The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  Doubts about the state of the Nationalist army, and Chiang’s leadership of it, reinforced skepticism. Officers and units vied for position and supplies when they should have been cooperating against a common enemy. Profiteers sold off American arms, which often ended up in CCP hands. A Communist needled Melby, “It is all right for the United States to arm the Kuomintang because as fast as they get it we take it away from them.” Commanders were afraid to give Chiang bad news—showing an “utterly unscrupulous disregard of truth,” as Stilwell earlier bemoaned, that fed overconfidence.

  Then there were political factors, the importance of which was not lost on Marshall. As he had learned in his own long war, a leader had to be sure his society and economy would sustain his strategic choices. He had to have his people behind him.

  “We all want peace,” a Nationalist general had recently said. “The reason is simple. If the Government did not advocate peace but wanted to fight, it would not have the support of the people.” The people had lived through many years of war, and they were now living amid widespread destruction and displacement. Chiang’s government was spending nearly 70 percent of its budget on the army—an “exorbitant” burden, Marshall said, that with inflation already raging would bring “financial chaos.” (It was also the inverse of how Chiang had once described the formula for success: “70 percent political and 30 percent military.”) In Marshall’s view, given the longing for peace in China, Chiang had to show he was doing everything possible to achieve it.

  The Communists were highly attuned to such impressions. Negotiation could be a “means of educating the people,” in Zhou’s words, an opportunity to demonstrate interest in compromise and avoid taking blame for strife. On May 23, with Chiang headed to Manchuria in Marshall’s plane, Mao was making public calls for a peaceful solution.

  The next morning, the residents of #5 Ning Hai Road woke to another pleasant spring day with hope renewed. A cease-fire and return to negotiation seemed within reach. The Executive Headquarters was reporting improved attitudes in the field, perhaps thanks to Marshall’s forceful public statement a few days earlier. Marshall was waiting to get word from Chiang that the Nationalist offensive in Manchuria had been stopped.

  Then press reports started coming in. Nationalist armies had seized Changchun. There was every indication they were pressing on.

  It was time for Marshall to dial up his anger. At 5:00 that afternoon, John Beal brought the Nationalists’ Minister of Information to the back terrace. Having still heard nothing from Chiang, Marshall set into a tirade. The takeover of Changchun wrecked the chance for a good agreement. It ruined his credibility. It marked the latest in a string of Nationalist blunders. Watching the “harangue,” Beal had no doubt that Marshall’s ire was meant to be conveyed to others.

  But in Manchuria, Chiang did not at the moment particularly care. He had landed the day before to find his troops already entering Changchun. He thought about halting and consolidating control over what he had (as first Wedemeyer and then Marshall urged); Chen Li-fu told a reporter that with Changchun in Nationalist hands, “there will be a truce.” But after lunch with his commanders, Chiang changed his mind: his armies would keep going. He had let too many chances go by and would not make the same mistake again. The fall of Changchun was a sign of “the protection of God.” As for Marshall’s anger, Chiang returned the sentiment. He wrote in his diary that night: “Marshall shows no regard for the benefits of my state, nor does he care how best his state’s policy can be implemented. What he solely cares about is his personal success.”

  Zhou returned to Ning Hai Road the next morning, May 25. Marshall expected an eruption. A day and a half earlier, he had been touting an agreement and pointing to the loan of his plane as proof of Chiang’s peaceful intent. Now American-equipped divisions were driving north from Changchun, the offensive apparently directed by Chiang himself. But Zhou turned out to be far less exercised than Marshall had thought. Aside from a matter-of-fact mention of what the Communists would do if the offensive continued—attack long Nationalist lines stretching south from the Manchurian front, the risk Marshall had mentioned to Chiang already—Zhou was conciliatory. The Communists wanted a cease-fire, and he was ready to deal.

  The day before, as soon as he got news of the Nationalist takeover of Changchun, Zhou had requested permission from Mao to approach Marshall with a new peace offer, and Mao had approved. The best hope of stopping Chiang’s offensive in its tracks was to get Marshall to do it for them. Mao even instructed Communist members of truce teams to be nicer to their American colleagues—a change the Americans immediately noticed.

  Marshall grasped the dynamic at work. Each side overplayed its hand when momentum seemed to be in its favor and then came back to negotiate when the momentum had shifted, at which point the other side was no longer interested. He wearily reminded Zhou that the Communists had been intransigent after taking Changchun in April. Now that the tables had turned, they were anxious for an agreement, and the Generalissimo was equally disinclined to relinquish momentum. He would exploit what he thought was a strong position to the hilt.

  Marshall pronounced the odds of any agreement “rather gloomy.” But he did not, he told Zhou, “quit in the middle of a fight.”

  Chiang was gone three days before a message from him reached Marshall in Nanjing. It was as Marshall expected—a stated desire for peace, but with harsh terms, including a rejection of the basic principle of simultaneous movement on political and military tracks. Marshall wrote back to recommend the immediate deployment of truce teams in Manchuria, but Chiang had already decided against it. “It is best if the mediation Executive Headquarters does not come to the Northeast and gain freedom of movement, so that the Communist bandits will not gain another chance at recovery under [its] protection,” he wrote in his diary. He had the Communists where he wanted them; Marshall’s peacekeepers would only thwart him from taking all he could.

