China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Melby, who first met Marshall in Chungking at the end of December, found that he made “a good and direct impression,” though he wasn’t as tall as he’d imagined. Marshall, who had organized the armies, the logistics, and the commands that defeated the Axis, was famous for never interfering with the men he named to lead troops in the field or attempting to manage battlefield decisions from afar. As Melby got to know him, he had “the growing impression of a man who is a really great soldier and a great man in the sense of being truly humble and unimpressed with himself,” but he also didn’t quite appreciate that the task of diplomatic mediation in China was going to be more frustrating, more littered with unanticipated obstacles, than even winning a global war. Marshall, Melby observed, was a man “whose outlook and experience have the limitations of a professional soldier.”

  Everybody was waiting for Marshall. Chinese and American honor guards were on hand when his plane landed in Shanghai on December 20, 1945. Albert Wedemeyer, the American military commander in China, escorted him in a black Buick sedan to the Cathay Hotel, the grand, tarnished edifice on the city’s famous Bund where sixteen years earlier Noël Coward had written his play Private Lives. The Cathay, built by Victor Sassoon, the Iraqi Jew who was the great real estate magnate of the International Settlement, was the showplace of the foreign-run part of Shanghai, overlooking the broad Huangpu River, which was crowded with junks, sampans, steamships, and, now, American naval vessels. Marshall was in the city during what amounted to an American military occupation: the marines were making their presence felt. They played football and baseball at the city’s famed racecourse and caroused at night, exploring what Time delicately called “the licentious pleasures of the cities,” Shanghai and others.

  Some of Marshall’s entourage went out to view this American occupation. On their way back to their ships late at night, some of the marines engaged in the pastime of pedicab racing. Coolies were hired. The servicemen took their places in the passenger seats. The race began down broad Nanjing Road or Bubbling Well Road or one of Shanghai’s other main streets, which wasn’t so bad, one member of Marshall’s party reported, “except that they try in some way or other to spur the coolie on and that usually takes the form of hitting him on the back with a belt.”

  By the time of Marshall’s arrival in China, the euphoria evoked by Japan’s defeat had been replaced by a sour, contentious, and pessimistic mood. The reality that after eight years of Japanese occupation the country was already engulfed in a civil war was setting in. Intense fighting between central government forces and the Communists was taking place in numerous areas stretching from Shaanxi province in the west to Shandong in the east. And there was more than just the division between Communists and Nationalists spoiling the thrill of the victory over Japan. There were also deep arguments among the non-Communists as well, especially among the KMT and the several democratic parties representing businessmen, intellectuals, and students that emerged as wartime restrictions on political activity came to an end. In many quarters, Chiang Kai-shek was still revered as the hero who had led the nation through the years of resistance. He was the best-known man in China, his picture everywhere, his speeches duly reported in the pro-KMT press, and he had a glamorous wife who slept in the White House when she visited Washington. But a powerful disillusion about the ruling party was also setting in, and there was a feeling among many that the postwar American presence in China, exemplified by those marines hitting Chinese pedicab drivers with their belts, was a neoimperialist imposition.

  In late November, student demonstrations erupted in Kunming, where several universities were still in the places of their wartime exile. Kunming had been the headquarters of Chennault’s Flying Tigers during the war and under the political control of Lung Yun, the warlord of Yunnan province. It had therefore always been a freer place than most of unoccupied China, less burdened by the KMT’s wartime restrictions. It was also a rare center of successful resistance and counterattack against the Japanese, as Chinese forces, with indispensable support from Chennault’s fighter planes, drove the Japanese from the Salween Gorge back to Burma. In one notable battle, Lung Yun had helped to turn near defeat into victory, taking command after a Chinese general was shot dead and rallying Chinese troops to prevent what would otherwise have been a disastrous enemy crossing of the Salween. But with the war over, Chiang sent his own army to Kunming, where after several days of bloody confrontations, they took over the city, sending Lung to a meaningless job in Chungking.

  Now in total control of the city, the KMT troops, enforcing the Gimo’s writ, had prevented a meeting from being held in the central hall of Yunnan University, leading to an open-air assembly that was addressed by members of the faculty. The meeting was broken up by troops firing over the heads of the crowd but not before students had expressed their demands, one of which was the withdrawal of American troops from China. The demonstrations mostly targeted the KMT government, its perpetuation of one-party rule, its corruption, the terror-inducing operations of its secret police. Student demonstrations had a particular meaning in China, a historical portentousness that went back to the clamorous protests against Japan’s Fifteen Demands of 1915 and the years of ferment known as the May Fourth Movement that preceded World War I. There were reports that during the demonstrations in Kunming, students had been killed or wounded in police raids as the government tried to impose order, but the demonstrations continued well into 1946, providing a kind of dissenting background noise to the Marshall negotiation, a sign of the central government’s diminishing popularity.

  “The murder and brutality going on there are shocking,” Melby noted in his diary, referring to the events in Kunming in early December—though Melby was not in Kunming and is unclear and unspecific about the murders taking place there. “A lot of Kuomintang people are genuinely horrified, but it still goes on.”

