Du Yuming

Whampoa Graduate and the Burma Campaign

Du Yuming (1904–1981) was born in Mizhi, Shaanxi, and graduated from the first class of the Whampoa Military Academy. In 1942 he commanded the 5th Army of the Chinese Expeditionary Force in the Burma Campaign, one of the first large-scale deployments of Chinese forces alongside Allied troops. That May, after Japanese forces captured Myitkyina and Tengchong and cut off the expeditionary force's route home, Du led his troops into the primeval jungle of the Hukawng Valley ('Wild Man's Mountain') in northern Burma, a 114-day retreat to India during which disease and starvation caused far greater losses than combat; the 5th Army's direct units and the New 22nd Division, numbering nearly 10,000 on entering Burma, arrived in Assam, India, with only about 3,000 survivors — regarded as the Chinese Expeditionary Force's most devastating single loss. He subsequently served as Manchuria Pacification Commander (October 1945 – July 1947, with a period of medical leave), the Nationalist commander on the Manchurian front in the early phase of the Civil War, before being succeeded in turn by Chen Cheng and Wei Lihuang.

Huaihai and Capture

At Huaihai, Du Yuming served as the effective operational commander under Liu Zhi's nominal headquarters. After the destruction of Huang Baitao's and Huang Wei's corps, he led the remaining Nationalist forces in an attempted breakout from Xuzhou. His column was surrounded at Chenguanzhuang and held out under siege for several weeks. He was captured on 10 January 1949 — the final day of the Huaihai Campaign.

Captivity and Later Life

After his capture, Du Yuming was held for reeducation at the Gongde Lin war criminal management centre in Beijing, and was released in 1959 in the first group of pardoned war criminals, later serving on the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. In 1957, Du learned by radio that the Chinese-American physicist Yang Chen-Ning had won the Nobel Prize in Physics; only when Yang's father, Fudan University professor Yang Wuzhi, visited him in detention did Du realise the laureate was his own son-in-law — Yang had married Du's eldest daughter, Du Zhili, in the United States in 1949. Du subsequently wrote to Yang: 'I congratulate you on winning the Nobel Prize. This is an honour for the Chinese nation.' Du Yuming died in Beijing in 1981.