Chiang Kai-Shek

  Chiang hated the idea. He had begun the government’s residence in Szechuan on good terms with the local lords, and had since managed, most adroitly, to maintain cordial relations. But the war lord of Yunnan was not friendly and had never been trustworthy. Chiang dragged his feet over the arrangements. Had Stilwell met such opposition he would have gone up in the air, but it was different now. Wedemeyer and Hurley didn’t scream or bully, yet in a short time Chiang saw things their way and went along with the new plan.

  In any case it was a desperate last measure, and would probably never eventuate. While the Chinese Army was strengthened and the kinks ironed out, while Wedemeyer simplified transport problems, persuaded recalcitrant generals to co-operate, and supplied new equipment, the Japanese threat ebbed away. By this time, the end of 1944, the Americans were bombing Japan itself, and battle by hard battle American naval and marine forces were shoving Japanese off the islands. Nobody in Washington was optimistic that victory would come soon. Island hopping would take a weary long time. But the Japanese could no longer afford to push ahead in China. And Burma would soon be clear, and already the ferry was bringing in over the Hump an amount of tonnage that would have been unbelievable in 1943. Nearly thirty thousand tons were carried across to China in December.

  So the practical details of building up the Army, preparing it for the long fighting march to the coast which everyone still assumed would be necessary, were much less of a problem for Wedemeyer than gloomy prophets had said they would be two months before. But the problem of reconciling Chiang and Mao was as big as ever, and Wedemeyer, for all his tact, was committed to his government’s policy as firmly as Stilwell had been.

  Hurley was supposed gently to persuade Chiang to swallow the coalition, but he found himself being pushed. Many of his compatriots in China were working hard to convince Roosevelt that the Red forces were entitled to the new equipment we were sending in just as much as were the Kuomintang forces, if not more so. By this time the Red guerrilla exploits had been described so glowingly and often that in the average American mind these encounters took on the proportions of heroic major engagements, and Nationalist battles were never heard of. The fact was there was not an immense amount of fighting done by either faction. Moreover, the Reds were becoming openly listless about the Japanese. But America wasn’t given this version.

  Washington’s attitude had settled into a worried longing to see the Kuomintang-Communist dispute ended, with China “unified” before the end of the war. Roosevelt still believed, because he wanted to believe, that Stalin wasn’t interested in the Chinese Communists. Yet it seemed clear even to him that Russia would not refuse to take them under her wing if they should come pleading for protection. His pro-Red advisers reminded him that it was dangerous to “push the Chinese Reds into the arms of Russia.” Far better, of course, to shove them into a coalition with Chungking; unfortunately America could do the pushing only from the other side. America could bully Chiang, perhaps; she couldn’t do anything to the Reds because they weren’t beholden to her.

  Hurley reasoned and reasoned with Chiang. He also went to Yenan, with the Generalissimo’s full consent, to talk it over with Mao Tse-tung. He was nicely treated there—Americans in those days were always nicely treated by the Reds—and he brought back a set of proposals for a coalition that would be acceptable to Mao. Chiang rejected them and drew up a set of counterproposals. Hopefully Hurley forwarded these to Mao. They were rejected.

  “I told you so,” said Chiang.

  Hurley started all over again.

  The Observer Mission was still sending copious reports to Washington about the excellence of the “so-called Communist” regime. Its members were relieved and charmed by the fact that Mao’s domain was being run on principles that seemed to them truly democratic, not at all like the way things were run in Russia. The people were being allowed a voice in the local governing bodies, there was a genuine redistribution of land, and nobody except really unpopular figures seemed to be suffering. The Americans, like the peasants, took it for granted that this state of affairs was to be permanent. Mao did make an occasional statement in print, or in some Chinese speech, that sweetness and light was a temporary phase on the road to achievement of the traditional Marx pattern, but the Americans did not believe him. A number of State Department officials were sending in private reports; they were sure Chiang was hopelessly discredited and doomed unless he chose to ride the wave of the future and combine with the Reds. The people of China all wanted Communism of this sort, said the bright young Americans. If it had been Russian Communism it would be different, but it wasn’t. And they were such nice people, anyway, and so friendly!

