The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (34 page)

There had, of course, been plenty of warnings that Chiang was going to fall. Even during World War II, when the main struggle was supposed to be against the Japanese, the battle between the Nationalists under Chiang and the Communists under Mao was a constant sideshow. Report after report coming in from the field during the war, from both civilians and military men, from men ideologically committed to Chiang as well as those appalled by him, had reflected the view that the Communists had better leadership, both political and military, and had far greater political legitimacy. Even as World War II was ending, very few people who had been there and knew what was happening militarily thought Chiang would make it. Some people in the national security
team, like James Forrestal, thought Chiang’s chances of winning were so slim that the United States had to be careful not to weaken Japan so much that it could not be used as a North Asian bulwark against the Communists. When World War II was finally over, and the civil war started in earnest, the reports from the field became even gloomier. Chiang had predictably turned inward, his base becoming ever more narrow, his policies ever more repressive. Even a figure as sympathetic to Chiang as Major General Claire Chennault, who had led the American Flying Tiger air units fighting in China during the world war and would be a lifelong hard-line supporter of the Generalissimo, had written Roosevelt near the war’s end that if there was a civil war, as there was likely to be, “the Yenan regime [the Communists] has an excellent chance of emerging victorious with or without Russian aid.”

Probably as good a date as any for the beginning of World War II is July 1937, when Chinese troops clashed with Japanese invaders near Beijing, close to the Chinese-Manchurian border. If nothing else, it surely ended any hope of the rise of a modern, semidemocratic China under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist or Guomindang Party, the kind of China many Americans had hoped for, and dreamed of long after it became the most hopeless of causes. What then took place in China, under the dual force of the Japanese invasion and the constant undercurrent of the civil war, was as powerful and complete a transformation of a social, economic, and political order as the modern world had witnessed. It was a cataclysmic event, driven at first by forces from without, but in no way purely an external challenge. It was, at the same time, a challenge of one China, as yet unborn and potentially lethal in its norms and residual hatreds, to another China, at once weak, cruel, and barbaric in its own way: a challenge by one set of violent, autocratic men to another set of autocratic and ruthless men who had ruled so poorly and with such elemental brutality for too long. It was a system of oppression rather than authority that had been imposed with unparalleled harshness and greed upon ordinary Chinese. The few who benefited were rich, powerful, and lived above the laws, which, in any case, were set by force of arms. The many who were poor existed that way in what seemed like hopeless perpetuity. Every unbearable aspect of their daily lives was marked by some kind of injustice, and the absence of elemental dignity. This China was probably dying even before the first Japanese troops marched into Manchuria.

Chiang’s own rise reflected the fragmentation of the older order. He was not so much a leader, as he was portrayed by favorable publications in America, as he was a survivor, a man who existed by balancing warring interests off against each other. His nickname among Westerners, as Barbara Tuchman pointed out in her book on the collapse of China, was “Billiken,” after a popular weighted
doll that could not be knocked over. He had strengthened his political ties in 1927 when he married into the Soong family, China’s most influential family in terms of wealth and connections to powerful interests in the West. Mayling Soong, the youngest member of the family, was Christian, Wellesley-educated, and politically ambitious. Earlier, Chiang had tried to marry her older sister, the widow of China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen, and had been rejected. To marry Mayling, he had to get rid of two other wives and convert to Christianity, something he readily did. In time, Chiang became known to the Americans as the Generalissimo or the Gimo, and she, not always affectionately, as Missimo. His marriage greatly strengthened his political connections with the United States and with those who longed for that most unrealistic of things, a modern, nationalist Chinese leader who was both Christian and capitalist.

Chiang’s great struggle in those years was with the Communists, who had the good fortune to challenge authority but not to have to govern. All they had to do was exploit the country’s myriad grievances and miseries. They did that with considerable skill, tuned brilliantly to the grievances of the peasants as Chiang and the warlords connected to him never had been. Chiang’s China gradually imploded—despite vast amounts of American military aid and advice, despite all kinds of warnings, journalistic, diplomatic, and military, that he needed to change and reform his government. A series of American political and military advisers who urged him to use his resources more wisely failed dismally. Their interests and his interests were rarely the same—they wanted him to provide a kind of bold American-style leadership, and he wanted to survive for another day; the corrupt military-political structure the Americans wanted him to get rid of was nothing less than the key to his very political survival. If he had one special talent at the end, it was to appear to agree with his Americans advisers—he did not after all want to hurt their feelings—and then pay no attention to them whatsoever, and keep on doing exactly what he had always done.

