The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  Others thought so as well. Melby watched him “playing against futility and despair and lack of any real hope and with nothing to go on except the conviction that somehow it must work or God help us.” Melby found Marshall’s pertinacity depressing; others admired it. “Here is a great man thinking of anything but himself,” Caughey wrote, marveling at Marshall’s renewed fervor after every setback. “He subjugates himself to a purpose.”

  One day in the car, a newly arrived black Cadillac, Marshall raised the matter himself. Looking out the window, he said to Caughey, “You know, whenever I get discouraged over the difficulties that I am having, I always think of the 450 million Chinese people who will suffer if I am unable to work something out.”

  As Marshall struggled, messages of support came from overseas. In Tokyo, General MacArthur said that no one in the world was more capable than Marshall of “bringing order out of chaos.” In Washington, John Carter Vincent declared that whatever the current travails, “I’d still rather have my money on Marshall than in the stock market.” General Matthew Ridgway, a hero of D-Day, sent paraphrased lines from Kipling:

  He who digs foundations deep

  Fit for realms to rise upon,

  Little credit does he reap

  Of his generation,

  Any more than mountains gain

  Stature till you reach the plain.

  On September 23, as Katherine and the Chiangs prepared to return to Nanjing, Marshall radioed President Truman: “Confused and maddening as are the developments I have not lost hope at all, for maybe yet we can pull this chestnut out of the cross fire which rages around us.”

  “I know you can ‘pull the chestnut out of the cross fire,’ ” Truman replied, echoing Marshall’s mixed metaphor. “If it can be done at all.” But in a letter to his wife, Bess, the week before, Truman had been more damning: “Looks like Marshall will fail in China.”

  Marshall himself would not have disputed the grim probability. Yet as Katherine wrote to friends: “As long as there is a possible chance of his stopping civil war George will not give up so heaven knows when we can come home.” Marshall was still looking for that chance.

  In the last days of September, Chiang settled back in Nanjing renewed and assured. The summer in Kuling, he told Katherine, had been the happiest of his life. Now, as summer came to an end, he had Marshall where he wanted him. Zhou had fled to Shanghai, and his refusal to return would leave little doubt that the Communists were playing a Russian game and plotting to drive the Americans out. Chiang reasoned that he had only to let Marshall’s mission run its course and leave it to Yenan to bring about the ultimate break. Then Washington would at last stand unquestioningly and unstintingly at his back.

  When Chiang saw Marshall for the first time after returning from the mountains, on the morning of September 27, they talked about the possibility of a “final rupture” between the Nationalists and Communists. Chiang was jubilant. “This is indeed in line with my intentions,” he recorded.

  Marshall did, however, want Chiang to extend one more cease-fire offer, to demonstrate an “attitude of tolerance.” Chiang was open to the idea. It fit with his plan to maneuver the Communists into taking the blame.

  But he was set on one more conquest first. The last north China city of any consequence still under Communist control was a railway depot one hundred miles northwest of Beijing called Zhangjiakou.* It was “the Communist nerve center between Yenan and Manchuria,” explained American intelligence. (It was also the proposed site of Marshall’s “elementary school” for Communist troops.) On September 30, the Nationalists announced a three-pronged offensive to take the city. Chiang would follow Marshall’s counsel and propose a cease-fire—just as soon as Zhangjiakou was in his hands.

  This was not what Marshall had in mind. “The fat’s in the fire all over,” he fretted. One major attack could set China aflame. Chiang had agreed to let the Communists hold on to Zhangjiakou months earlier. His insistence on seizing it now seemed to undercut his stated interest in a final push for peace.

  The evening after the offensive was announced, Marshall joined the Chiangs for dinner. It quickly became clear to Chiang that all was not well, despite his optimism a few days before. He fumed afterward that Marshall cared about nothing but his own success.

  The next day, the first of October, Marshall stepped up the pressure. He thought it was time for a showdown. He wrote Chiang a letter: “I wish merely to state that unless a basis for agreement is found to terminate the fighting without further delays of proposals and counter-proposals, I will recommend to the President that I be recalled and that the United States government terminate its efforts of mediation.”

