Through the Executive Yuan (T. V. Soong, President) the Chinese Government created an organization known as the “Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration” or CNRRA… which was authorized to take possession of relief supplies and to carry through a rehabilitation program for which UNRRA specialists would make recommendations, but in which they would exercise no authority. Insistence upon Chinese supremacy in the administration of relief was prompted in some degree by national pride and considerations of face.… Chiang wanted credit to accrue to the Nationalist Party Government; Kung and Soong wanted funds and materials to pass through the family’s banks and warehouses. Hardly less astonishing… were the arrangements which the Chinese devised to increase the value of the international gifts. Although a half-billion dollars’ worth of goods and services were being donated to China, the [Chinese] Government complained that it could not afford to distribute relief goods.… UNRRA had to agree that CNRRA could sell relief goods ‘at a moderate rate’ to generate funds with which to pay for distribution. In subsequent accounting to UNRRA, China charged off $190,000,000 as “administrative costs,” and an enormous percentage of relief goods disappeared into private channels once they had passed through those yawning warehouse doors.
Or, to quote journalist Randall Gould on what he called the “outrageous” UNRRA fiasco: “Its amateur Lady Bountiful start-off… conclusively demonstrated to our friends and allies in Nanking that we were a bunch of gullible suckers who would never exact real self-help performance in any field and who would stop at nothing in their eager enthusiasm to give China their shirts.”
41
The manners of the Kuomintang in public were perfect; its only faults were that its leadership was corrupt, its secret police merciless, its promises lies, and its daily diet the blood and tears of the people of China.
—THEODORE WHITE AND ANNALEE JACOBY
RATHER THAN improving with the elevation of China to the status of one of the four Great Powers, morale in the Middle Kingdom continued to degenerate during the last half of 1943 and the first half of 1944. So much so that while Chiang Kai-shek was in Cairo, a group of young officers tried to remove him along with the pillars of his government: Chief of Staff General Ho; head of the Secret Service, Tai Li; Minister of Finance H. H. Kung; and those ultraconservative arbiters of the nation’s thought, the Chen brothers. Known as the Young Generals’ Plot, the attempted coup involved something like six hundred men, angered by the corruption and inefficiency of their superiors. Tai Li got wind of the scheme, which was thwarted. Unfortunately, the event did not inspire Chiang to institute any reforms and ended with the execution of sixteen good young generals.
Another attempt to remove Chiang took place in the spring of 1944, when an OSS officer named Oliver J. Caldwell was contacted by a sixty-year-old Presbyterian minister who introduced himself as Mr. Chen, vice president of the Society of Elder Brothers, of which the Christian General Feng was president and Chiang Kai-shek, honorary president. According to Chen, the Elder Brothers was one of the most important secret societies in China, boasting 600,000 members drawn from provincial elders and community leaders. They had helped Sun Yat-sen fight the Manchus and, after the revolution, had morphed into what the OSS man called “a philanthropic organization with political overtones.” Chen asked Caldwell to inform President Roosevelt that the Elder Brothers could no longer back the generalissimo, and if the United States continued to support him, the Chinese Communists would take over the country. The society proposed to substitute a moderate government under the presidency of General Li Tsung-jen, currently vice president. Li, who commanded the strongest army in China, had agreed to take part in a peaceful coup. Caldwell forwarded Chen’s proposal to Washington, where OSS chief William Donovan took it to the president, who put it before his cabinet. Although it generated quite a bit of support in the cabinet, it finally lost in a poll of the members taken by Roosevelt.
But the most intriguing of the plots to dispense with Chiang Kai-shek was related by Colonel Dorn, Stilwell’s chief of staff, who was in Kunming preparing the Y Force for Burma while Stilwell was at the Cairo Conference. Shortly after his return to China, Stilwell went to see Dorn. When the two men were alone, he told Dorn that he had been “shocked by a verbal order he had received at Cairo.” Hesitating, seemingly “unwilling to continue,” the general finally “shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and said: ‘Well, an order is an order. I have no choice but to pass this one on. You ready for a shocker?’ ”
Dorn:
I think I can take it… whatever it is.
