The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  Both Stimson and Marshall believed that getting back into Burma was a necessity—not as a replacement for airpower over the Hump but as a much-needed alternative—and members of the State Department were furious at Chennault for bypassing proper channels and trying to appeal directly to the president. Marshall reprimanded T.V., who was on his way home to China, informing him that the U.S. military was completely committed to Stilwell and his plan. When Currie later informed the chief of staff that relations between Chiang and Stilwell had improved, Marshall replied that “he took a good deal of the credit for this himself because of his bawling out of Soong. He thought that Soong would never forgive him… but that the action was necessary and salutary.”

  T.V. returned to Chungking, convinced by Stimson and Marshall that it was better to cooperate with Stilwell than to oppose him, and in a general about-face, Chiang offered Stilwell five Chinese divisions, which, at May-ling’s suggestion, he was allowed to choose for himself. But when the British said that they did not have enough naval resources to support a landing at Rangoon, Chiang pulled out of the operation. “If the navy is unable to control the Burma seas,” he wrote Roosevelt in early January 1943, just five weeks before Stilwell was due to take his newly trained Chinese soldiers back into Burma, the Burma campaign would have to be postponed.

  35

  One makes a tour such as Mr. W[illkie]’s to make the maximum ephemeral impression on the press, newsreels, and radio, or to make a few close friends and contacts, or to gain as much information as possible. Mr. W. seems to be doing the first of these.

  —JOHN FAIRBANK

  THREE MONTHS before Chiang canceled Stilwell’s march back into Burma, Wendell Willkie arrived in China as part of a fact-finding goodwill tour of the world. Described by a friend as “a great hulk of a man, with attractively shaggy hair, a booming voice… charm, vitality, and… charisma,” he was called by one historian “the most memorable defeated candidate for the Presidency since William Jennings Bryan.” Willkie came bearing a letter from Clare Boothe Luce to Madame Chiang, introducing him as “a dear friend of my husband and mine, and a new but great friend of China.… You are bound to hit it off magnificently,” she added, suggesting that May-ling not lose the opportunity to discuss her ideas on the Sino-American situation, India, and the United Nations with their visitor. The letter had obviously caused Mrs. Luce some concern, as the initial draft is a mass of insertions, cross-outs, and penciled-in phrases.

  Willkie’s advocacy of a “one world” philosophy made him an ideal international envoy for the man who had defeated him, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while his appearance in China was seized on as a great opportunity to impress a man who might well become the next president of the United States. Meanwhile he could help get planes and armaments for China. To that end, Chiang had ordered Chungking’s worst hovels razed and local beggars put outside the city limits. On his arrival in Chungking, Willkie was assigned one of T.V.’s residences, described by his traveling companion, publisher Gardner “Mike” Cowles, as “a magnificent modern home… with all sorts of luxurious trappings, as well as dozens of perfect servants to attend to our needs.” Ambassador Clarence Gauss had wanted Willkie and his party to stay in the U.S. Embassy across the Yangtze, where he could have some influence on their activities during their six-day sojourn in Chungking, but the Chiangs had taken over, and Gauss was annoyed. Stilwell was mildly amused. “Willkie arrives this afternoon and he has a full schedule for his visit,” he wrote in his diary. “He has to go to lunch, tea, and dinner every day he is here. They are going to drag him around to see schools and factories and girl scouts and sewing circles and arsenals and keep him well insulated from pollution by Americans. The idea is to get him so exhausted and keep him so torpid with food and drink that his faculties will be dulled and he’ll be stuffed with the right doctrines.” The Chiang plan worked wonderfully. Willkie was, in the words of one writer, “quite carried away by the warmth and splendour of Chinese hospitality, Mme. Chiang’s insidious charm, and the Generalissimo’s air of scholarly wisdom.”

  As further guarantee against contamination, Chiang had assigned two escorts to meet Willkie the moment he set foot in China. This was at the small, “incredibly muddy” town of Tihwa, capital of Sinkiang, a province east of Afghanistan, north of Tibet, and twice the size of France. To greet his visitor, Chiang had sent Hollington Tong, his English-speaking, American-educated publicity man, along with the commander of the northwestern war zone. Willkie, who spent several days in Tihwa, did not arrive in Chungking until late in the afternoon of October 2. His plane, delayed by Japanese aircraft along the way, was finally spotted in the sky by Ambassador Gauss, H. H. Kung, and several other high officials along with their wives, who had dressed up for the occasion and were carrying “fat bouquets” of flowers. They marched down the runway toward the plane in a tight little group, followed by a uniformed army band playing “America the Beautiful.” Suddenly, the plane turned around and headed for them. “There were squeals and a great dropping of bouquets and band instruments as the greeters scattered,” an eyewitness reported. “Of course the plane turned again and came to rest,” and by the time Willkie got out, the welcoming party had managed to pull itself together.

