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839742439

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

It is Dark Underground

Student Resistance to the 1930s Japanese Occupation of China

Loo Pin Fei

It is Dark Underground was originally published in 1946 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 4

Preface 5

1. Shanghai, 1937 6

2. The Special Youth Group 12

3. Fire! 23

4. So End All Traitors 30

5. Death in Tientsin 38

6. Any Ground for a Battle 46

7. A Sprout to Stand the Wind 54

8. Broken Jade 62

9. An Incident a Day 69

10. Our Luck Runs Out 77

11. Dragon Sister 88

12. January the Fourteenth 96

13. Heaven on Earth 103

14. Trouble for the Japs 110

15. Student Traitor 117

16. Good Citizens 126

17. The End of My Rope 135

18. Farewell Party 142

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 148

Preface

Owing to the exigencies of travel it was not possible for me to read the manuscript of this book before it went to press. But I do know the author and I admire him for the courage and patriotic zeal with which in his student days he tried to do his bit toward resisting Japanese aggression. He was one among many of those students who both before and after the invasion of North China did all that they could to arouse the will and conscience of their fellow-countrymen to this menace, to warn or liquidate such Chinese as succumbed to Japanese intimidation or bribery, or who in other ways tried to frustrate the sinister Japanese designs. That Chinese youth, especially in the occupied regions, were so aware of the danger to the nation and so heroic in their endeavors, has been no slight factor in the moral resistance of the whole population. For it is significant that—in China at any rate—the Japanese failed as completely in their effort to win the hearts of the people as in their attempted military conquest. It is against this background that the story of what one valiant boy undertook to contribute should be read.

J. Leighton Stuart, President

Yenching University

China was still at war when this book was written. All of the characters are real, but for obvious reasons many of them were given fictitious names.

1. Shanghai, 1937

I am too young ever to have remembered a world at peace. Five times in my life the Japs have made war on my people. So when Peiping fell in July, 1937, and the great Japanese offensive against China began, it seemed as though all this had happened before. The only difference, so far as I was concerned, was that this time I was in the Army.

The army to which I belonged, however, was the so-called Students’ Army, a reserve force made up of five thousand high school and college students, and we never served on an actual front. In fact, we fought only once, when we discovered that the Japs were trying to land troops at Lotien, a small village near the sea behind the front lines. We resisted with high casualties until our regular troops came to rescue us.

For three months, while the Japs bombed and strafed and burned Shanghai, the Students’ Army was stationed outside the city, and we saw little of the actual fighting. But we saw what the Jap invasion had done to our country. This was the country where we would live out our lives, so the battle for freedom was our battle. And if we were to live like human beings we had to win that battle.

We saw more than a million people become homeless. Factories were reduced to ashes. Roads and streets and railroad stations were packed with refugees trying to get out of the besieged city.

We saw the bodies of machine-gunned coolies and raped women; we discovered the skulls of children that had been smashed against the walls. We found dying Chinese piled together like firewood after their bodies had been used as sandbags.

And then the Japs bombed the South Station where thousands of refugees, fleeing before the invaders, were waiting for trains. The Chinese officer called upon the Students’ Army to clean up the mess. I found a man lying on the ground, his body apparently intact and no sign of a wound. Thinking he was unconscious, I tried to turn him over, but as I touched his head it collapsed, and my hand was covered with blood and brains. That day we buried more than two thousand broken bodies, and the fragmentary parts of men, women, and children who had been blown to bits. Not counting the dead, we loaded three trucks with arms, legs, and other parts of the human body.

In all this horror there were almost no complaints from the Chinese people, though they had lost their loved ones and their property, because it was a war for freedom of the nation. For more than one hundred and twenty years our nation had been subject to foreign powers, divided into separate spheres of influence during that earlier era of empire building. This was a war in which China was fighting for international equality as well as resisting an invading enemy.

Late in November the commander of the Students’ Army came to speak to us. He was a young man of thirty-five, a graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy who had fought in the reconstruction revolution of 1927. It was after dark when we lined up, waiting for our instructions.

His speech was short, but his words are indelibly printed in my memory. He told us that our defense would soon be broken and that he had ordered his troops to evacuate to Soochow where we had better defense lines, leaving only twenty-five hundred volunteers to cover the retreat. They were actually in a death trap as they were cut off from the rest of our troops, but we clamored to join them and fight to the last bullet and the last man.

The commander refused. All of us in the Students’ Army, he explained, were comparatively highly educated, and it would be a great loss to the nation if we were to die on the battlefield. China needed us. There were bigger jobs ahead. Ours would be the task of the future, rebuilding a new and better China. He looked around slowly, scanning every face, and then he said, Brothers, do not be sad and discouraged. I promise you that we will come back under our same flag. I swear it!

