The other arm of Stilwell’s pincer was the X-Force, five divisions of Chinese troops, these under the command of an American, Lieutenant General Daniel I. Sultan, who had spent the better part of a year fighting their way from India over a succession of ridges and valleys across Burma in the direction of China. In November, Wei took Mangshi, a town in western Yunnan that had a landing field, permitting supplies to be flown in rather than air-dropped. On December 1, 1944, Chefang fell to the Chinese. On the other side of the border, the X-Force had taken the town of Bhamo on the Irrawaddy River, just fifty miles as the crow flies from Wanding.
Wei attacked there on January 3. Detachments of the Chinese Second Army climbed the dominant local peak, known as the Huilongshan, which commanded the approaches to the town. Colonel Stodter had a clear view of the action from an observation post, as did Theodore H. White, Time magazine’s correspondent in wartime China, who described the unfolding battle “as one of those vignettes that mark a turning point.”
“It was a long, hot day of mountain climbing,” White wrote in his memoirs,
and it began with American planes circling the peak: a tattoo of three smoke shells from the artillery to mark the Japanese positions on the crest, then American pursuits and bombers peeling off one by one, dropping their napalm, dropping frag bombs, dropping heavy bombs.
Artillery salvos, lasting eight minutes every hour, blasted the Japanese positions, and “after each salvo a rush of Chinese infantrymen to the next height through the shell-shredded trees; then another salvo, and one could see the Chinese in their blue-gray uniforms tumbling into trenches or circling Japanese blockhouses and dropping on them from the top.” Afterward, the vultures flew over the slopes of the mountains, where they picked at the corpses of the Chinese and Japanese dead.
A convoy of American trucks and jeeps rolls through the Chinese town of Baoshan after the reopening of the Burma Road at the beginning of 1945. (illustration credit 1)
White’s claim that a turning point had been reached seems a bit hyperbolic, and yet, the successful conclusion of the Salween campaign did seem a promising event in a war that had gone very badly. With their tanks, aircraft, gunboats, and fast infantry, their coordinated attacks, mobility, and firepower, the Japanese had won victory after victory in China. China’s territory was vast enough, Japan’s supply lines sufficiently long, and Chinese resistance just stubborn enough to deny the Japanese the total victory they sought. They had not conquered all of China, but they had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of China’s troops, whose fighting ability earned them little in the way of respect or admiration in American military circles or elsewhere in the world.
The most pathetic element in the Chinese military picture was the Chinese soldiers themselves, for whom being wounded or being killed in action ended the same way, the difference being either a quick death or a slow one. Foreign visitors reported their shock at seeing wounded soldiers by the roadsides, their eyes blank with hopelessness as their wounds went unattended, as if they were street beggars ignored by the passing throng. The dead and wounded were replaced by conscripts dragged unwillingly from their homes, underfed men sometimes literally roped together.
China had striven in the decade before the war began to create a modern military force, using mostly German advisers in its effort, but its armies were still underarmed and underfed, their soldiers often so emaciated that, in the words of one United States Army report, their skin was the “shabby cover of an emaciated body which has no other value than to turn rice into dung.” The military leadership was infested with corrupt and incompetent officers. Many of its senior commanders were actually semi-warlords whose allegiance to the central government was shaky, and who followed the custom of putting a portion of the salaries paid to their men into their own bank accounts—which gave them an incentive to pad their rolls. China was backward, inefficient, demoralized, fragmented, unhealthy, and poor. Japan was in every way a modern twentieth-century power, and that’s why China’s losses were so horrendous.
Despite this poor record, China fought on, and, as we will see later, there was a tendency on the part of foreign observers to stress its armies’ faults and to ignore its virtues altogether. The mere fact that China was undefeated for eight years and that it held down a million Japanese troops was itself an important contribution. Still, victories were few, and decisive victories fewer still, and that is what gave the campaign on the Salween its special glow. According to the official American military history, the campaign marked “the first time in the history of Sino-Japanese relations that the Chinese forces had driven Japanese troops from an area the Japanese wanted to hold.” As they ended the three-year Japanese blockade of their country, the Chinese also recouped twenty-four thousand square miles of territory in Yunnan province that had been held by Japan. The New York Times noted the “savage no-quarter fighting” in “the world’s toughest battle-ground, the gorges, cloud-shrouded passes and towering peaks of Yunnan province” and called the victory there “a smashing climax to China’s first real offensive of the war.”
Nine days after the fall of Wanding, a convoy of American trucks flying American and Chinese flags rolled through the Shweli Valley, passing the terraced landscape of the hill tribe villages on either side of the river, and ground up the steep hill toward China. American correspondents accompanying the X-Force stopped their jeeps to talk with the Chinese soldiers, tied the two countries’ national flags to their radio antennas, and then sped away toward Wanding, where their dispatches informed the world that the last Japanese positions on the Burma Road had been “wiped out or driven away.” To celebrate the victory, a veritable who’s who of Nationalist Chinese and their American advisers arrived in Wanding. China’s premier, T. V. Soong, the American-educated brother-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek, flew from the wartime capital of Chungking at the head of a delegation of the powerful and influential. General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had taken over from Stilwell as American commander of the China theater, arrived from Chungking as well. General Sultan was there and so was Chennault, the 14th Air Force commander who had started air attacks against the Japanese occupiers of China before the Americans were officially in the war, when his air squadron was known as the American Volunteer Group. Some of Chennault’s planes now droned above Wanding to guard against a surprise Japanese attack.
