That same night, Chiang summoned Hurley back to the residence and told him that Stilwell would have to leave China. The two met again the next day, with Chiang telling Hurley that Roosevelt’s message marked a low point in Chinese-American relations. He was especially wounded by the innuendo in Roosevelt’s note, which had been encouraged by Stilwell and others, that he had not mounted a fight against Japan. He told Hurley that 30 percent of China’s troops had been fighting since 1936, some of them since the Northern Expedition of the 1920s, and these soldiers would not accept the “patronizing attitude” of Stilwell.
Meanwhile, in the days after the meeting at Yellow Mountain, Stilwell was making plans to take over China’s armies. He ordered that two hundred tons of supplies be sent to the new commander of the defense of Guilin, the immediate target of the Ichigo offensive, supplies that he had up to then withheld—that is, he had withheld matériel from Chiang’s army even as he was complaining that it wasn’t fighting. He also drafted a proposal by which the United States would arm five divisions of Communist troops. Finally, he promised Hurley that he would change his behavior toward the Generalissimo.
But it was too late. On September 24, five days after Stilwell handed him Roosevelt’s message, Chiang reiterated to Hurley his demand that Stilwell had to go. Stilwell, he said, in a pretty fair assessment, “is a professional, works hard, is resolute, and good at his own military doctrine, which is to attack,” but “he has no strategic thinking … [or] basic political skills … [and] he is very arrogant.” The next day he gave Hurley a formal letter asking for Stilwell’s recall, while to his diary he confided his pain at what he saw as a betrayal by the man he probably worshipped most in the world, Roosevelt. “My heart is broken,” he wrote. “It is difficult to go on.” But he also expressed determination. China, he said, could “once again hold out absolutely alone … if necessary … in four provinces.”
Hurley later said that the night Chiang’s demand for Stilwell’s recall arrived, he was unable to sleep, and in the wee hours he summoned an aide and dictated a message to Roosevelt recommending that the president accept Chiang’s demand. “Stilwell’s every act is a move toward the complete subjugation of Chiang Kai-shek,” he wrote. “You have a choice between Stilwell and Chiang and you have to choose Chiang,” he told the president. “There is no other Chinese known to me who possesses as many of the elements of leadership as Chiang Kai-shek.… [He] has agreed to every request, every suggestion made by you except the Stilwell appointment.”
The divisions sowed by Stilwell’s removal were to be deep and long-lasting. Stilwell himself, whom public opinion was accustomed to seeing as honest, straight-talking, and no-nonsense, got in the first blow. After his dismissal but before he left Chungking, Stilwell invited the correspondent of Time, Theodore White, and the one from The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, to his office, and, in a remarkable breach of military discipline, gave them not only his version of what had happened but also access to the secret cable traffic involving the Chiang affair. White’s account was essentially spiked at Time, whose editor in chief, Luce, would not allow Chiang to be seen as corrupt and incompetent, which is how White presented him.
But Atkinson, under no such restriction, accompanied Stilwell on his plane back to Washington, D.C., and his account of the Chiang-Stilwell dispute represented a negative shift in the press coverage of Chiang and his regime. “STILWELL BREAK STEMS FROM Chiang REFUSAL TO PRESS WAR FULLY” ran the page-one headline in the Times, which perfectly encapsulated Stilwell’s view of the problem. “PEACE WITH REDS BARRED: GENERALISSIMO REGARDS THEIR ARMIES FIGHTING JAPAN AS THREAT TO HIS RULE.” Stilwell’s dismissal by Chiang, Atkinson wrote, “represents the political triumph of a moribund anti-democratic regime that is more concerned with maintaining its political supremacy than in driving the Japanese out of China.” “Relieving General Stilwell and appointing a successor has the effect of making us acquiesce in an unenlightened cold-hearted autocratic political regime.”
Hurley said nothing publicly right away. But within a year or so, he was making comments that can only be described as deranged, accusing Stilwell, the State Department officers who agreed with the general about Chiang, and the American press as engaged in a conspiracy to destroy Chiang and see him replaced by a Communist government. He summed up his position this way: “The record of General Stilwell in China is irrevocably coupled in history with the conspiracy to overthrow the Nationalist Government of China, and to set up in its place a Communist regime—and all of this movement was part of, and cannot be separated from, the Communist cell or apparatus that existed at that time in the Government in Washington.”
