China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  Between 1938 and 1940, when Soviet pilots were active in China, Chen-nault was kept out of sight, having been tasked with training Chinese pilots at Kunming. In 1940, Chiang Kaishek sent him to the USA to recruit pilots for a volunteer air force, an idea to which Roosevelt had given his blessing. Chennault’s Flying Tigers, as they were called by the Nationalists,63 first went into action two weeks after Pearl Harbor, with Chennault feeding squadrons in rotation into Burma. Having too few aeroplanes and with pilots still undergoing training, the Flying Tigers could not stem the Japanese advance, which was supported by some 500 planes.64

  Like Stilwell’s exploits, Chennault’s provided welcome copy in the US. A US army newsreel, ‘The Flying Tigers Strike Back’, shows the Flying Tigers downing Japanese fighters. The voiceover states that they were ‘making the Japanese pay dearly’ for Pearl Harbor.65 On 16 April, Chennault was re-inducted into the US Army with the rank of Brigadier General. He had already become ‘the famed commander of those fabulous “Flying Tigers”’.66 His portrait adorned the cover of Time magazine in December 1943.

  General Chennault’s view of the role of China in the Second World War was radically different from Stilwell’s. In November 1942, Chennault wrote to President Roosevelt (who had asked him to correspond with him directly) that with a small air command of 105 fighters, 30 medium bombers and 12 heavy bombers he would be able to establish air supremacy in China, after which he could attack Japanese shipping lanes and so reduce Japanese pressure on the US Pacific Fleet and support General Douglas MacArthur’s planned offensive in the southern Pacific.67 Stilwell disagreed, arguing that air bases in China needed the protection of ground forces. Japan’s flattening of Zhejiang province after the Doolittle Raid illustrated the problem.68

  The personal animosity between the two generals undermined US operations in China and Burma. Marshall tried to keep the peace between them, advising Stilwell, for instance, ‘would it not be wise in the light of your success to give Chennault his chance?’69 However, the disagreement between the two became so severe that one soldier lamented ‘the opinion of most of us is that if the different commands would stop fighting, we might get somewhere.’70 The conflict came to a head in the spring of 1943 when both men were called to Washington to make their respective cases in front of Roosevelt and Churchill.

  Stilwell’s performance was a disaster. He ‘shut up like a clam’, ‘muttered about China not fighting’, criticised Chiang Kaishek at length and insisted that Japan had to be defeated in China. Chennault, on the other hand, set out his case cogently and promised early successes against the Japanese.71 When Roosevelt asked Chennault’s opinion of Chiang Kaishek, Chennault replied that he had always kept his word with him and was holding China together.72 Roosevelt ruled that Chennault’s plan should be given the green light. He had received reports about Stilwell’s ‘open rudeness’ to Chiang Kaishek and had had several requests for Stilwell to be relieved of his duties, including one from the British.73 Stilwell was kept in place because Chennault’s closeness to Chiang Kaishek made him unsuitable for the top command in China. The result was the entirely unsatisfactory situation that Stilwell was senior to a man who not only had upstaged him in Washington in front of his own wheelchair-bound commander-in-chief (ungraciously dubbed ‘rubberlegs’ by Stilwell),74 but now had to implement a strategy with which he fundamentally disagreed to help a subordinate he loathed.

  The trouble between Chiang Kaishek and Stilwell, the fights between Stilwell and Chennault, and all the other difficulties in relations between the Nationalists and their allies should not obscure the fact that US support for China did boost morale in China no end. The death of President Roosevelt on 14 April 1945, so Chi Pang-yuan remembers, ‘shocked all of China deeply’. One of her teachers, Zhu Guangqian, who had studied in Britain and France and was a close friend of the cartoonist Feng Zikai, interrupted a class when the news broke. He read out Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Oh Captain! My Captain!’ as an act of commemoration.75 Its first stanza reads:

  Oh Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done

  The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won

  The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting

  While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring

  But oh heart! heart! heart!

  Oh the bleeding drops of red,

  Where on the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead.76

  Similarly, when Claire Chennault was set to return to the USA in August 1945 just before Japan’s surrender, Chongqing residents turned out in their thousands to bid him farewell.77 American support revitalised Nationalist resistance.

  China in the Planning for Victory

  The tide of war turned in the Allies’ favour during the spring of 1943. In early February the surviving units of the Wehrmacht’s 6th Army finally surrendered at Stalingrad, marking the end of the beginning of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Australian and US ground forces defeated Japanese army units at Buna-Gona on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea in a campaign that lasted from November 1942 until 22 January 1943. By February 1943, US forces secured Guadalcanal at the same time after a battle that had lasted half a year. British and American armies forced the surrender of the Germans and Italians in north Africa in mid-May.

  In Allied strategy, the war in China remained very much secondary to these operations. At a meeting in August 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that ‘the main effort’ with respect to China should be ‘establishing land communications and improving and securing the air route’ from India to China, but they made ‘no decision … on actual operations’.78 They did, however, create South East Asia Command (SEAC), which included Burma and Thailand, under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten. If one motivation was to shake up a command that had so far produced little, another was to spike Nationalist claims of sovereignty over north Burma.79 An American quip circulating at the time had it that SEAC stood for ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’.

