The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  By the last phase of the war, accumulated disappointment had brought Chiang’s fear to fruition: the China front truly had become a sideshow. American strategists initially wanted it as a base for attacking Japan. The island-hopping campaign in the Pacific and frustrations in China changed their plan. They had other angles of attack. Before his death, even Roosevelt had come to doubt his vision of China’s role. He allowed that “three generations of education and training would be required before China could become a serious factor.”

  War’s sudden end was not an unalloyed blessing. In an instant, complications of a wartime alliance became threats to a peacetime vision. Almost no one had thought Japan’s surrender might come when it did until soon before. U.S. military planners operated on the assumption that there would be a year or more, rather than three months, between Germany’s defeat and Japan’s. Even once the power of atomic weapons started to become clear, Marshall expected the war to go until the end of 1945. Days before it collapsed, Mao was predicting that Japanese resistance would last well into 1946.

  “If peace comes suddenly, it is reasonable to expect widespread confusion and disorder,” Wedemeyer warned Marshall in the war’s final weeks. In the wake of Japan’s surrender on August 14, such confusion added new urgency to Washington’s long-standing objectives—to bolster Chiang Kai-shek’s government, to bring the Nationalists and the Communists together, and to see China stand up as one of the great powers of the postwar world. In the confusion, it fell to Marshall to find a way.

  After leaving the Oval Office the morning of November 28, Marshall received a message from Chiang. “I am delighted with your appointment,” it read. “I hope that you will come as soon as possible.” Marshall replied that he would depart the following week. First he had to take care of some lingering business from the war.

  CHAPTER 2

  Horrid Dilemmas

  A democracy in triumph can present a strange spectacle. The week after getting Truman’s call, Marshall walked into the cavernous Senate Caucus Room to find the seats filled with onlookers and ten congressmen framed by columns in front—“Hollywood’s idea of what Washington is like,” the New Republic cracked. Days earlier he had been credited with giving the country victory. Now the people’s representatives were preparing to set into him, a journalist noted, “as if he were being tried for losing the war rather than winning it.”

  This was the latest in a string of investigations into the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Marshall was expected to answer any and all questions the congressional committee had before starting his new mission. He had told Chiang Kai-shek that he would depart for China by December 7 (four years to the day after Pearl Harbor, as it happened). When the questions began, it quickly became clear he would not be leaving so soon. Why had he not done more to warn commanders in Hawaii? Where had he been that morning? Who had known what, and when? Marshall reminded his interrogators that a plane was waiting nearby to take him across the Pacific; the questions continued.

  There was an ominous insinuation to many of these questions. Members of the committee were pushing a theory that the Roosevelt administration had let Pearl Harbor happen so that the United States would be forced into war. If that were true, the suffering and struggle of the last four years had been not a necessary sacrifice, but the fruit of conspiracy, of subversion by enemies within. (Patrick Hurley’s resignation tirade had similarly fixated on subversion and prompted another congressional investigation, this one by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was moving beyond its original Nazi-hunting purpose.) Marshall, the charge went, was an agent of this conspiracy.

  In the face of grandstanding and insinuation, Marshall was straightforward and composed. He was a lackluster orator with a prepared text; speaking off the cuff, on a subject he knew, he could be entrancing. He earnestly and lucidly reconstructed his “thinking at the time” in response to questions about minute decisions four years earlier. “I prefer to rest on the evidence,” he said after a sneering recitation of his alleged lapses. Only occasionally did his restraint falter and sarcasm come to the surface. “If we had failed,” he grumbled, “I presume there would have been a full investigation as to why we went into Normandy.” Afterward, he clipped a newspaper editorial for his files: “It was quite evidently General Marshall’s conviction that if he answered fully, reasonably, patiently, that the committee would see Pearl Harbor as the national tragedy it was—a tragedy in which fallible men had made mistakes in judgment.”

  When Marshall left the room for the last time, the crowd applauded. He had answered questions for more than twenty-four hours over six days. December 7 had come and gone, his plane sitting on the tarmac.

  “God bless democracy!” Marshall would say. “I approve of it highly but suffer from it extremely.”

  “We shall have to breed a race of supermen to endure the strains of American public life,” the columnist Walter Lippmann mused while watching Marshall’s interrogation. But Marshall was by now used to the strains; the story of his becoming the kind of man who could endure them centered on encounters like the one with the Pearl Harbor Committee. Over and over, not just during the war but before, he had faced doubters and detractors and persuaded them, as he would advise, by accomplishment rather than eloquence.

  In his telling, it began with an overheard conversation. He had grown up a forgettable student and unremarkable boy in the same western Pennsylvania town where he was born in 1880. When he decided to follow his older brother, Stuart, to the Virginia Military Institute, he caught Stuart arguing against it: lanky George would disgrace the family name. (Their father made embarrassingly much of the fact that the name traced back, circuitously, to the early Supreme Court justice and secretary of state John Marshall.) His brother’s slight stirred in Marshall what he called an “urgency to succeed”—a fervor that drove him forward, almost destroyed him, and then hardened into self-mastery.

