01
Since most of the puppet army participated in the war against their compatriots, most of the puppet army soldiers in countries with puppet armies were widely criticized. These puppet soldiers wear different clothes from the Japanese, wearing cloth hats, which shows that the Japanese regard them as tools. The common people call them "two devils". In addition, the Korea army during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea and the army of the Republic of Viet Nam (South Vietnam) during the Viet Nam War were also called "puppet army" by the mainland.
During the War of Resistance Against Japan, resistance activities in the occupied areas of Japan were repeated one after another, and a large number of regular combat troops were held back in order to suppress local resistance. In order to solve the problem of insufficient combat troops on the front line, it is hoped that the existing local troops will be used to maintain the rule and that the local people will be recruited to take charge of law and order in the occupied areas. According to the jurisdiction of the puppet regimes in the occupied areas of Japan, such as the "Nanjing Peace Founding Army" and the "North China Security Army", the puppet regimes do not have the right to interfere with each other's puppet army activities, but Japan officers have the right to arbitrarily dispatch the puppet army in the area at any time.
In 1938, the number of puppet troops in China was about 78,000, but with the defection of Wang Jingwei from the Nationalist government in 1940 and the establishment of a new government, the number of puppet troops in China rose sharply to 145,000. Among them, on May 14, 1943, Pang Bingxun and Sun Dianying jointly signed a telegram to Japan, and the number of troops led by them was huge.
After Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945, according to Chinese military statistics, the number of all puppet troops stationed in China except for the puppet "Manchukuo" was about 1.186 million. What motivates so many Chinese to serve the enemy who invaded their homeland?
02
Political dictatorship
After the establishment of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, it imposed a political dictatorship, suppressed democracy and eradicated dissidents, resulting in a multitude of factions within the ruling group. The struggle for power and profit between localities, between the Kuomintang and other political forces, and between factions within the Kuomintang was fierce. Chen Gongbo once described the Executive Yuan led by Wang Jingwei in the Chiang Kai-shek government in his "Bitter Smile" as follows: "The Executive Yuan is simply the secretariat of the chairman's camp" and even "an ordinary clerical unit in the secretariat." In order to become the supreme leader, Wang Jingwei planned to rely on the support of Long Yun, Liu Wenhui, Deng Longguang, Zhang Fakui, and other powerful local factions in the southwest region to set up an anti-communist "central government" long before he "returned to the capital." Under the suppression of Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship, a group of big traitors used this as an excuse to break away from Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorial government, waving the banner of "saving the country by curves", and throwing themselves into the arms of the invaders "with confidence". In 1938, the number of puppet troops was only 78,000, and after Wang Jingwei defected to the enemy, the number of puppet troops rose rapidly to 145,000, an increase of 85%.
03
Military dictatorship
After Zhang Xueliang changed banners in the northeast in 1928, Chiang Kai-shek achieved formal reunification, but he still had lingering fears about the powerful factions in various localities with heavy troops, fortified everywhere, and was constantly squeezed out, often attacking, weakening, and annexing the military strength of various places under various pretenses. In terms of treatment, the troops of their own descendants are superior to the local "miscellaneous" troops in terms of status, military salaries, and equipment. These "motley" troops were filled with dissatisfaction with the Nationalist Government in their hearts.
In the face of the powerful offensive of the Japanese army, some narrow-minded "motley" generals forgot the interests of the country and the nation, betrayed the country to seek glory, and sold themselves to the enemy in order to preserve their strength, or for the sake of selfish desires or resentment.
We can see that most of the troops that surrendered to the Japanese army in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression were troops and local armed forces that Chiang Kai-shek called "miscellaneous". For example, the commanders of the seven puppet army group armies in Wang Jingwei's "Nationalist Government", six of which came from the former Northwest Army, the Northeast Army, and Han Fuyu in Shandong, and only Hao Pengju turned out to be a subordinate of Hu Zongnan (this person absconded to Wang's puppet government for raping other people's wives in the army).