Wedemeyer, Stilwell’s replacement, paid his first call on Chiang just five days after Stilwell’s departure, on November 2. He had flown to Chungking two days before, then driven out of the afflicted, rubble-strewn city and across the Yangzi River to Yellow Mountain. Chiang, who often appeared in a simple Chinese robe with no insignia, was dressed in his Prussian-style green-brown uniform bearing the emblem of a five-star general. Wedemeyer found him to be a “small, graceful, fine-boned man with black, piercing eyes and an engaging smile.”
Chiang was eager to make a good impression on the man who would now be his chief of staff and who would also have control over the all-important Lend-Lease supplies for China, the tons of aviation fuel, weapons, and ammunition that came from India every month. He received Wedemeyer in a spacious reception room adorned with beautiful Chinese paintings and etchings on the walls, rugs on the polished floor, teakwood tables, chairs with marble inlay, and vases with flowers. Servants in long blue robes glided in and out with tea and refreshments. There were so many curtains and screens drawn around the room that Wedemeyer, no innocent abroad, wondered “how many people might be listening in and noting what we said.”
“Please, please,” said Chiang, the only English words he spoke, gesturing Wedemeyer to a divan and then sitting next to him on it. It was a gesture of equality. He would not have sat on the same couch with Stilwell. “He seemed shy but keenly alert,” Wedemeyer noted, and he constantly and nervously fluttered a fan. Hurley, who had been appointed the American ambassador a few weeks earlier, was present, as was T. V. Soong.
The meeting was an opportunity to exchange pleasantries and to repair the wounds of the Stilwell debacle, but not to get into detailed discussions. Wedemeyer told the Generalissimo he was sure “we would have no difficulties in bringing about an efficient, carefully coordinated employment of American and Chinese forces against the Japanese.”
Respectful as he was of Chiang’s feelings, Wedemeyer had no illusions about the condition of China’s armies. The Japanese were on the offensive, threatening the important cities of Guilin and Liuzhou, both sites of American air bases, yet Wedemeyer found the Chinese to be strangely “apathetic and unintelligent.” A bit later, on December 4, in a cable to Marshall, he had changed his mind, but only somewhat. “I have now concluded,” he wrote, “that the Generalissimo and his adherents realize seriousness of situation but they are impotent and confounded. They are not organized, equipped, and trained for modern war.” Among the problems was “disorganized and muddled planning” that was “beyond comprehension.” The Chinese soldier was not only not properly equipped, he was also not properly fed, and Wedemeyer soon realized that this inadequacy, which resulted in malnutrition and disease, “underlay most of China’s military problems.”
This assessment seemed to correspond with Stilwell’s harshest judgments, but in fact Wedemeyer was not only more tactful than his predecessor, an attribute that enabled him to establish a cordial relationship with Chiang, but also more sympathetic, more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. While American public opinion was souring on Chiang—or, at least, was now privy to the disillusionment illustrated by the New York Times coverage—and while American diplomats and military officers in China were forming an anti-Chiang consensus, Wedemeyer became convinced of Hurley’s assessment that the Gimo was a gr
eat man and the only one who could lead China. Others felt that way as well, so that the United States government ended up in a kind of warts-and-all resignation about Chiang, an unenthusiastic acceptance of the fact that, as FDR once said about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastazio Somoza, he may be a bastard but he’s our bastard.
At the end of 1944, a young congressman from Montana, Mike Mansfield, who had been a marine stationed in China and had taught Far Eastern history at Montana State University, was dispatched by FDR on a three-month fact-finding mission in China. “Conditions,” he wrote to Roosevelt in January 1945, “are really bad.” The main problem, Mansfield felt, was the rift between the Nationalists and the Communists, which sapped China’s strength in the face of the common Japanese foe. In addition, he wrote, the Nationalists were corrupt and incompetent, their army ill supplied, badly fed, and poorly led. And yet, he concluded, “Chiang is the one man who can make Chinese unity and independence a reality. He and he alone can untangle the present situation because, in spite of some of the things he has done, he is China.”