  During a visit to Chongqing in October, Mountbatten told Chiang Kaishek that Roosevelt and Churchill supported a campaign in Burma, but when Chiang asked whether his allies were prepared to provide naval and air support, Mountbatten’s evasive answer was that ‘he had not yet been assured by telegram on this point’.80 From the first moment that an operation to reconquer Burma was mooted, Chiang had insisted that in return for the deployment of large numbers of Chinese troops, the US should make three of its own divisions available, the UK should assist with naval forces and that sufficient air power should be put into place to establish air supremacy.81

  In November 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kaishek met at Cairo. Discussions about operations in Burma, the only place where the Allies could conceivably fight together in east and south-east Asia at this juncture, were largely for show. This was the only Allied conference where the Nationalists were present. Sir Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, sought to lever the Americans into taking the blame for doing nothing in Burma by insisting that the operation could only go ahead if the invasion of Europe was postponed, knowing full well that General Marshall was determined to press ahead with that campaign.82 Chiang Kaishek, who needed ‘joint warfare by the Chinese, British and American forces’ for domestic political reasons,83 agreed to the deployment of US-trained Nationalist forces at Ramgarh as well as in Yunnan, but once more reiterated his demand that US ground and British naval forces be deployed as well as enough aircraft to drive the Japanese from the skies above Burma. General Marshall made clear that he would not make US ground forces or any additional aircraft available. Roosevelt ruled in favour of an amphibious landing on the Andaman Islands off the Burma coast, an action that required the deployment of a British naval task force in the Bay of Bengal but not the involvement of US ground forces. When pressed by Chiang Kaishek, Churchill promised UK naval support, but only in a vague way.

  After Cairo, Churchill and Roosevelt
flew to Tehran to meet Stalin. With the Soviet–Japanese Non-Aggression Pact still in force, the Russian leader had been unable to come to the Cairo meetings, where he would have had to meet with Chiang Kaishek. Stalin made an offer Roosevelt and Churchill could not refuse: if Roosevelt and Churchill committed to the invasion of France in the spring of 1944, he would launch a counter-offensive against the Wehrmacht on the eastern front and join the war against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany. Now, finally, a clear strategy for the defeat of both Germany and Japan was in place – one that reduced yet further the strategic significance of China.

  To give the D-Day landings on the coast of Normandy every chance of success, the decision was made to transfer the landing craft designated for the assault on the Andaman Islands back to Europe, a decision which President Roosevelt was left to communicate to Chiang Kaishek.84 Coming so soon after promises of significant support for China, this was a slap in the face for Chiang. Although it would have to be conducted largely with Chinese forces, the operation in north Burma was nonetheless allowed to continue. The justification was the construction of an overland supply line to China. This was to assist China, of course, but it would also be helpful in relieving the logistical difficulties in supplying 20th Bomber Command, the USA’s strategic bombing force controlled from Washington. This was designed to attack Japan with the B-29 Superfortress bombers, something that at this point in the war could only be done from bases in China.85

  Chiang Kaishek agreed to the continuation of the invasion of north Burma; his options were either to do so or not to have the USA and the UK on side at all. Only Chiang Kaishek seemed to grasp that the assumption that the Japanese would simply wait while the Allies defeated Germany before turning their attention to China was built on quicksand. On 1 January 1944, his telegram to Roosevelt warned:

  From the declaration of the Tehran Conference, Japan will rightly deduce that practically the entire weight of the UN forces will be applied to the European Front, thus abandoning the China Theatre to the mercy of Japanese mechanized land and air forces. It would be strategic on Japan’s part to liquidate the China affair in the coming year. It may therefore be expected that before long Japan will launch an all-out offensive against China so as to remove the threat to their rear.86

  Chiang’s words would prove prophetic.

  Diplomatic Success

  The Nationalists gained little militarily from being one of the Allies, but diplomatically they achieved a tremendous amount. When the War of Resistance broke out, China was a country with no say in the international corridors of power. By the end of the Second World War, the humiliating unequal treaties imposed on China after the 1838–42 Opium War were finally abolished. By 1944, China was regarded not just as a state of international standing; formally it was treated as one of the Big Four, a position translated after the war into a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Roosevelt’s support for China, and his use of China to curtail the British Empire, were important to these successes.

  After Pearl Harbor, Churchill rushed off to Washington, but Chiang Kaishek went to India, the jewel in the British imperial crown, to cement an intensifying relationship with leaders of the Indian independence movement. Accompanied by his wife, Song Meiling, Chiang arrived in New Delhi on 9 February 1942. They faced a delicate situation. Britain was China’s ally but anger towards the British was widespread in India and some sympathy existed for Japan. Chiang’s visit took place just before a British mission, led by War Cabinet member Stafford Cripps, travelled to India to negotiate with Indian leaders. Its failure would lead to the Quit India Movement that began in August. The Axis powers were actively courting Indian National Congress Party members, including Subhas Chandra Bose, who was then in Berlin and who in 1943 formed the Indian National Army from India Army soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during the Battle of Singapore. Chiang was instinctively sympathetic to India’s independence campaign, but he could not easily turn his back on an ally either, and he feared that the Japanese would find a way to exploit anti-British disorder in India. An India in Japanese hands had implications for China that were too frightening to consider.

