To the Americans it seemed clear: the unraveling had begun with Marshall’s departure; only Marshall’s return could reverse it. “I think Marshall can fix it,” Caughey wrote a few weeks into his boss’s absence, “but he has got to be here to do it.” His prestige could get both sides in a room. His persuasiveness could get them to strike agreements. Without him, suspicions spiraled, and moves for advantage went unchecked. Arrangements came apart even faster than he had put them together. “It is appalling how bad things have gotten,” Melby wrote. “All parties now admit that things are a mess, but that when the General gets back he will straighten them out.” The embassy cabled drily: “all groups have expressed a desire for the early return of General Marshall.”
The appeals became more and more exigent, until finally they were desperate. On April 6, Walter Robertson implored from Executive Headquarters: “It is my carefully considered opinion that the situation is so serious and is deteriorating so rapidly that your immediate return to China is necessary to prevent your mission being dangerously jeopardized.” Madame Chiang wrote out a petition by hand. “I feel that I should tell you frankly that your presence is vital,” it read. “I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ but even the short time you have been absent proves what I have repeatedly said to you—that China needs you! And so hurry back to us, and bring Mrs. Marshall.”
Marshall hurried, but only after getting what he had come to Washington for. “It has been a hard battle,” he reported, “considering the political reactions or fears here, the past financial difficulties in dealing with the Chinese government, etc.” But he concluded with satisfaction, “I think I have sold China.” He had managed to secure, in his assessment, an aid package with generous terms and solid backing. He had not taken a single day off.
The day before flying, Marshall went to the White House. He planned to finish his mission over the summer, by early fall at the latest, and he wanted to ensure an official American ambassador would be in place to secure progress—perhaps, he thought, General Wedemeyer. Wedemeyer had experience in China, a sharp military mind, and enough command to keep hold of all lines of policy. “I will serve in any capacity gladly and as effectively as I can, for I owe much to you, to the Army and to my country,” Wedemeyer had replied when Marshall floated the idea.
Truman was more focused on filling a bigger role—secretary of state. Since December, there had been speculation, in Washington and Chongqing, that Marshall’s mission to China was a prelude to another position. The rumors had gotten to the point that, the day Marshall landed back in Washington, Truman felt the need to give a press conference rebutting them. “A big lie,” he said. But in reality, he had been fuming over Secretary Byrnes’s performance for months, especially when it came to relations with the Kremlin. “I’m tired [of] babying the Soviets,” Truman scrawled in a note after the Moscow summit. By then, he had already mentioned the possibility of secretary of state to Marshall, and he raised it again, via Shepley, in early March; Marshall was considering it seriously enough that he talked it over in confidence with some aides.
Wedemeyer, for one, was vehement: Marshall must take Truman’s offer, but his service to the country should not end there. “When the time comes for the nomination of a Presidential candidate, you should accept the same,” Wedemeyer argued. He made a rousing case: “You are still young and vigorous mentally and I do hope that conditions will be created whereby your talents will be exploited. General, I am not a damn flatterer when I state sincerely that we need now a man of your character to serve as a bulwark in defending the principles of democracy as well as decency in human relationships.”
First, Marshall had to return to China and finish his mission. This time, he would bring Katherine along, as Madame Chiang had urged. (“She says George needs me,” Katherine told a friend.) They were set to start the journey back on April 12, a month and a day after Marshall had left Chongqing.
Just before their flight, an urgent message came from the American embassy in China. The situation was deteriorating rapidly. Political democratization and military demobilization had both stalled, amid a flurry of fresh reservations and mutual recrimination. The Communists were issuing anti-Chiang screeds and ranting about his “lust for battle and slaughter.” The Generalissimo was giving fiery anti-Communist speeches and interviews. The embassy made a hurried recommendation: wait on announcing the aid Marshall had secured until his return, so as not to “seriously weaken his hand in reversing the present trend and bringing parties back to path on which he had set them.”
Marshall assented. He would hold off on an announcement until he could see the situation for himself. When reporters intercepted him and Katherine in Honolulu on their way to Chongqing, he had only one thing to say: “We don’t know how long we’ll be in China.”
* Equivalent to roughly $6 billion in real dollars today, and roughly $40 billion today measured as a percentage of GDP.
CHAPTER 8
Balance of Mistrusts
In the spring of 1914, First Lieutenant George C. Marshall, 33 years old and fresh off his second hospital stay for nervous exhaustion, crossed the battlefields of Manchuria on horseback. He had been given leave from his post in the Philippines and told to rest. Instead, he took his wife, Lily, and headed north, for an on-the-ground study of what he called “the most stupendous and ghastly struggle of modern times.”
A decade earlier, the Russo-Japanese War had raged across southern Manchuria. Its end, a crippling humiliation for Tsarist Russia, marked two turning points: the first modern defeat of a Western power by an Asian one, and the first American foray into a new kind of global activism, with Theodore Roosevelt orchestrating the peace conference. First Lieutenant Marshall was more interested in the battles themselves. Guided by solicitous Japanese officers, he rode trenches, surveyed terrain, and searched out signs of destruction. Afterward, he gathered his overwrought descriptions into a personal account titled “Forgotten Scenes of Heroism”: not just the “hopeless struggles of the ignorant Siberian peasant” and “grim determination of the Japanese warrior,” but also the “Chinese farmer and his picturesque villages” and the “missionary and his thankless task.” Marshall proudly recorded that according to his hosts, he had seen more than any foreign officer before.
