The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  Marshall warned the Nationalists that “the Generalissimo is leading China right into Communism through his over zealous and unrealistic treatment of the present military and political situation.” He warned Zhou that American intelligence had evidence of propaganda coordination between the Kremlin and CCP. He was well aware that both parties were furious with him. He stormed at Zhou one day: “I am sitting in between the two trying to be tolerant and understanding and patient. I assume I am misunderstood by many in the Government and if not misunderstood, I am bitterly resented. I don’t have to tell you what the feeling is regarding me on the Communist side.”

  The latest front for political negotiation was a Stuart project. He aimed to launch a five-person group, composed of himself and two representatives from each side, that would set up a State Council to help govern until democratic reform moved forward. “We felt there was nothing else we could do right now,” Marshall explained. He refused to return to the Committee of Three at the moment, certain it would fail. So Stuart hawked his Committee of Five, and the two sides bickered and backtracked, carped and impugned.

  The negotiation took on a geometric complexity—demands layered on demands, concessions qualified by conditions, agreements eviscerated by loopholes. Marshall occasionally admitted to being confused by the course of a discussion—as did Zhou and Madame Chiang. It had become “a dizzy merry-go-round of charge, counter charge, proposal, counter proposal and committee of three or five or none,” wrote Melby. “It will take a very pedantic doctoral candidate some day to unravel the threads.”

  It had been a year since the Americans, the Soviets, and the Chinese shared victory in World War II. At a V-J Day celebration in Nanjing, fireworks displays were canceled for fear they would be mistaken for an attack and cause panic. Chiang’s anniversary message included a warning: “We must put down rebellions.”

  It had also been a year since the first atomic weapons were dropped on Japan. The New Yorker devoted an entire August issue to a report on postapocalyptic Hiroshima by John Hersey, the young reporter awed by Marshall in the spring. Bernard Baruch, a financier and statesman who was devising a plan for atomic energy, wrote to ask Marshall’s thoughts. Marshall wrote back: “The turbulence in which I am involved and its tragic consequences to almost five hundred million people leads all my thinking to the urgency in this period of our civilization for finding a development without further delay of a positive means to put a stop to the probability of war.” He might have a more specific response, he apologized, if only he were back in Leesburg with nothing to do but work in the garden.

  Sitting on the terrace on Ning Hai Road one August afternoon, in khaki slacks and a blue blazer, Marshall thought aloud about what else he could do. There was agitation in Washington for a new approach, but opinion was polarized as to what it should be. Some called for total withdrawal and an end to support of a one-party regime that was murdering opponents, some for an unqualified embrace of Chiang as America’s champion in a first battle against global Communism.

  “The military situation naturally grows more serious by the day,” Marshall recognized. “Each side takes the same stand with me, that the other is provoking the fighting and cannot be trusted to go through with an agreement.” Neither party wanted to look responsible for snuffing out all hope, yet would do nothing to improve the odds of success.

  Marshall had asked the embassy for ideas—“some elixir to give a new life to our policy,” as Walton Butterworth, now the senior career diplomat, framed the task. (Butterworth had been transferred from Spain a couple months earlier on Acheson’s recommendation.) The embassy’s contribution focused mostly on the perils of alternate approaches. It would be too risky to “withdraw all aid from the recognized government of China and adopt a so-called policy of neutrality”; it would also be too risky to “accord all-out support to that government,” since “a serious clash between the Soviet Union and the United States” might result.

  A parallel inquiry in the State Department arrived at the same dilemma. “If I thought any good from our national or from an international point of view, would come from all-out support of Chiang,” reasoned the China hand John Carter Vincent, “I would be for it, but I can see only trouble, trouble, trouble coming from inconclusive action.” He hoped a few months of true civil war would have a “chastening effect” and cause both sides to reconsider.

  If the alternatives at either extreme did not seem wise, the question was, what else could be done to improve the current approach? The embassy’s analysis argued that the United States had minimal leverage over the CCP, but that there was more it could do to pressure Chiang. If his fundamental outlook would not change, at least his calculations could be shaped: “He must be convinced that there are certain limits beyond which he cannot go and still continue to receive American assistance.”

  In fact, Marshall had begun taking quiet steps toward that end already, in an attempt to show he was serious. The Nationalists, he said, were “encouraged by feeling dead certain the U.S. has no choice but to supply them because of our clash here with Russia.” In late July, he had radioed an instruction to his rear echelon in Washington. There was a military aid bill coming up for consideration by Congress; he wanted it stalled. There was the financial assistance he had toiled to secure in the spring; he wanted most of it still withheld. In August, with the situation deteriorating further and Chiang no less intransigent, he delayed shipments of airplanes and ammunition. Nationalist officials started to notice. “It was just a matter of time before such a step would be taken,” Marshall said when confronted by a general. “It confirms exactly what I have been telling you and the Generalissimo for some time.” The slowdown would hardly cripple the Nationalist military effort—some $800 million in military assistance had already gone to Chiang’s forces since the end of World War II, under the extension of Lend-Lease—but Marshall hoped it would focus Nationalist minds.