  It was an ultimatum. If the attack on Zhangjiakou did not stop, Marshall would go home. And Chiang knew what that would mean: he, not the Communists, would look responsible. “This old man is too stubborn to be persuaded,” he complained in his diary that night.

  Yet Chiang did not give ground. He informed Marshall he would call off Nationalist armies only if the Communists abandoned Zhangjiakou without a fight. Otherwise, he would need ten or fifteen days to take it by force and then would talk peace.

  The Nanjing atmosphere again turned tense. Chiang was in “a violent temper,” according to Stuart. Marshall was “irritable,” according to Chiang. And after a stretch of pleasant fall weather, it was once again hot. They had “entered the edge of the valley of the shadow,” said Melby.

  Despite the withdrawal threat, Chiang avoided Marshall while continuing the attack on Zhangjiakou. For three days after the ultimatum, the two of them did not speak. Finally Stuart persuaded Chiang that it was in his interest to take Marshall’s threat seriously. Chiang accepted Stuart’s argument: he had to make sure that he was not blamed if Marshall left.

  On October 4, over another long dinner, Chiang laid out his case. He pronounced himself “surprised” and “disturbed” by the prospect of Marshall’s departure. He invoked his “conscience as a Christian.” He lavished praise on Marshall’s efforts. But he did not grant the one concession Marshall demanded—an end to the attack. Chiang said he could not forfeit this opportunity, out of a sense of duty to his state.

  It was 11 p.m. by the time Marshall left. Chiang thought he had gotten his point across.

  In fact, Marshall had heard nothing to change his mind. The mere hint of Marshall’s departure had always moved Chiang in the past; not this time. The conquest of Zhangjiakou would end any remaining hope of future negotiation, and Chiang and his generals still seemed convinced that Washington would back them as much as they wanted no matter what they did. Marshall thought he was being turned into a “stooge,” his honor, and his country’s, at stake.

  The next morning, he drafted a message to the president: the mission was finished. “I believe that this is the only way to halt this military campaign and dispel the evident belief of the Government generals that they can drag us along while they carry through an actual campaign of force,” Marshall explained. He appended suggested text for a note from Truman to Chiang. “I deplore and I know the people of the United States will deeply regret that [Marshall’s] efforts to assist in bringing peace and political unity to China have proved unsuccessful,” it read, “but there must not be any question regarding . . . the intentions and high purpose of the United States Government.”

  Sharing it only with Stuart and a few aides, Marshall submitted the message for radio transmission to Washington. All he needed was Truman’s permission, and then he could go home.

  With Marshall’s request to be recalled on its way across the Pacific, Stuart contemplated the consequences. As much as Marshall feared for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who would pay the price of civil war, for Stuart it was more personal. Over half a century, he had devoted his life’s work to a vision of Chinese renewal. If this latest bid for peaceful unity failed—and Stuart did not doubt that Marshall’s departure would mark its definitive end—that vision would vanish. He worried about the toll on
the Chinese people, and about his beloved students in Nationalist, Communist, and third-party ranks. And he feared for Chiang as well. Stuart had long admired Chiang’s “heroic behavior,” but he worried now that the Nationalists’ failure to promote reform and improve the lot of China’s peasants was undermining the Generalissimo’s power and prestige. War would not only be terrible, Stuart thought; it might also end badly.

  As these implications sank in, he panicked. The evening after Marshall dispatched his note, Stuart told one of Chiang’s aides about the recall message transmitted to Washington. He got a phone call half an hour later: Chiang wanted to see him. Stuart arrived to good news. Chiang would make another offer to the Communists, including a pledge to pause the attack on Zhangjiakou. Elated, Stuart rushed to tell Marshall about the reversal.

  First thing the next morning, Marshall saw Chiang. Despite the concession, the mood was more fraught than triumphant. Marshall wanted an indefinite cease-fire, Chiang a five-day pause. But Chiang gave ground, and they settled on ten days. For Marshall, it was enough. He left Chiang at 1 p.m. and rushed a telegram to Washington: withdraw the recall request. They had stepped back from the precipice.