The day before, Chiang Kai-shek, speaking on a broadcast to the United States, declared that breaking the siege of China would serve as “a powerful tonic on the spirit of our army and our people” and an “omen of defeat” for the militarists of Japan. For three years, Chiang declared, Japan had proclaimed that the blockade of China would force the country into collapse and give it no choice but to surrender. But “now comes this caravan [proving] to the enemy that neither the will power of China nor the will power of her allies to win the war can ever be shaken.” In a gesture of apparent gratitude and admiration to the man whose work, vision, and planning were behind the success, the generalissimo officially named the new highway from India to China “the Stilwell Road,” in memory, Chiang declared, of Stilwell’s “distinctive contribution and of the signal part which the Allied and Chinese forces under his direction played in the Burma campaign and in the building of the road.”
From the vantage point of nearly seventy years, it is easy to be both moved and saddened by the Allied achievement in Burma, the blood, the sacrifice, the cruel immensity of the task, and by what appears now to have been its futility. The high-flown rhetoric marking the beginning of 1945 now seems false and formalistic given how badly that year ended, for the government of Chiang Kai-shek and for American ambitions in China. Despite the enormous sacrifice made to seize the territory and to build it, the road from Ledo in northeast India to Kunming in southeast China did not turn out to be of great significance in the war against Japan. Winston Churchill had long argued against making Burma the focus of a major Allied war effort, saying it would be like eating a porcupine quill by quill. Rebuilding the road
, he argued, would be “an immense, laborious task, unlikely to be finished before the need for it had passed.” He was right. By the time the road was reopened, the American Air Transport Command, now equipped with big, four-engine Douglas and Consolidated airplanes, was supplying forty-four thousand tons of matériel on the route over the Himalayas, nearly ten times the amount that had been brought over by air a couple of years before and double the highest amounts trucked in on the Burma Road early in 1942, before it was seized by Japan. Planes were now crossing the Hump on the six-hundred-mile route every two and a half minutes day and night, which, as Tillman Durdin of The New York Times put it, “is making the Ledo-Burma Road virtually obsolescent so far as the transport of military supplies to China is concerned.” In the end, even though Churchill, the supreme colonialist, had advised against the Burma campaign, what the Chinese troops had mainly done was regain for Britain its lost colony. They hadn’t done all that much for China itself.
Of course, as the firecrackers went off to welcome the convoy at Wanding, nobody was so impolitic as to say as much. Nobody alluded to the awkward fact that Chiang and Stilwell hated each other, or that for the months before he left, relations between China’s government and the Americans sent to the country to help in its war of resistance were tense and mistrustful. It must have left a sour taste in the Chinese leader’s mouth to name the Burma Road after the American general. But in winning the battle of the road, the Chinese had vindicated a long-held conviction of Stilwell, who, sometimes almost alone among American leaders, had sustained the belief that Chinese troops could fight with the best of them if only they were given proper supplies, solid training, and good leadership. Now, in an ambitious program code-named Alpha, training camps staffed by American officers were up and running in Yunnan to ready thirty-nine divisions of crack Chinese troops for the rest of the war against Japan.
Wedemeyer had it all planned out. The next step, after finishing the Alpha training, was to take the war to the Japanese strong points inside China itself, drive to the coast, secure a major port, probably near Canton or Hong Kong, and prepare for a landing of American troops. “It is believed,” Wedemeyer wrote to Chiang, “that if our operations can be initiated in July, they will catch the Japanese off-balance and probably preclude planned redistribution of their forces.” In other words, the Japanese would have no time to redeploy for a defense against an American invasion. After a port was seized, Wedemeyer felt, “the increased flow of supplies in conjunction with victorious battle experience may inspire confidence and create conditions that will enable the Chinese forces to destroy the Japanese on the Asiatic mainland without large-scale American ground participation.”
Things, in short, were looking better in China than they had in many years of war. American policy was beginning to pay dividends. Japan would certainly be defeated, the only question being how long it would take and exactly how and at what cost it would be done. The long-term American goal in China—to rescue it from Japanese domination and, once that was done, to foster a united, democratic, and friendly great power—seemed within reach.
The other big subject that nobody thought it politic to mention during the celebrations at Wanding was the dire political situation in China. Where it was not occupied by Japan, the country was divided into two geographic regions each governed by a rival armed political party. One of them, by far the larger, covering most of China west of the Japanese lines, including the rich, heavily populated provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi, was controlled by the Kuomintang (KMT), literally the National People’s Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, recognized the world over as China’s legitimate president. The Nationalists were headquartered at China’s temporary capital of Chungking in Sichuan province, where the entire, large wartime assemblage could be found—the foreign embassies, including the American, the British, and the Soviet; several Chinese universities, which had moved there from their homes farther east; the Chinese government bureaucracy; the international core of journalists covering the Japan-China war; and tens of thousands of refugees living desperately on the fringes, literal and figurative, of the city.
