The Naked Communist (29 page)

Finally, in the summer of 1946, when the Communists had repeatedly violated the truce agreement, the Nationalists decided to vigorously counterattack and penetrate deep into Manchuria. The diplomats frantically ordered Chiang to stop, but he refused to do so. He said another truce would only allow the Communists time to re-group and come back even more fiercely than before. He also said it was his intention to continue the campaign to forcibly disarm the Communists and restore them to civilian status so that China could get on with her program of constitutional government without fear of constant insurrection.

This line of reasoning did not appeal to the State Department. Three different times Chiang was ordered to issue an unconditional cease-fire. To make it stick a U.S. embargo was finally placed on all aid to China. Only after United States aid abruptly halted did Chiang reluctantly agree to a cease-fire. General Marshall stated: "As Chief of Staff I armed 39 anti-Communist divisions (in China), now with a stroke of the pen I disarm them."

This proved a great boon to the Communists. While the Nationalists were being held down by U.S. diplomatic pressure the Communists re-grouped their forces and prepared for the all-out campaign which later proved fatal to China. It is strange that even after Chiang had surrendered his own best judgment and issued a cease-fire, the U.S. embargo was not lifted. The Nationalist forces sat idly by, consuming many of their supplies which they feared would never be replaced. Later, when the Red tide had begun to roll in on Chiang, Congress did finally force through an "Aid to China" bill, but actual delivery of goods was not processed in time to be of any significant assistance.

From 1947 on, the morale of the Nationalist army disintegrated. It seemed apparent to Chinese military leaders that they were the victims of Communist aggression on the one hand and the victims of a total lack of insight by U.S. and British diplomats on the other.

After Chiang issued his unconditional cease-fire, General Marshall appealed to the Communist leaders to reopen negotiations for settlement. The Communists replied, but talked as though they were victors and made demands which even General Marshall labeled as completely unreasonable. They wanted all the rich areas of Manchuria from which they had just been driven. They wanted the National Assembly dissolved and demanded a predominant place in the proposed coalition government.

It was obvious that any hope of settlement under such circumstances was impossible. General Marshall accepted this as a Communist pronouncement that the Communists were no longer interested in mediation and he therefore ended his mission by having President Truman call him home. He returned to America in January, 1947, and immediately became the new U.S. Secretary of State.

There were many leaders in the United States Government who were completely dissatisfied with the way the Chinese Civil War had been handled. Therefore, in the summer of 1947, General Albert C. Wedemeyer was sent to Asia under Presidential orders to find out what was wrong in China. Upon his return he submitted a report which was extremely critical of the entire formula for peace which had been followed by General Marshall and the diplomatic corps. He indicated that not only had the interests of free China been violated, but the self-interests of the United States and all her Allies had been subordinated to the whims of the Communists. He recommended prompt and voluminous aid to the Nationalist Government and predicted that the situation could still be salvaged if help were provided in time.

Unfortunately, this report fell into the hands of the very people whom General Wedemeyer had criticized. Consequently, it was buried in department files for nearly two years and was not brought to light until long after it was too late to take the action it recommended.

Meanwhile, the forces of collapse were rapidly moving toward their inexorable climax. During 1947 and the early part of 1948 the armies of Chiang Kai-shek held up remarkably well, but toward the latter part of 1948, the lack of supplies and the internal disintegration of the Chinese economy took its toll. The fall of the Nationalist forces was not gradual -- it was sudden and complete. Many thousands abandoned their positions and raced southward in disorganized confusion but other thousands threw down their arms and surrendered to Chinese Communists on the spot.

By September, 1949, the Communist leaders were already wildly celebrating their victory as they set up the "People's Republic of China." Shortly afterwards Chiang acknowledged he was temporarily beaten and abandoned the mainland of China in order to flee with the straggling remnants of his army to Formosa.

The fall of free China produced a wave of boiling indignation throughout the United States. Both political leaders and lay citizens felt that somehow an old ally had been subverted or betrayed. At the time few Americans were really aware of what was involved in the Chinese debacle, but they knew Chiang Kai-shek and America's interests had suffered a catastrophic defeat. There was widespread demand for the facts.

The men who had engineered the fatal Chinese policy quickly collaborated on a report designed to justify their handling of America's interests in the Far East. It was called "United States Relations With China" and was published as a "White Paper" in 1949. To many people the arguments in this paper were highly persuasive, but not to all; in fact, the loss of China brought a startling awakening to some of those who had been with General Marshall and had trusted the Communists almost to the very last.

One of these was America's ambassador to China during that critical period, Dr. John Leighton Stuart.
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As a former missionary to China and president of Yenching University; he could not help but evaluate the fall of China as a vast human disaster. He criticized himself for having a part in it and censured his colleagues for trying to cover up their mistakes in the
White Paper
.

Dr. Stuart frankly declared: "We Americans (who were carrying out the China policy) mainly saw the good things about the Chinese Communists, while not noticing care fully the intolerance, bigotry, deception, disregard for human life, and other evils which seem to be inherent in any totalitarian system. We kept Communist meanings for such adjectives as progressive, democratic, liberal, also bourgeois, reactionary, imperialist, as they intended we should do. We failed to realize fully the achievements to date and the potentialities of Chinese democracy. Therefore, we cannot escape a part of the responsibility of the great catastrophe -- not only for China, but also for America and the free world -- the loss of the Chinese mainland."