04
The poverty of life
During the reign of the Kuomintang government, the people did not have a good life. Forced to make a living, many ordinary people had to serve the Japanese army in the Japan occupation zone, or earn a living by joining the puppet army, thus acting as the lackeys of the Japanese army's war of aggression against China. In order to entrap the puppet army, the Japanese adviser to Wang Jingwei's puppet regime, Ying Zuozhen Zhao, once said to Wang:
"Those who are stationed in the capital with appeasement troops and police stationed in the capital hope that their provisions will be 25 yuan per person per month, and in the first month of the lunar calendar, the chairman will be asked to reward each person with an average of 5 yuan, which will have a great effect on the people's hearts."
These salaries were enough for the puppet soldiers to support their families at the time. Attracted by money, there are constantly lower-class people joining the ranks of the puppet army. This situation was also very surprising to Kirs, a United Kingdom expatriate in China at the time:
"They (the Japanese) are as casual and easy as going to the market to buy goods, and when they find a suitable target, they want to approach their prey and seduce them with money nakedly."
05
The coercion and temptation of the Japanese army
After the September 18 Incident, the Japanese army easily occupied a vast area in the northeast of the mainland, and soon captured the Beijing and Tianjin regions. As a result, some people were frightened to lose confidence in resisting. Even Chiang Kai-shek's close confidant, Zhou Fohai, director of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang, was pessimistic and disappointed about the future of the war, believing that "the war will be defeated, and peace may not be chaos," and "I believe that if the war continues, it will perish, but the propaganda cannot but advocate the final victory." I advocate that the door to peace is not completely closed, but in propaganda it is necessary to advocate the war of resistance to the end and oppose compromise halfway." Under the influence of these high-ranking officials, many traitor officials also believed that "Japan has a developed economy and strong power, and China is not Japan's opponent at all, and it cannot be defeated."
In order to make up for the lack of manpower and material resources in the war, consolidate the occupied areas, cover up its aggressive features, and extinguish the Chinese people's sense of resistance, Japan threatened and lured China in various ways. In 1938, when Japan and Wang Jingwei's faction Mei Siping and Gao Zongwu signed the "Record of the Japan-China Agreement" in Shanghai, they hypocritically declared:
"Respect China's territorial sovereignty" and "withdraw troops from China within two years".
Then, the Japan cabinet put forward the Three Principles of Konoe to China, deceived and induced surrender, and finally caused the Wang Jingwei faction in the anti-Japanese camp to split and establish China's largest puppet regime.
In addition to engaging in espionage activities by unscrupulous means, another important task of Japan's four major secret services in China is to create traitors and puppet army units. They are seduced by money, lured by personal interests, or coerced by force, and try their best to win over and corrupt some Chinese. In addition, the rule of the Kuomintang was corrupt and unpopular, and some people forgot the interests of the country and the nation for the sake of selfish interests, defected to the Japanese invaders, joined the puppet army, and actively participated in and instructed the traitors to constantly arrest Ding and expand the ranks of the puppet army. For example, the soldiers of the three divisions of the guard unit with the best equipment and the strongest combat effectiveness in the puppet army of the Wang puppet regime at that time were all "composed of strong men captured from Anhui, Henan, Shandong and other places and soldiers selected from other units of the puppet army."
06
From the "advance army" to the "regular army"
In the 14 years of the War of Resistance Against Japan, there was never a real battle between the Kuomintang army and the puppet army. The anti-Japanese armed forces led by the Communist Party of China and the masses resisted and wiped out the vast majority of the puppet army, killing and wounding, capturing and forcing more than 1.18 million people to surrender. In addition, the Soviet Red Army sent troops to the northeast and wiped out all the puppet Manchurian army and the puppet Mongolian army, a total of 8 divisions and 12 brigades, about 200,000 people. By the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Wang puppet army and the North China puppet army, except for a slight escape, were still intact. The puppet army belonging to the Wang puppet government in Nanjing still has 15 corps, 52 divisions, 9 brigades, and special forces, totaling more than 282,000 people, and the puppet "North China Political Affairs Committee" army has 13 groups (brigades) and one artillery and engineer army, totaling more than 55,000 people. The remnants of the puppet "Autonomous Government of the Union of Mongolia" still have the number of 9 divisions, plus more than 14,000 troops directly under it. There are more than 351,000 puppet soldiers above. They were all co-opted by Chiang Kai-shek and thrown into the anti-communist and anti-people civil war.