  In India, Chiang held many meetings with Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress Party leader who would become India’s first prime minister after independence. Nehru had pursued close relations with China since the outbreak of war. For instance, he held a China Day in 1938 and wrote about China and India as ancient civilisations, both threatened by Japan and struggling to ‘secure freedom’ from British imperialism.87 ‘Behind the war and inhumanity and violence … a new China is rising, rooted in her culture, but shedding the lethargy and weakness of the past, strong and united, modern, and with a human outlook.’88 On a personal level, however, the two leaders were not natural bed-fellows. In August 1939, Nehru visited China. During a Japanese raid, he and Chiang Kiashek sheltered together in a bomb shelter at Chiang’s residence in the Huangshan mountains just outside Chongqing, during which Chiang became increasingly annoyed with Nehru’s loquaciousness.89

  The British had attempted to dissuade Chiang from his visit to India. Churchill had even sent a personal appeal,90 but Chiang had rejected it. The British insisted that, if he had to go, he should meet the Governor-General, Lord Linlithgow, before seeing anybody else. In his meeting with Lord Linlithgow, Chiang urged Britain to grant India dominion status, while in discussions with Nehru he suggested that India should follow China’s example and seek a gradual path to independence. Nehru’s response was that a real transfer of power had to take place before he could support India’s participation in the war.91

  Following his return to Chongqing, Chiang sent a telegraph to President Roosevelt, urging him to put pressure on Churchill because ‘if the Indian political problem is not immediately and urgently solved, the danger will be increasing daily … If the Japanese should know the real situation and attack India, they would be virtually unopposed.’92 Fully aware of Churchill’s sensitivity about India, Roosevelt forwarded Chiang Kaishek’s message as an indirect way of pressuring the British prime minister on the issue. Church-ill’s predictable response was that Allies should not interfere in each other’s domestic affairs.93 That nothing came of Chiang Kaishek diplomatic démarche is unsurprising; that he assumed a position of equality with his allies with the right to advise them, and that he did so with US support, was a new development. In Whitehall, eyebrows shot up in alarm.

  According to Roosevelt’s son, Elliott, when Churchill and his father met in August 1941 to draw up the Atlantic Charter, with its promise of self-determination for all people, Roosevelt had admonished Churchill about wanting to preserve the British Empire, saying, ‘I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.’94 Churchill had attempted to confine the applicability of the charter just to Europe, but Roosevelt believed that it should be applied worldwide. Supporting China in seeking recognition as an equal partner in the alliance offered the US president a way of pursuing his understanding of the Atlantic Charter.95

  In the spring of 1942, Washington started to consider placing relations with China on an equal footing to its other allies. Maxwell Hamilton, the Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs of the US State Department, wrote a brief arguing that this step would give substance to the assertion that ‘the present war is a people’s war’ in which the Allies ‘are fighting not only for self-preservation but also for human rights and decencies and greater equalities’.96 Secret discussions began with Britain. The British response was that it accepted the case in principle but that going ahead at present ‘would be constructed as the fruit of a sense of weakness’,97 and ran the risk of fanning the flames of unrest in India.

  For the Nationalists, abolishing the unequal treaties was important in and of itself. But the matter had become urgent because Japan and the Wang Jingwei government were in discussion about returning all foreign concessions to Chinese c
ontrol, leaving Wang on the brink of a huge propaganda coup. Chiang Kaishek instructed Guo Taiqi, the Nationalist ambassador to the UK, to broach the subject of ending the unequal treaties while Guo was in Washington, on his way back to China via the USA.98 Guo’s meetings with Secretary of State Cordell Hull culminated in an exchange of diplomatic notes.99

  Under pressure from Hull, the British went along with the idea of concluding new treaties on the basis of equality with the Nationalists. They had indicated at the outbreak of war that they were willing to negotiate such a treaty, but in 1942 they hesitated, fearing the impact it might have on the situation in India. Hull wanted a short treaty achieved after short negotiations, and dealing with issues of principle only, but the British insisted on a more detailed treaty, settling such issues as the right to trade, to own property, to reside anywhere in China and to navigate in coastal and inland waters. British interests in China were far larger and went far deeper than American ones. The negotiations dragged on longer than Hull wanted, but by the thirty-first anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, they were sufficiently advanced for Chongqing, Washington and London to be able to announce that they were in talks about ending the unequal treaties. In a nice flourish, ‘V’ for victory was tapped out on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to commemorate the event.100 In a message of thanks to President Roosevelt, Chiang Kaishek declared that its chimes ‘resounded in the hearts of all our people’.101 The new treaties, ensuring China’s equality, were signed on 11 January 1943 – as it so happens, one day after the Wang Jingwei government and the Japanese did the same.