When the government finally fell in 1949, there was no surprise involved. General Joseph (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell, the principal American military adviser assigned to work with Chiang during World War II, had decided as early as 1942 that Chiang was utterly worthless, unwilling, if not unable, to use his army against the Japanese. Stilwell was hardly alone among Americans in the region in his distaste for Chiang. The Gimo’s nickname among many American soldiers serving in China reflected their frustration with him; Chancre Jack, they called him. Stilwell might have done three tours of duty in China and might have spoken the language fluently, but he was hardly the ideal American representative to deal with so weak a regime and so fragile a leader. He was the least diplomatic of men, edgy, outspoken, cantankerous, and blasphemous; he could
be, wrote his biographer Barbara Tuchman, who in many ways admired him, “rude or caustic or sometimes coarse or deliberately boorish.” He said what he thought, without much reflection, or tact. There was no difference between his private view of the Chinese leader and what he told any and all who listened to him. He had decided early on that Chiang was virtually useless as an instrument of American policy. Once, the young
Time
magazine reporter Teddy White had asked Stilwell for an explanation of the debacle of Chinese troops during a battle, and he answered, “We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, peasant son of a bitch called Chiang Kai-shek.” A more accurate description might have been that the United States was failing because it was trying overnight to create a China that was in America’s image, something very unlikely to take place. Any leader the United States chose would end up failing either his own people or America or, as happened in this case, both. The reality failed because the dream was impossible from the start.

Stilwell regularly reported back to Washington that Chiang was hopeless as a military ally, unable or unwilling to take any of the requisite steps to get his army to engage the Japanese. But in Washington, Stilwell’s reports did not greatly matter. Even though the then Army chief of staff, George Marshall, Stilwell’s personal sponsor, was on his side, Chiang always held a better hand. On his side was the one person who mattered most, Franklin Roosevelt, who feared that if Chiang were pushed too hard, he might make a separate peace with the Japanese, allowing them to move armies bogged down for so long in China to other areas of Asia. As the war dragged on, the attitude of Chiang and the people around him toward their Western allies, most particularly the Americans, lapsed into one of utter and complete cynicism. As Barbara Tuchman later wrote of his policy, “To use barbarians to fight other barbarians was a traditional principle of Chinese statecraft, which now more than ever appeared not only advisable, but justified. Chinese opinion, according to a foreign resident, held that not only was China justified in remaining passive after five years of resistance, ‘it was her right to get as much as possible out of her allies while they fought.’ The exercise of this right, she noted, became the Government’s chief war effort.”

Chiang’s army was a mighty one—on paper. In reality, it was increasingly a sham. He allegedly commanded three hundred divisions, but Stilwell believed they were, on average, at least 40 percent understrength, filled with invisible or ghost soldiers kept on the rolls so that their commanders could draw and personally pocket their pay. Early in World War II, when China was allegedly fighting for its life, American advisers were simply appalled by the conscription process. A senior American officer on Stilwell’s staff, Colonel Dave Barrett, wrote of one engagement, “The troops had only the poorest equipment.
No medical attention. No transport. Many sick. Most recruits were conscripts delivered tied up. Conscription is a scandal. Only the unfortunates without money or influence are grabbed.” The numerous, large, incompetent divisions did not exist by happenstance; they were Chiang’s way of buying influence in a corrupt, feudal world already collapsing around him. If he had done what the Americans wanted, he understood far better than they, he might quickly have fallen from power.

Long, bitter, and divisive as it was, the Stilwell-Chiang struggle could have only one outcome: in the fall of 1944, Stilwell, the teller of so many unwanted truths, had thus become the most unwelcome of guests, and was recalled. Roosevelt had chosen to go with Chiang, even though he was a hopelessly flawed instrument of American policy. There were two reasons for this: first, it kept China in the war; and second, Roosevelt had his own hopelessly romantic vision of China, and seemed to believed that if we treated Chiang as the great leader of a great nation, brought him as a high-level leader to some of the conferences among the world’s leaders, he would in time morph into what the president wanted.