Manchuria had long been an object of intense outside interest—thanks to its geography, its resources, and its history as a staging ground for incursions into the rest of China. After a Manchu invasion broke south through the Great Wall, unseated the Ming Dynasty, and replaced it with the Qing in 1644, settlers had flowed north into Manchuria, drawn by its abundant fertile land and, later, stocks of timber, coal, and iron. In the early twentieth century, as the Qing Dynasty weakened and then fell, the same attributes drew in other powers, with their own clashing ambitions.
After its victory over Russia, Japan built up control year by year, until in 1931 it launched a full-scale takeover and created the puppet state of Manchukuo, over the world’s feeble protest. While the Chinese shouted for the return of “Chinese Manchuria,” the Japanese set about pioneering it, said the propaganda, as the Americans had California. They built mines, factories, steel mills, power plants, and railroads. Soon Manchuria was producing as much coal and more electricity than the entire rest of China. “The Ruhr of the Far East” some called it, after Germany’s industrial heartland, though Manchuria was much bigger, twice the size of France. Others called it “the cockpit of Asia,” the place where wars began. And with reason: whoever controlled Manchuria controlled one of the region’s great industrial and agricultural centers, with a rich resource base, warm-water ports, and a commanding position over the North China Plain.
In 1914, after his leave, First Lieutenant Marshall made a recommendation to his army superiors: that they send other officers on the Manchurian tour he mapped out. He even specified the best time of year: late April or early May, when “there is little or no rain and a minimum of the frequent and trying dust and wind storms.”
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bsp; In late April of 1946, Marshall was once again preoccupied with the battlefields of Manchuria.
With Katherine along, the trip west across the Pacific was slower than the trip east a month earlier. In Tokyo, the Marshalls dined with the MacArthurs as cases of canned spring water were loaded onto the C-54, for the sake of Katherine’s health in Chongqing. In Beijing, Marshall checked on his faltering Executive Headquarters while Katherine toured the Forbidden City. As they continued inland, she peered down at villages built of mud and fields that seemed to cover every inch of ground. It was like nothing she had ever seen.
When they landed at the airfield outside of Chongqing, in the middle of the afternoon on April 18, Madame Chiang and Madame Zhou were waiting to welcome Katherine. But it was 100 degrees, with 90 percent humidity, and Katherine was struck mostly by the heat, dust, and smells. The one consolation was that they would not be there long. Chiang’s capital was in the process of moving back to Nanjing.
Like his arrival four months earlier, Marshall’s return brought a surge of expectation. “Everyone says that there is only one thing and one man that can save the situation,” wrote the New Yorker’s John Hersey. Chang Chi-chung sent a note: “With your wisdom and sagacity, I am sure this task”—peaceful unification—“can be accomplished under your guidance.” Zhou expressed confidence “that Marshall will take any necessary steps in the fair and just spirit he has used in dealing with the problems of China in the past.” At Happiness Gardens, Caughey waited with a combination of shame and hope—shame that so much had come undone, hope that Marshall would put it back together. “He will be disgusted I did not do more,” Caughey fretted, anticipating long days and sleepless nights ahead. Yet he believed Marshall could “pull the situation out of the fire.” Melby added merely: “About time.”
At the airfield, reporters clamored for a statement. “It is about like it was when I arrived before,” Marshall said. “I will have to study the situation first.”
It was not in fact like when he arrived before. This time, not much study was needed to realize that the situation was, as he soon put it, “completely out of hand.” Even as he and Katherine were leaving the airfield, tens of thousands of CCP troops waged an all-out assault on Changchun, the capital of occupied Manchuria, firing artillery at a ragged Nationalist force. Later that afternoon, the city fell. An American officer there when the conquerors entered described them as “young, well disciplined, battle experienced, with excellent morale and well indoctrinated with Communist principles.” Many carried automatic weapons with Japanese markings.
From the airfield, the Marshalls went to see Chiang. Over the previous weeks, he had gotten frequent updates from Washington. At first pleased by Marshall’s exertions—the financial assistance would be a major boost—he soon started to find the terms of American support galling. And then came word that assistance would be delayed, to give Marshall time to assess what had gone wrong. Chiang lamented in his diary that the Communists were making “every effort to ruin Marshall’s arrangement to get loans.” Truman’s December policy statement had conditioned maximal American assistance on Chinese unity, and Zhou had been pointedly citing that condition as Marshall lobbied in Washington: how could Chiang get aid when he was thwarting unification? (“America needs China to be peaceful and stable before it makes any big loans,” Zhou had reminded Yenan. “This is the crux of the contradiction between America and Chiang.”)
