* This is the only instance this author ever found in which T. A. and T. L. Soong are accused of sharing their eldest sister’s penchant for speculation.
† 50,000 yuan = $33,500 U.S. in 1914 ($744,340 today).
‡ 200,000 yuan = $168,000 U.S. in 1925 ($2,063,370 today).
§ 2,000,000 yuan = $720,000 U.S. in 1935 ($11,290,000 today).
¶ 1,000,000,000 yuan = $50,000,000 U.S. in 1945 ($598,064,000 today).
* The fact that Ai-ling joined her husband on this trip effectively negates the story May-ling told Martha Gellhorn about her sister’s effort to save the price of the government bonds and support the Chinese stock market at the same time.
* See chapter 19.
† $400,000 Chinese = $118,000 U.S. in 1932–1933 ($1,960,000 today).
‡ $16,000,000 Chinese = $4,720,000 U.S. in 1932–1933 ($78,412,800 today).
§ $30,000,000 Chinese = $8,850,000 U.S. in 1932–1933 ($147,024,000 today).
¶ These figures as well as most of the above information come from Jonathan Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–1945,” The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, July–September 1976, p. 21.
* $400 Chinese = $104 U.S. in 1933 ($1,727 today).
† $1,688.70 Chinese = $439 U.S. in 1933 ($7,293 today).
* Crozier says there were about 2,500; the figure of 5,000 comes from White and Jacoby. As with everything in the New Fourth Army Incident, there are few consistencies in the story.
† It is said that during dinner Chou told Chiang that his Nationalist government was undemocratic. “You mean you call me undemocratic?” Chiang retorted. (White, In Search of History, p. 114.)
* Even these did not always help. On June 5, 1941, too many people crowded into a tunnel in the center of town. The shelter was packed full, people panicked, and many of Chungking’s ordinary citizens suffocated. After what came to be called the Great Tunnel Disaster, shelters were built with more than one opening.
* 25 cents Chinese = 1.2 cents U.S. in 1941 (17 cents today).
† $2.00 Chines = 10 cents U.S. in 1941 ($1.46 today).
* The United States was still supplying Japan with two-thirds of its war materials.
* $34,000 Hong Kong = $10,438 U.S. in 1938 ($159,500 today).
* The Lend-Lease Act was Roosevelt’s solution to the fact that Great Britain had run through $6.5 billion in credits for arms, food, and raw materials from the United States two months earlier. Under Lend-Lease, “any country whose defense the president deems vital to the defense of the United States” became eligible for defense material through lease, sale, transfer, or exchange.
† Michael Schaller agrees: “Many of those who joined Soong’s effort made fortunes in the lucrative sales to China financed by American credits.” (Michael Schaller, The United States and China in the Twentieth Century, p. 55.)
* Chuikov later gained renown as the commander of the famous defense of Stalingrad.
* In his memoir, Marshal Chuikov posited a disturbing possibility: “I have also thought that Chiang Kai-shek and Dai [Tai] Li were intentionally withholding intelligence in their possession from the Western powers so as not to put any impediments in the way of the expected Japanese strike, whether against the Soviet Union in the north or against Britain and the United States in the south.” (V. Chuikov, Mission to China, pp. 156–57.)
* Alsop, a socially prominent journalist and great-nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, had joined the U.S. Navy and arranged to get himself assigned to Chennault’s Flying Tigers. He was on a supply mission for Chennault at the time.
* It was later said that Drum was not the fool pictured by Stilwell but demanded “some clarification of the War Department’s muddy thinking” about China and was, in fact, “a general of prescience, who deserves more than the shabby treatment he received.” (Hanson W. Baldwin, “The Place of Vinegar Joe in History,” The New York Times, April 12, 1953.)
† In 1962, when Chiang was seventy-five, May-ling wrote T.V. that her husband’s weight was up to 130 pounds, “the heaviest he has been at any time in his life.” (Hoover Archives: T. V. Soong files, Madame Chiang Kai-shek to T. V. Soong, Box 63, Folder 33, December 10, 1962.)
* The foreign legations had not yet been transferred to the new capital of Nanking.
* Equivalent to $6,604,000 today.
† The AVG was dissolved on July 4, 1942. Some of the pilots remained, forming part of a new China Air Task Force, which became the Fourteenth Air Force in March 1943.
* $100 Chinese = $5.00 U.S. in 1943 ($62.23 today).
* $16 Chinese = $.80 U.S. ($9.96 today); $18.00 Chinese = $.90 U.S. ($11.20 today.)
† Chiang’s temper was not always used against the deserving. Watching a movie in his home one evening and vastly annoyed by a particular scene, he stalked out of the room and ordered that the projectionist be thrashed.