That night I joined the countless other refugees who were headed for the French Concession and the International Settlement in the heart of Shanghai. With me went one of my best friends, Ting. We had gone to high school together, taken our military training together at Soochow, enlisted in the Students’ Army together, and belonged to the same regiment. Ting was good company at any time and invaluable in moments of discouragement, for he was full of animal spirits, a big muscular fellow, shorter than I but stronger, who always talked very loud and liked to sound much tougher than he was.

It was dawn before we reached the haven of refuge that the French Concession had become, for there was no means of transportation and the roads were jammed with refugees. It was a scene that would have made an iron statue weep. As each family shuffled along, the wife managed the children while the husband devoted himself to his mother. Many of the older women had tiny bound feet and found it impossible to walk. They were being pushed or pulled in anything on wheels, some of them in baby carriages, some carried on the crossed hands of two sons. And some, whose sons had died in the war, crawled painfully along on their hands and knees.

We saw a white-haired mother carried on her son’s back; a blind father led by his young daughter; husbands laden down with baggage; wives herding along their children; every face stamped with fear of the invaders and the heartbreak of leaving home. And we heard the unending murmur of the crying of children and the moans of the sick.

There was no one in command. This was a completely order-less rabble, shoving, pushing. All along the road were shoes that had dropped from the feet of those who rushed ahead, but nobody bothered to pick them up, for they would only add to the burden that was already too heavy. Most of the refugees carried dried food, usually rice cakes that would keep for some time without spoiling. Bombed shops gaped open and their contents were looted.

Two days before the war started, French and British soldiers had put up a blockade all along the river to prevent refugees from entering the French Concession and the International Settlement. Now they were admitting them again for a few hours a day, so Ting and I had no trouble getting in.

A boy named Kao, who had been in our class in high school, lived in the International Settlement, so Ting and I got in touch with him at once, and he joined us for breakfast to talk things over. Kao had been the best student in our school, having twice been awarded highest honors. He was as unlike Ting as possible, tall and quiet and scholarly, squinting a little through his glasses because of eyestrain, as bored by sports as Ting was enthusiastic about them. He knew Japanese, English, French, and Spanish, and had a wide fund of knowledge.

Ting and I were at loose ends. We were out of the Army, our careers as soldiers at an end, and college was still some time off. Ting had no family, and my own was in North China, so we did not know what to do.

Kao promptly came to the rescue and suggested that we go home with him. He was working in a refugee center, and he promised to arrange for us to help there too. Ting and I accepted at once and went home with Kao. Like that of many wealthy Chinese, Kao’s house was neither Eastern nor Western, but a mixture of both. The exterior was Western, the interior Eastern, dark, with small windows and uncomfortable furniture magnificently carved. His family was away, and there were only two servants, a cook and a maid, though the maid’s entire family had moved in from a suburb and taken refuge in the house: her husband, who was a typical farmer; his old mother; and a little girl whose relationship I never got straight.

Shanghai was still smoking. Compared with the rest of the city the International Settlement was a haven of peace; compared to any city in peacetime it was a nightmare. The food shortage was acute and prices sky-high. Canned goods had disappeared from the market, snatched up by the wealthy, who hoarded them. Rice has always formed the main staple of Chinese diet, and in order to buy rice it was necessary to stand in line for hours. Members of a family generally took turns, one standing until he could stand no longer, then another member replaced him while he went home to rest. And even this rice, so laboriously obtained, was only for those with the money to pay.

By this time most of the refugees were beggars. Few of them had anything left but the straw mats they carried on their shoulders and on which they slept at night. As trucks rumbled down the streets, loaded with bags of rice, they followed like locusts, sticking knives into the bags and holding their cupped hands under the hole they had made to catch the grains that poured out. I saw guards on the trucks—and the trucks had to have guards if the rice was to reach its destination—slash them across the face and head with their whips. The starving men cried out, they bled; but in their desperate hunger they did not give way. When the truck had gone they swept up every scrap of rice from the street, together with the filth into which it had fallen.

Every night, Kao told us, and we later saw for ourselves, the authorities in the International Settlement sent a truck to collect the corpses of refugees who had died in the night from lack of food, medical care, and any kind of sanitation.

You have to live through an invasion to understand what it is like. The constant fear is not the worst thing, nor the devastation, nor even the brutal separation of families who may never find one another again. But the enemy, the victor, the conqueror is always there. The soil that nourished you and in which you have your roots belongs to him. You may come to terms with him and become a slave, or fight him and be an outcast. There is not a day, not an hour when his presence does not rankle, when your resentment is not more than you can bear.

The only way you can achieve any peace for yourself is to fight in any way you can, with any weapons you can find, on any ground that offers—but fight, unceasingly, to rid the land of its unspeakable plague.

The day after our arrival in Shanghai we started work in a refugee center, a number of which had been set up to shelter and feed the homeless, find them jobs, and teach them a trade. The idea was fine, but as all the workers were voluntary and the contributions, never adequate, eventually stopped altogether, they existed for a very short time.