  Marshall also rushed word to Zhou in Shanghai, letting him know what Chiang was offering. He dictated the details of Chiang’s proposal himself to make sure none was mangled. The Communists had been agitating for a cease-fire, and Zhou’s emissaries had conveyed that if only Chiang called off the offensive against Zhangjiakou, negotiations would again be possible. There was cause for hope, however slim.

  It was two days before the Communists replied: Zhou refused to return from Shanghai.

  “I am completely baffled as to what your position is now,” Marshall grumbled when two of Zhou’s aides came to see him. They complained about the terms of Chiang’s offer—the time limit on the cease-fire, the narrow scope of proposed talks, the posture of “the victor over the vanquished.” After all he had done to force another cease-fire onto the table, Marshall was incensed. “I very much fear my efforts in negotiations have terminated,” he told them. “That is all I have to say.”

  That day, Katherine was turning 64. She had not wanted to spend her birthday in China. But when she proposed going home at the end of her Kuling sojourn, Marshall had “seemed so pathetic,” as she put it, that she agreed to stay. Madame Chiang was hosting a celebration for her, and Marshall joined after Zhou’s aides left. At the party, the Generalissimo thought Marshall seemed repentant.

  At 9 o’clock the next morning, Marshall slipped out of Nanjing. He drove to the airfield, boarded his plane, and took off as inconspicuously as possible. A short time later, he landed in Shanghai without the usual fanfare. He quietly proceeded to a house occupied by General Gillem, who was now posted in Shanghai to oversee American troops, and concealed himself behind a screen in the living room. Gillem had invited Zhou to lunch without mentioning that Marshall would be there. Marshall was going to put Zhou on the spot—an ambush that would leave him no choice but to return to Nanjing.

  “Marshall is the most accomplished actor in the Army,” an officer had remarked during the war. “Everybody thinks MacArthur is, but he’s not. The difference between them is that you always know MacArthur is acting.” This officer perceived what others missed: Marshall’s stoic manner concealed a sense of theater that he used to his own ends. The stoicism, cultivated over many years, was itself part of the effect.

  When Zhou walked into the room, Marshall stepped from behind the screen. Zhou was startled. “He damn near died,” Gillem thought after watching his face. The ambush executed, Gillem left the two men to have this encounter on their own. Zhou was caught out, and Marshall was ready to go to work, the impact of a personal appeal heightened by surprise.

  “I am deliberately avoiding Marshall,” Zhou had written Mao after fleeing Nanjing a few weeks earlier. In justifying his refusal to return, Zhou had turned publicly vicious. The Nationalists, he charged, were rooting for World War III. Marshall’s diplomacy, he told a reporter, served to “camouflage the true civil war situation in China and to black out the truth for the American and Chinese publics.” In the face of such recrimination, Marshall pointedly reminded Zhou’s underlings of their side’s mistakes. There had been the failure to submit troop lists for demobilization after the February military unification agreement; the conquest of Changchun in April; the attacks during the June cease-fire (“you about wrecked everything I was trying to do”). Again and again, they had given Nationalist hard-liners ammunition and undercut negotiations. But what most bothered Marshall now were the attacks on his own integrity—a “stupid piece of business.”

  Still, Marshall wanted to try everything he could. Nearly ten months in China had sharpened his sense of failure’s consequences, human and strategic. He had contemplated what a civil war would mean for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who would be caught in it. He also recognized what it would mean for American objectives: a warring China would present an easy target for Soviet influence, even if the Nationalists had an apparent military edge. And the resulting maelstrom would threaten to suck American troops into a war that the country would not support and that Marshall worried it might not win, at a time of growing demands around the world. It would not only be the wrong battle at the wrong time; it might also be a futile battle, fought at great cost.

