Han Suyin, the novelist who would later become an unabashed acolyte of Mao, was just as unabashed in her admiration for Chiang in the early years of the war. The reunification of China was “due to the genius of one man, a slim, unassuming young Chinese officer” who had realized the goals of the Chinese revolution after “sixteen years of the struggle in the dark,” she wrote. Chiang, she continued, in her many-splendored prose, possessed “a will as stern as the Great Wall, as irresistible as the flood of China’s rivers.” He was “the man in whose hands the fate of our four hundred millions still is laid.” In the face of the Japanese onslaught, she continued,
he is there, Chiang Kai-shek, directing the war with steady, unshaken resolve never to yield, in weakness and cowardice, to armed force. We are strengthened, reassured.… Here is the determination that has stirred the whole country, willed China to rise from her torpor, given her consciousness of her past glory and future dignity and greatness. One man, yet not one man alone. A spiritual force, a symbol, an inspiration to us all.
Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek in one of his many appearances on the cover of Time, this one in August 1945. © 1945 Time Inc. All rights reserved (illustration credit 2)
The savior-of-China, man-of-destiny image was reflected in the photographs of Chiang that appeared everywhere—schoolrooms, government offices, public squares, even, for a brief few years after the end of the war, over the massive entry gate to the Forbidden City in Beijing, long since replaced by a photograph of his great enemy, Mao. One of the standard pictures shows him in the military uniform favored by Chinese commanders in those days, with oversized epaulets, golden braids, sash and belt, and a constellation of saucer-sized medallions. His left hand is on the hilt of a sword, his shaved head and trim mustache somehow just a bit too small for all that paraphernalia. One of the covers of Time, this one published in 1933, has him on a white horse, in sunglasses, saluting. Other photographs show him in an elegant silk scholar’s robe, and in still others he smiles in avuncular, mustachioed fashion, the understanding, kindly, indulgent teacher of the Chinese nation.
The images were all designed to convey a sense of the dignity, wisdom, and command due the leader of China, a spiritual force, as Han Suyin put it, and, if the image is to be believed, a tranquil, confident one. Henry Luce continued to convey this image to the American public until long after Chiang’s cause was lost. Other Americans with a more balanced, less rhapsodic vision of Chiang admired him despite his faults, and when a heavy cloud of disillusionment with Chiang took hold of many, perhaps most, in official American circles, these diehard supporters argued that his faults were being exaggerated and his virtues underplayed.
For Albert C. Wedemeyer, who arrived in China late in 1944 as the commanding American military officer in the China theater, the astonishing thing was not how badly Chiang had done in the war but how well. Compared to Britain and the Soviet Union, he wrote, China had gotten only “a trickle of aid,” yet “she had managed to survive as a national entity in spite of Western indifference and neglect.” Wedemeyer made no secret of his disagreement with his predecessor, Stilwell, about Chiang. “Far from being reluctant to fight as pictured by Stilwell and some of his friends among the American correspondents,” Wedemeyer later wrote, China “had shown amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan.”
Americans, in Wedemeyer’s view, failed to understand the sacrifices that China had made and the degree to which it had fought. The battle for Shanghai in 1937, he noted, was “the bloodiest battle that the world had seen since Verdun.” This was true. The battle for Shanghai belied the view that came to prevail later that China essentially had failed from the beginning of the anti-Japanese war to the end to resist the Japanese invasion. As a matter of historical fact, China’s resistance had been so fierce as to take the Japanese completely by surprise. At the outset of the war, the Tokyo militarists who pressed for the conquest of China had predicted that the fighting would be over in a few months. They did not predict that nearly eight years later, nearly one million Japanese troops would remain tied down in China. The British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma fell to Japan almost without a fight. So did the sprawling Dutch-run archipelago of Indonesia, and ditto the Philippines, which was then an American colony. But China was still resisting, unconquered.
