CHAPTER SEVEN
The Rage of an Envoy
On January 10, 1945, Major Ray Cromley, who had been living in a limestone cave in Yenan since the previous July, sent an urgent, secret message to General Wedemeyer in Chungking. “Yenan Government,” Cromley wrote, sitting most likely at a wooden desk lit by a kerosene lantern, “wants to dispatch to America unofficial rpt unofficial group to interpret and explain to American civilians and officials interested the present situation and problems of China.”
Cromley, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who had worked in Japan, was a member of the military observer group in Yenan, and, as such, he mingled with the senior Communist leaders—at the Beijing operas that were performed al fresco there, at the Saturday night dances, and at the other informal gatherings at which American intelligence officers met Chinese Communist leaders. At least once he’d even danced with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, the grade-B actress from Shanghai once known as Lan Ping (Blue Apple), who failed to conceal her touch of coquettish glamour beneath her padded cotton clothing.
Cromley told Wedemeyer that none other than Mao and Zhou “will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire at White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party.” Mao, who had never been outside China, who had spent the past decade and a half as a sort of bandit chief, a Chinese Robin Hood, or a Chinese Lenin (depending on your point of view), was asking to visit the White House!
Mao’s request to meet Roosevelt is similar to requests from another Asian revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, the father of today’s Vietnam, who, long before the United States went to war against him, requested American help against French colonialism, not once but twice, and was ignored both times. The idea that the two top leaders of Chinese Communism might, in 1945, have gotten on an airplane and flown to Washington for a meeting with Franklin Roosevelt suggests the main question of the entire twentieth century bedeviling America’s relations with Asia: Was there a colossal opportunity the missing of which caused incalculable losses in lives and treasure?
The request Mao and Zhou sent via Crowley came twenty-seven fraught years and two American wars in Asia before Mao actually did meet an American president, Richard M. Nixon, not in Washington but behind the walls of a well-guarded palace in Beijing, and not as a revolutionary brigand but as the semi-deified leader of the world’s most populous Communist dictatorship who had spent many of his years in power calling on the world proletariat to crush American imperialism. Could the breakthrough of 1972 have happened a generation and a half earlier? If it had, might the Chinese Communists never, as Mao later put it, have “leaned to one side,” meaning the side of the Soviet bloc during the tense era of the Cold War? And if China had not leaned to one side, might the wars in Korea and Vietnam, both proxy conflicts fought by the United States to halt an expansion of hostile Communist power, never have been fought?
There are two views of this. One is that American leaders missed the chance to side with the tremendous forces in Asia that were yearning for change, and that had it remained at least neutral toward those forces rather than posing as their chief global enemy, the history of the twentieth century would have been infinitely more peaceful and happy. The other view is that the revolutionary forces that came to be led by Communist parties, inspired by the example of the Soviet Union, were bound to take a radical, anti-American path that would inevitably put them into conflict with the United States, no matter what.
The message passed on by Major Cromley used the word “unofficial” no doubt to enable the United States to accept a Communist delegation without violating the principle that only the government of Chiang Kai-shek could officially represent China. In that spirit, Mao and Zhou had also requested that the special representative of President Roosevelt in China, Patrick J. Hurley, not be informed of their secret initiative. By then, even though Hurley was attempting to get the CCP and the KMT to join forces in a coalition government that would together fight the Japanese, the Communists had identified him as an adversary who would block their efforts to go over his head to the American president directly. In this they were right. Wedemeyer ignored Mao’s request to keep their letter a secret, and, following protocol, he passed the cable on to Hurley, who impounded it. The proposal was never passed on to Washington. The future leaders of Communist China received no answer to the query they had initiated.
