Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (57 page)

Tang and Jiang had behaved inexcusably. But in some ways Tang’s abandonment of his men had echoes of Stilwell’s “walkout” in Burma in 1942. Stilwell was not remotely corrupt, and he could show deep concern for his men. But he was also capricious and capable of driving his men beyond reasonable limits (as he would do soon with the American troops sent to relieve Myitkyina), and letting his personal vendettas overrule his military judgment. Western and Chinese commanders alike in the China-Burma-India Theater were capable of inspired leadership, but also of conduct that demanded a court-martial: Tang and Stilwell were among those clearly capable of both.

The indictment against Tang and Jiang went on. Because the soldiers lacked supplies, they had to “borrow” grain from the farmers, and they were distracted from training by the need to find the grain and mill it. Even when they had done this, the poor quality of the grain meant that they were undernourished, and “their will to fight was exhausted.”
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The relationship between the population and the military was now utterly hollow. When the northern part of Henan fell to the Japanese, the invaders seized much of the grain that had been left in the official government granaries: the million bags of flour captured could have nourished 200,000 soldiers for five months.

Tang’s excuse—that the Henan peasants had been deceived by collaborators and were seizing the Nationalist army’s weapons—was dismissed by Guo Zhonghuai: “Everyone knows that the Henan people are loyal and brave, and even at a time of drought and famine they offered men and grain.” In fact, Tang was right. The locals had simply picked up the weapons that the Nationalist troops had abandoned when they fled, to defend themselves against the Japanese. “Even if there is an Allied victory which changes the war situation, it will still be very difficult to recover the northern provinces and the important area of Henan,” Guo admitted.
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Jiang Dingwen’s account also blamed collaborators with the enemy, who were in the “lower-level administration and police stations,” enabling them to harass the army and “mislead” the people. His report shows the breakdown in trust between the state and its population. The locals did not obey the Nationalist army orders to destroy local highways to prevent the Japanese advancing. Sometimes they even went back at night and mended roads which the army had torn up by day.
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The Nationalists were reaping the results of the dike-breaking in 1938 and the subsequent famine in Henan in 1942. The famine had not been wholly caused by governmental incompetence (although that was a significant element), and without the Japanese invasion it might not have occurred at all. But this made little difference to the farmers who had endured endless horrors and seen themselves reduced to refugee status or starvation as their crops failed and their grain was seized as tax. Now the Nationalists demanded that they contribute to the defense against the enemy once more. This time the population of Henan declined to do so.

