Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  The only Arab ruler to support partition, King Abdullah of Jordan, did so with a view to absorbing a small Arab Palestine into Transjordan itself. His wider regional ambitions frightened the Syrians, whom he wished to subsume into a greater Hashemite kingdom, the Egyptians, who thought they were leaders of the Arab world, and finally the Saud dynasty, who were the Hashemites’ main regional rivals. But since Arab emotions had been whipped up by the prospect of a Jewish state in their midst, Arab rulers had to be seen to act, for their own febrile street mobs might easily be turned on them. In view of their rivalries, it suited Arabs rulers to send a free-floating Arab Liberation Army into battle with the Jews, whom the Arabs regarded as an alien European excrescence in their part of the world. They could not understand why the Europeans or Americans could not find the Jews a homeland elsewhere.

  The Jews responded with a similar argument vis-à-vis the leaderless Palestinian Arabs, who began fleeing the fight they had spasmodically begun. Why couldn’t they be relocated to the huge desert spaces of the Arab kingdoms? A Palestinian Arab and Jewish war began, fought under weary British eyes and with mounting ferocity on both sides. Believing that they were going to be massacred by the Jews, up to 300,000 Arabs fled their homes, convinced that they would return with neighbouring Arab armies to exact their own vengeance. One day after the British had sailed away, five Arab armies attacked the newly declared state of Israel – and comprehensively lost. Israel would survive further wars as the sole modern democratic state in a Middle East dominated by dictators and autocratic monarchs. But it would carry forward both a wider sense of Jewish victimhood and militarism in its DNA. That so many military men have also figured in its political class testifies to what it means to live in a neighbourhood of fanatics and maniacs.

  4. SOME MORE VICTORIOUS THAN OTHERS

  The View from the Potomac

  The US emerged from the Second World War with its industrial power mightily boosted, as well as being sole possessor of the most destructive weapons invented by humankind. The Pacific had become an American lake. US warships alone had routed the Imperial Japanese Navy and US Marines had stormed Pacific islands in the teeth of suicidal resistance. The US also had the world’s only significant long-range bomber in the B-29 Superfortress with its 3,250-mile combat range, given a nearly global reach by the acquisition of new oceanic bases, and the US attitude to colonies subtly shifted as it prepared to hang on to those bases for strategic reasons.

  US policy towards China was always overshadowed by events in Europe, where the Soviet threat grew more menacing by the day. Nazi occupation and the bloodiest fighting of the war had ravaged the Soviet Union’s heartlands, but it too was manifestly a bigger player than the battle-scarred imperial giant represented at Potsdam, not by the exhausted Churchill, but by the new Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Unlike the British, the Soviets defined themselves in opposition to US interests, time and again showing a pattern of aggressive behaviour that the US felt obliged to counter. These points of friction condensed into global ideological conflict between free and totalitarian camps, in which issues of national sovereignty took second or third place to how individual countries aligned themselves. The passions aroused by the broader struggle were to distort perceptions of lesser conflicts whose origins were more local.

  While Americans, Russians and Britons celebrated peace, and others the liberation of their countries from Nazism, the wider world in 1945 was hardly a peaceful place. But from 1945 onwards the destinies of many of the world’s peoples depended no longer on the colonial powers but on Washington and Moscow, united only in common hostility towards colonial empires. The Soviet heirs to imperial Russia’s overland dominions forcibly imposed a Red Empire over Eastern Europe and sought to make mischief in Asia, and the US response was to intervene in much less benign ways in the affairs of Asia, not least to bolster European allies against threats which they convinced themselves were Communist, a perception eagerly encouraged by these self-interested colonial powers.

