China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Manchuria had at least twice before served as a base for the conquest, or the attempted conquest, of all of China, most recently in 1937 when the Japanese sent their divisions southward from their puppet state of Manchukuo. Three and a half centuries earlier, when the central Chinese government was weak, a Manchu chieftain, Nurhaci, rebelled against the last Ming dynasty emperor, sending his troops through the mountain passes between Manchuria and inner China. Just like the Japanese later, they clambered over the Great Wall, which had never been a very effective barrier against determined invaders, and poured out onto the vast North China Plain and its thousands of undefended villages, which is what Mao was going to do later in some of the largest battles ever fought. To control Manchuria is not to control China, but it provides an enormous advantage for any insurgent force.

  Mao was well aware of that. His image, especially in the West, is of the peasant guerrilla who used the countryside to surround the cities but didn’t need the cities to win. But already at the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the late spring of 1945 Mao was saying that the CCP needed industry, a communications system, a way of generating wealth, in order to counterbalance the government’s control of the industrial region near Shanghai. “Once we occupy the Northeast,” a confident Mao told a concluding session of the Seventh Congress, “we can lay a solid foundation for the Chinese revolution even if we lose all the existing base areas.”

  The foundation was being established with Stalin’s help in those weeks and months after the Japanese surrender, but the Communists’ movements were largely surreptitious and Stalin’s help a secret so that both sides could preserve the fiction that they were peace parties striving to avoid a Chinese civil war. Stalin continued to give assurances that he would live up to the agreements he’d signed on China, assurances that were foolishly believed by Hurley and others. Months of American confusion and uncertainty would pass before it became clear that Stalin’s policy was to pay lip service to his agreements with Chiang while helping the Chinese Communists as much as he could, short of provoking a vigorous American response.

  With that strategy, Stalin was bound to come out a winner. If the Communists gained control of North China, he would have helped them do it, and he would have gained what he assumed would be a friendly and even subservient regime on his border. That would be the best outcome from his point of view. Stalin, however, knew that the Communists might lose. If the national government prevailed, Stalin would claim to be innocent of intervention in China’s internal affairs, keeping the gains he had made at Yalta, stationing Soviet warships at Port Arthur, and maintaining friendly relations with a government that depended on his goodwill. In both cases, Stalin would succeed in replacing Japan as the paramount power in northeast Asia, reversing the effects of the Russian defeat in the war of 1905 and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and maintaining a safe buffer zone between Soviet Siberia and the rest of Asia.

  If he got that from China’s national government, Stalin would have no reason to risk the animosity of the nuclear-armed Americans in order to have even more. So he did his best to minimize that risk, pursuinga policy of such extraordinary flexibility that at times it seemed self-contradictory. He would urge the Chinese Communists to act aggressively, and when they did, he would curb them and demand that they make concessions to the national government. Later, when the situation allowed it, he would again urge a more aggressive policy. Stalin managed this masterfully. He never lost his influence among the Chinese Communists, even during those times when his caution provoked fits of frustrated anger on the part of Mao, and at the same time, he maintained correct, even cordial relations with the national government, until the forces he helped set in motion forced that government into exile.

  Assured of Soviet non-interference, the Communists devised an aggressive strategy to deal with the new American military presence. The very day the marines landed in China, an editorial in Liberation Daily said, accurately: “No matter what the intention of the Americans is, their landing will in fact interfere in China’s internal affairs, and inevitably assist the KMT to oppose the CCP and 100 million people in the liberated areas.” A few days later, the paper warned that the Americans should not advance into “places that have already been liberated and where there are no Japanese troops.” Communist policy was to be polite to the Americans and even to welcome them “if they respect our interests.” But if they tried to force their way into Communist-held areas, “we should formally inform them of our objection [and] be prepared militarily for resistance.”