A sort of squaring of circles begins to emerge in views like those of Mansfield and others, in which Chiang was deemed to be a deeply flawed leader, strangely disconnected from the suffering of his people and the abuses inflicted on them by his own government. Yet at the same time these hardheaded, unsparing analyses are accompanied by the judgment that his destiny and China’s destiny are one and the same. For the first of several times in its subsequent experience shoring up right-wing dictators against Communist revolutionaries, the United States depended on an Asian leader whose performance was unsatisfactory but who was nonetheless the American choice for the future.
CHAPTER THREE
The Devastated Country
The Sino-Japanese War was devastating and unnecessary. For eight years it raged across China creating an immeasurable degree of death, destruction, and loss—loss in the conventional senses of death and material damage but also the loss of commonality, of humanistic relations among the Chinese themselves, as the struggle to survive overwhelmed the country’s capacities for compassion, mutual aid, and fellow feeling.
The main and climactic battles of this war took place between 1937 and 1945, but it could be said to have started in 1895 when Japan, resurgent, implacable, and unrestrained in its pursuit of international prestige—which meant emulating the major European powers in their scramble for colonial possessions—made a colony of the entire island of Taiwan, which had belonged to China for centuries. But Japan’s major goal was the possession of Korea and Manchuria, the vast landmasses just across the Sea of Japan that were stepping-stones toward the even larger prize, which was China. China, normally the dominant country in northeast Asia, was weak, in political disarray, and incapable of defending its historic interests in Korea or in its farther-flung provinces, like Manchuria, which became contested territory between Japan and the other powerful nation in the area, imperial Russia.
In 1905, Japan announced itself as a major player in the contest for colonies when it soundly thrashed Russia in a war with the chief characteristic of many colonial wars: the two combatants fought it entirely on the soil of a third country, China, which was not a combatant. The Russo-Japanese War marked the first time that an Asian power had defeated a European one in a major conflict. Japan’s armies outfought and outmaneuvered the Russians both on land and, perhaps even more important, at sea. In the decisive land battle for Mukden, the largest Manchurian city (now called Shenyang), the Russians lost ninety thousand men. In the decisive naval confrontation, in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan, the Japanese fleet under the command of Admiral Togo Heihachiro annihilated the Russian fleet, most of which had sailed eighteen thousand miles from its home port in the Baltic Sea. Only three Russian ships escaped. Russia lost all eight of the battleships in its fleet and five thousand men—compared to Japanese losses of three torpedo boats and 116 men. Russia agreed that Korea would be part of Japan’s sphere of influence, and Japan seized the whole country in 1910. Japan was awarded the southern half of the Sakhalin Island chain, which had belonged to Russia, and it took over the special colonialist rights that Russia had had in southern Manchuria, including a lease on the port of Port Arthur and control over the South Manchurian Railroad. From that point on, it became a constant Russian ambition to recover these losses, and this, as we will see, was to have major consequences for China and the United States.
As a result of its victory, Japan was the indisputable great power in Asia and the fastest-rising power in the world, a country preparing to move on to the audacious, racially tinged goal of replacing white European colonialism in all of Asia, creating a vast new sphere to be led by Japan. It made modest progress toward this goal after World War I when, as a reward for having aligned itself with the winning side, it was granted the former German possessions in Shandong province in China, including the coastal city of Qingdao, known in the West for the eponymous brewery that the Germans had built there. Japan gave those possessions back to China in the 1920s as the world collectively began to feel some remorse for its violations of China’s sovereignty, and Japan, more moderate and accommodating than it later became, felt the need to make a conciliatory gesture.
But then Japan’s moderates lost control of the situation to its extreme nationalists and militants bent on realizing the country’s pan-Asian destiny, which, they believed, would require an apocalyptic final showdown with western civilization. To dominate Asia, they first had to dominate China, which they despised as flabby, corrupt, and inferior, and to dominate China, they needed to retain control of Manchuria and to build it into a base for expansion.