  At VMI, it was the fervor of a lone Yankee in the land of Jackson and Lee. Early on, weak with typhoid and forced to squat over an unsheathed bayonet, Marshall fainted and almost impaled himself. By the end, he was his class’s “first captain.” In his thirties, he again and again pushed himself to the point of breakdown, or past it, agitated by the slow progress of his military career. At 35 he was just a lieutenant, ready to give up on the army. “I do not feel it right to waste all my best years in the vain struggle against insurmountable obstacles,” he confessed. He was known for edgy intensity, a quick temper, a heavy smoking habit. Twice he was hospitalized, exhausted and overrun, for “neurasthenia.” Once he collapsed in the street.

  Twenty-five years later, it seemed a different man who led his country in World War II. The restless drive had given way to assured determination, the nervous energy to Olympian calm. He would still curse, but now only for effect. His temper was still feared—“I’ve never seen a man who apparently develops a higher pressure of anger when he encounters some piece of stupidity,” wrote Eisenhower—but now rarely seen. He had developed exquisite self-control, an aptitude for focusing on what was necessary, and a commitment to relaxing “completely.” Even during the war, he napped on a lounge chair after lunch and went riding almost daily. (That is where he was the morning of Pearl Harbor.) In the hours before the D-Day landing, he went to bed at his usual time—he had already done what he could. “It was as though he lived outside of himself,” said Katherine. Secretary of War Henry Stimson extolled him with a proverb: he who controls his spirit is better than he who takes a city.

  Along with this transformation had come another trait central to Marshall’s persona: a reputation for truth-telling, for almost insolent integrity in rooms of yes-men. His army career took off when he challenged the top American general in World War I, John “Black Jack” Pershing. Those watching thought this middling officer was finished. Instead Pershing made Marshall his aide and protégé. Before World War II, Marshall challenged Roosevelt in a meeting at the White House: “Mr. President, I am sorry, bu
t I don’t agree with that at all.” Again those watching thought Marshall, not yet army chief of staff, was finished. Instead the president promoted him over several higher-ranking generals. Marshall accepted on the condition that he always be allowed to speak his mind. “You said ‘yes’ pleasantly,” he added when Roosevelt assented, “but it may be unpleasant.”

  Marshall was characteristically blunt when, after meeting with Truman in the Oval Office, he reviewed a suggested “course of action” drafted by the State Department. The president had given him an objective, but he wanted to go to China with more than an objective. He wanted a strategy, a clear statement of what he was to do there and what he was to do it with. The State Department’s policy paper, he told Truman’s chief of staff, William Leahy, “appeared susceptible of serious misunderstanding.” What was needed was clarity, something “saying what we mean so that the people at home and the people in China, and the Russians also, will clearly understand our intentions.”

  While Marshall answered the Pearl Harbor Committee’s questions, administration officials started working out a more satisfactory plan. He stepped out of the Senate Caucus Room for hurried briefings between rounds of testimony and marked up drafts when he went home at night. But as he noted to a former colleague, “For the past week I have been all day, every day, before a congressional committee and during the few remaining hours I have been engrossed in preparations for my departure for China, which up to the present have of necessity been very superficial.”

  On Sunday, December 9, with the Pearl Harbor Committee off for the day, Marshall joined the discussions under way at the State Department. Secretary Byrnes was in his office, across an alley from the White House in the State, War, and Navy Building, along with two members of his team. John Carter Vincent, the head of the Department’s Office of Far Eastern Affairs, had spent much of his career in China and come back to Washington with a reputation for unsparing analysis of events there. Dean Acheson, Byrnes’s debonair and sharp-tongued deputy, was also known for sure and usually trenchant views. Less so Byrnes himself. A South Carolina politician, he was certain of one thing in particular: that he rather than Truman should have gotten the 1944 vice presidential nomination—and that he rather than Truman should by extension now be president. On other matters Byrnes was less resolute. It was said around Washington that he would lay out three hats in the morning so he could compromise on the one in the middle.

  The men in Byrnes’s office agreed on the basic objective for the mission. Marshall was to guarantee China’s unity, secure Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, and at the same time encourage enough reform and compromise to undercut the force of revolution and avert a civil war. By doing so, he would take China off the table as both a source of US-Soviet tension and an easy target for Soviet subterfuge. Without a strong and unified China, Byrnes reminded Marshall, “we could expect Russia to ultimately take control of Manchuria and maintain a dominant influence in North China.”

  They also, however, knew that similar objectives had sent Stilwell to his ruin and Hurley into his rage. Marshall was taking over where those others had failed, and the circumstances had not gotten dramatically more promising, even with the Japanese defeated. As one U.S. officer stationed in China put it, “I am still trying to find where the war left off and the peace commenced.”

