From Xian, the journalistic party crossed the Yellow River “on a huge barge-like wooden boat,” Epstein recounted, rowed by sixteen men squatting on their haunches and singing the “Yellow River Cantata,” a patriotic hymn composed in Yenan in 1939. Now the journalists were in “another world.” There were “no flags, no banners, no regimented people jumping up and down with joy as though we visitors were Roosevelt and Churchill combined.” Their first night was spent in a cave village where they were met by an unpretentious Communist general—“so different … from the tailored-uniformed and white-gloved officers of the Kuomintang.” The next day they headed off on horseback for a visit to their first Communist troops—“sweaty, sun-bronzed boys with toothsome smiles” armed with captured Japanese weapons slung over their shoulders, reinforcing the idea that the Communists were waging spirited, full-scale, successful guerrilla war against the Japanese. The land, Epstein reports, had been transformed by the CCP leadership, specifically by Wang Zhen, the general who was escorting them. “Every once-barren hilltop and terraced slope seemed to be cultivated with millet or beans or flax or cotton.” Epstein, who had never before traveled to the region and therefore had no firsthand knowledge of what it was like before the Communists arrived, wrote: “There was no cotton here at all before the blockade and people dressed in rags for a couple of years, but not any more.” All these “newly fruitful lands” would be turned over to the people, Epstein wrote, who didn’t have to pay any of their crops in taxes to support the soldiers.
In Kulin, the first town the reporters reached, they met the local magistrate, a man, Epstein reported, who was illiterate before the Communists came but was now able to write simple reports. A sixty-year-old labor hero was “trotted out,” a formerly landless man who told the reporters how much his life had improved. He noted that the magistrate had carried manure out to the fields in the last planting season, “and who had ever heard of a magistrate in the old days doing that kind of work.”
There is something almost laughable in an American journalist praising the Communists for having “no regimented people jumping up and down for joy” and failing, in books he published long after the Communists took power, to note the ceremonies of mass fealty to the deified Mao that became a standard aspect of life under Chinese Communist rule. China became a place where factory workers literally did a “loyalty dance” at the beginning of every day, a bit of choreography performed before a portrait of the “Beloved Chairman,” where mass rallies of teenagers took place in which they held up copies of a little red book of Mao quotations in a sort of salute, where factories produced hundreds of millions of badges printed with Mao’s image to be worn by virtually every person in the country. But Epstein remained a Communist supporter all his life, working for years in the People’s Republic of China as the editor of one of the country’s main propaganda journals, China Today. He was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and seems never to have been bothered by a blatant double standard.
But if some of the journalists who wrote about Mao and Yenan were fellow travelers, most of them, including Edgar and Helen Snow, Jack Belden, and Harrison Forman, and most of the others on that 1944 press tour, weren’t. Among them were Maurice Votaw, who, while working for the Associated Press, was an employee of the central government’s information office, and Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor. “Everything is open and above board,” Forman wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “with absolutely no control or restrictions on movements, discussions, interviews, visits, and photographs.” Stein struck what was becoming a common theme when he wrote, “The men and women pioneers of Yenan were truly new humans in spirit, thought, and action … in a brand-new well-integrated society that [had] never been seen before anywhere.”
The notion that the “Chinese Soviets” were not all that red and only sought a higher degree of democracy gained currency among other shrewd, discerning analysts who were not the sort to fall for political fairy tales. Yet they did. In 1942, two years before the beginning of the Dixie Mission and only a few months after Pearl Harbor, John Davies was referring to the Chinese Communists in dispatches as “agrarian democrats” while John Service wrote that the CCP, which, he said, was seeking simple democracy, was “much more American than Russian in form and spirit.”
It became something of a trope in State Department reporting on China to refer to the Communists as “so-called Communists,” or to Yenan as the “so-called Communist area,” as Secretary of State Cordell Hull himself did in a memo to Ambassador Clarence Gauss in June 1944. Even Patrick Hurley, no opponent of Chiang and certainly no leftist of the Smedley or Epstein stripe, used this locution. In a letter to Roosevelt shortly after his arrival in China, Hurley, brimming with confidence that he could bring the two Chinese sides together in a coalition government, dismissed Chiang’s concerns about “so-called Communists,” passing along to the American president an assurance that Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had given him in Moscow, namely that while some impoverished Chinese called themselves Communists, “they were related to Communism in no way at all.”
Molotov’s characterization echoed that of Stalin himself, who told the American ambassador in Moscow, Averill Harriman, that the Chinese were “not real Communists” but “margarine Communists,” though, Stalin added, they were real patriots and wanted to fight the Japanese. It may have been strange for Americans to pick up this vocabulary from the likes of Stalin and Molotov, but, after all, Stalin was an ally and there was an inclination to believe him.