  Long before any American dreamed up the domino theory, the French had the ‘ten-pin theory’, which was much the same. Thus General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny told an American colleague: ‘Tonkin is the key to Southeast Asia, if Southeast Asia is lost, India will burn like a match, and there will be no barrier to the advance of Communism before Suez and Africa. If the Muslim world were thus engulfed, the Muslims in North Africa would soon fall into line and Europe itself would be outflanked.’1 Sub-Saharan Africa had yet to become part of this global struggle. Amid the conflict and chaos of 1945 one key trend emerged: the rise of the Soviet Union and its willingness to kick at the rickety doors of declining British and French global influence. There was no way back to the merely dollar diplomacy of the 1930s, however much many Americans might have wished it. Events in China gave powerful impetus to the belief that the onward march of global Communism had to be stopped, though only after attempts to rescue Chiang Kai-shek had failed.

  The Americans restrained Chiang from definitively strangling Mao’s Communists in their Yan’an fastness, and then suggested he incorporate them into a coalition government. Quite possibly Chiang could not have achieved a military solution, but the constraints put on his freedom of action by the Americans ruled it out altogether. One would not think it from British historiography, but China, untainted by either Communism or imperialism, was Roosevelt’s favourite ally in the Second World War. ‘The people of China’, he said in 1943, ‘have been, in thought and in objective, closer to us Americans than almost any other peoples in the world – the same great ideals. China in the last – less than half a century has become one of the great democracies of the world.’ The will to see a world full of potential Americans, struggling to cast off the shackles of imperialism, tribalism and other unAmerican cultural accretions, has deep roots. Many influential Americans looked at China and saw evolving a more populous version of their own country.2

  Real China, as distinct from this fantasy, fascinated and frustrated Americans in equal measure. It was vast, with desert, mountains and then coastal plains crisscrossed by irrigation canals. The currency fluctuated with bewildering rapidity, while palms had to be greased for every encounter with officialdom. Gangsters, such as Shanghai’s Green Gang, had fluid relations with government agencies including the KMT secret police, which reminded Americans of the Gestapo. Although the US sought a unified, democratic China, its chosen instrument for achieving this goal, Chiang’s Nationalists, denied elementary Western freedoms even as they experimented with constitutions and assemblies.

  An alarming percentage of US aid went to the territorial warlords who dominated the Nationalist military. The US sought a moral basis for supporting the Nationalists, but grew frustrated when it could not find one in a regime whose corruption was epic. Misreading Mao’s Communists as honest agrarian socialists, Washington thought they could be persuaded to become a loyal opposition within a democratic framework. To that end financial pressure was brought to bear on the Nationalists, who after a twenty-year struggle knew their Communist opponents far better than the Americans did. As Chiang once remarked: ‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart.’3

  US policy was not well served by its Ambassador to China from late 1944 onwards, a former Republican secretary of war called Patrick Hurley, a drunken idiot given to Choctaw war cries. Oblivious of China’s delicate protocols, he referred to Chiang as ‘Mr Shek’ and Mao Zedong as ‘Moose Dung’ in the course of shuttle trips designed to bring the two together to convert China into a springboard for the final showdown with the Japanese. Mao’s cronies called Hurley ‘the Clown’; his US diplomatic colleagues dubbed him ‘the Albatross’.4

  Although in 1943 the Western powers had given Chiang’s nationalist credentials a boost by renouncing most of the (Japanese-occupied) urban territorial concessions wrung from the Qing empire, foreign dabbling in China continued. The Soviets (who had the largest enclave of al
l) encouraged Muslim Uighur separatists in Xinjiang, who in 1944 established an East Turkestan Republic. The British sought to maintain a buffer between China and India by promoting Tibetan autonomy, personified by the boy Dalai Lama, but neither they nor the Americans were prepared to subsidize it with loans in return for yak tails.5

