Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (42 page)

But Chiang’s view was hardly irrational. The US knew that if China fell, then the more than 600,000 Japanese troops held down there by Nationalist and Communist forces could be redeployed to the Pacific Theater. Therefore, at the very least it became imperative to “keep China in the war.”
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In January 1942 Chiang requested a loan of $500 million from the United States. Gauss and the US treasury secretary were wary of the request, justifiably fearing that significant portions would be skimmed off the top by corrupt elements in the government.
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But American censoriousness about Chiang’s demands distracted attention from the fact that, compared to the rest of the Allied war effort, the amounts being assigned to China were very small. (In 1941 and 1942 the total proportion of US Lend-Lease aid to China was around 1.5 percent of the total, dropping to 0.5 percent in 1943 and 1944, and would rise to 4 percent only in 1945.)
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Despite the misgivings of American officials, the loan was passed by the House of Representatives on February 3, 1942.

Yet if they had cared to notice, the spring of 1942 showed Chiang’s critics how useful he could be. Chiang had authority in at least one area where his Western counterparts were compromised: his unwavering anti-imperialism. This would become particularly important as the newly begun war in Asia threatened the prize possession of the British Empire, the subcontinent of India. Axis planners had expressed covetous and ambitious plans to create a pincer that would attack from the Middle East and East Asia, capturing the Indian Empire with its manpower and rich resources. It was vital that no such plan ever came to fruition, but there was genuine fear that the turbulent state of domestic Indian politics might make it more likely.

India’s capital was indeed at war, but New Delhi looked very different from the rubble-strewn, jerry-built temporary capital at Chongqing. Three decades before, Sir Edwin Lutyens had created a gleaming new city in white marble that was supposed to be fit for a raj and that would last many centuries. Yet even as it was erected, the British had had to engage with a growing Indian independence movement pressing for swift political change. Winston Churchill had been one of the most diehard opponents of handing over power to the Indians, but his views looked old-fashioned by the 1930s and helped to isolate him within his own Conservative Party. During that decade, although the British viceroy remained supreme, significant amounts of executive power had been handed over to elected constitutional assemblies of Indians. Yet in 1939 the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had committed India to the war effort against Germany without consulting the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the major secular pro-independence movement in India. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, along with the movement’s other prominent leaders, were furious. Like Churchill, Linlithgow was an opponent of swift transfer of power to the Indians, and this gesture seemed a calculated snub. Most of the Indian National Congress leaders had declared their support for the struggle against fascism (the major exception being the former Congress Party president Subhas Chandra Bose, who left India for Germany in January 1941 and ultimately led the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army). By early 1942, however, Nehru and Gandhi were increasingly concerned that Indian political and military backing for the British cause was not being translated into a concrete timetable for independence. Relations between the British and Congress became fraught, particularly after the outbreak of war in Asia in December 1941.
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The connection with India was of vital importance to the survival of Chiang’s government. One of the consequences of war between Japan and the British Empire was that the Burma Road might well close. Chiang had had a foretaste of what this meant when Churchill’s government had shut it for three months under Japanese pressure in the summer of 1940, but at the end of that year it was still supplying China with some 20,000 tons of goods per month.
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With the loss of those supplies, the airlift of material over the Burma “Hump” from India became ever more important, and Chiang was increasingly concerned that the British hold on India should not be weakened before Japan had been defeated. Chiang proposed a visit to India to meet the Congress leaders. The idea outraged Churchill, but it was eventually arranged thanks to the intervention of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador in Chongqing.

Chiang had not been overseas since his visit to the Soviet Union as a young officer, nearly twenty years previously. When he arrived in the Indian capital, it was the center of a massive effort by the British Empire to use its largest colony as a bulwark against a Japanese invasion. The size of the Indian Army had been increased tenfold. Yet the city was also tense; the ineptness of the British authorities’ declaration of war on India’s behalf still made the political atmosphere explosive.
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In Delhi, on February 11, 1942, Chiang met Nehru, as well as Maulana Azad, the chair of the Congress and one of the Muslim leaders opposed to the separation of the country into the two states of India and Pakistan, as Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League advocated. Chiang felt that he and Nehru had hit it off, which is unsurprising. Nehru had visited China in 1939 and had several positive meetings with Chiang. Although Nehru’s background and temperament made him a democrat in a way that was never natural for Chiang, the two leaders were both secular and inclined to find pragmatic compromises even while holding fast to their anti-imperialist goals. Nonetheless, Chiang took advantage of his senior status to lecture the Indians. “Based on my revolutionary experience,” Chiang recorded, he told the two pro-independence leaders that they “should
not
make mistakes in procedures or strategy.” Chiang had sympathy for the Indian nationalist cause, and no love for Churchill or the British. But he was concerned that Gandhi and Nehru’s opposition to the British presence in India might weaken the Allied war effort. (In fact, Nehru and Gandhi had different positions: Nehru advocated resistance to Japan, but autonomously from the British effort, whereas Gandhi took a much stronger position of nonviolent resistance.)
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“The extreme nature of their attitude surprises me,” Chiang wrote. He was much less enthusiastic about Jinnah, whom he also met, calling him “dishonest” and writing that “the British make use of people like this—but it’s not true that Hindus and Muslims can’t get on,” and suggesting that “truly patriotic Muslims” should stick to Gandhi and the Congress.
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Chiang was leader of a country that had been splitting itself into fragments for much of the twentieth century; no wonder he looked coolly on an Indian politician who advocated separatism.

