Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (51 page)

The American policymakers were won over by Madame Chiang, and the fund-raising tour she made saw her mobbed by adoring crowds across the US. But beneath its image as an embattled, embryonic democracy fighting Asian fascism, Free China was more and more strained. Graham Peck, for one, interpreted Song Meiling’s seeming triumph as a sign of impending collapse. “I do not think she really began to disintegrate until she went to America,” he wrote. “Then, the wild adulation given her seems to have had the same effect that unqualified American support was to have upon the Kuomintang [Nationalists].”
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Actually, Chiang’s view of Meiling’s American visit was more sober than Peck realized. “After my wife’s visit to the White House,” he mused, “I’m certain that it’s American policy just to make use of us without any sincerity.”
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The year 1943 would be one of deepening mistrust between the Allies, as China, Britain, and the US circled each other with ever greater wariness. By the end of the year, Chiang would find that the roller coaster of US-China relations would fling him from triumph to disaster, in locations as far apart as the sands of Egypt and the jungles of Burma.

After the Burma debacle in the spring of 1942, relations between the American and Chinese political and military leaders continued to worsen, slowly but perceptibly. However, overall, the global war was turning, just as slowly but also noticeably, in the direction of the Allies. Far from China, the Battle of Stalingrad reached its climax in the first days of February 1943. Zhou Fohai, now playing secretly for both the Nanjing and Chongqing teams, recognized the change in fortunes for the Axis. “The German frontline is in trouble,” he observed in late January. “If [the Allies] open a second frontline, Germany will definitely lose.” Zhou was prescient: the battle was indeed the turning point, when the Soviet Union began to turn back the Nazi invasion. Yet Zhou still believed that there might be a place for a Japanese-dominated sphere in the postwar world. Rightly suspecting that the Americans and British did not really trust the USSR, he thought they might try and prop up Japanese power to contain the Soviets: “They’ll still allow Germany a certain level of power so as to contain the USSR. Otherwise the whole of Europe and Asia will all be controlled by the Soviet Union . . . so the US, Britain, Germany, and Japan will all have to compromise to face the USSR.”
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Zhou failed to understand the Allies’ determination that there would never be a third opportunity for Germany to dominate Europe by military force, and that compromise with Japan had been made immeasurably more difficult by the increasing savagery of the war in the Pacific. But he was prescient in his prediction that containment of the Soviet Union would be a prime concern for the Western powers in a postwar world. In a secret meeting with Liu Baichuan, a representative of Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Chongqing, Zhou suggested that if the US and Japan looked likely to reach a compromise agreement, then Chongqing should make the first move toward a peace with Japan, leaping in ahead of the Americans. The idea was clearly in the Wang government’s interest in Nanjing, since this would keep it politically relevant in the event that peace broke out in the Pacific. However, Zhou knew the right button to push with Chiang Kai-shek. Chongqing remained paranoid that the US might not insist on unconditional victory against Japan, but arrange a brokered peace.
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Because the defeat of the Nazis in Europe now seemed a real possibility, the Allies might well decide that the Pacific should be made a secondary priority, and China sidelined even further.

