Du Yuming
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Du Yuming (py) or Tu Yü-ming (wg) (杜聿明) (November 28, 1903-May 7, 1981) was a Kuomintang field commander active in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) theatre of World War II and in the Chinese Civil War from 1945 to 1949.
A trusted protégé of Chiang Kai-shek, Tu was a graduate of the first cadet class at the Whampoa Military Academy. During the Second Sino-Japanese War he commanded the 5th Corps in the First Changsha Campaign, and Battle of South Guangxi.
During WWII he commanded the same 5th Corps or Nationalist Fifth Army in the Battle of Yunnan-Burma Road from Mid March to early June 1942, during the Burma Campaign under Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell. Du was largely to blame for the disastrous failure of Chinese Expeditionary Army in the Burma-India theater at the early stage, for his blind obedience to Chiang. However, due to his blind obedience, he was viewed as an ardent loyalist of Chiang and thus was not punished for his failure.
After the war, Tu helped strengthen the Nationalist position in the Southwest by removing Long Yun, the local warlord of Yunnan Province in October 1945. Du was then transferred to the Northeast Theatre to consolidate Kuomintang control. For most of the Civil War, he served as a field commander in Manchuria and Northeast China.
Toward the end of the struggles against the communists following World War II, Du correctly guessed that one of Chiang's most trusted staff officers was a communist agent but the only solid evidence he came up with was that unlike most nationalist cadres and officers who were corrupted, the suspected communist spy was clean. Obviously, this was not a good reason and Chiang was of course enraged when Du presented his view, because Chiang interpreted such reason would imply that all of the nationalists were corrupted, and only the communists were clean, not mentiong the fact Du's wife was once a communist herself.
Du was captured during the Huai Hai Campaign and held in Communist prisons until his pardon in 1959, after which he was rewarded a high ranking position in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, reportedly because the Chinese government wanted to convince his son-in-law, the Nobel Prize in Physics winner Yang Zhenning to return to China. Ironically, the communist agent Du correctly suspected was also in the same political organization and the two became friends.
