The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (35 page)

Yet Chiang had little sense of his own vulnerability. Now, with the Japanese defeated, he still believed he held the whip hand over the Americans, prepared as he was to fight that country’s newest enemy, the Communists. Typically, T.V. Soong, probably the most powerful (and richest) man in the government, was openly contemptuous of the Americans. He went around Nanjing telling Chinese colleagues not to worry about them. “I can take care of these boobs,” he said. Certainly, the Americans seemed ready to play their part as scripted by Chiang. Even as the Japanese were surrendering, the United States had managed to turn their forces into a kind of temporary constabulary, staying in place, weapons in hand, until Nationalist, not Communist, troops arrived to accept their surrender. Then the Americans helped airlift or ferry as many as five hundred thousand Nationalist troops from southwestern China to key positions around the country. (“Unquestionably the largest troop movement by air in the world’s history,” boasted General Albert Wedemeyer, who directed it as the senior American military officer in the region in the post-Stilwell era.) In a number of places in northeast China, the United States sent detachments of their own Marines in, perhaps as many as fifty thousand all told, to hold outposts until the Nationalist troops could arrive. As such, with the help of the United States, Chiang’s forces were able to accept the surrender of some 1.2 million Japanese soldiers, along with their equipment, much of it desperately coveted by the Communists.

Yet even when the civil war was apparently going well, the truth was very different. No one was more aware of this than the former American chief of staff. In October 1946, near the end of his tour as Truman’s special representative, George Marshall repeatedly warned Chiang not to go after the Communists in their bases in the north and northwest. Chiang was spreading himself much too thin and playing into Mao’s hands, Marshall argued. In addition, sensing the kind of war the Communists fought, he tried to make one basic point with the Gimo. The Communists might be retreating, but they were not surrendering. The implications were obvious: when the Nationalists were far from their base camps and supply lines, then, and only then, would the Communist forces strike. Chiang, of course, did not listen. He never did. He was pumped up on victories that were not victories, on the departure of Communist forces from projected battlefields, which was part of the larger Communist strategy. Chiang promised Marshall that he would destroy the Communists in eight to ten months, and then, having rejected all of his advice, he asked Marshall, the most
distinguished American citizen-soldier of his generation, a man exhausted and desperate for retirement, to stay on as his personal military adviser. Marshall quite emphatically said no—if he could not influence Chiang as the personal representative of the president of the United States, he knew what chance he would have on Chiang’s own payroll. (“Chiang’s confidence in me may have been unbounded, but it did not restrain him from disregarding my advice,” Marshall said years later, somewhat mordantly.)

For all of Chiang’s surface strengths, the Communists at that moment could not have been more confident. They might have been pushed back into the caves of impoverished Yenan, but they had been surprisingly successful in their guerrilla strikes against the Japanese, and even more successful in their efforts to forge a deep relationship with China’s vast peasant population. Aware of the mounting problems of the Nationalists, they were absolutely confident of their own destiny and their inevitable victory, and sooner rather than later. In America, powerful religious leaders, men of deep faith, were outraged by the possibility of their victory, but in their own very different way the Communists were men of faith, politics and war having been entwined together into what was virtually a religious fervor, a certainty on their part that they were a force of destiny. For Mao and the men around him were designing what seemed at the time a new kind of war, based initially not so much on force of arms as on gaining the support of the people.

C
HIANG HAD BARELY
waited for the world war to end before launching his offensive against the Communists, who had hoped that he would do exactly that, would come after them and extend his line of communications. American aid continued to pour in. It was as if he were following an agenda that the Communists had scripted for him. “It is all right for United States to arm the Guomindang, because as fast as they get it we will take it away from them,” a Communist representative said at the time. All told, the United States sent $2.5 billion in aid to China from the end of World War II to 1949, when Chiang fled to Taiwan. Indeed, so much military aid had been wasted and stolen during the war that some of the Americans who flew the equipment over the Hump—that is, the Himalayas—from India, an unusually dangerous supply mission given that era’s aircraft, had a cynical phrase for it all: “Uncle Chump from over the Hump.”

On paper, the Communist Army was at first comparatively small and poorly armed, but they had leadership, discipline, and grievance. They had come to their combat skills and their strategy the hard way. First there had been the Long March, the 6,000-mile, 370-day trek from southern China to Yenan that had begun in October 1934 and that, among other things, had seen the rise of Mao Zedong within the Party. Then there had been the long ordeal of struggling to survive against the Japanese during the war years, which had provided them with a form of warfare that perfectly suited their strengths and minimized their weaknesses. They had fought the Japanese with great skill, using mobile, small-unit guerrilla tactics, striking only when they had overwhelming numerical strength and vanishing when the enemy units were larger and stronger. Now, pursued by larger, better-armed Nationalist forces, they made comparable adjustments on what was a changing battlefield, a battlefield they redesigned to suit their purposes, rather than those of their enemy. They would not hold cities, and they would not fight a stationary war; they would operate out of bases that were so distant as to be almost unreachable by conventional forces. In the beginning they would seek more than anything simply
to capture weapons from the Nationalist troops. Sixty years later, when American forces would fight in Iraq against urban guerrillas, there was a new name for it—an asymmetrical war.

