The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Long, bitter, and divisive as it was, the Stilwell-Chiang struggle could have only one outcome: in the fall of 1944, Stilwell, the teller of so many unwanted truths, had thus become the most unwelcome of guests, and was recalled. Roosevelt had chosen to go with Chiang, even though he was a hopelessly flawed instrument of American policy. There were two reasons for this: first, it kept China in the war; and second, Roosevelt had his own hopelessly romantic vision of China, and seemed to believed that if we treated Chiang as the great leader of a great nation, brought him as a high-level leader to some of the conferences among the world’s leaders, he would in time morph into what the president wanted.

  If Chiang had succeeded politically in the two-man game with Stilwell, that did not make the American general any less of a prophet. Everything he had said came true; the ever more ferocious downward spiral of Chiang’s government was nothing less than a profound historical process, the collapse of a nation outside the control of any foreigners, no matter how rich and powerful their own country. No wartime military man had been more successful in a variety of exhausting tasks than George Marshall, but sent on a mission to China in late 1945 to mediate the struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists, he was a study in unadulterated failure—and was all too aware of that fact, for he was much too shrewd a figure not to understand that neither side was going to listen to him, and that the forces he was dealing with were irreconcilable. Marshall was sixty-five at the time and had just retired from the Army, physically exhausted and wanting nothing so much as to become a country squire in Leesburg, Virginia. But Harry Truman, badly shaken by events in China and fearing what the China issue might represent domestically if matters did not improve, had called on him: “General, I want you to go to China for me.” So it was that just before Christmas, 1945, John Carter Vincent, the head of Far Eastern Affairs at State, saw Marshall off. He then turned to his ten-year-old son as the plane departed: “Son,” he said, “there goes the bravest man in the world. He’s going to try and unify China.”

  The trip was such a disaster that Marshall seemed to age visibly in front of his own aides. He seemed, John Melby, who did some of the translating for him, wrote in his diary, very tired, very sad, and most likely quite ill. It was as if he saw the failure that was coming in China and the toxins it would create in the American political system. At one point in May 1946, he ran into Dwight Eisenhower, also in China. At Truman’s request, Eisenhower sounded Marshall out about replacing Jimmy Byrnes as secretary of state, an enormous responsibility for a man already worn down by prolonged public service. “Great goodness, Eisenhower, I’d take any job in the world to get out of this one!” Marshall quickly answered. Hearing of the failure of the Marshall mission, Joe Stilwell said, “But what did they expect? George Marshall can’t walk on water.” To Marshall, China was hopeless. The one thing he wanted to do more than anything else was to prevent American combat troops from being sent there to support Chiang, as some of the Nationalist leaders wanted. As he told Walton Butterworth, who became head of the State Department’s Far Eastern Affairs Office in 1947, “Butterworth, we must not get sucked in. I would need 500,000 troops to begin with and it would just be the beginning.” Then he paused and added: “And how would I extricate them?”

  Yet for all of the sense that those people knowledgeable about China had of the rot that had set in, as World War II ended, outsiders could be forgiven for thinking that Chiang’s position still seemed enviable. He retained the support of the new American administration, though its most influential members doubted his viability. He was a recognized world leader; and the portrait most Americans had of him, thanks to the efforts of a brilliant propaganda machine, was of a great and sympathetic Asian leader. In the fall of 1945 his army, and his party, the Guomindang, controlled all of China’s major cities, its entire—if devastated—industrial base, and more than three-quarters of its total population, then variously estimated at between 450 and 500 million people. He had more than 2.5 million men officially under arms, and those arms were relatively modern, having been provided by the United States.

  The Communists had fewer than half that number of men under arms and ruled over only an impoverished rural area of northwest China. Yet all kinds of foreign and domestic observers, civilian and military alike, believed that Chiang’s strength was a complete illusion and that the government was on the verge of collapse. The finances of the country were a joke. It was for a small handful of people a kind of golden trough, so much money flowing into the country to be handled by so very few Chinese. Clearly it was a situation that might not last long, and it was a time to make as much money as you could as quickly as possible. Critics of the government talked openly of key officials storing away bars of gold for their own future security. Marshall had warned Chiang almost on arrival that far too much of the country’s budget—between 80 and 90 percent—was going to the military, and that financial collapse would come before military victory. If the Chinese government, he told some of Chiang’s ministers, thought the American taxpayers would “step into the vacuum this creates, you can go to hell.” As that became more obvious, the government’s only response was to print more currency—“printing press money,” as it was known.

