China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Stilwell and FDR had had a twenty-minute private meeting in Cairo, Stilwell told Dorn, during which, as Stilwell related it, describing the president as if he were a Mafia godfather had told him, “in that Olympian manner of his: ‘Big Boy, if you can’t get along with Chiang and can’t replace him, get rid of him once and for all. You know what I mean. Put in someone you can manage.’ ”

  In Dorn’s account, Stilwell instructed him to “cook up a workable scheme and await orders,” and Dorn did just that, devising a contingency plan for an assassination that would have been worthy of a Hollywood thriller. The Gimo, or the Gissismo, or CKS, or Cash My Check, or Generalissimo, General of Generals, as Chiang was variously called by Americans, either respectfully or derisively, would be taken on a flight to Ramgarh, India, to inspect Chinese troops being trained there as part of the effort to improve China’s backward army. The pilot would pretend to have engine trouble and order his crew and passengers to bail out. Chiang would be ushered to the door of the plane wearing a faulty parachute and told to jump.

  “I believe it would work,” Stilwell told Dorn.

  There was of course no assassination of Chiang, nor did Dorn receive further instructions from Stilwell on this matter. There is, moreover, no other evidence that FDR expressed any desire to have Chiang eliminated, and it seems unlikely that he did, despite the ominous sound of that you-know-what-I-mean uttered to Stilwell. Roosevelt had his occasional bursts of irritation at Chiang, but he also nurtured a certain sympathy for him as a fellow head of state, another lonely man at the top of the unwieldy contraption known as a political system. Roosevelt, whose ancestors on the Delano side had made their fortune in the China trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shared that very American wish for China to rise out of the ashes of its recent deplorable condition, preferably by adopting American ways. Unlike, for example, his closest wartime ally, Winston Churchill, who thought American aspirations for China to be silly and wishful, FDR aspired for Chiang to be one of the Big Four of the postwar world, along with Churchill, Stalin, and himself, and he believed that Chiang was the only person with the prestige and standing to lead his afflicted country to a new era of respectability. His remark to Stilwell at Cairo came at a moment of particularly intense puzzlement at what seemed to Roosevelt a combination of evasiveness, deceitfulness, and imperiousness on Chiang’s part. At the Cairo conference, speaking to his son Elliott, FDR wondered why Chiang seemed so loath to allow Stilwell to train Chinese troops, why he kept “thousands and thousands of his best men on the borders of Red China,” and, above all, “why Chiang’s troops aren’t fighting at all.”

  Stilwell has been lionized in histories of this period and in biographies, and, indeed, he was a powerful figure, a brilliant commander much beloved by his troops even when he drove them almost beyond endurance. He was a straight-talker with no tolerance for fakery, deceit, or incompetence, but he was also truculent, indiscreet, stubborn, lacking in sober judgment, and disinclined to recognize his own mistakes—not, in other words, the right man for the job in China, which required fewer prejudices and more diplomatic finesse than he was capable of. He despised Chiang, whom he called “Peanut,” not only in his diaries but in his utterances to his staff and superiors, and from time to time he mused aloud on what a good thing it would be if he could be removed from the scene. Even before the Cairo conference or his conversation with Dorn, Stilwell had summoned Carl F. Eifler, the senior American intelligence officer for China, to his office in New Delhi, and, according to Eifler, told him that to pursue the war successfully, “it would be necessary to get Chiang Kai-shek out of the way.” Under instructions from Stilwell, Eifler inquired about how to achieve this objective, and he determined that botulinus toxin, which is undetectable in an autopsy, would be an effective weapon. But in May 1944, at a meeting in his headquarters in Burma, Stilwell told Eifler that he’d changed his mind about eliminating Chiang and nothing further was done.

  These were outlandish ideas—to throw an allied leader out of an airplane, or to poison him in the fashion of some Roman Empire plot. But the mere fact that it is part of the historical record, mentioned in the memoirs of creditable witnesses and discussed in the serious biographies of Chiang, makes it a gauge of sorts to the dilemma facing American policymakers in China, a poor and divided country, during World War II and right after it, coping with an imperfect leader whom they counted on for more than he could deliver.