If Chiang had succeeded politically in the two-man game with Stilwell, that did not make the American general any less of a prophet. Everything he had said came true; the ever more ferocious downward spiral of Chiang’s government was nothing less than a profound historical process, the collapse of a nation outside the control of any foreigners, no matter how rich and powerful their own country. No wartime military man had been more successful in a variety of exhausting tasks than George Marshall, but sent on a mission to China in late 1945 to mediate the struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists, he was a study in unadulterated failure—and was all too aware of that fact, for he was much too shrewd a figure not to understand that neither side was going to listen to him, and that the forces he was dealing with were irreconcilable. Marshall was sixty-five at the time and had just retired from the Army, physically exhausted and wanting nothing so much as to become a country squire in Leesburg, Virginia. But Harry Truman, badly shaken by events in China and fearing what the China issue might represent domestically if matters did not improve, had called on him: “General, I want you to go to China for me.” So it was that just before Christmas, 1945, John Carter Vincent, the head of Far Eastern Affairs at State, saw Marshall off. He then turned to his ten-year-old son as the plane departed: “Son,” he said, “there goes the bravest man in the world. He’s going to try and unify China.”

The trip was such a disaster that Marshall seemed to age visibly in front of his own aides. He seemed, John Melby, who did some of the translating for him, wrote in his diary, very tired, very sad, and most likely quite ill. It was as
if he saw the failure that was coming in China and the toxins it would create in the American political system. At one point in May 1946, he ran into Dwight Eisenhower, also in China. At Truman’s request, Eisenhower sounded Marshall out about replacing Jimmy Byrnes as secretary of state, an enormous responsibility for a man already worn down by prolonged public service. “Great goodness, Eisenhower, I’d take any job in the world to get out of this one!” Marshall quickly answered. Hearing of the failure of the Marshall mission, Joe Stilwell said, “But what did they expect? George Marshall can’t walk on water.” To Marshall, China was hopeless. The one thing he wanted to do more than anything else was to prevent American combat troops from being sent there to support Chiang, as some of the Nationalist leaders wanted. As he told Walton Butterworth, who became head of the State Department’s Far Eastern Affairs Office in 1947, “Butterworth, we must not get sucked in. I would need 500,000 troops to begin with and it would just be the beginning.” Then he paused and added: “And how would I extricate them?”

Yet for all of the sense that those people knowledgeable about China had of the rot that had set in, as World War II ended, outsiders could be forgiven for thinking that Chiang’s position still seemed enviable. He retained the support of the new American administration, though its most influential members doubted his viability. He was a recognized world leader; and the portrait most Americans had of him, thanks to the efforts of a brilliant propaganda machine, was of a great and sympathetic Asian leader. In the fall of 1945 his army, and his party, the Guomindang, controlled all of China’s major cities, its entire—if devastated—industrial base, and more than three-quarters of its total population, then variously estimated at between 450 and 500 million people. He had more than 2.5 million men officially under arms, and those arms were relatively modern, having been provided by the United States.

The Communists had fewer than half that number of men under arms and ruled over only an impoverished rural area of northwest China. Yet all kinds of foreign and domestic observers, civilian and military alike, believed that Chiang’s strength was a complete illusion and that the government was on the verge of collapse. The finances of the country were a joke. It was for a small handful of people a kind of golden trough, so much money flowing into the country to be handled by so very few Chinese. Clearly it was a situation that might not last long, and it was a time to make as much money as you could as quickly as possible. Critics of the government talked openly of key officials storing away bars of gold for their own future security. Marshall had warned Chiang almost on arrival that far too much of the country’s budget—between 80 and 90 percent—was going to the military, and that financial collapse would come before military victory. If the Chinese government, he told some
of Chiang’s ministers, thought the American taxpayers would “step into the vacuum this creates, you can go to hell.” As that became more obvious, the government’s only response was to print more currency—“printing press money,” as it was known.