The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  17. Chennault, Way of a Fighter, 103.

  18. Soong’s report on China’s estimated requirements, March 27, 1941, box 31, Soong Papers, as cited in Park, “In Support of ‘New China,’ ” 310.

  19. Soong to Frankfurter, April 7, 1941, box 29, in ibid., 265.

  20. Morgenthau’s China diary, 377, 378, 388; http://ow.ly/A1PDP.

  21. Janeway, “Roosevelt vs. Hitler.”

  22. Henry R. Luce, “China to the Mountains,” Life, June 30, 1941.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 133.

  28. Hull, Memoirs, 2: 994.

  29. Ibid., 2: 995.

  30. From Hull’s memorandum of the conversation between Hull and Nomura, May 16–June 16, 1941, in ibid., 994, 987, 996.

  31. Robert J. C. Butow, “The Hull-Nomura Conversations: A Fundamental Misconception,” American Historical Review 65, no. 4 (July 1960): 830.

  32. Ibid., 832.

  33. Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, 2: 535–36.

  34. Anderson, “The 1941 de Facto Embargo on Oil to Japan,” 216.

  35. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, 3: 218–19.

  36. Ibid., 3: 553–59.

  37. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 20.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Tokyo Circular No. 1139, May 29, 1941, to Japanese offices in Nanking, Shanghai, Peking, and Canton concerning message number 267 from Hong Kong on May 28, 1941, as cited in Armstrong, Preemptive Strike, 125–26.

  40. Chennault, Way of a Fighter, 104.

  41. Robert P. Patterson memo to Stimson, July 18, 1941, correspondence box 387, Stimson Papers.

  42. Edward S. Miller, Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 174.

  43. U.S. Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 702–4.

  44. I. F. Stone, “Oil on the Pacific,” Nation 153 (August 9, 1941): 109–10.

  45. Press release, July 26, 1941, box 424, Morgenthau Papers. FDR’s press release stated he had “extended the freezing control to Chinese assets in the United States… in accordance with the wishes of the Chinese Government.” This was to stop Japan from using captured Chinese funds. What Roosevelt did not mention was that he was exempting from the freezing order all Soong-Chiang private holdings: the Bank of China, the Central Bank of China, and China Defense Supplies, as cited in Park, “In Support of ‘New China,’ ” 302.

  46. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, 3: 588.

  47. Testimony of Admiral Stark, Pearl Harbor Hearings, part 5, 2115, as cited in Anderson, “The 1941 de Facto Embargo on Oil to Japan,” 220.

  48. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 388.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries, 2: 265.

  51. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 25.

  52. Michael Fullilove, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 296–97.

  53. Halifax to Foreign Office, August 2, 1941, as cited in Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 141.

  54. Ickes, Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, 3: 592.

  55. Stimson MS diary, August 1, 1941, 35: 1–2, as cited in Rendezvous with Destiny, 310–11.

  56. Ibid.

  57. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 155.

  58. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 177.

  59. Sir R. Campbell to Foreign Office, September 27, 1941, as cited in ibid.

  60. “Japan: Oil Shipments To” folder, FFCC, as cited in Utley, Going to War with Japan, 155.

  61. Jonathan Utley, “Upstairs, Downstairs at Foggy Bottom: Oil Exports and Japan, 1940–41,” Prologue (Spring 1976): 17–28.

  62. Miller, Bankrupting the Enemy, 200.

  63. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 154.

  64. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 19.

  65. B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 269.

  66. Roland Worth, No Choice but War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), 129.

  CHAPTER 10: ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

  1. John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (New York: Random House, 1970), 186–87.

  2. Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 28.

  3. Sadao Asada, From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 276.

  4. Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: The Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941 (New York: Penguin, 2008), 380.

  5. Minutes of the Economic Defense Board meeting, August 20, 1941, as cited in Anderson, “The 1941 de Facto Embargo on Oil to Japan,” 229.

  6. Memorandum of conversation, Roosevelt and Hull with Nomura, August 28, 1941, in FRUS, 2: 571–72.

  7. Japanese proposal, September 4, 1941, in ibid., 600.

  8. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 26.

  9. Nobutaka Ike, ed. and trans., Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 147–48.

  10. Asada, From Mahan to Pearl Harbor, 267.

  11. Miller, Bankrupting the Enemy, 220.

  12. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 161.

  13. Ike, Japan’s Decision for War, 286.

  14. Ibid., 282.

  15. Ibid., 152.

  16. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire, 188.

  17. Jespersen, American Images of China, 53–54.

  18. Luce to Time subscribers, November 8, 1941, box 7, UCR-USC Records, as cited in Park, “In Support of ‘New China,’ ” 292.

