China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (40 page)

There was a practical matter as well. The Yalta agreement, while devastating for Chinese pride, bound the United States ever closer to the Chiang government. Russia, by the terms of the secret deal, was pledged to give aid only to the KMT government, not to its ideological allies, the Communists. And now, here was a proposal that the United States effectively recognize the Communists as the de facto government of northern China and that, in defiance of the wishes of an allied government, it provide arms and aid to that de facto government! And what if Chiang were to fall from power as a result of this American help to its enemy? Then, as the historian
Gary May has written, the Russians would be freed from their obligation to support only the Nationalists. “They could therefore,” May concludes, “join the Chinese Communists and
seize control of China.”

Whatever FDR’s reasoning, Hurley was now armed with a vote of confidence from the president, and he used it to press what amounted to a purge of the professional China experts in the field, the men who had been in the country for years, who spoke the language, who knew the place and its dramatis personae. John Davies, luckily for him, had already left for Moscow where he was greatly appreciated by
George Kennan, the chargé at the embassy there. But John Service, who had gone to Yenan in March to report on a Communist Party congress, learned, upon his return to Chungking, that he was to disembark for Washington right away, which he did, the only passenger on a military plane making the long trip via South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and
South America, arriving on April 12, the very day of FDR’s death. Arthur Ringwalt was also reassigned. So were several others, including a third secretary, a language officer, and
George Atcheson, the embassy’s number two, who was replaced at Hurley’s insistence by a Virginia banker,
Walter S. Robertson, who knew nothing about China and, perhaps because of that, got along well with Hurley.

Hurley also imposed a ban on American diplomatic travel to Yenan, so the easy access that the China hands had had to senior Communist officials was cut off. Service also later reported that Hurley’s habit of showing diplomatic dispatches to Nationalist Chinese officials had a dampening effect, because their sources might be endangered. “Some,” Service said, “were called on the mat to receive a lecture, in mule-skinner language, from the Ambassador.” Hurley’s triumph was not the main reason that the possibility of friendly relations with the Chinese Communists evaporated, but it was a contributing factor, since it confirmed to Mao and his advisers what they were disposed to believe anyway, which was that the United States was an imperialist power dominated by monopoly capitalists that was going to be their enemy inevitably.

The men whose services
on China were now lost to the United States had kept up a remarkable, often brilliant flow of reporting on China for the entire war. They were interested in everything. John Stewart Service wrote fact-rich reports on cleavages within the Kuomintang military, about the propaganda on both sides of the war, on why some Chinese collaborated with the Japanese, on the effects of censorship on public opinion, on how the Communists were able to expand their bases into Japanese-occupied territory, and many other topics, even on the wall slogans and posters of both the Kuomintang and the Communists and what they showed of the nature of China’s political culture and the image that the two parties strove to present of themselves and each other. Service’s report in March 1945 on Chiang’s rivalry with a group of commanders known as the
Guangxi Clique was a deft dissection of the inner workings of Chinese politics, showing, among other things, why it was more important to China’s president to weaken his potential rivals than to promote capable officers to higher positions. This thoroughly Machiavellian application of “Divide and Rule,” Service wrote, “may have seemed to Chiang to be his only alternative. Being itself weak,
the only hope of the Central Government, by this limited view, was in weakening—and keeping weak and disunited—all the opposition groups. ‘Unity,’ to Chiang obviously means domination.”

Service and the other diplomatic pros made a major mistake, which was to become starry-eyed about Mao, to stress the “democratic” impulses of the CCP, to miss utterly the repression of dissent that the Communists engaged in even as they called on the KMT to respect civil rights. They were duped by the Communists. There is no avoiding that conclusion. But they were in no way pro-Communist, as Hurley and the committees of witch-hunters would later allege in their efforts to blame them for “losing” China. The term that Hurley insisted on applying to them—“disloyal”—was an ugly slander. Not until forty years later, when a new generation of China experts was able to go to China again, would the United States enjoy such a consistently high level of reporting and analysis on China as was provided by Service, Ludden, Davies, Atcheson, Rice, John Emmerson, and the others who were removed from their posts in Hurley’s purge.

