With the return of Marshall—Atlas—at least one of Truman’s peacetime burdens could be shifted to other shoulders. In the headlines that morning, the news of Marshall’s return had already done much of what it was meant to do. If it had not driven Hurley off stage entirely, it had at least taken the spotlight away from his wildest accusations. A “shrewd political counterstroke,” one editorialist judged. A “stroke of genius,” a judge applauded. Henry Luce, the powerful publisher of Time and Life, coiner and champion of “the American century,” and China-born son of missionaries, wrote Marshall directly: “I do not need to tell you how glad I am that you have undertaken the mission to China. . . . My basic conviction is that peace, with justice, can be achieved in the critical area of Northeast Asia if our country exercises sufficient intelligence and will.”
Americans had long harbored grandiose ambitions of transforming China. For a century, capitalists, missionaries, teachers, and diplomats had gone with their visions and schemes, some nefarious, some noble, and treated China as “plastic” in the hands of “strong and capable Westerners,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. Looking back over that history, Americans could tell a pleasing story of their role. While China was being devoured by imperialist powers that both inflamed and fed off internal strife, America had represented something better.
In part it was a matter of self-interest. The British, French, and Germans, and eventually the Japanese, were threatening to carve China into pieces. The United States had neither the inclination nor the wherewithal to get in on the imperialist scramble. So in 1899 and 1900, it issued the Open Door policy—a demand, wrapped in principle, that no foreign power violate what was left of China’s sovereignty by claiming a slice of territory for itself. It was also a matter of sentiment. The United States would remake China in its own image, through ministry, through commerce, through education. “With God’s help,” said a U.S. senator, “we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”
Yet to most Chinese, although Americans might be better than the worst aggressors, they were hardly innocents. Acts of supposed beneficence looked different from the other side of the Pacific. That vaunted Open Door policy, for example, was at bottom a covenant among thieves, as some would describe it, a way for the United States to reap the spoils of imperialism without incurring the costs, to its self-image or its global image. John Hay, drafting the policy as secretary of state, said as much: “The inherent weakness of our position is this: we do not want to rob China ourselves, and our public opinion will not permit us to interfere.”
Washington made much of devoting its share of the Boxer Indemnity, a $300 million payment Western powers extracted from China’s late-imperial government, to educational institutions in China; it got that share in the first place by joining a coalition of foreign armies to intervene against the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Wilson preached universal rights and self-determination everywhere; his principles counted for little after World War I when he got to the negotiating table in Versailles and allowed Japan to take concessions in China—the moment of betrayal that sparked the May Fourth Movement and formed modern Chinese nationalism. “All fairness, all permanent peace, all President Wilson’s fourteen-point declaration,” a future founder of the Chinese Communist Party lamented, “have turned into hollow words not worth a cent.” And whatever the gauzy hopes for the Chinese in China—the peasants of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, which tens of millions of Americans consumed in the 1930s as a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Academy Award–winning film, and Broadway play—the Chinese in America were subject to atrocious institutionalized racism. U.S. exclusion laws banned Chinese immigration from 1882 until 1943, when the rhetoric of wartime solidarity finally made them unsupportable. The best that might be said was that Americans were the best of a bad lot—more “pure-minded” than the Europeans, a Chinese imperial official assessed, and thus perhaps more “exploitable.”
What Marshall gently referred to during the war as “our difficulties in China” followed this pattern with woeful predictability. After Pearl Harbor, the New York Times rhapsodized about “our loyal ally China . . . from whose patient and untiring and infinitely resourceful people there will now return to us tenfold payment upon such aid as we have given.” Such proclamations became cliché: indomitable China, spiritually kindred China, freedom-loving China, “with democratic traditions extending back two thousand years,” according to Time. Its sister publication Life ran a piece called “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese”; the former, it advised, “never [have] rosy cheeks.” The public consumed tales of the iron-willed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his beautiful wife, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Bible-reading Christians both. Prominent Americans returned from brief visits—they got what one young official would call the “quick airport-warphanage-dugout-hospital-Madame-airport treatment,” the shacks and beggars cleared along every route traveled—and said it was all true.
This proselytizing had its purpose. By not submitting, China was keeping hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops occupied with occupation. These were hundreds of thousands of troops that otherwise, as Marshall needed no reminding, might be killing Americans on islands in the Pacific or, as Roosevelt feared, joining the Nazis in a “giant pincer” that would give the Axis control of the entire Eurasian land mass. “The determination with which the Chinese nation under your great leadership has defended its freedom,” Marshall wrote Chiang, “has been an inspiration to the American Army as well as to the American people.” The United States had a vital interest in doing what it could to sustain Chinese resolve. With a virtual siege by Japan, American planes ferried ton after ton of supplies over the Hump, hundreds crashing into the Himalayas below. Dashing American pilots, the Flying Tigers, flew combat missions from Chinese airstrips. Hundreds of millions of dollars in military support flowed to Chiang’s army under Lend-Lease.
