Revolution and Civil War, episode 21

Allies

With America in the war, General George Marshall sends Joseph Stilwell, a blunt American infantry general, to be Chiang Kai-shek's chief of staff, and in 1942 the two men lose Burma together and blame each other. The episode follows Chiang and Stilwell from Burma to Cairo in November 1943, where Chiang sits with Roosevelt and Churchill and then, the Americans say, goes back on his word, and sets beside them the Henan famine, which the American journalist Theodore White went to see, and Chiang's wife Soong Mei-ling winning over America; it asks what the alliance gave China. It leans entirely on scholars.

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Transcript

Last time, at one o'clock in the morning on the eighth of December 1941, an aide woke Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing with the news that Japanese carrier planes had attacked Pearl Harbor. Before the night was out he had dictated a letter to President Roosevelt, and his wife put it into English. "To our new common battle we offer all we are and all we have," he wrote. Japan had gambled, and miscalculated. America declared war at once, and the powerful United States was at last officially China's ally. Chiang had waited well over four years for that. This time, we find out what the alliance was actually worth. Along with the scholars this season stands on, this episode draws for the first time on the China White Paper of the United States Department of State, the record of American policy that Washington published in 1949, as the Communists were winning. Chiang started the new war with big ideas. He proposed that China, America, Britain and the Soviet Union all declare war on Germany, Italy and Japan, and pledge that none of them would make a separate peace. And he had something to bring to the table. His jumble of armies was tying down about 1.3 million Japanese soldiers, nearly two thirds of the whole Japanese army. On the very first day of the new war, he told the British he would send 80,000 of his best troops to Burma, and put them under British command. So the question was what America would send back. On the fourteenth of January 1942, in Washington, the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, sat down to dinner with a single guest. The subject was China. His guest wrote in his diary that night that Stimson thought the Chinese would accept an American commander, and that Stimson had told him, "More and more, the finger of destiny is pointing at you." The guest was General Joseph Stilwell. And from here on, he and Chiang Kai-shek are the story. The man who picked him was George Marshall. Marshall was the head of the whole American army, and Roosevelt's most trusted soldier. Marshall had decided to put America's weight into the war in Europe. But the attack had come from Japan, not Germany, and he knew Americans had to be seen fighting in Asia too. What he did not want was to send American ground troops to China. His answer was to persuade Chiang to accept an American chief of staff for the Chinese armies. That would show the Americans standing side by side with the Chinese, without sending any significant number of troops. A chief of staff is the officer who plans and runs a commander's operations for him. In this case the commander was Chiang, whose title was Generalissimo, the supreme commander of China's forces. For the job, Marshall recommended his closest friend in the army. So who was Joe Stilwell? He had taught at West Point, where his cutting remarks earned him the nickname Vinegar Joe, a name he was proud of. He was a thin officer with a sharp nose and a tart tongue, small and bony, built rather like the Generalissimo himself. And like Chiang, he was a man of action who believed that willpower drove the world. He knew China. He spoke Chinese, he had served there in the twenties and thirties, and as the American military attaché from 1935 to 1939 he had watched the war with Japan break out. By the time of Pearl Harbor, he had been named the best corps commander in the American army. He could be warm and generous. But in judging other people his sentiments were harsh, and often spiteful, and for him life was categorical. Nuances did not exist. He had already judged Chiang. Back in 1937, as attaché, Stilwell had reported that Chiang either meant to do nothing to prepare for the coming war, or was "utterly ignorant of what it means to get ready for a fight with a first class power." He had been just as puzzled and angry at the Chinese army's habit of retreating rather than holding ground. Asked once when the Chinese might fight back, he answered, "Not until they lose their inherent distaste for offensive combat." Chinese officers, he believed, lacked the skills of modern war. The ordinary Chinese soldier was another matter. He had the toughness to win, as long as someone who knew