Four months after their trip, Luce devoted most of Fortune magazine to China. “The time has come for Americans to awake to the realization that further appeasement in the Pacific will be just as fatal as appeasement was in Europe,” the magazine announced. The message was timely. The month after the Luces’ visit, on June 22, 1941, Hitler had invaded Russia without warning. Stalin asked the Chinese Communists to go to battle against the Japanese in northern China, thus enabling the Soviets to concentrate on defending European Russia, but Mao refused.
During the second week in August, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill held a meeting on board the warships Augusta and Prince of Wales off the coast of Newfoundland. Resentful that he had not been invited to this or an earlier meeting of what was known as the ABDA (American-British-Dutch-Australian) talks on cooperation in the Far East, Chiang had asked for a political adviser, who, he hoped, would improve his standing in and access to the White House. After consultations with Lauchlin Currie, the president chose Owen Lattimore, a former journalist and academician described by one American admiral as “the greatest authority in America on China and Manchuria.” Before leaving the United States, Lattimore met with the Soviet ambassador. “I suppose you know what kind of a son of a bitch you’ll be working for?” the Russian asked him. Ignoring this, the adviser-to-be told a group in San Francisco, “Among the handful of great world leaders, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is conspicuous for the fact that he is not only a great leader, but a leader who has steadily grown in strength and stature in the last four years, a growth commensurate with that of the country itself.” Lattimore, who had arrived in Chungking in the middle of July, was able to consult with the generalissimo without an interpreter. Both Chiang and May-ling warmed up to him immediately. A month later, at the time of the Atlantic Conference, he reported to Washington that the Chinese were worried that they would not be given “equal status and fair treatment” after the war.
On August 23, 1941, in spite of the fact that anti-Russian discussions were still taking place between the Japanese and the Germans, the Germans and Russians signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, leaving the Japanese out in the cold. Shortly thereafter, Chiang’s forces managed to drive the Japanese out of the province of Kwangsi in the south. Although some thought that this victory should signal the beginning of an aggressive fight against Japan, Chiang withdrew. As Crozier put it, “He [Chiang] had no plans for victory, only for survival, for outsitting the enemy. In time, he had guessed, the Americans would be drawn into the war; then he would be rewarded for tying up a million or so Japanese soldiers.… In these circumstances, why should Chiang exert himself militarily and fritter away the strength he would need for the forthcoming confrontation with the Communists?”
During July, the United States had sent a military mission to China, headed by Brigadier General John Magruder. If U.S. largesse camouflaged self-interest, it became clear to Magruder and his team that Chiang Kai-shek had no intention of using what he received for the purposes it was intended. The group’s artillery expert returned from a tour of inspection to report that China’s requests for men and arms were not “for the purpose of pressing the war against Japan, but… to make the central government safe against insurrection” once Japan had been forced out of China. This home truth was repeated by the naval attaché in Chungking, who was surprised by the belief, currently widespread throughout the United States, that China could actually be counted on to fight the Japanese—a misconception carefully fostered by May-ling and the magazines owned by Henry Luce.
Another representative of the U.S. government, a transport expert named Daniel Arnstein, was sent by Roosevelt’s chief troubleshooter, Harry Hopkins, to find out why “not a god damn thing was moving over the Burma Road.” What Arnstein found was an “impossible situation” created by incompetence, inefficiency, and the inevitable corruption—a situation Chiang Kai-shek had been told about nearly two years earlier but had done nothing to alleviate. Hundreds of trucks were stranded for want of grease, and there was a lively market in black-market parts. At Kunming, the point at which the road started in China, truck drivers had to pass through eight different customs checkpoints before receiving permission to go ahead. At one point on the border, Arnstein found 250 trucks whose drivers had been waiting anywhere from twenty-four hours to two weeks to get clearance. In addition, there were fifteen more checkpoints on the road where provincial officials took tolls, passing the squeeze on to various government ministries. Because of this, goods shipped under Lend-Lease had piled up on the docks of Rangoon and at the terminus of the connecting railroad, and it was estimated that it would take eight months to move the backlog.
SUDDENLY, ON December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, sinking 5 battleships and 3 cruisers, and destroying 177 planes. More than 2,000 American sailors were killed, over 1,200 injured, and nearly 900 men were missing. Japan also attacked the British in Hong Kong and Malaya. The next day both the United States and Britain declared war on Japan. China, which had waited for the United States’ declaration, followed suit. No longer alone, Chiang sent the following wire to President Roosevelt: “To our new common battle we offer all we are and all we have, to stand with you until the Pacific and the world are freed from the curse of brute force and endless perfidy.” The wire was clearly written by May-ling.
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If you want a decent war, first thing you do is get rid of your allies.
—MAJOR GENERAL FOX CONNER
IN CONTRAST to the rest of the Allied world, the reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor was greeted in Chungking with jubilation. “Kuomintang officials went about congratulating each other as if a great victory had been won,” wrote Han Suyin.
