The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  I suggest… that beginning in January, you should accept the resignations of additional pilots and ground personnel as care to accept employment in China, up to a limit of 100 pilots and a proportional number of ground personnel.13

  Chennault recalled that when his recruiters visited air bases across the U.S. offering “a one-year contract with CAMCO to ‘manufacture, repair, and operate aircraft’ at salaries ranging from $250 to $750 a month… several spluttering commanders called Washington long distance for confirmation of their orders.”14

  For additional cover, Ailing’s CAMCO and FDR’s CDS disguised the fighter squadrons as “advanced training units”; the airplanes were “advanced trainers,” and Chennault was a “supervisor.”15 Sensing which way FDR’s winds were blowing, Hull caved in. He informed the Chinese embassy that, though the U.S. would not accept an open military alliance, it was willing to issue passports to Americans to work in China as “aviation instructors.”16 Chennault later described his interaction with a State Department clerk in the passport division:

  In applying for my passport, I listed my occupation as farmer. The clerk was skeptical. “I own land in Louisiana, and I make a living from it,” I replied to him. “That makes me a farmer.” He insisted I change my occupation. It took a call to the White House to convince him that I was a farmer.17

  Roosevelt was now running an off-the-books secret executive air force through Ailing’s front companies. Claire Chennault was a private contractor—a mercenary—being paid by the China Lobby. Roosevelt was sheep-dipping: taking U.S. personnel, cleansing them with the fiction of their resignations, and then sending them off as secret mercenaries. Today, many mistakenly believe that Chennault’s mission was an American invention controlled by the U.S. military, but when he returned to Asia, Chennault reported back to Washington not through American military channels but privately, through his boss, T. V. Soong.

  In March of 1941, T. V. Soong presented his Lend-Lease shopping list: a thousand planes, three hundred fifty technical assistants, two hundred flying instructors, enough arms and supplies to outfit thirty infantry divisions, and sufficient equipment for what would have been the world’s largest construction project: a highway and a railway connecting China and India.18 T.V. expected that his enormous requests would be filled as quickly as possible. When he went to Roosevelt, FDR was noncommittal. Soong complained to his China Lobby man on the Supreme Court, Justice Felix Frankfurter, that he had “begged [FDR] specifically to say that China’s demands would be granted.” Roosevelt had smiled and responded, “So long as the Battle of the Atlantic is won everything will be all right.”19

  T.V. was also frustrated with Henry Morgenthau, who was refusing to hand over the entire $100 million that FDR had promised. (Morgenthau wanted the loan released in installments of $5 million per month.) Soong asked Frankfurter to take time out from his duties and dicker with the president over terms. Soong also contacted China Lobbyist Thomas Corcoran, and together Tommy and Frankfurter argued T.V.’s case to FDR, who in turn pressured Morgenthau, who then complained to associates about T. V. Soong’s “special representatives” and “special attorneys,” wondering “who is on the U.S. payroll and who is on the Chinese payroll and who is working for what.”20

  The Currie-FDR plan to “say nice things” about Chiang surfaced in the form of an article about Currie’s mission to China that appeared in Life magazine on May 5, 1941. The piece was crafted by China Lobbyist Eliot Janeway, who wrote that FDR believed Chiang was “Roosevelt’s fellow-leader of democracy,” a man through whom the president would promote the “democratic principles of the New Deal.”21

  That same month, Henry Luce ventured to the country of his birth with his wife, Clare Boothe Luce. By the time the couple arrived in Chungking, on May 8, 1941, Ailing and Mayling had already run hundreds of Americans through the Soong-Chiang drill. Ailing housed the Luces in her Western-style Chungking home, where she could almost literally watch their every move. The Soongs controlled the Luces’ schedule; the publisher and his wife went where the Soong sisters wanted them to go, and they met the people who were put in front of them. The Soong sisters kept the Luces on a stimulating treadmill of daily meetings with graduates of U.S. universities and late-night banquets hosted by smiling American-trained Chinese who, in American-style English, toasted Henry’s brilliance and Clare’s beauty.