  Yet Chiang had little sense of his own vulnerability. Now, with the Japanese defeated, he still believed he held the whip hand over the Americans, prepared as he was to fight that country’s newest enemy, the Communists. Typically, T.V. Soong, probably the most powerful (and richest) man in the government, was openly contemptuous of the Americans. He went around Nanjing telling Chinese colleagues not to worry about them. “I can take care of these boobs,” he said. Certainly, the Americans seemed ready to play their part as scripted by Chiang. Even as the Japanese were surrendering, the United States had managed to turn their forces into a kind of temporary constabulary, staying in place, weapons in hand, until Nationalist, not Communist, troops arrived to accept their surrender. Then the Americans helped airlift or ferry as many as five hundred thousand Nationalist troops from southwestern China to key positions around the country. (“Unquestionably the largest troop movement by air in the world’s history,” boasted General Albert Wedemeyer, who directed it as the senior American military officer in the region in the post-Stilwell era.) In a number of places in northeast China, the United States sent detachments of their own Marines in, perhaps as many as fifty thousand all told, to hold outposts until the Nationalist troops could arrive. As such, with the help of the United States, Chiang’s forces were able to accept the surrender of some 1.2 million Japanese soldiers, along with their equipment, much of it desperately coveted by the Communists.

  Yet even when the civil war was apparently going well, the truth was very different. No one was more aware of this than the former American chief of staff. In October 1946, near the end of his tour as Truman’s special representative, George Marshall repeatedly warned Chiang not to go after the Communists in their bases in the north and northwest. Chiang was spreading himself much too thin and playing into Mao’s hands, Marshall argued. In addition, sensing the kind of war the Communists fought, he tried to make one basic point with the Gimo. The Communists might be retreating, but they were not surrendering. The implications were obvious: when the Nationalists were far from their base camps and supply lines, then, and only then, would the Communist forces strike. Chiang, of course, did not listen. He never did. He was pumped up on victories that were not victories, on the departure of Communist forces from projected battlefields, which was part of the larger Communist strategy. Chiang promised Marshall that he would destroy the Communists in eight to ten months, and then, having rejected all of his advice, he asked Marshall, the most distinguished American citizen-soldier of his generation, a man exhausted and desperate for retirement, to stay on as his personal military adviser. Marshall quite emphatically said no—if he could not influence Chiang as the personal representative of the president of the United States, he knew what chance he would have on Chiang’s own p
ayroll. (“Chiang’s confidence in me may have been unbounded, but it did not restrain him from disregarding my advice,” Marshall said years later, somewhat mordantly.)

  For all of Chiang’s surface strengths, the Communists at that moment could not have been more confident. They might have been pushed back into the caves of impoverished Yenan, but they had been surprisingly successful in their guerrilla strikes against the Japanese, and even more successful in their efforts to forge a deep relationship with China’s vast peasant population. Aware of the mounting problems of the Nationalists, they were absolutely confident of their own destiny and their inevitable victory, and sooner rather than later. In America, powerful religious leaders, men of deep faith, were outraged by the possibility of their victory, but in their own very different way the Communists were men of faith, politics and war having been entwined together into what was virtually a religious fervor, a certainty on their part that they were a force of destiny. For Mao and the men around him were designing what seemed at the time a new kind of war, based initially not so much on force of arms as on gaining the support of the people.

  16

  CHIANG HAD BARELY waited for the world war to end before launching his offensive against the Communists, who had hoped that he would do exactly that, would come after them and extend his line of communications. American aid continued to pour in. It was as if he were following an agenda that the Communists had scripted for him. “It is all right for United States to arm the Guomindang, because as fast as they get it we will take it away from them,” a Communist representative said at the time. All told, the United States sent $2.5 billion in aid to China from the end of World War II to 1949, when Chiang fled to Taiwan. Indeed, so much military aid had been wasted and stolen during the war that some of the Americans who flew the equipment over the Hump—that is, the Himalayas—from India, an unusually dangerous supply mission given that era’s aircraft, had a cynical phrase for it all: “Uncle Chump from over the Hump.”

  On paper, the Communist Army was at first comparatively small and poorly armed, but they had leadership, discipline, and grievance. They had come to their combat skills and their strategy the hard way. First there had been the Long March, the 6,000-mile, 370-day trek from southern China to Yenan that had begun in October 1934 and that, among other things, had seen the rise of Mao Zedong within the Party. Then there had been the long ordeal of struggling to survive against the Japanese during the war years, which had provided them with a form of warfare that perfectly suited their strengths and minimized their weaknesses. They had fought the Japanese with great skill, using mobile, small-unit guerrilla tactics, striking only when they had overwhelming numerical strength and vanishing when the enemy units were larger and stronger. Now, pursued by larger, better-armed Nationalist forces, they made comparable adjustments on what was a changing battlefield, a battlefield they redesigned to suit their purposes, rather than those of their enemy. They would not hold cities, and they would not fight a stationary war; they would operate out of bases that were so distant as to be almost unreachable by conventional forces. In the beginning they would seek more than anything simply to capture weapons from the Nationalist troops. Sixty years later, when American forces would fight in Iraq against urban guerrillas, there was a new name for it—an asymmetrical war.