  The first test of the CCP’s guidelines came near Beijing, where Zhou had warned General Worton there would be resistance. On October 5, a marine reconnaissance patrol on the route from Tianjin to Beijing discovered thirty-six scattered roadblocks that made it impossible for truck-sized vehicles to get through. The Communists wanted to impede deliveries of supplies from the port to the former imperial capital, where the marines had already set up their encampments and where Nationalist soldiers were arriving by air. The next day, when marine engineers, guarded by a rifle platoon, went to clear the road, some forty to fifty Communist troops opened fire on them from behind the surrounding trees and foliage. Three marines were wounded and the whole platoon withdrew. The next day, a rifle company and a tank platoon arrived on the scene, protected by planes based on a carrier off the coast, and they cleared the road without further incident.

  That same day, the marine commander, Major General Keller E. Rockey, presided over the surrender of all the Japanese forces in the area of Tianjin, about fifty thousand officers and men. The ceremony took place with due pomp—a marine band, a color guard, the flags of the United States and the Republic of China flying—in front of the French Municipal Building, the city’s most imposing European-style structure, now converted into the IIIAC headquarters. Tens of thousands of Chinese jammed the roped-off area where the surrender took place, or peered down from rooftops. A group of six Japanese officers walked past the marine guard to the surrender table where they symbolically laid down their swords before Rockey. Afterward, as they were escorted to waiting cars, the Chinese hissed and booed.

  The next day, Rockey, accompanied by a naval commander, Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, boarded the command ship Catoctin and headed along the north Shandong coast to carry out the task of occupying the port of Chefoo. The Americans knew that the Communists had seized control of Chefoo from the Japanese in the days after the end of the war. Chefoo held tremendous strategic importance because whoever held it could use it to ferry troops to Manchuria via the port of Dalian, just 150 miles across the Gulf of Zhili, and Manchuria was where the opening battle for control of China was looming.

  A few days before, on September 27, knowing that the Americans planned to send troops to the port, Ye Jianying, chief of staff of the Communist armed forces, sent a message to Wedemeyer telling him that since there were no Japanese in the vicinity, the deployment of American troops in that area would be taken by the Communists as interference in China’s internal affairs. Despite that, the Catoctin, escorted by the cruiser Louisville and its detachment of marines, arrived at Chefoo on the morning of October 7. Barbey, a specialist in amphibious warfare from Oregon who had commanded marines in battles in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Borneo, dispatched an American colonel to ask the Communists to leave, but the Communist official who met the American colonel politely refused to do so. He repeated what Wedemeyer had already heard from Ye. All was in good order thanks to “Chinese troops supported by the people of the province who have fought the enemy many years with many sacrifices.” At the same time, Ye sent a second warning to Wedemeyer’s headquarters: If American troops landed, there might be trouble, and it would be the fault of the United States.

  On board the Catoctin, Barbey confirmed to Wedemeyer that indeed there were no Japanese forces in the area, which meant that any landing by the marines would not represent the liberation of a Japanese-held city but “an interference in the internal a
ffairs of China” and that would be “bitterly resented by the Communists.” At Barbey’s urging, the American high command decided to forgo the Chefoo landing. The Communists had won a victory whose significance was not lost on at least one of the American reporters on the scene. The United States, Tillman Durdin wrote in The New York Times, had already given the Kuomintang government—“now in a relationship bordering on civil war”—a great deal of help by transporting government troops to the north and by directly taking over Tianjin, Beijing, and Qinwangdao. “The decision regarding Chefoo draws a line beyond which the United States will not go at present in supporting Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in relation to rival factions in China.”

  How things had changed. Only a few months earlier, while the war against Japan was still going on, American officers and members of the CCP Politburo were going together to the Saturday night dances in Yenan. In the fields and villages of occupied China, Eighth Route Army soldiers, the friendly Balus, were risking their lives, and sometimes sacrificing them, to rescue downed American airmen. Now the Communist policy was to make it just unsafe enough for the Americans, short of actual open warfare, that they would decide to leave.

