The war with Japan, however, had turned out to be a major boon to the Communists’ prospects. With the central government bearing the brunt of Tokyo’s firepower, Mao had taken the opportunity to infiltrate guerrillas and organize peasants behind Japanese lines as Chiang fought for China’s survival. The Communists started the war with fewer than 100,000 soldiers and scant territory beyond the desolate landscape surrounding the revolutionary headquarters in Yenan. By the end, they had a million troops and more than a million party members, controlling territory that was home to nearly 100 million people, almost a quarter of China’s population. “China’s destiny is not Chiang’s but theirs,” a young American diplomat had written of the Communists, contradicting the assurance of his superiors.
When the Soviet Red Army swept into Manchuria in the final days of the war, Mao saw a chance to build on his progress. He ordered hundreds of thousands of regular and irregular Chinese Communist fighters into the region as the Soviet invasion began. They did not always get the kind of welcome they expected from their revolutionary brethren. But a combination of the occupiers’ enabling indifference and quiet help meant that within a few months of Japanese defeat, the Communists had managed to establish a strong presence in a large swath of China’s northeast. “Without Soviet assistance,” the State Department assessed, “it is difficult to see how the Chinese Communists could have become so securely entrenched in Manchuria as they appear to be today.”
Chiang invoked this assistance, a violation of the deal he had struck with Stalin, as an argument for further U.S. support, whatever the injunction against “fratricidal warfare.” He wrote Truman about “Soviet Russia’s connivance with Chinese Communists.” He reminded Wedemeyer again and again that the Soviets “collaborate with the Chinese Communists in making Japanese arms and equipment available and in placing definite obstacles in the way of Chinese Central Government troops when attempts are made to move them by sea and/or air to Manchuria.”
Wedemeyer was sympathetic, but he needed further guidance from his government before he could do anything. Should he offer more help, or was it time to start withdrawing the more than 100,000 U.S. troops in China?
By the time of Marshall’s selection, Wedemeyer had been presenting versions of this question for weeks, hoping that the stark choice—fully commit or go home—would force Washington’s hand. The State Department wanted to equivocate, postponing any more troop movements until Marshall could arrive and persuade the two sides to make progress in peace talks. But to Marshall’s military advisers, this position was another of “the vague, indecisive, delaying tactics which have characterized U.S. policy toward China since the Japanese capitulation.” Marshall himself worried that it would give the Communists reason to stall once he arrived, maneuvering to “block all progress in negotiations as far as they can, as the delay is to their advantage.”
So a new order again split the difference, giving Wedemeyer some leeway, but not as much as he wanted. He could immediately transport another 200,000 of Chiang’s troops north, then be ready to transport more without yet committing to it. Once in China, Marshall could perhaps use the uncertainty about further troop movements to his own advantage.
But Wedemeyer’s estimate of what might be needed was growing, his view of the situation becoming darker. No longer was he saying, as he had at a press conference in August, “I do not anticipate any difficulty with the Communists.” In fact, the challenge was great, and overcoming it would mean assuming great risks. “If the unification of China and Manchuria under Chinese National Forces is to be a United States policy,” he advised, “involvement in fratricidal warfare and possibly in war with the Soviet Union must be accepted.” War with the Soviets might be the price America had to pay for the China it wanted.
Something else happened in the days after Japan’s surrender. The OSS agents dropped behind Japanese lines in China were not just looking out for American prisoners. They were also taking stock of Communist positions. One of them, a brash former missionary who spoke Chinese well and detested the CCP, happened on a Communist troop detachment in eastern China. When he refused to give up his gun, an argument started, and before long, he was dead. The Communists cut his throat from ear to ear and mutilated his face with bayonets.
Mao was apologetic. It was all, he explained afterward to Wedemeyer, a “very unfortunate” misunderstanding. Members of the agent’s party reported that his behavior had been provocative. But U.S. officials also recognized that the agent was intruding on important geography for the Communists; the killing might have been meant to send a message. Wedemeyer told Mao that it would have “a very disturbing effect” in the United States. “The Chinese Communists are doing their utmost,” Wedemeyer related to Washington, “to involve United States forces in military operations that definitely can be construed as offensive in nature. They hope . . . to influence public opinion in the States.”
For now, however, few Americans took much notice of John Birch’s death.
Two days after the meeting at the State Department, Marshall returned to the White House, this time with Secretary Byrnes, to go over the plan with Truman and his chief of staff, Leahy. American power, wielded by Marshall, would bring the two sides together in a truce. Chiang would reform his government, Mao would give up his independent army, and China would be unified. And this new China would be rewarded with considerable American assistance, economic and otherwise—an incentive for both Chiang and Mao, since all Chinese would benefit from such support.