  On 8 August 1945, in accordance with the Yalta agreement to create zones of influence, a million Soviet troops made a devastating attack on Manchuria in an operation codenamed August Storm, seizing Port Arthur and usurping the railway rights that Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to. Some 600,000 Japanese civilians and POWs were deported to the Siberian gulags, where it was said a corpse lay under every sleeper of the railways they built. The Soviets dismantled and removed around $2 billion worth of plant, while subjecting local women to attentions as infamous as those they had imposed on the women of Germany. OSS teams were sent to Soviet-occupied China to investigate the fate of US POWs. One agent had studied Russian in the US and had long harboured a theoretical admiration for all things Soviet after joining a US–Soviet friendship society. In Manchuria he advanced on the first Red Army troops he spied, optimistically bellowing ‘Tovarischi!’ (Comrades!). The Russians swung their sub-machine guns towards him, while their leader bore down on him: ‘Give me your watch,’ he said.6

  Stalin played a typically Machiavellian hand. His aim was a weak China in which he could meddle at will, so, while using a ten-month phased withdrawal to allow Mao’s troops to establish themselves in Manchuria, he simultaneously extracted a treaty from Chiang reaffirming economic concessions to the Soviets, a treaty which acknowledged Chiang as sole ruler of China. This was an extraordinary slap in the face to Mao, perhaps a quid pro quo for Mao’s refusal to aid the Soviets against the Japanese in their hour of greatest need in 1941. The seeds of the later Sino–Soviet split were sown in this period, resentments which festered in already dark hearts.

  Following Japan’s abrupt surrender, Chiang used stranded Japanese soldiers to assert his authority throughout coastal China, while despatching his own best troops to seize urban centres in Manchuria ahead of the Communists. This race saw the first fighting of a civil war which would cost a further three million Chinese lives. Although it claimed to be neutral, the US helped Chiang redeploy his forces in one of the greatest airlifts of all time, in which half a million Chinese troops were flown north in US transport planes.7 The Soviets turned over to Mao’s forces prodigious quantities of Japanese weapons, as well as Japanese instructors to help establish a Red Chinese air force. Two hundred thousand North Korean troops were loaned to Mao, who could also avail himself of northern Korea for strategic depth, as Chiang’s armies pressed him in Manchuria. It created a sense of obligation on Mao’s part towards Kim Il Sung, who was otherwise a servile Soviet client.

  Since neither Mao nor Chiang wanted the sole responsibility of plunging China into a civil war hard on the heels of fourteen years of genocidal conflict with Japan, they made a stab at negotiations. Mao undertook the first flight of his life – he deemed it ‘very efficient’ – to the Nationalist headquarters at Chongqing, although he took along the US Ambassador as a precaution against assassination. Despite superficial cordiality, these talks achieved nothing, since Mao refused the absorption of his forces into a national army. Nor would he cede control of key provincial administrations in the north, where his cadres were winning peasant support through agrarian reforms and the murder of anyone who opposed them.

  The situation became far too complex for Ambassador Hurley, who flew home and resigned in a blaze of self-publicity, convinced that China had been betrayed by Communist sympathizers in the State Department or by those liaising in Yan’an with Mao. This stance sat oddly with his own recent flirtations with Moose Dung, but played well with domestic right-wingers at a time when the Chinese Communists had just murdered an American Baptist missionary and OSS officer called John Birch after he unwisely tried to test the resolve of some juvenile cadres at a roadblock (they shot him).8

  China and Chiang, as if the two were synonymous, were highly emotive subjects in the US. China had long been a major field for American Protestant and Catholic missionaries, who roused the American public to outpourings of charity for good works among little girls with bandaged feet. Among the Christian Sinophiles was Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines and the son of missionaries, who believed passionately that China’s destiny was both Christian and capitalist, an Asian version of the US. Such sentiments were politically useful both to isolationists (for whom China’s great virtue as a client was that it was so geographically remote) and to ‘China-Firsters’ (who believed America’s destinies lay in the Pacific rather than the Atlantic). A neologism – Asialationists – combined these positions, which expressed the paradox that, although these people emoted about a vision of China that had little contact with reality, few were prepared to make the major commitment that would have been required to bring it about. It would be the bane of US foreign policy thenceforth that Chiang’s Nationalists operated the most successful lobby group in modern US domestic history, and that the Republicans alighted on China’s plight as a powerful unifying issue to attack a Democrat government whose fiscal conservatism otherwise made it a slippery target for inveterate tax cutters.