In 1931 and 1932, the militarists, supported by Emperor Hirohito, gained complete control. Nationalist groups with names like the Cherry Blossom Society and the Blood Brotherhood League committed a series of domestic assassinations. One victim was the last prime minister who attempted to curb the army’s ambitions on the Asian mainland, which wiped out any vestiges of moderation. In 1931, in what came to be called the Mukden Incident, the members of the Kwantung Army, which was the epicenter of armed Japanese nationalism, blew up some railroad tracks on the Southern Manchurian Railway near Mukden, blamed the Chinese for the sabotage, and then used the incident to seize control of all the northeastern Chinese provinces that made up Manchuria. A few months later, they persuaded the last emperor of the overthrown Qing dynasty, Henry Pu-yi, to become the puppet leader of a new, supposedly independent country called Manchukuo. Early in 1932, an angry Chinese crowd beat up five Japanese Buddhist monks in Shanghai—or, as some accounts had it, Japanese officers bribed Chinese thugs to assault the priests. In response, the Japanese sent troops into the Chinese section of the city (the international settlements where most Japanese citizens lived was always off-limits to warfare in Shanghai). When units of the Chinese army, advised by their German trainers, effectively resisted, Japan sent an enormous land and naval invasion force to Shanghai and used both gunboats and biplanes to bomb heavily populated Chinese residential areas, the first such bombing of an urban center in history though it was soon to be followed by many more in both Asia and Europe. The long-term, remorseless, and atrocity-laden effort to conquer all of China had begun.
These aggressions aroused futile protests in the League of Nations. The creation of Manchukuo was deemed to be illegitimate, but no practical steps were taken to punish Japanese aggression. More important, though Chiang Kai-shek’s government sent troops in an unsuccessful effort to resist the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1932, it acquiesced to Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. It was in the midst of its nationalist revolution, striving to forge a “new China,” modern, strong, self-reliant, and free of foreign infringements on its sovereignty, and Chiang, the leader of this revolution, understood that the country was militarily feeble and unable to thwart Japanese ambitions. The slogan, before Chiang was kidnapped in Xian and forced to abandon it, was “internal pacification before external resistance.”
But Japan’s manufacture of “incidents” continued, and each of them was used as a pretext for further encroachments. Beginning on July 7, 1937, when a Chinese patrol killed a Japanese soldier on night maneuvers near an ancient marble span called the Marco Polo Bridge, so named because the Italian traveler was supposed to have crossed it in the fourteenth century, Japan turned to the conquest of all of China. Responding to this new “incident,” it sent four divisions of its heavily armed Manchurian-based troops through the Great Wall with the objective of seizing the four provinces of China north of the Yellow River, the old imperial capital of Beijing included. With that move, full-scale war between the two countries broke out, and it continued intermittently, its lulls interspersed with periods of intense fighting, for the next eight years.
By the time World War II had spread to Western Europe, when Germany invaded Belgium, Holland, and France, the Japanese assault on China was four years old, and during those four years, China fought entirely alone, without allies or support, except for some financial and material aid from the Soviet Union and the United States and, more significantly, the efforts of Chennault’s American Volunteer Force, which used airfields in the interior of China to make the Japanese pay at least some price for their invasion of the country’s northern and coastal provinces.
Like Ethiopia after Mussolini’s invasion two years before, China in 1937 appealed to the rest of the world for help, but no help came, not from the League of Nations, which had been set up to make international aggression illegal and of which Japan was a member, and not from the United States. China had a great sentimental importance to Americans, who had been sending their traders there since the late eighteenth century and whose missionaries had been bringing what they ardently believed to be the benefits of Christian civilization to the Chinese for a hundred years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to tell visitors about his Delano ancestors’ connections to China. The music room at the family’s ancestral home, Hyde Park, was filled with Chinese porcelain and lacquer antiques that the president’s ancestors had collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But less than twenty years after the end of World War I, the United States was in no mood to intervene in a foreign conflict, whether in Europe or Asia. For most of the first four years of the Sino-Japanese War, the United States continued to supply Japan with vital raw materials, the most important of which was oil, so in a way Americans were collaborators in China’s humiliation and despoliation. In 1931, after the Mukden Incident, the headline in the Hearst tabloids provided a succinct summary of the American attitude, wherein its sentimental attachments to China were trumped by China’s strategic unimportance. “WE SYMPATHIZE. BUT IT IS NOT OUR CONCERN.” The same headline could have been written after the Japanese invasion of 1937, even if the sympathy was greater and the knowledge of Japanese atrocities more immediate.
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