  Chiang had promised to return in Marshall’s plane within four days, but the deadline came and went. Communication between him and Marshall was halting—thanks in part to stalling, in part to messages getting misplaced or, in one case, mistranslated. With attempts at persuasion succeeding neither at bringing a cease-fire nor forcing Chiang’s return, Marshall resorted to a sharper line. “The continued advances of the Government troops in Manchuria in the absence of any action by you to terminate the fighting other than the terms you dictated,” he wrote, “are making my services as possible mediator extremely difficult and may soon make them virtually impossible.” When that message elicited no response, he sent another: “A point is being reached where the integrity of my position is open to serious question.” Marshall understood how it looked: Chiang in Manchuria, in Marshall’s own C-54, commanding an offensive that he had assured Marshall he would stop. It was both humiliating and discrediting.

  On May 30, with Chiang gone a week and the most recent message to him unanswered, Marshall sat down with aides to take stock. He had been mulling options. He could take another plane and fly to Manchuria to personally intervene. He could give up and go home, which some aides thought he might be considering seriously. When the meeting ended, Marshall did not say what he would do. But it was Memorial Day, and he was scheduled to address a group of officers gathered in Nanjing’s foreign cemetery. Among the graves of American soldiers killed in China in the last war, Marshall spoke of the consequences of another—above all for “the patient and starving women and children who more than any others are sacrificed to the inevitable brutalities of such a conflict.” He concluded, “It is for Americans on this Memorial Day to recognize their plain duty to fulfill the obligations of the peace so dearly won by the sacrifices of our war dead.”

  It was June 3 when Chiang finally started his return to Nanjing. That morning, Zhou came to see Marshall. They stood, Zhou had declared, “at a turning point in history.” Marshall said he could talk all day, and for the next six hours they ranged over the events of the past six months.
Insisting he was addressing Marshall as a friend, Zhou said that everything that had transpired left only one viable conclusion: Chiang was intent on “total war,” and the United States was encouraging it, thanks to its “double policy,” with a “bright side” of mediation and a “gloomy side” of militarism. Marshall represented the “bright side,” in Zhou’s formulation, but the “gloomy side” had come to dominate.

  Marshall took issue with the dichotomy, no matter that it was meant to flatter him. He alone was responsible for U.S. policy, and while both sides were now attacking him, he stood by it. To criticism of assistance to the Nationalists, he reminded Zhou that Chiang was an American ally who was leading a government that the Communists had pledged to join. To demands that U.S. troops leave China, Marshall noted that a major source of delay was the CCP’s obvious intent to take “aggressive action” to fill any vacuum. To charges of militarism, he pointed out that the United States had in fact demobilized more quickly than it should have. And to suspicions of an imperial agenda, Marshall invoked history. America had never claimed territory in China, and it never would. If anything, it had been “foolishly idealistic.”

  At 6:00 that evening, shortly after Zhou left Ning Hai Road, Chiang finally landed at Nanjing’s airfield in Marshall’s plane. His trip had lasted eleven days, a week longer than promised, and brought diametrically different results than Marshall had hoped. “The boss man is beginning to get the idea he is getting pushed around, made a tool of; and he doesn’t like it a good goddamn,” Melby observed. “In short, he is about as angry a gringo as I have ever seen.”

  But perhaps Marshall’s anger no longer mattered. The whispers in Washington had been picked up around Nanjing, and Chiang, Melby reasoned, was almost certainly getting “assurances of support from other U.S. circles.” Their promises could render Marshall’s displeasure a secondary concern.

  “My endurance has worked,” Chiang wrote in his diary. “God will definitely not let down a man as painstaking as me.”

  Both Chiang and Marshall were on edge when they met the next morning. Marshall arrived ready to do what was necessary to “force a truce,” as Caughey put it, and found Chiang anxious and impatient, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. It was one of the tics Americans looked for as evidence of agitation: he would cross his legs and trace circles with his right foot, or run his hands over his closely shaved head. But Marshall did not need to press the point. Chiang was ready to declare a unilateral cease-fire. It would be a chance, he said, for the Communists to prove their good faith.

  Chiang had made his decision a few days earlier, but waited to see how far his armies could get first. He recognized the prudence of not pressing too far north into Manchuria. He would give himself a chance to consolidate control, avoid overexposing his flanks to the Communist forces still present in much of north China and poised to take advantage of any vulnerability, and avoid provoking Moscow. (The Soviets had warned Chiang’s officials that an attack on Harbin, the next major city north of Changchun, would elicit a response.) Nationalist victories had put him in a position of strength, which would allow him to drive a hard bargain in a negotiation.

  Marshall, however, thought that the Nationalists were “pressing their temporary advantage to the limit”—temporary being the key word. Contrary to the initial triumphalism following Nationalist victories at Siping and Changchun, American analysis concluded that neither was a “crushing blow.” At Siping, “the actual number killed and wounded was light.” And Changchun had been a “voluntary” Communist retreat, Lin Biao ceding the city and sparing his forces for fights to come.