Their belief that Hurley had turned against them could certainly explain the timing of the Mao-Zhou initiative. It’s not difficult to imagine what the two Chinese leaders would have said to FDR in early 1945, because it would surely have been the same thing they were telling Hurley, the members of the Dixie Mission, and the American journalists who were able to visit Yenan around that time. The Communists wanted the United States to put pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to make what the Communists called “democratic reforms,” that is, to allow them into a “unity government” with all the anti-Japanese parties of China without requiring that they give up control of the large armies they had built up during the war against Japan. But what the Communists most wanted from America was bullets and guns. Mao no doubt would have asked for those things as well, to be provided directly to the Communists, who, he would have said, were bearing the main burden of the fight against Japan.
Mao would have told the American president that he would happily place his troops under an American commander in the common fight against Japan. In early 1945, when nobody could have imagined that the atom bomb would bring an end to the war in the Pacific in August of that year, the universal assumption was that the war would go on for at least one or two more years. In order to defeat Japan, it was thought, the United States would have to invade the Japanese home islands, and one option on the table for doing so was to land troops in eastern China, which would serve as a staging area for the final assault on the enemy’s territory. The other option, which was gaining strength among military planners, was to continue the ongoing island-hopping strategy and to use close-in islands like Okinawa as staging areas for an invasion. Nonetheless, Mao urged the Americans he met in Yenan to employ his troops to protect what might have been hundreds of thousands of American soldiers arriving on Chinese soil, no doubt to fierce Japanese resistance, and he would have repeated that offer to Roosevelt.
Beyond that, Mao would almost certainly have tried to persuade FDR that the Chinese Communists were not Communists in the Soviet sense, that is, a party determined to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat, to eliminate private enterprise, imprison its detractors, or to collectivize agriculture—all of which the Chinese Communists did within a few years of coming to power. Mao, as we’ve seen, had compared himself to Lincoln when interviewed by Harrison Forman in Yenan a few months before, and he would no doubt have talked to Roosevelt as he had done to Forman about “the liberation of slaves,” meaning China’s impoverished peasants, “improving their livelihood by means of agrarian reform,” not, as in the Soviet Union, the brutal elimination of class enemies—though putting landlords in front of howling mobs of landless peasants and executing them in furtherance of class struggle was exactly the model approved by Mao after he took power. Along these lines, Mao might even have spelled out for Roosevelt the grander meaning of his movement, which is that it represented a massive Asian upheaval, something entirely new, a tidal wave of yearning and determination for what the Communists later called “liberation.” He could have given Roosevelt, who was an instinctive anti-colonialist, a choice: to ignore this primal new force, or to ally America with it, and in so doing befriend the behemoth that was ascending, whether Roosevelt liked it or not.
It is extremely unlikely that Franklin Roosevelt would have accepted the Mao-Zhou request to visit him in Washington even if it had been passed on to him by Hurley. The president of the United States was not going to give prestige and legitimacy to the leaders of a Communist insurrection against an allied government. Nor would he have agreed to
the condition they insisted on before they joined a coalition government: to keep the million-man army they had built up in their “liberated” areas. Hurley’s confiscation of the Mao-Zhou request thus does not loom as a lost opportunity. The significance of the Communists’ gesture lies much more in Hurley’s reaction to it, because their request to Crowley that Hurley not be informed of it was clear and irrefutable proof to him that some of his subordinates were attempting to help the Communists by undermining his peacemaking program.
Hurley had been trying strenuously to get the stalled talks going again. On January 6, he wrote to Mao asking him to send Zhou back to Chungking. On that same day, Edward Rice, the consul in Xian, explained one of the reasons Mao was not anxious to do so: the areas of Communist control were continuing to expand. Most recently, he wrote, the Communists had taken advantage of a central government defeat in Henan “to create a large new strip of Communist territory in that part of north central China frequently spoken of as the Central Plain”: Shandong, Jiangsu, Hubei, and parts of Henan. Rice’s point was that when Chiang’s government lost an area, it did so in two ways: “the main cities and transport lines are lost to the Japanese and control of the country districts is lost to the Communists.”