  It is worth noting in this connection that twenty or so years later, the United States was complicit in the assassination of a supposedly allied Asian leader—Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963—with more than a passing resemblance to Chiang. Diem was killed by local rivals who had gained the approval of the Kennedy administration because his erratic rule and growing unpopularity were deemed by senior officials to be increasingly problematic.

  Chiang was a sort of predecessor to Diem, in that he too was the leader of a corrupt rightist dictatorship, though he himself was rigorously honest in the financial sense. Chiang’s wife, American-educated Soong Mei-ling, came across to foreigners as charming and imperious—“dragon lady” is the common, racially tinged pejorative; Diem was represented in this sense by his sister-in-law, the glamorous, charming, and vindictive Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, educated in France and assumed, like Madame Chiang before her, to exercise great influence behind the scenes. Ngo was a Catholic, Chiang a Methodist. Both faced Communist insurrections that rendered them helpless without American aid and goodwill.

  But Chiang was never a client ruler in the way that Diem was. He was a man who came to power on the basis of his own intelligence and charisma; he was not put in a gated presidential palace by a foreign intelligence agency. In the decades since World War II, it has become conventional wisdom to see Chiang as one of the great incompetents of twentieth-century history, but at the time, and even subsequently, there was reason to see him in a more sympathetic light, as an effective leader striving under tremendous disadvantages to push his country into a brighter future. Recent biographers, especially Jay Taylor, a former American diplomat, have emphasized Chiang’s good qualities rather than his deficiencies, and have portrayed him as laboring under almost impossible circumstances, especially after the ruinous Japanese invasion. Chiang was born in Zhejiang, the coastal province south of Shanghai, in 1887 and educated in part at a Japanese military academy. He became the chief protégé of Sun Yat-sen, the first republican leader of China, the man who led the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and established the Kuomintang, promising after a period of authoritarian tutelage to establish a western-style democracy. Chiang was slender, small, stiff, prideful, and patriotic, imbued with a sense of China’s humiliation at the hands of foreigners and determined to do something about it, though following the revolution of 1911, China, far from becoming a powerful democracy, had fallen into fragmentation and chaos, its territory divided up among a group of competing warlords and prone to Japanese aggression.

  Among Chiang’s great achievements was the Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928 when the army he led established a fragile sort of unity across the country. He was advised in that endeavor by members of the Communist International dispatched from Moscow, his armies trained by the German officers who had forged the kaiser’s forces in the years leading up to World War I. This was a great moment in Chinese history, even if it has taken on the appearance of a brief interlude, lost in the tumultuous events that followed it, great because Chiang, in eliminating many of the warlords and establishing a modern government, embodied the national and nationalist aspirations of a majority of his countrymen. His army was by far the best in China, and it made the heretofore scary private armies of the warlords seem almost quaintly archaic by comparison. The world saw in Chiang a young, competent, visionary leader who would finally, after so many false starts for China, lead his country into the modern world.

  But Chiang was never able to overcome the deep divisions in China or the byzantine, s
ometimes literally murderous politics of rival parties. In 1927, he mounted a vicious coup against his allies in the reunification drive, the Communists, who he believed, probably correctly, were plotting, with Moscow’s connivance, to eliminate him, once he had served his purpose. The Communists, or those not among the thousands arrested or assassinated, were driven out of the cities and set up rural bases under the newly emerging leader Mao Zedong. Meanwhile, Chiang set up the capital of the Republic of China at Nanjing, a former imperial-era capital on the Yangzi River that was in territory controlled by the new government—in contrast to Beijing, which, though China’s capital for most of the previous six hundred years, was dominated by one of China’s as yet unvanquished warlords. For the next decade, Chiang presided over a promising and resurgent country, one whose economy grew rapidly and that made great progress against its poverty, superstition, and backwardness. In the early 1930s, having expelled the Soviets but advised by his German officers, he undertook several campaigns to wipe out the Communists in their rural bases, and he would likely have succeeded if he hadn’t had to address a Japanese threat at the same time.