  “Before we reached the middle of the city, the crowds stood packed from curb to store front,” Willkie wrote,

  … they packed eleven miles of road over which our cars slowly moved on our way to the guesthouse in which we were to stay.… On all the hills of Chungking… they stood and smiled and cheered and waved little paper American and Chinese flags. Any man who has run for President of the United States is used to crowds. But not to this one.… The paper flags waved by the people were all of the same size, suggesting that the… Mayor of Chungking… had had a hand in planning this demonstration. It was perfectly clear that not all these people, many of whom were barefoot or dressed in rags, had any clear idea of who I was or why I was there.… But in spite of all my efforts to discount it, this scene moved me profoundly. There was nothing synthetic or fake about the faces I looked at. They were seeing, in me, a representative of America and a tangible hope of friendship and help.… It was a mass demonstration of good will.

  Journalist Graham Peck had a different reaction:

  The school children had been marched out en masse and had been told who Willkie was, for they hallooed and waved with enthusiasm. Some of the better-dressed adults, probably newspaper readers, cheered and waved too. But many welcomers were the very poor, the kind who were hired as substitutes for annoying… duties, while others were cripples and old men and bound-footed women, the useless non-working people sent out by their own families. With resigned expressionless faces they stood silently by the road in their mean clothes, boredly holding up their Kuomintang and American flags in one hand, while they scratched themselves or picked their noses with the other. At intervals behind them, police were posted to see that they did not escape until all the cars had passed.

  As predicted by Stilwell, there were daily activities, nightly banquets, and five long conferences with the generalissimo, all geared to dazzle the American with the efficiency and worthiness of Chiang’s government. A chorus of ten-year-old war orphans appeared at a tea given in Willkie’s honor two days after his arrival. “These orphaned children symbolize what Mme. Chiang Kai-shek is doing in order to bring about a world where children can grow up and live decent respectable lives,” Willkie said. To which Madame responded with a smile, describing their visitor as “the embodiment of warmth and spontaneity, the vibrant, dynamic symbol of a free world society of free nations.”

  Treated to a military review the day after his arrival in Sinkiang, Willkie had been struck by the apparent health, neatness, and training of the soldiers. During his stay in Chungking, he was taken to the largest military academy in China, where he watched several thousand cadets cut through barbed wire, drive across a mine field, and swim a river with their rifles held above their heads. For this maneuver, the American
visitor was attended by a Chinese graduate of West Point, who never left his side. In his book One World, Willkie wrote about his impressions of the Chinese army as a whole: “Military China is united; its leaders are trained and able generals; its new armies are tough, fighting organizations of men who know both what they are fighting for and how to fight for it, even though they markedly lack any quantity of modern fighting equipment. In China… this is truly a people’s war. Even the sons of those of high estate enlist as privates in the army, an unthinkable act in China a generation ago, when service in the army was for hired and ignorant mercenaries.”

  Willkie’s impression of the Chinese army was ludicrously off the mark, and it is not too difficult to guess that the source of his information, particularly the last and most outrageous assertion, was Hollington Tong, the master propagandist. The charade continued when Willkie said that he wanted to visit the Chinese front. “At first,” Willkie wrote, “it seemed impossible. It was only later that I learned that the Generalissimo’s solicitude for my safety… had had to be overcome, and that ‘Holly’ had required time to accomplish this.”

  The Chinese flew Willkie to Sian, the scene of Chiang’s kidnapping, and from there drove some distance outside the city, where they climbed up a mountain by the light of Chinese lanterns until they reached a military academy. They continued their journey—“incongruously enough,” according to Willkie—in “luxurious sleeping cars” on the railroad. At dawn they transferred to handcars, then walked as they approached the Yellow River and the 1,200-yard-wide so-called Japanese front. From their side, Willkie reported, they could “look down the muzzles of Japanese guns pointed at us and see the Japanese soldiers in their own encampments.” They were met there by Captain Chiang Wei-kuo, Chiang’s second son.

  “Captain Chiang, who speaks perfect English,” Willkie wrote, “showed us in a long day the reasons why the Japanese had been unable to push across the river here, where there is a gap in the mountains, the traditional invasion route of south China. We saw artillery and infantry and armored cars and fortresses built into the hills so deep that Japanese would have to blast them out.” Willkie was also treated to a review of the 208th Division, which he described as “well trained, well uniformed, and equipped with good, modern weapons.” He was asked to speak to some 9,000 Chinese soldiers: “It seemed to me that not one man wavered in his attention until I had finished, although I was speaking in English. When what I said had been translated, they cheered so loudly that the Japanese must have heard them and wondered what the excitement was all about.”

  Back in their train for dinner, Willkie claimed that Chiang’s son “demonstrated conclusively… that the front I had just seen was more than a showplace. He walked into the dining car with his arms full of Japanese cavalry swords, as presents for my party, and excellent French wine. Both had been captured by raiding parties which crossed the river at night, struck swiftly behind the Japanese lines, and returned with booty like this and more important trophies, including prisoners and military plans. Sometimes, Captain Chiang told me, such raiding parties stay for weeks inside the enemy lines, cutting communications and organizing sabotage, before returning to their own headquarters on the west bank of the river.” But according to Tuchman, journalists stationed in China had been treated to quite a few similar tours of “cold battlefields” and were used to being shown quantities of Japanese helmets, guns, and other military equipment. “To test the theory that the material was transferred from one place to another for their benefit,” one enterprising journalist reported that he had scratched his initials on a helmet, which he later found on another tour in another location.

