The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  But the fact that it had expedited Johnson’s departure, almost guaranteed before the year was out anyway, was the least important part of the VFW-MacArthur contretemps. It had exacerbated the relationship between the president and the general, who had been forced to back down and respect a presidential order, a process that was as unpleasant as it was alien to him, and it was bound to fester. It was also a clear warning to the White House, like the visit to Taiwan, that MacArthur was a dissident, both hierarchically and politically. It showed that he was by no means in agreement with their policies in Asia, including potentially the aims in the war they were fighting, and that he was more than likely to be a serious opponent on an issue that had come to haunt them, that of China. That was no small fault line: the president and his secretary of state wanted, if at all possible, to separate Korea from the larger issue of China, and the general, if he did not actually want to connect the two—and there is considerable evidence that he did, much of it from things he said, that he got down on his knees and prayed every night that China would enter the war—certainly was in no way bothered by the prospect of a Chinese entry.

  To replace Johnson, Truman reached out for George Marshall, exhausted by his previous tours of duty, whose health was somewhat shaky, and who was just a few months short of his seventieth birthday. Marshall had been hoping to slip into a semi-gentrified retirement as head of the Red Cross. Truman, sensing Johnson’s fate, had already sent out a recon mission to see if Marshall might be willing to serve again. Marshall said he would serve, but only for six months, with Bob Lovett, a much respected figure in the national security world, coming in as his number two and then replacing him. Are you sure you really want me? Marshall had asked the president. The president might want to ponder, he said, “the fact that my appointment may reflect upon you and your Administration. They are still charging me with the downfall of Chiang’s government in China. I want to help, not hurt you.” Later, noting the conversation in a letter to his wife, Truman had written, “Can you think of anyone else saying that? I can’t and he’s one of the great?”

  Even as the Korean War began, the death of one China and the birth of another hung over the administration—it was the issue from which the administration was beginning to hemorrhage. If in 1948 the Republicans had been in search of an issue, in 1949 their prayers were answered. The collapse of Chiang’s regime would prove the first important step in what would eventually become a terrible collision between the United States and China on the battlefield itself a mere twenty months later. On November 3, 1948, the day before the presidential election, Chinese Nationalist forces retreated from Shenyang, the largest city in Manchuria, abandoning for the first time a major city (and control of much of the surrounding area) to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communists. The rout was on. Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were in the process of a stunning collapse, each new defeat seeming to ensure that the next one would be bigger and come even more quickly. Sometimes entire Nationalist divisions surrendered and immediately became part of Mao’s new army. Other divisions simply disappeared, leaving behind for their Communist enemies millions of dollars worth of American military equipment.

  From then on, the United States and a new revolutionary China, sometimes seemingly deaf and dumb to each other’s political and military impulses, would stumble in an awkward slow-motion dance toward an unwanted military collision. There had been plentiful signs of Chiang’s decline over the previous four years, but because of the propaganda put out by so many journalists favorable to the regime, the end of his rule had still come as shattering news to millions of Americans. Beloved China, a country they had been told during World War II was inhabited by industrious, obedient, trustworthy, good Asians (as Japan had only so recently been inhabited by wily, sneaky, untrustworthy, bad Asians), had suddenly gone Communist. First Russia, an ally during World War II, had turned out to be an enemy; now, perhaps even more shattering, China had become an enemy as well, an ally of the Soviet Union.

  For millions of Americans it felt like a betrayal, and a sinister one at that, because when China’s immense land mass and population were added to Russia’s enormous land mass and population, the world looked infinitely more dangerous. If both countries were colored pink on a giant geopolitical map of the world, which for political reasons they now often were, that map suddenly looked significantly more ominous. Because the emotions China generated among millions of Americans were greater than those generated by any comparable country, because the Democrats had won five elections in a row and the Republicans were looking for a new, hot issue, the political ramifications of the fall of China would prove staggering. The question now rising—an immensely partisan one—was: Who Lost China? Underlying it was the deeper assumption—and great historical misconception—that China had ever been ours; more, ours to lose. The fall of Chiang’s China, though few understood it—or wanted to understand it—at the time, was part of the price of a dramatic alteration of the world’s power structure that had taken place during six years of total war. World War II had been more than just the catastrophic struggle between two sides, the Allies and the Axis; like World War I, it would have far-reaching global consequences.

  THE CHINA THAT existed in the minds of millions of Americans was the most illusory of countries, filled as it was with dutiful, obedient peasants who liked America and loved Americans, who longed for nothing so much as to be like them. It was a country where ordinary peasants allegedly hoped to be more Christian and were eager, despite the considerable obstacles in their way, to rise out of what Americans considered a heathen past. Millions of Americans believed not only that they loved (and understood) China and the Chinese, but that it was their duty to Americanize the Chinese. “With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up until it is just like Kansas City,” said Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, one of the Republicans who would become a particularly bitter critic of the administration for its China policies (and who once referred to French Indochina as Indigo-China).

