Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (41 page)

In the early morning of December 7, 1941, the US Pacific Fleet was anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Two waves of Japanese bomber aircraft, launched from six aircraft carriers, attacked the vessels and their sleeping crews, destroying the battleship
Arizona
outright and damaging seventeen others, as well as most of the military aircraft parked nearby. Some 2,400 Americans died, and another 1,100 were wounded. Within a day Japanese invasion forces had attacked Siam (then an independent state), Malaya, and the Philippines.

Chiang Kai-shek heard the news at one o’clock in the morning and immediately dictated a letter of support to President Roosevelt, pledging commitment to a new “common battle.”
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The news reached Zhou Fohai in Shanghai as well. On December 8 (across the international date line from Hawaii) he had heard the sounds of firing as the Japanese took over the rest of the city, and then received reports that Japan had declared war on the Western powers. “I heard they’d bombed Honolulu, Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong,” he wrote. He also observed mournfully: “From now on, the Pacific becomes a killing ground.”
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PART IV

THE POISONED ALLIANCE

Chapter 13

Destination Burma

S
INCE THAT TERRIBLE DAY
in December 1941, they had been captives. Spring had come to Guangdong province, but the new season left missionary doctor Velva V. Brown and her American colleagues still in limbo, trapped in the city of Shantou (Swatow), on the south coast of China.

Brown had been stationed in China since 1923. The outbreak of war in 1937 had affected Shantou, particularly when Japanese bombs hit the city, but after the initial shock the majority of Americans stayed on. “Business as usual is our motto,” declared Brown to her family at home, as she struggled to keep the hospital going in the face of invasion and upheaval.
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But four years later, as the autumn of 1941 drew on, it became evident to all Americans in China that their protected status might not last. The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society sent out a cablegram on November 15 declaring “in view of increasingly critical developments we advise and urge that all women of mission, all men who are near retiring age or not in good health should return to United States . . . by first available passage.”
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On December 7 in China (December 6 in the United States) Brown and other missionaries huddled around the radio in the mission house, waiting for news from the last-ditch talks in Washington, DC, between Cordell Hull and the Japanese representatives, Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburô and special envoy Kurusu Saburô. (In Washington, Cordell Hull had little hope that peace could be negotiated, but wanted to seize the “one chance out of a hundred” that the two sides could avoid war. Hull reported that after a final, almost silent visit to his office, the two Japanese envoys “turned without a word and walked out, their heads down.”)
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Then, at 4:00 p.m. the next day, the Mission sent a message speaking of “the staggering news of the Japanese attack on Hawaii.”
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Their missionaries were caught behind what had suddenly become enemy lines. At home, President Roosevelt condemned the attack as a “date which will live in infamy.” “Next morning word came to us that war had been declared,” Brown wrote.
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Later that day, Japanese military police began the process of rounding up foreigners.

Until December 8, 1941, the war in China had been a distant concern for the Americans and the British, distracted at home by the Depression and then the war in Europe. For the many Westerners who remained in China after 1937, the war was an everyday reality, but their protected status as foreign neutrals always gave them some measure of distance as well as protection, particularly for those who remained in the zones controlled by the Japanese. Now, though, they were enemy aliens. All across eastern China, Americans and Britons were rounded up and interned. The International Settlement of Shanghai, for so long an oasis of neutrality in the midst of a war-torn city, was now reunified under Japanese control. In that city thousands of foreigners with Allied nationality were sent to holding camps. For some, this harsh environment would be home until the end of the war, if they survived at all. An eleven-year-old British boy, Jim Ballard, would become a teenager in Longhua, a holding camp of some 2,000 people; as the novelist J. G. Ballard, forty years later he would tell a semi-autobiographical version of his story in
Empire of the Sun
, detailing the hunger, cold, and disease which were the everyday fate of Longhua’s residents. While they could not know what had happened to their fellow Westerners in Shanghai, Velva Brown and her friends in Shantou were rightly nervous of what might become of them. The Japanese did not treat the missionaries too harshly, but the period of waiting stretched for weeks, then months, during which the balance of power in Asia changed with frightening speed.