  Unlike Willkie, his traveling companion, Mike Cowles, had his suspicions about the whole show. He found that there was “an unreal quality to the war that one would never find on the battlefields of Western Europe,” as well as “very active commercial trading going on between the Japanese and the Chinese across the Yellow River.” Cowles said that the Americans thought that some of the shooting they heard as they left one area on their way to another was “staged,” and he concluded that “the front may have been relatively dormant.” Nevertheless, according to The New York Times, the Japanese twice tried to kill Willkie—once when they machine-gunned a railway carriage and a second time when he and his party were riding a handcar.

  Willkie was always inclined to give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt, particularly Chiang Kai-shek himself. “Only a truly great man could present such an humble outward appearance and yet remain great,” he commented after a day or two in Chungking. “I can write no account of China without setting down my own conclusion that the generalissimo, both as a man and as a leader, is bigger even than his legendary reputation.” Willkie found Chiang “strangely quiet” and “soft-spoken,” so much so that when the G-mo was out of uniform and in Chinese dress, he gave the impression of being a scholar “rather than a political leader.” He heard that Chiang spent time each day reading the Bible and praying and believed that this habit gave him “a reflective manner, a quiet poise, and an occasional appearance of thinking out loud. He is undoubtedly sincere, and his dignity and personal imperturbability have something almost severe in quality.”

  Willkie was also struck by Chiang’s “unbreakable” ties to the Soong family. “I could not document this,” he wrote, “but no one can stay in Chungking even for a short time without realizing that the young republic… has already developed a sort of ‘old-school tie’ of its own which automatically keeps some men in high position.” Mike Cowles looked at the situation from a historical point of view. “Before the Communist takeover,” he wrote in his autobiography, “family dynasties ruled China for many centuries. Few, though, have left a greater mark on recent Chinese history—for better or for worse, depending on which history book you read—than the Soong family.… I met all three sisters during our visit, but it was Madame Chiang who most fascinated me—and Wendell.”

  One evening, the generalissimo gave a reception for the Americans. At a certain point during the party, Willkie whispered to Cowles that he and May-ling would be disappearing in a few minutes and that Cowles was to cover for him. “I stationed myself alongside the Generalissimo and unleashed a flurry of questions about China every time I felt his attention wandering,” said Cowles. After about an hour, Chiang clapped his hands to summon his aides and left the party, indicating that everyone who wanted to could now leave. Cowles returned to the Soong guesthouse, poured himself a scotch from a bottle that May-ling had sent over,* and by nine o’clock had begun to worry about where the couple had gone. Not long after dinner, Chiang Kai-shek “stormed in, visibly furious,” accompanied by three bodyguards, each with his own tommy gun. He gave Cowles a stiff little bow. “Where’s Willkie?” he asked.

  “I have absolutely no idea. He’s not here in the house,” Cowles answered, then asked Chiang if he would like some tea, knowing that to refuse an invitation to tea in China was a social offense. The generalissimo called impatiently for the tea, which the two men gulped down in silence. “Where’s Willkie?” he demanded again.

  “I assure you, Generalissimo, he is not here and I do not know where he could be.”

  Trailed by Cowles and the bodyguards, Chiang searched the house, opening closets and even looking under beds. Without another word, he left. Cowles, who had “visions of Wendell in front of a firing squad,” said he was “really scared.”

  Around four in the morning “a very buoyant” Willkie came back, “cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl.” After giving Cowles “a play by play account of what had happened between him and the Madame,” adding that “there was never anything like this before” and that it “was the only time… he had ever been in love,” he told his companion that he had invited May-ling to go back to Washington with them.

  “Wendell, you’re just a goddam fool!” Cowles said, enumerating all the reasons why this was impossible. Agreeing with Willkie that “Madame Chiang was
one of the most beautiful, intelligent, and sexy women either one of us had ever met” and that he “could understand the tremendous attraction” between the two of them, he told his friend that there was already too much gossip about them among the reporters in Chungking, that pre sumably Willkie wanted a second chance to run for president, and that Willkie’s wife and son would probably meet them at the airport when they returned home.

  Cowles was not wrong about the gossip. According to John Paton Davies, Jr., Stilwell’s political consultant, “There is little doubt that Little Sister [Madame Chiang] has accomplished one of her easiest conquests. Presiding at a relief organization tea, with the cloak of an air marshal thrown over her shoulders, she admitted with disarming feminine frailty that Mr. W. was a very ‘disturbing influence,’ a confession which visibly gratified the President’s Personal Representative.”

  When Cowles came down for breakfast at eight the next morning, he found Willkie already at the table. “Mike,” he said, “you’re going to see the Madame and tell her that she cannot fly back to Washington with us.”

  “Where will I find her?”

  “Sheepishly,” Willkie described the location of an apartment on the top floor of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, May-ling’s pet charity. It turned out that this was where she had taken him the night before. Cowles arrived around eleven in the morning and was ushered into May-ling’s sitting room. “I told her bluntly she could not fly back to Washington with Mr. Willkie,” he said.