  19. Theodore White, “Aid to China—When?,” Fortune, September 1941, 142.

  20. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 536.

  21. “Christianity in China,” Time, April 28, 1941, 54–56, as cited in Park, “In Support of ‘New China,’ ” 290.

  22. McKean, Peddling Influence, 163.

  23. Armstrong, Preemptive Strike, 201.

  24. R. John Pritchard, The Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial: The Records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), as cited in Miller, Bankrupting the Enemy, 243.

  25. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire, 189.

  26. New York Times, December 9, 1941.

  27. Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 26.

  28. Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 88.

  29. Memo, May 24, 1932, Nelson T. Johnson Papers, Library of Congress, as cited in Cohen, America’s Response to China, 122.

  30. Report of AMMISCA to War Department, December 10, 1941; Magruder to War Department, January 5, 1942, FRUS, 4: 796–71; Magruder to War Department, February 10, 1942, cited in Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 89.

  31. Memo, Sliney for Magruder, December 10, 1941, AMMISCA, folder 1, as cited in Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, United States Army in World War II: China-Burma-India Theater (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1952–1958), 44–45.

  32. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 222.

  33. George W. Sliney and Edwin M. Sutherland, item 87, AMMISCA, folder 4, as cited in Romanus and Sunderland, United States Army in World War II, 36.

  34. Hannah Pakula, The Last Empress (New York: Simon and Schuster), 370.

  35. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 119.

  36. Maochun Yu, The Dragon’s War: Allied Operations and the Fate of China, 1937–1947 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 91.r />
  37. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 330.

  38. Yu, The Dragon’s War, 91.

  39. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 330.

  40. “Battle of China: Blood for the Tigers,” Time, December 29, 1941.

  41. Chennault’s many defenders point to his tactical brilliance and courage, the undoubted bravery and skill of his men, and the many Japanese planes and ships destroyed. But Chennault initiated a troubling pattern for the U.S. military on the Asian mainland: tactical excellence but strategic failure. The Chiang-Chennault plan to bomb Japan from China didn’t work, and while Mao had no air force, he—not the U.S. Air Force’s client—won the Chinese civil war. The U.S. Air Force—in thousands of successful tactical operations during the 1960s and 1970s—dropped more bomb tonnage on Vietnam than was dropped on all contestants in World War II and still lost to a foe with paltry airpower. In 1990, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Claire Chennault stamp, allowing him at long last to be associated with effective air operations.

  CHAPTER 11: THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN

  1. Pearl S. Buck, “A Warning About China,” Life, May 10, 1943, 53.

  2. Joseph Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers, ed. Theodore White (New York: Schocken, 1972), 332.

  3. Ibid., 36.

  4. White, In Search of History, 134.

  5. Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers, 80.

  6. Ibid., 320.

  7. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 355.

  8. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 331.

  9. Churchill, The Second World War, 4: 119.

  10. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 338.

  11. Chennault Papers.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 338.

  14. Chennault, Way of a Fighter, 225.

  15. Ibid., 226.

  16. Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers, 204–6.

  17. “Madame Chiang Asks Defeat of Japan, and House Cheers,” New York Times, February 19, 1943, as cited in Li, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 201.

  18. David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 223.

  19. Mayling Soong, “Addresses to the House of Representatives and to the Senate,” February 18, 1943; transcript available at U.S.-China Institute, University of Southern California, http://china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=1297.

  20. “China: Madame,” Time, March 1, 1943, 23, as cited in Pakula, The Last Empress, 421.

  21. Pakula, The Last Empress, 422.

  22. Roosevelt, My Day, 77.

  23. “Trials and Errors,” Fortune, March 2, 1943, 62, as cited in Pakula, The Last Empress, 427–28.

  24. Joint press conference with Madame Chiang Kai-shek; http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16366.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers, 316.

  27. Ibid., 340.

  28. Ibid., 250.

  29. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 401.

  30. Ibid., 357.

  31. John Paton Davies Jr., China Hand (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 108.

  32. Hanson Baldwin, “Too Much Wishful Thinking About China,” Reader’s Digest (August 1943), and Nathaniel Peffer, “Our Distorted View of China,” New York Times Magazine, November 7, 1943, as cited in Pakula, The Last Empress, 460.

  33. Buck, “A Warning About China,” 56.

  34. Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers, 332.

  35. Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 67.

  36. Service, Lost Chance in China, 179–80.

  37. Interview with Mao Zedong, August 23, 1944, in ibid., 302–7.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Many China Lobbyists point out that the China Hands were naive to believe Mao’s presentation of himself, that at the same time Mao was smiling at them in Yan’an, he was torturing people over the hills. But Mao’s critics don’t mention that the U.S. Navy helped Chiang’s Himmler—Dai Li—with his Happy Valley torture camp, just over the mountains from Chungking. Also, for supporters of Chiang to complain about others being duped is questionable. Again, I examine Chiang and Mao not in search of perfection but to discover why one of them won the Mandate of Heaven.