Stilwell:
Well, here goes then. I have been directed to prepare a plan for the assassination of Chiang Kai-shek.… The order did not say to kill him.… It said to prepare a plan. And that means a plan only. One that can never point the finger of guilt at the U.S. Government or at any American, you included.
Dorn:
That’s a big order.
Stilwell:
I know damned well it is. Think it over carefully. And remember: absolutely nothing in writing, ever. I don’t need to tell you this whole business has to be super hush-hush. If anything leaked out while the war is still going on, we’d be in one hell of a mess.
Dorn:
But why me?
Stilwell:
I’ve thought it over ever since I left Cairo. I decided on you for two reasons: you understand the Chinese setup about as well as anyone, and you know what can not be done in China, which in this case is just about as important as knowing what can be done.
Dorn:
If I dream up a workable plan, will I have to carry it out?
Stilwell:
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But I can tell you this: if you ever are directed to carry out any such plan, it better by a damn sight succeed. The order for its execution will come to me from above, and I will transmit it to you personally.… Until I receive such an order, which I doubt will ever come, I will do nothing. And neither will you, except make the plan.… I doubt very much if anything ever comes of this. The Big Boy’s fed up with Chiang and his tantrums, and said so. In fact he told me in that Olympian manner of his: “If you can’t get along with Chiang and can’t replace him, get rid of him once and for all. You know what I mean. Put in someone you can manage.”
Stilwell himself was clearly not in favor of the scheme, confiding in Dorn that “no matter how big a pain in the neck the Peanut can be, or how impatient we may feel, or how mad we get, this is not the solution for the China problem.”
Dorn:
Sometimes I’ve almost felt like murdering the old bastard myself.
Stilwell:
Sure, I know. So have I. So have a lot of his generals. And I suppose Mei-ling has, too. She doesn’t have too easy a time with the old boy. But still, the United States doesn’t go in for this sort of thing.
Dorn:
May I ask, sir, who directed that this plan be made?
Stilwell:
Sure. You may ask all you want. But I’m not answering your question.… It comes from the very top. Draw your own conclusions. Next time I pass through Kunming, let me know what you’ve cooked up.… I leave for Chungking in the morning to iron out a few of the usual hassles. But knowing what’s in the wind, I’m going to feel damned queasy when I sit down with him over a cup of tea.
With the help of two of Dorn’s most trustworthy officers, “dozens of ideas”—shooting, poison, bombing, a palace revolution—were considered and discarded until one of the men suggested taking Chiang on a trip to inspect the Ramgarh Training Center in India, arranging for the plane to crash on the way, and fixing his and Madame’s parachutes so they would not open properly. As to the pilot, he would not know “one damned thing” until the plane was over the Hump, when he would be given “sealed top secret orders.” Stilwell agreed to the plan, which, fortunately for those involved, was never ordered to be carried out. “Nor,” according to Dorn, “did General Stilwell ever mention the matter a
gain.”
NEFARIOUS PLOTS NOTWITHSTANDING, there was little question that Chiang Kai-shek was in serious trouble. What there was left of a Chinese middle class, once the backbone of the KMT, had been impoverished by the war, and the extreme right wing of the party had taken over. With inflation out of control, taxes delivered to the government reduced by two thirds (due to the same graft in politics that characterized the military), warlordism back on the rise, and the G-mo unwilling to take any action beyond hoarding arms and preparing for civil war against the CCP, the country was in no way equal to fighting off the Japanese, who started a new offensive in April 1944. To prepare for their march south, the enemy had cleaned out the province of Hunan, site of the recent famine, at the end of 1943. After they bombed the city of Changteh, on which they had previously dropped fleas infected with bubonic plague, only thirty of its ten thousand buildings were left. This destruction was preceded by a “propaganda blitz” in which pamphlets were distributed claiming that it was not Japan that was the enemy of China but “the white-faced demons.” Japanese soldiers were instructed to stop mistreating local Chinese and taught to sing a marching song the words of which proclaimed their kindness to fellow Asians.