  The Luces were accompanied on parts of their trip by their newly hired Time magazine correspondent Teddy White, lately of Chiang’s Ministry of Information.

  Luce was thrilled to witness a Japanese air raid on Chungking, which he observed from the safety of the American embassy, located across the river from the city. “There they come!” Luce wrote. “There they come! I could hear nothing nor see anything except the blazing sky. Then: Corrump, corrump, corrump, corrump. And again: Corrump, corrump, CORRUMP.”22 Luce admitted that he never actually saw any Japanese aircraft, but Minister of Information Hollington Tong told him there had been forty-two Japanese airplanes, which Luce reported as fact. After the bombing, Luce and company crossed the river and drove through Chungking’s streets. He saw no injured people, but Tong said there had been casualties, which Luce also reported.

  Henry Luce and Theodore “Teddy” White. Luce hired White from Chiang’s Ministry of Information. (Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)

  No barbarian’s tour of the China Lobby’s New China theme park would be complete without a visit to “the front,” so Luce took a short airplane hop north to the city of Xian and was thrilled to find that it was becoming Americanized with “wide long straight streets with sidewalks… Western clothes… and above all, rubber tires—rubber tires even on oxcarts.”23

  Tong roused the Luces at 3:15 the next morning so they could witness the army’s dawn rituals. Well-muscled troops in crisp uniforms paraded past the publisher, came to attention, saluted a flag, and listened to a band. After the men marched away, Tong told Luce there were twelve thousand such troops in the area fighting the Japanese, another unverifiable claim parroted by Luce in his dispatch home.

  Escorted by General Chow, the Luces went to “the wall of the city nearest the river and the Japanese.” In the city was a frontline headquarters. A colonel sat the Americans down to tea and showed them brightly colored maps. The colonel next took them to an observation post, and then Henry Luce—dressed in suit and tie with polished shoes—descended with the commander into the trenches.

  Luce wound through the trenches, encountering soldiers who were reading, not fighting, and finally made his way to the observation point: “On the cliffs beyond we could see the gun emplacements and then we spotted one Japanese sentry and through the glasses we could see the flag of Nippon. That was all.”24

  Did Luce see a real Japanese soldier or one of Hollington Tong’s Chinese actors? Luce—and the American reader—never knew.

  Henry Luce at the “front” in suit and tie (Courtesy Henry Luce Foundation)

  Based on his observation of a few hundred soldiers and his examination of war maps over tea, Luce reported that Chiang had an army of three million snappy, ready-to-fight soldiers:

  Let it be said right now that the Chinese Army of Chiang Kai-shek has a fine morale, as strict discipline, as earnest and as intent an expression as ever characterized any army in history.25

  When the Luces met with the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, Henry found it a transcendent experience. Mayling greeted them first and Luce wrote, “We were in almost no time at all talking 100% American faster than I have ever heard it talked.” When Chiang arrived, the four of them had a simple lunch, and Luce presented the Generalissimo with a portfolio of photographs. Luce concluded, “An hour later we left knowing that we had made the acquaintance of two people, a man and a woman, who, out of all the millions now living, will be remembered for centuries and centuries.”26

  There were three Chinas at that point: Chiang’s, Mao’s, and Japan’s. Henry Luce had fully examined none of them; he had obediently stayed wit
hin the China Lobby bubble. Perhaps if the publisher had not been a missionary’s son, someone at Time Inc. might have reported on Mao’s China and revealed the twentieth century’s largest revolution as it developed from embryo to maturity.

  Had Luce made his way to Yan’an, no lavish banquets in marble halls would have been awaiting him. But Luce would have found that Yan’an, which six years earlier most Chinese had never heard of, was now one of China’s largest educational centers. Before Mao had marched to Yan’an, there had been few schools scattered across a vast area of North China, and what schools there were taught only the Confucian Four Books and Five Classics. Mao founded the University of Resistance, which graduated over ten thousand students a year. He built primary schools, middle schools, three colleges, the largest arts academy in China, and a vocational training school. A publishing house hidden deep in the loess hills printed books, magazines, and newspapers. A factory produced many types of medicines.