  Still, he rejected the more draconian cutoff some in Washington wanted. He pushed noncombat aid in key sectors. Even as bombers and bullets were held back, he allowed officials to begin discussions about a major handover of “surplus property”—some $500 million in trucks, railway supplies, machinery, medical equipment, and construction materials, abandoned on Pacific islands as American troops rushed home.

  The reward for balance was censure by both sides. Despite Marshall’s explanation that the surplus property did not include arms or ammunition, Zhou, claiming it was “adding fuel to flame,” gave a press conference in protest. “You are confusing propaganda with fact,” Marshall told him, “and Chinese propaganda is far from fact.”

  Yet Marshall would say only so much publicly. He faced the now standard quandary: how to chasten Chiang without emboldening Yenan. The Communists, Marshall explained to Truman, “are seeking by intense propaganda and any other means available to terminate all American assistance to the Government which they claim is making possible the latter’s military effort.” He did not want to encourage such designs, yet he thought it necessary to show the Nationalists that intransigence carried a price.

  There was a similar dilemma when it came to ongoing reductions in American troops. Pressure to bring the boys home had only intensified in recent months—especially after the death of four Marines at Anping. Secretary of the Navy Forrestal reported to Marshall that the attack had generated “significant pressure to withdraw Marines from China.” Much of Truman’s cabinet was urging him to do just that, while even Forrestal was recommending that the American presence in China be consolidated, to make it less vulnerable to provocation and attack. Marshall was once again getting letters from wives and mothers. “Those who have anything to do with keeping troops” in China, one charged, were “just as responsible as the men who killed those boys.” Another wrote: “It may have been right for our men to die defending their own country and loved ones—but they do not need to be sacrificed needlessly in the civil strife of China.”

  Marshall had long been sensitive to
the risks of a large ongoing military presence. He worried about both America’s image and the possibility of escalation. That danger was all the greater because both the Nationalists and the Communists had an incentive to draw the Americans into the fight. “It is anticipated that the Communist Party will try every possible means to implicate the United States in the eyes of the world as fighting the civil war ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the Kuomintang,” reported a senior officer at the Executive Headquarters. “I am quite sure certain elements in the National Government would be extremely pleased to have us so implicated and irretrievably so.”

  But Marshall was also sensitive to the risks of a precipitous or poorly timed drawdown. He had been pressing for a smooth, coordinated handover from American to Nationalist forces (noting in the process that sending large armies to wage war in places like Manchuria would mean shortages of troops to hold key sites in the rest of China). Chiang’s troops had been stepping sometimes shakily into the breach as the Americans withdrew.

  Anping underscored the risks of both a large presence and a quick withdrawal. Marshall saw the ambush as part of a Communist effort to drive out American troops by inciting opposition on the homefront—exactly the effect it had achieved. So while he would not halt or reverse the withdrawal, Marshall slowed it down and insisted that any consolidation be done quietly. “Otherwise,” he wrote Forrestal, “it would be a victory for the Communists, encourage them to more extreme propaganda and make it very hard for me to influence them.” With Zhou, Marshall was explicit: more incidents like Anping would delay, not speed, the planned withdrawal of American troops.

  Meanwhile, Marshall had been spending more time with figures from neither side—the third-party liberals trying to carve a middle path. Carsun Chang, the German-educated philosopher who founded the Democratic League, reassured Marshall that “there is no reason why the present conflict can not be easily solved through your mediation and a little more compromise on the part of the opposite parties.” Other third-party figures were asking Marshall what they could do to help in that cause. Unite, he told them, to become a force capable of balancing the Nationalists and Communists.

  The problem was that their ranks, already relatively thin, included few operators and many philosophers, more inclined to fractious debate than joint action. They “advocate discussion groups as the way out of all troubles,” hoping to “stand between the two primitive giants and drive them both in the same harness, the superiority of mind and reason over naked force,” Melby had scoffed after first encountering them. Now they were bearing the brunt of Chiang’s repression—in many cases paying with their lives, as had the professors in Kunming. “They are learning that no party can survive here without armed force behind it,” wrote Melby, “and at the same time a lot of them honestly cannot go along with either of the sides having power.”

  When September came, the Chiangs and Katherine were still ensconced in Kuling. Marshall was still going back and forth. After one trip, CCP propagandists mockingly speculated that he was spending his time in the mountains walking with Katherine in the moonlight. He was amused: that is exactly what he was doing.

  Between those moonlit walks, Marshall tried again and again to persuade Chiang and his generals that their current course would bring chaos, destroying the economic and political foundations of Nationalist rule and offering a “formal invitation to Russia to sow the further seeds of Communism.” The Generalissimo, Marshall told Madame Chiang, was operating with a sense of “false power.”

