China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Service saw things differently. He didn’t believe that Chiang’s weakness was due to the policies of the United States. Rather, it was his own limitations that doomed him. Like Davies, Service knew it was likely that the Communists would fall under the Soviet sway, and it was exactly to give them an option that he favored building ties with them. As for Chiang, pressing him for political reform was the only way to preserve him—assuming there was any way to preserve him at all—while to coddle him was to prop up what Mao had called a “rotten shell.” It was then, and it remains now, fanciful to imagine that anything short of another full-scale war involving hundreds of thousands of American troops could have maintained the KMT in power in all of China, or even in just the southern half of the country. Service, believing that, wanted to prevent the United States from making a drastic mistake.

  And he got encouragement from higher-ups, including from Lauchlin Currie, formerly FDR’s administrator of Lend-Lease, and from Vincent, who urged Service to provide selective leaks to the press advancing their collective point of view and discrediting that of Hurley. Service had done this sort of thing when he was still in China, meeting with journalists and providing background information, including the views that he was sending in his reports to Washington. “I was Lauchlin Currie’s designated leaker,” he later told E. J. Kahn. Among his contacts was Drew Pearson, the influential columnist, whose opinions were decidedly unfavorable to Hurley, to Hurley’s rage. As we’ve seen, Hurley had complained to the State Department about what he called a campaign to smear his reputation.

  One of Service’s contacts was Philip Jaffe, the editor of Amerasia. Jaffe was a naturalized immigrant from Ukraine who had made money in the greeting card business. He was a friend of Earl Browder, the chairman of the American Communist Party, and clearly a leftist, though there’s no indication he was a Communist himself—and in any case Browder was under attack from Moscow for reasons having to do with the sectarian quarrels that often took place in the international Communist movement. Amerasia had a point of view similar on the subject of the Chinese revolution to that of Edgar Snow or any of the others enchanted with the Communist movement in China and disillusioned with the national government. But it was a serious magazine, not a piece of propaganda, and it was not under the control of Moscow or any other foreign power.

  Jaffe was active and enterprising, and he managed to obtain copies of government documents, provided to him by several sources, one of whom was Service, who gave him copies of some of the classified reports he had written during his days in China. Jaffe had been under FBI surveillance since the end of January, when Kenneth Wills of the OSS had reported to the FBI that Amerasia had published almost verbatim his classified report on British policy in Southeast Asia. FBI agents were stationed outside the Amerasia office, which was in a building at 225 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and in March, seeing that the office was empty, a five-man team, which did not have a warrant, broke into the magazine’s office and found what appeared to be powerful and abundant evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

  They discovered that the magazine was equipped with a darkroom even though it didn’t publish photographs. They found photocopies of many government documents, some of them marked “Top Secret.” There were locked suitcases crammed with materials from army and navy intelligence, from the State Department, and from the OSS. From that point on, a team of seventy-five FBI agents was assigned to keep watch on Jaffe and his associates, tapping their phones, listening in on their conversations.

  In such a way did Service come to be overheard by the FBI. Jaffe had cultivated him, invited him to dinner in Washington, introduced him to some of his contributors, and established common ground with him on the general subject of China and on the particular subject of Hurley. Once Service visited Jaffe in his room at the Statler Hotel in Washington, and with the FBI’s tape machines turning, he talked about what he called something “very secret”—evidently the initiatives taken the previous fall by Donovan and McClure, and carried out by Bird and Barrett, to broach a plan for military cooperation with the Communists. It was the most indiscreet comment that Service made to Jaffe, but was it an act of criminal disloyalty to the United States?

  The grand jury didn’t think so, and neither did some of the wiser American commentators. Liberals like Pearson, Walter Winchell, and Max Lerner produced columns early on denouncing the FBI arrests as efforts to stifle the press and to suppress dissent inside the State Department. Pearson called it “America’s Dreyfus case,” after the Jewish captain in the French army falsely accused of espionage. Others recognized the case for what it was, simply an instance of some leaking of the sort that government officials of all persuasions had always done. Even though the case was to disappear from public attention pretty soon, the aftertaste produced by the initial, sometimes lurid coverage was long-lasting. The appeal of a good story, of espionage, hidden dangers, secret and sinister forces, was just too much to resist. The New York Journal American warned that the case of the six provided “sensational proof that Communist organizers had access to highly confidential files of vital government agencies.” A headline in the New York Herald Tribune asserted, with no evidence, “WAR SECRETS LEAKS WIDESPREAD, SIX ARRESTS MAY BE ONLY A START.” The Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, whose motto was “Give light and the people will find their own way,” and whose Ernie Pyle was probably the most famous war correspondent of the time, reported without any truthful evidence that Service had engineered what the paper alleged to be an American turn away from Chiang and toward the Communists.