Everett F. Drumright, one of the US embassy staff based in Xi’an (and a future ambassador to Chiang’s government on Taiwan), had sent an account of the battle to Gauss, who in turn forwarded it to the State Department. Some 60,000–70,000 Japanese troops had been met with only “token resistance,” and the First War Zone was now “shattered,” along with the reputations of Jiang Dingwen and Tang Enbo. “Chinese suffered heavy losses in men, material, and crops. Loss of wheat crop, best in years, most serious loss.” Shaanxi, the next province to the west, now lay open.
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Theodore White also observed all the features that had made the defeat in Henan such a rout—commanders absent from the field, officers using military facilities to evacuate their private property, and the seizure of oxen from the peasants—as well as the result: soldiers being disarmed by their fellow Chinese. “Within three weeks the Japanese had seized all their objectives; the railway to the south lay in their hands, and a Chinese army of 300,000 men had ceased to exist.”
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The fall of Luoyang was rapidly followed by another disaster as the Nationalist military leadership underestimated the strength of the Japanese forces that were ranged against them. At the end of May, General Xue Yue prepared, once again, to defend Changsha, the city that had suffered so grievously after Chiang’s retreat from Wuhan in October 1938. Although Xue Yue had previously held the city with great bravery, this time he was hampered by inferior numbers (his 10,000 troops had to match 30,000 Japanese), and the fact that the Japanese were already familiar with his plan to encircle them: he had used it before at Changsha.
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“His units were three years older,” was Theodore White’s verdict; “their weapons three years more worn, the soldiers three years hungrier than when they had last won glory.”
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Chiang Kai-shek placed his own judgment in serious question by refusing to send supplies to Xue Yue in Changsha, fearing that Xue was disloyal to him. General Chennault, for one, was outraged at Chiang’s behavior.
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Xue and the general in charge of the defense of the city itself, Zhang Deneng, were unable to hold the line and the city fell to the Japanese, after six years of resistance, in just three weeks, on June 18, 1944. American confidence was now as low as Chinese. It became all the more imperative that the Nationalists should be seen to fight back. On June 15 Gauss wrote of the “general gloom . . . and somewhat defeatist attitude [that] is becoming prevalent at Chungking,” adding that the fact that the Henan peasants had turned against their own troops, “due to their own deplorable condition,” had particularly harmed official morale. Just a week later, Chiang gave a downbeat speech at the Central Military Training Academy. “Everybody has adopted the mentality that the Japanese are too strong and we are too weak,” he declared. “Our current age is an age of science,” he continued, “and we must develop a spirit in accordance with it.”
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Yet the reality was a long way from the technological modernity implicit in Chiang’s words. In a later address, he too focused on the attack by the people of Henan on their own army, as had happened to the Whites in the Russian Civil War, and admitted that the retreating army had robbed, raped, and murdered. “Of course,” he mourned, “this sort of army will lose.”
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It was fortunate that Chiang, and the Americans, did not see the reaction of their supposed comrade, Mao Zedong. Soviet adviser Peter Vladimirov recorded that “the CCP leadership rejoices at the news of the defeat suffered by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Honan [Henan] and Hunan . . . His calculations are simple—whenever Chiang Kai-shek suffers a defeat, [Yan’an] benefits from it.”
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The city of Hengyang was the next probable Japanese target. Eventually, the assault through central China was likely to be accompanied by separate Japanese thrusts north of Guangzhou (Canton) and south of Wuhan, cutting a line right across the country’s heartland and leaving Free China even more isolated than before. In addition, the Nationalist war effort was once again under threat because of the toxic relationship between Chiang and Stilwell. Xue Yue now moved to Hengyang, but again Chiang refused to offer him direct assistance because of his suspicions about Xue’s loyalties. Chiang did allow a general whom he trusted, Fang Xianjue, to take part in the defense of Hengyang, supported by Chennault’s air force, and the Japanese were at first driven back from the city. But soon the Chinese supplies ran out. Chiang did not resupply the defenders, and Chennault went directly to Stilwell, begging him to send a tiny amount of support, some 1,000 tons, to the Chinese front-line troops. Stilwell vetoed the plea with three words: “Let them stew.”
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Chiang and Stilwell both acted irresponsibly. Their pique and personal prejudices led to decisions that caused the deaths of thousands of the Chinese soldiers both claimed to hold in such high regard. In the end, though, it was Chiang’s efforts and not Stilwell’s that proved decisive, as Chiang realized how important it was that the Chinese be seen to fight. Rather than flying in new supplies, he sent other armies located nearby to help defend Hengyang. The city was defended heroically but unsuccessfully, and it fell on August 8.
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In 1938 a gallant but failed defense had been sufficient to bolster Chiang’s case for support. By 1944 it was no longer enough. The Nationalists were drawing strong criticism from one figure whose confidence Chiang needed to maintain: President Roosevelt. Early in the war the Nationalists had been defeated over and over again. Yet their performance in Shanghai and then at Wuhan, even when they were eventually bested, gave the necessary impression that the government was serious about resistance. Now, the sorry defeats at Luoyang and Changsha were causing hostile murmuring in Chongqing and in Washington. General George Marshall told Roosevelt that the time had come to entrust the remaining military resources of China to an “individual capable of directing that effort in a fruitful way against the Japanese.” In Marshall’s view, only Stilwell fitted the bill. Roosevelt requested that the American be appointed as commander for all forces in China. Chiang had no option but to agree.
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Chiang was not oblivious to American attempts to encroach on his command and even his right to rule. He became convinced that Sun Fo (also known as Sun Ke) was being groomed by the Americans as a possible head of the Nationalist Party. As the son of Sun Yat-sen, Sun had an excellent pedigree for this task. His untouchable status also gave him license to advocate liberal policies that had gotten other prominent figures into trouble with Dai Li’s secret police. “Sun Ke is flapping around everywhere, using the slogan of ‘democracy’ to shake up people’s hearts,” complained Chiang. “Certain Central Government committee members are following along . . . I think a great disaster will happen.” In the following months Chiang widened the net of suspicion. “Russia is the master behind the scenes . . . [Sun] is even worse than the traitor Wang!” he wrote, adding a while later, “The US, Britain, and the Soviet Union all use Sun as a puppet . . . and the US is the worst.”
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But while American confidence in the Nationalists was fast dissipating as the Japanese smashed into central China, it was not Sun Fo to whom most of their eyes turned. (Vice President Henry Wallace, on meeting Sun in China, judged that he “does not impress one as having strength of character needed for leadership.”)
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John S. Service, the second secretary at the US Embassy in Chongqing, attached to Stilwell’s staff, reported to Gauss that the consequences of a Nationalist collapse in central China would be severe for the Chinese war effort. The loss of the rice-growing provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan, a new refugee flow, the need to support large armies on ever poorer land in western China, and the influx of Japanese puppet currency would worsen the already soaring inflation in Nationalist China. The collapse of the National Government, he concluded, “might become only a matter of time.”
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This assumption would lead Service to draw daring conclusions about the alternative to the Nationalists as future leaders of China.

