The cease-fire in Manchuria had come just in time. Watchful Communist intelligence networks had been relaying updates of the northward progress of Nationalist armies, and Lin Biao had been preparing to abandon Harbin, the northernmost large city and the CCP’s last major urban stronghold in Manchuria. With Nationalist forward units just thirty miles away, his troops were crossing to the far side of the Songhua River and blowing up bridges behind them to hinder pursuit. Mao heard about Chiang’s cease-fire order and rushed off an order of his own: keep Harbin.
Yet losing Harbin would not necessarily have been a major blow to Communist prospects in Manchuria. Already, Lin’s armies had been shifting back to a strategy centered not on holding cities but on occupying the area around them. The earlier stand at Siping, with Communist troops defending fixed positions for weeks, had been a deviation—one made at Mao’s insistence over the skepticism of his commanders. Since then, Lin had reverted to type, dispersing troops in the countryside and readying mobile attacks and guerrilla operations as Nationalist lines stretched thinner and thinner, their overextension clear. Mao had laid all of this out months earlier, in a warning to Chiang before Marshall’s arrival: “If we fight now, I cannot beat you. But I can deal with you with the same method that I used to deal with the Japanese. You can seize points and lines, and I shall occupy their sides and rural areas to surround cities.” In retreat, Lin had shown his dispirited troops a film about Napoleon’s defeat in Russia.
In Yenan, nothing Zhou related of Chiang’s cease-fire demands, or Marshall’s requisites for peace, diminished the skepticism of his comrades. As far as they could tell, Chiang was maneuvering to confine CCP troops to a few disconnected bases in Manchuria and north China, where he would try to isolate and then “annihilate” them.
Still, Zhou advocated one more push for a settlement. Although wary, Mao gave his permission. But there was a condition: as Zhou returned to talks, no military advantage was to be sacrificed in the process. Mao sent a message to his commanders in Manchuria: “While our delegates are negotiating with the KMT in Nanjing, our units in the Northeast should use this period to have a rest, to have logistics taken care of, to enhance the morale, so that we can continue to fight again.”
As the cease-fire got under way, #5 Ning Hai Road turned into a madhouse. Spring had given way to a hot and sticky summer. Visitors streamed in to see Marshall, all persuaded that these fifteen days were pivotal but each with his own idea of how to take advantage of them—how to forge a fair settlement in Manchuria, how to speed military unification, how to reopen railway lines and roads. What the Nationalists and Communists intended was not entirely clear. But as Melby observed, “all other groups want peace, and every available missionary is being brought in to exert pressure in that direction.”
So far Marshall had played an inside game, working privately with official representatives and only rarely resorting to more public interventions. But facing the implacability of the other players, he had begun to enlist outside actors for help. There was one he thought particularly useful, a missionary-turned-educator named John Leighton Stuart who had unique credibility across partisan lines. Hoping Stuart might be able to persuade both sides to take a more compromising stance, Marshall summoned him from Beijing, dispatching the C-54 for the trip.
They had first met in May, on the recommendation of both Chiang and Henry Luce. Born to missionary parents in Hangzhou and raised singing “Jesus Loves Me” in Chinese, Stuart had for twenty-five years presided over Yenching University (China’s Harvard, said Americans), where he had educated a generation of rising leaders, Nationalist and Communist. He had championed and occasionally advised Chiang, but seeing Mao recently, Stuart had laughed about how many Yenching students had made the pilgrimage to Yenan and expressed hope that they were “proving a credit to their training.” Crucially, he also knew Chiang’s conservative confidant Chen Li-fu—whom Marshall had come to see as “the man most opposed to my efforts.”
“I have had long experience with the Communists,” Chen told a reporter in the cease-fire’s opening days. “I know them and they have never forgiven me for taking 23,000 members from them.” His private comments to American officials were even more bellicose. He had been fighting Communists for eighteen years, he said to Melby at a cocktail party, and would fight them for eighteen more if he had to. (Not that eighteen would be necessary: they “can easily be destroyed,” Chen gloated.) He liked to tell Americans that he had first encountered Communist treachery during his time working in a Pennsylvania coal mine—incongruously, since he was small, smooth skinned, and polite. U.S. military intelligence noted his “ruthless elimination of opposition by the use of whatever means which may be available.” He was equally zealous in his loyalty to Chiang.