As Marshall registered the extent of the past month’s deterioration, he was dismayed—though not because he thought his staff had done too little, as Caughey feared. The Nationalists had lost a chance to lock in a good deal and secure it with hard-won American support. Before, the Communists had been in a weak position and willing to negotiate; now, given developments in Manchuria, they could make stiffer demands. It was, Marshall said, a “tragedy.”
He let loose his frustration in a meeting with one of Chiang’s generals, Yu Ta-wei. Yu had a Harvard doctorate in mathematical logic, German training in ballistics, and a love of Greek literature. Stilwell had considered him one of the few figures, on either side, who could be fully trusted, and Marshall judged him forthright enough to give Chiang a relatively unvarnished version of the truth.
In the living room of Happiness Gardens, Marshall erupted. “I do not know who the Generalissimo’s advisors are but whoever they may be, they are very poor ones,” he said. “Instead of constructive action they got the Government into trouble.” The list of offenses and lost chances was long. There were Chiang’s bellicose speeches while Marshall labored in Washington. “They murdered my effort,” he fumed. “The Generalissimo accused the Communists of sabotaging the loan but it was what he said that ruined it.” There was the stalling on truce teams. “The Kuomintang had a good chance to have peace in Manchuria but it did not utilize this chance,” Marshall said. “The Government has gotten into a bad spot and I have to figure a way out.” There were other recent infractions that inflamed tensions for no apparent gain—such as Nationalist fighters buzzing Yenan, the original American markings on Lend-Lease planes still visible.
“A great part of these difficulties could have been avoided by the National Government but now the whole situation is reversed,” Marshall continued. He stressed to Yu that “no one has offered any alternative except a great war and you can not support a great war.” Nor, Marshall added, would the United States.
While Nationalists were getting blasts of Marshall’s frustration, Zhou, to his distress, was getting nothing at all. Marshall seemed to be avoiding him. Marshall’s anger at the CCP’s seizure of Changchun, a clear violation of the cease-fire, was evident. But Zhou also drew other, more extreme conclusions. “Marshall probably intends to let Chiang fight, and appears not eager to see me,” he wrote Mao; the Communists, accordingly, should be ready for battle. To Americans, Zhou seemed worried and depressed.
Katherine was miserable as well. She found Chongqing dreadful, the crowds so overwhelming that she hardly went out; when she did, she would stare straight ahead to avoid eye contact as faces pressed against the car window. The foggy wet cold of winter had given way to thick wet heat. (Stilwell composed a lyric about springtime in Chongqing: “Not to speak of the slush, or the muck and the mush / That covers the streets and alleys. / Or the reek of the swill, as it seeps down the hill,—/ Or the odor of pig in the valleys.”) Katherine wrote home bitterly: “I walk to the bathroom & watch the Chinese out the window & I have one desire—To have the entire administration & their wives sent out here to stay and let me bid them a farewell of ‘How nice you are going to China with your husband.’ ”
Some aides had wondered as Marshall returned from Washington: Would he regret having gone? “I have forced so many compromises on both sides,” he had acknowledged beforehand, “that I am in the awkward position of being obligated by pressure from both sides to stay on and maintain a balance between the mistrusts of the two parties.” Once back, he quickly recognized that this balance had collapsed entirely, and his return had come too late to stop a recurrence of fighting. He was more slowly coming to see just how deep the breakdown went, deep enough to suggest that not even his presence could have averted it—which raised the question of whether there was anything he could do to reverse it now.
Signs of breakdown were visible on all fronts. The political process had collapsed into public recrimination, and preparations for the National Assembly—the constitutional convention for the new China, supposed to open on May 5—were frozen. The Communists refused to submit military demobilization plans, and Chiang was blocking the “elementary school” meant to speed integration. Both sides were escalating in Manchuria as the Soviet presence receded north. They seemed to be making aggressive moves for advantage before Marshall could get them back to the negotiating table—“taking the most extreme position possible,” as Melby put it, “in order to have plenty of leeway for compromising when he puts the screws to them.” At least that was the optimistic take.
But calculations
were changing. The international landscape was shifting, tension between Washington and Moscow growing, politics everywhere unsettled. There were new considerations and new opportunities. To both sides, the path of negotiation was looking less promising, but also less essential—since the prospect of outside support was looking better every day.
In Chongqing, Chiang had seen his hopes of neutralizing Moscow fade and recalcitrance in his party mount. If there was little chance, as he had come to believe, of real Soviet help in establishing control of Manchuria, he had lost a key piece of his argument with the Nationalist “diehards” who maintained that negotiation was foolish. Decrying the democratic promises of the Political Consultative Council as a “coup against our party,” they had successfully maneuvered, in the March Central Executive Committee meeting, to ensure that control of government would stay in Nationalist hands. But Chiang thought a flip side of Soviet hostility would be American solidarity. His ambassador in Washington was keeping him apprised of the anti-Soviet frenzy there. Before, postwar comity had left him little choice but to attempt some degree of cooperation. Now geopolitical friction should give him an opening, a play for unstinting U.S. support. “I should wait for the evolution of the international situation and then make policy,” Chiang wrote in his diary after reading Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech.
The China Mission Page 18