Despite Song Meiling’s seeming triumph in Congress, Chiang’s attitude toward his allies had become ever more suspicious. “China is the weakest of the four Allies,” he wrote. “It’s as if a weak person has met a kidnapper, a hooligan, and a bully.” No matter whether they claimed to be your friend or your enemy, they might still “regard you as meat on the chopping board.”
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Criticism was repeatedly heaped on China as a weak and corrupt dictatorship unworthy of alliance with the democracies. Yet the critics included the US, which maintained legal racial segregation across a third of its territory, and Britain, which held colonies across the world; and both countries had of course entered an alliance with the murderous regime of Stalin. The indictments of Nationalist China did of course reflect its often ugly domestic politics, but were also a product of the country’s weak geostrategic position. Chiang looked on the United States and its president with a mixture of respect and anger. In February 1943 he fumed that Roosevelt and Stalin had “destroyed our war plan of the last three years” after the two leaders made agreements following the Casablanca Conference of 1943, and drawing on the improvement in the USSR’s position at Stalingrad, that tied the Soviets into the defeat of Germany as their top priority. In Chiang’s view this commitment reduced the (already very low) possibility that Japan might attack the Soviets, “so the victim is China.” The sense that the “Big Three” would continue to treat China as a minor player reinforced Chiang’s view that he would have to fight to win his country its rightful prominence. “Previously the US treated China as a decorative object,” Chiang brooded, speculating that even financial assistance to China might have been just an indirect way to soften up American public opinion toward increasing Lend-Lease assistance to Britain. Now once again, he declared, “China is clearly being made a sacrificial item.” He resented the fact that the United States, intent on controlling the Pacific after the war, did not want China to have an independent air force.
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Yet Chiang also realized that power in the Pacific was shifting. In one conversation he observed that “we’re not afraid that America
will
be the dominant power in East Asia; we’re afraid that it
won’t
be.”
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If there was to be a hegemonic power, he thought, then better the US than Japan, the USSR, or Britain.

In contrast, if Chiang respected the British, it was mostly for what he saw as their cunning, stubbornness, and arrogance. He believed that their presence in China had little purpose beyond maintaining their own position. Churchill was a particular bugbear. In March 1943 Chiang seethed that Churchill had talked about the “Big Three” countries that would shape the postwar order: “he excludes China completely.” A few months later Chiang followed this up with the observation that “all ambassadors are spies by nature, but the British more than most.”
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Britain’s political leadership took an equally dim view of China. “Assistance to China should only be a primary consideration if it is in the interests of strategy,” one Foreign Office document declared in July 1943, adding that it was better to let the Chongqing government fall than to disrupt the major effort against Japan. Indeed, Churchill found the idea of China as a great power farcical, and made no secret of the fact that he considered the American aspiration to raise China’s global status utterly misconceived. Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, that it was “affectation” on the part of the US “to pretend that China is a power in any way comparable to the other three.”
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Nor did the British trust American intentions: Churchill made it clear that he had no time for Roosevelt’s aspiration that Britain might return Hong Kong to China as a goodwill gesture.
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From the Opium Wars onward, Britain had been the preeminent Western power in China, and it was Japan, not the US, that seemed to threaten its position in the 1930s. Yet despite Churchill’s unwillingness to treat China as a key power in the postwar global order, there was a wider understanding in British circles that China would now have to be treated as an actor in its own right.
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Britain communicated this with one particularly substantial action. Since 1842, Western imperialism in China had been visible in the most obvious form in the center of China’s greatest commercial city, Shanghai. The International Settlement, along with the French Concession, were islands of foreign rule, although the Settlement had fallen to the Japanese as soon as the Pacific War had broken out. Now, the Americans and British offered to end the hated system of extraterritoriality, and to return the International Settlement to Chinese rule. If China won the war, Shanghai would be a city united, for the first time in a century, under Chinese national sovereignty.
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Under considerable American pressure, the British agreed to new treaties, signed on January 11, 1943, that marked the end of imperialism in China and the replacement of “unequal treaties” with equal ones for the first time. (Not to be outdone, Wang Jingwei had also obtained “sovereignty” over the concessions in a treaty signed two days earlier, on January 9, as part of his price for an official declaration of war by the Nanjing regime against the Allies.
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But this was a hollow gesture, replacing Western imperialism with a Japanese variant.)

