The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  At the moment, however, Nanjing was in chaos. As Marshall’s C-54 approached over green rice paddies striped with canals, the airfield was so overcrowded that planes had trouble landing. Many of the city’s 700,000 residents lived not along the modern boulevards, but huddled into narrow old alleyways that snaked off them, refugees sleeping alongside water buffaloes. Even American diplomats struggled to find accommodation and had to settle for “barracks existence,” as Melby put it—dirty, crowded, unruly, with unreliable electricity and a shortage of pillows. The new U.S. embassy had two vehicles: a broken-down Ford and a Cadillac missing a transmission. Inflation made it hard to buy anything new. “Basic foodstuffs sell at prohibitive prices,” Marshall alerted Washington, pleading for more support for staff. “Rents for suitable quarters are beyond capacity to pay.”

  The Communists had trouble getting to Nanjing at all. The Nationalists had offered to help move Zhou and his team, then failed to follow through as rancor grew. Marshall protested: how could he restart negotiations if there were no Communists in town? That may have been the point; he gave up protesting and lent his own plane for the job.

  But Zhou arrived in Nanjing no less strident than before. “Being too eager to see your mission crowned with an early success,” he entreated Marshall, “I hope that you would not mind, if I venture to remind you that you still have other resources at your hand which would add immense weight to your talk with the Government.” Why not stop transporting troops? Why not cut off equipment and ammunition? Zhou also continued to deny that the CCP was in league with the Kremlin. “The Chinese Communists favor Lincoln’s idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people,” he told an American reporter. Yet in Manchuria, his side would not stand down: the Nationalists had “abandoned” it to the Japanese in World War II, so why did they deserve to hold it now?

  In the face of hostilities, Marshall could do frustratingly little, even as he worried that fighting in Manchuria would spread through China and beyond. He proffered formulas for a cease-fire: the CCP handing over Changchun in exchange for political talks; both sides stepping back and granting control to Americans; empowering the Committee of Three to oversee troop movements; guaranteeing Nationalist “authority” along with Communist “rights.” None got purchase. Nor did truce teams help. Marshall thought Chiang’s shortsighted refusal to permit them in Manchuria earlier, for fear they would hold the Nationalists back, both provocative and exceptionally unwise. Now the Communists seemed equally opposed. Both sides had ambitions that truce teams could only hinder. Mao was holding out for better terms, Chiang for complete submission.

  For Chiang, Marshall’s doggedness was a source of growing outrage. This moment, his return to Nanjing, was supposed to signify a new beginning, an end to his and his country’s shame. Instead, he found Marshall’s pressure to be an unexpected tribulation. In his diary, Chiang wrote of being humiliated by Marshall: “Nothing is more shameful and unbearable than this.”

  Chiang believed the Communists would fold if confronted with enough force. “The Americans should help us prepare for war, if they really want to stop the Russians’ ambition of expansion,” he insisted. But Marshall was “afraid and helpless,” Chiang complained, “terrified at the thought of the breakdown or suspension of the negotiation,” perhaps even poisoned by the Communists. He “cannot let go of the old ways—appeasement and compromise.” The same kind of retreat, Chiang noted, had brought about World War II.

  He asked rhetorically: “Is the United States quitting on the whole Asia problem? Or do they want to actively participate and lead?” Whatever Marshall’s failings, Chiang thought he still had a good idea of the answer: ultimately, America would have no choice but to support him in his war.

  On May 5, Chiang celebrated the official return of his capital to Nanjing. With a clear blue sky above, he climbed the steps to Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum, bowed three times, then stood straight for a 101-gun salute. Afterward, there was a party at his house just outside the city walls, at the base of Purple Mountain, watched over benevolently by Sun. When the Marshalls arrived, guests spilled from a large wood-floored living room onto a bright terrace, its railing carved with images of the phoenix. Locating the capital in Beijing, Chiang explained to Americans, would have recalled an autocratic past. Nanjing evoked “revolution and people’s government.”