Code-named ICHIGO, the Japanese spring assault, the second phase of which coincided with the D-Day landings in Normandy, started with 60,000 soldiers moving down from the Yellow River, cutting easily through any Chinese defenses in their path. Facing the enemy in the province of Honan* were thirty-four Chinese divisions, reputedly some of China’s best. But the Chinese soldiers were poorly led, and their ammunition supply was low. Moreover, one of their commanders, Tang En-po, was away at the time of the attack. Known as one of China’s worst generals, Tang not only kept his units purposefully under strength in order to pocket the extra cash but traded with the Japanese. Once attacked, the Chinese soldiers simply turned and ran, leaving the province to enemy pillage and local peasants turned looters. At Loyang, the capital of Honan, there were seven to eight hundred military trucks, only about a hundred of which were used to send reinforcements to the front, since the rest had been commandered by army officers to remove their personal belongings to safety. At another headquarters, the staff was killed off when the Japanese found them playing basketball.
To compensate for the lack of supplies, the Chinese soldiers began to expropriate the peasants’ oxen. Since Honan is a wheat-producing area where the peasant’s most valuable assets were the oxen that dragged his plow, the farmers revolted. After years of “merciless military extortion,” they turned on the army with bird guns and pitchforks. Starting with individual soldiers, they graduated to entire companies, and by the end of the uprising, it was estimated that 50,000 Chinese soldiers had been disarmed by their own countrymen. It took the Japanese less than three weeks to overcome those who had not fled and take over the railroad.
With that much of the railway secured, the enemy headed down toward Changsha, capital of the province of Hunan and key to 500 miles of railway tracks leading to the airfields located in Kweilin and Liuchow in the coastal province of Kwangsi. General Hsueh Yueh, a “peppery Cantonese” who loved being called the Tiger of Changsha, ruled over this area and commanded about 200,000 soldiers. White and a reporter from Reuters joined one of his Chinese armies on the march—the only one that took a stand against the enemy. “As far as we could see ahead into the hills and beyond were marching men,” White said.
They crawled on foot over every footpath through the rice paddies; they snaked along over every ditch and broken bridge in parallel rivulets of sweating humanity. One man in three had a rifle.… There was not a single motor, not a truck… not a piece of artillery.… The men… were wiry and brown but thin; their guns were old, their yellow-and-brown uniforms threadbare. Each carried two grenades tucked in his belt.… Their feet were broken and puffed above their straw sandals; their heads were covered with birds’ nests of leaves woven together to give shade from the sun and supposedly to supply camouflage. The sweat rolled from them; dust rose about them.… [The army]… had two French seventy-fives, from the First World War.… It had 200 shells… it expended them as a miser counts out gold coins.… The Chinese mortars whistled fitfully over the crest where the Japanese were dug in.… All that flesh and blood could do the Chinese soldiers were doing. They were walking up hills and dying in the sun, but they had no support, no guns, no directions. They were doomed.
Although unable to dislodge the enemy soldiers from their position, General Hsueh and his soldiers managed to hold out for forty days. One by one, Chungking sent other armies to break through the Japanese lines, but the soldiers were tired, malnourished, and directed by telephone calls from Chiang, hundreds of miles away. The G-mo never ordered a concentrated action of all the troops available, and, as in past campaigns, new units were sent in only to replace the wounded. General Hsueh, who had successfully countered three Japanese assaults in the past, fell victim to inadequate arms for his soldiers, since Chiang did not trust him and refused to send more. When the Japanese resumed the offensive, they overcame the Chinese in less than a week and headed south to take over the airfields built by the peasants and paid for by the United States. By the summer of 1944, Chennault’s pilots had managed to destroy one fifth of Japan’s transport ships but were unable to stop enemy advances on the ground. Having assured Chiang that all he needed to rout the Japanese was a sufficiency of planes and supplies over the Hump, Chennault found that he had painted himself into a cloudy corner and was reduced to complaining that his supplies were still “hopelessly inadequate.”