Mao and company also gave credibility to Stalin’s description of them. They never appeared to be ideologues, true believers in a revolutionary doctrine. They were friendly, relaxed, and good-humored with their American guests, dining with them, talking late into the night, drinking what they called tiger bone wine (distilled whiskey made from sorghum soaked, in the absence of tigers, in beef bones), putting on plays that Brooks Atkinson, who had been the Times drama critic before going to China, praised highly. Some members of the Dixie Mission went on regular hunting expeditions deep in the mountains with Zhu De, who was always given the first shot. On Saturday nights, there were al fresco dances when the weather was warm—a legacy of Agnes Smedley and the dance lessons she gave Mao—held in a grove of fruit trees called the Pear Orchard, during which Mao and the other Communist leaders moved around the floor with pigtailed local girls while scratchy music played on an old phonograph.
In his book, Forman describes a visit to the Lu Xun College of Arts and Literature, the main cultural institution in Yenan. Lu Xun was China’s most famous twentieth-century writer, an iconoclast and freethinker and the leading figure in Shanghai’s League of Left-Wing Writers, which was close to the Communists and opposed to the KMT. Lu died in 1936, and it is a matter of intense debate whether he wouldn’t have despised Maoism at least as much as he did Chiang Kai-shek.
At the Lu Xun College of Arts and Literature, Forman found some three hundred artists and writers happily creating plays, stories, and songs under Mao’s beneficent guidance. “The Communists take their culture seriously,” he wrote. “Artists, writers, musicians, educators, dramatists, and newspapermen meet regularly, to discuss their poems frankly and criticize each other and their work.” But it wasn’t always this way, Forman informs his readers. Most of the artists and writers came from Shanghai, and “their highly westernized culture was pretty far from peasant folklore of hinterland China,” which made it “almost impossible for them not to look down upon the ignorant peasants, the workers and soldiers, who retorted by rejecting them.”
“Far-seeing Mao Zedong observed this and decided that it was no good,” Forman says. “Calling a meeting of all cultural workers, he flayed them for their high and mighty airs, warned them of retrogression and decay if they persisted.” Forman concludes that “Yenan’s literati took Mao Tze-tung’s words to heart with amazing good results,” adjusting to “new conditions, a new society … created by and for the peasant, the worker, an
d the soldier.” As for Mao himself, Forman concluded, after interviewing the chairman, he “is no unapproachable oracle, not the sole fount of all wisdom and guidance, his words unquestioned law.” His words are just “taken as a basis for discussion and final approval by a committee of Party leaders who are certainly no rubber-stampers.”
Mao assured Forman of the CCP’s democratic aspirations and its admiration of western values. “We are not striving for the social and political Communism of Soviet Russia,” he told him. “Rather, we prefer to think of what we are doing as something that Lincoln fought for in your Civil War: the liberation of slaves.” Mao may have been aware of Snow’s use of the word “Lincolnesque” to describe him in Red Star. Mao further assured Forman that “we believe in and practice democracy,” in contrast with what Mao called the “one-party dictatorship as practiced by the Kuomintang today.”
The Dixie Mission had closer relations with senior Chinese military officers than any Americans have had with the Chinese Communists command before or since. There were regular meetings with virtually all the men who would lead the People’s Liberation Army in the civil war against the Kuomintang and against American troops during the Korean War. Among them was Zhu De, the Communists’ commander in chief, who always impressed visitors with what Davies called his peasant shrewdness and “tremendous character.” Among the other future senior military leaders who rubbed shoulders with the Dixie Mission Americans was Lin Biao, who was, until his death in a mortal struggle for power with Mao in 1979, the chairman’s closest comrade-in-arms, the man who propagated the Little Red Book of Mao quotations and put the military behind Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Before that, he was one of the principal commanders of Communist troops in the civil war and a planner, with Peng Dehuai, whom the Americans also got to know in Yenan, of the surprise Chinese offensive in the Korean War that inflicted one of the worst defeats ever experienced by American forces in any war. Colonel David Barrett was deeply impressed by Lin, who, he said, “could not but make a strong impression on anyone who met him.” He was polite, Barrett remembered, but among the less openly affable of the Communist leaders, smiling little but clearly “a first rate soldier” whom “I would have been glad to serve under … except of course in fighting against my own or a friendly country.”
Davies draws a verbal portrait of the three top leaders, sitting on stools and talking for two or three hours in Zhou Enlai’s cave. Mao was obviously the leader, the authority, the first among equals in Yenan, “big and plump with a round, bland, almost feminine face.” Davies spoke of “the incandescence of his personality” and the “immense, smooth calm and sureness to him.” This description is so strikingly similar to Henry Kissinger’s twenty-two years later, when he met Mao not in a cave but in the inner recesses of a new imperial city. In Kissinger’s description, Mao “dominated the room—not by the pomp that in most states confers a degree of majesty on the leaders, but by exuding in almost tangible form the overwhelming drive to prevail.”
Zhou Enlai, who spent his life as Mao’s number two, impressed Davies with his “mobility, his anger, his earnestness, and his amusement fully set forth in his face,” while “Old Zhu,” as he called Zhu De, was “the shambling, slow, shrewd peasant.”
Members of the Dixie Mission were taken on foot or horseback from Yenan headquarters to the front on expeditions lasting weeks or even months. Among them was Raymond P. Ludden, one of the Chinese-language officers who had socialized with Snow in Beijing a few years before and who, like Davies, was now assigned to Stilwell’s command. Ludden spent four months traveling through Shaanxi province, observing the Communists’ administration of villages that were theoretically under Japanese control. His conclusion was that the Communists had the support of the local population, that they had done a good job mobilizing the peasants, and that the Communist leadership was “the most realistic, well-knit, and tough-minded group in China.”