The prisoners had plenty of time to reflect. For decades Americans had set off in thousands to China. Many came, like Velva Brown, as doctors, missionaries, and teachers. The novelist Pearl Buck lived for years through China’s revolution and journey toward modernization, and became one of the best-known interpreters of China to an American audience. Henry Luce was born in China, the son of missionary parents. As owner of
Time
, America’s most influential newsmagazine, his strong partisanship toward Chiang Kai-shek meant a powerful boost in the US for the Chinese wartime effort. Yet despite the many advantages that it had brought to China, the American presence was ultimately an imperial one, just as much as the British or French. Americans had also been prominent in the opium trade and enjoyed privileges of legal immunity in China. At 7:48 a.m. on December 7, 1941, with the destruction of US naval vessels in a Hawaiian harbor, that world disappeared.

News finally came for Brown and her friends on April 4. They were lucky. They would be evacuated as part of a wider US-Japanese exchange, which would also cover prominent figures such as Ambassador Nomura in Washington and the US ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew. “One of the most heart-breaking things about leaving,” wrote Brown, “was the dismissing of my staff, and especially old servants, many of whom had been with us for fifteen or twenty years.” The mission staff were told to pack their belongings in no more than three suitcases. While the old order prepared to leave, the new order rolled in; as the Americans packed their bags, Japanese and Taiwanese picnickers came “sightseeing” to decide “which house they might want to live in.”
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For a century the Americans had been part of an imperial presence in China that had sometimes been benevolent, sometimes violent, but always under the ultimate control of the West. Now a new empire had come to take its place.

The journey home was awkward. Among the company were the American and British consuls who had been based in Shantou, along with merchants and missionaries, but there was no concession to status: all were given “bed-sized strips of Chinese matting which we spread side by side . . . on the iron floor of the hold,” Velva Brown wrote.
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Most of the travelers had to scramble to make the padding comfortable on the hard overlapping metal plates. It was nothing like the appalling journeys that the Chinese refugees had to make in 1937 as they fled the Japanese advance. But it must have felt humiliating, and very final.

Thousands of miles away, in Washington, DC, a newly promoted lieutenant general in the US Army was about to receive orders that would start a very different American relationship with China. That encounter would last only four years, but the aftermath of his tenure would shape Chinese-American relations for more than half a century. Chiang Kai-shek would gain what he had craved for so long: a seat at the top table of global decision-making, with China treated, at least in name, as an equal partner. Within a few weeks of Pearl Harbor, Chiang would show his value to the new alliance by setting an example to other Asian leaders who, like him, could boast anti-imperialist credentials. Chiang would visit India and speak to the leaders of their independence struggle as an ally and friend, a fellow non-European. Then he would join the Allies in their first joint campaign, not in China, but in the jungles of neighboring Burma. Yet the price he would pay for China’s entry, at long last, into the alliance, would be a heavy one. Chiang desperately needed his new partners, but accepting this alliance would unleash forces that would threaten the very basis of his rule. The complexities of that bargain would be most visible in the four-year duel between Chiang and that American general: Joseph Warren Stilwell.

