Roosevelt (67 page)

Twenty years after the end of World War II, historians would hotly debate the questions how and when the Cold War began. Did its origins lie in British and Russian colonial rivalry in the nineteenth century? In Pan-Slavism? In Marxist or liberal ideology? In the Russian Revolution or the Allied counterrevolution? In capitalist neoimperialism? In fascist aggression? In the Nazi-Soviet Pact? In the illusions or broken promises of Yalta? Or in postwar developments?

Most of these forces or episodes doubtless had some part, but perhaps the most determining single factor was the gap between promise and reality that widened steadily during 1942 and 1943. Imperialism, nationalism, revolution, ideology—these are longstanding forces in an unstable world, and can be calculated in advance by practical men. But the striking fact about the Allied postponement of the second front, and about Soviet policy toward Poland, was the contrast between this kind of
Realpolitik
and the promises, pronouncements, and ideals of the United Nations. For a brief shining moment during World War II democratic and Communist nations were united in a euphoria of hope and idealism about how people might live in brotherhood, with common goals, sacrifices, and triumphs. But behind the facade of unity statesmen were pursuing
Realpolitik
and national interest. The resulting cynicism was the breeding ground of postwar disillusion and disunity. The second-front delay far more than any other factor aroused Soviet anger and cynicism. If the Anglo-Americans were planning to land in France in the event that Germany was winning, or in the event that Russia was winning (Operation
SLEDGE-HAMMER),
was not this evidence that the West, whatever its protestations, was following a strategy of letting Russia and Germany bleed each other to death? By mid-1943 the grand coalition was foundering in a welter of broken promises and crushed expectations.

Nowhere in the world of 1943 did the gap between fact and expectation open so wide and ominously as in China. Nowhere were military reality and Roosevelt’s hopes in greater disjunction.

Chiang’s problem was almost a caricature of Stalin’s. The Chinese, too, awaited a long-promised front—a second or third or fourth front. They, too, felt isolated from the Anglo-Americans, starved for supplies, robbed by Atlantic and Mediterranean needs, put off by promises and excuses, exploited for their vast manpower. Otherwise the Chinese scene was far more somber than the Soviet. Chiang’s three hundred divisions still held a sagging front against the Japanese. Prices were still soaring as printing presses turned out billions of fapi; the American loan seemed to have sunk without trace. The Communists, steadily consolidating their northern sectors, offered the peasants just what the Kuomintang could not: stern and demanding but honest village authority; campaigns against landlords, usurers, and other bourgeois devils; participation in local government, collectives, and militias; an ideology of equality, democracy, and freedom. By mid-1943 the Communists
controlled 150,000 square miles and about fifty million people.

Roosevelt clung to his high hopes for China’s wartime success and postwar greatness even as he stood by his priorities of Europe first, Russia second, and China third. He also knew that aiding China was popular at home. He felt, too, that “China really likes us” and he wanted to sustain the reservoir of good will. He expected China to be a great power after the war and he wanted its friendship. He was proud of his country’s record in China and of his own old-time family connections, though he himself had never been there or in any part of Asia. Hopkins said later: “The United States, through the espousal of the ‘Open Door Policy,’ has an absolutely clean record in China over the years. We must keep it so.”

Early in 1943 the President struck a blow for Chinese friendship—a blow that did not cost a single gun or bomber. On February 1 he asked the Senate to ratify a treaty surrendering extraterritorial rights in China. For decades foreigners had resided or done business in China under their own laws and courts, backed by their own gunboats and garrisons, all exempt from Chinese law and taxation. Within eleven days the Senate ratified the treaty and ended an arrangement that was humiliating to the Chinese and embarrassing to wartime America. The British government took similar steps. By their action, declared Chiang, “our Allies have declared their Pacific war aim to sustain the rule of human decency and human right….” Later in the year Roosevelt asked Congress to repeal the Chinese exclusion laws, which had harshly discriminated against Chinese immigration. “Nations, like individuals, make mistakes,” the President told Congress. “We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and to correct them.” Again the legislators acted quickly and favorably.