  May 5 was supposed to have marked another milestone as well: the opening of the National Assembly—a major step on the road to democratic unity, or so it was hoped. Days earlier, the opening had been postponed, neither side agreeing to basic terms. A new date had not been set.

  After the party, the Marshalls stayed for dinner, and then Marshall and Chiang talked until 10:30. The Generalissimo was feeling confident. Marshall, he thought, was coming to see that “the Communists are hard to deal with” and that “I cannot be pressured into doing anything.”

  To Chiang’s satisfaction, Marshall seemed to have given up for now on pushing a solution in Manchuria. The hope that had accompanied his return to China two and a half weeks earlier—that his very presence would have a restorative effect—had proved illusory. There were bigger forces at work. Americans may have assumed that it was Marshall’s departure in early March that started the breakdown. Events on the ground in Manchuria indicated that the Soviets’ departure, also starting in early March, had been an even bigger factor.

  The next day, Marshall wrote Truman for the first time since returning. “I have delayed in sending this report in the hope that I would have reached an agreement on Manchuria ere this,” began the unusually detailed note. Marshall ran through the reasons he had not. The Nationalists had backed away from political agreement and refused to allow truce teams; the Communists had taken Changchun and broken the January cease-fire with their conduct in Manchuria, and they were now “jubilant” over their success, well armed with Japanese weapons and “in a very strong strategical position.” The Nationalists, meanwhile, were dominated by overconfident hard-liners who “urge a policy of force which they are not capable of carrying out even with our logistical support and presence of Marines.” Marshall opposed transporting additional Nationalist armies to Manchuria, since it would amount “to supporting under the existing circumstances a civil war.” (Also, ships were needed for what he considered an even more critical function: to deliver food to starving populations elsewhere in China.) Yet he would not at the moment cut off ammunition or resupply support to Chiang, since it would be “most unfair for our government to leave, as it were, his troops now in Manchuria completely in the lurch.” Nor would he give up on negotiations, for fear of the consequences: “the only alternative to a compromise arrangement is, in my opinion, utter chaos in North China to which the fighting will inevitably spread.”

  “At this moment I submit no recommendations,” Marshall concluded. “I am going ahead in the hope that I can resolve the difficulties without troubling you and while I am taking many diplomatic liberties I am trying to do so in a manner that will keep the skirts of the U.S. Government clear and leave charges of errors of judgment to my account.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Fighting While Talking

  Marshall was a different man with Katherine around. His mood was brighter. He made jokes at meals, eliciting a teasing “Oh, George” from across the table. “A wife is a very necessary part of the balance of life in a man,” he had counseled an unmarried former aide a few months earlier. “His judgment and efficiency will always lack otherwise.” Current aides were struck more by other qualities. “The affection between those two people is very lovely to watch,” said Melby, hardly a sap. “Every time he looks at her his eyes soften.” Katherine’s presence, Marshall wrote a friend, “makes my moments here of possible relaxation very pleasant.” In the two years between the death of his first wife and meeting Katherine, also widowed, when he was 48 and she 46, Marshall had not known what do with those moments.

  In Nanjing, Katherine started to get her bearings. Other than the food
(“all fungus and entrails”), her main complaint was how hard her husband worked, keeping on with “the patience of Job.” As in Washington, Marshall continued to find himself as busy as he had been during the war. But Katherine was becoming a presence in her own right, one much appreciated by aides. She “tempers the General’s formidability,” said Caughey, who deemed her “my favorite General’s wife.”

  They lived in one of the best houses in the city, #5 Ning Hai Road. It was on a placid strip of large gated homes—outer walls painted yellow, the color of power—that had belonged to foreign ambassadors and top Nationalist officials before the war. Imported London plane trees lined the street and shaded #5’s tile roof, which curved upward in the Chinese style, the character for “longevity” carved into its trim.

  Marshall found the house luxurious. There were rooms for aides and visitors, space on the second floor for screening evening movies, a suite for him and Katherine, with a sun porch, where she could sit and look out, and one of Nanjing’s few working air conditioners. The previous occupant had been Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the wartime puppet government. The former ambassador was said to be in a detention camp nearby, but his possessions remained: rugs, appliances, a library of German books, and a croquet set the American staff put to use in heated matches on the back lawn, which covered a spacious bomb shelter, also courtesy of the Germans.

