Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (58 page)

At first, Chiang fiercely resisted any suggestion that there should be formal contact between the US and the CCP. “It’s only reasonable that I should strongly refuse,” he wrote.
⁴⁰
However, the visit of US vice president Henry Wallace in June 1944 helped to sway him. Wallace sent a deeply gloomy report to Roosevelt about the state of Chinese resistance, condemning Chiang as surrounded by “reactionary” figures, and judging that he “showed himself so prejudiced against the Communists that there seemed little prospect of satisfactory or enduring settlement as a result of the negotiations now under way.”
⁴¹
Chiang had to give way to American pressure to make contact with the CCP.

The events of the long summer of 1944 began to induce paranoia in Chiang. “For twenty years, the Communist bandits and the Russians have been plotting against me,” he wrote. “But now the British and Americans are plotting with the Communists—this is like world imperialism ambushing me!”
⁴²
Stilwell might regard Chiang as “the Peanut,” a buffoon who was unwilling to fight. But from Chiang’s point of view, his fear of his own allies was perfectly rational. He was seeking to resist a major Japanese incursion with reduced troops at the same time that he had been pressured to support a campaign in Burma of which he did not approve. Simultaneously, his rule was also being undermined by American attempts to find other bases of power.

Yet Chiang’s great opponent was nervous too. Peter Vladimirov, Soviet adviser to the CCP in Yan’an, saw Mao on July 15. “He looked tired,” the Russian noted, observing Mao dropping cigarette ash everywhere while pacing up and down during a long nighttime conversation. “America’s position is of tremendous importance to our future,” Mao told him. Vladimirov felt that Mao was willing to try and make some sort of accommodation with the US and Britain to lessen his dependence on the Soviet Union.
⁴³

On July 22, 1944, a Douglas DC-3 aircraft came in to land on the yellow loess soil of Yan’an, bearing the United States Army Observation Group. Mao and Zhu De had come to the airfield to meet them, wearing new matching uniforms for the occasion. There was martial music, a parade of soldiers, and Vladimirov himself (in his role as correspondent for the official Soviet news agency, TASS) waiting to record the historic moment with his Leica camera. History threatened to turn into farce or even tragedy as the Douglas veered off the runway in a cloud of dust and made an abrupt stop as the propeller fell off noisily. Fortunately, there were no injuries and the party emerged unscathed.
⁴⁴

The visiting American party would become known as the “Dixie Mission,” a joking reference to Union missions behind Confederate lines during the American Civil War. The group of nine, supplemented a month later by another ten, was led by John Service, who undertook political analysis, and Colonel David Barrett, in charge of military information-gathering. Service made a particular impression on Vladimirov: “young, full of bounce, and has a good retentive memory.” Service made good use of those qualities as he traveled throughout the area, asking endless questions.
⁴⁵
Service’s reports were sent back to Chongqing, where Gauss passed them on to Washington. It was all new, for little was known about the reality of Yan’an. From the discomfort of the caves to the terror of Rectification, the politics of the Communist base lay behind a veil of secrecy, in sharp contrast to the fierce light that shone on the decay in Chongqing. Service observed that he was at pains not to be taken in by the “spell of the Chinese Communists.” Nonetheless, the first impressions of the Observation Group were immensely positive, with a universal sense that they had “come into a different country and are meeting a different people.” The differences between Yan’an and the Nationalist areas were obvious at every level. “Bodyguards, gendarmes and the clap-trap of Chungking officialdom are . . . completely lacking,” Service wrote. “Mao and the other leaders are universally spoken of with respect . . . but these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking.” Also impressive were the simplicity of life and clothing, and the lack of beggars and desperate poverty. Service also noticed the similarity in clothes and manners, at least ostensibly, between men and women. He even remarked on the absence of the “spooning couples seen in parks or quiet streets in Chungking,” echoing the activist who had commented that “Yan’an was really not a sexy town.”
⁴⁶