In January 1944 John Paton Davies Jr., a US Foreign Service officer, had made the case that the US would be wise to make formal contacts with the Communist headquarters at Yan’an. “Only one official American observer has ever visited the ‘Communist’ area,” he noted. “That was six years ago.” Yet even from the secondhand information that the Americans had gleaned since then, Davies argued, certain points about the CCP seemed quite clear. The Communists had a major base near important Japanese military and industrial centers, and they possessed valuable intelligence on Japan. If the USSR were to enter the war, it would have to attack through areas held by the CCP. He declared that they were “the greatest single challenge in China to the Chiang Kai-shek government.” More contentiously, he suggested that they ran the “most cohesive, disciplined, and aggressively anti-Japanese regime in China” (with the implication that more active fighting was being done by the CCP than by the Nationalists), and that they might form the “foundation for a
rapprochement
between a new China and the Soviet Union.” The Communists had indicated they would be willing to receive American visitors, and the US should seize the opportunity before the Communists changed their minds, as Chiang’s blockade of Yan’an made compromise harder. Chiang, of course, would be opposed to any such approach, and “the request should come to him directly from the President, who can overcome any initial refusal by exercise of our ample bargaining power.”
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Gauss, forwarding Davies’s message to Washington, observed that Chiang’s position was under threat from several directions. For instance, there had recently been an attempted coup by young officers who wanted to revitalize the Nationalist regime. An effort to crush the CCP might provoke a civil war, particularly as some Nationalist generals, such as Hu Zongnan, stationed in the northwest, were reported to have cooperative agreements with the Communists.
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Stilwell was also convinced that the Communists must be brought more fully into the conflict and that they had an understanding of Chinese society that the Nationalists lacked. Although a Republican at home, Stilwell’s disgust at Chiang’s regime led him away from his usual political tendencies. “He can’t see that the mass of Chinese people welcome the Reds,” Stilwell wrote, “as being the only visible hope of relief from crushing taxation, the abuses of the Army, and Tai Li [Dai Li]’s Gestapo.”
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