China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (53 page)

In this connection, while Mao was still in Chungking,
Lu Yi, a CCP army leader,
told him that Chinese Communist troops had arrived in Dalian from Chefoo, which was taken over by the Eighth Route Army on August 23. There, Lu said, the Chinese were in contact with the Soviets, who told them that they would not interfere with their activities in villages and that they would be able to organize unarmed mass organizations in the large cities.

The United States
also swung into action. The OSS, which, like everybody else, was surprised by the sudden end of the war, switched its mission from gathering intelligence about the Japanese occupiers to gathering intelligence about the postwar situation. “Although we have been
caught with our pants down, we will do our best to pull them up in time,” Colonel
Richard Heppner, the OSS chief in China, wrote to Wild Bill Donovan, who was on his way back to the United States after a trip to China only a few days earlier. Since the war ended in Europe, OSS had expanded its operations in China and now had
nearly two thousand agents in the country. By August 12, the same day that Zhu
De’s note arrived at the American embassy in Chungking, Heppner had assembled several teams to be
dropped into territories all over China. The Magpie Team went to Beijing; the Duck Team to Shandong; Sparrow to Shanghai; Flamingo to Hainan Island; and Cardinal to Mukden, the largest city in Manchuria. Other teams went elsewhere in Asia—Quail to Hanoi, Raven to Vientiane, Eagle to Korea.

The teams arrived in place within the next week. In Beijing, Magpie quickly discovered a large POW camp. So did Duck, in the central Shandong city of Weixian. Cardinal parachuted to a place on the outskirts of Mukden on August 16, sent there urgently to arrive before the Soviets did and to collect intelligence on them once they were there. When the Soviets did arrive, the Americans immediately sensed a sort of petty harassment and unfriendliness directed toward them by the Soviet military that foreshadowed the two countries’ future conflict of interest in Manchuria. Cardinal quickly learned of
a nearby POW camp housing 1,321 Americans and several hundred others. The team’s efforts to get there and liberate it were stalled by the Soviets. “Russians very non-cooperative,” a member of the Cardinal Team, Major
R. H. Helm, wrote in a letter to Heppner on August 25. “They delayed us until they could send a detachment to our camp to ‘liberate’ them and accept the credit. Took four days to arrange for us to go to camp. Not the consideration and cooperation we would give a similar group if the situation were reversed.”

Once the OSS team did get to the camp, it began sending back reports on what it learned from the newly liberated GIs, especially about the
deaths of thousands of American troops at the hands of the Japanese. Lieutenant
Ray Harrelson, of Crossville, Alabama, the pilot of an observation plane who
was
captured on April 2, 1942, in the Philippines, said that of 398 pilots who boarded a Japanese ship in Manila for transport to Manchuria, 13 survived the journey. Cardinal estimated that of 1,600 POWs evacuated from the Philippines on a forty-five-day trip via Taiwan and Japan, 1,300 died of malnutrition and lack of medical treatment.

The repatriation of these prisoners was the ostensible reason for Cardinal’s presence in Mukden, but it quickly established covert operations there, keeping an eye on the Russians and the Chinese both and reporting on their activities. This included the arrival, “
suddenly and unannounced,” of the first contingents of Chinese Communist troops on September 7. Former Chinese collaborators, also caught by the sudden
end of the war, desperately tried to conceal their identities by creating a police department and so-called peace preservation committees to maintain order in Mukden, sewing KMT insignia onto their old puppet uniforms.
Cardinal observed the Eighth Routers ferreting out these people and arresting them. The Communists quickly removed or defaced the KMT flags that had been posted on buildings all over the city. Red flags proliferated, some people waving them, the OSS team concluded, “for protection against Eighth Army persecution.” Among the popular street slogans were “Down with Chiang Kai-shek” and “Manchuria for the Communists.”

Meanwhile, American tensions with the Russians did not abate. On August 29, the Americans reported that the Russians had informed them that there was insufficient gas to refuel American planes so that “all planes coming to Mukden must have sufficient gasoline for return trip.… Do not plan on Russian cooperation in any respect.” There were robberies of Americans at tommy-gun point. There was “
a stabbing of a B-24 tire, drunken abuse of ‘Americanskis,’ flagrant insults to American flags, etc.” Captain Robert Hilsman Jr. and three other Americans were robbed of their watches, sidearms, and money by a Russian private who also, according to Hilsman, “insulted President Truman and Americans in a vile manner.” The Americans went to the Russian headquarters, where they were able to recover their sidearms and one watch. “The Russian General assured us the private would be punished; however, the next day the private was put on guard at the intersection outside our hotel, from which point of vantage he sneered and chuckled at us each time we passed. I believe this was a planned insult.”

“Americans are very unpopular in Mukden with the Russians,” Cardinal reported on September 13, “probably because the Russians do not desire American observation of their actions which are as follows: prior to their departure date of November 1, they are proceeding with a policy of scientific looting. Every bit of machinery is being removed and all stocks of merchandise from stores and warehouses. Mukden will be an empty city when they get through.”