Roosevelt’s hopes for China were matched by fears. As the Nationalist armies fell back, rumors drifted out of Chungking of a possible separate peace with Japan. Americans in China worried about reports of a considerable trade going back and forth across the Chinese-Japanese lines. Stilwell suspected that Chiang would never pull out and was only bluffing. Roosevelt was not so sure.

Certainly the military situation by early 1943 gave little cause for optimism. Stilwell deplored the rosy picture back home of China’s effort. Its army actually was in desperate condition, he reported to Marshall, “underfed, unpaid, untrained, neglected, and rotten with corruption.” Still, the hard-bitten General had ambitious military plans for the spring of 1943. He proposed an Allied effort to recapture key areas of Burma and reopen communications from Rangoon to Kunming. British and Chinese forces in India would attack over mountain land from the west, Allied naval
forces from the Bay of Bengal to the south. Stilwell would then send thousands of tons of supplies up the Burma Road into Kunming; he would equip and modernize the Chinese armies; he would launch a new offensive to open a seaport in South China or Indochina, thereby gaining further war supply. Thus he would break the siege of China.

Stilwell had planned boldly against the enemy; his troubles lay with his friends and associates. Roosevelt was all for the plan in principle, but he was still giving top strategic priority to Europe, and Churchill was cool to any plan that would drain naval and ground strength from the Mediterranean. Chiang would support the plan only if the Anglo-Americans backed it heavily and soon; otherwise he seemed more interested in it for bargaining purposes. Stilwell’s particular nemesis was his fellow general Claire Chennault, Chiang’s air adviser and commander of the air force that was still doing valiant work against the Japanese. Chennault had all the self-confidence of the American airman. He assured the President that with 105 fighters, thirty medium bombers, and twelve heavy bombers he could destroy the Japanese Air Force and accomplish the downfall of Japan. Stilwell regarded this plan with a groundman’s skepticism, but Chiang favored it as a way of avoiding a huge ground-power commitment he feared he could not deliver.

As usual Roosevelt was caught among the contending forces. Stimson and Marshall strongly supported Stilwell; by the eve of 1943 Chiang was pressing for the Chennault plan and for at least the postponement of the Burma operation. In Congress a platoon of Senators continued to urge more help for China.

At this point the slim, elegant figure of Madame Chiang Kai-shek entered the scene. She had flown to the United States in the fall, protesting to Hopkins on arrival that she had come only for medical treatment but making clear in the same breath that she opposed Europe First, disesteemed Stilwell, liked Chennault, and was suspicious of the Anglos if not of the Americans. By February 1943 she was recovered and in Washington, where she talked with Roosevelt for hours, discreetly lobbied with aides and officials, won a standing ovation from the Senate and shouts of approval from the House. Presented to 172 reporters by Roosevelt with the air of a benevolent uncle, she beguiled the press even as she subtly urged more help for China.

She was an appealing figure in her long black dress, tiny, open-toed pumps, and minute splashes of jade and sequin. She knew how to mix gentle flattery with high strategy. She told Stimson that he had beautiful hands, putting the old man on his guard. Roosevelt was less resistant. He liked to tell friends—in a jocular
way but with what Frances Perkins felt was more than a shade of pleasure—how he had asked Madame her impressions of Wendell Willkie in China.

“Oh, he is very charming,” she answered.

“Ah, yes, but what did you
really
think?”

“Well, Mr. President, he is an adolescent, after all.”

The President could not resist the opening.

“Well, Madame Chiang, so you think Wendell Willkie is an adolescent—what do you think I am?”

“Ah, Mr. President, you are sophisticated.”

Madame’s visit was perfectly timed, for in late February Roosevelt was facing a crucial choice between the Stimson-Marshall-Stilwell plan for Burma and the Chiang-Chennault plan for air attack. The President, on the advice of Hopkins and Currie, chose the latter. Once again the personal factor weighed heavily in the scales. Roosevelt knew that Stilwell hated Chiang, though even the President could hardly know the extent of the General’s contempt for the Generalissimo, which went to the point of referring to him privately as “Peanut.” He felt that Stilwell was taking exactly the wrong approach to Chiang.

