China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  Mao Zedong underscored his uniqueness not just by dominating meetings, addressing large rallies and having all Party members imbibe his most important articles. He did so through the way he dressed and went about his daily life and in his use of language, setting him apart not only from other Communist leaders but also from Chiang Kaishek. Whereas Chiang wore military uniforms, Mao wore patched peasant clothing; whereas Chiang was stiff, upright, distant and controlled, Mao was relaxed, talkative and entertaining. If Chiang went to bed early and rose at the crack of dawn to do his exercises and pray, Mao slept during the day, smoked endlessly, ate sloppily and cracked jokes, often off-colour ones. Whereas Chiang continued to write in a semi-classical style, Mao – a perfectly good classical poet – wrote in a simple, direct and colloquial way and addressed people by their personal names. None of this was incidental, of course, but was used by Mao to stress the difference between the old, hierarchical, Nationalist order and the new vibrant, open, energetic and egalitarian Communist one. Yan’an became the radical new rural alternative to Nationalist urban backwardness, exploitation and corruption.

  Mao Zedong and Chiang Kaishek both confronted the question with which Sun Yatsen had first struggled: how to transform a China which was like a sheet of loose sand, as Sun Yatsen put it, into a cohesive and unified nation able to resist imperialism. The histories of both the Nationalists and the Communists provided ample examples of the dangers of disunion. Factionalism had split the CCP even during the Long March, with nearly disastrous consequences. Nationalist divisions had almost led to the defeat of the Northern Expedition, while now, in the War of Resistance, there were two National governments, one in Nanjing under Wang Jingwei and the other in Chongqing under Chiang Kaishek. Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists themselves were more a coterie of different factions than a unified government, which undermined both their political and military effectiveness. The Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, was widely vilified as ineffectual; it certainly had done nothing to unify China’s various armed forces and transform them into a cohesive fighting force.

  Mao paid so much attention to disciplining his party and carrying out a rectification campaign in the midst of war because he saw a disciplined, unified, effective and energetic party as the answer to the Sun Yatsen question of how to bind China together. He cast the Party as a web over all organisations, including the army, governmental offices and mass organisations, in order to coordinate all the varied activities of the Communists on the battlefield, in the villages, in the media, on the stage, in schools and in universities across all regions of China.

  In Yan’an, Mao Zedong became the undisputed leader of the Party, towering over other Chinese Communists. He not only reorganised the Chinese Communist Party through a distinct revolutionary strategy, but also expounded a new understanding of China’s past, present and future. The rebirth of the Communists and the growth of Mao’s power during the War of Resistance meant that between him and Chiang Kaishek China now had two saviours, each with a powerful base, each promising China’s redemption and each convinced of his own unique value. That could only spell trouble.

  PART III

  THE ACID TEST

  — NINE —

  THE ALLIES AT WAR

  Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose.

  General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, Happy Odyssey (1950)1

  The New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941 showed that the Communists had become a force to be reckoned with. However, the consequences of the revival of the Communists would unfurl only in the last year of the war. Japan’s decision in December 1941 to invade colonies of the USA, Britain and the Netherlands in what we now refer to as south-east Asia administered a far more immediate impact. It yanked the War of Resistance in China in an entirely new direction.

  British prime minister Winston Churchill learned of the new development on the evening of 7 December, while he was entertaining the American ambassador John Winant and US Special Envoy Averell Harriman at Chequers. Having spent the evening commiserating with his American guests, that night, according to Churchill, he ‘slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’.2 This was an over-simplification: Churchill remained anxious that the USA would not join in the war against Germany right up to the moment that Hitler declared war on the US four days later, on 11 December. Churchill was also worried that ‘we are going to be heavily attacked in Malaya and throughout the Far East’.3 But once it was clear that the USA, with its massive industrial capacity and agricultural resources, had joined the war, Churchill was right to believe, as he wrote, that ‘Britain would live’.

  In Chongqing, Chiang Kaishek also had cause to breathe a sigh of relief. On 5 December, the journalist Owen Lattimore, who was now an advisor on China policy to President Roosevelt, informed him that a last ditch effort by US Secretary of State Cordell Hull to secure peace with Japan was dead in the water. Chiang declared in his diary that ‘this is our greatest diplomatic triumph’.4 Although prone to writing in overly dramatic language in his diary, this time he had reason to do so.

  At a meeting held on 22 November in Washington, Hull had told representatives of the UK, the Netherlands and China that the USA was not yet prepared for a two-ocean war. To secure a delay, so he told them, he had proposed to Japan’s ambassador to the US, Nomura Kichisaburo, that, in return for Japan’s agreement not to invade south-east Asia and reduce its troops in southern Annam (Vietnam), the USA would relax its oil embargo. This had been imposed on 26 July after Japan deployed 50,000 troops into southern Annam. Japan being completely dependent on oil imports, the embargo posed a devastating threat to its war-making capacity: an aircraft carrier without fuel is just a huge metal box clogging up a harbour. When pressed by the Chinese ambassador, Hu Shi, to say whether a Japanese undertaking not to attack Yunnan was part of the agreement, Hull declined to say.5 Holding Ambassador Hu back after the conclusion of the meeting, Hull assured him that the delay would be only ‘for a short period of transition’.

