A week before Germany launched an attack on the former Soviet
Union on June 22, 1941, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central
Committee notified Josef Stalin of the intelligence. The CPC also
provided the Soviets detailed military deployment of the Japanese
Kwantung Army in northeast China before Soviet forces hit a final
strike on the crack Japanese troops.
Yan Baohang, a senior advisor to General Chang Hsueh-liang,
gathered the two intelligence pieces and transferred them to the
Soviet Union via conduits of the CPC.
Yan Mingfu, Yan Baohang's son and the former head of the United
Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee, was interviewed
by Xinhua recently about his father.
In Spring 1941, Zhou Enlai, CPC chief representative to
Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, ordered
Yan, who was also a CPC member but was posing as a democracy
advocate, to collect intelligence for the CPC and the Communist
International.
"My father had extensive high-profile networks, including almost
all the important men within the government," Yan Mingfu said,
adding that his father knew Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Ke, son of
Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and Yu Youren, a veteran statesman of the Chinese
Kuomintang Party.
In May 1941, Yan was invited to a banquet entertaining the
German military attach and learned by accident that Germany planned
to invade the Soviet Union around June 20 that year.
During toasts, Yan heard Yu talking about the possible German
strike, which was confirmed by Sun. Yan immediately left the
banquet and reported to Zhou, who sent a telegram to Yan'an,
wartime headquarters of the CPC Central Committee and its military
forces. On June 16 the CPC telegrammed the intelligence to
Moscow.
The Soviets hastened preparations and avoided even greater
losses to the German invasion.
In 1944, Chen Cheng, head of the political department of the
government's military committee, directed Yan to research whether
Japan would invade the Soviet Union in the closing months of WWII.
Yan "borrowed" from one of his countrymen the highly classified
files on military deployment of the Japanese Kwantung Army in
northeast China, which might have been big obstacles impeding
Soviet military maneuvers in the Far East. The intelligence
obtained by Yan included the deployment, fortresses, defense plans,
weapons, size of units and names of all generals.
The countryman, a ranking official who was working in the
Defense Department, was quoted by Yan Mingfu as saying to his
father, "Generalissimo Chiang (Kai-shek) has recovered our land
north to the Great Wall, but people from the northeast like us are
devoted to fight back to our homeland. You could take these files
but must return them in three days."
With this much-needed intelligence, the Soviet army overturned
the Japanese crack forces in a matter of days in August 1944.
On November 1, 1995, Russian Ambassador to China Igor Rogachev,
a representative of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, granted the
late Yan and the other two men medals commemorating the 50th
anniversary of the national defense war of the Soviet Union.
Ambassador Rogachev said the contribution made by Yan would be
memorized by Russians and recorded in the history of the war.
Born in April 1895 in Haicheng, Liaoning
Province, Yan was respected by young people in the northeast
for his disobedience of Japanese occupation in the 1930s. He for
the first time translated the secret memorial to the Japanese
throne written by the Prime Minister Tanaka into English, making
the outside world know the vicious intention of Japan on invading
China.
After the Xi'an Incident, a peaceful mutiny led by General Chang
Hsueh-liang to force Generalissimo Chiang to fight the Japanese
invaders more vigorously, Yan secretly joined the CPC in September
1937.
"In the 1,600 days and nights when he collected intelligence for
the Party and the Communist International, my father cared little
about his and our family's safety and was ready to devote his
life," Yan Mingfu said.
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(Xinhua News Agency May 5, 2005)