  Wedemeyer’s subordinates were as keen on the Reds as were the State Department officials. He had not been in China more than six weeks before their eagerness precipitated a crisis. Unknown to the Generalissimo, these enthusiasts approached the Reds with a plan by which they could utilize Communist-held territory. American paratroopers, working side by side with Red companions, were to go out on small guerrilla expeditions and capture outlying Japanese posts.

  Wedemeyer put his foot down when he heard of these plans and Hurley was quick to help him do it. The Reds were disappointed and resentful; their friends argued that their behavior from that time on grew worse, and Hurley and Wedemeyer were bitterly blamed for ruining a promising amity. Hurley defended himself; such action would be tantamount to American recognition of the Communists. Stilwell may have wanted this, but it was different now. We were supporting Chiang and that was that.

  Yet, while Hurley and Wedemeyer were being so meticulous about the Generalissimo’s rights and dignity, the Yalta Conference was in the making.

  The time had come for the fulfillment of Stalin’s promise, made at Teheran, to come into the Far East war as soon as Germany should be accounted for. Germany was on the run and it was clearly only a matter of months before she surrendered. But the Allies had not counted too much on Stalin’s remembering his pledge, and he surprised everybody when he brought the matter up himself in September 1944.

  Recovering swiftly from the shock, the other United Nations set to work at his behest, figuring out how much they thought Russia might contribute to the final struggle to eliminate Japan. At the time it was thought, erroneously as it turned out, that Japan was very strong, much stronger than she was in actuality after all those years of war. Evidently Stalin saw no reason to disabuse the Allies of this idea.

  It seemed best that the Russians should handle the northern part of the affair while the Americans went ahead with their plan to land on the south coast after taking as many islands as they needed. Stalin continued to surprise: he now declared himself ready to act on a far bigger scale than they had ever expected. His estimates of the number of Japanese that would be encountered outdid the gloomiest Chinese and American apprehensions by a great deal. The other allies, therefore, produced an outline by which Russia would be expected to secure the Trans-Siberian Railway with Vladivostok, co-operate with the Americans in conducting air raids from the Maritime Province, cut off Japan from the mainland by sea, secure the supply route across the northern Pacific to Russia, and, most important of all, meet with and destroy the Japanese occupying Manchuria.

  To all of this Stalin amiably consented. If the extra Lend-Lease supplies that he thought necessary could be delivered in time, he said, he would be able to go into action three months after Germany collapsed. The Lend-Lease supplies were to maintain his forces for something under two months, which was the period he said would be necessary for dealing a mortal blow to the enemy.

  The list of material he said he needed was a staggering one, but the Russians explained that they must have it all for the hard task ahead; they would have to supply a million and a half men, three thousand tanks, seventy-five thousand vehicles and five thousand airplanes—nearly nine hundred thousand tons of dry and two hundred thousand tons of liquid cargo. Eighty per cent of it was actually delivered as promised, before Jun
e 30, 1945.

  The conference to settle all this was scheduled for the beginning of February. Roosevelt was not at all well when he arrived. Harry Hopkins, who accompanied him, was also a very sick man, but there was nothing wrong with the health of the President’s adviser, Alger Hiss. Yalta was selected as the meeting place because that was as far away from Moscow as Stalin could be persuaded to go. It was kept very secret for a lot of good reasons, and for other reasons that interested parties, had they known, would not have considered good at all. To advertise it would have been to tip the Japanese off. And to let Chiang Kai-shek know, as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed, would have been equivalent to advertising it. Nothing, they said, was ever kept secret very long in Chungking.