Truman had no reason to object. He had been hearing for months, from a variety of sources, that this basic course offered the best hope of realizing American objectives in China. “As I see it, there is only one way to get off the horns of the dilemma,” an emissary wrote him after a visit. “That is to aid the Chinese Government to take immediate economic and political measures which can produce political unity before our troops leave China.” John Carter Vincent, a skeptic of Chiang, would argue that “a reduction in the influence of the Communists might be more readily achieved if the Government ‘took them in’ (in more sense than one) on a minority basis rather than try to shoot them all.” Wedemeyer, a champion of Chiang, advised that the government would “not be able to stabilize the situation in North China for several months perhaps years unless a satisfactory settlement with the Chinese Communists is accomplished,” followed by “economic, political and social reforms through honest, competent civilian officials.” And Henry Luce, perhaps Chiang’s greatest American advocate, had recently endorsed “the policy of Byrnes, Truman, and Marshall,” while warning, in black tie at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, that Chiang’s government must “produce a solution for the current social ills.”
Whether a stable unity government could be other than democratic had been a matter of debate. Marshall accepted the State Department’s formulation of a “strong, peaceful, united and democratic China” over the War Department’s “strong, peaceful, united and effective.” (Wedemeyer argued that China “is not yet capable of implementing, nor is she psychologically prepared for, democratic procedures in government.”) Yet the fact that Chiang’s regime required fundamental change was not in dispute: only fundamental change would allow it to survive.
Nor was the goal of a united China. Around Asia, countries were splitting in two: Korea along the 38th parallel between American and Soviet occupation zones, Vietnam along the 16th parallel between north and south. China was different. Just six months earlier, in San Francisco, the United Nations Charter had delivered on Roosevelt’s promise of anointing China a great power. A divided China would make that status meaningless. It would be easily dominated by the Soviet Union and sow tension among other governments. “A divided China will obviously further the forces of insecurity, invite foreign intervention, and may eventually bring about conditions which will plunge the world into a third world war,” a State Department analysis concluded.
So Plan A was clear enough. Marshall remained uneasy, howeve
r, when it came to Plan B. He pressed Truman on the scenario others had wanted to brush aside: what if this course failed, and what if that failure was, in whole or in part, Chiang Kai-shek’s fault? The president gave a different answer than his secretary of state had given two days earlier. In the “unfortunate eventuality” of such intransigence, as Marshall recorded it, “this Government would have to swallow its pride and much of its policy.” Otherwise, the consequences would be “tragic”—“a divided China,” “a probable Russian reassumption of power in Manchuria,” “the defeat or loss of the major purpose of our war in the Pacific.” Even if Chiang did little of what Marshall demanded, the United States would have to do most of what he wanted.
Underneath the wishful thinking and the optimistic evasions, Marshall’s key source of leverage over Chiang looked like a bluff.
When Marshall went back to the White House for a final conversation with Truman, he wanted to go over this point one last time. It was not part of his directive, it would be written nowhere official, so he repeated his understanding of the instruction: “in the event that I was unable to secure the necessary action by the Generalissimo, which I thought reasonable and desirable, it would still be necessary for the U.S. government, through me, to continue to back the National Government of the Republic of China—through the Generalissimo within the terms of the announced policy of the U.S. government.” Truman told Marshall that he had it right. Withdrawing all support from Chiang was out of the question, even if he resisted Marshall’s efforts.
Marshall’s interrogation by the Pearl Harbor Committee had ended the day before, on Friday, December 13. The following morning he would start a five-day airplane journey across the Pacific. Truman reiterated his faith in Marshall and then gave him the final version of his directive, the policy that had been worked out through edits, negotiations, and rewrites in the two and a half weeks since his selection. It described the scope of his authority, the means at his disposal, and the stakes of his mission. “The fact that I have asked you to go to China,” Truman’s note read, “is the clearest evidence of my very real concern with regard to the situation there.”
There was also a version of the directive that would be released to the public—abridged, but, for Marshall at least, hardly an afterthought. He had worried that he would find himself on “the horns of a dilemma,” caught between his own desire for as much public clarity as possible and the government’s usual aversion to any public clarity at all. He had worked through drafts with Byrnes and with his own aides. “U.S. support,” the public statement stressed, “will not extend to U.S. military intervention to influence the course of any Chinese internal strife.” Yet some key details were left out. It said nothing of either the further transport of Chiang’s troops or of Marshall’s authority to transfer even more, or not, depending, as the private version specified, on whether doing so would “prejudice the objectives of the military truce and the political negotiations.” The statement also said little about just how involved in those negotiations Marshall would be.
Instead, it sought to persuade Americans that their country’s involvement was worthwhile. “Events of this century,” it read, “would indicate that a breach of a peace anywhere in the world threatens the peace of the entire world.” The country could no longer act as if affairs across oceans were not its concern. And Marshall’s private directive from the president was even starker. Whatever the apparent costs, “they will be infinitesimal by comparison to a recurrence of global warfare in which the new and terrible weapons that exist would certainly be employed.” If Marshall did not succeed, the consequences would be dire, possibly even nuclear.
With these two versions of the directive in hand, Marshall said good-bye to Truman and went next door to the State Department with Dean Acheson. Acheson had joined the meeting in place of Byrnes, who had left for a summit meeting in Moscow—an effort to salvage the faltering spirit of Allied cooperation amid growing geopolitical tension. Officials hoped the summit would, among other things, help Marshall right the situation in China.