  Before Mao’s arrival, women in North China were hired out as labor by their husbands and fathers, who collected their wages. Mao created the Women’s University, housed in a series of caves connected by internal walkways. The Women’s University had students of all ages who were from all over China—astonishing, considering that Chiang had this area surrounded and that the aspiring scholars who ventured to Yan’an risked arrest.

  Even if he had traveled to Yan’an, Luce might not have comprehended what he was seeing. Luce, like most Westerners, understood only positional warfare, maps with lines of troops facing each other. A map of Mao’s empire would have resembled a net. The Japanese lifelines—cities and connecting roads—were the cords. The open spaces—the majority of the net—were the areas under Mao’s influence. When the Japanese advanced, Chiang retreated. Into the resulting vacuum Mao dispatched his acolytes to teach the villagers a new type of resistance warfare.

  The late 1930s saw chaos in China as Chiang Kai-shek’s holdings shrunk while Mao Zedong and the Japanese expanded.

  Mao—like Chiang—had a torture and detention center out of sight. After all, this was a Chinese civil war, and Mao was no saint. The difference was that Mao inspired the Four Hundred Million to reclaim their country.

  In the ten months following FDR’s July 1940 partial embargo, the Japanese purchased more oil than they had in 1939, and they obtained State-approved licenses for five million gallons more. Shipments from California to Japan in May of 1941 totaled over two million barrels, a record for the year. Newspaper photographs of Japanese ships loading oil in California ports infuriated many Americans, who were two to one in favor of “nonparticipation in Japanese aggression.” It was “ghastly” how we were letting Japan “pile up” oil, complained Henry Morgenthau.27

  Surprisingly, despite all the controversy, the Roosevelt administration’s contacts with the Japanese were minimal and limited mostly to official exchanges. No individual Japanese had anything like the personal access to the Roosevelt administration that the China Lobby had. Indeed, the Japanese ambassador was an old navy admiral with minimal English skills. Kichisaburo Nomura was dispatched from Tokyo to Washington in November 1940 because he had served in Washington when Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy. In Tokyo’s eyes, Nomura’s value in Washington was symbolic. He represented the Japanese navy, which, like the U.S. Navy, did not want war. Roosevelt respected Nomura, but the admiral had none of the public relations skills possessed by Baron Kaneko or T. V. Soong. Nomura’s diplomatic experience was limited and he had never attended any overseas English-speaking school, let alone Harvard. Without the benefit of Ivy League ties, the communication between Tokyo, through its embassy in Washington, and the Roosevelt administration was stilted and formal.

  In the spring of 1941 Roosevelt agreed to let members of his administration talk with the Japanese government, but, perhaps because of the public’s sympathy for the Noble Chinese Peasants and China Lobby pressure, FDR green-lighted the negotiations only if Secretary of State Hull conducted them in secret. On April 14, 1941, Nomura quietly called on Hull at his apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel. Hull’s speech impediment and pronounced Tennessee drawl exacerbated the challenges raised by Nomura’s poor grasp of English and the complex, layered language of diplomacy.

  The subject of their first talk was a draft understanding that Nomura had given to Hull days earlier. Written by a Japanese army colonel in the Japanese embassy in Washington, the draft understanding was a wish list that expressed the Japanese desire to maintain their presence in China. Tokyo officials were unaware of its existence, yet Nomura had submitted it to Hull.

  Hull told Nomura up front that their meetings did not constitute formal negotiations, that before the U.S. and Japan could begin talks, Japan must agree to “the integrity and sovereignty of China and the principle of equality of opportunity in China.”28 Hull had just informed Nomura that Japan had to reopen the Open Door before the U.S. would even begin negotiations. Nomura—quickly lost in the twists and turns of Hull’s legalistic language—never grasped that the secretary of state had drawn a line in the sand.