“Over in China things look very black,” Stilwell wrote his wife from Burma. “It would be a pleasure to go to Washington and scream, ‘I told you so,’ but I think they get the point. This was my thesis in May last year, but I was all alone and the air boys were so sure they could run the Japs out of China with planes that I was put in the garbage pail. They have had their way.… If this crisis were just sufficient to get rid of the Peanut, without entirely wrecking the ship, it would be worth it. But that’s too much to hope.”
BY THE SPRING and summer of 1944, even the Luce publications were forced to admit that all was not well in the Middle Kingdom. According to the April 24 issue of Time magazine, “the nation of Sun Yat-sen has faltered on its path toward democracy, gone off into some darkly undemocratic byways. The man who said so was none other than Founder Sun Yat-sen’s stocky and genial son, Dr. Sun Fo, liberal president of China’s Legislative Yuan.… [The KMT] regards itself as ‘the sovereign power in the state, entitled to the enjoyment of a special position,’ though it directly represents only an ‘infinitesimal portion’ (less than 1%) of China’s 450,000,000 people.” A week later, Life magazine published an article by White in which he blamed American misconceptions about China on several things, among them the recent visit to the United States of Madame Chiang. “Perhaps nothing attests more eloquently the genius of this brilliant woman,” said White, “than the skill with which she has clothed all China in the radiant glamor of her personality.”
Madame Chiang, in fact, seemed to be the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal Chinese landscape. The Four Queens, a propaganda book published in England that spring, named her the Queen of Clubs, one of the four most important woman in the world, a woman who epitomized “power, fame and ability.”* Recognized as Chiang’s “alter ego, able to speak for him and to act as his representative abroad,” she was, according to the author of the book and Diana Lary, a China scholar who wrote an article based on it, the first person to defy the traditional role of women in China and who, in doing so, had risen above the wives of the other Allied leaders. She was, Lary said, “in a class of her own, intelligent, active, committed and beautiful, a combination of talents which no other wife approached.”
But while China’s first lady earned herself a place in this pantheon of women, her country, according to White, was currently suffering from three disastrous problems. The first was the blockade, which was causing life-threatening
shortages of food, transportation, and armaments. The second was runaway inflation. By 1944, prices were five hundred times higher than they had been before the war, and planes were still hauling in quantities of banknotes, printed in the United States, which the government was issuing at the rate of 5 million Chinese dollars every month. “There are no real sources of revenue left in the country,” White wrote, explaining that China had been reduced to financing the war with paper currency since there was no industry left in the country to produce revenue. The gap between official salaries and the staggering rate of inflation had led to unprecedented—even for China—corruption and extortion. “You get your money where and how you can” was White’s cynical but realistic assessment of the situation. The third problem, according to White, was the political deadlock between the Communists and the Kuomintang, described by him as a “corrupt political clique that combines some of the worst features of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition.” But the American journalist still pled for America’s understanding and help. “To keep the permanent friendship of this great nation almost any price is small,” declared White.
In June of 1944, President Roosevelt sent Vice President Henry Wallace to China to try to make peace between Chiang and the CCP and to arrange for a military mission to visit Yenan, the area held by the Communists. Accompanying Wallace were Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent, one of the best known of the China Hands.* “The Generalissimo asks questions and the Madame translates my replies,” Wallace wrote about his initial meeting with the G-mo. “… ‘How—how—how’ all the time. He has an almost feminine charm.” Wallace met with Ambassador Gauss, who gave him a rundown on the family: “Gauss says T.V. Soong is O.K.… says Madame Kung and Madame Chiang through stooges used the U.S. advance of $100,000,000† as a medium of speculation.… Kung may or may not have been in on it. The Generalissimo found out.… Kung took the stooges with him to the U.S., and it will be a long time before they venture back.”
The Last Empress Page 63