And there was a comparison with Europe as well, in which Chiang emerged in a favorable light. Wedemeyer noted that China could have “followed France’s example and let herself be occupied, waiting to be rescued eventually by the United States.” But after the Japanese invasion of 1937, Chiang called on the Chinese people to go to the “limits of endurance” and to “sacrifice and fight to the bitter end,” a statement that was, Wedemeyer felt, more gallant and resolute than Churchill’s famous “blood, sweat and tears” speech after Dunkirk. And China did resist, in complete international isolation, for the four long years before Pearl Harbor, during which the United States, supposedly neutral, continued to supply Japan with such vital materials as oil and iron.
Chiang’s American allies supported him in the very areas where he was most criticized by his American detractors, in his military strategy and in his undemocratic rule, which made FDR think about getting rid of him and Stilwell apoplectic. Chiang’s military philosophy seemed reasonable to some highly qualified observers who believed that Chiang simply could not do what the Americans like Stilwell were asking of him and also survive in power. “China could hope for victory only by hanging on against superior forces in the expectation that Japan would sooner or later become embroiled in war with the Western powers,” Wedemeyer concluded. “The Generalissimo adopted the sound strategy of endeavoring to dissipate Japanese strength and forcing the enemy to overextend his lines.” FDR’s cousin, Joseph Alsop, who was an aide to Chennault, believed that American policymakers did not understand Chiang’s dire situation, in which a domestic force that wanted to overthrow him was growing stronger by the day even as his sole foreign ally demanded that he do nothing about it.
In many ways, Chiang’s kidnapping and the united front agreement that resulted from it were a genuine historical watershed for him and for China. Seen at the time as a sort of apotheosis, it was actually the beginning of his decline, the point after which he could no longer be the ultimate victor in China’s domestic strife, leading his country down a path of political reform and change strongly influenced by western liberal-democratic ideas. Had it not been for the Xian kidnapping, Chiang would almost surely have completed the “last five minutes” of the campaign to defeat the Communists. His army was not of international caliber, but it was larger, better equipped, and more effective under its German advisers than it had been earlier, while the CCP’s Red Army was still a ragged and poorly armed force of perhaps thirty thousand men. Had Chiang undertaken a new campaign against the Communists in late 1936 and 1937, before the Japanese embarked on their full-scale effort to conquer China, Mao and his followers would have taken refuge in Mongolia or the Soviet Union. There, Stalin would have kept them alive, but, needing to confront the great danger to Soviet survival that a Japanese victory in China represented, he would have had little choice but to support China’s central government, and he would not have backed the CCP in any effort to overthrow it. Dislodged from their base in northern Shaanxi and chased across the border, the Communists would not have been able to expand their army and territory in the way they did during World War II, growing in those years into a force of more than a million soldiers governing some nineteen “liberated” areas.
But that is not how events unfolded. Under extreme duress, Chiang broke a fundamental rule of civil conflict, which is never to allow an armed force that you do not control into your camp, because surely, when the conditions are ripe, that force will oppose you. The story is told that when he got back to Nanjing from Xian, Chiang was advised by an old friend and senior KMT official, Chen Lifu, to organize a large force and wipe out the Communists in their Shaanxi refuge, but Chiang, as T
aylor has written, “bent his head and did not answer.”
And with that decision to keep to his word, Chiang helped to establish the conditions that, in the long run, would destroy him.
For the entire war, Chiang remained a hero to many people, both Chinese and foreigners, but for many others a slow disillusionment set in, and in the later stages of the war, no place would his image and reputation be more tarnished than in the United States, Chiang’s indispensable ally. By the beginning of 1945, Chiang’s reputation as China’s man of the hour, Time’s gallant knight on the white horse, became mixed with something close to its opposite, a reputation as a petty-minded, obstructionist, and deceitful dictator. This was Stilwell’s frequently expressed description of Chiang, and it slowly came to be accepted as accurate by many American experts on China and by many in the press, even if the public at large was unacquainted with it. On that same day in the Oval Office when Chennault affirmed Chiang’s greatness, Stilwell described him to FDR as “a vacillating, tricky, undependable scoundrel.” For many Americans, including some of those who observed him most closely, Chiang turned into a right-wing dictator more like Benito Mussolini or Francisco Franco in those days of ascendant fascist leaders than George Washington, though China in general, many Americans came to feel, had its particular cultural blind spots. “They are great believers in make-believe,” Brigadier General John Magruder, a senior adviser to the Chinese army, told the War Department. They ignore reality in favor of “flattering but fictitious symbols,” among them the defeats they suffered at the hands of the Japanese that they turned into victories.