At the beginning of April, still in Washington, Hurley gave
a widely covered press conference, watched attentively in Chungking and Yenan, announcing in no uncertain terms that there would be no aid to the Communists, because such aid would be equivalent to recognizing another Chinese government other than the one the United States was pledged to support. Hurley threw in a statement of his usual optimism, saying that the various parties in China were “drawing closer together” and that his goal of unity was achievable. But the main message was that, until this unity could be achieved, there would be no “fostering or assisting the development of armed Chinese Communists.” This declaration was inconsistent with the position paper that the State Department had given Wedemeyer only weeks before, but nobody emerged to contradict the man the press referred to as Major-General Hurley.

Even before that, Hurley had pressed the president for information about
Yalta and what exactly had been decided there with regard to China. At first, FDR had denied to his ambassador that there had been a secret
agreement on China between him and Stalin, but on his final visit to the White House, Hurley finally got him to acknowledge the truth, and FDR showed Hurley the text of the deal with Stalin. In later accounts of this incident, Hurley says he was deeply shocked. “
American diplomats,” he charged, had “surrendered the territorial integrity
and
political independence of China … and [written] the blueprint for the Communist conquest.”

But as his unauthorized biographer,
Russell D. Buhite, has noted, he was probably feigning his outrage or at least exaggerating it. Hurley understood full well the need to induce the Soviet Union to get into the war, and he accepted the concomitant necessity of giving them something in China in return. What he wanted—or, more accurately, what he unrealistically wished for—was
a deal between Moscow and Chungking that would preempt Soviet help to the CCP. Hurley seems to have taken it on himself to go to London and Moscow in an effort (sanctioned, he later said, by Roosevelt, though this is uncertain) to get British and Russian support for his China policy.

And so, once again, Hurley was off swimming naïvely in the treacherous waters of international diplomacy. He met with
Churchill, who dutifully agreed to support the Chiang government and to encourage the KMT and the CCP to make a deal, and who subsequently did nothing of the kind. Then it was on to Moscow, where Hurley saw Stalin and Molotov, who assured him that they supported Chiang Kai-shek’s government and his government alone and that they had no intention of throwing their weight behind the “radish” Communists of China.

It is amazing how easily Hurley, so ready to suspect the China hands of dark, hidden, and nefarious motivations, was taken in by this confection. He never seems to have suspected that Molotov and Stalin could be trying to
neutralize the United States by providing false assurances about their intentions. Ironically, one of the China hands that he had battled with, John Davies, was now in Moscow, and he tried to warn his old boss that he was being sold a bill of goods—and yet it was Davies who was later accused of softness on Communism rather than Hurley. “
There was ample advice to [Hurley] which he showed no desire to tap,” George Kennan commented.

While the political maneuvering
took place, the war in China sputtered on. Thousands were dying as Japan’s China Expeditionary Army, under General
Yasuji
Okamura, made a last-ditch effort to knock China once and for all out of the conflict.
Okamura had 820,000 men organized into twenty-five divisions, an armored brigade, eleven independent infantry brigades, a cavalry brigade, and ten independent brigades.
These troops were deployed in three formations—the
North China Area Army holding the territory between the Yellow River and the Great Wall, the Sixth Area Army, which faced the Chinese and the Americans in east China, and the Thirteenth Area Army in Shanghai and the lower Yangzi Valley. Okamura himself commanded the Sixth Area Army, which, with five divisions and 228 cannon, was the elite
force that kept the Americans of China theater headquarters, and especially its commander, General Albert Wedemeyer, up at night.

Okamura was the type of Japanese officer—ruthless, determined, and capable—to inspire worry. He had been in China since he commanded troops in the occupation of Shanghai in 1932, and in that role he had gained the dubious distinction of being the first such commander to order the forced prostitution of local women, given the stupendously euphonious name “comfort women,” who were made available to Japanese troops in virtually all of the territories they invaded and occupied.