One important reason for the American impulse to like the Communists was illustrated by the experience of a thirty-year-old American pilot, George Varoff, and the ten crew members of a B-29 Superfortress bomber that took off from Shaanxi province on December 7, 1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor, to bomb Japanese targets in Mukden in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Varoff had been a track star back home, the world record holder in the pole vault for a time, having jumped fourteen feet four and five-eighths inches at a 1936 meet in Princeton, New Jersey, so his situation attracted attention in the newspapers. On January 3, 1945, The New York Times reported him missing in action. Two weeks later, the paper announced that Varoff was safe and had been returned to his air base in China. The paper provided no details about what had happened to him or how he had been rescued, because that information involved a network run by the Chinese Communists and their American friends that had to be kept secret.
Varoff’s mission had been to hit an arsenal and airplane factory in Mukden, but at twenty-two thousand feet his B-29, which was the most potent bomber in the American airborne arsenal of the time, was so cold that ice built up on the cockpit windows, making it difficult for Varoff to follow the lead plane in his formation. His aircraft’s tail gun, manned by Sergeant John P. Quinlan, failed to function. As he neared the target, Japanese fighters attacked from all directions, streaking through the American formation and pursuing the American planes that had dropped their bombs. Varoff’s plane was hit, forcing him to turn back toward Shaanxi. Two other planes from the American formation peeled away from the rest of the convoy to serve as escorts.
Varoff descended to twenty-four hundred feet in an effort to keep his engine running as slowly as possible, but when it became clear that he wasn’t going to make it, he ordered the entire crew to bail out, and then he jumped himself. Buffeted by the cold, heavy winds as he dropped, straining to pull his parachute’s shrouds so he could maneuver to land in a valley, he watched as his plane crashed into a mountain peak in a ball of fire. The two escort planes circled overhead, marking the position of the downed Americans before they turned west toward base. Varoff fell into the side of a rugged hill and lost consciousness when his head hit a rock. He woke up to find the snow stained by his blood.
The odds of survival for Varoff and his crew were not good. The eleven Americans, scattered by heavy winds across several of the region’s rugged mountains, were in Hebei province, which was controlled by Japanese troops who, having seen the planes, would start searching for them right away, and who would surely execute any Americans they captured. But within minutes of the B-29’s crash, Chinese peasants were combing the several square miles of forest and crag trying to reach the downed American airmen first. Whole mountainsides were speckled with the light of torches as the search went on through the night, and within two days, the Chinese had found all eleven airmen and brought them to a Chinese Communist guerrilla outpost belonging to what the Americans called the Balus, for Balujun, or Eighth Route Army. Two of the Americans were badly injured and had to be carried to shelter on the backs of peasants. One, William Wood, who operated the plane’s radar, was knocked unconscious when he landed, and when he came to, he saw that local people had already carried him to a dwelling.
The Balus fed the Americans, tended to their wounds, and assured them that they would be escorted to safety. For more than a month, they moved the airmen from one location to another, keeping them out of the hands of the Japanese, and, as the Americans later reported, treating them as heroes. Chinese peasants scavenged for eggs, peanuts, and fruit and gave them to the flyboys. Banquets were held for them by the villagers who harbored them, all under the threat of discovery and retaliation by the Japanese, who were looking for them. The Balus sent word up the chain of command that they had custody of the airmen, and American military officials were informed of their whereabouts. After several weeks of constant moving about, the Communists carved a runway out of a stretch of isolated mountain road and an American plane was able to land. On a cold winter day in January of the new year, the men of the B
alujun watched as the captured Americans met the Americans who arrived in the rescue plane and then flew them back to their base.
In all, about sixty downed American airmen were saved in this way, some by the Nationalists but most by the Communists, who had the more extensive network behind Japanese lines and were estimated to have suffered some six hundred fatalities fighting off Japanese troops in these rescue operations. Saving American airmen involved great bravery by the ordinary Chinese like those who combed the mountains of Hebei looking for Varoff and his crew, because they surely knew the Japanese would have had no hesitation in executing anybody they caught doing so. Wartime censorship kept these rescue operations from being known to the American public, but the members of the Dixie Mission certainly knew about them, and they were just the sort of thing to promote an atmosphere of common purpose and good feeling.
While Barrett was in Yenan, he witnessed the return of one John Baglio. After going down not far from Beijing, Baglio was guided by a local farmer to the Balus, who passed him safely from one area to another on a thousand-mile trek, giving him a party at every stop, until he arrived in Yenan. Barrett noted that “Baglio was one American who couldn’t have cared less about the political beliefs of the Chinese Communists. All he knew was that they had saved him.”
The next time American pilots bailed out into the hands of Communist troops was in Korea about five years later, and the reception this time was imprisonment and torture, which makes the level of wartime cooperation all the more amazing and the decline of the relationship into enmity all the more shocking and costly.
China 1945 Page 15