Chiang Kai-shek found much to criticize in his British and American allies, but he reserved his bitterest scorn for his chief of staff. Typical was one diary entry in which Chiang declared “I saw Stilwell today; he disgusts me. I despise him: I’ve never met anyone like that!”
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In February 1943 Chiang recorded his version of a conversation between the two of them. Chiang requested 10,000 tons a month of supplies across the Hump, and 500 aircraft; without this, China could not be “responsible” for prosecuting the war further. “Are you saying that if we can’t do that,” Stilwell replied, “then you can’t fight Japan?” Chiang found Stilwell’s response “evil and disrespectful.” He noted:

I swallowed it and didn’t attack him—but I just replied that China had been fighting for six years; even before the Pacific War had broken out, when the US and Britain were not helping, China had fought alone.
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“Vinegar Joe,” of course, was equally forthright in his private assessment of Chiang. “We are maneuvered into the position of having to support this rotten regime and glorify its figurehead, the all-wise great patriot and soldier—Peanut. My God.”
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Chiang’s suspicions about Stilwell were nourished when Burma returned to the Allied agenda in spring 1943. At least Stilwell, unlike most of the senior Allied commanders, did believe in the centrality of China as a battleground in Asia, a sentiment shared by his opponents Chennault and Chiang. However, Stilwell was still tied up in his continuing feud with Chennault about the merits of airpower versus land forces in the China Theater. In November 1942 Wendell Willkie, the Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940, had been sent to Chongqing on a goodwill mission. (His visit would many years later give rise to a salacious rumor that he had a one-night stand with Song Meiling.) Willkie asked to meet Chennault, who wrote down for the visitor what he claimed to need for victory in China and then the Pacific: 105 fighters and 42 bombers, which would enable him to win the war from the air. The letter was quickly dismissed by Marshall back in Washington, but he also suggested to Stilwell that he should try and mend his relationship with his American rival.
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In May 1943 Chennault and Stilwell were called to Washington to report on what needed to be done in China. Stilwell remained adamant that Chinese troops had to be better trained so that they could launch the assault against the Japanese in north Burma to open up a supply road there. Chennault disagreed. He wrote a memo to Marshall which argued that “the internal situation in China is already critical.” He noted increased recruitment to Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist armies, and “that progressive inflation, progressive starvation, and increasing disease have at last begun to tell visibly on the Chinese people.” He doubted that the time remained to prepare for a land war, and suggested airpower instead. “The risks to be run by launching a China air offensive are relatively slight,” he suggested, “compared to the risks that will be run by continued inaction.”
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Stilwell was acid about his rival’s suggestion. “Nobody was interested in the humdrum work of building a ground force but me. Chennault promised to drive the Japs right out of China in six months, so why not give him the stuff to do it? It was the shortcut to victory.”
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The weight of the conference turned against Stilwell’s idea of a campaign in north Burma, which they proposed should begin after the monsoon season of autumn 1943. Instead, Chinese forces in Yunnan were to be built up so that they could be used to protect bases for heavy bombers within China. Roosevelt also agreed that there should be a major increase in the tonnage to be flown over the Hump. “Roosevelt wouldn’t let me speak my piece,” complained Stilwell, who thought the concentration on airpower ill-advised. “I interrupted twice, but Churchill kept pulling away from the subject, and it was impossible.”
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When it was put to him, Chiang agreed to a Burma campaign, but only if there were to be substantial air, naval, and infantry support from the US.
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Chiang’s wariness about the commitment of the Western Allies to a new venture in Burma was well founded, for the plan did not materialize. By mid-1943 the American and British commanders were concentrating on Operation Overlord, the D-Day landing in Europe that would eventually lead to the defeat of Nazi Germany. China, once again, sat very low on the list of priorities. Then, at the Quadrant Conference held in Quebec in August, a new Southeast Asia Command (SEAC) was established under Lord Louis Mountbatten that separated the region of Burma from China and India. Some of the pressure came from Churchill, who was concerned that American public opinion might feel that Britain was not playing a sufficiently important role in the war in Asia (leading to the quip in American circles that SEAC stood for “Save England’s Asian Colonies”).
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Burma and Thailand were placed under SEAC, separating them from Chiang’s sphere of influence, and placing the relief of China even further down the list of important issues. Stilwell was appointed as deputy commander of SEAC under Mountbatten, but retained his command of the China-Burma-India Theater as chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, a situation that was complex and not easily workable, not least since “Vinegar Joe” was almost as allergic to the British as he was to Chiang.
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