No one in Washington officialdom doubted that there was, as Chiang had written to Truman, connivance between Stalin and Mao. How much, and what exactly it meant, were murkier questions—in part because the answers frequently changed, leaving even Mao confused and dismayed. American policymakers had long worried that Stalin “would make full use of and support the Chinese Communists.” Yet he had gone out of his way to reassure them that his basic goals in China and theirs did not have to clash. The U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, sensed Stalin’s frustration with Mao and wariness about investing too much in a far-fetched Chinese revolution. Another American diplomat in Moscow, an up-and-coming Soviet specialist named George Kennan, would point out Stalin’s “use of words which mean all things to all people.” But Mao himself had been spooked by the Sino-Soviet Treaty with Chiang. When Stalin followed it by insisting, soon after Japan’s surrender, that Mao restrain his forces and engage in face-to-face talks with Chiang, Mao had no choice but to comply, taking his first-ever airplane flight for the encounter.
In Moscow, Byrnes thought he could secure more Soviet cooperation and less connivance. He was more optimistic than many of his colleagues; Henry Stimson had contended that “no permanently safe international relations can be established between two such fundamentally different national systems.” Yet even skeptics saw the need to try, including in China. Stalin might be unlikely to cut the Communists off completely, but the difference between limited and lavish backing could be decisive. As an assistant secretary of war had remarked recently after returning from China, if the Soviets “decide to give active support to the Chinese Communists, then we are in a real mess.”
With Byrnes on his way to Moscow, Marshall finalized the logistics of the mission with Acheson. The success of even the best strategy would depend on the unglamorous details of implementation, and Marshall was intent on getting those details right. Over the course of the war he had come to have high regard for the aristocratic Acheson; Acheson had come to worship Marshall, and would now make sure to provide whatever he said he needed. He would have a three-man staff to take with him. He would have a special expense account, in order to operate without the meddling of the State Department. He would have a “rear echelon,” his man in Washington, who could quickly and discreetly take care of what needed taking care of without worrying about bureaucracy and go straight to Truman, Byrnes, or Acheson with any message or request.
Marshall also wanted one other assurance: that no one in Washington would try to work around him. If his mission was to have any chance of success, he needed full authority to carry out his orders from the president, to use the leverage he had without being undermined by other officials with other priorities or views; otherwise, the Chinese would assume, as they often had during the war, that they could always try other channels if they did not like what Marshall was telling them. Acheson agreed to draft a letter for signature by the president directing the rest of the government to do nothing on China without permission from Marshall.
In the meantime, Marshall would say nothing about what he planned to do and insisted that no one else say anything either. Any stray comment, he worried, “might by some chance, because of the unusual complexity of the problem in China, prejudice my freedom of action in reaching conclusions on the ground.” He would need that freedom of action once the mission began.
The next morning, a small crowd gathered on the tarmac at National Airport, across the Potomac from the White House, to see Marshall off. The propellers on his C-54 were turning, photographers’ bulbs flashing, as he arrived in uniform, khaki coat belted and peaked general’s cap on.
The newspapers had hailed him and his mission in lofty terms—“the most difficult diplomatic mission anywhere in the world,” a commentator proclaimed. “Upon General Marshall, who did so much to win the war,” said the Washington Post, “there devolves a responsibility for winning the peace.” He will be armed “as few U.
S. diplomats have been armed for years,” said Time. He was carrying the great hopes Americans had for China; in a survey, 86 percent of respondents predicted a future of Sino-American cooperation. With his mere selection, the New York Times editorialized, “The situation in China has taken a turn for the better.”
For Katherine, none of this softened the “bitter blow” of the departure, and she had trouble hiding her anger. “I give a sickly smile when people say how the country loves and admires my husband,” she wrote to a former aide. “This sounds bitter. Well, I am bitter. The President should never have asked this of him and in such a way that he could not refuse.”
Marshall himself expressed no such bitterness. But those close to him could see that the only thing driving him was a sense of duty. “I know it is a great honor,” a friend wrote, “but—nuts—you’ve got enough honors.” Others worried he had been handed an impossible mission that would threaten the historical reputation he deserved. It was, one quipped, “the simple, rapid, one-man task of unifying 400 million-odd people who have practiced disunity for a thousand years and coaxing into being an efficient and honest government where none has ever existed.” During the war, China had come to be seen as a “graveyard for American officials.”
The most infamous of them was not there on the tarmac that day. In fact, Marshall had not spoken to Joe Stilwell since getting Truman’s call. Quietly, however, he had sent an aide to visit Stilwell in his spartan quarters at a nearby base. Vinegar Joe had a grim analysis for his former chief: the Chinese respect power, he said, and Marshall was going with little.
Marshall waved to the well-wishers and posed for the photographers. He told Katherine he would be gone just a few months. He shook hands with a somber Chinese ambassador and a grinning Eisenhower. He climbed the stairs, turned and raised his right hand, and then boarded the C-54.
The China Mission Page 5