  The Chinese Communists themselves, perhaps confused about the waywardness of American China policy, were paying attention. For them, the arrests represented proof of the unchangeable nature of imperialist countries. Three weeks after those sensational headlines in American newspapers, the Communists’ Liberation Daily provided a full analysis of the event, and while the analysis was couched in Marxist-Leninist terms, it wasn’t wrong. The ordeal of Service et al., the newspaper said, wasn’t really about “confidential information,” as the American press had it; it was about the deeper battle in the United States over China policy, which, in turn, was really about the ability of big capitalism and imperialism to endure in the postwar world. “The arrest of the six people is the emergence of the heated debate on the two roads of American policies toward China,” the newspaper said, one of which “acknowledges the Chinese people’s great democratic force,” namely “the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Route Army.” And then there is the other force, the one “that does not acknowledge the great power of the Chinese people but only the anti-democratic KMT government along with the reactionary elements and the murderous devil Chiang Kai-shek.”

  The newspaper struck some themes that would remain constants of the Communists’ propaganda, even as it became shriller over the following years. The enemy was not the “American people” or “the American friends who support the Chinese people’s cause.” The enemy was American imperialists, “Hurley and his ilk,” as the common phrase had it, because their aim was “exactly the same as that of the autocrat and traitor who drinks blood from the bodies of the Chinese people”—meaning, Chiang Kai-shek. From now on, the CCP’s broadsides against the United States—with occasional periods of remission—would become both more bitter and more formulaic, with the phrase “the Hurley-Chiang double act” becoming the standard reference to the American ambassador and his support of the KMT, along with the boilerplate assurance that both Hurley and Chiang would inevitably be defeated. The Communist commentators increasingly referred to Hurley’s press conference of April 2 as a watershed event, the moment when American policy shifted in favor of “the goal of victimizing the Chinese people.” Hurley became the first of several Americans over the years to be held up as a Great Enemy even as the United States came more and more to be described as a “capitalist dictatorship” seeking to gain “hegemony” in China. The American ambassador became “Master Hurley,” the puppeteer without wh
om Chiang would never have dared to attempt to uphold his dictatorship. And with this denunciation of the United States and its “imperialist bureaucrats” came countervailing praise of the Soviet Union as “a real democracy of the laborers” that is “a hundred times more democratic” than “the American democracy under its capitalist dictators.”

  We see here what would become a signal feature of Chinese Communist propaganda, a superheated, demonizing, radically simplifying an inescapable rhetorical extremism, a barrage of exaggerations, distortions, and lies, that was among the tools the Chinese Communists learned from the Leninist-Stalinist model. The Communists’ irritation with the United States, moreover, was not confined to Mao’s speeches and Yenan’s propaganda machinery. It was reflected in events taking place in the embattled territory of China where the war continued and soldiers died. On May 28, 1945, a five-member American team led by Major F. L. Coolidge was parachuted behind enemy lines near the town of Fuping in Hebei province. Known as the Spaniel Mission—after the dog of one of its members—it was an OSS operation aimed at collecting information about the pro-Japanese puppet government.

  The Americans knew that the Communists had succeeded in infiltrating Chinese army units that were ostensibly loyal to the collaborationist Nanjing government. In 1945, these puppet forces came under ever greater scrutiny by American intelligence, especially the secret operations, or SO, arms of SACO, the cooperative organization jointly commanded by the American naval officer Milton “Mary” Miles and his chief Chinese collaborator, Tai Li, the head of Chiang’s secret police. Among SACO’s subdivisions was a propaganda production unit that put out slick and clever misinformation aimed at demoralizing both Japanese soldiers in China and the puppet forces, and, in the case of the latter, at encouraging the belief that Japan was nearly defeated and that they should think about defecting before it was too late.

  One poster, distributed in occupied territory, consists of a dark and melancholy image of a woman tending to a dying man. It represents itself as a warning by the puppet government about infectious diseases coming from Japan, where because of the “many unburied bodies of bombing victims” the drinking water had become polluted. The aim was indirectly to persuade Japanese soldiers in China that their relatives back home were in dire straits. Another poster, this one aimed at Chinese collaborators, shows a knife pointed at the back of a receding man. “Save your life, protect your family,” the text reads. “For eight years the enemy has forced you to work for him. Now he must rush to the defense of his homeland. Is he going to leave you behind him? No. You are a danger. You know too much and you must die.… Already in Canton and Fuzhou these assassinations have begun. What can you do? Desert him now. Save your life.”

  Puppet troops faced with defeat might, the Americans believed, be susceptible to recruitment. They knew that some of the weaponry in the hands of the Communists was not, as the Communists often claimed, captured from the Japanese, but had come from bribes paid to the well-armed puppet troops. Now the Spaniel Mission was being dispatched to contact the Communists and to carry out joint intelligence operations to determine the extent to which the puppets could be turned against their Japanese masters, providing intelligence and perhaps cooperating in sabotage. It was, in short, exactly the sort of cooperation against the common enemy that the Communists had been pleading for since the middle of 1944.