Chen was not the only one newly brazen in his rhetoric. In Nanjing, Soviet diplomats lambasted U.S. aggression and openly speculated about the need for more active intervention. In Yenan, CCP complaints about Marshall’s bias had flowered into charges of imperialist iniquity. “Is it the Chinese reactionaries, with their vicious civil war policy, who are demanding vigorous military intervention,” asked Emancipation Daily on the first day of the cease-fire, “or is it the United States’ vigorous military intervention which is demanding the Chinese reactionaries’ vicious civil war policy?” A few days later, an editorial predicted that the “imperialistic elements in the United States” would turn out to be as maligned as “the Japanese imperialists before.” Chiang’s use of Marshall’s plane while in Manchuria featured prominently in denunciations.
By now, Marshall was aware how much those eleven days had fanned suspicion and fueled propaganda. As Communist attacks on him became more virulent, he sent a top secret message to Washington, explaining that Chiang’s prolonged absence “just as I had brought the two sides to the verge of an agreement . . . aroused a deep suspicion in their minds that I was favoring the Government side and was a party to the delay.” It added “fat to the fire.” At the same time, Marshall sensed that the criticism had a clear purpose: “to arouse U.S. opposition to any military representation out here.” The Communists might see an opportunity to repel U.S. assistance entirely.
It was not just in the realm of propaganda that Communist actions belied Communist calls for peace. Fighting slowed in Manchuria itself, but in the areas around it, CCP troops maneuvered aggressively. The day the cease-fire went into effect, there were strikes on railway lines in Shandong—a broad peninsula just south of Manchuria, offering easy access to it by sea—and then days of attacks so aggressive as to raise fears of clashes with U.S. Marines posted to the port city of Tsingtao. When Marshall challenged him, Zhou brushed off the incidents as “the impertinent actions of lower level officers.” But as the Executive Headquarters tracked the violations, there was too clear a pattern for Zhou’s excuse to be persuasive: the Communists looked to be preserving routes between Manchuria and their other base areas, ensuring a continued ability to move troops and threaten Chiang’s lines.
The cease-fire was nothing more than a “reasonable pause,” Marshall acknowledged to Truman, and the question was whether he could use it to good effect. He took a characteristically methodical approach, but with a difference from before. No longer did he hope to induce reciprocal positive steps that would create a virtuous cycle of their own, each side making additional concessions in response to concessions from the other. Instead, he looked for commitments, “definite proposals,” he could persuade each side to make unconditionally. That might be enough to stop most fighting and get the Executive Headquarters and truce teams working properly again. And from there, one step at a time, perhaps other issues would somehow start to look less intractable.
He pressed Zhou to stop the sabotage of railways. He tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the Communists on a Nationalist-backed proposal to give Americans the swing vote on the truce teams rather than requiring consensus. He pressed the Nationalists to give the Executive Headquarters real authority in Manchuria. Rather tha
n rushing to reconvene the Committee of Three, he asked Zhou and a new Nationalist representative to try to make progress on their own first.
For Marshall, this frantic shuttle diplomacy proved even more grueling than the long negotiating sessions of the winter. He had his staff working “war days,” as he put it to Eisenhower. Still, he projected confidence: “This is a hell of a problem but we will lick it yet, pessimists to the contrary notwithstanding.”
But Katherine felt no such need to show assurance, especially after coming down with dysentery in the middle of June. “Sometimes I feel neither party really wants peace,” she wrote in a letter home. “They are so bitter they want to fight it out no matter what it does to China or these poor people.” Her husband was looking “thin and tired,” she reported, but “still struggling manfully.”