My own work was not exactly what I had expected in my eagerness to go on fighting. I was assigned the job of entertaining children who had no place to go and nothing to do. They were reluctant to come to us, and their parents were uneasy about letting them out of sight in their constant fear of being separated and unable to find each other again. In wartime it is a great deal just to be together. So every morning we collected children, ranging in age from those who could barely walk to boys and girls of twelve, and took them into a room that had been set aside for us. There was no furniture. In fact, the only equipment we had was a blackboard. But we taught them what we could, read to them, sang with them, told them stories and played with them.

Among the children at the refugee center were a number whose parents had been killed in the bombing or whose families had been separated during the retreat. My sister and her husband came to Shanghai at that time, and, though they had two children of their own, they adopted four of these little waifs. One of them was a bright little boy about six years old, with a very high I.Q. No one knew who his parents were or what had become of them. We did not even know how long he had lived alone in the streets of Shanghai during those months of bombardment. All about him grownups had been killed, yet this little fellow had managed to survive. When the refugees had poured into the International Settlement, he had simply run in after them.

Another of these adopted children was a twelve-year-old girl who had recently lost her father. She played obediently with my sister’s children, even laughed with them. But hers was a loyal heart, and when she was alone and thought herself unobserved she wept for her father.

While Kao and Ting and I were doing what seemed to us most unheroic work in the refugee center, the twenty-five hundred volunteers who had been left to cover the Chinese retreat fought fiercely, their number reduced in a week to five hundred. They concentrated their strength in a twelve-story building, not far from the International Settlement, and when the Japs ordered them to surrender their only reply was to write their wills and throw them over into the Settlement.

For more than two weeks these five hundred brave men held out. Everyone in the Settlement, Chinese and foreigners alike, tried to help them. Under Japanese fire, volunteer drivers brought trucks loaded with food, bandages, and coal. A Dutchman led a dozen coolies to repair the water supply of the building so they even had hot water. A little fourteen-year-old Chinese girl carrying a large Chinese flag left the International Settlement by way of a bridge spanning Soochow Creek, and while thousands watched she walked through gunfire to present the flag. As the huge emblem rose slowly to the top of the building, the watchers cheered and some of them wept.

But at last an order came from Generalissimo Chiang, telling the five hundred heroes to surrender to the French, in accordance with an arrangement that had been made between the Japs and the Foreign Consulates. And so ended the defense of Shanghai.

A week later fifty thousand Jap soldiers marched through the main street of the International Settlement in a triumphal parade. From early morning the streets were guarded by police and detectives of the International Settlement to prevent trouble. All communications were cut off when the parade began. The streets, usually crowded with people, were quiet and nearly empty. Shops were closed and locked, while the Chinese watched the parade from their windows. The only applause that greeted the marching men came from a few hundred Jap civilians.

It was midday when Ting, Kao, and I, taking off time for lunch from our work at the refugee center, went to a place where we could watch the parade from a second-floor window.

The Jap soldiers did not look as though they had won a battle. Their clothes were dirty, their faces unshaven. Their slow, spiritless walk was more like a funeral march than a triumphant procession.

We stood watching our conquerors, our hearts pounding with hatred all the more bitter because we felt so helpless. What could we do? What could anyone do? But the Chinese are a stoical people, and there was no sound—only tight mouths and eyes that watched and smoldered.

Suddenly we heard a ringing cry, Long live China! It was a voice that lifted the heart. Then a man leaped from the seventh floor of a store and landed among the marching troops. The parade stopped instantly, and at once the place was surrounded. Craning out of the window we saw an ambulance draw up; three Japs in uniform were lifted into it and driven away. The body of the Chinese was dragged to one side and covered with newspapers, and the troops began to march again.

They had gone only fifty paces when there was a loud explosion. A man had thrown a grenade into the marching column, injuring a dozen or more Japs. He was shot the moment the grenade left his hand. The Japs dropped to the street, their rifles and machine guns ready for use. No one was allowed to move from the sidewalk. I was afraid the Japs would start their favorite game of shooting defenseless people. I had heard of this practice of theirs ever since I was in elementary school. But after a few scattered revolver shots, all was quiet.

Small incidents. But already the Japs were getting an inkling of a fact that never ceased to puzzle them. They could defeat the Chinese; they could not keep them defeated.

2. The Special Youth Group

Ting and Kao and I were very thoughtful that day. The suicide and the hand grenade, those lonely and hopeless gestures of defiance, had stirred each of us to the same decision. We were going to do some underground work.

At that time there were two underground movements functioning in China, one attached to the Central Government, the other to the Communist regime; but they were hampering their efforts and losing sight of their real enemy by the intermittent warfare they conducted with each other. It was not for a party we wanted to fight; it was for the better China that must grow out of the war. Many of the people disliked politics, and we decided that there should be a group with whom they could work, one which asked no questions about party allegiance and accepted no party authority for the group as a whole.

The