China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (32 page)

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.

FDR took
Hurley’s cable seriously enough to pass it on to Admiral
William D. Leahy, the president’s chief military adviser, who gave it to the army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, who sent it on to Albert Wedemeyer. Wedemeyer, at the time, was in the field striving to get the government forces to renew their offensive on the Salween front. Wedemeyer, asked by Marshall for an explanation, replied at first that there had been no “disloyal scheming” by any of the men under his command. Wedemeyer was angry at Hurley for having sent off his accusatory cable to the president without his knowledge. The men Hurley had accused of misbehavior were, after all, on Wedemeyer’s staff, including McClure, his chief of staff. Hurley was upset at Wedemeyer’s dismissal of the charges. Matters became so strained between the American ambassador to China and the commander of China theater headquarters that they didn’t speak to each other for days—while sharing a house in Chungking! “
It was most embarrassing, since we had to sit together at meals,” Wedemeyer later wrote, until “Pat Hurley came into my room one evening while I was propped up in bed reading. He sat on the edge of my bed, clasped my right hand in both of his, and said that he was sorry for his behavior toward me.”

When Marshall pressed for more details, Wedemeyer looked deeper into the matter and discovered that, indeed, Hurley’s account had been largely true: some officers, namely Bird and Barrett, the latter under orders from McClure, had indeed talked to Mao. Given McClure’s role, it is hard to believe that Wedemeyer knew nothing about the initiative, but never mind. In a cable to the War Department, he apologized for the “
unauthorized loose discussions” that had taken place between the Communists and “my officers employed in good faith by General Hurley,” and though he disagreed that this had been the cause of the breakdown in KMT-CCP negotiations, he admitted that it “could have strongly contributed to [Hurley’s] difficulties in bringing about a solution to the problem.” Doing his part to further this reconciliation,
Wedemeyer held a press conference in Chungking where he announced that all American officers had sworn henceforth to give no assistance to anybody in China other than the Chungking government—a clear if unspoken repudiation of the McClure-Barrett initiative.

The result of all this was that Hurley, the only actor in the matter who had direct access to Roosevelt, felt vindicated in his suspicions of
disloyalty on the part of his subordinates. If he ever learned that the matter had originated with Donovan and that Bird and Barrett were simply following orders, he never acknowledged it. It is, of course, entirely possible that, as Hurley believed, the Communists were emboldened to back out of the Hurley negotiations by the prospect that they could get American aid without a deal with Chiang. But if they felt that way for a few weeks at the end of December and in January, they were soon disabused of that notion, and negotiations did resume.

Meanwhile, an event was taking place thousands of miles away that gave Mao far more reason to believe that matters in China were moving his way than some inconclusive conversations with American military officers ever could have, and this event soon made almost everything that had already taken place between the United States and the Communists irrelevant for the future.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Moral Compromise

E
arly in the New Year, Mao Zedong became one of the first to know that something of historic significance was soon to take place along the wintry shores of the Black Sea at a place that few outside Russia had ever heard of called
Yalta.

There, from February 4 to February 11, 1945, the Big Three—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—were to meet and to decide among themselves on fighting the war’s final battles and shaping the balance of power afterward. The meeting was held under conditions of strict wartime secrecy. Until it was over, the American press and people didn’t even know that Roosevelt had left the United States. But the circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that Mao knew about the meeting shortly before it began, and almost certainly it was Stalin who informed him, using a secret radio connection that the two maintained to keep in close touch for the entire anti-Japanese war of resistance in China.

On February 3, the day before Yalta’s opening session, Mao cabled Zhou Enlai that “Stalin is meeting Churchill and Roosevelt,” and that Stalin would be in touch about the results of the meeting later. Given the overall secrecy, there was
no way for Mao to have known that the fateful Yalta Conference was about to start unless Stalin had told him.

Zhou was in Chungking at the time, having gone there on January 22 after Mao acceded to Hurley’s persistent entreaty that he resume the stalled KMT-CCP negotiations. But the news about Yalta evidently persuaded Mao that the talks should be postponed, and he ordered Zhou to return to Chungking right away. Mao reasoned, as the leading scholar of this episode has concluded, that the news of the imminent meeting at Yalta meant that, sooner or later, the Russians would come
into the war in Asia, and that “would certainly increase the weight the CCP carried in China’s politics.” Mao’s decision therefore was to defer the talks with Hurley for a while “
in order to take full advantage of the increasing Soviet influence in the Far East after Yalta.”