  Chiang, in fact, was so innocent of the arrangement that in February he talked to Hurley about improving Sino-Russian relations. The Generalissimo had long thought that he might have better luck dealing with Moscow than with his own country’s Reds. He had said this to Wallace and asked Roosevelt to act as “intermediary” between Stalin and himself. He even evolved the idea of sending his son Ching-kuo to Moscow as an emissary to hold conversations with Stalin. Later he decided, on Hurley’s advice, that T. V. Soong would be a better envoy. Twice he tried to make a definite date for Soong with Stalin; each time Stalin put him off with some convincing excuse. The true reason for the postponement, the impending conference, didn’t occur to Chiang. For a long time Yalta was that rare thing in diplomacy, a genuine secret.

  If ever in all the grueling years the Generalissimo felt cheerful about the future he must have done so just then. The Japanese would soon be on the run; Americans were being polite at last; supplies were pouring in.

  The Big Three had a lot of things to talk over; China was one of the least of their worries. Stalin’s claims in the Far East were not even brought up until the fifth day, and he was very easygoing when the time came, just as amiable as he had been during the preliminary discussions with Ambassador Harriman in Moscow.

  Naturally everyone was prepared for a request that Russia get some sort of reward for her commitment to the war against Japan. The main price she demanded was not unexpected. During the Teheran Conference Stalin had mentioned that his country badly needed a warm-water port, and Roosevelt had then suggested that Russia be given access to Dairen or Port Arthur. Chiang, when sounded out on this idea, had offered no objection. Stalin now spoke again of these ports; he wanted the right for Russia to lease both of them. Roosevelt pointed out that there were two ways to give Russia access; she could lease them as Stalin suggested, or she could share equal rights in them with the rest of the world—in other words, they could be made international ports. Stalin did not persist.

  Another point was that “The former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904 should be restored viz:

  “(a) the southern part of Sakhalin as well as all the islands adjacent to this part of Sakhalin should be restored to the Soviet Union.…

  “The Kurile Islands should be handed over to the Soviet Union.”

  Strictly speaking, this was asking for more territory than had belonged to Russia before the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. By the treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875, when Japan was weak and Russia strong, Russia had grabbed southern Sakhalin from Japan and awarded the Kurile Islands in exchange. Sakhalin was rich in coal and fisheries, whereas the Kuriles were barren, wind-swept spots on the map that hadn’t belonged to Russia any more than they did to Japan. Either Roosevelt and Churchill weren’t especially aware of this unimportant bit of history, or they didn’t care to go into detail on the matter. Naturally nobody was inclined to haggle on Japan’s behalf.

  There was also the matter of the railways in Manchuria. Stalin requested “the rights possessed by Russia before the Russo-Japanese War in the operation of the Chinese-Eastern Railroad and the South Manchurian Railroad providing an outlet to Dairen … on the understanding that China should continue to possess full sovereignty in Manchuria.” But Russia in the days of the Czars had seized these rights by force and they had been contested by the National Government of China. Once again Roosevelt pointed out, as he did on the question of the warm-water ports, that the railroads could be controlled either by Russian lease or some less exclusive arrangement, preferably a Chinese-Russian commission. Like the other question this was left in the air.

  None of these matters, least of all the last one, should have been decided without Chiang’s co-operation, and Roosevelt paid lip service to this fact during the ensuing haggling over the wording of the agreement. On the final point, when other amendments had been made, he added, “It is understood that the agreement concerning the ports and railways referred to above requires the concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.” Beyond this shadowy reference nothing was said on the subject, and no alternative proposals were made in case the Generalissimo refused to give concurrence. Roosevelt asked when Chiang should be told about the arrangement, and Stalin said he would let him know. At any rate, they all agreed, he need not be told just yet. Stalin wanted to put a lot more men into the Far East first.

  In the meantime the man whose fate was being sealed thus summarily was going about a task that had been neglected, if not forgotten, for many months. The period of “political tutelage” as laid down in the Kuomintang program had expired. It was time at last for the constitution, said Chiang. On March 1 he announced that a People’s Congress was scheduled for November to prepare for the constitutional government in which all political parties were to have equality.