  41. Barbara Tuchman, Notes from China (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 94.

  42. Christopher R. Lew and Edwin Pak-wah Leung, Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Civil War (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 95.

  43. Romanus and Sunderland, United States Army in World War II, 279.

  44. Joint press conference with Madame Chiang Kai-shek; http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16366.

  45. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 239.

  46. Ibid., 354–55.

  47. Service, Lost Chance in China, 161–66.

  48. John S. Service, “State Department Duty in China, the McCarthy Era and After: 1932–1977,” an oral history interview conducted by Rosemary Levenson (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 1978), as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 97.

  49. Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 98.

  50. Service, Lost Chance in China, 160.

  51. John Davies memo, “The Chinese Communists and the Great Powers,” FRUS, 6: 667–69.

  52. Tuchman, Notes from China, 78.

  53. Ibid., 96.

  54. Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 204–5.

  55. Ambassador Hurley cable to President Roosevelt, January 14, 1945, FRUS, 7: 172–77; http://images.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/EFacs/1945v07/reference/frus.frus1945v07.i0006.pdf.

  56. Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 113.

  57. Roger J. Sandilands, The Life and Political Economy of Lauchlin Currie (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 132.

  58. John Service, “Chou En-Lai as Seen by an Old China Hand,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1976; http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/service5.htm.

  59. Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 117.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Service, The Amerasia Papers, 185, as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 119.

  62. John Service, letter to John Carter Vincent, February 1945, as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 119.

  63. Service, Lost Chance in China, 358–63.

  64. Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 121.

  65. Service, The Amerasia Papers, 108.

  66. Ibid., 105.

  67. Service, Lost Chance in China, 358.

  68. Service, “State Department Duty in China,” 308, as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 122.

  69. Service, Lost Chance in China, 370.

  70. Ibid., 378.

  71. Service, The Amerasia Papers, 150, as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 124.

  72. Service interview with Mao, March 13, 1945, as cited in Service, Lost Chance in China, 372–73.

  73. Ibid., 384.

  74. Ibid., 372.

  75. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 586, as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 126.

  76. Ibid., 571, as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor.

  77. Service, The Amerasia Papers, 124–27, as cited in Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 128.

  78. Geoffrey C. Ward, Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 418.

  79. Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 304.

  CHAPTER 12: WHO LOST CHINA?

  1. Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31.

  2. Tom Wicker, JFK and LBJ: The Influence of Personality upon Politics (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 205, and Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Knopf, 2012), 402.

  3. Joiner, Honorable Survivor, 1.

  4.
John Service and Thomas Corcoran crossed paths in what is called “the Amerasia affair,” which is well documented in a number of studies. There is still today tremendous China Lobby smoke around Service’s actions, but no fire occurred.

  5. Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 387.

  6. For further discussion, see James Bradley, Flyboys (New York: Little, Brown, 2003).

  7. Nancy MacLennan, “Mme. Chiang Opens Peace Campaign,” New York Times, August 15, 1945.

  8. “Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5139/.

  9. Letter from Ho Chi Minh to President Harry S. Truman, February 28, 1946, National Archives; http://www.archives.gov/global-pages/larger-image.html?i=/historical-docs/doc-content/images/ho-chi-minh-telegram-truman-l.jpg&c=/historical-docs/doc-content/images/ho-chi-minh-telegram-truman.caption.html.

  10. Felix Belair Jr., “Hurley Demands Hearing in Public,” New York Times, December 1, 1945; “Five Representatives Ask U.S. to Quit China,” New York Times, November 27, 1945.

  11. Hurley’s letter of resignation to Truman, November 26, 1945, FRUS, 7: 722–26.

  12. Mao’s Bloody Revolution Revealed, directed by Philip Short, documentary broadcast on UK Terrestrial Station Five in May 2007.

  13. Chiang Kai-shek to Truman, November 9, 1948, as cited in Pakula, The Last Empress, 562.

  14. Memo from Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of State, December 16, 1948, as cited in Pakula, The Last Empress, 562.

  15. Pakula, The Last Empress, 564.

  16. Miller, Plain Speaking, 288–89.

  17. Ibid., 283.

  18. Pakula, The Last Empress, 567.

  19. Ibid., 577.

  20. Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842–1949 (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 291.

  21. Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 251.

  22. U.S. Department of State, The China White Paper, August 1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 1: xvi.

  23. Norman A. Graber et al., America and the Cold War, 1941–1991: A Realist Interpretation (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 1: 167.

  24. Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997), 203.