This material aid was never enough, not in Chiang’s eyes and not in Marshall’s either. Yet U.S. resources were already overcommitted, in the sprawling multifront war Marshall had to manage. So it took other measures, more symbolic, to elevate an ally. The United States scrapped the exclusion laws. It gave up quasi-imperial privileges in China, and leaned on the British to do the same—aside from control of Hong Kong, which would be relinquished, Churchill said, over his dead body. China’s “Century of Humiliation” had started with British victory in the First Opium War. Now, perhaps, it was over. “Today marks a new epoch in Chinese history,” Chiang proclaimed. “Henceforth if we are weak, if we lack self-confidence, the fault will be ours.”
Washington’s hopeful vision for what would come after world war also gave China pride of place. “An unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity not only in Eastern Asia but in the whole world,” Roosevelt told Chiang during the darkest days of the Japanese invasion. It would join with the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—the Big Four, the four policemen—to forge a just and lasting settlement. Together they would guarantee, Roosevelt explained to Americans in one of his fireside chats, that “there will be no possibility of an aggressor nation arising to start another world war.” For the moment, China’s inclusion in this club of great powers might be aspirational; Arthur Vandenberg, a prominent member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described it as a “three-power alliance (with China added as a pleasant gesture).” But Roosevelt was looking further into the future. Whatever the country’s weakness today, he believed that “450,000,000 Chinese would some day become united and modernized and would be the most important factor in the whole East.” Plus, in the event that Stalin could not be fully trusted despite talk of long-term cooperation, China would help balance Russia in Asia.
The rest of the Big Four never really accepted his logic, but Roosevelt fought for China’s place. Churchill, baffled by this “great American illusion,” quipped after a transatlantic trip, “If I can epitomize in one word the lesson I learned in the United States,
it was ‘China.’ ” The Soviets, too, were dubious. British dismay was more than a little imperial, and racial. A strong China, one officer warned, “would jeopardize the white man’s position immediately in the East and ultimately throughout the world.” But there were other grounds for skepticism: how could China be regarded as a great power when it was more failed state than unified country?
Before long, the high-flown rhetoric took on a bitterly ironic tone in the United States and China as well. This bitterness was given crude, savage voice by the officer sent on Marshall’s recommendation to assist Chiang with his war effort—“Vinegar Joe” Stilwell.
The Stilwell saga came to be a saga of mutual grievance. For Marshall, it was a headache almost from the start. Over two decades, despite their contrary temperaments, he had come to respect General Stilwell as one of the toughest fighting men in the army. He also knew that Stilwell loved China: he had served there, traveled its countryside, studied its language. But if Stilwell was a fierce fighter, he was an appalling diplomat. While he had love for China, he came to have only contempt for Chiang Kai-shek. The contempt was reciprocated. Stilwell and Chiang clashed over both claims of authority and questions of strategy. Chiang wanted to keep his best troops on the eastern front, saving many for later fights against the Communists, while pursuing the promise of almighty airpower peddled by the commander of the Flying Tigers, Claire Chennault, an approach Stilwell (and Marshall) found asinine. Stilwell wanted Chinese troops to head west to retake lost supply lines in Burma and build a road through the jungle. When the route was opened, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, Chiang named it the Stilwell Road; he meant it more as curse than honor.
Friction turned into hatred—hatred that the irascible Stilwell was unable to keep to himself. He described his job as “shoveling the manure pile.” His expletives and invective were repeated by GIs and junior officials. His name for the Generalissimo, the Peanut, gained common usage. A less colorful but just as cutting stream of censure made its way back to Marshall and U.S. officialdom. Chiang, Stilwell reported, “had a ring around him, half-informed, and they gave him a distorted view of everything”; “he wanted to keep all his subordinates in the dark, because he didn’t trust them”; “the Chinese soldier is excellent material, wasted and betrayed by stupid leadership.” In his diary, Stilwell went further: “The cure for China’s troubles is the elimination of Chiang Kai-shek.”
Marshall chided Stilwell for his indiscretion and at one point wanted to summon him home. Roosevelt reprimanded him for treating “the undisputed leader of 400,000,000 people” as if he were “the Sultan of Morocco.” But Marshall also understood that Stilwell was in a thankless position. He was answering to two masters, Chiang and his own army. He was getting scant support, what relatively little could be spared given demands everywhere else. “I read your profane message,” Marshall replied to a complaint, “and I sympathize with your reaction.”
Most consequentially, Marshall sided with Stilwell in a showdown with Chiang over control of military decision-making in China. Roosevelt eventually agreed to issue an ultimatum on Stilwell’s behalf, in a sharp letter to Chiang backed by an implicit threat. When Stilwell had the letter in hand, he rushed to deliver it, with as insulting an air as he could manage. “The most severe humiliation I have ever had in my life,” Chiang wrote in his diary. Stilwell was exultant. He sent his wife a lyric: “I know I’ve still to suffer / And run a weary race, / But, oh, the blessed pleasures! / I’ve wrecked the Peanut’s face.”
The confrontation backfired on Stilwell. Chiang insisted that he leave the country, and despite the ultimatum in the letter, Roosevelt conceded. But it also backfired on Chiang. Vinegar Joe was a character made for a newspaper interview, and his indiscretion meant that reporters covering his departure had rich material. His exit from the scene, in late October of 1944, let loose a flood of damning copy—“the bursting of a great illusion,” CBS reported, “the long delayed washday for China’s dirty linen.”