  But Chiang was less inclined than ever to accede to demands. He wanted Marshall to know that “pressure does not work.” When especially incensed by a message, Chiang simply refused to see Marshall. When intent on letting a military offensive proceed without interference or hectoring—including a major push in Rehe, the province south of Manchuria that had almost torpedoed the first cease-fire in January—he evaded conversation. When Marshall informed Madame Chiang that Washington had blocked shipments of military aid, Chiang pledged in his diary: “He can use the sale of goods and materials as his leverage to put pressure on me and urge me to cease fire. I will just treat him with indifference and refrain from anger.” Chiang’s reply to Truman’s letter was an unapologetic reminder of the CCP’s intent to “install a totalitarian regime such as those which are now spreading over Eastern Europe.” Truman promptly wrote back, expressing pointedly how eager he was to support a unified government with economic and military aid. “We can get along without it,” T. V. Soong said of the assistance. “It would be nice to get it, but we don’t absolutely need it.”

  Both sides remained angry at Marshall, and he remained angry at both sides. “I am not the Government of China,” he snapped. “I am not the head of the Communist Party.” They continued to wrangle over Stuart’s Committee of Five, over the terms of a cease-fire, over the seating of a National Assembly. Every seeming breakthrough quickly proved to be another false start. The Communists demanded that fighting stop—sincerely, Marshall insisted—but refused to accept concessions Chiang wanted in exchange. A cease-fire was his trump card, he explained, so he would need to get everything he wanted before playing it, including an agreement from the Communists to take part in a National Assembly on his terms. Otherwise, he would move the political process forward without them. Only military defeat, he told Marshall, would force the Communists to truly cooperate.

  Marshall thought that if there was not a cease-fire by October, the war might have spread too wide to be contained. Neither side shared his urgency. It was, Marshall wrote Truman, “a somewhat Chinese view that several months of fighting will be a necessary procedure. . . . What happens in the meantime to the hundreds of millions of oppressed people is ignored. Also what happens in the way of Soviet intervention overt or covert is also ignored.” Yet he conceded to Truman that he was “stymied and can only suspend efforts while we wait and see.”

  Marshall was supposed to be on his way home by now. One day in Kuling, he sat Katherine down and confessed that their departure would have to be delayed. There was no hope of getting concessions from either side unless he stayed to see they were carried out. “Only he can make it stick,” Madame Chiang confirmed to Katherine. Marshall wrote an aide in Washington about the timing of his return: “Disregard all press guesses and try none of your own.”

  Katherine was again bitter on her husband’s behalf. She complained he was being treated like “a messenger boy between the Generalissimo and the Communists.” She reported to a friend that he “looked as though he had been put through the wringer.” It had been “a cruel year.”

  Marshall’s aides were more philosophical. “Maybe there just ain’t no answer to a problem like China,” Melby quipped, as Marshall made his final trip to Kuling. Caughey wondered whether “the General was presented with a problem that is beyond the powers of one man to solve completely.”

  “But what did they expect?” Joe Stilwell had written as things started to come apart. “George Marshall can’t walk on water.”

  Marshall descended from Kuling for the last time on the afternoon of September 17. Earlier that day, Chiang had received him for one more conversation in the summer capital. After Marshall left, Chiang played three games of Chinese checkers with Katherine.

  When Marshall arrived back in Nanjing, by sedan chair, jeep, gunboat, airplane, and Cadillac, Zhou was no longer there. He had gone to Shanghai. And he would not return, he said, unless the Committee of Three reconvened to work out another cease-fire—doing again what it had done eight months earlier, in Marshall’s hopeful first weeks in China.

  Three memos from Zhou were waiting. They were extended denunciations, “on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party and the 140,000,000 population in the Communist-led liberated areas,” of both the Nationalists and the United States: “War has engulfed the whole country, and the negotiation has degenerated into nothing but a camouflage for the ruthless prosecution of war.” The memos appealed to Marshall to put a stop to it. At the same time, ra
dio broadcasts from Yenan asserted that Marshall’s prestige had reached a new low, his mission now just an exercise in deception as his government backed reactionary aggression.

  “It is clear that he does not intend for the U.S. to mediate,” Chiang said of Zhou after learning of his departure for Shanghai. Whatever Marshall’s lingering “dreams of mediating,” Chiang was certain of the reality: negotiation was over.

  III

  LIMITS OF POWER

  CHAPTER 13

  The Rock and the Whirlpool

  At the start of World War II, Marshall received a letter from a high school student in Seattle. What, the student wanted to know, was the secret of success? Marshall replied with a personal answer: “Giving the best I had to each job and not permitting myself to grow pessimistic over the slow progress or inevitable discouragements.”

  Over six years of world war, that determination had become renowned. Now, in China, it was being tested more than ever before.

  When Marshall returned from the mountains for the last time, there were signs of fall in the September Nanjing air. A few days later, after a Cantonese lunch, he was sitting on the once-again pleasant terrace of #5 Ning Hai Road with John Beal, the communications adviser he had foisted on Chiang in the spring. As Marshall spoke of recent events, his blue eyes seemed to flash with anger. Yet Beal recorded afterward, “I suspect I have been wrong in thinking he could not stay much longer.” Marshall, judged Beal, “clings so tenaciously to a seemingly hopeless job.”