China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (54 page)

Simultaneous with the marine landings, Wedemeyer began the airlift of Nationalist troops from their bases, mostly in southwest China, to the eastern and northern parts of the country. It was a massive operation. Writing to Dwight Eisenhower, who was now chief of staff, having replaced the venerable George Marshall, Wedemeyer called it nothing less than “
the largest troop movement by air in the world’s history.” For two months, China buzzed and rumbled with the sound of giant four-engine C-47 transport planes. Most of them flew over
the Hump from India, picked up their cargo of troops, flew them to their new posts, and then returned over the Himalayas to India. These planes brought 35,000 men from Liuzhou to Shanghai, a distance of 900 miles; they
flew 40,000 Chinese veterans of the Burma campaign the 800 miles from Zhijiang to Nanjing; thousands of other troops were dropped into Beijing and the vicinity.

Meanwhile,
the marines took over
Qingdao, the former German colony, a “fragment of Westphalia.” General Jones commanded a Beijing Group, which took up residence in the old Legation Quarter, the district of stately foreign embassies, apartments, clubs, churches, and hotels that had been put under siege by the Boxers decades before. Among the marines’ duties was to guard the train lines between Tianjin and Beijing and between Tianjin and Qinwangdao, and to protect the Chinese work gangs maintaining the tracks. An aircraft wing was set up at the beginning of October at a former French arsenal near the airfield east of Tianjin. Other air squadrons took up positions at airfields near Qingdao and Beijing. Chinese peasants living in the hundreds of mud-brick villages near rail lines got used to the drone of American planes on reconnaissance missions over China’s beleaguered transportation network.

All of this activity was undertaken as the public back home demanded and expected American troops to be coming home from the war rather than setting up new, very faraway deployments. The demobilization of one of the greatest war machines in history was so fast and so pell-mell that Truman called it a “disintegration.” Had he tried to halt it, his biographer David McCullough has concluded, “
he might have been impeached, so overwhelming was the country’s desire for a return of its young men and women now that the war was won, the enemy crushed.” This public mood imposed a sharp limitation on the ability of the United States to make a big commitment in China. The China hands were nervous about the marine deployment for a related but different reason: it involved exactly the kind of intervention in Chinese affairs that it was official American policy to avoid. John Carter Vincent, the head of the China desk at State, asked Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state, what the Americans would do if the Communists attempted a takeover of one of the ports controlled by the marines. The United States would either have to fight them off, or “stand aside” and allow them to take over, Vincent pointed out, and neither option was an attractive one. “Unless there are over-riding military reasons for carrying out these dispositions of American Marines,” he wrote, “
the plan should be abandoned in favor of occupation by Chinese troops.”

The question that Vincent was raising was the key one: Should the
United States intervene in China or not? It was a question that was raised and examined numerous times as 1945 rolled into 1946, even as the United States was intervening, however modestly, while staying officially neutral in the Chinese domestic quarrel that was becoming more intense by the day. The policy was both ambiguous and contradictory because the goals were irreconcilable, one being to help the Nationalist government move its troops and extend its authority, and the other to refuse to be drawn into Chiang’s intensifying conflict with the Communists. In order to keep the Americans out of China’s domestic quarrel, Vincent wanted Chinese troops to perform the tasks Americans had been sent to perform.

But how were those Chinese troops to get into position if not in American planes? And what if they were unable to maintain order? What if they couldn’t prevent the Communists and their Russian patrons from taking over all the ports in northeast China? Should the United States simply stand aside and allow that to happen? If not, how could it avoid taking sides? If it did take sides, how much could it do given the public clamor for peace?

Wedemeyer did think of these problems. He thought that Hurley’s optimism regarding the Soviets was naïve. He believed their long-range plan was to foster a Chinese Communist takeover of the entire country,
and this led him to a conclusion opposite to Vincent’s. Wedemeyer argued vociferously that a “strong” occupation of key port areas by the United States was essential. He believed the situation in
China was potentially explosive. There were anywhere from four to six million Japanese nationals in the country, including a million soldiers still in possession of their weapons, who needed to go home. There were millions of Chinese refugees trying to make their way to their prewar homes. There were desperate economic needs that had to be met right away. Coal had to be moved from the mines near Tangshan to the ports by train—Wedemeyer called guarding them a “
military necessity”—or there would be no power to fuel the power plants and factories of places like Shanghai during the coming winter, and if the economy collapsed, Wedemeyer warned, there would be massive starvation.

American marines arriving in Tianjin, September 1945, among the 50,000 American troops who landed in North China after the end of the war.
(illustration credit 12)

The Communists, already engaged with the Nationalists in a fierce race to occupy territory, were the ones attacking the rail lines. Acheson agreed with Wedemeyer that the marines were indispensable, writing that “
the ports in question were those in the neighborhood of which trouble was most likely to start … and that therefore the presence of American troops would strengthen the position of the National Government, help to prevent any disorders from starting, and was desired by the Generalissimo.” That hardly sounded like staying aloof in China’s war.