  Despite the vulnerability of their positions in 1945, the morale of the Communists was high. It was not long before a sense of a changing military dynamic was obvious to foreign observers. John Melby, one of the younger State Department officials, noted in his diary as early as December 1945, “One of the great mysteries to me is why one group of people retains faith, whereas another from much the same origins and experience loses it. Over the years the Communists have absorbed an incredible amount of punishment, have been guilty of their own share of atrocities, and yet have retained a kind of integrity, faith in their destiny, and the will to prevail. By contrast the Guomindang has gone through astonishing tribulations, has committed its excesses, has survived a major war with unbelievable prestige, and is now throwing everything away at a frightening rate, because the revolutionary faith is gone and has been replaced by the smell of corruption and decay.”

  Almost from the start the Communist tactics succeeded, while those of the Nationalists failed. In the fall of 1946, as the civil war intensified, Chiang’s American advisers were pessimistic, but being traditional military men, if anything they overestimated the value of American military gear in a war like this and underestimated how successful yet simple the Communist order of battle was. They imagined Chiang’s forces ultimately mired in another protracted struggle, eventually leading to an uneasy stalemate, perhaps with a geographic division of the country, the Communists getting the north and the Nationalists the south. They did not understand the particular dynamic of a political war like this, that the forces and the balance would not stay static. Once the dynamic no longer favored the Nationalists—and that happened with surprising speed—it would favor the Communists at an ever accelerating pace. “No one anticipated the speed and skill with which the Chinese Communists would be able to transfer their anti-Japanese guerrilla campaign into campaigns of mobile warfare,” wrote John Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker in their Cambridge History of China.

  Actually, one person had. In the days when Chiang’s forces were at their strongest and had attained some early successes, Mao had not lost his faith, nor his essential belief that his forces were infinitely closer to the average peasant than Chiang’s. In the summer of 1946, when there was a brief armistice, Robert Payne, a distinguished British historian, visited Mao in his redoubt in Yenan. Near the end of a prolonged interview, Mao, clearly tired, asked if there were any more questions. “One more,” Payne answered. “How long would it take for the Chinese Communists to conquer China if the armistice breaks down?” “A year and a half,” Mao answered. It was said, Payne noted, slowly and with absolute conviction, and it proved surprisingly accurate. By mid-1948, the war was virtually over and Chiang’s forces were in almost complete retreat. But at the time it had seemed like the wildest of boasts.

  At first there had been, on the surface at least, some apparent Nationalist victories; some cities and towns were recaptured from the Communists. But whether they were victories or not was always a question—they might have been part of a larger Communist strategy of bait and wait. The Nationalists took cities and then remained stationary; the Communists had to move constantly and were highly mobile. The Communists learned to be nimble, to move quickly at night. They perfected the art of the ambush. They used tactics “of feint and deceit that seemed to place them everywhere and nowhere,” as one American historian noted. Often they would feint a frontal assault against a Nationalist unit while keeping their main force at the rear in well-prepared positions, ready to inflict a brutal pounding on the retreating—and terrified—Nationalist troops (a tactic they would employ again with some significant success against the Americans in the early days of the Korean War). They would often strike at night, when the Nationalists were least prepared. Because of their connection with the peasants, and because their men had often infiltrated Chiang’s units, they had excellent intelligence. They seemed to know every move the Nationalists were going to make. When the Communists lost men in combat, they were able, because of their superior political skills, to recruit more quite readily from their abundant local peasant base.

  By May 1947, Chiang’s offensive had ground to a halt. His poorly led forces, spread too thin, their supply lines too extended, were bottled up in cities, their morale dropping almost daily. They had become bogged down and vulnerable before their commanders even realized it. By the end of the summer of 1947, Mao and his people estimated that of his 248 brigades Chiang had committed 218 to his offensive and had already lost over 97 of them, or nearly 800,000 men. Some Americans, even back in the United States, were becoming frustrated with Chiang. “Why, if he is a generalissimo, doesn’t he generalize?” asked an angry Senator Tom Connally, the Democ
rat who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

  The Communists were getting very little aid from the Russians—a source of eventual tension between Mao and Stalin. By contrast, the Nationalists had become ever more dependent on the Americans. That they were turning over American-made weapons to their enemies at what the Americans thought was an alarming rate did not seem to bother them—the solution was to ask for more. In the middle of 1947, Wellington Koo, the very well-connected, extremely supple Nationalist ambassador to Washington, dropped in on George Marshall, by then secretary of state. The frustrated Marshall, sick of what Chiang’s armies were doing in the field, and equally sick of the political problems that men like Koo were causing for the administration in Washington, told Koo that Chiang “was the worst advised military commander in history.” That did not stop Koo from asking for more weapons. “He is losing about 40 percent of his supplies to the enemy,” Marshall told Koo and added sardonically, “If the percentage should reach 50 percent he will have to decide whether it is wise to continue to supply his troops.” Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao would later comment laconically, “was our supply officer.” When Weifang and Jinan fell in 1948, David Barr, the last American senior military adviser to Chiang’s army, added, “The Communists had more of our equipment than the Nationalists did.”