  If the situation in China was uncertain and ambiguous, the policy of the United States was also fraught with vagueness and inconsistency. Before his departure for China, Marshall attended a Sunday morning meeting with Secretary of State James Byrnes and his advisers, including Dean Acheson, who was the number two in the State Department, and John Carter Vincent. In China, Wedemeyer was reporting Chiang Kai-shek’s continuing demands for American help in transporting more troops to North China and to Manchuria, where, clearly, they would be used to stop Communist expansion. Because it was contrary to American policy to become involved in China’s “fratricidal strife,” the question naturally emerged: Should the United States agree to this request? If it did, Chiang’s incentive to form a coalition government would be reduced, so a delay in responding seemed appropriate. But Marshall wanted to know what American policy would be if it was Chiang rather than the Communists who obstructed the desired settlement.

  There were deep disagreements on this question. Vincent argued forcefully and strenuously against further aid to Chiang if he was the obstacle to Marshall’s mission. More arms to Chiang would lead to a civil war, and the Communists were likely to win it. If that were to happen, Vincent believed that the consequences would not be disastrous for the United States. He did not think, given China’s immensity and the power of its yearning for independence, that it would become a satellite of the Soviet Union. And if it did—so what? China was such a wreck of a country, so badly in need of basic rebuilding and reconstruction, that all its energies would be taken up by its pressing domestic needs. Therefore, if Chiang refused a political settlement, the United States should refuse to move his troops even if that meant the Communists would take control of the areas vacated by the departing Japanese. China would be divided, and while that would be bad, it would not be calamitous, and, anyway, in the end it was the Chinese themselves and not the Americans who would determine their fate. Vincent’s was an articulation of a deeper view of foreign relations, one that recognized the limits on America’s power to shape the world to its specifications and the necessity to accept less than perfect outcomes.

&
nbsp; Vincent’s argument had no traction. The looming Cold War doomed it. Byrnes spelled it out in that Sunday morning meeting with Marshall and the president. If the United States failed to help Chiang, Byrnes argued, the Soviets would delay their promised withdrawal from Manchuria, from which they would help the Chinese Communists consolidate the territories they held in North China, including Hebei, Shaanxi, and Shandong. Eventually the several hundred thousand Japanese still in North China would be forced to surrender to the Communists. The Soviets would dominate China in much the same way they were already coming to dominate Eastern Europe, installing submissive Communist dictatorships in place of the collaborationist governments that had been set up during the Nazi occupation.

  Marshall entirely agreed and helped to make the case to Truman. In order to give both sides in China an incentive to come to terms with each other, he said, the question of whether or not to give more aid to Chiang should be given no clear answer. There should be an element of intentional ambiguity in American policy. But if Chiang “failed to make reasonable concessions,” Marshall said, summarizing the position he took at the meeting, “there would follow the tragic consequences of a divided China and of a probable Russian reassumption of power in Manchuria, the combined effect of this resulting in the defeat or loss of our major purpose of the war in the Pacific.” That was the idea that swept away all opposition, that after all that sacrifice, after Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march, Iwo Jima, Saipan, the Coral Sea, the airlift over the Himalayas, and the atomic bomb, after more than one hundred thousand American military deaths in the Pacific theater and another quarter million wounded, after more than twenty-one thousand American servicemen had suffered the horror of internment in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, the end result would be even worse than a China under the thumb of Japan—it would be a China under Stalin’s thumb instead. Truman was convinced. Byrnes was on board. Marshall was formally instructed, as one historian has summarized, “to try to induce both sides to make reasonable concessions toward a truce.…If the Communists refused to do so, he was authorized to transport government troops into the region. But if the Generalissimo refused to do so … he was not to be abandoned.”

  In other words, no matter what Chiang did, the United States would provide ships and planes to move his troops into battle, though he wasn’t to know this until the moment arrived. Marshall’s goal would be to bring about a peaceful political settlement in China so the transport of more government troops would be unnecessary. But there was no denying that the fallback American position was to continue to give help to Chiang if all else failed, and this help would constitute involvement in China’s “fratricidal conflict” on the side of the KMT.

  Success for the Marshall mission was essential, and perhaps for that reason, but also by reason of personality, Marshall refused to give credence to any of the pessimistic forecasts that preceded his visit. His chief of staff, Colonel Henry A. Byroade, who accompanied him to China, had told him in Washington that he had a two percent chance of success. Isaac Newell, who had been commander of American forces in China when the youthful Marshall had served a tour of duty there in the 1920s, wrote to him, “You have … been given a problem almost as difficult as the one you have just solved.”

  Similar cautionary opinions greeted Marshall when he arrived just before Christmas in Shanghai. Within minutes of his installation at the Cathay Hotel he summoned Wedemeyer to his suite. “I told General Marshall,” Wedemeyer later recalled, “that he would never be able to effect a working arrangement between the Communists and the Nationalists, since the Nationalists, who still had most of the power, were determined not to relinquish one iota of it, while the Communists for their part were equally determined to seize all power, with the aid of the Soviet Union.”

  Marshall’s stern reply to this realistic prognosis: “I am going to accomplish my mission and you are going to help me.”