In September, President Truman weighed in with a masterpiece of diplomatic ambivalence. The United States, he said, responding to Chiang’s request for help, would provide airplanes, naval vessels, and support for Chinese land forces. He said this help could be given without bringing the United States in on one side in China’s looming internal battle, a prime example of America’s wishful thinking. In his policy declaration on China, Truman invoked American democratic ideals, specifying that American aid could not be “diverted” for use in civil war against the CCP or “
to support undemocratic institutions”—a nice-sounding requirement that ignored the inconvenient fact that the government of Chiang Kai-shek was an undemocratic institution. From that point on, American emissaries repeatedly warned Chiang that the United States did not want civil war in China, and if it broke out, the aid would stop.

The Communists, not surprisingly, took the American position as an unfriendly one. Throughout the fall of 1945, as the American airlift proceeded and the marines carried out their activities, the contacts between Americans and Communist Chinese fell into a pattern of tension
and small-scale confrontation. On August 15, Captain
John Birch became the first American to be killed by Communist forces in Asia, the first of many thousands to come.

Birch, whose name was adopted years later by a subsequent far-right political movement, was, as noted earlier, an army officer working for the OSS. He had been commended by Stilwell, was admired by Davies, and declared by the War Department to be “one of the
outstanding intelligence officers in our organization.”
Paul Frillman, another OSS officer, met him in his little headquarters outside Changsha and found him “a
lean, hearty, enthusiastic young man of about twenty-five, an attractive character.” He had been in China for two years before Pearl Harbor, when the United States was neutral in the Sino-Japanese war, and he had seen enough atrocities to become “implacably anti-Japanese.” He was “most conscientious and knowledgeable in his work,” Fillman later wrote. He was from Macon, Georgia, a man of deep religious faith who, as Frillman put it, thought “it was God’s war and our side was all good, the Japanese all bad.”

Birch was working specifically for AGFRTS, the agency collecting information for Chennault’s 14th Air Force, for which Birch had set up a dozen or so listening posts behind enemy lines. When the Japanese surrendered,
Birch was ordered to go to
Shandong province to scout airfields that could be used by the 14th Air Force for the return of American prisoners of war being held in Japanese camps in that area. From the Communists’ point of view, his mission was a complicated and largely undesirable one. Shandong was an area where the Communists had tried hard to establish a presence behind enemy lines. It was strategically important not for its size and centrality but because its two main seaports,
Qingdao in the south and Chefoo, now Yentai, in the north, commanded the approaches to much of the China coastline, especially Manchuria. In early 1945, the Communists had proposed that the Americans use a port in northern Jiangsu province, just south of Shandong, in exchange for the $20 million that Zhu De requested as a sort of slush fund to help him get arms from puppet troops.

Conditions in Shandong during the war illustrated the unspoken truce in place between the Communists and the Japanese, neither of which was interested in depleting its forces in what was essentially a vast military stalemate. The Communists had also managed some undercover cooperation from the puppet regime whose main enemy was the central government. It was useful for both the puppet government and
the Japanese that the Communists be able to tie down a sizable portion of the Nationalists’ army. A key figure in this clandestine mutuality of interest in Shandong was a former Nationalist commander named
Hao Pengju, who had gone over to the puppet regime and become a garrison commander in east China.

This was the very person whom Birch was instructed to contact for help as he reconnoitered potential air bases, and the Communists didn’t like it. They had close contacts with many commanders in Hao Pengju’s four divisions. When the war ended, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Hao to await incorporation into the central government army. The Communists wanted to persuade him to go over to them, and they didn’t want any American interference with that plan. When the Birch party of four Americans, seven Chinese, and two Koreans arrived in Shandong via northern Jiangsu, they were stopped by Communist troops. An angry parley ensued. Birch was not there to interfere in the emerging KMT-CCP contest for power in east China. He wanted only to survey airfields, and he angrily demanded that the Communists allow him to continue on his mission.

The Communist troops allowed him and his party to proceed, then stopped him a second time, and a third time, on August 25, at a place called Huangkou Station. Birch’s deputy, a KMT officer named
Tung Chin-sheng, tried to persuade the Communists that the Americans were friends and that detaining and disarming them would cause “a serious misunderstanding between Communist China and America.” Birch refused to allow his party to be disarmed. He demanded to see the Communist commander. He behaved in an angry, even imperious manner that has led some historians to conclude that he provoked his own death.

At one point, while the entire group was looking for the local Communist commander, Birch grabbed a CCP orderly by the collar, shook him, and asked, “Are you bandits?” The commander, the same soldier who initially had ordered their arrest, now ordered his men to disarm Birch and his men. According to Lieutenant Tung, who was wounded in the incident but survived to testify to American investigators later, Birch was shot in the thigh, carried to a cinder pile near the train station, and bayoneted to death. “The body was found wrapped in a straw mat,” Lieutenant
W. J. Miller, a surviving member of the mission, later reported to Wedemeyer. “The hands and feet were bound. There was a large wound in the left thigh, a large hole in the right shoulder, and the whole of the face had been mutilated beyond recognition.”