“All of us must remember,” Roosevelt told Marshall, “that the Generalissimo came up the hard way to become the undisputed leader of four hundred million people—an enormously difficult job to attain any kind of unity from a diverse group of all kinds of leaders—military men, educators, scientists, public health people, engineers, all of them struggling for power and mastery, local or national, and to create in a very short time throughout China what it took us a couple of centuries to attain.

“Besides that the Generalissimo finds it necessary to maintain his position of supremacy. You and I would do the same thing under the circumstances. He is the Chief Executive as well as the Commander-in-Chief, and one cannot speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.” Roosevelt must have sensed that he was overriding the weight of army opinion in stressing in this letter that priority must be given to Chennault’s efforts, for he concluded:

“Just between ourselves, if I had not considered the European and African fields of action in their broadest geographic sense, you and I know we would not be in North Africa today—in fact, we would not have landed either in Africa or in Europe!”

Marshall warned his chief that the Chennault tactic was risky. Just as soon as the air assault began to hurt the Japanese, they would attack the air bases and thus there would be a ground battle anyway. But the President wanted to give Chennault a clear chance. He was much impressed by the airman’s proposed strategy.
He wanted to respond to Chiang and to Madame. Above all, his strategy of Europe First would not allow much war aid to China in any event, and an attack by air might bring victory cheaply.

The President’s disapproval of Stilwell’s battle tactics reflected a fundamental difference between the Commander in Chief and the General. Despite his sympathies for the Chinese people, especially the peasants and soldiers, Stilwell advocated a hard-boiled,
quid pro quo
approach to the Kuomintang. Bargaining, pressuring, prodding were the only tactics to use with Chungking. “For everything we do
for
him”—Chiang—“we should exact a commitment
from
him,” he wrote to Marshall. If “Peanut” threatened to make a separate peace, call his bluff.

Roosevelt could not allow himself the simplicity of one set tactic. He was following his usual multichanneled approach to a number of goals. He wanted to keep China in the war. He wanted Chiang to cultivate political and economic democracy. He wanted to prepare China for a major postwar role, so that it would become a member of the highest council of world organization and help rally Asians to the new world partnership. He wanted the good will of the Chinese people. And despite his Europe First priority, he wanted to win as quickly as possible in Asia.

Above all, Roosevelt saw China as the kingpin in an Asiatic structure of newly independent and self-governing nations and hence as the supreme example and test of his strategy of freedom. On few points had he been more consistent during the past twenty-five years than on the evil of colonialism. Something of an imperialist in Wilsonian days, he had shifted in the mid-1920’s to a more generous and less interventionist policy toward Latin America. As President he had shaped and articulated the Good Neighbor policy, asked Congress to grant Puerto Rico the greatest possible measure of self-government, and advocated legislation that finally became the Philippine Independence Act of 1934.

The American record in the Philippines seemed to Roosevelt, indeed, as proof of his and his nation’s commitment to freedom for all peoples. In a radio talk on the seventh anniversary, Novem- 15, 1942, of the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth government, he reminded Americans of the more than thirty years of United States sovereignty, the granting of more and more local self-government, the establishment of a commonwealth with its own constitution, and the plan under way at the time of Pearl Harbor for complete independence in 1946.

“I like to think that the history of the Philippine Islands in the last 44 years provides in a very real sense a pattern for the future…a pattern of a global civilization which recognizes no
limitations of religion, or of creed, or of race.” Roosevelt was surprised that the columnists did not make more of the obvious implications of this for his allies. He lost few opportunities to criticize colonial practices. He told reporters after Casablanca that he had seen different types of colonization in West Africa. “It hasn’t been good.”

And now, after years of Japanese occupation, the overwhelming number of Filipinos were remaining loyal to the American idea of freedom. Tokyo maintained a strenuous propaganda effort. Quezon warned Stimson that Premier Tojo had visited the Philippines three times, had taken large delegations of Filipinos to Japan, and was offering complete independence. The OWI, working in close collaboration with the Philippine Commonwealth offices in Washington, kept up a counterpropaganda effort, with heavy emphasis on the certainty of Allied victory and hence of liberation and full self-government.