  The Nationalists went into overdrive to put pressure on Hull. Had Hull’s deal gone through, it would have come at an awkward time for the Nationalists. General Yan Xishan in Shanxi province had negotiated a compromise with Japan, the Wang Jingwei government had only recently been inaugurated and the Chinese economy was in free fall. Yunnan province was ruled by General Long Yun, who was no friend of Chiang Kaishek; he probably would have cut a deal with the Japanese rather than fight them. Nationalist resistance might well have disintegrated had Hull had his way and the US had concluded a deal with the Japanese.

  Chiang Kaishek instructed Ambassador Hu and Lattimore to lobby the State Department and the Oval Office to stick to US demands, made when negotiations had begun back in February, for a Japanese withdrawal from China.6 A message from Lattimore to Laughlin Currie, Roosevelt’s economic advisor, read: ‘Generalissimo has shown me Chinese ambassador’s summary of America’s suggestions … He is shocked by suggestion that an agreement would be no worse than Britain’s closing Burma Road. He wishes President to understand that fundamental question is not wording of terms but departure of principle involving sacrifice China, callousness of which impossible to hide.’7

  At his press conference on 4 December, which made the front pages across the USA, Hull ‘charged Japan’, so the Washington Post put it, with pursuing a policy of conquest. Hull had come to the conclusion that ‘seven months of negotiation have done nothing to bridge the broad gap between the Japanese position and that of the United States’.8 As Lattimore told Chiang Kaishek, that meant that Hull had abandoned any hopes of an acceptable peace deal. Denied US acquiescence in their ambitions in China, the Japanese began Nanshin, the conquest of south-east Asia otherwise known as the Southern Expansion Doctrine, of which the assault on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was part. If Japanese intransigence was as responsib
le as the Nationalists’ diplomatic push for sinking Hull’s peace gambit, given the huge consequences that flowed from this, the importance of the Nationalists’ efforts should not be underestimated.

  Britain and China both benefitted from the USA’s participation in the Second World War, but each also paid a price. In terms of military aid, Britain benefitted hugely but China did not. China received only US$2 billion of the US$50 billions-worth of supplies which the US made available to its allies during the war under the Lend–Lease programme of 1941, under which the president was authorised by Congress to transfer war material without payment to any state whose defence was considered vital to US interests.9 Most of that aid only arrived in China towards the end of the War of Resistance. By contrast, Britain obtained US military assistance on a cornucopian scale. But politically, the reverse was the case; China benefitted hugely and Britain less so. Because of Roosevelt’s support, the Nationalists were not only able to secure the abolition of unequal treaties and the return to China of foreign concession areas, they also gained recognition of China as one of the Big Four countries in the world, with a commensurate role in international affairs. In contrast, Roosevelt’s actions did much to set in motion a process of decolonisation that would lead to the end of a world order dominated by militarised empires, such as Britain’s, to which Churchill remained deeply attached.

  Europe versus Asia

  The moment the news of Pearl Harbor reached him, Chiang Kaishek fired off telegrams to Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin to propose a military alliance. To coordinate the defence against Japan’s Nanshin, Chiang proposed a joint command for the USA, the Soviet Union, the UK and China, with a US commander taking the lead.10 Chiang was especially keen on an immediate Soviet declaration of war on Japan; only the Soviets could make a significant difference in China. As desperate as Chiang was for foreign assistance in his war with Japan, he would not join an alliance on any condition. He wrote in his diary that China should insist on: 1) Recognition by the Soviet Union and the UK of Chinese claims over Tibet, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia; 2) Acceptance by all of Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria; and 3) The return to Chinese control of all foreign settlements and concessions in the country and the abolition of all foreign special legal privileges.11 Resistance against Japanese aggression stood in the service of bringing about the Nationalist version of the New China.

  Chiang Kaishek called for an ‘Asia first’ strategy. Because Japan was the weaker opponent, he argued, it would be best to defeat it first so that all resources could then be concentrated on defeating Germany. The cold water was not long in coming. Stalin informed Chiang a week after Pearl Harbor that the USSR would not take up arms against Japan until after the defeat of Germany. He also warned Chiang that China should resist joining the USA and the UK in their war against Japan in south-east Asia so as ‘not to be sold out by them’.12 The USA and the UK also rejected an Asia-first strategy. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Churchill sailed to Washington, where he gave a rousing speech at a joint session of Congress. He and Roosevelt presided over a series of meetings involving senior military and political leaders, named the Arcadia Conference, which made decisions that would shape Allied strategy for the next two years. These included the affirmation of a Europe-first strategy, the creation of a Combined Chiefs of Staff organisation as well as a joint Munitions Allocation Board; and the decision that their first joint effort would be Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa.