Some of this was caused by what the French call usure, a slow dulling of the sheen due simply to the passage of time, the very length of the war, the sweep of Japan’s armies, the casualties, the rivers of refugees, the famine, the malnutrition, the fearsome reach of the secret police, the lines of conscripts roped together and marched off to war without proper clothing, arms, training, and food, the inability of the government to put a stop to Japanese atrocities—all of these things wore down the once-great leader’s standing. The KMT government tried to fight on the morale front. There were marches, songs, slogans everywhere. The government press office put out an endless series of good-news reports about valiant resistance and tremendous Japanese casualties, most of it fictitious, but at a certain point reality becomes inescapable, and when it does, it is the leader who is held responsible. Chiang made mistakes as well. He was repressive of dissent; prominent figures were jailed or put under house arrest. The press was rigorously censored. Chiang’s image came to seem more and more bogus, a matter of artificial inflation. Over time more and more of China’s intelligentsia, much of it American-educated, the country’s professors, students, and writers, shifted their allegiance, sometimes active, often passive, to the Communists, whom they saw as more dynamic, less corrupt, less responsible for the country’s suffering, and, in the minds of many of them, more democratic.
This disillusionment was also strong among the Americans in China. “Where is the gallant resistance?” Stilwell asked. “Where is the great guerrilla warfare? Where is reform or even elementary understanding of the problem?” He likened Chiang’s government to that of Nazi Germany—“same outlook, same gangsterism.” Stilwell once summarized to George C. Marshall, FDR’s chief of staff, a conversation he had with Chiang as “one and a half hours of crap and nonsense.” In his diary and in his letters to his wife back home, the American commander was even more vitriolic. Chiang, he wrote, was a “stubborn, ignorant, prejudiced, conceited despot.” He was a “grasping, bigoted, ungrateful little rattlesnake.” He presided over “a one-party government, supported by a Gestapo and headed by an unbalanced man with little education.”
All through 1944 and into 1945, the dispatches from the American embassy in Chungking were loaded with outraged complaints against Chiang for holding his forces in reserve while the United States did the fighting and made the sacrifice for him. The American ambassador, Clarence E. Gauss, dismissed the heroic portrayals of Chiang as “rot,” noting as early as 1943 that there were no KMT troops north of the old course of the Yellow River and, unlike the Communists, the Nationalists had failed utterly to establish a guerrilla presence there.
“The Chinese strategy is entirely defensive in character,” Gauss wrote. “The Chinese soldier suffers such serious deficiencies that from an offensive standpoint he has no value … and the Chungking forces are unwilling to use their scanty military resources against the Japanese when they feel the Communist problem still exists, many military and civil officials stating that the Japanese are the secondary enemy and the Communists the primary one.”
Upon leaving China in the fall of 1944, the entirely fed-up Gauss told the newly arrived Wedemeyer, “We should pull up the plug and let the whole Chinese government go down the drain.”
This disenchantment with Chiang was rooted in the fact that for the Americans and for China’s leader, World War II in Asia and the Pacific were very different struggles. For the United States the battle was to defeat Japan, and this came with the sense that some of the American sacrifice in the war was being made for the sake of China, and, in particular, for the sake of China’s imperfect and, as Stilwell put it, “ungrateful” regime. In the fall of 1944, having gotten more than an earful from Stilwell, Marshall greeted Chiang’s agreement to commit Chinese forces to the campaign in north Burma as “the first time since the war began that the Generalissimo had shown an active interest in the improvement and employment of his Army”—this comment made about a leader whose army had up to that point taken over a million casualties and had for seven years tied down a million of Japan’s best troops, most of whom would have been deployed directly against the Americans if China had surrendered.