After the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, Okamura commanded the Japanese Eleventh Army in some of the major battles in the Yangzi River Valley. Transferred to the northern provinces in the spring of 1939, Okamura requested permission to use poison gas, arguing that it was needed to give his troops “
the feeling of victory,” and he subsequently commanded the largest chemical attack of the war.

In 1940, a full general and overall commander of the North China Area Army, Okamura was in charge when the Communists launched the surprise
Hundred Regiments Offensive, which Japan countered with the brutal tactic known to the Chinese as the
Three Alls policy—“burn all, kill all, loot all.” Japanese troops under his command were responsible for the deaths of what scholars have estimated to be 2.7
million noncombatants. After that, in 1944, Okamura was the overall commander of the
Ichigo offensive, the effort stretching over many months in 1944 to conquer all of east and southeast China, knocking out along the way the American 14th Air Force’s bases. The photographs of him show a stern, dour, grim man in uniform, every inch the graduate of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy that he was, deeply imbued with the Japanese military values of iron discipline, the unsparing massacre of the enemy, and the glory of victory for the emperor.

As 1945 dawned, Okamura and the Japanese could congratulate themselves on some important recent successes in China—this in contrast to the war elsewhere, where devastating losses in the Pacific, in the Philippines, and in Burma, as well as the defeats earlier at Midway,
Iwo Jima, and other Pacific atolls, were already spelling doom for the empire. Still, in early 1945 there seems to have been little thought of giving up. Nor did American commanders believe that the hardest fighting was behind them. In November 1944, even as the newly arrived Wedemeyer was familiarizing himself with the situation, Japan seized the portions of the
Canton-Hankou-Beijing railroad line that were still in Chinese hands, thereby creating an unbroken railroad line stretching from the port of Haiphong in French Indochina all the way to Manchuria and Korea, potentially a critical supply line if a showdown battle between the United States and Japan were to take place on Chinese soil. At the same time, the 11th Army, with four glory-seeking divisions and a company of tanks, seized the American airfields of Guilin and Liuzhou, from which Chennault’s 14th Air Force had harassed Japanese supply lines in China and bombed shipping at sea.

At a press conference a few weeks later, Secretary of War
Henry L. Stimson announced that victory was a long way off. “
For many years the Japanese have been squatting on the China coast,” he said. “They have many thousands of troops there and lately have been reinforcing their grip. They have taken over an inland supply route from Canton to Hankou to Peiping, and have occupied three more airfields east of this route that were helpful to our airmen.” In addition, Japan still possessed powerful home defenses against an invasion, with production capacity still strong and large reserves of oil and gas.

The losses of Guilin and Liuzhou were serious and worrisome, since not only were these the sites of large American airbases, they also commanded the roads further to the west, especially to
Kweiyang and
Kunming. Kunming was the terminus of the over-the-
Hump airlift and the about-to-be-reopened Burma Road, the point of distribution for the American supplies without which China couldn’t stay in the war.

Guilin was an old southern town with colonnaded streets and shops shaded under wide porticoes, a weather-beaten, stained, and picturesquely shabby place near an ethereally beautiful range of mountains that arose spire-like from the verdant countryside. Almost since the beginning of the Japanese war in 1937, American pilots had flown into and out of the military airport there, catching glimpses of the Li River, the early morning sunlight flashing on rice paddies plowed by water buffalo below, even as the pilots took off for bombing and strafing runs in the most lethal and modern aircraft known to men.

At night, the pilots and maintenance crews had steaks and beer in
bamboo shacks near the airfield, and then in the morning they sat at briefings for that day’s run. They talked about near misses and about their buddies who were shot down and never made it back. They expressed murderous fury at the Chinese desperadoes, some of them war refugees, who descended on Guilin precisely because the Americans were there, getting their hands on Lend-Lease supplies and selling them on the black market or, as was widely suspected, operating radio transmitters to let the Japanese know when the American planes took off.