  Outrageous, said the Communists. It was being done merely to pull the wool over the eyes of the people. They would have no part of it.

  A large number of bright young men from Washington were now wandering about China, sending independent reports on the situation, making their own contacts and their own promises to friends they had picked up beyond the Red frontier. It was no wonder that the Communists ultimately tried to by-pass the Ambassador and make unilateral arrangements behind his back. Certainly they were given every encouragement to do so, and that is one reason Hurley resented it highly when the Red general Chu Teh calmly approached Wedemeyer, instead of the Ambassador, and asked for an official loan of twenty million U. S. dollars. That Wedemeyer behaved with perfect propriety and turned the matter over to him did not soothe Hurley. It seemed to him that this was the last insult. He went back to Washington with Wedemeyer for a conference, determined to have it out.

  There he found even more reason to rage. Hardly had he left Chungking before a number of these State Department officials sent a telegram to headquarters strongly urging that Washington crack down on Chiang and insist upon equipping and using Communist troops. Otherwise, they declared, the Reds would turn to Russia just when America needed them most in the coming crisis. Washington’s policy of supporting Chiang, they insisted, was merely encouraging him to remain stubbornly set against coalition. If he still refused, America should go ahead anyway and use the Communists. After all, if Chiang would not see reason …

  By this time Hurley had learned of the Yalta Conference and its resulting agreement. The knowledge may have been worrying him, lending strength to his resistance; at any rate, he blew up over the telegram. He said that he couldn’t work when his own staff was disloyal, that the others were trying to reshape government policy. Roosevelt and his advisers agreed that Reds should not be used until Chiang gave his consent. Then the more turbulent of the officials-without-portfolio in China were moved to other posts, and the rest were awed into silence for a little while. They were silenced partly because Chiang seemed to be showing up as a reasonable fellow. He had consented to permit Communists to accompany the Chinese delegation to the coming San Francisco Conference, at which the United Nations postwar organization was to be discussed. Mao had demanded that they appear as an independent body, but this Washington would not allow.

  Hurley, with the guilty secret of Yalta weighing on his mind, visited Moscow on his way back to his post,
intending to get permission from Stalin to break the news to Chiang. Chiang fully realized something was in the wind and had begun to ask embarrassing questions. The fact was the atmosphere had suddenly changed in Washington and the State Department was more than uneasy about that agreement. The innocents had just been brought up short by information received and checked through a private, preliminary investigation of the files of the pro-Communist magazine Amerasia. Someone had noticed things in one of its articles that should not have been there, things that were presumably secret and confidential. When the F.B.I. managed to get a look at what the editors had, they were astonished and dismayed. The awakening came in March, but open action had not yet been taken. In the meantime the editor was being watched, and it was slowly borne in upon Roosevelt and his aides that some of their young men must be supplying him with a lot of material.

  Moreover, Stalin’s behavior in other directions was illuminating. Rumania had been taken over; Poland was clearly going the same way. Stalin’s and Molotov’s attitude altogether was not nearly so jolly as it had been heretofore. When a peremptory note came from Stalin, accusing the American Government of trying to make peace privately with the Germans in Italy, Roosevelt was deeply shocked. He had just sent his reply to Moscow, appealing to the Russians not to entertain such a spirit of distrust when his sickness at last overtook him and he died.

  In those last troubled days he had a glimpse of the enormous mistake he had made.

  Nevertheless Stalin and Hurley had a pleasant interview because Hurley was indomitably optimistic about settling the China question. He had arrived ready to affirm on behalf of his government a future policy regarding China that the Russians strongly approved: it suited them in every way. Chiang was to be persuaded to permit the arming of at least four divisions of Communist soldiers who would be added to the thirty-six Nationalist troops already in training. If he refused—well, the threat was not voiced at this interview, but the implication was there. They would be equipped anyway. All China’s resources were needed, the men agreed, for the great all-out push against Japan.