  Long before Chiang went to Taiwan, and established his rather personal China on location, there were two Chinas. There was China in the American public mind, a China as Americans wanted it to be, and the other China, the real China, which was coming apart and was the sad daily reality of those Americans on location. The illusory China was a heroic ally, ruled by the brave, industrious, Christian, pro-American Chiang Kai-shek and his beautiful wife, Mayling, a member of one of China’s wealthiest and best connected families, herself Christian and American-educated, and who seemed to have been ordered up directly from Central Casting for a major public relations campaign. The goals of the Generalissimo and his lady, it always seemed, were exactly the same as America’s goals, their values the same as ours as well. The reality of course was completely different. In a way, what happened after World War II was the cruelest of jokes: the impact of all those thousands of American missionaries who had so dutifully and faithfully gone to China over a century would be greater on the politics of their own country than it was on China, the country they hoped to change, and whose culture and politics they barely dented. Millions and millions of American children, as John Melby, one of the more talented members of the American embassy in China’s wartime capital, Chongqing, later wrote, had faithfully brought their pennies to Sunday school to give to the poor and unwashed of China. Their parents had heard the missionaries, back on home leave, speak at their churches and evoke not just the marvels of China and the Chinese, but the vast challenge always still ahead for those who desired to do the Lord’s work.

  The China that existed in reality was a feudal country badly fragmented politically and geographically, a country of almost unbearable poverty, ruled more often than not by regional warlords of exceptional cruelty. It was a country of some 500 million people governed, if that was even the word, by a shaky, corrupt national administration, predatory foreign interests, an infinite number of warlords, and a tiny, self-serving oligarchy that also doubled as the government. To the le
adership in much of the West, seeking as it did constant commercial benefits, a weak, vulnerable China was the preferred one. As the civil war continued, it reflected a historic attempt on China’s part to redefine itself as a nation, one that would be truly whole, and perhaps even strong, and no longer, as it had been for so long, prey to powerful Western nations from afar and to warlords within. It had been torn apart by more than two decades of on-and-off civil war and by the brutality inflicted on its people during the Japanese occupation. It was a China burdened, now that World War II was over, with a sad, badly flawed leadership under Chiang, hardly equal to the Herculean challenges caused by such severe external and internal problems. It was, in historic terms, ripe for the picking.

  There had, of course, been plenty of warnings that Chiang was going to fall. Even during World War II, when the main struggle was supposed to be against the Japanese, the battle between the Nationalists under Chiang and the Communists under Mao was a constant sideshow. Report after report coming in from the field during the war, from both civilians and military men, from men ideologically committed to Chiang as well as those appalled by him, had reflected the view that the Communists had better leadership, both political and military, and had far greater political legitimacy. Even as World War II was ending, very few people who had been there and knew what was happening militarily thought Chiang would make it. Some people in the national security team, like James Forrestal, thought Chiang’s chances of winning were so slim that the United States had to be careful not to weaken Japan so much that it could not be used as a North Asian bulwark against the Communists. When World War II was finally over, and the civil war started in earnest, the reports from the field became even gloomier. Chiang had predictably turned inward, his base becoming ever more narrow, his policies ever more repressive. Even a figure as sympathetic to Chiang as Major General Claire Chennault, who had led the American Flying Tiger air units fighting in China during the world war and would be a lifelong hard-line supporter of the Generalissimo, had written Roosevelt near the war’s end that if there was a civil war, as there was likely to be, “the Yenan regime [the Communists] has an excellent chance of emerging victorious with or without Russian aid.”

  Probably as good a date as any for the beginning of World War II is July 1937, when Chinese troops clashed with Japanese invaders near Beijing, close to the Chinese-Manchurian border. If nothing else, it surely ended any hope of the rise of a modern, semidemocratic China under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist or Guomindang Party, the kind of China many Americans had hoped for, and dreamed of long after it became the most hopeless of causes. What then took place in China, under the dual force of the Japanese invasion and the constant undercurrent of the civil war, was as powerful and complete a transformation of a social, economic, and political order as the modern world had witnessed. It was a cataclysmic event, driven at first by forces from without, but in no way purely an external challenge. It was, at the same time, a challenge of one China, as yet unborn and potentially lethal in its norms and residual hatreds, to another China, at once weak, cruel, and barbaric in its own way: a challenge by one set of violent, autocratic men to another set of autocratic and ruthless men who had ruled so poorly and with such elemental brutality for too long. It was a system of oppression rather than authority that had been imposed with unparalleled harshness and greed upon ordinary Chinese. The few who benefited were rich, powerful, and lived above the laws, which, in any case, were set by force of arms. The many who were poor existed that way in what seemed like hopeless perpetuity. Every unbearable aspect of their daily lives was marked by some kind of injustice, and the absence of elemental dignity. This China was probably dying even before the first Japanese troops marched into Manchuria.