  The Communists, in other words, were hardly on the verge of defeat. But Yenan was nonetheless eager for a cease-fire. “We want [Marshall] to succeed, not to fail,” Zhou said, in order to give Communist forces in Manchuria time to regroup.

  There was some haggling over the length of the cease-fire. Chiang offered a week, Marshall got him to extend it to ten days, Zhou demanded a full month. They settled on fifteen days. And this time, Chiang had a very particular vision of a cease-fire. An order would come not from the Committee of Three, nor as a joint announcement with Mao. Chiang would issue it alone, as a favor he was bestowing. So when, on June 5, the day after their meeting, Marshall sent a draft order, Chiang rejected it.

  Intent on getting it right, Chiang sat down to craft his own order. He wrote through the afternoon and evening, took a break at 9 p.m. to make an appearance at a reception, then went back to writing until midnight. He slept for two hours, woke to write for two more hours until 4:00, then slept for two more hours before waking at 6:00. After his morning prayer, he was ready to present the text to Marshall.

  Marshall arrived at 8:00. All fighting was to cease, Chiang informed him, by noon of the following day. Chiang also had a letter for Marshall. “The painful experience I have encountered during the past five months compels me to be more precise and definite in dealing with the Communists,” it explained. In exchange for calling off all attacks by his armies, he wanted an assurance that the Communists would proceed with demobilization and cooperate in the repair and restoration of railways. He also stressed that “the sacred responsibility of restoring the sovereign rights of Manchuria to the Government should not be delayed.” If the Communists interfered, he would not hesitate to strike back.

  The cease-fire would last until noon on June 22. It would be, Chiang said, his “final effort at doing business with the Communists.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Umpire on a Battlefield

  Marshall agreed: the cease-fire might be his last chance. It gave him fifteen days to restore the political and military commitments of winter and find solutions to problems that had plagued negotiations for months—or in Caughey’s words, fifteen days “for working out China’s destiny.” Melby had a more jaundiced take. Both sides needed “a little breather in which to lick their wounds,” and would bend “just enough to get Marshall out of the country.”

  Chiang announced the cease-fire at noon on June 6, after sharing the text of his order with Marshall. The purpose, it specified, was “to give the Communist Party an opportunity to demonstrate in good faith their intention to carry out the agreements they had previously signed.” If they chose not to use that opportunity, Chiang would resort to other means.

  Zhou rushed to release a more soaring statement of his own, hailing “the persistence of the Chinese Communist Party, the aspiration of the Chinese people, and the efforts exerted by General Marshall.” He stressed to reporters that “no opportunity for the realization of peace should be skipped over” and then, at dusk, came to Marshall with a question: what could be done to create an “amicable atmosphere” in the next fifteen days? Zhou planned to fly to Yenan the next morning to speak to Mao.

  Marshall was ready with a list of demands. The Communists had to help restore communications—the railways, roads, and telegraph lines essential to both economic recovery and governmental control. They had to end repressive measures in their territory, as the Nationalists had to in theirs. They had to commit to a specific timetable for military demobilization and integration. Marshall also shared Chiang’s letter on what would be required to turn the fifteen-day cease-fire into a sustained peace—pointing out Chiang’s mention of the Nationalists’ “sacred responsibility” in Manchuria. He urged Zhou to return from Yenan with proper authority to negotiate and a clear sense of how much the Communists could do to meet that demand. The only alternative, Marshall said, was “a world tragedy.” To avert it, they had to move fast.

  The next day, Zhou took off for Yenan in Marshall’s C-54, carrying a box of candy that Marshall had asked him to give Madame Mao. At noon, the cease-fire began. In Manchuria, half a million troops, Nationalist and Communist, stopped in their tracks after almost three months of heavy fighting.

  War was inevitable. That was the conclusion most CCP leaders had reached by the time Zhou arrived in Yenan on June 7: “Marshall’s efforts to mediate the Chinese civil confl
ict have had no effect in stopping the Chinese reactionary forces. On the contrary, enjoying American support, the Chinese reactionary factions are even more active and unscrupulous.” Three months before, the Communist masses had hailed Marshall’s “great spirit,” Mao had toasted his “selfless dedication.” Now they were questioning not only his ability to restrain the Nationalists, but also his desire to even try. After all, Chiang had spent eleven days in Manchuria directing attacks from Marshall’s own plane—a sign of winking support, many assumed, whatever Marshall’s protestations to the contrary. Bitter and emboldened, Mao resolved not to be fooled again.

  But as they assessed their options, CCP leaders realized that although they had lost faith in Marshall, they still had a use for him. It was in their interest to delay the war’s onset. Marshall could serve “as a means of relaxing tensions,” giving their armies time to prepare and their political mobilization time to gain momentum. As Zhou said to his comrades, “We cannot again harbor illusions of real peace or real democracy, but it is possible that we just halt large-scale fighting for a period of time in order to consolidate our current positions and our own strength, win over new masses, and prepare for further development.” With added strength, the Communists might manage some quick victories, forcing Chiang back to the negotiating table with newfound willingness to give ground. As Yenan saw it, an inevitable war still did not mean a war to the death.