No matter how “manfully” Marshall struggled, ten days into the cease-fire “definite proposals” were just starting to take shape. Late on the morning of June 17, he sat with Zhou on the terrace, now shaded by a bamboo structure that covered much of the yard and house, cooling them in these sweltering summer months. Earlier there had been hours of heavy rain that flooded the streets, but the sun had since turned the city into a steam bath. While Marshall and Zhou talked outside, a Nationalist general was waiting inside, leaders of the Democratic League were asking for an appointment that afternoon, and Chiang was summoning Marshall to a meeting that evening. They were, noted Caughey, in “a race for time.”
At this point, even Zhou seemed on edge. “Under the present rule of the Kuomintang, it is impossible to obtain true peace and democracy,” he said. As Marshall pressed for actions, Zhou quibbled over words, contested the terms of the original promise of Nationalist sovereignty in Manchuria, and refused to name an acceptable breakdown of troops in the region, even though Chiang had agreed to revise the original 14-to-1 ratio. The Nationalists, Zhou scoffed, would be unsatisfied with any Communist concession, no matter how generous. He insisted that the Communists still trusted Marshall, despite their railing against American imperialism; if anything, they hoped he would stay in China “for a long time.” (To Zhou’s mind, one sign of good faith: Marshall had gone out of his way to return a personal notebook that Zhou had inadvertently left on the C-54, with no indication that any information inside had been extracted.) Still, Zhou refused to grant Marshall’s request that the Americans get greater authority to enforce peace. “We’ve trusted Marshall,” he said, “but to trust him and to give him arbitrary power are two different things.”
At 6 p.m., Marshall visited the Generalissimo. Chiang thought Marshall’s views had been moving toward his own. “Marshall’s attitude is also getting more and more resolute,” he recorded hopefully in his diary. He was ready to lay out his own set of demands—including the immediate withdrawal of Communist troops from the contested provinces on Manchuria’s southern edge, Rehe and Chahar, a commitment to complete demobilization and integration of the two sides’ armies in Manchuria by the end of 1946, and a pledge from Yenan to begin rebuilding sabotaged railway lines on June 22, the day the cease-fire was set to end. Marshall knew immediately that the CCP would never accept such conditions. He suspected Chiang knew that as well.
“We have reached an impasse,” Marshall conceded to Truman the next day. The Nationalists were convinced, he explained, that the Communists “can quickly be crushed”—which he considered “a gross underestimate of the possibilities, as a long and terrible conflict would be unavoidable.” Before long, the Soviets “would probably intervene openly or under cover.” But he had said as much to Chiang and was not optimistic that the message had gotten through.
Marshall’s pessimism about the prospects of the next five days was shared by both Chiang and Zhou. Chiang, more intent on proving that Yenan bore responsibility for the cease-fire’s failure than on offering solutions of his own, dismissed Communist proposals as ruses. Zhou reported to Mao that Marshall had no real sway over Chiang, meaning it was time to “reassess the role of the United States and Marshall.” Mao, in turn, dispatched a message to his cadres: “Judging from recent events, Chiang Kai-shek is preparing for large-scale war. . . . If we fight to a draw, peace may also be possible. If Chiang scores a big victory, however, it will not be possible to negotiate peace. Therefore, our army must repulse Chiang Kai-shek’s attack in order to secure a peaceful future.”
Caughey started sending warnings to his wife, Betty. “You and I have to think about the possibilities of another war in a few years in this place,” he wrote, with concern for their two young daughters. “Mark my words, honey, about the time Pat and Nancy are ready to go to school—possibly about the time they are ready to finish school and about to be married—we will be embroiled in something that will be much worse than anything that has happened so far.” Yet watching Marshall, Caughey reflected, “He sees things in a light that another man could not see them. He is philosophical about it and tries to do the best that he can and leaves the rest to destiny.”
But in fact, as he contemplated the consequences of failure, Marshall was troubled. The Nationalists could not destroy the Communists, he thought, nor could the Communists destroy the Nationalists. But “between them, they could destroy China.”