* The number of enemy planes varies with the raconteur.
* Dorn’s italics.
* One of whom was Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Seagrave, the famous “Burma Surgeon.”
* Stilwell later apologized to the generalissimo via Madame Chiang for having left Burma without her husband’s permission.
* He was ranked lieutenant general until 1944.
* Figures from China Monthly 4, no. 4 (March 1943), p. 14 (Wellesley College Archive).
* What really bothered Currie was a wire he discovered from T.V. to an associate on the subject of Currie himself: “Please confidentially advise all CDS [China Defense Supplies] department chiefs to have as little to do with him [Currie] as possible as War Department, Lend-Lease, American Embassy and Stilwell do not have any regard for him.” (Hoover Archives: T. V. Soong papers, Box 11, T.V., wire to Dr. Rajchman, November 11, 1925.)
* Currie was furious that Stilwell did not give him credit for this arrangement. As he wrote John Paton Davies, Jr., Stilwell’s political adviser, “Seeing as how it was my bright idea, concocted mainly to save lend-lease to China, cleared by me with the Generalissimo and Ho Ying-chin [General Ho], and cleared again by me back here.… I think the General might have given me a little credit. In fact he is pretty deeply in my debt for having patched things up and having got this new project started.” (Hoover Archives: Lauchlin Currie papers, Box 1, Currie to Davies, November 26, 1942.)
* 100,000 Indian rupees = $19,400 U.S. in 1943 ($365,890 today).
* As Tuchman points out, it eventually took nine army air forces, ninety naval carriers, 14,847 combat planes, and two atom bombs to do this.
† It will be remembered that McHugh was a friend and frequent guest whom the Chiangs had met through Donald, as well as the officer in charge of Far East secret intelligence.
* A rarity in Chungking at the time since one bottle of scotch cost $100 at the American PX.
* According to Jonathan Fenby, Chiang was worried that May-ling might have stomach cancer and wanted her to take tests not offered in China. He therefore had her carried onto the plane, and she was accompanied on her journey by two nurses. According to Li, her severe abdominal pain was caused by an intestinal parasite.
* Stalin had refused an invitation to participate because the Red Army was engaged in serious fighting against the Germans at the time.
* Her appearance caused the president to address Jeanette as “my boy,” while the White House servants, thinking she was her brother, unpacked her suitcases in his room. (Tuchman, p. 448, and Li, p. 198.)
* Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was the first.
† The pilots in the first American bombing of Tokyo, commanded by James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, were successful in dropping their bombs on the Japanese capital but crash-landed or had to parachute out of their planes on their way to the airfield in the province of Chekiang.
* The traditional friendship of China and the United States; gratitude for American support of China in the Sino-Japanese conflict; the danger of Japanese ambitions; the emancipation of mankind; and the fact that China a
nd the United States were the gigantic pillars of peace in the Pacific. In two subsequent wires, Chiang added that along with these, his wife should mention Washington, Lincoln, Jesus, Confucius, and Sun Yat-sen.
* A famous American actress of the day.
† Koo had been ambassador to France (1936–1941) and was currently serving as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. In 1945, he was named China’s chief delegate to the United Nations and served as ambassador to the United States from 1946 to 1956.
* Kennedy was not a Republican but had been against the United States entering the war. He had incurred the wrath of the British when, as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, he argued for the appeasement of Hitler. Resigning under pressure in 1940, he had tried to reinstate himself after Pearl Harbor by wiring Roosevelt, “Name the battlefront—I’m yours to command,” but he was never again offered an important post by the president. (James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, p. 211.)
* In 1973, sister Ching-ling complained to a friend that she had been “a victim of neurodermatitis for over 5 months” with “itching and insomnia”; five years later, she wrote that the bright klieg lights at a party congress had “caused my old skin trouble to return, while my body and face are covered with red itchy patches. Naturally insomnia follows.” Moreover, one of May-ling’s younger brothers was apparently known as “the Frog.” (The quotes are from Israel Epstein,Woman in World History, p. 589; Sylvia Wu, Memories of Madame Sun, p. 11; and interviews with family friends.)
* Shortly after her Madison Square Garden speech, Henry Luce said that over $300,000 had already come in for China and $1 million more was on the way. Luce had, by this time, managed to merge eight different groups appealing for various kinds of aid to China (war orphans, medicine, Christian colleges, etc.) into something called United China Relief and had put Willkie, Paul Hoffman (president of Studebaker, later head of the Ford Foundation, delegate to the United Nations, and managing director of the U.N. Special Fund), David O. Selznick, and himself on the board of directors.