  The Europe-first strategy was not unambiguously popular in the USA. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, surveys suggested that 60 per cent of the US population favoured focusing the war on Germany, but after the Japanese made gains in the Pacific, especially the Philippines (which was still a US colony), that changed.13 For a large number of Americans, Japan was Enemy Number One and China ‘the favourite ally’.14 But well before Pearl Harbor the consensus in the US military was, as its Plan Dog memorandum of November 1940 put it, ‘if Britain wins decisively against Germany we could win everywhere; but … if she loses the problem confronting us would be very great; and, while we might not lose everywhere, we might, possibly, not win anywhere.’15 Plan Dog therefore defined US strategy as ‘an eventual strong offensive in the Atlantic as an ally of the British and defensive of the Pacific’.16

  Between January and March 1941, at the same time that diplomatic talks were being held in Washington between the US and Japan about avoiding war, American and British military staff members were engaged in secret discussions, known as the American-British Conversations (ABC). Fusing the key features of Plan Dog and British strategy, the report that resulted from these meetings defined the Atlantic Ocean and Europe as the decisive theatres of war. The main US effort should therefore occur there. The priority was the safeguarding of sea communications between the UK and the USA so that forces could be gathered together in the UK for an eventual offensive against Germany. American and British military planners agreed that Italy should be eliminated from the war early on and that Germany should be subjected to a sustained air offensive. In case Japan joined the war, the defence of the British Commonwealth would be the UK’s and the USA’s first objective.17 The ABC agreements did not constitute a military alliance and nor did they commit the US irrevocably to joining the war, but they formed important steps towards both. They had a profound impact on the decisions Churchill and Roosevelt reached in Washington at the Arcadia Conference, at which it was resolved to adopt a defensive strategy towards Japan: the UK would take responsibility for holding Singapore, while the USA would defend the Philippines and Australia.18

  By contrast with the discussions in Washington, those in Chongqing involving China, the UK, the US and the Netherlands ended in acrimony.19 The Nationalists were offended when General Archibald Wavell, the British commander-in-chief, India, declined a Nationalist offer of military assistance in Burma, fearing that they would overburden Burma’s disintegrating infrastructure. An indignant Chiang Kaishek told Wavell that he should not think of Chinese forces like another native army from the British Empire, only good ‘for railroad protection duties and digging trenches’.20 The British looked down upon China’s military capabilities, and they let it show.

  The exclusion of the Nationalists not just from the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Munitions Allocation Board but also from ABDA (America, British, Dutch and Australia) Command to coordinate the defence against Japan injured Nationalist pride. The creation of a separate China Theatre, in which Chiang had command of ‘all Allied forces now or in the future in China’ – essentially his own – did nothing to assuage his hurt feelings. He told a US diplomat that ‘China is regarded as an ally only in name’.21 It is possible that concerns about the security of Chinese secret military codes shaped the British and American attitude, but it is also the case that China was simply not seen as an important theatre of war. China did not figure large in either the ABC or the Arcadia agreements.

  From the American perspective, the adoption of a Europe-first strategy made sense. An Asia-first strategy would have been sensible only if the USSR was willing to join an attack on Japan, if the USA had completed its military build-up, and if Britain had not decided to focus on the defence of the Middle East rather than its colonies and dominions in the Far East.22 The USSR was still reeling from the German onslaught, Operation Barbarossa, which had begun only half a year earlier. Shoring up the defence against Hitler, on both Germany’s eastern and western flanks, was crucial to prevent the nightmare scenario outlined in Plan Dog from becoming a reality. Reports from China made it clear that Nationalist forces had lost much of their fighting ability, and so would be unlikely to help sustain a major campaign against Japan.23 Britain’s air and naval forces were concentrated in Europe and the Middle East, counting on Japanese awe of British imperial might and US aid to defend its Far Eastern colonies. It made sense to give priority to reinforcing the Allied position in Europe, not in the least to prevent a Soviet collapse.

  The Europe-first strategy was n
ever as one-sided as the term suggests. Once it became clear that the US Pacific Fleet was not damaged as much by Pearl Harbor as the Japanese had hoped – no carriers had been sunk, and the Pacific War was going to be a carrier war – steps were undertaken first to shore up the Allied position in the Pacific, including by strengthening the defences of Australia. By the summer of 1942 the US navy was fighting back against the Japanese at New Guinea and Guadalcanal.

  However, there was a problem. The embracement of China as an ally served the UK and the USA well in suggesting that they were not fighting a race war and had been serious in August 1941 when they had issued the Atlantic Charter, with its promise of self-determination. But they had little faith in China’s military capacity and they were not prepared to deploy substantial military assets to China. The US tried to square this circle by staging dramatic actions that required few resources but would illustrate its commitment to China, partly to boost China’s flagging morale but also because they would generate uplifting reports in the US press about American forces taking on the Japanese in Asia and winning. The Doolittle Raid of 18 April 1941 was an example.

  That day, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle took off with sixteen B-25 medium bombers, each loaded with four 500-pound bombs, from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the western Pacific Ocean. His aim was to carry out an air raid on Japan. The raid inflicted little damage, but on 19 May President Roosevelt was to be photographed pinning the Medal of Honor on to the chest of the recently promoted Brigadier General Doolittle at a ceremony at the White House. He praised Doolittle for ‘a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland’.24