The visit soon ran into a diplomatic storm. Churchill was adamant that Chiang, a national leader, should not visit Gandhi at his home at Wardha, near Bombay, as if the latter were a dignitary in his own right. Instead, Gandhi should make his way to New Delhi. Chiang was furious. Chiang received repeated late-night messages from the British authorities ordering him not to visit Gandhi. He refused to reply.

At midnight on February 15, Chiang received a message from Gandhi himself, which moved him deeply. “To lose one’s country is a painful loss of freedom,” reflected Chiang. “I summoned Ambassador Clark Kerr and told him that before I leave India, I have to meet Gandhi.”
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Eventually, it was agreed that Chiang and Gandhi should meet at Santiniketan, the university near Calcutta founded by the Nobel laureate poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore.

On February 18 Chiang and Gandhi talked for some five hours, with Song Meiling interpreting. Gandhi told Chiang that he was sympathetic to the War of Resistance, and he would not obstruct British assistance to China. However, Chiang also tried to float the idea of mutual cooperation—in other words, supporting a more active Indian role in the war. Gandhi did not reply directly, but stated that Chiang “should not force him to change his principles,” and then used his long-favored technique of ending an awkward conversation by turning to his spinning wheel, on which he made plain
khadi
cloth. The next day Chiang wrote of his frustration:

After meeting Gandhi yesterday, I’m disappointed. My expectations were too great, but perhaps the pain of being ruled by the British has hardened his heart . . . he knows and loves only India, and doesn’t care about other places and people . . . Traditional Indian philosophy has made him this way. He only knows how to endure pain, and has no zeal—this is not the spirit of a revolutionary leader. I judge that the Indian revolution will not easily succeed.
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Gandhi also realized that the two had reached an impasse. “I would not say that I learnt anything,” he wrote to his colleague Vallabhai Patel, “and there was nothing that we could teach him.”
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Song Meiling later told Nehru that she was pessimistic that Gandhi’s approach would bring about Indian freedom, greatly upsetting the Congress leader. Chiang’s assessment of Gandhi was not fair: he was an internationalist whose lifelong struggle had started in South Africa, not India, and his distinctive nonviolent philosophy of resistance owed much to thinkers such as Tolstoy as well as to traditional Indian thought. But Chiang was right to see a fundamental disconnect between their aims. Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence made little sense to a leader shaped by the warlord conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s, and while Chiang did not live a personally extravagant lifestyle, the extreme simplicity that Gandhi advocated was a long way from Song Meiling’s opulent tastes.

In his parting speech on February 21, 1942, the last day of his visit in India and broadcast from Calcutta by Song Meiling in English, Chiang’s words were bold. He reminded his listeners about the Nanjing massacre, implying that they should not place their anti-imperialist hopes in the Japanese, and warning that if the Allies lost, then “world civilization may be set back over a hundred years.” But he also made an explicit link between China’s freedom and that of India, and warned the British that they should give real power to India ahead of demands from Indians themselves.
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(Churchill once again was furious, of course.)

In his diary Chiang reflected on the two dynamics that had shaped his visit to India. “In my farewell statement,” he wrote, “I completely supported the liberation of India. The British may not understand this, but I deeply believe it may be of advantage to Britain.” He noted that Nehru had complained of the contradictions in Chiang’s attitude to India, supporting independence but also requesting that it throw its lot in with the British war effort; Chiang had replied that all politics was confusing, and if it were clearer then it would be “philosophy, not politics.” After all, in February 1942, the war in Asia was in its very earliest months. The Burma campaign was about to start, and Chiang could not know (any more than could Churchill or Roosevelt) whether India might fall to the Japanese. It was entirely in Chiang’s interests that the country’s most prestigious pro-independence figures should wholly endorse the war against Japan rather than merely giving it tacit assent. But Chiang’s visit to India also strengthened his view that the war was an opportunity to create a new, anti-imperialist united Asia. “Revolutionary opportunities are hard to find and easy to lose,” he chided Nehru at the final lunch they held on February 21. “This is India’s
only
good revolutionary opportunity. If we lose it, we won’t get it again.” Nehru was silent, “but seemed to understand.”
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Chiang followed up in March with another speech in which he once again urged the Indian leaders to back the Allies. He also stressed to the British that India was already supplying more soldiers than any country except China, and that a promise of swift independence would energize the country yet further.
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Anti-imperialist solidarity had its limits. A mission to India by the leftist British politician Sir Stafford Cripps in April 1942 failed to achieve any accommodation between the colonial authorities and Congress. Just a few months later, in August 1942, Nehru and Gandhi began the Quit India movement, which demanded swift independence from the British and led to the arrest of the top Congress leadership and around 100,000 other activists. Some 2.5 million Indian troops did fight for the Allies during the war, although without the explicit support of Congress.

Nonetheless, Chiang’s gesture in visiting India was important. In an era when non-Western people around the world were seeking freedom, it was still a rarity for leaders of independence movements to be visited by the head of a sovereign non-European nation. No other Allied leader could have met Nehru or Gandhi with the same credibility. Chiang was privately disappointed that he had been unable to persuade the Congress leaders to back the war effort fully. In this, his agenda was no different from that of Churchill or Roosevelt, although the British leader, at least, failed to realize or acknowledge that. Had the British authorities backed Chiang more fully, the result might have been different. Above all, however, the visit marked China’s first wartime gesture as a great power, a sovereign actor in international relations.

On January 14, 1942, the United States secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, dined in Washington, DC, with a single guest: General Joseph Stilwell. The subject of their conversation was China. Stimson “thinks the Chinese will accept an American commander,” Stilwell wrote in his diary, adding that Stimson had said, “More and more, the finger of destiny is pointing at you.”
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