  Two days later, at another meeting in the secretary’s apartment, Hull educated Nomura on the four principles upon which any U.S. agreement with Japan must be based:

  (1) Respect for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of each and all nations.

  (2) Support of the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries.

  (3) Support of the principle of equality, including equality of commercial opportunity.

  (4) Nondisturbance of the status quo in the Pacific except as the status quo may be altered by peaceful means.29

  Hull was demanding that Japan get out of China, a momentous change in American policy that was expressed in secret by a man who couldn’t speak Japanese to a man who barely understood English. Hull’s goal was “regeneration,” the theory that if the U.S. forced the Japanese military into a humiliating withdrawal from China, moderates in Tokyo would seize power from the militarists. Hull had no interpreter and recorded in his memoirs that Nomura “spoke a certain—sometimes an uncertain—amount of English,” so Hull “took care to speak slowly and to repeat and reemphasize some of [his] sentences.” Hull concluded that he “was not sure” whether Nomura understood him.

  Nomura asked Hull a yes-or-no question: Did the U.S. agree with the draft understanding Japan had submitted? Nomura struggled to comprehend Hull’s answer: “If your Government is in real earnest about changing its course, I can see no good reason why ways could not be found to reach a fairly satisfactory settlement of all the essential questions presented.”30

  Unsure if Hull had answered yes or no, Nomura optimistically guessed it was a yes.

  None of what Hull had carefully laid out to Nomura was transmitted to Tokyo. Nomura simply cabled the draft understanding to Japan’s Foreign Ministry, saying that Hull was willing to go ahead with it. Historian Robert Butow noted,

  Nomura’s brief account gave not the slightest hint of the innumerable statements with which Hull had patiently built up his position like a mason carefully laying one stone upon another. The ambassador’s few clipped words did not even report the sense of what he had been told by the American Secretary of State.31

  The drawling Hull had asked Nomura to have Tokyo examine the draft understanding so Japanese leaders could decide whether they wished Japan to officially present it to the State Department as a basis for starting negotiations. Instead, Nomura implied to his superiors an American eagerness to go ahead on the basis of the draft understanding. Nomura’s vague and stilted phrasing led Tokyo officials to conclude that the draft understanding was an American plan prepared as a response to the various inside moves initiated by Nomura and his staff. Nomura also failed to forward Hull’s crucial four principles, which effectively demanded that Japan withdraw from China.

  The draft understanding cabled by Nomura was received in Tokyo on April 18 “like welcome rain in the desert” and a “boon from Heaven.” As army
minister Hideki Tojo later said, “We regarded the Japanese-American negotiations as having begun from the moment we were asked to indicate our attitude with respect to this proposal.”32 Suddenly what was the draft understanding in Washington became the “American plan” in Tokyo.

  Tokyo responded on May 12 with its answer to the American plan, which Hull accepted as Japan’s initial offer. Thus, as a result of this tragicomedy of errors, from May 12, 1941, negotiations were doomed; when Hull suggested changes, leaders in Tokyo were outraged that he was backing down on the promises he had made in the American plan.

  Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The Age of Roosevelt of FDR’s management style:

  In many cases jurisdictions overlapped each other and even spilled into cabinet departments. This was sloppy and caused much trouble. Yet this very looseness around the joints, this sense of give and possibility which Henry Stimson once called the “inherently disorderly nature” of Roosevelt’s administration, made public service attractive to men of a certain boldness and imagination. It also spurred them on to better achievement. Roosevelt liked the competitive approach to administration, not just because it reserved the big decisions for the President, but perhaps even more because it enabled him to test and develop the abilities of his subordinates. How to tell which man, which approach was better? One answer was to let them fight it out.33

  By early May, the study groups established by the canny bureaucrat Henry Stimson had produced eighteen plans on how to cripple Japan with economic warfare.34 The First Wise Man initiated no accompanying analysis of how Japan might react.