Not surprisingly, on January 11 a letter for Hurley arrived from Yenan. In it, Mao rejected renewed negotiations on the grounds that the KMT was showing “not the least sincerity.” Three days later, vexed by Mao’s refusal, Hurley fired off a long cable to FDR in which he recounted his negotiating efforts of the previous months, starting with his trip to Yenan in early November. Hurley told Roosevelt that he had been on the verge of success when, suddenly and inexplicably, “the Communists walked out on us.” This “drastic change of position of the Communists,” their refusal to resume talking even when Chiang was making such significant concessions, Hurley now informed the president, was due to “certain officers” of Wedemeyer’s command who had been offering the Communists pretty much everything they wanted from the United States without requiring them to agree to a deal with the KMT. “These American officers had formulated a plan for the use of American paratroops in the Communist-held areas. The plan provided for the use of Communist troops led by Americans in guerilla warfare. The plan was predicated on the reaching of an agreement between the United States and the Communist Party, bypassing completely the National Government of China, and furnishing American supplies directly to the Communist troops.”
Hurley said he’d had some inkling of this plan earlier, but “I did not know it had been presented to the Communists until that was made apparent by the Communists applying to Wedemeyer to secure secret passage for Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to Washington for a conference with you. They asked Wedemeyer to keep their proposed visit to you secret from the National Government and from me.”
Hurley wasn’t all wrong about the bare facts. Where he was disastrously wrong was in his accusation of sabotage and disloyalty against these “certain officers of Wedemeyer’s command,” when what happened merely illustrated the overall incoherence of American China policy, the actions of all those agencies operating more or less independently. Davies’s verdict on Hurley, while no doubt self-interested, seems true. It was, he wrote to his wife at the time, that the ambassador was “a little confused by the maelstrom of intrigue in which he finds himself.” And one of the main initiators of intrigue was “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS in Washington.
Donovan was eager for cooperation on intelligence matters with the Communists, as he was with Tai Li and the central government. The Communists had guerrillas and agents all over occupied China and were clearly in a position to provide the United States with a vast amount of information. The Communists, moreover, made clear in their talks with the OSS agents inside the Dixie Mission, Cromley in particular, that they welcomed and encouraged this interest. The Communists needed equipment, especially radios, that their troops and agents could use in their far-flung archipelago of “liberated” areas. They also wanted technical training for their intelligence agents. In September 1944, the OSS agreed to provide radios for fourteen Communist-held areas, and by April 1945, something like fourteen thousand pounds of American equipment, mostly lightweight radios and spare parts, had been flown to Yenan, and more was in the pipeline. There was enough OSS activity with the Communists for Willis Bird, the deputy director of the OSS in China, to be assigned to deal with Yenan full-time.
Bird was not the only American official talking to the Communists about military or quasi-military cooperation. In early November 1944, just four days after Wedemeyer’s arrival in China, Ye Jianying, a Long March veteran who was chief of staff of the Eighth Route Army, responded to an American idea, presented by Davies, that the United States might carry out a Normandy-style landing at Lianyunkang on the Shandong-Jiangsu border. This would be supported by the Communists in what would have been a major joint operation, similar in scope to American operations with government troops in Burma and Yunnan province. Ye suggested that the Communists contribute fifty thousand troops to support five divisions of Americans; this support would include disrupting Japanese communications and tying down Japanese troops to keep them away from the arriving Americans. Davies understood right away the underlying Communist goal: to get American arms that it would later use against the KMT. He knew also that an American landing on the China coast would draw American forces away from the south and west just at the time of Japan’s Ichigo offensive, which would leave Kunming and possibly even Chungking much less protected.
Still, he favored Ye’s plan, and for good reason. If the United States did land troops on the China coast—and American military planners at that point assumed this would be necessary to defeat Japan—Communist help would be needed. Zhou told Davies that if an invasion took place, “they would mobilize the population within a two hundred mile radius of the landing to provide labor and foodstuffs for the American forces.” The Communists, in other words, “offered all of the cooperation within their power to give,” Davies confided to his journal, clearly thrilled at the prospect that was manifesting itself, and believing it to be of possibly historic dimensions. “For who can say,” he wrote later, “how the orientation of the Yenan oligarchy would have developed had the United States … accepted Mao’s invitation to cooperate?”