  And, as the firefight on the Tianjin–Beijing road and the killing of John Birch demonstrated, it was unsafe, even if the danger didn’t seem all that serious to American military leaders. At a meeting with Secretary of State James Byrnes and the secretary of the navy, James F. Forrestal, the new secretary of war, Robert P. Patterson, dismissed these incidents with the Chinese Communists as of the “comic opera” variety, asserting that the marines could walk from one end of China to the other without “serious hindrance.”

  This was no doubt true. No force in China, except for the Soviets themselves, matched the marines in firepower or tactical know-how. Still, the China duty was tense and hard. The marines heard from the Japanese awaiting repatriation about the constant sniping, the ambushes, the mines, the sabotage of tracks and signal equipment that they had experienced from Eighth Route Army guerrillas as they patrolled the roads and rail lines of North China. That duty had fallen to the Americans, who rode the dusty coal trains and patrolled the earth-packed roadways in jeeps and trucks. Whatever a bureaucrat in a suit and tie might say ten thousand miles away, the marines faced a tricky indigenous group of armed partisans who wanted them to leave. From the Great Wall to Mukden, a Marine Corps history, states that “every mile of track, every bridge, and every switch was the potential target of Communist attacks.” During their entire deployment in China, the marines suffered twelve killed and forty-two wounded in eighteen armed clashes and several small-scale Communist attacks.

  On October 11, a marine reconnaissance company landed on the docks of Qingdao, the big port across the Shandong peninsula from Chefoo. The Eighth Route Army was in control of much of the nearby interior and a great deal of the coast. The central government was absent. The marines took over the port and secured the airfield ten miles outside the city. Within two days of the initial landing, a letter arrived for the division commander, Major General Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr., later commandant of the Marine Corps. It was from the Communist commander in Shandong, and it proposed cooperation in “destroying the remaining Japanese military forces and the rest of the traitor army,” meaning the army of the Chinese puppet regime. He said that the Communists were getting ready to enter Qingdao and that he expected no resistance from the marines, who he hoped would stay out of the “open conflict” looming with government troops.

  Shepherd wrote back that he wasn’t there to destroy anybody, that it was not desirable for the Communists to enter Qingdao, and that “the Sixth Marines will in no way assist any Chinese group in conflict against another.” Shortly thereafter, Shepherd stood side by side with the commander of the central government troops as the Japanese garrison, ten thousand strong, formally presented its surrender at the Qingdao racecourse, built during the days when Qingdao was a German colony.

  After that exchange of letters between Shepherd and the local CCP commander, there were frequent clashes among the various armed groups, the puppet remnants, the Japanese who did guard duty while awaiting repatriation, and the Communists. Despite the buildup of government forces, Qingdao, as the marine history puts it, remained “an island in a Communist Sea.” Only the marines kept the Communists from taking the biggest port in China between Shanghai and Tianjin, a fact that, certainly in the eyes of the Communists, meant that, contrary to Shepherd’s assurance, the Americans were assisting one side against the other in China’s civil war.

  The tension also led to armed incidents farther north. In the middle of November, DeWitt Peck, a four-star general from Bakersfield, California, who commanded the First Marine Division, was on a train near Guye, a village on the main line between the coalfields of Tangshan and the port of Qinwangdao—the freight line whose protection General Wedemeyer had called a military necessity. Suddenly, Peck and the troops he was accompanying, a group of marine guards, were attacked by Communist forces based in a village five hundred yards north of the track. A squadron of marine planes was called in and made mock strafing runs on the Communist-held village—not wanting to risk civilian casualties—and the attacking Communists slipped away. When a rescue company from the Seventh Marines arrived on the scene the next day, they discovered that during the night the Communists had ripped up four hundred yards of track. Several Chinese railroad workers were killed by mines planted on the roadbed.