In his memoir of his wartime service in China, Oliver J. Caldwell, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), recounts being approached by a certain Mr. Chen, who claimed to be an emissary of a coalition of secret societies that opposed Chiang, believing that his dictatorial and divisive rule would lead eventually to a Communist victory in China—a view that, as it happens, was shared by some of the best American analysts of China and turned out to be correct. Mr. Chen told Caldwell that his group wanted to replace Chiang with General Li Zongren, China’s vice president and a semi-independent military leader with a base of support and loyal troops in Guangxi province.
Nothing ever happened with this plan, and Caldwell didn’t raise it again. But from time to time, some anti-Chiang, non-Communist groups would make contact with Americans seeking support for Chiang’s ouster. Chiang, of course, knew of these approaches. He knew that he was unpopular among China’s intellectuals, especially among those who had been to school in the United States and yearned for greater freedom in China. He also knew that his armed domestic opposition was growing vastly more powerful. By early 1945 the bedraggled remnants of the Communist armies who had survived Chiang’s earlier campaigns against them had grown into a large and, by Chinese standards, potent armed force. Mao had built his refuge in the northwest into a de facto independent state with some 90 million people within its informal borders. Chiang’s greatest fear was that as soon as the war was over, the Chinese Communists would combine with the Soviet Communists in a concerted effort to overthrow him. This is why he kept four hundred thousand of his best troops on a long front in the north blockading the Communists, to the puzzlement and fury of FDR and many other American observers. But the simple reason for Chiang’s behavior was that he didn’t have the resources to fight effectively against the Japanese and to contain the Communists at the same time. Those divisions that he kept out of the battle with Japan not only blocked potential Communist expansion to the south and east but also sealed off the main routes north into the Soviet Union via Mongolia, thereby helping to forestall the cooperation that Chiang felt, with good reason, could spell his ultimate doom.
This was the biggest divide between Chiang and his putative American friends. By the mi
ddle of 1944, especially with American victories against Japan in the Pacific, both sides in China, the KMT and the CCP, were no longer primarily interested in defeating their common foreign enemy. This, they both knew, would be accomplished by the United States. Both sides were now preparing for the postwar showdown whose ultimate prize would be China itself, and Chiang, who was weak, knew it.
So, for the rest of the war, Chiang walked the narrow path between two incompatible requirements. He was materially weak and his country was effectively sealed off from the rest of the world by the Japanese—but for the cargo-plane lifeline from India. So Chiang needed to do enough to keep the Americans happy and the all-important Lend-Lease supplies coming into the airfields at Kunming. But he could not do so much of what the United States wanted that he would wreck his chances in the postwar struggle to come. Stilwell found Chiang arrogant and ungrateful, but Chiang saw himself as humiliated by American demands that threatened his ruin. He had to maintain a posture of deference. He ingratiated himself, as when he swallowed his pride and named the reopened road from Burma the Stilwell Road, honoring the man whom he probably most disliked among those Americans whose demands, he feared, might in the end destroy him.
The animosity between Chiang and Stilwell went back to Burma in 1942, when Japan chased the British colonial rulers across the border to India, defeated Chinese and American forces, and closed the last overland supply route to China. Stilwell by then had been appointed Chiang’s chief of staff, and as such he supposedly had effective command over Chinese troops in Burma, but it was in this campaign that, for the first time, Stilwell experienced Chiang’s inclination secretly to direct his commanders to ignore Stilwell’s orders, especially the order for them to take the offensive, and Chiang’s reluctance to commit troops to Burma ever after remained a sore point.
China 1945 Page 4
