then I lost all contact.
Jack Belden, the young, bright, moody United Press correspondent, groused to me about how shabbily UP treated him and then asked what I was being paid as a Vice Consul. I told him something in the neighborhood of $3,500 a year, as I now recall it. Jack flared up, “I’m as good as you are.” So he wired UP that unless it raised his salary to whatever it was that I was paid, he would quit.
He quit. As he was then without income, I invited him to stay at my apartment. One night on the way back from a restaurant dinner with friends Jack disappeared. For days thereafter we checked with the police, hospitals, and military intelligence—no Jack. We gave him up as probably dead, fallen into the Yangtze or victim of foul play.
Some ten days later he casually walked into my apartment. He had on impulse gone to the railroad station and boarded a northbound troops train. It delivered him to the front. There for about a week he was caught in a battle and Chinese retreat—days of swirling confusion and terror. Stilwell was delighted to receive Belden’s account of the engagements and rout. Although the Military Attaché had gotten to other fronts, notwithstanding obstacles placed in his way by the Chinese High Command, which was ashamed of the condition and performance of its forces, he had not at that time been able to visit the front north of Hankow. Jack had brought him eyewitness, participant reports of action, to which the official communiqués bore scarcely any resemblance.
Belden slipped out of Hankow ahead of the Japanese. I did not see him again until 1942, in Burma, again with Stilwell.
Hankow, summer 1938, changed for a time the outlook for Freda Utley—a middle-aged woman of versatile convictions, each successively proclaimed with passion. Born in England, Miss Utley began life as a British subject. But while at university she joined in 1928 the Communist Party, thereby adopting an allegiance above that to King and country.
She married a Soviet citizen, went to the Soviet Union in 1930 where she worked in the Comintern, and soon became disillusioned with at least Soviet Communism. She later claimed that she did not transfer her British CP membership to the Soviet Party and that she let her British membership lapse. The detention of her husband by the Soviet authorities further alienated Miss Utley. She was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1936, and headed to China.
At Hankow, she met the Chinese Communist delegation, also Snow, Carlson, Smedley and others having firsthand acquaintanceship with the Chinese Communists. With exhilaration she found a new faith, one in the Chinese Communists, whom she described in her book China at War (1939), as having abandoned the goal of dictatorship, adopted a policy of reform along capitalist and democratic lines and become, in sum, like radicals in the English Nineteenth Century sense of the word. At the same time, as she testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1950, she decided to expose the Soviet Union for what it was, “even if my husband was still alive and it led to his death.” Such was Miss Utley’s sense of civic duty.
Her attachment to her Chinese Victorian radicals did not last long. I would later learn that because of their approval of the Soviet-Nazi pact, she had turned against them with fury.
By early 1938 the Japanese had practically wiped out the small, Italian-trained, incompetent, corrupt Chinese Air Force. Claire Chennault, an American Army Air Corps (AAC) captain in his late forties, retired for deafness and insistence on (contrary to AAC doctrine) the vulnerability of bombers to pursuit aircraft, was retained by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and Mme. Chiang as air adviser. Chennault looked like the warrior that he was—pitted face, cold straight-on gaze, thin lips, aggressive jaw. As Stilwell was the epitome of the foot soldier, Chennault was that of the open cockpit fighter pilot. These two warriors, both in Hankow during the summer of 1938, would be teamed together four years later in rancorous association.
The Chinese offered no resistance to the Japanese capture of Hankow. In contrast to its savage behavior following the seizure of Nanking, the Japanese army occupied Hankow in a relatively orderly fashion. Life for those of us who stayed behind—thousands of terrified Chinese and several scores of uneasy foreigners—meant virtual captivity; checkpoints within the city and no leaving it without a tightly controlled pass.
My work was political reporting and drafting notes advising the Japanese of the location of American properties in Central China and placing on the invading forces responsibility for damage to any of these properties or harm to any Americans by bombing or other military action. I also made, with reluctant Japanese permission, extended trips into Japanese occupied areas to check on the welfare of isolated Americans. On one of these assignments, involving the evacuation of Americans from a mountain resort held by Chinese Communist guerrillas and besieged by the Japanese, I underwent the stimulating experience of being shot at by the Communists.
* * *
The State Department transferred me in the autumn of 1940 to its Far Eastern (FE) Division, where I was put to work as the junior of two China desk officers. As our windows in the old State-War-Navy building, later housing presidential executive offices, faced the west wing of the White House, one of my duties was to keep at a fixed level all window shades in FE visible from the Executive Mansion, lest President Roosevelt’s eye be affronted by a spectacle of irregularity across the street in the cathedral of American diplomacy. In addition, I moved about the Department prodding other divisions to do things that my superiors wanted done and collecting concurring initials on FE’s draft telegrams. These menial activities were a valuable introduction to the way things were done.
My education in this respect was furthered by acquaintance, originating from Georgetown socializing, with Lauchlin Currie. He was a brisk, little, rimless-bespectacled Harvard economist who had been acquired by Roosevelt as a special assistant. Currie was developing, when I met him, an interest in Chinese affairs and after several social meetings took to phoning me at FE to ask for information or my comments on Chinese events. I thought it odd that he should occupy himself with matters so evidently outside of his expertise. But then this spontaneous straying into other jurisdictions to dabble therein was characteristic of the helterskelter Roosevelt administration.
Naturally, I was flattered by the attention from a presidential aide. At the same time, this contact made me uneasy because Currie was clearly out of channels. By orderly governmental procedure he should have dealt with an Assistant Secretary or certainly no one lower than chief of division. I let my immediate superiors know of Currie’s queries. They expressed no opinion, but I sensed they did not approve of the connection. In the absence of orders forbidding me to respond to requests from the White House, I felt that it would be priggish of me—or at least awkward—to tell a special assistant to the President to take his questions elsewhere.
The President set an example for Currie in operating out of channels and undercutting the man in charge. Roosevelt frequently bypassed his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to deal directly with the Under Secretary, Sumner Welles. This was, of course, the President’s prerogative, and in a sense it was understandable because, while Hull was useful in coping with Congress regarding foreign policy, his knowledge of foreign affairs was limited and his approach simplistic and moralistic. In contrast, Welles was a highly competent professional diplomat.
Good management practice, however, dictated that if Roosevelt had not, for whatever reason, wished to deal with the man he had put in charge of foreign affairs, he should have replaced the Secretary with someone in whom he had full confidence. But FDR did not work that way. He was a politician, not an executive. The confusion that he, his White House staff, and his special emissaries sowed in the conduct of American foreign relations was to grow with passage of time and the emboldenment of Roosevelt’s virtuosos.
Dr. Stanley K. Hornbeck, PhD exercised with some pomposity his mandate as political adviser to the Secretary in Far Eastern matters. Having been promoted from chief of FE, he regarded the division as a fiefdom obligated to serve him. Substantive papers were accordingly submitted to him for approval,
