Chiang undertook the campaign in collaboration with the puny new Chinese Communist Party, which the Soviet representatives had persuaded Sun to accept in a united front with the Kuomintang. Although Chiang had continued with the united front, when the successful offensive approached his own turf, particularly Shanghai, he turned on his Communist collaborators and caused the killing of all that his men could lay hands on. Using the right wing of the Kuomintang, he established at Nanking a conservative government claiming to be the national administration, even though it controlled—and that imperfectly—only the southeastern portion of the country.
In search of respectability Chiang courted Shanghai’s most powerful banking and commercial community. And late in 1927 he disembarrassed himself of his old-fashioned marital entanglements (two wives) and embraced Christianity so as to quality for marriage to Soong Mei-ling. In marrying Miss Soong, Chiang acquired a pretty, temperamental wife of inclinations with rich historical precedents—the empress or imperial favorite who usurps the throne. He also acquired a spirited assortment of in-laws.
The Soongs were a wealthy Christian family. The father, Charlie, was brought up in the United States and his progeny were educated there. He was a friend of Sun Yat-sen’s and his second daughter, Soong Ching-ling, became Sun’s second wife. She was the gentle, idealistic member of the family and disapproved of her brother-in-law’s dictatorial nature. The oldest daughter, Ai-ling, shrewd and self-controlled, married H. H. Kung, who claimed lineal descent from Confucius and was from time to time Chiang’s Finance Minister. The dominant son, T. V. Soong, a Harvard product, aggressively rose to become Foreign Minister and, like his sister, Madame Chiang, acted during World War II as a broker between the Generalissimo and the Americans.
Chiang failed in his attempt to unify China. Warlords continued to control large portions of western China and all of Manchuria, until the Japanese took over that northeastern region in 1931. Rather than going to war against Japan over Manchuria, Chiang attempted to eradicate his former allies, the Communists. They had established themselves in a small rural area in Central China where they held out against repeated government offensives. The Generalissimo’s fifth campaign in 1934 finally forced them into a circuitous 6,000-mile retreat, known as the Long March, to Northwest China. His persistent harrying of the Communists resulted in a bizarre incident in 1936 wherein he was kidnapped by regional forces, released through Communist intercession, and agreed with the Communists to form again a united front, this time directed against Japan.
The Generalissimo’s successful 1934 campaign had been planned by his German advisers, headed by General Hans von Seeckt. General Alexander von Falkenhausen succeeded von Seeckt and was training Chinese troops when Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China in 1937. He was largely responsible for planning the only important victory of the Chinese, Taierchuang, and was infuriated when they held back and would not press on to achieve a major success.
Early in the war the Soviet Union began military aid to Chiang—but not to the Communists—and made available to the Generalissimo Soviet military advisers. Among them were Generals G. K. Zhukov and V. I. Chuikov, both of whom, on the basis of their subsequent performances in the war against Germany, could be considered as competent to give advice to
Chiang. But the Generalissimo did not make use of them and so they returned to the Soviet Union.
To Chiang the assignment of Stilwell was not a totally new kind of experience. For some eighteen years, off and on, he had dealt with foreigners intent on telling him how to be a soldier. He had not suffered as a consequence any apparent decline of confidence in his own superior judgment in military matters. At times he accepted—and always adapted— advice; more often he did not act on it. There was no convincing reason to believe that Chiang would be more responsive to Stilwell than he had been to Blyukher or von Falkenhausen.
* * *
The approach of the American public to China, especially during the three years after Pearl Harbor, was largely subjective. It was a product of one hundred years of missionary compulsions and involvement, spiritual and emotional, of a sense of guilt that the United States had not gone to the rescue of China under attack from Japan and had sold war materiel to Japan, and of propaganda portraying the Chinese as heroically fighting on our behalf and wanting only American arms and know-how to drive the enemy into the sea. Central figures in this vision of China were Chiang and Mei-ling—he the unflinching Christian commander of four hundred million tillers of Pearl Buck’s good earth, and she, a Wellesley girl, fragile as a peach blossom sheathed in brocade, faithful helpmeet to the devout Generalissimo (Time’s 1937 Man and Wife of the Year), and an eloquent pleader of China’s cause (moving assembled members of Congress to penitence, high resolve, and other manly emotions).
The widespread mythology about China meant that more than facts and logic went into the making of American wartime policy toward China. The surcharged sentimental attachment to the Chinese raised the importance of China in strategic planning all out of proportion to its real military and immediate political worth. The significance of China was further inflated by a geopolitical assumption of Roosevelt’s that China would become a great power after the war and therefore during hostilities it should be treated as one, and Chiang as co-equal with Churchill, and Stalin.
This caused Washington civil and military officials, notwithstanding reports to the contrary from their representatives in Chungking, to think wishfully that Chiang and his National Government might want to prosecute the war with all vigor. Washington was also anxious to keep China in the war, not fully recognizing that while Chiang was loath to expend strength against the common enemy, he would not withdraw from the war. Assuming an American victory, there was much for him to gain from remaining nominally an ally: all kinds of assistance and, after the war, territorial acquisitions.
Thanks to Pinky and the General, I received in February 1942 State Department orders assigning me as Consul at Kunming, designating me as Second Secretary of Embassy at Chungking, and detailing me to “the China Military Mission headed by Major General Joseph W. Stilwell.” This was followed by the standard formula: “This assignment is not made at your request nor for your convenience.”
The orders specified that my detail to Stilwell was for “liaison between the Mission and American and foreign civil officials.” Three days later, on February 13, as an afterthought the Department admonished me to conduct my liaison duties “at the direction and under the supervision of General Stilwell.” The Department also desired that, as practicable and appropriate, I keep the Ambassador and, through him, the Department informed of “the activities of the military mission.”
My superiors in the Far Eastern Division did not favor my detail to the General, feeling that it was irregular and bordering on the frivolous. I should stick to the Foreign Service. Currie, who was administering lend-lease to China, welcomed the arrangement. I assumed he thought I could be a useful point of contact with Stilwell’s headquarters.
Currie and Owen Lattimore, recently returned from serving as a personal adviser to the Generalissimo, emphasized to me the logistic importance of India in view of the impending Japanese capture of Rangoon. Lattimore referred with approval to what he said was the opinion of Chiang and Chennault, then heading a small pursuit aircraft contingent manned by American mercenaries and called the American Volunteer Group. That opinion was that the United States should direct its then limited strength against the Japanese flank from China. They asked that I assure Chennault that he was appreciated, but that he must play ball with General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. Otherwise he would get no equipment. Arnold was extremely influential, Chennault should be advised, and had to be humored.
About a fortnight after Stilwell’s departure for China-Burma-India, I left Washington, on February 25. Also bound for Stilwell’s theater were six officers and a sergeant. We flew by one of Pan American’s original clippers, a flying boat, to Belém at the mouth of the Amazon—moist,