  “I don’t wish to leave anything undone that I might do to try to save this situation,” Marshall began after surprising Zhou. He explained how he had labored to halt the Nationalist offensive on Zhangjiakou (although he did not disclose that he had gone so far as to request his own recall). But the Communists, despite days of noisy complaints about Chiang’s refusal to stop fighting, had passed up an opportunity to make the fighting stop.

  After lunch, Zhou took his turn. An accomplished actor himself, he had quickly recovered from the ambush. He maintained that Chiang’s offer was really just an excuse for Nationalist armies to catch their breath before resuming the attack—“tantamount to a document of surrender.” He would go back only for an indefinite halt to the Zhangjiakou offensive, along with real political concessions.

  Almost as soon as Zhou started talking, Marshall knew his gambit had failed. There was little point in revisiting explanations he had recited many times before. “I told you some time ago that if the Communist Party felt that they could not trust my impartiality, they had merely to say so and I would withdraw. You have now said so,” he concluded abruptly. “I am leaving immediately for Nanjing. I want to thank you for coming over here to General Gillem’s today and giving me this opportunity for a direct conversation with you.” It had been a futile few hours.

  On the flight back, Marshall reflected. Zhou had been even less cooperative than feared. His typical graciousness had been replaced by petty obstinacy. His reactions, usually clear and analytical, had turned “psychoneurotic”; they had spent half an hour quibbling over an accidental inconsistency in Marshall’s phrasing.

  Marshall landed in Nanjing at 6:00, unsure what to do next. The fact of the trip—“a splendid gesture,” Stuart gushed privately, “the ultimate in humble, kindly-meant activity”—was revealed half an hour later in a terse statement by the embassy.

  The next day, Nationalist armies marched into Zhangjiakou.

  On October 13, Marshall’s magnificent C-54 was taxiing down the runway when its front wheel hit a patch of soft dirt and its nose slammed into the ground, rendering it unflyable for weeks. When Caughey brought news of the accident—another diplomat had been borrowing the plane—Marshall appeared unfazed. But as usual Katherine knew otherwise. It was, she told a friend, “just another blow and a dreadful one. He was so proud of it and had planned our trip home with such interest and care.”

  That same day, a telegram arrived from Washington: Joe Stilwell was dead. Marshall had gotten word the week before that Stilwell was sick, and the end had come quickly. At a memorial service in Nanjing, 1,500 people showed up, including Chiang.

  Stilwell h
ad been on Chiang’s mind of late. Did Marshall, Chiang wondered, harbor resentment over the Stilwell affair during the war? In reality, Marshall had more often seen Stilwell—however gallant a fighting general, however sincere an advocate of China’s cause—as a source of mistakes to be avoided. Still, it seemed darkly fitting that, as Vinegar Joe’s ashes were scattered over the Pacific, Chiang was once again bridling against American exhortation.

  The conquest of Zhangjiakou hardened his resolve. There had been chatter among the Americans that the Nationalists would never manage to take the city. Chiang had proved them wrong. On all fronts, Communist armies were retreating or dispersing as his armies advanced.

  Chiang restarted national conscription. He announced that he would convene a National Assembly on November 12, Sun Yat-sen’s birthday, with or without the Communists. (Yenan, in turn, announced it would hold a separate assembly for the “liberated areas.”) On the anniversary of the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, Chiang delivered a blistering radio address, demanding that the CCP “abandon its plot to achieve regional domination and disintegration of the country by military force.” Privately, he predicted total Nationalist victory within five months.

  There were reports of renewed fighting in Manchuria. The region had stayed mostly quiet since June: recognizing the risk of both overextension and Soviet reaction, Chiang had refrained from pushing farther north even without a cease-fire holding him back. But now emboldened, he had decided to wipe out the remaining CCP presence. Nationalist generals were “straining at the leash,” an American officer reported, encouraged by the ease with which they were taking by force of arms what their diplomatic colleagues had struggled to get in months of negotiation.

  Even the Kremlin, months after instructing Mao to fight, was anxious about his prospects. Soviet officials advised their CCP counterparts that they should consider taking part in the National Assembly Chiang had called for November. Watching from Moscow, Stalin himself was surprised by the speed of Chiang’s advances.