From their standpoint it was a victory, what they had waited for, America at war with Japan.* At last, at last.… Now China’s strategic importance would grow even more. American money and equipment would flow in; half a billion dollars, one billion dollars.… Now Lend-Lease would increase from a mere 1.5 per cent (England got 95 per cent). America’s navy had been partly destroyed… that Japan had knocked out the Great White Fleet, made the Whampoa officers almost delirious with pleasure, both because Japan had delivered a big blow to a White Power… and because the telling criticisms of Chinese chaos, inefficiency, and defeat, could now be shrugged off with a triumphant “And what about you?”
Both of May-ling’s sisters were in Hong Kong when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. Although Two-Gun Cohen tried to get Ching-ling to leave the British colony immediately, she refused on the grounds that “if there is fighting here,” she might be needed to help the refugees. After the Japanese attacked the city, he tried again, explaining that she must realize that “she was a sort of national heroine” and if she stayed, many people would be killed trying to save her life. This time she agreed to leave “as soon as a plane was available.” Although the British did not surrender Hong Kong to the Japanese for seventeen days, T.V. was very worried about her. “Where is Second Sister?” he wired May-ling on December 8. “Please reply as soon as possible.” This cable was followed by a second one, sent the same day: “Hong Kong is in danger. Can you try to rescue Second Sister by plane at night? Looking forward to your answer.”
Ching-ling did manage to leave Hong Kong before Britain surrendered it to Japan. “I would not have been able to get out so quickly if it were not for the fact that Sister E. [Ai-ling] happened to be in HK,” she wrote T.V. a month later. “… We escaped on the very last plane, after waiting from 12 P.M. to 5 A.M. the next day… at the airport, expecting every minute to be killed by shells or bombs, as firing was going on furiously around us. Six damaged planes and two craters at the airport reminded us of the risk we were taking. There was no ferry service between Kowloon and HK. Only people provided with special military passes could get on the boats. So it was not until the evening of the 8th that I managed to go over to HK during the blackout with the help of P. N. Chung of the Central Bank, who risked h
is life to rescue me.”
Following the sisters’ escape, a nasty story about Ai-ling circulated around Chungking. It seems that a special plane had been sent to take her and her entourage, which included her sister, to safety. As she was boarding the plane, Ai-ling insisted that her favorite dog, a dachshund, go with her. The pilot replied that the plane was already overweight. In response, Ai-ling told one of her security guards to stay behind, and the poor man was captured and killed. Since it is unlikely that such a small dog would have added enough weight to jeopardize the plane, the pilot must have disliked Madame Kung enough to try to blacken her reputation. A more damning version of this same story, however, was told by Joseph Alsop,* who claimed that Ai-ling’s dog—a “large, well-fed” animal—had taken his place on the same flight, thus leaving him in Hong Kong, where he was interned in a Japanese prison camp. A third variation, related by an American living in Shanghai, claimed that Ai-ling, a “tough, grasping” woman, had loaded one of the last planes out of Hong Kong with her furniture, leaving her servants behind. Whatever the truth or falseness of these stories, when they got to Chungking, the sisters were, as Ching-ling put it, “welcomed… by… a libelous editorial accusing us of bringing tons of baggage, seven milk-fed foreign poodles and a retinue of servants. The truth was there were 23 persons on our plane, so you may well imagine how much luggage each could bring along. I wanted to answer the editorial, which was cunningly written, giving no names but directed at us, but was told to hold a dignified silence. Meantime rumours fly thick and fast. Sister E [Ai-ling] said that she has been accused of so many things that she doesn’t care about correcting rumours now. I could not even bring along my documents and other priceless articles, let alone my dogs and clothing.”
On her arrival in Chungking, Ching-ling moved into Ai-ling’s large home—a former palace built in the 1930s for a general with four concubines and comprising four separate buildings. Ching-ling remained there until early 1943, when T.V. arranged for her to have a government house. An ordinary two-story home, it had a small garden with a sewer running through it, crossed by a wooden bridge. It also had its own bomb shelter. Chungking bomb shelters were divided into grades—for peasants, townspeople, officials, and so on—but Ching-ling invited all her neighbors, regardless of social status, to share hers. She and her two sisters also had a private telephone line connected to their homes, which they used to speak to each other throughout the war years in Chungking.
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Chiang Kai-shek sent identical wires to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, proposing that the Allies in Asia hold a conference to coordinate their efforts. Stalin declined on the grounds that Russia was not ready to take part in a war in the Pacific. The other two accepted, and on December 23, Chiang offered them a plan whereby the Allies would use air attacks to isolate the Japanese, after which the Chinese army could finish them off. He was clearly thrilled when Roosevelt wired him to suggest that he was the appropriate leader for the undertaking, and he answered the president with an extra dollop of Confucian humility: “If it were simply a question of my own capacities and military qualifications I could not accept this supreme command with its attendant duties and responsibilities. However I do not hesitate to accept it at your suggestion.… I shall spare myself nothing to second your efforts and to serve the common good.” The generalissimo asked that the United States “control priorities and supplies,” thus preventing the British from preempting the war materials that had been collecting in Burma.