how to use him was in charge. And Stilwell thought that someone was him, though he had no experience of command as a general. There was one condition, and he said it plainly. Meeting Stimson, Stilwell said the mission would succeed or fail on whether Chiang would turn any part of his army over to American command. Stimson assured him that Chiang himself had proposed it. Two days later, with Marshall, he said the chances were good if he were given command, and in his diary he wrote that word in capital letters. Washington piled on the titles. Stilwell would be chief of staff of Chiang's China Theater, commander of the American forces in China, Burma and India, and the man in charge of the American supplies for China under Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease was the American program that sent weapons and supplies to its allies, to be paid for later or not at all. When Chiang heard who was coming, his answer was that Stilwell was most welcome. But on the sixth of February, Marshall sent a message to the head of the American military mission in Chongqing that set out Stilwell's place in black and white. American forces in China and Burma would operate under Stilwell's direction, it said, "but General Stilwell himself will always be under the command of the Generalissimo." Stilwell believed he was coming to command. Washington had written that he would always be under Chiang. Chiang, for his part, was happy to give the Americans their gesture of closeness. But he had no intention of actually handing command of his armies to a Westerner. Keep that gap in mind. Everything in this episode falls into it. Chongqing was changing fast. American officials and officers were now part of everyday life in the wartime capital. One day American P-40 fighters with grinning sharks' faces painted on their noses roared over the city, dipping and climbing for half an hour. Graham Peck, an American whose wartime job in Chongqing was to spread good news about the alliance, heard what came back from the ground: "the noise of half a million people shouting together to the sky," a whole city cheering its new allies. Those were the Flying Tigers, commanded by Claire Lee Chennault, an American flier who had been in Chongqing since 1937. Chennault believed air power was the key to a quick victory over Japan in China. Stilwell believed in well-trained ground troops. Two American generals, with two theories of how to win, in one small alliance. That fight will matter later. For now, Stilwell arrived in Chongqing by way of India in early March 1942, and went to meet the Generalissimo. He came away pleased. Chiang, he wrote, "seems willing to fight and is fed up with the British retreat and lethargy." Chiang liked him too, at first. But he made it clear from the start that he was commander in chief of the China Theater, and that he expected Stilwell to follow orders.

Stilwell's chance to put Chinese troops into action came very soon, and not in China but in Burma. Burma was a British colony lying between China and Britain's Indian empire, and it mattered to China for one reason above all: the Burma Road. Some 20,000 tons of supplies a month had been coming up that road. The only other way in was to fly much smaller loads over the Hump, from India into China. The Hump was the airmen's name for the mountains between India and southwest China, the eastern end of the Himalayas, among the most dangerous flying in the world. Japan had not thought of Burma as a priority. But after Pearl Harbor it took Hong Kong and the Philippines in quick succession, the British army suddenly looked less fearsome, and Burma offered two prizes at once: cut the Nationalists off from the Burma Road, and lay open the eastern edge of British India. In February 1942 the Japanese moved on Rangoon, the capital. Chiang offered help. He put up his Fifth and Sixth Armies to defend Taungoo, in central Burma, to take the pressure off the British at Rangoon. The British commander, General Archibald Wavell, turned him down, partly for reasons of supply and partly out of imperial pride. He wrote to Churchill that it was obviously better for Burma to be defended by British troops rather than Chinese. Then on the fifteenth of February, Singapore fell, one of the greatest disasters the British Empire suffered in the whole war. The British could not hold Rangoon either. The Japanese took it on the eighth of March and at once planned their drive north. On the ninth and tenth of March, Stilwell and Chiang sat down to plan. Chiang wanted caution. Hold a line across Burma at Mandalay, let the Japanese come on, and only then strike. And he was blunt about what he could not afford to lose. "The 5th and 6th armies are the cream of the Chinese Army. Their loss would have a grave effect." Stilwell listened respectfully and thanked him. He told Chiang, "You are very generous in giving me command