It was to support his view of the breathtaking possibilities that Davies wrote his three visionary papers on the Communists and sent them off to Washington. In them, he played down their Communist aspects and emphasized instead their nationalist qualities, and he favorably assessed the likelihood that the Chinese Communists could be “captured” from Soviet domination—an opinion that he later acknowledged “underestimated the influence of ideology on Communist behavior.” But at the time, he was clearly under the influence not just of the prospect of military cooperation but of the warmth and good humor of his reception in Yenan, those affable Saturday night dances, the church-social informality of it all, his inner conviction that the Communists did genuinely yearn for friendship with America. After all, it made sense. Friendship with America would have brought them so much more benefit than closeness to Russia. “They have now deviated so far to the right that they will return to the revolution only if driven to it by overwhelming pressure from domestic and foreign forces of reaction,” Davies wrote at the end of 1944. As for such matters as the Rectification Campaign, Davies wrote later that he was “aware” of it but “I did not inquire into it. My attention was fixed on the issue of power, and what the United States might do to attract Yenan away from the Soviet Union.”
There is a bit of willed ignorance in this, and what Davis ignored is how much the Rectification Campaign made the Chinese Communists seem very much like their Soviet counterparts. Still, under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine anybody seeing matters more clearly than Davies did at the time.
At the end of 1944, Donovan of the OSS dispatched his man in China, Lieutenant Colonel Bird, to Yenan to talk over further cooperation with the
Communists. Bird was accompanied by Barrett, who was told by General Robert McClure, Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, to go to Yenan to explore the possibility of stationing American paratroopers in Communist-held territory. They left on the same flight as Davies, who, as we’ve seen, was taking his farewell Yenan trip. In his memoirs, Davies claims to have had only a vague idea of the nature of Bird’s and Barrett’s missions. The three landed in Yenan on December 15. The next day, Bird and Barrett went to see Mao and others, and over the next three days, they drew up an ambitious plan for possible future American–Chinese Communist cooperation, which included the stationing of American Special Operations agents with CCP units to “generally raise hell and run,” as Bird put it in a memo. More important as an institutional commitment, the plan envisaged American equipment being provided for up to twenty-five thousand Communist guerrillas. In exchange for this, as Bird put it, the United States would “receive complete cooperation of [the Communists’] army of six hundred fifty thousand and people’s militia of two and a half million when strategic use required by Wedemeyer.”
It is easy to see why the Communists would have agreed to this idea: equipment for twenty-five thousand of their ill-equipped soldiers. It is also easy to see that the KMT would have violently resisted it for the same reason, and so, in fact, nothing came of it. It was just another of those schemes thrown out there by somebody with authority in one of the many agencies that proliferate in war, Donovan in this case. Bird’s offer, however, had a permanent effect on Hurley, who, from that point on, was the implacable enemy of the Foreign Service China professionals who, he insisted on believing, had intentionally ruined his mediation attempt. Whether because of bureaucratic deviousness, especially on the part of Donovan, or because of some less sinister motive, Hurley was not informed of Bird’s extraordinary mission to Yenan. He would surely have vigorously opposed it had he known what was afoot, because Bird’s proposal of cooperation promised substantial help to the Communists without the bother of making a deal with the KMT. At the same time, Hurley assumed the most nefarious possible motives on the part of all three of the emissaries who had gone to Yenan at the end of 1944—Bird, Barrett, and Davies. His cable to Roosevelt was the opening blow of his long campaign to dishonor both the Foreign Service China experts who labored under him and the military officers in Wedemeyer’s command, and not only to dishonor them but to purge them from the service.
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