Chiang had previously offered to send Chinese forces to Hong Kong to help Britain defend its colony. The British declined his offer, but nonetheless he had sent a good-sized force to attack the Japanese from the mainland. When the British withdrew on December 18, Chiang’s soldiers were left to be killed by the enemy. For this and other reasons, the Chinese neither liked nor trusted the British. Britain had been the first imperial power established in China; it had allowed the Japanese to force it to close the Burma Road, however temporarily; and above all, the British treated the Chinese like an inferior race. “This meeting in Chungking,” Tuchman said, “… was almost as calamitious as Pearl Harbor. It brought to the surface… the hostility between two of the three major Allies.” In spite of their mutual animosity, China and Britain were both interested in defending Burma—China because it wanted the Lend-Lease supplies that were there, Britain because Burma was the last barrier separating the Japanese from India. Nevertheless, the British, convinced that China had never renounced some “vague traditional claims” to Burma, did not want Chinese troops operating there.
The British representative to Chiang’s meeting in Chungking was General Archibald Wavell, a one-eyed veteran of the First World War, a Scotsman “of formidable silences” who argued that Burma, currently under threat of Japanese attack, must be top priority. But when Chiang, who had told the British military attaché that he would send up to 80,000 Chinese troops to Burma, was informed by Wavell that the British could use only one Chinese division and that it must be provisioned from China, the generalissimo was infuriated. Moreover, they disagreed over Lend-Lease. A huge supply of munitions had been collecting in warehouses and stranded trucks—material the Chinese were loath to hand over to the British. To settle the problem, U.S. Lend-Lease officers impounded everything in question. Chiang, still seething at Wavell’s offer to use only one Chinese division, offered to send Wavell twenty machine guns to defend Burma, refused to meet with the British ambassador, and threatened to stop cooperating with Britain altogether.
When word of the contretemps between Chiang and Wavell reached Washington, the Americans became considerably alarmed. Roosevelt had always worried that the Chinese would give up fighting and allow the Japanese free rein in Asia; U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall contended that it was necessary to build up China’s “faith and confidence in British-American joint purposes in the Far East”; and Secretary of War Henry Stimson offered the opinion that Wavell had been “rather peremptory and tactless and had acted in an old-fashioned British way toward China.” The Americans believed that the days of empire were over and China’s allies had better start treating the country and its generalissimo as equals. But Churchill, who had declared that he had not become prime minister to preside over the dismemberment of the British Empire, did not agree, saying that while in Washington, he had “found the extraordinary significance of China in American minds… strangely out of proportion. I was conscious of a standard of values which accorded China almost equal fighting power with the British Empire.” Or, as White and Jacoby put it rather more bluntly, “The British were fighting two separate wars. In Europe they stood with all honor for the freedom of humanity and the destruction of the Nazi slave system; in Asia, for the status quo, for the Empire, for colonialism.”
On January 1, 1942, Chief of Staff Marshall, called General Joseph W. Stilwell in to discuss the British-Chinese problem and to say that he was looking for an American officer of high rank to send to Chungking to smooth things out. Stilwell suggested Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum, the pretentious commander of the First Army. “The G-mo’s a stuffed shirt; let’s send him the biggest stuffed shirt we have,” Stilwell said. Magruder, who had led the U.S. Military Mission to China, was not high-ranking enough and was already disillusioned with the Chinese. The only other alternative was Stilwell himself, who had served in China in a lesser capacity three times before. “Me? No, thank you. They remember me as a small-fry colonel that they kicked around. They saw me on foot in the mud, consorting with coolies, riding soldier trains. Drum will be ponderous and take time through interpreters; he will decide slowly and insist on his dignity. Drum by all means.” But on January 14, Stilwell was invited to Secretary of War Stimson’s home, where he was told that Drum had arrived in Washington with an entourage of forty to fifty staff officers and had turned down the assignment in China as unworthy of a man of his importance and experience.* Now, Stimson told Stilwell, “the finger of destiny is pointing a
t you.” Stimson laid out Stilwell’s duties: the “entire disposition” of Lend-Lease in the Far East; command of U.S. air operations in China; and command of one or two of Chiang’s armies, which the generalissimo, according to T.V., had agreed to turn over to an American adviser. This was something Chiang had previously refused to do, but T.V. had promised that his brother-in-law would give Stilwell “executive control” of the Chinese troops in Burma. Marshall added that Stilwell was to “arm, equip and train the Chinese forces” to enable them to fight the Japanese.
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