China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Japan ignored the ultimatum, however, and in any case Byrnes was overruled by Truman, the only president since Teddy Roosevelt who had actually been in combat during a war and whose priority, like Roosevelt’s at Yalta half a year earlier, was to save the lives of American soldiers. “I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it,” he wrote to his wife from Potsdam on July 18. “I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed!”

  And now the Soviets were in Manchuria, their armies commanded by a tough Bolshevik veteran, Rodion Malinovsky, a man about whom John Melby, the Soviet expert at the American embassy in Chungking, commented, “there was not a drop of gentleness or mercy.” And once the Soviets were installed in Manchuria, all the other arguments and possibilities of past years and months—and especially whether a smarter policy by the United States might earlier have encouraged Chinese Communist independence of Moscow—faded into insignificance. With the end of the war, the situation was drastically and irretrievably different, and the biggest difference was that the Chinese Communists now sensed that victory for them was in view. The Soviet invasion meant that the Communists were dominant in North China and there was virtually nothing that could be done, short of a massive effort by the United States on a scale of the recently concluded war, to dislodge them.

  This was the underlying reason American relations with the Chinese Communists steadily soured with the end of the war even as American emissaries tried to broker a peace agreement between them and the Nationalists. Something opposite to Hurley’s hope and expectation occurred. So far from feeling abandoned by the Sino-Soviet treaty, the Chinese Communists felt emboldened by the Soviet occupation of China’s three northeastern provinces. Rather than needing the United States more than ever, the Chinese Communists needed it less. They didn’t want open conflict with the United States, but they were ready now aggressively to confront it if and when they found the Americans acting against their interests. A few months before, Mao had told John Service, “There is no such thing as America not intervening in China. You are here, as China’s greatest ally. The fact of your presence is tremendous.” Now, Mao understood that American intervention would inevitably help his opponents in his struggle with them for control of China, and therefore the Communists just as inevitably had to see the United States as an obstacle to its aims.

  On August 12, three days after the Nagasaki bomb but three days before Hirohito’s surrender announcement, Zhu De was already ordering four armed groups to move to Manchuria and to cooperate with the Russian troops already there. A few days later, on the eve of his trip to Chungking, Mao dispatched nine regiments to the northeast and told Communist cadres who had come from Manchuria years before to return home. Then, while Mao strolled with Chiang Kai-shek in the presidential garden in Chungking, recognizing his authority, he continued to maneuver to expand the CCP’s power into Manchuria, the eventual goal of which was to oust Chiang from power. Getting hold of Japanese arms was, as always, the key immediate goal for the poorly armed Communists. In January, Zhu De had asked for $20 million in American money to buy arms from puppet troops. Now it was the Soviet Union that would be the main supplier, even though for the Soviet Union to provide arms to the CCP was a blatant violation of the Sino-Soviet treaty. Very quickly, the Soviets took 925 airplanes, 360 tanks, 2,600 cannon, and 8,900 machine guns from the Japanese along with huge quantities of smaller weapons. How much of this weaponry ended up in Communist hands is not clear, though much of it clearly did.

  Despite this provision of captured arms, it would have been hard for the Chinese Communists to know exactly what help they would get from the Soviets, or how Moscow would balance its wish to help them with its obligation under the Sino-Soviet treaty not to help them at all. But the Communists understood that ultimately they and the Soviets were on the same team and shared the same purpose. “They are Red Army; we are Red Army too,” Liu Shaoqi, number two in the Communist hierarchy and now back in Chungking during Mao’s absence, assured his colleagues. “They are Communists; so are we.”

  On the day after Mao’s arrival in Chungking for his talks with Chiang, the CCP in Yenan published an order governing the Eighth Route Army troops it had sent to Manchuria. The Chinese forces should refer to themselves not as the Eighth Route Army but as the Northeast Volunteer Army. They should keep a low profile, stick to minor roads, enter only villages and cities where there were no Red Army units, and avoid publishing newspaper accounts of their movements. Striking in these orders is Yenan’s confidence that they were going to get help from the Russians, even if that help had to be kept secret. “The Soviet Union doesn’t interfere with Chinese internal politics,” the order declared. “It takes an indulgent attitude toward our activity in the Northeast as long as we don’t cause diplomatic difficulties.” The Chinese historian Yang Kuisong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, puts the matter this way: “The Soviets not only gave secret help to establish the revolutionary center in Dongbei [the Northeast] but also provided weapons and ammunition that was enough to arm a hundred thousand guerrilla soldiers, enabling them to completely defeat the KMT in much less time than was expected.”

  Certainly, relations between the ragged Chinese Communist soldiers and the Red Army veterans quickly warmed up after the Soviets kept CCP troops out of Mukden. In their first meetings with the Eighth Route Army, Yang has written, the Soviets took them to be bandits, so poorly armed and clothed were they, which prompted Yenan to order its units to pay attention to how they dressed. But this early caution soon gave way to close and cordial contact.

