China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (55 page)

Birch’s killing took place at a time when the Communists were becoming strikingly more aggressive against anybody whom they perceived to be standing in their way. The four American soldiers in the
Spaniel team were still under arrest. A few weeks later,
another American OSS team was captured and held by the Communists in Shaanxi province. And there were very soon to be other incidents centering in Shandong in which Communist opposition to any American presence would be expressed vociferously at the point of a gun.

Manchuria is some
six hundred thousand square miles in area, bigger than France, Germany, and Poland combined. It is rich in the resources needed for a modern industrial economy, which is the reason the Russians and the Japanese went to war over it in 1905 and why Japan took it over in 1931. It contains nearly 10 percent of the entire population of China. It has excellent year-round ports on the Yellow Sea and on the large bay known as the Bohai—Dalian, Port Arthur, Yingkou, Huludao, and others. In the south, Manchuria is menacingly close to key points in North China, especially to Beijing, which is only about a hundred miles from its southernmost province, Liaoning, fifty or so miles from the Great Wall. Most important strategically, it had a thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union and an additional border with Soviet-dominated Mongolia, so whatever party held the area could easily be supplied with Russian arms and have a vast hinterland to serve as an impregnable refuge.

Manchuria had at least twice before served as a base for the conquest, or the attempted conquest, of all of China, most recently in 1937 when the Japanese sent their divisions southward from their puppet state of Manchukuo. Three and a half centuries earlier, when the central Chinese government was weak, a Manchu chieftain, Nurhaci, rebelled against the last Ming dynasty emperor, sending his troops through the mountain passes between Manchuria and inner China. Just like the Japanese later, they clambered over the Great Wall, which had never been a very effective barrier against determined invaders, and poured out onto the vast North China Plain and its thousands of undefended villages, which is what Mao was going to do later in some of the largest battles ever fought. To control Manchuria is not to control China, but it provides an enormous advantage for any insurgent force.

Mao was well aware of that. His image, especially in the West, is of the peasant guerrilla who used the countryside to surround the cities but didn’t need the cities to win. But already at the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the late spring of 1945 Mao was saying that
the CCP needed industry, a communications system, a way of generating wealth, in order to counterbalance the government’s control of the industrial region near Shanghai. “Once we occupy the Northeast,” a confident Mao told a concluding session of the Seventh Congress, “we can lay
a solid foundation for the Chinese revolution even if we lose all the existing base areas.”

The foundation was being established with Stalin’s help in those weeks and months after the Japanese surrender, but the Communists’ movements were largely surreptitious and Stalin’s help a secret so that both sides could preserve the fiction that they were peace parties striving to avoid a Chinese civil war. Stalin continued to give assurances that he would live up to the agreements he’d signed on China, assurances that were foolishly believed by Hurley and others. Months of American confusion and uncertainty would pass before it became clear that Stalin’s policy was to pay lip service to his agreements with Chiang while helping the Chinese Communists as much as he could, short of provoking a vigorous American response.

With that strategy, Stalin was bound to come out a winner. If the Communists gained control of North China, he would have helped them do it, and he would have gained what he assumed would be a friendly and even subservient regime on his border. That would be the best outcome from his point of view. Stalin, however, knew that the Communists might lose. If the national government prevailed, Stalin would claim to be innocent of intervention in China’s internal affairs, keeping the gains he had made at Yalta, stationing Soviet warships at
Port Arthur, and maintaining friendly relations with a government that depended on his goodwill. In both cases, Stalin would succeed in replacing Japan as the paramount power in northeast Asia, reversing the effects of the Russian defeat in the war of 1905 and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and maintaining a safe buffer zone between Soviet Siberia and the rest of Asia.

If he got that from China’s national government, Stalin would have no reason to risk the animosity of the nuclear-armed Americans in order to have even more. So he did his best to minimize that risk, pursuing
a policy of such extraordinary flexibility that at times it seemed self-contradictory. He would urge the Chinese Communists to act aggressively, and when they did, he would curb them and demand that they make concessions to the national government. Later, when the situation allowed it, he would again urge a more aggressive policy. Stalin managed this masterfully. He never lost his influence among the Chinese Communists, even during those times when his caution provoked fits of frustrated anger on the part of Mao, and at the same time, he maintained correct, even cordial relations with the national government, until the forces he helped set in motion forced that government into exile.

Assured of Soviet non-interference, the Communists devised an aggressive strategy to deal with the new American military presence. The very day the marines landed in China, an editorial in
Liberation Daily
said, accurately: “
No matter what the intention of the Americans is, their landing will in fact interfere in China’s internal affairs, and inevitably assist the KMT to oppose the CCP and 100 million people in the liberated areas.” A few days later, the paper warned that the Americans should not advance into “places that have already been liberated and where there are no Japanese troops.” Communist policy was to be polite to the Americans and even to welcome them “if they respect our interests.” But if they tried to force their way into Communist-held areas, “
we should formally inform them of our objection [and] be prepared militarily for resistance.”

The first test of the CCP’s guidelines came near Beijing, where Zhou had warned General Worton there would be resistance. On October 5, a marine reconnaissance patrol on the route from Tianjin to Beijing discovered thirty-six scattered roadblocks that made it impossible for truck-sized vehicles to get through. The Communists wanted to impede deliveries of supplies from the port to the former imperial capital, where the marines had already set up their encampments and where Nationalist soldiers were arriving by air. The next day, when marine engineers, guarded by a rifle platoon, went to clear the road, some forty to fifty
Communist troops opened fire on them from behind the surrounding trees and foliage. Three marines were wounded and the whole platoon withdrew. The next day, a rifle company and a tank platoon arrived on the scene, protected by planes based on a carrier off the coast, and they cleared the road without further incident.