  Peck took a plane to Qinwangdao, where he conferred directly with the Nationalist commander for the whole northeast, General Tu Li-ming. The two agreed that central government troops would be deployed to clear the railroad line of Communist guerrillas and that in order to release the troops for this duty, the marines would take over guard duty for all the bridges over one hundred meters long for the entire 135-mile distance between Tangshan and Qinwangdao. From the marines’ point of view, the arrangement kept them from a direct role in fratricidal war; from the CCP’s perspective, the marines were helping the central government take back territory that the Communists, by dint of bravery and sacrifice, had taken under their control behind the Japanese lines.

  These small skirmishes do not figure prominently in American military history. Yet they were the first such confrontations between American forces and a new kind of enemy, one that was going to become familiar over the succeeding decades in Vietnam and, still later, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the kind of confrontation that gave rise to the term “asymmetric warfare.” Hostile guerrillas materializing from anonymous villages, firing and then melting away when American fighter planes appeared in the skies, became a pattern for the later American wars in Asia. In the background to these skirmishes fought on the railroad line in China’s Hebei province was the looming Cold War. They were small proxy fights between the United States and the Soviet Union whose contest for spheres of influence and power had already begun.

  As part of the Sino-Soviet agreement, a negotiating committee, set up ostensibly to supervise the transfer of control from the Soviet Union to China, was already in place in the city of Changchun in south central Manchuria, which was where Marshal Malinovsky had his headquarters. Malinovsky, the hard, seasoned, highly decorated, utterly reliable Communist officer, the man in whom there was “not a drop of gentleness,” was from an impoverished family in Ukraine. He had escaped a nasty childhood by joining the pre-Soviet Russian army when he was fifteen years old, and he had been fighting ever since, participating in just about every Russian and Soviet armed conflict occurring during his lifetime. He was wounded twice during World War I. He fought on the Soviet side in the civil war that followed the revolution of 1917. He was a volunteer during the Spanish Civil War, and when he returned home he was awarded the Order of Lenin in recognition of his bravery. After the German attack in 1941, he became one of the heroes of the bloody, do-or-die defense of Stalingrad where, for the first time in World War II, the tide turned in favor of the Russians, and he got the Order of Suvorov for outstan
ding generalship, the highest decoration in the Soviet army.

  Later, Malinovsky was the victor in the battles for Budapest, Brno, and Bratislava as the Russian armies ground down German divisions in the march to Berlin. At the end of the war in Europe, he was transferred to Asia, and he commanded the Soviet rout of the Japanese in Manchuria. Years later, he was minister of defense of the Soviet Union; in 1960 he was pictured on the cover of Time magazine under the headline “Russia’s New Hard Line.” He was “hulking” and “impassive,” the magazine said; he was “a true son of the socialist motherland,” according to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He was short and heavy-set with a kind of bulldog determination imprinted on his unsmiling face, not a man to be intimidated or to be afflicted by the sentiment known in the Communist lexicon as bourgeois humanitarianism. He was also, as the Chinese delegation soon discovered, a master of a kind of bureaucratic obstructionism, of the fake excuse.

  The Chinese team, led by General Hsiung Shih-hui, arrived in Changchun on August 12. They soon had occasion to count the many ways by which the Russians could hinder them in achieving their purpose, which was to replace the Soviets with soldiers and officials of the central government. There were petty obstructions. The Chinese learned, for example, that the Soviets had ordered a suspension in the Bank of China’s activities in Manchuria, so the negotiating team had difficulty paying its expenses. At one point, complaining of some press coverage of Soviet domestic politics, the Russians actually searched the KMT offices in Changchun, summoned the entire staff for interrogation, accused them of distributing propaganda without first getting permission from the Soviet high command, held them overnight, and then ordered them to cease all their activities, including the sending of teams to investigate conditions in various places in Manchuria. For weeks, the Soviets complained about what they called “anti-Soviet activities” in Manchuria, and they held the KMT’s representatives responsible. The Soviets even refused to allow the Chinese to send representatives to Jehol, the region just west of Manchuria, to buy leather for uniforms, saying that the route to Jehol was “disorderly.”