  On September 9, while he was negotiating with Hurley and Chiang, Mao received a report from Zeng Kelin, the commander of the Eighth Route Army detachments that had gone to Manchuria, describing the cordial welcome he received from the commander of the Russian troops outside the port of Shanhaiguan, where Zeng had arrived ten days earlier. The two of them held what a Chinese historian has called “a grand city-entering celebration,” after which the Soviets allowed Zeng, his troops, and his civilian cadres to go on to the port of Jinzhou and then to Mukden itself, taking over the territories on the route. This was around the time that Theodore White was reporting that the Soviets had given “the back of their hand” to the Eighth Route Army, but according to Zeng, he was guest of honor at a festive banquet held for him at the Dahe Hotel in Mukden. “They affectionately called us ‘comrades,’ ” Zeng later wrote of his Soviet hosts.

  They gave high praise to the contribution our army had made in the victorious War of Resistance, but, because of the relations between the Soviet Government and the Nationalist Government, they asked us not to engage in activities under the name of Balujun [Eighth Route Army], so, after careful study, we decided to rename our troops the Autonomous Army of the People of the Northeast.… One after the other, we took over the Shenyang Arsenal, warehouses, military clothing factories, water and electricity companies, post offices, banks, and radio stations. We also utilized the radio station to report the important news that our army had advanced into Dongbei, vigorously promoted the policies of our party, repeatedly played Sanda jilu, Baxiang zhui [“Three Main Rules of Discipline” and “Eight Points for Attention”] and other revolutionary songs. We also sent troops to other cities and towns.

  In the middle of September, Malinovsky, who had set up headquarters in Changchun, the main city of Jilin province northeast of Mukden, sent an emissary to Yenan to sort things out with the Chinese Communists. This was a big event in Yenan. The Communists told the members of the Dixie Mission to stay away from the airfield, which the next morning was ringed with Communist security troops armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. At noon, the Soviet emissary’s plane arrived from Mukden. It disgorged a small group of uniformed Soviet military personnel who were quickly escorted to the CCP’s headquarters. Malinovsky’s emissary made a public statement to the effect that CCP troops would have to withdraw from Manchuria. The mem
bers of the Dixie Mission would presumably get wind of that statement, and that was probably its purpose, though the head of the mission, Colonel Ivan D. Yeaton, says nothing about it in his memoirs. In any case, the Soviet emissary’s public speech was followed that night by a private meeting with the Communist leaders during which he spelled out what would be the real Soviet policy. Large Manchurian cities like Mukden, Changchun, and Harbin would be turned over to the central government, and the CCP would have to withdraw from those cities, but the Soviet Red Army would support Communist troops elsewhere, as long as these troops were in the guise of local armed forces.

  The Communists were delighted with this arrangement. It was the opportunity they had been hoping for. It meant in practice that, while they would be kept out of a few big cities, they would be free to send their forces anywhere else. Mao had announced, after he’d given up his adventurist plans to seize Shanghai and other big cities, that Communist strategy would be to occupy the countryside and mobilize the people there. This would not result in the overthrow of Chiang for the time being, but, as he put it, “We want to bore our way in and give Chiang Kai-shek’s face a good washing, but we don’t want to cut off his head.”

  After their session with the Soviet colonel, the Politburo members held a late-night meeting. They proposed a program summed up in the slogan “expand to the north and defend toward the south,” which in practice meant dispatching twenty-five thousand cadres and two hundred thousand troops to the north. Mao signaled his approval from Chungking, and within months the number of Chinese Communist troops in the northeast had reached four hundred thousand, under the command of Lin Biao. Among the subterfuges used by the Soviets, always eager to keep up the appearance of adherence to the Sino-Soviet treaty, was formally to prohibit armed Eighth Routers from passing through their lines, but to permit them to go as civilians. These “civilians” would then be given Japanese weapons, which were superior to the ones they were not allowed to bring into Manchuria with them.

  “There is a possibility that they armed the people,” a Communist spokesman in Chungking admitted to American journalists, meaning the civilian “volunteers” who had been allowed to cross the Soviet lines. “They may have gotten some arms from the Japanese.” In such a way were Communist soldiers able to take up positions behind the Manchurian ports of Huludao and Yingkou. Many of these troops marched overland across Inner Mongolia from the Communist base areas in the northwest, but there were also tens of thousands of Eighth Routers in the eastern province of Shandong, and these needed to be sent by boat to Manchuria.

  In this connection, while Mao was still in Chungking, Lu Yi, a CCP army leader, told him that Chinese Communist troops had arrived in Dalian from Chefoo, which was taken over by the Eighth Route Army on August 23. There, Lu said, the Chinese were in contact with the Soviets, who told them that they would not interfere with their activities in villages and that they would be able to organize unarmed mass organizations in the large cities.

  The United States also swung into action. The OSS, which, like everybody else, was surprised by the sudden end of the war, switched its mission from gathering intelligence about the Japanese occupiers to gathering intelligence about the postwar situation. “Although we have been caught with our pants down, we will do our best to pull them up in time,” Colonel Richard Heppner, the OSS chief in China, wrote to Wild Bill Donovan, who was on his way back to the United States after a trip to China only a few days earlier. Since the war ended in Europe, OSS had expanded its operations in China and now had nearly two thousand agents in the country. By August 12, the same day that Zhu De’s note arrived at the American embassy in Chungking, Heppner had assembled several teams to be dropped into territories all over China. The Magpie Team went to Beijing; the Duck Team to Shandong; Sparrow to Shanghai; Flamingo to Hainan Island; and Cardinal to Mukden, the largest city in Manchuria. Other teams went elsewhere in Asia—Quail to Hanoi, Raven to Vientiane, Eagle to Korea.