Despite the vulnerability of their positions in 1945, the morale of the Communists was high. It was not long before a sense of a changing military dynamic was obvious to foreign observers. John Melby, one of the younger State Department officials, noted in his diary as early as December 1945, “One of the great mysteries to me is why one group of people retains faith, whereas another from much the same origins and experience loses it. Over the years the Communists have absorbed an incredible amount of punishment, have been guilty of their own share of atrocities, and yet have retained a kind of integrity, faith in their destiny, and the will to prevail. By contrast the Guomindang has gone through astonishing tribulations, has committed its excesses, has survived a major war with unbelievable prestige, and is now throwing everything away at a frightening rate, because the revolutionary faith is gone and has been replaced by the smell of corruption and decay.”

Almost from the start the Communist tactics succeeded, while those of the Nationalists failed. In the fall of 1946, as the civil war intensified, Chiang’s American advisers were pessimistic, but being traditional military men, if anything they overestimated the value of American military gear in a war like this and underestimated how successful yet simple the Communist order of battle was. They imagined Chiang’s forces ultimately mired in another protracted struggle, eventually leading to an uneasy stalemate, perhaps with a geographic division of the country, the Communists getting the north and the Nationalists the south. They did not understand the particular dynamic of a political war like this, that the forces and the balance would not stay static. Once the dynamic no longer favored the Nationalists—and that happened with surprising speed—it would favor the Communists at an ever accelerating pace. “No one anticipated the speed and skill with which the Chinese Communists would be able to transfer their anti-Japanese guerrilla campaign into campaigns of mobile warfare,” wrote John Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker in their
Cambridge History of China.

Actually, one person had. In the days when Chiang’s forces were at their strongest and had attained some early successes, Mao had not lost his faith, nor his essential belief that his forces were infinitely closer to the average peasant than Chiang’s. In the summer of 1946, when there was a brief armistice, Robert Payne, a distinguished British historian, visited Mao in his redoubt in Yenan. Near the end of a prolonged interview, Mao, clearly tired, asked if there were any more questions. “One more,” Payne answered. “How long would it take for the Chinese Communists to conquer China if the armistice breaks
down?” “A year and a half,” Mao answered. It was said, Payne noted, slowly and with absolute conviction, and it proved surprisingly accurate. By mid-1948, the war was virtually over and Chiang’s forces were in almost complete retreat. But at the time it had seemed like the wildest of boasts.

At first there had been, on the surface at least, some apparent Nationalist victories; some cities and towns were recaptured from the Communists. But whether they were victories or not was always a question—they might have been part of a larger Communist strategy of bait and wait. The Nationalists took cities and then remained stationary; the Communists had to move constantly and were highly mobile. The Communists learned to be nimble, to move quickly at night. They perfected the art of the ambush. They used tactics “of feint and deceit that seemed to place them everywhere and nowhere,” as one American historian noted. Often they would feint a frontal assault against a Nationalist unit while keeping their main force at the rear in well-prepared positions, ready to inflict a brutal pounding on the retreating—and terrified—Nationalist troops (a tactic they would employ again with some significant success against the Americans in the early days of the Korean War). They would often strike at night, when the Nationalists were least prepared. Because of their connection with the peasants, and because their men had often infiltrated Chiang’s units, they had excellent intelligence. They seemed to know every move the Nationalists were going to make. When the Communists lost men in combat, they were able, because of their superior political skills, to recruit more quite readily from their abundant local peasant base.

By May 1947, Chiang’s offensive had ground to a halt. His poorly led forces, spread too thin, their supply lines too extended, were bottled up in cities, their morale dropping almost daily. They had become bogged down and vulnerable before their commanders even realized it. By the end of the summer of 1947, Mao and his people estimated that of his 248 brigades Chiang had committed 218 to his offensive and had already lost over 97 of them, or nearly 800,000 men. Some Americans, even back in the United States, were becoming frustrated with Chiang. “Why, if he is a generalissimo, doesn’t he generalize?” asked an angry Senator Tom Connally, the Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Communists were getting very little aid from the Russians—a source of eventual tension between Mao and Stalin. By contrast, the Nationalists had become ever more dependent on the Americans. That they were turning over American-made weapons to their enemies at what the Americans thought was an alarming rate did not seem to bother them—the solution was to ask for more. In the middle of 1947, Wellington Koo, the very well-connected, extremely supple Nationalist ambassador to Washington, dropped in on George
Marshall, by then secretary of state. The frustrated Marshall, sick of what Chiang’s armies were doing in the field, and equally sick of the political problems that men like Koo were causing for the administration in Washington, told Koo that Chiang “was the worst advised military commander in history.” That did not stop Koo from asking for more weapons. “He is losing about 40 percent of his supplies to the enemy,” Marshall told Koo and added sardonically, “If the percentage should reach 50 percent he will have to decide whether it is wise to continue to supply his troops.” Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao would later comment laconically, “was our supply officer.” When Weifang and Jinan fell in 1948, David Barr, the last American senior military adviser to Chiang’s army, added, “The Communists had more of our equipment than the Nationalists did.”