of the Chinese troops in Burma", and promised, "I will do my best to carry out your orders." But after the meeting, Stilwell wrote in his diary that his plans remained the same. "Rangoon is the vital point," he noted. "Without it, supply stops." He had a hunch, he added, that the Japanese were weak. Chiang had a different hunch, and some numbers behind it. He believed Japanese strength in southern Burma and Thailand had doubled. The Japanese had almost five hundred warplanes around Rangoon, the Flying Tigers were down to forty-two that could fly, and the Japanese navy held the whole Bay of Bengal. He began to lose sleep. He was risking his best armies with a man he had quickly come to distrust, a man who had never led troops in combat or run a real battle of several divisions. Stilwell, for his part, had disliked Chiang since his early years in China. Now he began, in his diary and among other Americans, to call him Peanut. The nickname was not meant kindly. When Chiang told him again that the Fifth and Sixth must not be defeated, Stilwell scoffed in his diary that Chiang wanted to be sure the fight would be easy, and said he had told him to send someone else who could guarantee it, because he could not. The Generalissimo's wife took a different line. Soong Mei-ling, who leaned toward the offensive herself, privately told Stilwell to keep up what he was doing. Chiang gave way. When the fighting started, Stilwell would be free to act. It was a gamble Chiang felt he had to take, to show Roosevelt that China meant to play a full part in the war. On the nineteenth of March the Japanese hit Taungoo. Holding it was the 200th Division, the only unit in the Chinese army that could move entirely by truck. The battle raged for twelve days, and by every account the Chinese soldiers fought gallantly. The Japanese surrounded the town, and Stilwell refused to give the order that would let the trapped division retreat. "I know that I've sacrificed a great deal for nothing, for the sake of this plan of the Americans and British," Chiang wrote despairingly in his diary. On the thirtieth of March Chiang finally got a message through letting the divisional commander withdraw. The 200th came out of the nearly surrounded town intact. Chiang's order very probably saved its commander's life, and his men. Stilwell saw it differently. To him, Chiang had meddled. And his own Chinese generals had not obeyed him. Du Yuming, commanding the Fifth Army, had ignored an order to attack a Japanese regiment. Du later said that on one occasion he had refused to attack a town because there were civilians in it. So Stilwell flew back to Chongqing. It was the first of April, and he asked his diary, "Am I the April Fool?" At midday he went to Chiang and, in his own words, "threw the raw meat on the floor," demanding to be relieved of his command. His Chinese commanders were not obeying his orders, he said, and he had no confidence in them. Yet in his diary he also allowed something rare. In justice to them, he wrote, "it is expecting a great deal to have them turn over a couple of armies in a vital area to a goddamn foreigner". He never wrote anything like it again. Chiang had his own grievance. Until that day, Stilwell had not sent him a single report on the fighting in Burma. The Chiangs talked over how to handle him. Mei-ling still thought Stilwell a capable soldier, and to her his bluntness was just the American temperament turned up loud. Her first concern was the tie with Roosevelt. Stilwell was Roosevelt's man in China, and everything hung on America. In the scheme of things, she told her husband, their problems with Stilwell were "relatively small." So Chiang was conciliatory. He invited Stilwell to Huangshan, their villa outside Chongqing, and gave him a Chinese general, Luo Zhuoying, to pass his orders down to the Chinese commanders. And Chiang would go to Burma himself, to make it plain that he stood behind Stilwell's authority. "This is a major victory for me," Stilwell wrote. On the fifth of April they flew south together, Chiang, Mei-ling and Stilwell, and with them Henry Luce, the publisher of Time-Life. At the front, Chiang told Du Yuming in plain words that Stilwell was the boss, with full powers to promote, relieve and punish any officer in the Chinese force. Stilwell reviewed the troops, and called them a fine-looking lot of soldiers. His new plan was a trap. The Fifth Army fell back to Pyinmana, the Japanese rushed after it, and Stilwell got ready to spring a counterattack. But on the right, the British were already pulling back, afraid their Indian and Burmese troops were being surrounded. Chiang, hearing that the Chinese flank was exposed, radioed that staying at Pyinmana was "absolutely unallowable". Stilwell called the message "crap and nonsense," and went on preparing. Then on the eighteenth of April the British First Burma Division was surrounded