  Yet there was aback reason they kept coming to the objective: the alternatives were dreadful. Marshall had been hearing contrary warnings through his final months as army chief of staff. Total abandonment of Chiang could mean at best a weak and divided China and at worst a Communist victory, either of which would invite Soviet domination; total commitment could mean a long, costly, and potentially futile war. General Wedemeyer, commanding U.S. forces from postwar headquarters in Shanghai, had sent message after message sounding the alarm about doing too little. “If China were to become a puppet of the Soviet which is exactly what a Chinese Communist victory would mean,” he wrote in a classified report, “then Soviet Russia would practically control the continents of Europe and Asia.” The warnings about committing too much were just as vehement. John Carter Vincent had cautioned against “the establishment of a relationship with China which has some characteristics of a de facto protectorate with a semi-colonial Chinese Army under our direction.” The implications of such a relationship, a diplomat stationed in China predicted, would be dire: “should Chiang attempt to liquidate the Communists, we should find ourselves entangled not only in a civil war in China but also drawn into conflict with the Soviet Union.”

  It was, as Walter Lippmann framed it in his widely read column, “a horrid dilemma—to become entangled by intervention in China’s civil war, or to get out of China in such a way as to leave China hopelessly divided, and dangerously weak.”

  Yet there was also some cause for hope that, with a mix of support and cajoling from Washington, Chiang might succeed in building something like the postwar China Roosevelt had envisioned. Compared to his challengers, Mao included, Chiang had the most resources, the most modern military, the most territory, and explicit recognition as the legitimate leader of China by all of the world’s powers, including the Soviet Union. A Sino-Soviet Treaty signed with Washington’s prodding on the last day of World War II exchanged Stalin’s support of Chiang for Russian economic advantages and a dominant role in Manchuria (concessions that Roosevelt and Churchill had, without Chiang’s consent, mostly already made to Stalin at Yalta anyway).

  The challenge was to achieve the right mix of support and cajoling, and to use it to persuade the Communists that their best option, their only option, was taking part in a government led by a longtime nemesis. It was a matter of leverage, of sending Marshall to China with, as Byrnes put it, “sufficient weapons . . . to induce the Central Government and the Communistic Government to get together.” To this end, Marshall had asked former aides in the War Department to rework the State Department’s draft policy, before the State Department reworked the War Department’s reworking—a negotiation in line edits.

  What most preoccupied Marshall, however, was a question not answered by any of these drafts. They could lay out what was expected of the two sides, but what would the United States do if it failed to persuade them, particularly if the Communists cooperated and Chiang did not? Byrnes conceded that Washington might in that case have to withhold support from Chiang’s government. But no one aside from Marshall wanted to spend much time contemplating failure. A man of his caliber, Vincent suggested, would find a way forward once there.

  In the wake of Japan’s surrender, the most pressing question for American policymakers had been just how much to help Chiang as he tried to take control of his country. At first they moved quickly. Washington’s Order Number One to its forces in the region was supposed to make his supremacy clear: except in Manchuria, where the Soviet occupiers were in charge, the Japanese were to hand over their weapons to Chiang’s troops alone, even when Nationalist forces were months away and the Communists were nearby. To facilitate this handover, the United States moved hundreds of thousands of Chiang’s troops from China’s interior toward the coast—“the largest troop movement by air in the world’s history,” according to General Wedemeyer. Military assistance also continued to flow. And by the fall of 1945, more than 50,000 U.S. Marines had started landing, welcomed as “angeles of peace,” as one sign had it, to help evacuate the Japanese and guard key points in northern China: railway lines, ports, coal mines, and cities that otherwise might have fallen into Communist hands.

  After a few months, this support started to run up against the limits of what the United States said it was willing to do. Washington insisted that any advantage given to Chiang in his fight with Mao was “incidental”; the main purpose was to facilitate the repatriation of 3 million Japanese soldiers and civilians and the recovery of 9,000 American prisoners. This was the explicit charge given to the Marines, as well as to teams of agents—Team Eagle, Team Cardinal, Team Magpie, Team Duck—dropped behind Japanese lines on be
half of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the wartime U.S. intelligence operation. U.S. personnel would help Chiang take China back from the Japanese, but they were not to back him in “fratricidal warfare” against the Communists.

  To those out in the field, this injunction hinged on a distinction without a difference. As Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal asked, “How do you draw the line between internal security and internal war?” Wedemeyer complained insistently about the “conflicting orders” he was to execute. “Under the present circumstances,” he wrote, “it is impossible to avoid involvement in fratricidal warfare or political strife, yet I am admonished by my directive to do so.” American ships and planes were helping American-armed troops take territory that the Communists claimed. Marines were protecting supply lines and resources, and even allowing the Japanese to continue as de facto occupiers until government troops could arrive. Whatever the stated goal, Wedemeyer pointed out, “we are making an important contribution to preclude successful operations by Communist forces.”

  What was more, the fight against the Communists was proving more challenging than many had expected. In briefing Marshall a few months earlier, Wedemeyer advised that it would take only moderate U.S. help for Chiang to defeat Mao’s forces. (Wedemeyer still wanted more American troops to land in China, but Marshall, who had to consider other needs in the region, told him that Japan and Korea were more urgent priorities.) Encouraged by the upbeat assessments, the new secretary of war, Robert Patterson, had recently boasted that the Communists were so negligible a force that U.S. Marines could walk from one side of China to the other without encountering any trouble.