Before the end of the war, Chiang Kai-shek was ready to use the puppet armies in various places to fight a civil war. On August 15, 1945, on the day Japan announced its surrender, the Kuomintang government renamed the General Headquarters of the puppet North China Appeasement Army as the "General Headquarters of the North China Advance Army" and ordered it to "hold on to the spot and wait for the Nationalist Army." The next day, Chiang Kai-shek issued an order to the puppet army across the country:
“…… The subordinate armies and puppet armies in all parts of our occupied areas should be responsible for maintaining local law and order and protecting the people in their current garrisons, and the puppet armies in particular should take the opportunity to atone for their sins and strive to rehabilitate themselves, and they should not move their garrisons without the orders of the Chairman of the Committee, and they should not be absorbed without the permission of the Chairman of the Committee......"
Immediately afterwards, Chiang Kai-shek wantonly conferred on the traitors and high-ranking generals of the puppet army and entrusted them with important tasks. He appointed the traitor Zhou Fohai as the commander-in-chief of the Shanghai Action Corps to prevent the communist army from taking over Shanghai; King De was the commander-in-chief of the Mongolia advance army, and Li Shouxin was the commander-in-chief of the advance army of the two provinces, responsible for gathering the remaining military and police units of the puppet Mongolian and puppet Manchus scattered everywhere to attack the Eighth Route Army; Sun Dianying and Pang Bingxun were also appointed commanders-in-chief of the advance army, and Sun Dianying's troops were in Tangyin, Henan, blocking the southward movement of the Eighth Route Army. Pang Bingxun's troops gathered the puppet army troops near Kaifeng, echoed with Hao Pengju in Xuzhou, Sun Dianying in Xinxiang, and Zhang Lanfeng in Shangqiu, blocking our army everywhere. Because of his contribution to preventing the Eighth Route Army from entering Kaifeng, in the spring of 1946, when Chiang Kai-shek went to Xinxiang to convene a military meeting to prepare for the civil war, he also specially summoned Pang Bingxun and Sun Dianying, and asked them to stand aside one by one and take a group photo.
With regard to the reorganization of the puppet army, the Kuomintang adopted the sequence of columns and general units, that is, if it is an army, it will be given the establishment of a column, and if it is a division, it will be given the establishment of a general army, and the word "provisional formation" will be added above the column and the general army to show its difference from the regular army. The puppet army in various localities was organized into six columns, 27 corps, and 73 regiments, and Men Zhizhong, Sun Liangcheng, Wu Huawen, Sun Dianying, and Zhang Lanfeng were all appointed as column commanders. At the beginning of 1946, the reorganization was completed, and after November, it was successively organized into a certain army and a division of the official national army.
07
The fate of the puppet army
After many high-ranking generals of the puppet army were favored by Chiang Kai-shek, they thought that all the sins they had committed could be written off. Unexpectedly, Chiang Kai-shek's wanton reuse of the puppet army to deal with the Communist Party's Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army aroused the anger of the people throughout the country, and social organizations and the masses of the people in various localities protested one after another in various forms.
Zhou Kunsheng, an expert in international law, also severely condemned the Chiang Kai-shek government, saying:
"The traitor Zhou Fohai, who is said to be killable, why doesn't he know the canonical punishment to clean up the country?"
Only then did Chiang Kai-shek feel that people's words were terrible, and he had no choice but to instruct the Military Unification Bureau to send Zhou Fohai, Wang Kemin, and other big traitors and a group of high-ranking puppet military officials who had committed numerous bloody cases to the military court. After trial, Chen Gongbo, Wang Yitang, Chu Minyi, Ding Mocun, Fu Shuangying, commander of the puppet 11th Army, Ye Peng, director of the Wuhan Pacification Office, and Qi Xieyuan, the puppet North China Pacification Supervisor, were sentenced to death, and Zhou Fohai was sentenced to life imprisonment (later died of illness in Nanjing No. 1 Prison). Soon after Wang Kemin was detained, he fell ill and died in prison. Most of the other high-ranking generals of the puppet army and their subordinate units who were protected by Chiang Kai-shek and narrowly escaped trial were also wiped out by the PLA or surrendered to the PLA in the War of Liberation.
Except for Wu Huawen, who led his troops to revolt in the Battle of Jinan, others such as Sun Liangcheng, Sun Dianying, Zhang Lanfeng, and Hao Pengju were all taken prisoner by the People's Liberation Army.
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