in the oil fields at Yenangyaung, and a gap of sixty miles opened west of the Chinese. Woken at three in the morning, Stilwell sent Chinese troops to the rescue, among them a regiment of the 38th Division under Sun Liren, a Chinese general trained at the Virginia Military Institute. Sun's men helped get the British out. And while Chinese troops were going west to save the British, the Japanese came out of the jungles of Thailand on the east, with tanks, in far greater strength than anyone expected. They broke through the Chinese line and destroyed a division of raw recruits. On the twenty-fifth of April, Stilwell and his Chinese generals met the British commander in Burma, General Harold Alexander, at Kyaukse, south of Mandalay, and agreed on a general retreat. In the middle of the meeting six Japanese bombers roared overhead, and a five-hundred-pound bomb burst a hundred yards away. Some men scrambled for cover. Alexander stood defiant in the garden, glaring at the fire and smoke. And Stilwell, not to be outdone, leaned on the porch railing and lit a cigarette in his long holder. On the twenty-ninth of April the Japanese took Lashio, in the east, and the road home to China was in danger. "Imminent danger of disintegration and collapse," Stilwell wrote. Chiang had already quietly ordered his commanders not to move troops on Stilwell's orders unless his War Ministry approved. He did not tell Stilwell. For one critical week, Stilwell did not send his supreme commander a single message about what was happening. Chiang ordered him to go to the town of Myitkyina, in the far north, and not lose time. By June, Burma was lost. Chiang, who had opposed the campaign from the beginning, was bitterly disappointed, and blamed the British and Stilwell. He had some justification. The British, fearing for their authority, had at first refused to work with the Chinese, and had then preferred to give up Rangoon rather than risk forces they might need to defend India. But how it ended, for Stilwell and for the men he left behind, is the next part of the story.

Stilwell set out for Myitkyina by road, though Chennault had sent a plane. He belonged with his troops, he told his aide. After four hard days, on the fourth of May, he and his staff came to believe the road to Myitkyina was cut. They decided they could no longer be of much use. His officers thought the boss should tell the Chinese "to go to Hell and get out while the getting was good." He sent a short report to Washington and to the Generalissimo. The Chinese divisions, he said, had broken up into small parties heading for India, so his further command would be unnecessary. In fact most of the Chinese divisions under him were still holding together as units. He radioed Du Yuming to take the Fifth Army to India too. On the fifth of May, Stilwell's party of almost eighty people set out paddling up the Chindwin River. The Indian border town of Imphal was 140 miles away. It was an unlikely little column: American, Chinese and British soldiers, Indian engineers, Burmese nurses and British refugees. Stilwell usually marched at the front, in his old scout hat from the First World War, baggy shirt and trousers, and sleeves rolled up. Back in Chongqing, on the sixth of May, Chiang heard from Du Yuming that Stilwell had ordered him into India. It was the first Chiang knew that his chief of staff had sent a large part of his army into a foreign country, completely contrary to his own order to gather it at Myitkyina. He reversed the order and told Du to take his troops to Myitkyina. And he wondered about the American. "One doesn't expect this of one's military adviser," he wrote. "Could it be that because of the battle, his nerves have given way?" Then, later that same day, came the telegram saying Stilwell and his staff were leaving for India. Chiang was stunned. Stilwell, he wrote, "has abandoned my 100,000 soldiers in foreign jungles and headed off to India. Only then does he send me this telegram." The walk itself took three weeks, in stifling heat, first by raft up the river and then on foot over the steep, craggy Naga Hills. Disease and snakebite were as much of a threat as the enemy. Stilwell's diary for the eighth of May is a list: "Our people tired . . . Chattering monkeys in the jungle. Bombers over . . . Hot camp. Insects." Army photographers came along with plenty of film, and so did a friend of Stilwell's who wrote it all up for Time. On the twentieth of May they reached Imphal, in northeast India, where they were met by what Stilwell called an old fool of a provincial official. Remarkably, not one of them had died. America loved it. The press and the public greeted the walkout as a heroic event. And Stilwell gave them a line to remember. "I claim we got a hell of a beating", he told reporters. "We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell." "I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back, and