  Chiang did not oppose earlier Japanese aggression in China, especially the conquest of Manchuria in 1931. Chiang felt China was too weak to fight Japan, and he concentrated instead on nation building and eliminating the Communists. It wasn’t a stupid decision. Chiang understood that as long as China was divided into warring factions, it was unlikely to be strong. But as Japan continued to press for more Chinese territory, an aroused Chinese public put pressure on him to forgo the effort to eliminate his domestic rivals and to enter into a united front with them to fight Japan, which he did at the end of 1936, though unwillingly and as the result of a comic-opera deception aimed at forcing his hand.

  In December that year, Chiang flew to Xian, the ancient imperial capital in China’s northwest, where he was to meet with a man known as the Young Marshal. This was Zhang Xueliang, who had seen his share of bloody intrigue in his short lifetime. Zhang’s father, Zhang Zuolin, was one of the more picaresque characters of the time when power in China was dispersed among a group of warlords, each with his own army, territory, and ambition to become the ruler of all of China. Known as the Old Marshal, Zhang Sr. was a thoroughly reactionary, antirepublican former bandit who, in good Chinese warlord fashion, liked to appear in a Prussian-style uniform with braids and sashes, oversize epaulets, medals, and a tassel swaying over a brimmed cap. He commanded an army of several hundred thousand men, had five wives, and for a brief time controlled Beijing. But in 1928, as the armies of Chiang Kai-shek advanced northwards in their reunification drive, Zhang was forced to retreat to Manchuria, where Japan enjoyed semi-colonial privileges, including the right to deploy a sizable military force known as the Kwantung Army—Kwantung being a name given to the part of Manchuria east of the pass dividing it from the rest of China. On his way back, Zhang was killed when a Kwantung Army soldier put a bomb under his train. The reason normally assumed for this assassination was Japanese anger at Zhang’s failure to stop Chiang Kai-shek’s forces from advancing north, but it seems equally likely that Zhang was deemed too independent at a time when Japan planned to turn Manchuria into a puppet state.

  Zhang Jr. was a decadent, opium-using womanizer whom the Japanese installed as the new warlord of Manchuria, apparently thinking he would be more pliant than his father. They were wrong. Zhang gave up opium and got serious as a Chinese political figure, supporting the Nationalists. In 1929, he invited two pro-Japanese Chinese officials to a banquet and had them executed in front of the other guests. Chiang named him commander of the renewed effort to cut the Communist cancer out of the Chinese body politic. But as 1936 wore on and the prospect of further Japanese incursions against Chinese sovereignty seemed imminent, Zhang balked at the idea of Chinese fighting other Chinese, and he opened up contacts with the Communists to plot what he would later call a coup d’état.

  At the end of November, Zhang told Chiang that his troops in Shaanxi province were close to mutiny at the prospect of fighting fellow Chinese, and he proposed to Chiang that he come up from Nanjing to Xian, a couple of hours by airplane, to talk to them. Chiang agreed to go. Zhang informed Mao of the unfolding plan. Mao called it “a masterpiece.”

  Chiang arrived with his usual retainers, including his foreign minister and military advisers, staying at a hot springs resort ten miles from Xian. He spent his time talking to the officers of the army organized to march on the Communists in Yenan, telling them that only “the last five minutes” remained to go before victory in that long campaign would be theirs. Then, in the wee hours of December 12, Zhang’s bodyguards, wearing the fur caps of Manchurian soldiers, burst into the cabin where Chiang was sleeping. They intended to kidnap him, but Chiang, wearing his nightclothes, escaped out of a window and climbed over the back wall of the compound, injuring his back when he fell. The Generalissimo spent a frigid night with a few loyal aides in a cave at the top of a nearby mountain, and in the morning he was taken into custody by Zhang’s troops.