A thousand miles north of Chungking was the other main Chinese force, the Communist Party of China and Mao Zedong, its resourceful, charismatic, and ruthless leader. The Communists had been the sole Chinese beneficiaries of the Japanese invasion, because the war had put a stop to Chiang’s effort to wipe them out, forcing him to recognize them as a partner in the national resistance. As such, they had used the chaos of China to recruit a large number of new soldiers to the armies that they maintained in the areas under their control, mostly in the more sparsely populated areas of the north, especially in Shaanxi province, where their headquarters, in an old walled town called Yenan, were situated. After the inevitable defeat of Japan had been achieved, it was highly likely, though far from certain, that a new conflict would break out in China between these two parties and these two leaders, who had been enemies for twenty years. Once this occurred, moreover, the chances were very strong that the new China war would be a duel to the death, with the winner taking the whole prize, which was China itself.
The United States was too preoccupied by the war with Japan and the immense, ongoing task of finishing the war in Europe to be thinking very hard about China’s political future. From the standpoint of January 1945, a civil war in China seemed only one of several possible futures. The Americans had managed to arrange matters politically to suit their preoccupation with winning the Japanese war.
Most important from the standpoint of global politics, American relations with the Soviet Union, the most powerful country in the world after the United States itself and the other major future victor of World War II, were cordial and trusting. The American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, regarded his Russian counterpart, Joseph Stalin, as a friend and an ally in the ongoing war and a partner in the creation of a new order of peace and stability that FDR intended to follow the war, to be ensured through the creation of a powerful new organization, the United Nations. After all, hadn’t the United States through the massive Lend-Lease program essentially given the Russians the equipment they needed to fight Nazi Germany, and wouldn’t the trust the two sides had built up during the war endure when it was over? When the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov visited Washington in 1942, he’d been invited to sleep at the White House. “I think,” Roosevelt told Churchill in 1942 referring to Stalin, “that if I give him everything I can and ask him for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” The American president clung to that illusion until his death in April 1945.
Separate from its dealings with Stalin, the United States, over the strong objections of Chiang, was also maintaining cordial relations with Mao and his forces in Yenan. While Chiang’s troops were closing in on Japan’s forces in Burma and Yunnan, American representatives were talking by candlelight to Mao and his lieutenants about the various forms of cooperation that could emerge in the two parties’ struggle against Japan. There was animated discussion of intelligence sharing, of American arms and training for Communist forces, of Communist help to American paratroopers in the north and to a Normandy-style landing of American troops on China’s coast, which would require close coordination with the Communist guerrillas who had established themselves behind Japanese lines. Most of all, there were solemn vows to avoid civil war in the future and to work together to promote a united and democratic China, which was the long-standing American dream for the country.
“We would serve with all our hearts under an American general,” Mao gushed to an American envoy in the fall of 1944, one of many statements he made about the strength of the Communists’ friendly regard for the United States. “That is how we feel toward you.”
And then, over the course of the year, it all fell apart. By the end of 1945, pretty much all realistic hope of avoiding civil war, forging a united, pro-western China, and maintai
ning good relations with a Communist Party integrated into a functioning government had been effectively dashed. The American ambition was still being formally pursued, but it was clear, certainly in retrospect but to many even then, that it was a futile pursuit, a chimera. Japan was gloriously defeated, but the victory won in the Pacific turned out to be only a way station toward a tremendous, unprecedented loss, namely the emergence of a China entirely closed to the United States, deeply inimical to its values, bombastically hostile to its interests, and closely allied to its most menacing rival, the Soviet Union. Within a few short months, the American dream for China evaporated in a cloud of recrimination and accusation.
This, far more than the battle at Wanding, was the real turning point for the United States in Asia. The war to rescue China from the hands of an enemy was won, but China was then quickly lost. The main American goal in Asia unraveled as China slipped into the hands of a dictator allied to a new enemy whose ambitions, values, and practices were deeply inimical to those of the United States. This condition would endure for a quarter of a century. It would lead the United States, in its attempt to prevent history from repeating itself, to fight two costly wars, one in Korea, the other, the most disastrous conflict in twentieth-century American history, in Vietnam. Both of these wars were among the long-range effects of the events that took place in the twelve months and a little more that followed the heartening success at Wanding.
CHAPTER TWO
The Generalissimo and the Americans
Once during the Sino-Japanese War the president of the United States talked with his senior military representative in China, Joseph W. Stilwell, about the possibility of assassinating Chiang Kai-shek. FDR didn’t use the word “assassinate,” and it seems unlikely that he meant precisely what Stilwell took him to mean, though this confusion could be said to mirror the deep ambiguity and uncertainty of American policymakers as they tried to maneuver throughout the war and after it in the murk and gloom of Chinese domestic politics. Stilwell’s version of this matter comes through his chief of staff and most trusted subordinate, General Frank Dorn, who met with Stilwell in Chungking on the latter’s return from a conference in Cairo in 1943, attended by FDR, Chiang, and Stilwell himself.
China 1945 Page 2