  Even under Roosevelt, US policy towards China was focused on winning the war against Japan. But behind that simple goal there were different perceptions of what was happening in China. Foreign Service officers in Chongqing and Yan’an had a higher opinion of the honesty and efficiency of the Communists than of the Nationalists. The pro-Soviet Vice President Henry Wallace convinced himself that Mao’s adherents were, as Stalin put it, ‘margarine Communists’ rather than real butter. The State Department’s Division of Chinese Affairs (part of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs) were under no illusions about the Communists, but rather hoped that a liberal, pro-Western third force might emerge to supplant both them and the Nationalists, an illusion special unto itself. Then there was the US military mission to Chongqing, under ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, whose vocal contempt for Chiang (and Roosevelt, and the British, and so on) made it necessary to replace him with the more diplomatic Albert Wedemeyer, whose primary role was to get the Chinese to draw off as many Japanese as possible while the US converged on the home islands. It is easy to see how policy towards China was always incipiently a blame game in the making.9

  Truman harboured no sentimental delusions about China. He knew that US support for Chiang (around $2.5 billion before 1949) was like gambling on a three-legged horse. It would take an authentic American hero to broker a deal between the Nationalists and Communists, whereby the latter would take their place in a democratic China, and he trusted military men far more than diplomats. In December 1945, Truman telephoned General George Marshall, around six days into a well-earned retirement from directing the US war effort, at his home in Leesburg, Virginia. ‘General, I want you to go to China for me,’ said the President. ‘Yes, Mr President,’ replied Marshall before he hung up, lest Mrs Marshall overhear his acceptance of a new appointment.10 The architect of US victory embarked on a mission which was one of the few failures in his career. He was revisiting his own past. He had been posted to Tianjin for three years in the 1920s as commander of an infantry regiment. On 20 December 1945 he was back in China and remained there until January 1947.

  The poker-faced General was determined to deal honestly with a country whose elites had turned graft and corruption into a higher art form. His bargaining chips were the threat to cut off relief supplies and to withdraw the 100,000 Marines in China. While the ideal was to unify the Communists and Nationalists into a democratic China, Marshall’s bottom line was that the Communists were not going to emerge as sole rulers. To improve the Nationalists’ mixed popular image in the US, Marshall attached a journalist, John Robinson Beal, to advise Chongqing on public relations. Since Beal’s knowledge of China derived from reading a chapter in an American academic book, h
e had the grace to recognize that Chiang might have known more about the pitfalls of attempting to deal with the Communists than he or Marshall. Beal’s account of Marshall’s thirteen months in China includes a statement of basic US objectives:

  We undertook to promote unity in China in the interest of world stability, which was in our own interest. At the same time we believed the solution to both corruption and political intrigue was to seek establishment of a unified China, in which the army would be divorced from politics, and devote itself to defending the country; a China in which KMT and Communists alike would compete democratically within a reorganised governmental structure, exchanging power as often as they won such support. Given the climate of the times in the Western world, given the fostered belief that the Chinese Communists were really honest agrarians and not the undemocratic Russian type, this was not unsound as a concept on which to base the mediation effort.11

  Marshall was adamant that the US would commit no forces to fight in China, for he could see no clear exit route and the country was too vast. He also urged Chiang to spend less on the military, and not to chase after the Communists at the very end of his supply chain. Frustrated by Chiang’s cavalier response to his considered advice, he used the threat to withdraw US aid to force Chiang into repeated ceasefires with the Communists, which merely enabled them to cement their hold on territories roughly the size of Germany. However honourable Marshall’s intentions, these ceasefires were a lifeline to Mao as both sides embarked on the final round of a struggle which would determine the destiny of China.