That same day, the marine commander, Major General Keller E.
Rockey, presided over the surrender
of all the Japanese forces in the area of Tianjin, about fifty thousand officers and men. The ceremony took place with due pomp—a marine band, a color guard, the flags of the United States and the Republic of China flying—in front of the French Municipal Building, the city’s most imposing European-style structure, now converted into the IIIAC headquarters. Tens of thousands of Chinese jammed the roped-off area where the surrender took place, or peered down from rooftops. A group of six Japanese officers walked past the marine guard to the surrender table where they symbolically laid down their swords before Rockey. Afterward, as they were escorted to waiting cars, the Chinese hissed and booed.

The next day, Rockey, accompanied by a naval commander, Rear Admiral
Daniel E. Barbey, boarded the command ship
Catoctin
and headed along the north Shandong coast to carry out the task of occupying the port of Chefoo. The Americans knew that the Communists had seized control of Chefoo from the Japanese in the days after the end of the war. Chefoo held tremendous strategic importance because whoever held it could use it to ferry troops to Manchuria via the port of Dalian, just 150 miles across the Gulf of Zhili, and Manchuria was where the opening battle for control of China was looming.

A few days before, on September 27, knowing that the Americans planned to send troops to the port,
Ye Jianying, chief of staff of the Communist armed forces,
sent a message to Wedemeyer telling him that since there were no Japanese in the vicinity, the deployment of American troops in that area would be taken by the Communists as interference in China’s internal affairs. Despite that, the
Catoctin
, escorted by the cruiser
Louisville
and its detachment of marines, arrived at Chefoo on the morning of October 7. Barbey, a specialist in amphibious warfare from Oregon who had commanded marines in battles in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Borneo, dispatched an American colonel to ask the Communists to leave, but the Communist official who met the American colonel politely refused to do so. He repeated what Wedemeyer had already heard from Ye. All was in good order thanks to “Chinese troops supported by the people of the province who have fought the enemy many years
with many sacrifices.” At the same time, Ye sent a second warning to Wedemeyer’s headquarters: If American troops landed, there might be trouble, and it would be the fault of the United States.

On board the
Catoctin,
Barbey confirmed to Wedemeyer that
indeed there were no Japanese forces in the area, which meant that any landing by the marines would not represent the liberation of a Japanese-held city but “
an interference in the internal affairs of China” and that would be “bitterly resented by the Communists.” At Barbey’s urging, the American high command decided to forgo the Chefoo landing. The Communists had won a victory whose significance was not lost on at least one of the American reporters on the scene. The United States,
Tillman Durdin wrote in
The New York Times,
had already given the Kuomintang government—“now in a relationship bordering on civil war”—a great deal of help by transporting government troops to the north and by directly taking over Tianjin, Beijing, and Qinwangdao. “
The decision regarding Chefoo draws a line beyond which the United States will not go at present in supporting Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in relation to rival factions in China.”

How things had changed.
Only a few months earlier, while the war against Japan was still going on, American officers and members of the CCP Politburo were going together to the Saturday night dances in Yenan. In the fields and villages of occupied China, Eighth Route Army soldiers, the friendly
Balu
s, were risking their lives, and sometimes sacrificing them, to rescue downed American airmen. Now the Communist policy was to make it just unsafe enough for the Americans, short of actual open warfare, that they would decide to leave.

And, as the firefight on the Tianjin–Beijing road and the killing of
John Birch demonstrated, it was unsafe, even if the danger didn’t seem all that serious to American military leaders. At a meeting with Secretary of State James Byrnes and the secretary of the navy, James F. Forrestal, the new secretary of war,
Robert P. Patterson, dismissed these incidents with the Chinese Communists as of the “
comic opera” variety, asserting that the marines could walk from one end of China to the other without “serious hindrance.”

This was no doubt true. No force in China, except for the Soviets themselves, matched the marines in firepower or tactical know-how. Still, the China duty was tense and hard. The marines heard from the Japanese awaiting repatriation about the constant sniping, the ambushes, the mines, the sabotage of tracks and signal equipment that they had experienced from Eighth Route Army guerrillas as they patrolled the roads and rail lines of North China. That duty had fallen
to the Americans, who rode the dusty coal trains and patrolled the earth-packed roadways in jeeps and trucks. Whatever a bureaucrat in a suit and tie might say ten thousand miles away, the marines faced a tricky indigenous group of armed partisans who wanted them to leave.
From the Great Wall to Mukden,
a Marine Corps history, states that “
every mile of track, every bridge, and every switch was the potential target of Communist attacks.” During their entire deployment in China, the marines suffered twelve killed and forty-two wounded in eighteen armed clashes and several small-scale Communist attacks.

On October 11, a marine reconnaissance company landed on the docks of
Qingdao, the big port across the Shandong peninsula from Chefoo. The Eighth Route Army was in control of much of the nearby interior and a great deal of the coast. The central government was absent. The marines took over the port and secured the airfield ten miles outside the city. Within two days of the initial landing, a letter arrived for the division commander, Major General
Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr., later commandant of the Marine Corps. It was from the Communist commander in Shandong, and it proposed cooperation in “destroying the remaining Japanese military forces and
the rest of the traitor army,” meaning the army of the Chinese puppet regime. He said that the Communists were getting ready to enter Qingdao and that he expected no resistance from the marines, who he hoped would stay out of the “open conflict” looming with government troops.

Shepherd wrote back that he wasn’t there to destroy anybody, that it was not desirable for the Communists to enter Qingdao, and that “the Sixth Marines will in no way assist any Chinese group in conflict against another.” Shortly thereafter, Shepherd stood side by side with the commander of the central government troops as the Japanese garrison, ten thousand strong, formally presented its surrender at the Qingdao racecourse, built during the days when Qingdao was a German colony.