take it." Marshall sent commendations. Roosevelt expressed great satisfaction with Stilwell's handling of the whole situation. Even Madame Chiang cabled Roosevelt's representative, to tell the President that the Generalissimo had entire confidence in him. In a letter to his wife, Stilwell was plainer about what came next. He was going back to report to Chiang, and "I sure have an earful for him." Chiang's diary said something else. Stilwell's abandonment of his troops, he wrote, showed that he "lacked the virtue and vision of a commander." For the general it had been a hard trip, but no one died, no one was badly hurt, and there was no fighting. Next to what his army went through, it was a ramble. Most of Sun Liren's disciplined 38th Division made it to India. The 96th Division marched all the way back to China, fed by American parachute drops. The 200th Division got home as a unit, though its commanding general had been killed. Du Yuming reached Myitkyina with the 22nd Division and found he could not get to the Chinese border, because the Japanese held the ferries on the Salween River. Chiang let him head for India after all, and Japanese ambushes, malaria and dysentery tore at his men along the jungle trails. In the east, two divisions of the Sixth Army simply fell to pieces, and small bands escaped through the mountains to China. One of the soldiers in Du's army was a man named Luo Gu, and he kept a record. They had fought hard, he wrote, and even captured a couple of elephants. But at the start of May, as communications broke down, they tried to march northwest and got lost. "The jungle covered everything for miles," he recalled, "leaving us deadly thirsty." Days became weeks. The men destroyed their own weapons, too weak to carry them and unwilling to let the Japanese have them. A month in, Luo wrote, "the soldiers are all in rags and look very gaunt." Each man carried a bag of rice, a water can and a walking stick. Everywhere they went they found bodies. The company cook went missing, and his remains were found half eaten, probably by one of the tigers that stalked the jungle. By the middle of June they were starving, digging up roots, under monsoon rain every day. When supplies were finally dropped from the air, falling boxes killed some of them, and others died from eating too fast. Luo Gu and his companions reached India only at the start of August. Add it up, and the first Burma campaign was an unmitigated disaster. About 3,600 British and Indian troops were killed and some 7,000 wounded. China lost about 25,000 of its best trained men, perhaps 8,000 or 9,000 of them killed, and most of its few remaining cannon and trucks. The Japanese, fighting in a strange land and on the attack, lost only 4,500 killed and wounded. Stilwell's gamble had been far more likely to fail than to succeed. And the Burma Road was gone. Now China could be supplied by land only along the long road through desert and steppe from Soviet Russia, or by air over the Hump. Then came the blame, and everyone had some to hand out. Stilwell blamed the Chinese generals and Chiang. The British blamed Stilwell and the Chinese. Chiang blamed the British and Stilwell. They were all partly right. But it began with Stilwell badly underestimating the enemy. If the Allies had fought a defensive battle from the start, holding a line at Mandalay or Myitkyina as Chiang wanted, they would have had a fair chance, and even a failure could have been an orderly retreat. What Stilwell took away was a very low opinion of Chinese officers, all the way up to Chiang. Too many of them, he said, padded their rolls with soldiers who did not exist to pocket the pay and rations, stole from their own men, and squeezed the civilians around them. What Chiang took away he wrote in his diary. "Now I know that the alliance is just empty words," he wrote, "and I don't exclude America from this." He also decided that from now on he must approve Stilwell's orders himself, and again he did not tell him. And Burma set the picture of China that the West would carry for the rest of the war: American officers, Stilwell above all, struggling ever more hopelessly to make China fight, against a corrupt and unwilling leader. Chiang knew it. Stilwell's reports on his army, he wrote, were "contemptuous and blacken our name," and thinking about it angered and pained him. In fairness, with the British retreating all around the region, China's performance in Burma was not exceptionally poor by comparison. One more thing came out of the defeat. Some 45,000 tons of American supplies meant for China went instead to the Chinese troops who had reached India, and Stilwell kept control of China's Lend-Lease for the rest of the war, spending much of it on the projects he favoured. So the American aid Chiang needed stayed in the hands of a man who thought him a cruel and unthinking dictator.