If Marshall seemed uncharacteristically tolerant of bad behavior in this case, it owed in part to his recognition that, while Stilwell’s poisonous tongue and poor discipline did not help, the real disconnect was more fundamental. Underlying all the rancor and recrimination, the feuds and insults, was strategic calculation on both sides. The United States had good reason to focus its resources on the war in Europe. Without Japan, Germany could still fight and maybe win. Without Germany, Japan was finished. So the United States would start with Europe, condemning China to low priority in its war effort. Chiang and his government also acted with reason. “China could not lose if the democracies won,” one reporter pointed out, “nor could she win if the democracies lost.” China had borne the initial terrible brunt of Japanese force and pinned down Japanese troops. Now, there seemed little point in risking everything on fights that always took second or third or fourth place for its allies—especially since for Chiang, success against Japan would still leave the problem of the Communists.
Strategic disconnect set off spirals of disenchantment. Chiang concluded he was “a decorative object” in the Alliance. His requests to join the high councils of strategy—the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Munitions Assignment Board—went nowhere, in part because of British opposition, in part because of apparent Chinese difficulty keeping secrets. At the great summits, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin made decisions about China’s future and did not even tell Chiang what they decided. “This meeting of the three leaders has already carved the seeds of the Third World War,” he fumed after Yalta. “Roosevelt is still calling this a diplomatic victory—this is really laughable.” When Chiang got his own war summit and sat side-by-side with Churchill and Roosevelt in Cairo, commitments to China collapsed almost immediately afterward, when the European front turned out to need more help—a stab of humiliation in what was to be a moment of glory. And while the Chinese got copious sympathy, what they really wanted was money and weapons. Their share of global Lend-Lease assistance to American allies was 1 percent of the total in some years, never more than 4 percent. Why, they asked, should they do more of what the Americans wanted? Chiang threatened collapse, demanded billion-dollar payments, hinted at capitulation.
If the Chinese looked at the Americans and saw high-handed inconstancy, the Americans looked at the Chinese and saw two-faced ingratitude. While their Lend-Lease share was small compared to the enormous shipments crossing the Atlantic, it was still hundreds of millions of dollars in matériel and supplies, flown death-defyingly across the Hump—the Skyway to Hell, pilots called it. There was another $500 million in financial support. Yet Chiang’s war, as one diplomat put it, seemed to be “much sound and no fury.”
Marshall was at times sympathetic to Chinese frustrations. The United States could offer relatively little and needed from Chiang a lot. “Because the Pacific is a secondary theater,” he told colleagues, “we must depend on the Chinese to contain increasingly more Japanese divisions than at present.” But he was also frustrated. Chinese officials showed little understanding of his global concerns. They lectured Washington about what it owed them, to which Marshall would react: “I thought these were American planes, and American personnel, and American materiel.” They had little regard for the constraints of logistics. Every piece of equipment sent to China had to cross the Atlantic, round the Cape of Good Hope, and then pass over the Hump on a flight that burned a gallon of fuel for every gallon delivered. (That was why Marshall supported Stilwell’s road: in a long war, it would be the only way to supply China in large quantities.) “The whole problem of maintaining China in the war,” Marshall said, is “one of logistic difficulties which must be linked to our capabilities of overcoming them.”
For many Americans stationed in China, not just Stilwell, familiarity brought more than just frustration. It bred contempt. There was a story about Chinese soldiers eating a puppy kept by American soldiers—a puppy, the Chinese noted, fed better than they were. There were rumors of aid lining the pocket
s of generals and officials. GIs took to calling their government Uncle Chump from over the Hump. There was the sight of starving Chinese recruits, roped together to prevent flight, dropping dead after marches of less than a mile. Stilwell’s successor, General Albert Wedemeyer, had his own harsh observations. “We Americans here are doing our utmost to help the Chinese, but it is really difficult, for they know so little about modern warfare and in addition seem to be honeycombed with corrupt officials,” he reported after arriving. “The Chinese are not fighting.”
That, ultimately, was the most explosive issue—the extent to which Chiang was leaving Japan to the Americans while he saved his fire for the Communists. Riled by one report from the front, Marshall complained that the Chinese were “confining themselves to lip service and letting someone else do the fighting.” Many Americans, including Stilwell, figured a way around this: if Chiang would not fight as much as or where the United States wanted him to, it should work with Chinese armies that would—most pointedly, the Communists. Enticed by this possibility, Mao and his comrades worked to convey a spirited readiness to take up the charge. They said they would serve under American officers. They purveyed their own myth of heroic resistance, telling tales of guerrilla attacks behind Japanese lines—though far from scrutiny, they were making the same calculation that Chiang was, working for position after Japan’s defeat and letting him and his allies pay the greater costs for now. To Chiang, the prospect of US-Communist cooperation was infuriating and unacceptable. Only under pressure did he finally allow the small American outpost, the Dixie Mission, in Yenan.
The China Mission Page 3