  Marshall was sixty-five years old when the war ended. He came from an old Virginia family—among his ancestors was John Marshall, the first chief justice of the United States. He went to the Virginia Military Institute, served as a company commander in the war to defeat the guerrilla insurrection against American colonial rule in the Philippines, and, in World War I, became a protégé of John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces to Europe. For three years after the war, Marshall commanded the 15th Infantry Regiment, a storied unit that had been deployed to China since the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century. It was during that time that he met Joseph Stilwell, who was a 15th Infantry battalion commander, and the two men remained close and mutually supportive ever after. On the day that Germany invaded Poland in 1939, President Roosevelt named Marshall chief of staff of the army, a post he held for the next six years, until just before his mediation mission to China in 1945.

  Chiang Kai-shek was nervous about Marshall’s friendship with Stilwell, the Chinese leader’s American bête noire, but the subject was discreetly avoided when the two men met for the first time in Nanjing on the second day of Marshall’s China sojourn. Marshall reassured the Gimo that Truman’s policy included “eliminating autonomous armies in China, such as those of the Chinese Communists,” and this was clearly what Chiang wanted to hear. Marshall’s goal, and Truman’s, he said, was to achieve “a solution of China’s internal problems by peaceful means,” which didn’t arouse opposition from Chiang but which wasn’t entirely his goal either. Chiang’s goal was to stop the Communists from threatening his rule by whatever means he had at his disposal, and if the use of military force was his best option, he was prepared to adopt it. Chiang told Marshall, as Marshall paraphrased it, that there was “a definite connection between Soviet Russia and the Chinese Communists,” and the latter relied upon the former, which had given the Chinese Communists arms and equipment in Manchuria and had been “unfriendly and uncooperative” at Dalian, Huludao, and Yingkou. The Soviet aim, Chiang affirmed, was “to establish a puppet regime in Manchuria under the Chinese Communists. He said that the Soviet military commander in Manchuria had purposely delayed the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Manchuria as a means of aiding the Communists.”

  Marshall, in his American way and in the way of a negotiator whose success depends on a willingness to persuade others to compromise, chose at this early stage to chalk up the KMT-CCP conflict to mutual misunderstanding, or, as he put it, to a “barrier of fear, distrust and suspicions between the rival parties.” He seemed to think that Chiang exaggerated the importance of the CCP’s connection to Moscow, that it was more a tactical necessity than the reflection of a deep ideological commitment. Actually, Chiang was closer to reality in his view of the Communists than Marshall was. The conflict in China was not due to a failure to communicate. It was due to the existence of two parties that sought unrivaled power and represented incompatible social and political visions.

  The day after their meeting in Nanjing, Marshall and Chiang flew together to Chungking, which, though no longer the country’s capital, was the place where many government offices and embassies remained, where Zhou Enlai was installed in the Communists’ ramshackle headquarters, and where Marshall’s negotiation would take place, at least to start. “All shades and grades of brass turned up at the airport for the arrival of the American and Chinese Generalissimos,” Melby reported. The police tried to get the Communists to leave, forcing the Americans to intervene to stop them from doing so, Melby recalled, and that was one reason the mood was “anything but joyous.”

  Chungking was into its grim winter season. It was foggy, rainy, and cold. Dark clouds boiled up from the rivers below. The day before, Melby had made his way down the alley, lined with peddler stalls and slick with mud, to Communist headquarters to do advance work for Marshall’s visit. The day after the American party’s arrival in Chungking, the new emissary met with Zhou Enlai, who, according to Marshall, “emphasized their desire for a cessation of hostilities and for the establishment of a coalition government.” Zhou had come to
the airport the day before, where he told Marshall of his admiration for Lincoln’s idea of government of, by, and for the people, and Washington’s spirit of national independence—a not so subtle reassurance that the Communists intended to be similarly independent and not subservient to the Soviet Union. Marshall understood the catch to Zhou’s assurance of cooperation, which was that the Communists had never before shown a willingness to enter a coalition with the Nationalists if they had to give up control of their own armed forces and if Chiang insisted, as the phrase had it, on one country, one army.

  The Chinese Communists had decided to welcome Marshall’s mission, and this, for the time being, was consistent with their overall strategy. Early in December, Mao had sent a directive to cadres in the field to use the winter not to fight but to build up their forces in Manchuria for a later showdown with the KMT. He did this in part because Stalin, always wary of the possibility of an American military intervention, wanted him to. In January, just a few weeks into the Marshall mission, Stalin advised the Chinese Communists never to underestimate American strength and therefore to be careful not to provoke the United States into a major intervention in China on Chiang’s side. At a foreign ministers’ meeting in Moscow in December, Stalin, as Byrnes put it, had “pledged his support to the National Government and his intention to comply with that obligation.” Stalin had denied aiding the Chinese Communists in Manchuria. He’d dismissed them as weak, inconsequential, and Byrnes, perhaps out of wishful thinking, fell easy prey to these deceptive assurances. “My estimate,” Byrnes concluded, was that Stalin “will not intentionally do anything to destroy our efforts for unified China.”