* Steve Neal, author of Dark Horse.
* Cowles was domestic director of the Office of War Information during World War II.
* Willkie had died in 1944.
* I am indebted to the Wellesley Archive for showing me a tape of this event.
* Li explains that The Gospel According to Hoyle is a book of card tricks with Christian messages used by evangelists.
* It was said by the Chinese in New York and Washington that she had bought forty pairs of shoes and spent $45,000 on furs. $45,000 U.S. in 1943 = $533,333 today.
† $945,000 U.S. in 1943 = $11,200,000 today. (See Hoover Archives: Lauchlin Currie papers, Box 3, Folder Madame Chiang Kai-shek, LC notes of May 24, May 26, and June 10, 1943.)
* Raised in China, Buck was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her novel about Chinese peasants and the land, The Good Earth.
* A report as of April 1942 lists fourteen men in the AVG with various forms of venereal disease, causing a loss of seventy-six days of work.
* An unidentified flyer.
* Referred to by Alsop as “these ruthlessly self-centered women.” (Alsop with Platt, I’ve Seen the Best of It: Memoirs, p. 223.)
* General Alan Francis Brooke (later Viscount Alanbrooke), chief of the Imperial General Staff and principal military adviser to Churchill.
* A historian and editor of the Morgenthau diaries.
† Equivalent to $249,000,000 today.
* The others were Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Poland, the Ukrainian SSR, and Yugoslavia.
* As distinguished from Hunan, which is to the south, Honan is in the north.
* The others were Eleanor Roosevelt (Queen of Diamonds) for her enterprise and energy; Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (Queen of Spades) for the tragedy of her country; and Queen Elizabeth of England (Queen of Hearts) for her support of her husband and country’s war efforts.
* The China Hands were a group of Foreign Service officers stationed in the U.S. Embassy in China, called by journalist and commentator Eric Sevareid “the ablest group of young diplomats I have ever seen in a single American mission abroad.” (E. J. Kahn, Jr., The China Hands, jacket copy.)
† This was part of the $500 million credit the U.S. Treasury had deposited in China’s account. According to John Morton Blum, who edited Wallace’s diaries, “Though American officials in Chungking suspected that members of the Soong family had used some of that deposit for their personal gain, those suspicions were never proved. Incontestably Kung and others did use American aid unwisely.” (Henry A. Wallace, The Price of Vision, pp. 349–50.) (Note: This is the only time that this author found a direct reference to Madame Chiang being involved in speculation.)
* At another time Stalin spoke of the members of the CCP as “radish Communists,” i.e., red on the outside but white on the inside. (Herbert Feis, The China Tangle, p. 141.)
* One nurse described the primitive conditions of the wards—raised straw pallets for the patients with rats and cockroaches running around underneath—plus the uncaring attitude of the staff, men and women “who had been associated with the Chinese Army for a long time… [and]… were squeezed dry of compassion.” (LaVonne Teleshaw Camp,Lingering Fever, p. 41.)
* Mountbatten was the commander of SEAC and Stilwell’s superior.
* According to Alsop, Chiang “burst into convulsive and stormy sobbing” after everyone except T.V. had left the room. (Alsop with Platt, I’ve Seen the Best of It: Memoirs, p. 241.)
† He had actually told Kung that the president would take no action on Stilwell without consulting Marshall.
* According to Seagrave, while May-ling rested, sister Ai-ling “wheeled and dealed” with their host, Getúlio Vargas, the dictatorial president of Brazil, a man who was said to have brought the more ruthless, if superficial, elements of European fascism to Latin America. Kung’s wife, Seagrave wrote, “transferred sums of money” and bought properties in industrial São Paolo. He also contends that the Kungs and Soongs had been investing in South America for some time. (Sterling Seagrave, The Soong Dynasty, p. 413.) According to a member of the British Information Service, the purpose of Ai-ling’s visit was “to inspect her investments in that hemisphere,” which were “said to be very large.” (National Archives: RG 226, Entry 210, Box 401, July 26, 1944.)
* The 5,300-mile trip down to Rio and back to the United States made aviation history— the first time any airplane had flown more than 5,000 miles in one day.
* Hurley outmaneuvered Lauchlin Currie, who was also campaigning for the assignment. (Hoover Archives: Lauchlin Currie papers, LC, “Memorandum for the President: Re: Ambassador to China,” November 13, 1942.)
* Statistics from Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45, p. 589. White and Jacoby’s figures differ; they estimate twice as many inhabitants and twice as many soldiers. (White and Jacoby, Thunder out of China, p. 199.)
* As in rebels and “Is it true what they say about Dixie?”
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