  Within two days, the Spaniel Mission’s five members were captured by Communist guerrillas, who subjected them to intense questioning, then brought them to two senior Communist political commissars, who made the decision to detain them indefinitely. They stayed in detention, despite American protests, for four months and were released only a month after the end of the war in September. The reason given for this hostile treatment at a time when the United States and the Communists were cooperating over such things as the rescue of downed American fliers was, as the chief American scholar to examine this incident has written, that “no prior notice had been given to Yenan,” and therefore the assumption in Yenan was that “the Spaniel mission must have ulterior motives to organize people against the Communists.” Another historian of Sino-American relations in this period has written that the Communists, already disillusioned by the partiality Hurley and Wedemeyer were showing to the central government, feared that this effort to contact Chinese puppet government troops was part of an effort to turn them against the Communists.

  A SACO propaganda poster warning that the Japanese will murder Chinese collaborators as they withdraw. The caption reads: “When the angel of death arrives, all affairs cease.” (illustration credit 8)

  A few months later, in August, with the men of the Spaniel Mission still detained and cut off from contact with American headquarters, General Wedemeyer vehemently protested their treatment directly to Mao, who was in Chungking for talks with Chiang. Wedemeyer argued that as China theater commander, he had the authority to operate behind enemy lines and that “it is not always feasible” to get permission in advance either from Communists or Nationalists who might be operating in the same areas. Numerous such missions had been dispatched before, Wedemeyer said, and local commanders had “recognized and accepted [the American agents] as friends and co-workers,” taking them in “and treating them kindly.”

  Maochun Yu of the U.S. Naval Academy, the author of an account of the OSS’s wartime activities in China, concludes that the Communists didn’t want the Americans to discover that Yenan’s propagandistic portrayal of their valiant struggle against the Japanese and the puppet regime was essentially false, and that in many areas they and the supposed Japanese enemy observed an unwritten truce, carrying on barter and the selling of arms but rarely fighting. In fact, the Spaniel Mission made exactly such an observation, reporting to American headquarters that the Communist claim of fighting an active guerrilla war against Japan “has been grossly exaggerated,” and that Yenan’s actual policy was “to undertake no serious campaign against the Japanese or puppets.” The Communists could well have detained the Spaniel Mission and kept it incommunicado because they didn’t want any foreigners in the vicinity to make such observations.

  When Mao was confronted by Wedemeyer about the arrest of the Spaniel Mission members, Mao recapitulated the friendly and cordial treatment given to the Dixie Mission in Yenan, the implication being that the Communists had no policy to treat Americans badly. “I consider the Fuping incident to be very unfortunate,” he said. But the warm reception of the Dixie Mission had been months earlier, before the collapse of the Hurley negotiations, before Hurley’s April 2 press conference, and before the explosion of the Amerasia Affair. It is likely that Mao did not order the arrest of the Spaniel Mission, though it seems unlikely he wouldn’t have been quickly informed of it, and could, had he wanted to, have ordered the quick release of the detained men. It also seems that the Eighth Route Army commander who was so suspicious of the Americans dropping into Fuping was following a general order. On June 11, 1945, Wilbur J. Peterkin, acting head of the Dixie Mission in Yenan, reported to Wedemeyer, “All communist headquarters have been instructed to arrest and disarm and hold all unauthorized Americans encountered anywhere.”

  There was in this sense a signal difference between the Spaniel group and the Dixie Mission members, like Raymond Ludden, who traveled in the company of Communist guerrillas behind enemy lines. The Dixie Mission was authorized, its members accompanied by what later travelers to Communist China would call “minders,” official guides who chose the places to visit and the people to be met. The Spaniel Mission operated without minders, and was therefore “unauthorized.”

  Whatever the reasons for the treatment of the Spaniel Mission, the unfriendliness and suspicion that it demonstrated foreshadowed what was to come when, after eight long years of conflict, the war against Japan suddenly came to an end. With the war against Japan won, the United States and the Communists would no longer have a common enemy, and its disappearance would strip away the incentive to cooperate, leaving behind many reasons
for each to see in the other a mortal foe.

  PART III

  Victory and Failure

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hearts and Minds

  Ma Yingchu was the sort of man whose support the Chinese government needed but lost, to the tremendous benefit of its mortal rival the Communists. He was one of those figures of influence in China who straddled both the centuries and the era. He was born in 1882, the seventh year of the Guangxu emperor, and educated during the last years of the Qing dynasty, the decadent and deeply conservative mandarin China of silk robes and imperial government, but he spent his career in the new China, a country whose educated class was engaged in a deep self-examination, seeking the reasons for its long decline and a formula that would enable it to be wealthy and powerful, as it had so often been in its past.

  Ma’s hometown was Shaoxing, an ancient place of Buddhist temples, literary teahouses, and wooden homes built Venice-like alongside a warren of lakes and canals. Shaoxing was, and still is, the country’s capital of vintage rice wine. Ma’s father was a winemaker who wanted his son to follow him into the family business, and who then disowned him when, in the newborn modern spirit, Yinchu wanted to study science, metallurgy, and economics, which he did at some of China’s best schools.