  Within hours, Mao, in his more comfortable cave at Chinese Communist Party (CCP) headquarters in Yenan, was informed of the kidnapping. Overjoyed at the news, Mao wanted Chiang and his top generals put on trial and executed. He sent a cable to Moscow asking for advice on the matter from the leader of the global proletarian revolution, Joseph Stalin, expecting no doubt that Stalin would rejoice in Chiang’s elimination. Stalin was also the main source of arms and funds for the Chinese Communists, who were only beginning to rebuild their strength after the last attempts by the central government to wipe them out.

  Stalin was appalled at the Chiang kidnapping and even more so at the prospect of assassinating him. Here is evidence of a certain pattern in the relations between the cautious Stalin and the more impetuous Mao. The Soviet leader’s overriding concern at the end of 1936 was the simultaneous threats of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In November, Japan joined with Italy and Germany to form the Anti-Comintern Pact, directed explicitly against the Soviet Union, and this raised the prospect that the Soviets would be attacked by Germany in the west and Japan in the east. For this reason, Stalin had for months encouraged the Communists to make an accommodation with Chiang so that they could be united in the anti-Japanese fight. Stalin therefore saw this threat on Chiang’s very life as reckless and dangerous. If Chiang were eliminated, he felt, the road would be open for the pro-Japanese faction inside the KMT to take power, facilitating Japan’s ability to roll into Soviet Siberia. Stalin issued strict orders to Mao that Chiang was not to be harmed; having received these instructions, Zhou Enlai, the Communists’ suave and skillful chief negotiator, flew to Xian and passed the message on to the Young Marshal, who found himself suddenly abandoned by his Communist ally.

  A negotiation spearheaded by Zhou then ensued in which Chiang promised to call off the campaign against the Communists and to join with them in a new united front against Japan, with Chiang recognized as the undisputed national leader. When, on the day after Christmas, Zhou went to see the Gimo, the first thing he did was salute him—“the Red Army’s first sign of obedience to the united front commander,” Chiang’s biographer Jay Taylor has written. In exchange, the Communists got a kind of de facto legalization, or at least Chiang would give up his efforts to destroy them. They would keep their own army; indeed, they’d now have a chance to substantially expand it; and they’d be able to send their representatives to the national capital at Nanjing so resistance to Japan could be coordinated.

  News of Chiang’s capture and the formation of the United Front quickly spread through all of China, with the result that when he left Xian and returned to his capital in Nanjing, Chiang was no longer just a popular leader; he was, as Taylor has put it, “a national hero,” propelled to new heights of popularity and power. China was still poor, weak, and fragmented, but it was stronger, more orderly, more united, and more economically vigorous than it had been at any time since the overthrow of the Qing dynasty a quarter cent
ury before, and Chiang was given a lot of the credit for this. The new determination to forge unity in the fight against Japan made him globally and locally recognized as China’s man of destiny, the sole figure who could lead his country in its hour of peril. And the luster endured for nearly the entire duration of the Sino-Japanese War, the four years when China resisted alone and the four years after Pearl Harbor when its chief and only real ally was the United States.

  For all that time, Chiang enjoyed the almost universal conviction that he was valiantly resisting the naked aggression of a nefarious invader. This image was supported in the United States most of all by Henry Luce, the China-born son of missionaries and the founder of Time and Life, which were the most influential magazines in America. Over the years, Chiang was on the cover of Time ten times, more than Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, or anyone else.

  Luce was far from the only passionate observer of the scene in China who saw greatness in Chiang’s character and leadership. Hans von Seeckt, who had effectively commanded the German army during the Weimar Republic and was Chiang’s chief adviser during the Northern Expedition, called him “a splendid and noble personality.” Owen Lattimore, the scholar of China who would later be accused, falsely, of being a Communist agent, called him a “genuine patriot,” a “highly nationalistic” figure who was “certainly responsible for holding China together at the critical moment.” Claire Chennault, the commander of the Flying Tigers, told Roosevelt in 1943, in Stilwell’s presence, that Chiang was “one of the two or three greatest military and political leaders in the world today.”