Eventually, the Soviets, no fools about the intelligence-gathering purposes of Cardinal, ordered the team out of Mukden. By mid-October it was gone, but not before it clearly perceived what was at stake. “The Communist Chinese Eighth Route Army … has categorically stated that it intends to occupy this section of Manchuria,” read the team’s
report. “This raises the question: can the Central Government move into the Mukden area
without a fight?”

Chiang was well aware of the Communists’ quick move to expand their forces wherever they could, and his response was to ask Wedemeyer for help transporting government troops by air and ship to the north and east. The Americans agreed to do this, and in their doing so the lines of the present and future conflict in China were drawn. The Soviet Union was giving clandestine help to the Communists; the United States was giving open help to the central government, though under somewhat false pretenses. The ostensible reason for the airlift was to enable the government to receive the surrender of Japanese troops, which was an important task. There were still more than a million of them in North China, many doing temporary guard duty, and taking their weapons, replacing them with government troops, and sending them home was the big unfinished item of World War II.

Therefore, in response to Chiang’s request, the Joint Chiefs in Washington instructed Wedemeyer to help China repatriate the Japanese and to recover some of its lost territory, though at the same time, American forces, the order made clear, were “to avoid participation in any fratricidal conflict in China.” To army officers in China, this requirement seemed both naïve and impossible to carry out. As Wedemeyer pointed out in a series of increasingly irritated and pointed cables, moving government troops into areas where the Communists were already present was participation in China’s fratricidal conflict. Certainly the Communists treated it as such. After August 15, denunciations of the American action became a staple of Yenan’s newspapers and radio broadcasts, commonly described as “
support for Chinese reactionaries in their efforts to promote
civil war.”

The Americans also decided that it would be necessary to send American marines to China, specifically fifty thousand members of the
Third Amphibious Corps (IIIAC), a task force that had fought some of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war and that when the war ended had been training in Guam to participate in the expected invasion of Japan. These men would ensure against disorder and help with the immense task of repatriating Japanese soldiers and civilians.

After Zhu’s letter
to the embassy in Chungking, the Communists made one more effort to dissuade the United States from helping the national
government in North China. In the third week of September, Brigadier General William A. Worton, chief of staff to the IIIAC commander, flew from Guam to China to make preparations for the arrival of the marines at the end of the month. Worton had twelve years of experience in Asia before the outbreak of the war, most of it in North China. He spoke the language and knew the country. He flew to Shanghai, where he met Hurley, then went on to Tianjin to talk with the Japanese, who were exceedingly cooperative, about the marines’ takeover of the local garrisons. Then he went to Beijing to arrange for the billeting there of the expected marine detachments.

At the end of his Beijing visit, Worton received a message that “people opposed to Chiang Kai-shek,” as he put it in a later interview, wanted to meet him. That night, Zhou Enlai turned up at the American’s headquarters and wasted no time in issuing a blunt warning: The Communists “would fight to prevent the Marines from moving into Peiping.” What Worton called a “stormy” hour-long meeting ensued, during which Worton was equally blunt, telling Zhou that the marines would be coming to Beijing, using both the roads and the rail lines, and that these marines would be “
quite capable of driving straight on through any force that the Communists mustered in its path.” A few months before, Mao had been practically pleading with the United States to land troops on the China coast. Now, with the war over, the situation had drastically changed and American forces were no longer welcome.

Army general
Rodion Malinovsky, the commander of Soviet forces in Manchuria, September 1944. He had “not a drop of gentleness or mercy,” said one American diplomat.
(illustration credit 11)

But welcome or not, in the middle of the morning of September 30, six weeks after the Japanese surrender and while Mao, Chiang, and Hurley were locked into their talks in Chungking,
a convoy of nearly twenty-five thousand men belonging to the IIIAC appeared at the mouth of the Hai River, the opening to the port of Danggu, which served the big
northern Chinese city of Tianjin. For most local people it was a welcome sight. A flotilla of Chinese sampans emerged from the estuary, and the marines lined their landing craft railings, exchanging mutually unintelligible greetings with the Chinese boatmen and buying cheap trinkets as souvenirs.

At 10:30 that morning, the commanding officer of the First Division of the Seventh Marines, Brigadier General
Louis R. Jones, led a procession of landing craft over the sandbar at the mouth of the Hai and upriver to the port to arrange for the troops to disembark. Crowds of Chinese stood on the entire fifteen-mile-long route from the estuary to the port as Jones’s boats went by. The next day, the marine Seventh Division went by railroad to Tianjin, where the crowds of people, many of them waving paper American flags, were so thick that the marine trucks had to force their way through them on the way to their billets in the former International Settlement.

Within days, the marines had spread out, a battalion sailing north to the port of
Qinwangdao just south of the Manchurian border, where they found some troops of the now-defunct puppet regime exchanging fire with Communist guerrillas. Qinwangdao was not only the historical coastal gateway to Manchuria but also the terminus for the freight cars of coal from the mines of inland Hebei province. When the American commander, Lieutenant Colonel
John J. Gormley, replaced the puppet troops with a perimeter defense of marines, the Communists ceased firing as a signal of their willingness to cooperate.

This was to be a short-lived truce. Within a month, the Communists began an ongoing campaign of sniping, harassment, polite negotiation, and not-so-polite intimidation in an effort to prevent the Americans from enabling the central government to build up its forces.