  The teams arrived in place within the next week. In Beijing, Magpie quickly discovered a large POW camp. So did Duck, in the central Shandong city of Weixian. Cardinal parachuted to a place on the outskirts of Mukden on August 16, sent there urgently to arrive before the Soviets did and to collect intelligence on them once they were there. When the Soviets did arrive, the Americans immediately sensed a sort of petty harassment and unfriendliness directed toward them by the Soviet military that foreshadowed the two countries’ future conflict of interest in Manchuria. Cardinal quickly learned of a nearby POW camp housing 1,321 Americans and several hundred others. The team’s efforts to get there and liberate it were stalled by the Soviets. “Russians very non-cooperative,” a member of the Cardinal Team, Major R. H. Helm, wrote in a letter to Heppner on August 25. “They delayed us until they could send a detachment to our camp to ‘liberate’ them and accept the credit. Took four days to arrange for us to go to camp. Not the consideration and cooperation we would give a similar group if the situation were reversed.”

  Once the OSS team did get to the camp, it began sending back reports on what it learned from the newly liberated GIs, especially about the deaths of thousands of American troops at the hands of the Japanese. Lieutenant Ray Harrelson, of Crossville, Alabama, the pilot of an observation plane who was captured on April 2, 1942, in the Philippines, said that of 398 pilots who boarded a Japanese ship in Manila for transport to Manchuria, 13 survived the journey. Cardinal estimated that of 1,600 POWs evacuated from the Philippines on a forty-five-day trip via Taiwan and Japan, 1,300 died of malnutrition and lack of medical treatment.

  The repatriation of these prisoners was the ostensible reason for Cardinal’s presence in Mukden, but it quickly established covert operations there, keeping an eye on the Russians and the Chinese both and reporting on their activities. This included the arrival, “suddenly and unannounced,” of the first contingents of Chinese Communist troops on September 7. Former Chinese collaborators, also caught by the sudden end of the war, desperately tried to conceal their identities by creating a police department and so-called peace preservation committees to maintain order in Mukden, sewing KMT insignia onto their old puppet uniforms. Cardinal observed the Eighth Routers ferreting out these people and arresting them. The Communists quickly removed or defaced the KMT flags that had been posted on buildings all over the city. Red flags proliferated, some people waving them, the OSS team concluded, “for protection against Eighth Army persecution.” Among the popular street slogans were “Down with Chiang Kai-shek” and “Manchuria for the Communists.”

  Meanwhile, American tensions with the Russians did not abate. On August 29, the Americans reported that the Russians had informed them that there was insufficient gas to refuel American planes so that “all planes coming to Mukden must have sufficient gasoline for return trip.… Do not plan on Russian cooperation in any respect.” There were robberies of Americans at tommy-gun point. There was “a stabbing of a B-24 tire, drunken abuse of ‘Americanskis,’ flagrant insults to American flags, etc.” Captain Robert Hilsman Jr. and three other Americans were robbed of their watches, sidearms, and money by a Russian private who also, according to Hilsman, “insulted President Truman and Americans in a vile manner.” The Americans went to the Russian headquarters, where they were able to recover their sidearms and one watch. “The Russian General assured us the private would be punished; however, the next day the private was put on guard at the intersection outside our hotel, from which point of vantage he sneered and chuckled at us each time we passed. I believe this was a planned insult.”

  “Americans are very unpopular in Mukden with the Russians,” Cardinal reported on September 13, “probably because the Russians do not desire American observation of their actions which are as follows: prior to their departure date of November 1, they are proceeding with a policy of scientific looting. Every bit of machinery is being removed and all stocks of merchandise from stores and warehouses. Mukden will be an empty city when they get through.”

  Eventu
ally, the Soviets, no fools about the intelligence-gathering purposes of Cardinal, ordered the team out of Mukden. By mid-October it was gone, but not before it clearly perceived what was at stake. “The Communist Chinese Eighth Route Army … has categorically stated that it intends to occupy this section of Manchuria,” read the team’s report. “This raises the question: can the Central Government move into the Mukden area without a fight?”

  Chiang was well aware of the Communists’ quick move to expand their forces wherever they could, and his response was to ask Wedemeyer for help transporting government troops by air and ship to the north and east. The Americans agreed to do this, and in their doing so the lines of the present and future conflict in China were drawn. The Soviet Union was giving clandestine help to the Communists; the United States was giving open help to the central government, though under somewhat false pretenses. The ostensible reason for the airlift was to enable the government to receive the surrender of Japanese troops, which was an important task. There were still more than a million of them in North China, many doing temporary guard duty, and taking their weapons, replacing them with government troops, and sending them home was the big unfinished item of World War II.