  In the nice spring weather, Marshall conducted business on the back terrace, sometimes with an Old Fashioned in hand. (Under Madame Chiang’s tutelage, his cook, Richard Wing, had become expert at mixing them.) Katherine hosted lawn parties, with live music, spiked punch, and “the best looking girls available,” according to Caughey—“Russians, Germans, German Jewesses, Chinese and of course the local American element.”

  Even with Chiang’s improvements, Nanjing was a provincial place compared to Shanghai or Beijing. Within the city wall, among the boulevards and electric lines, farmers still cultivated fields. Bullfrogs could be heard at night and birds at dawn. Damage from the war was prevalent, along with plenty of problems of the postwar: unrepatriated Japanese roaming the city, a shortage of cars and housing, inflation that left many consumer goods out of reach even in dollars.

  Still, most Americans thought the new capital a step up from tumultuous Chongqing. The social scene took on some of the glamor of a prewar China posting. At the choice night spot, they ordered martinis and watched Jimmy Wong’s trio. The embassy organized an excursion to a production of Tosca. A new Officers’ Club had a pool, a bar, and a house band. Arriving American women were cautioned by an orientation brochure, “It is quite easy to become engaged for every night of the week if one is not careful.” A social commentator explained that the Marshalls were “probably the most sought after guests for any big diplomatic party.” But Zhou was also a “catch,” thanks to “one of the most easy and affable party manners.” Even now, he and Chen Li-fu, Chiang’s hard-line adviser, could be seen slapping one another on the back at evening gatherings. Americans were baffled. Everywhere else, the two sides seemed intent on killing each other, and in many places already were. Here they drank together. Zhou had a term for it: fighting while talking.

  Eight hundred miles north, the two armies were fighting the biggest battle in China since the early days of the Japanese invasion. The Communists, in a departure from their usual mobile and guerrilla strategies, had dug in at Siping. “Do not fear blood or sacrifice,” said signs on their gun emplacements. Waves of Nationalist troops were coming from the south to reinforce a brutal siege.

  Both sides considered Siping vital. It lay on the route between Manchuria’s two major cities, Mukden and Changchun, the former in Nationalist hands, the latter in Communist. A railway ran through the middle of town.

  Chiang aimed to “defeat the Communists’ main force in one blow.” He sent his best American-trained troops. Mule carts hauled American-supplied weapons to the front.

  Mao told his commander, Lin Biao, to hold Siping at all costs. He intended for it to be his “Battle of Madrid,” the place where the Communists made their heroic stand. No matter what it took, they would overcome an elite Nationalist army, protect their hold on Changchun and northern Manchuria, and then return to negotiations in a position to wrench real concessions from Chiang, having crushed his will to fight.

  As Mao had once written in an essay that played off Clausewitz: “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.”

  May 8 was Victory in Europe Day, the first anniversary of German surrender. Yet Caughey, still consumed with foreboding, took it as another opportunity to brood. “The year after V-E Day the world is faced with a situation in China that may make it necessary for another V Day,” he wrote in his diary.

  The next morning, Marshall stood in the sunshine at Nanjing’s dirt airfield, waiting to greet the hero of V-E Day. When Dwight Eisenhower, now army chief of staff, stepped off his transport plane, they shook hands warmly. Marshall’s feeling toward Eisenhower, another officer had remarked, was “that of a father to a son.”

  The amiable Ike and austere Marshall made for an unlikely pair. Marshall had plucked Eisenhower from an obscure post after Pearl Harbor and, for his first task, ordered him to craft a strategy to defeat Japan. (Among its recommendations: “influence Russia to enter the war.”) Impressed, Marshall soon promoted him over 350 more senior officers to a major field command, then stood back to let him lead D-Day. On one of the rare occasions when Marshall questioned a decision he made, Eisenhower was so disturbed that he skipped breakfast and lunch.