  Chiang’s own rise reflected the fragmentation of the older order. He was not so much a leader, as he was portrayed by favorable publications in America, as he was a survivor, a man who existed by balancing warring interests off against each other. His nickname among Westerners, as Barbara Tuchman pointed out in her book on the collapse of China, was “Billiken,” after a popular weighted doll that could not be knocked over. He had strengthened his political ties in 1927 when he married into the Soong family, China’s most influential family in terms of wealth and connections to powerful interests in the West. Mayling Soong, the youngest member of the family, was Christian, Wellesley-educated, and politically ambitious. Earlier, Chiang had tried to marry her older sister, the widow of China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen, and had been rejected. To marry Mayling, he had to get rid of two other wives and convert to Christianity, something he readily did. In time, Chiang became known to the Americans as the Generalissimo or the Gimo, and she, not always affectionately, as Missimo. His marriage greatly strengthened his political connections with the United States and with those who longed for that most unrealistic of things, a modern, nationalist Chinese leader who was both Christian and capitalist.

  Chiang’s great struggle in those years was with the Communists, who had the good fortune to challenge authority but not to have to govern. All they had to do was exploit the country’s myriad grievances and miseries. They did that with considerable skill, tuned brilliantly to the grievances of the peasants as Chiang and the warlords connected to him never had been. Chiang’s China gradually imploded—despite vast amounts of American military aid and advice, despite all kinds of warnings, journalistic, diplomatic, and military, that he needed to change and reform his government. A series of American political and military advisers who urged him to use his resources more wisely failed dismally. Their interests and his interests were rarely the same—they wanted him to provide a kind of bold American-style leadership, and he wanted to survive for another day; the corrupt military-political structure the Americans wanted him to get rid of was nothing less than the key to his very political survival. If he had one special talent at the end, it was to appear to agree with his Americans advisers—he did not after all want to hurt their feelings—and then pay no attention to them whatsoever, and keep on doing exactly what he had always done.

  When the government finally fell in 1949, there was no surprise involved. General Joseph (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell, the principal American military adviser assigned to work with Chiang during World War II, had decided as early as 1942 that Chiang was utterly worthless, unwilling, if not unable, to use his army against the Japanese. Stilwell was hardly alone among Americans in the region in his distaste for Chiang. The Gimo’s nickname among many American soldiers serving in China reflected their frustration with him; Chancre Jack, they called him. Stilwell might have done three tours of duty in China and might have spoken the language fluently, but he was hardly the ideal American representative to deal with so weak a regime and so fragile a leader. He was the least diplomatic of men, edgy, outspoken, cantankerous, and blasphemous; he could be, wrote his biographer Barbara Tuchman, who in many ways admired him, “rude or caustic or sometimes coarse or deliberately boorish.” He said what he thought, without much reflection, or tact. There was no difference between his private view of the Chinese leader and what he told any and all who listened to him. He had decided early on that Chiang was virtually useless as an instrument of American policy. Once, the young Time magazine reporter Teddy White had asked Stilwell for an explanation of the debacle of Chinese troops during a battle, and he answered, “We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, peasant son of a bitch called Chiang Kai-shek.” A more accurate description might have been that the United States was failing because it was trying overnight to create a China that was in America’s image, something very unlikely to take place. Any leader the United States chose would end up failing either his own people or America or, as happened in this case, both. The reality failed because the dream was impossible from the start.

  Stilwell regularly reported back to Washington that Chiang was hopeless as a military ally, unable or unwilling to take any of the requisite steps to get his army to engage the Japanese. But in Washington, Stilwell’s report
s did not greatly matter. Even though the then Army chief of staff, George Marshall, Stilwell’s personal sponsor, was on his side, Chiang always held a better hand. On his side was the one person who mattered most, Franklin Roosevelt, who feared that if Chiang were pushed too hard, he might make a separate peace with the Japanese, allowing them to move armies bogged down for so long in China to other areas of Asia. As the war dragged on, the attitude of Chiang and the people around him toward their Western allies, most particularly the Americans, lapsed into one of utter and complete cynicism. As Barbara Tuchman later wrote of his policy, “To use barbarians to fight other barbarians was a traditional principle of Chinese statecraft, which now more than ever appeared not only advisable, but justified. Chinese opinion, according to a foreign resident, held that not only was China justified in remaining passive after five years of resistance, ‘it was her right to get as much as possible out of her allies while they fought.’ The exercise of this right, she noted, became the Government’s chief war effort.”

  Chiang’s army was a mighty one—on paper. In reality, it was increasingly a sham. He allegedly commanded three hundred divisions, but Stilwell believed they were, on average, at least 40 percent understrength, filled with invisible or ghost soldiers kept on the rolls so that their commanders could draw and personally pocket their pay. Early in World War II, when China was allegedly fighting for its life, American advisers were simply appalled by the conscription process. A senior American officer on Stilwell’s staff, Colonel Dave Barrett, wrote of one engagement, “The troops had only the poorest equipment. No medical attention. No transport. Many sick. Most recruits were conscripts delivered tied up. Conscription is a scandal. Only the unfortunates without money or influence are grabbed.” The numerous, large, incompetent divisions did not exist by happenstance; they were Chiang’s way of buying influence in a corrupt, feudal world already collapsing around him. If he had done what the Americans wanted, he understood far better than they, he might quickly have fallen from power.