From the very earliest days, it was clear that the new Allies were wary of one another. The rhetoric was highly positive, of course. On New Year’s Day of 1942, Chiang spoke to the nation about the new reality. He declared that the Allies were striving to protect civilization in the face of Axis barbarity. China’s hope, during its years of desperate resistance, had been that another great power would enter the conflict on its side. Now there were two, the United States and the British Empire. Chiang also knew that he must use this opportunity to correct the wrongs that had been done to China over the past century, not just by Japan, but by the very countries that had now come to China’s aid. The aim was not just complete victory in the War of Resistance but also to use Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles, to “guarantee our nation’s eternal independence and survival.”
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Chiang was diplomatic as he set down his goals in public. In his diary he was more frank and ambivalent about the new alliance. As he reflected on the month of December 1941, Chiang recorded details of the conversation that his ambassador to the US, the scholar (and former strong critic of the Nationalists), Hu Shi, had had with Roosevelt: the president had asked that China should show sympathy, but not celebrate noisily (presumably the American leader was still nervous about how the new alliance would go down at home and might not relish his voters seeing overly jubilant crowds in Chongqing). Of course the Chinese would not celebrate, Chiang wrote. Even this request showed “the contempt that the Americans and British hold for us. Even Roosevelt can’t get out of these old attitudes. Such a pity.”
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Just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, as it became clear that China would have to bow to US and British priorities when it came to providing military supplies, Chiang wrote (at the first Three-Power conference) that China had been “shamed” by the way that she was treated by the Americans and the British.
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Although Roosevelt had disappointed Chiang, it was the other ally, the British, who bore the brunt of his criticism. “The British don’t take us seriously,” Chiang wrote, adding, “The next generation should understand the difficulty of building the country up from its past shame.” It was not just Japan that he considered to be the source of China’s troubles, and he had no intention of forgetting Britain’s long record of imperialism in China. On December 15, just a week after Pearl Harbor, Chiang noted:

I can’t describe how humble the attitude of the British ambassador [Sir Archibald Clark Kerr] and his military attaché was . . . But their greed, and their search for a small profit while avoiding the big questions is the same as ever. This is the real character of the British; I wouldn’t have imagined this in normal times of this bold Saxon race.
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Two days later, he added, with honest ambiguity: “I despise them, but I also respect them.”
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Chiang also laid down the list of demands to the British that he would make in exchange for participation in the war: the return of Kowloon in Hong Kong, the return of control over Tibet (where the British exercised influence), as well as the return of Outer Mongolia and Xinjiang from Soviet control (the region, under warlord Sheng Shicai, was at that point essentially a satellite of the USSR), and the recognition of Manchuria as China’s sovereign territory.
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The British also noted the change in Chinese attitude; their British military attaché in Chongqing declared that the Chinese had “reached a pitch of arrogance and conceit that is unbelievable.”
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Informed American observers also became more wary about the regime they were supporting. Three years earlier, Ambassador Nelson Johnson had declared his confidence that the Nationalists were sincere in their war efforts and permitted a more pluralistic political culture than might have been expected. Now, Johnson’s successor Clarence Gauss, who took on the post in 1941, sounded a more cautious note. When Secretary of State Cordell Hull asked whether there was any danger that China might abandon the war, Gauss dismissed that particular fear, but noted that “the Party has for years given lip service to reform and improvement but little of tangible character has been accomplished.”
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The problem was that the Chinese and the Westerners looked at China’s role through almost entirely different lenses. To the Western Allies, China was a supplicant, a battered nation on its knees, waiting for the Americans and British to save it from certain destruction at the hands of the Japanese. In Chiang’s view and that of many Chinese, their country was the first and most consistent foe of Axis aggression. Despite numerous opportunities to withdraw from the conflict, China had fought on when the prospects of outside assistance seemed hopeless, and it now deserved to be treated as an equal power. The United States maintained a more openly friendly attitude toward its Chinese allies than did the British, too many of whom veered between affable detachment and contempt, although some were sympathetic. Yet Chinese requests for a presence on the joint Allied boards and committees, or for a joint ABCD (American-British-Chinese-Dutch) military staff based in Chongqing, were not taken up.
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This was in part because of justified fears that the Chinese headquarters would leak intelligence, but overall neither the British nor the Americans treated Chiang as a true equal, nor China as a theater of primary significance. (In contrast, the Soviet Union was hardly an entirely trustworthy ally either for the US or Britain, but its bargaining power and importance meant that they were obliged to treat it as a full strategic and intelligence partner on most key issues.) The Western Allies were at odds about the best way to prosecute the war, and within the US military leadership there were calls from the Navy for the Pacific, not Europe, to be the first priority. General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the United States Army, weighed all the options, but ultimately favored a Europe First strategy.
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Both sides’ views contained elements of self-deception: the British and Americans wished to give the impression that China was a serious ally without actually putting much effort into the relationship, while Chiang overestimated what he was worth to the Western Allies.