  From the airfield, Eisenhower and Marshall went to see Chiang, who made the case for a more aggressive stance in Manchuria. Only afterward did they get to the visit’s real purpose. A few weeks earlier, Eisenhower had been summoned to the presidential yacht and asked to carry a secret message to China. Truman wanted a definitive answer to a question he had raised before: whether Marshall would accept an appointment as secretary of state. The query could not be made through normal channels, because Byrnes was not supposed to know. (By this point, Truman had such disdain for Byrnes that he had pushed a change in the order of presidential succession, to make secretary of state fifth rather than third in line.) Marshall, Truman said, would give him “a wonderful ace in the hole.”

  When Eisenhower conveyed the offer, Marshall quipped that he would even reenlist in the army if it gave him a way out of his present struggle. But Truman’s desired timeline, with a July 1 transition, was unrealistic. Marshall could not in good conscience leave China until at least September. In order for him and Eisenhower to communicate about timing by radio, Marshall wrote out a code on a scrap of paper. COURIER would refer to the president, AGENT to Byrnes, AGREEMENT to confirmation. For secretary of state, he chose PINEHURST, his cabin in the mountains of North Carolina, a place he associated with escape. Eisenhower put the scrap in his pocket and kept it there when he left Nanjing the next day.

  Marshall now had his own exit strategy. The problem was that, with breakdown unchecked, other plays in his endgame were stalled. The wartime combat theater had officially ended on May 1, and the Military Advisory Group was starting to operate from Nanjing’s Metropolitan Hotel. The number of American troops in China had fallen below 40,000—leaving them like a Peking duck, said one marine, able to eat but not to move. But further withdrawal was on hold. Additional reductions, timed wrong, could send an unhelpful signal as Marshall tried to resume negotiations. And Chiang was directing so many troops to Manchuria that he did not have manpower to take over from Marines guarding key points in north China—particularly railway lines crucial for Nationalist transport. (Marshall had a good idea of their importance, since one of his tasks in the 1920s had been to protect them from bandits.)

  Some pieces of the aid package were moving forward. Marshall pushed for funds for railroad equipment and a good deal for Chiang’s government on surplus American property left in the Pacific—25 percent of cost and more than $300 million in credits, which he hoped w
ould help contain inflation and stabilize prices. “The Chinese problem,” he pointed out in making the case for a generous offer on ships, “is very much our problem strategically and diplomatically.” But the centerpiece of what Marshall had secured in Washington, the more than $500 million in financial aid, was still not announced.

  The appointment of a new ambassador was also postponed. Wedemeyer had gone to Washington for a sinus operation and was there recovering. He was told to stay for now, out of concern that any announcement would be interpreted as signaling Marshall’s imminent departure.

  Instead, Marshall recruited a new member of his own team. Anticipating questions to come, he wanted someone to start work on a careful official account of the mission and thought the local New York Times correspondent, Tillman Durdin, suited to the task. Durdin, an introspective Texan with years of experience in China, had written when Marshall first arrived: “He will be tackling a situation unsurpassed for complications and filled with pitfalls for the unwary. He will be dealing with problems the handling of which may well determine whether there must be another world war.” Marshall sent a request to Arthur H. Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher: “Would you be agreeable to loaning him to me on a leave status at full pay?” Sulzberger consented, and in mid-May Durdin joined Marshall’s staff, his paychecks still coming from the newspaper.

  Shortly after, a message arrived from Eisenhower, now back in Washington. “I sent you a letter on the Pinehurst proposition,” Eisenhower’s note read. “Courier was more than pleased to have my report.”

  As Marshall thought about his future, Mao was initiating a new step on the way to his revolution. A directive went to Communist cadres: they were to adopt a more aggressive approach to land reform in areas they controlled. Until now, the tactically agile Mao had focused on reducing rural rent and debt. (While rural China was technically not “feudal,” the term often used to describe it, most farmers spent their lives struggling to get by, cruelly beholden to landlords, lenders, and tax collectors.) His new approach was more radical: take land from those who have it and give it to those who do not.