Marshall started warning of the “loss of China”—not necessarily to Communism, but to a terrible new war. He was operating on the assumption that if nothing had been resolved by noon on June 22, war would begin at 12:01.
On the morning of June 20, just over forty-eight hours before the cease-fire’s end, Marshall received Yu Ta-wei, the Harvard-educated Nationalist general. Marshall had been struggling to persuade Chiang that there was wisdom in compromise—that the Nationalists could soften their demands and find common ground without putting themselves in danger. He had made the case through emissaries, including John Leighton Stuart, and in person. The atmosphere was growing more and more tense, rife with rumor and gossip. “Life continues to be a walking nightmare and is getting worse as the deadline approaches,” wrote Melby. He wondered “whether either side can nerve itself for the final break and accept the unpredictable consequences.”
With so little resolved, Marshall had only one idea: prolonging the cease-fire. But when he asked Yu how long an extension the Nationalists could offer, the answer was dispiriting: “one day.” It set Marshall off. The United States “would not back a civil war,” and the Nationalists were making a mistake if they assumed it would. When Yu asked what would happen if war broke out in the next few days, Marshall’s answer was harsh: the Marines would be withdrawn, the navy’s Seventh Fleet would sail away, and American support would be curtailed.
When Yu left, Stuart came in. Since summoning him from Beijing, Marshall had seen him daily. Stuart had held long conversations with Chiang, in Chinese, one Christian to another. He had also seen Zhou, who, after rhapsodizing about the CCP’s commitment to peace, opposition to Russian influence, and desire for “American help in every way,” had agreed to an extension of the cease-fire. But with Chiang, Stuart was less certain. He had come away sharing Marshall’s concern that Chiang had a perilously exaggerated sense of Nationalist strength.
Next came Zhou at 3 p.m. As the end of the cease-fire approached, Marshall had found Zhou increasingly resentful. Although Zhou had agreed to an extension, he still complained about Nationalist intransigence. Meeting Chiang’s demands—particularly that the Communists stand down in key parts of north China—was “impossible,” he told Marshall.
But for now, an extension was the important thing: a little more time to find a way forward, to mount a “final effort to effect a peaceful solution to this situation.” When Zhou left, Marshall left to see Chiang. After Marshall’s outburst to Yu that morning, after all the pressure and lobbying, Chiang had spent three hours discussing the wisdom of an extension with his advisers. When Marshall arrived, Chiang announced that he would grant eight more days, until noon on June 30.
In conveying the news to Truman, Marshall was muted—but no longer d
espairing: “There is a wide gap to be closed but I now think I have some chance of success.”
When a copy of Chiang’s official announcement of the extension reached Ning Hai Road the next day, Marshall was there talking with Zhou. Even with the additional eight days, Zhou’s suspicion was running high. Chiang’s demands, he charged, were meant to position Nationalist forces so that “he can wipe out the Communists at any time he wishes.” But Marshall pointed out that without Communist movement on military commitments—the CCP had still not submitted lists of troops for demobilization, as it was supposed to months earlier—he could not make Chiang proceed on the political front. He also noted Nationalist fears that “the Chinese Communist Party is either coordinated or dictated with or by Soviet Russia”—a claim Zhou dismissed as “completely groundless.”
Marshall snapped at Zhou as well: “I do not belong to the Kuomintang Party and I do not belong to the Communist Party and I don’t enjoy my job. I am merely doing the best I can.”
With just over a week to put China back on a peaceful path—“this last effort, and it certainly is the last effort”—Marshall tried to revive the Committee of Three, hoping that he could get it back to its old ways. He called a meeting for the next morning, June 22. Five and a half months since the original Committee of Three had climbed the steps to Happiness Gardens, hopeful in the gray and damp of Chongqing winter, Zhou and a new Nationalist representative, Hsu Yung-Chang, arrived at #5 Ning Hai Road on a day that was, as Melby recorded, “like walking through a cloud of live steam.”
The China Mission Page 23