With the Manchurian city of Shenyang about to fall in late October 1948, Colonel Dave Barrett, the assistant military attaché, and John Melby went to the airport in the capital, Nanjing, hoping to hop a plane north to survey the contested areas. But no planes were going north. They had all been commandeered to bring out the Nationalist generals, their girlfriends, and their personal wealth. Barrett turned to Melby: “John, I’ve seen all I need to see. When the generals begin to evacuate their gold bars and their concubines, the end is at hand.” That so obvious and sad a collapse of a regime was taking place was one thing; what made the political situation back in America much more dangerous and explosive was all the extremely influential people who for a variety of political reasons and loyalties refused to tell the truth when they were back in America, or who tempered their reporting to make it seem that America had failed Chiang, rather than that Chiang had failed himself, his people, and his ally. What infuriated John Melby and many of the people trying to report honestly on the fall of Chiang was the duplicity of various American figures, who spoke one way about Chiang and why he was failing when they were in China; then, on return to the United States, feeling the domestic pro-Chiang political pressure, switched their line, refused to find fault with him, and became powerful voices for the China Lobby, placing all blame for his failures on the administration and the State Department’s China Hands, who had been warning of Chiang’s flaws and a future Communist victory. It was as if there was one truth that you told in China, when you were surrounded by other Americans and Chinese who knew how pathetically Chiang’s forces had fought, and another you told back in the States, surrounded by conservative friends who wanted
their
truths reinforced.

The symbol of it, in Melby’s view, was the performance of General Albert Wedemeyer. In the summer of 1947, George Marshall, delighted to be out of China, had sent Wedemeyer, an old friend of Chiang’s, on a fact-finding mission.
Generally considered an exceptionally able staff officer, Wedemeyer was a fierce anti-Communist, so it was a calculated risk on Marshall’s part, reflecting his belief that Wedemeyer’s ideology would be subordinated to his sense of reality. The Wedemeyer trip also represented a shrewd hope on Marshall’s part that the reactions of someone as conservative and pro-Chiang as Wedemeyer, after confronting the terrible reality on the ground in China, might help lessen right-wing pressure on the administration. In fact, the Wedemeyer visit did work in the short run, but in the long run it backfired. Within a few days of his arrival, Wedemeyer cabled Marshall that the Nationalists were “spiritually insolvent.” The people had lost confidence in their leadership. By contrast, he noted, the Communists had “excellent spirit, almost a fanatical fervor.” The government, he decided, was “corrupt, reactionary, and inefficient.” Later, asked what had gone wrong with Chiang’s cause, Wedemeyer said, “Lack of spirit, primarily lack of spirit. It was not lack of equipment. In my opinion they could have defended the Yangtze with broomsticks if they had the will to do it.”

On August 22, 1947, just before Wedemeyer’s return home, he was scheduled to speak to a meeting of Nationalist ministers. He had been told by his old friend Chiang to be blunt, but the Gimo, playing a dual game, as he often did, had promptly called John Leighton Stuart, the American ambassador, and suggested Wedemeyer should speak carefully and not be too critical of the Chinese Army. Stuart, however, told Wedemeyer that time was running out and there should be no more niceties. As such, Wedemeyer was brutally blunt. The government, he said, had little support among the people; its failures had allowed the Communists to succeed; it was spiritually bankrupt. It was a devastating moment. One top Chinese official openly wept. The next night a farewell dinner had been scheduled at Stuart’s residence. But at the last minute, the Gimo canceled, claiming illness. Missimo, however, would come. Wedemeyer did not need that, so he canceled the dinner.

But soon, back in America, the dedicated anti-Communist Wedemeyer reappeared, pushing the China Lobby line that Chiang had been brought down by a lack of aid and by treachery within the American mission. In December 1947, he went before the Senate Appropriations Committee, where the chairman, Styles Bridges, himself an important player in the China Lobby, asked him about Chiang. The Gimo was, Wedemeyer said, “a fine character, and you gentlemen on this committee would admire him and respect him.” Was it urgent, Bridges pressed, to send more military supplies to him? Wedemeyer, who while in China had recommended no further commitment of aid, answered in the affirmative. And did Wedemeyer think the United States had kept its promises to Chiang over the years? “No sir, I do not.” The reality and politics of China were clearly different from the reality and politics of Washington.

The end in China came surprisingly quickly. On November 5, 1948, three days after Harry Truman’s surprise victory in the presidential election, the embassy in Nanjing advised all Americans in China to leave. At virtually the same time, Mao was warned by Anastas Mikoyan, special envoy from the ever cautious Joseph Stalin, not to let his armies cross the Yangtze River into southern China too hastily, lest it provoke the Americans to enter the Chinese civil war. On January 21, 1949, Chiang turned over nominal control of the Nationalist government to proxies and moved with his gold reserves to Taiwan, making himself into, as a State Department bulletin put it, “a refugee on a small island off the coast of China,” having thrown away “greater military power than any ruler had ever had in the history of China.” On April 21, 1949, Mao’s forces crossed the Yangtze River. Three days later, they took Nanjing, the Nationalist capital. The end was now in sight.