Concerning the
White Paper
he said: "I was, in fact, merely one of many persons who were perplexed and filled with apprehension by what they found in this extraordinary book.... It is clear that the purpose was not to produce a 'historian's history' but to select materials which had been used in making the policy in effect at the moment. What had been omitted were materials rejected in the making of policy, materials which had not been relied upon."

This had been General Wedemeyer's complaint. The diplomatic strategists were not willing to neither recognize the realities of the situation nor reverse their evaluation of Communist leaders even though the evidence of duplicity was everywhere.

By 1949 there was little excuse for any alert American to further deceived by Communist strategy. Dozens of American-Communist spies had been exposed, the leading American Communists had been arrested by the FBI and convicted of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. Government by violence, Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and a swarm of exCommunist agents had laid bare their souls, the Western Allies had gone through the vicious squeeze play of the Berlin blockade and the United States had spent billions in foreign aid to keep Russia from consuming all of Europe the same way she had taken over China. But in spite of all this, a meeting was sponsored by the State Department in October, 1949, which almost defies explanation.

It was held for the announced purpose of deciding what the "experts" believed should be done in the Far East. The meeting was presided over by Philip Jessup of the State Department, and those in attendance included not only State Department officials, but many select guests who were interested in Asia. Dr. John Leighton Stuart was present and afterwards expressed deep apprehension concerning the slant of the entire discussion. Harold Stassen was also present and later testified that the majority present favored the following policies:

1. European aid should be given priority over Asia.

2. Aid to Asia should not be started until after a "long and careful study."

3. Russian Communists should be considered "not as aggressive as Hitler" and "not as apt to take direct military action to expand their empire."

4.
Communist China should be recognized by the U.S.

5. Britain and India should be urged to follow suit in recognizing the Chinese Communists.

6.
The Chinese Communists should be allowed to take over Formosa.

7. The Communists should be allowed to take over Hong Kong from Britain if the Communists insisted.

8. Nehru should not be given aid because of his "reactionary and arbitrary tendencies."

9. The Nationalist blockade of China should be broken and
economic aid sent to the Communist mainland
.

10.
No aid should be sent to Chiang
or to the anti-Communist guerillas in South China.

Two of the men at the conference who were foremost in promoting these policies were Owen Lattimore and Lawrence Rosinger. Both were eventually identified by Louis Budenz (former editor of the Daily Worker testifying under oath) as members of the Communist Party.
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Even if there had been no such identification, the glaring truth which every man at the conference should have known was the fact that this entire list of policies was a car bon copy of the prevailing "party line" coming out of Moscow. For months these very policies had been hammered out in every edition of the Communist press. It was a singular commentary on the judgment and professional discernment of those officials who fell in with these fantastic recommendations -- particularly in the light of the provocative and inflammatory policies which Russia was using at that very moment to threaten nations in nearly every region of the free world.

Three months after this conference, the new Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, announced several policies portending the loss of Formosa and the liquidation of the Chinese Nationalists by the Communists. First, he overruled the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (to give strong military aid to Chiang) by announcing on January 12, 1950, that the principles itemized above as point No. 6 and point No. 10 was to be official U.S. policy. He also stated that the U.S. defense perimeter in the Pacific did not include either Formosa or South Korea. He stated that if an attack should occur outside the U.S. defense perimeter "the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it." Then he suggested that they could appeal to the United Nations.

This was simply a blunt statement that the U.S. diplomats were abandoning Formosa and Korea. This announcement was shocking to many students of the Far East, not only because the policy violated U.S. self-interest, but because it literally invited Communist attack on these free-world allies by giving advance notice that these areas could be invaded without interference from the United States.

It took just six months for the Communists to select and prepare their point of attack. They chose the practically defenseless territory of South Korea as the first theater of war.

It will be recalled that the Yalta agreement allowed Russia to take over North Korea at the same time the Soviets occupied Manchuria. As elsewhere, the Russians did not withdraw their troops until a strong Communist puppet government was firmly entrenched. As for South Korea, U.S. forces occupied the territory up to the 38th parallel.

During 1949 a United Nations mandate required both Russia and the U.S. to withdraw their troops. The Russians left behind them a powerful North Korean Red Army consisting of 187,000 well-trained and well-equipped troops, 173 Russian tanks, quantities of Russian-built artillery and 200 Russian planes. On the other hand, South Korea was a new-born Republic with an army of 96,000 men who were poorly equipped with practically no tanks, anti-tank weapons, heavy artillery or fighter planes. This meant that by the end of 1949 South Korea was even more vulnerable to attack from North Korea than Formosa was from Communist China. And the Washington diplomats had assured both Formosa and Korea that in case of attack they definitely could not expect any military help from the United States. As spokesman for the diplomatic left-wing contingent, Owen Lattimore explained the situation: "The thing to do is let South Korea fall, but not to let it look as if we pushed it."
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