Communist Military High Command in 1937-1940

[Carlson, Evans (photographer)]. [Red Army / 8th Route Army - Photographs].

€ 35,000.00

Generals of the Second Sino-Japanese War, from Zhu De to Nie Rongzhen: the Communist Eighth Route Army poses for the camera in this historic collection, which showcases the future leaders of the People's Republic of China as they were during the Japanese invasion of WWII.

Zhu De (1886-1976) - Commander of the Eighth Route Army and along with Mao and Zhou Enlai a member of the founding triumvirate - poses for a photograph flanked by generals Peng Dehuai (1898-1974) and Zuo Quan (1905-42). Elsewhere, one of the future Ten Marshals Nie Rongzhen (1899-1992) gazes calmly into the camera. A fellow member of the Ten Marshals, the general He Long (1896-1969), appears in four different snapshots each taken at the same moment, surveying a landscape; he would later be purged in the Cultural Revolution. General Xiao Ke (1907-2008), sometime rival of He Long, is captured in motion; he would later be attacked by Peng Dehuai, before Dehuai's own fall and exile. Zhu De's wife Kang Keqing, who would go on to become a powerful politician in her own right, grins in her NRA uniform, having fought on the front lines since the Long March. Lieutenant-General Gao Shuangcheng (1882-1945) stands between two of his men, and an ROC diplomat, Hallington K. Tong (1887-1971), is one of the few figures in civilian dress; he would later write the official biography of Chiang Kai-shek.

Among the generals are a range of other men: photographs captioned in English "Manchu officers", "Underground CCP?", and "Chinese cook 8th Route Army", as well as snapshots of irrigation work, captured Japanese documents, and a Western pilot (possibly a member of the Soviet Volunteer Group secretly sent by the USSR) posing in front of a Polikarpov I-15, which is being camouflaged with bamboo.

These photographs may have been the work of Evans Carlson (1896-1947), an American military observer who spent much of 1937 and 1938 in China. The photographs come from Carlson's own collected papers, dispersed by his descendants, and Carlson had known correspondence with Zhu De and Mao, with whom he was friendly during the war.