Service also noticed many of the other social changes the Communists had fostered: the stress on peasant art forms such as folk dancing, for example, a product of Mao’s demand in 1942 for art and culture to find more points of connection with the culture of the peasantry.
⁴⁷
Service also reported a lack of censorship, and a sense of freedom. “Morale is very high,” he wrote. “The war seems close and real. There is no defeatism, but rather confidence.”
⁴⁸
“To the casual eye there are no police in Yenan,” he observed. Over the months, Service attempted to get some measure of the Communist leaders and their system. He described them as having a “lack of striking individuality” but giving an overall impression of youth and vigor, as well as pragmatism. “The test of everything,” he suggested, “was whether it works—in China.” He did observe that there was a certain “uniformity” in their way of thought.
⁴⁹
But in general, the assessments of Service praised Mao’s achievements and contrasted them unfavorably with Chiang’s. The views of Service differed strongly from Vladimirov’s, who wrote that anti-Nationalist propaganda and the Rectification movements had led to an “oppressive, suffocating atmosphere in the party”: people “abandoned any initiative” in their haste to “redeem themselves from their nonexistent sins.”
⁵⁰

On July 26, Service was seated next to Mao at a banquet given in honor of the American visitors. The Communist leader asked Service whether there was any prospect of an American consulate being set up at Yan’an. Service spoke diplomatically of the obstacles to such a plan, but Mao stressed that if the Americans left immediately on cessation of the war with Japan, then it would be at “just the time of greatest danger of a Kuomintang attack and civil war.”
⁵¹

In the Cold War years, Service, Barrett, and the other Americans involved with the Dixie Mission would find themselves in deep trouble as political warmth between the US and China turned to icy enmity, poisoned by the politically barbed and misleading question of “Who lost China?” Their defenders argued that there had been a realistic hope of cooperation between the United States and Mao’s party. Those who attacked them argued that they had become dupes of a Communist campaign of deception.

Neither interpretation seems convincing. Service and his colleagues were right to argue that the Communist areas had better-disciplined troops and that their policies were more economically just than those in the Nationalist zone, because this was demonstrably true. In particular, the successful implementation of tax reform marked a real socioeconomic change that the Nationalists had never managed, and was to the Communists’ credit. But despite their close observation, Service’s group were not comparing like with like: their long years and inside knowledge of the Nationalist areas were being contrasted with a short and selective visit to Yan’an. After years of close-up experience of Chongqing, with its “reek of corruption,” and knowledge of horrors such as the famine in Henan, it was not surprising that they found the Communist areas much more impressive.
⁵²
Their view of the Communist presence was overly rosy, but the brutality of the Rectification movements does not in itself invalidate their views: it is possible for a regime to be repressive and genuinely popular among its own people at the same time. Yet Service’s group also underestimated the advantage that Mao gained by avoiding the massive air raids and refugee flight that had hampered the Chongqing regime from the start of the war. Furthermore, they were not privy to intraparty discussions that made it clear Mao would never genuinely entertain an alliance with Washington.
⁵³
His ideological alignments were toward Stalin and toward a radical, violent, indigenous revolution.

Nor did Service’s group acknowledge the extent to which Western and particularly American action and inaction were responsible for the decayed and flawed state of Chiang’s regime. The years of isolation, and the acceptance of an alliance that placed China far down the list of Allied priorities, put Chiang in an impossible position. Just at the time that Service and Barrett were visiting Yan’an, Nationalist armies were attempting to hold the line at Hengyang, at the same time that some of their best troops were following Stilwell on his quixotic journey into Burma. Gauss, who was much less starry-eyed about the CCP than Stilwell and Service were, passed on Service’s enthusiastic accounts faithfully to Washington, but added a rider in which he cautioned against taking the CCP’s assessment of its own contributions too literally. “Recent Chinese Communist claims of military achievements against Japan seem to have been exaggerated,” Gauss cautioned. He acknowledged that the Communists had “unquestionably” set up valuable sites of resistance in north China, and also contained “some” Japanese troops in north and central China:

They appear to have avoided meeting the Japanese in frontal clashes, confining themselves in the main to occasional attacks against small elements of the enemy. In reviewing the battles of the past seven years in China, it would seem safe to say that Communist participation has been on a relatively minor scale. The Communist[s] have fought no battles comparable in scope and intensity to those of the Shanghai, Hsuchow [Xuzhou], Hankow [Wuhan], and Changsha campaigns; and their claims to the contrary notwithstanding, they appear to have contained but a minor proportion of the Japanese military forces operating in China.
⁵⁴

A minor proportion, that is, in comparison to the Nationalists. Gauss was no admirer of Chiang, but he could see that the CCP was not the magic key that could transform the worsening war situation in China. In Yan’an, Vladimirov, who could see the CCP close up, agreed. “The Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army have actually folded up military operations since 1941,” he stated flatly in his report to Moscow.
⁵⁵

While central China continued to collapse, the campaign in Burma ground on. Huang Yaowu had no doubt that death could come to him and his friends at any moment. One of Huang’s comrades suffered from night blindness; he disappeared at night in the forest and was never seen again. Huang’s commander, knowing that his men were in unfamiliar territory, gave orders on setting up camp: first array machine guns, then set up defense works, and only then set up shelter. The bedding was often elementary, as soldiers simply threw down sheets and blankets between trees. The enemy threat was present and real. One night skirmish saw 100 Japanese dead, but 30 Allied troops were also killed. One of the dead was an American liaison officer. He had used his parachute as a makeshift tent, but in doing so had made himself a particularly visible target.
⁵⁶

The siege of Myitkyina in northeast Burma showed no signs of ending. Stilwell might have used British troops to relieve the siege, but his mind was still on public relations and he insisted that American troops must retake the city. Stilwell’s troops included the crack unit known as Merrill’s Marauders, which had been supplemented with Chinese and native Burmese troops, but they had already been seriously reduced in number as they fought their way across the mountains. By the time they reached Myitkyina, many of them were extremely ill, and the siege cut them off from supplies. Mountbatten was outraged at Stilwell’s willingness to sacrifice his men and once again tried to have him recalled.
⁵⁷
Stilwell’s diaries show concern at the pounding his men were taking, and he had generous words for the Chinese soldiers (the “pings” as he called them, using the normal—and perfectly respectful—Chinese word for “soldier”) who had tracked down and liquidated Japanese soldiers attempting to enter the town. But he also found time to complain about an edition of the
Saturday Evening Post
that had been flown in. “The one man of genius in Asia is Chennault,” he fumed ironically, referring to the paper’s judgment on his great rival; Stilwell was “just a dumb bastard” (Stilwell’s words, not those of the
Post
). Even in the midst of a hellish siege, Stilwell was concerned about his press.
⁵⁸
He also found time to vent his scorn at Mountbatten, writing that “he had the nerve to make a speech at our headquarters but he don’t fool our GIs much. They are getting a look at the British Empah with its pants down and the aspect is not so pretty.”
⁵⁹

Yet in that same week it was the British troops so despised by Stilwell who turned the tide in Burma with a hard-won victory at Imphal on June 22. Lieutenant General Slim’s armies were known for their pitiless treatment of any Japanese they might find in their advance: the enemy was to be killed, not captured. Some 80,000 Japanese died during the recapture of Burma.
⁶⁰
Stilwell’s troops, American, Chinese, and Kachin, advanced from the north, inflicting further destruction on the Japanese. By August 3 they knew that they were beaten. The monsoon was coming, and they retreated, leaving Myitkyina to Stilwell’s men. Of those troops who had started out with Stilwell, during the three months of the siege, four out of every five had been wounded or died.
⁶¹