While the generals argued, something far worse was happening inside China. In February 1943 a Chinese journalist, Li Shu, went to Henan, the province on the Yellow River in central China, because of the rumours. People said a terrible famine was ravaging the province, but official censorship made the story hard to pin down. Henan had suffered before in this war. In 1938, when Chiang ordered the Yellow River dikes destroyed to stop the Japanese, parts of the province had suffered dreadfully. "As I was traveling from Yinjingpu to Yanshi," Li Shu wrote, "I saw three corpses by the side of the road." At one point he asked an old man why so many people had gathered on the banks of the Luo River. They were collecting bird droppings, the old man said. They washed them to get at the undigested grains of wheat inside. How had it come to this? It started with the weather and the war. Much of Henan had been fought over and occupied in the Japanese offensive of early 1941. Then in the spring of 1942 no rain fell, and the harvest came in at ten to twenty percent of normal. A Nationalist official named Zhang Zonglu, a former president of Henan University, later remembered how people pinned their hopes on the autumn. "But there was no rain all summer, and the early autumn crop all died." Even where wells saved the crops from the drought, he said, locusts came and ate everything. But the weather was not the whole story. There was grain in the neighbouring provinces of Shaanxi and Hubei. The authorities there refused to send it. That was not pure selfishness. The government was now taking its land tax in grain, huge amounts were being taken to feed the armies, and no province wanted to sell its precious grain for paper money that was worth less every month. A tax in kind is a tax paid in goods instead of money. The Nationalists turned to it in the war because inflation was eating their currency, and grain fed the army whatever the money was worth. Chiang did announce a lower grain quota for Henan. In practice, the head of Henan's grain administration collected even more than the old quota. Corrupt officials were turning a natural disaster into a man-made one. In the summer of 1942 Chongqing sent inspectors out to see the countryside for themselves, and to check that the grain tax was being collected. Zhang Zonglu was one of them. The head of one county was in tears as he told Zhang he could not collect the grain. In Zheng county, the county head, Lu Yan, told him about a family named Li, who gave their last grain to the tax collectors and then all killed themselves by jumping in the river. "Then he began to weep," Zhang wrote, "lost his voice, knelt down and knocked his head on the ground, and begged for exemption from the grain tax." Everywhere Zhang went, starving people were digging up grass roots, eating leaves, and stripping the bark from the trees. And this was early. The main autumn harvest had only just failed. Just outside the town of Fangcheng there was a market where people sold themselves. Zhang watched a married couple whose only hope was to sell the wife. As they parted, she called out, "My trousers are better than yours, you take mine." Her husband cried out, "I can't sell you—let's die together." Refugees streamed south, begging, and those who could not go on dropped dead beside the road. Zhang wrote, "You could exchange a child for a few steamed rolls." At the railway station at Luoyang, refugees crowded round every train, groaning and crying. When a train came, they fought to get on, and clung to the roof. Those who could not get aboard sold their children, for any price at all. When a westbound train went into a tunnel, Zhang wrote, "countless numbers of them were crushed against the roof of the tunnel, and fell down dead." Further out, Zhang heard that villages had turned to cannibalism. Li Shu met a man who had been imprisoned for eating and trading in human flesh. And in one village the granary, which was supposed to hold enough to feed some 15,000 people in a famine, turned out to be empty. Local officials had never stored the grain. They had sold it on private deals. In the middle of all this stood General Tang Enbo, still a close ally of Chiang, who had played an important part at Tai'erzhuang in 1938. People said Henan had four disasters: "flood, drought, locusts, and Tang Enbo." At the height of the famine, worried about a Japanese advance, Tang forced several hundred thousand peasants to build roads, promising that the work would count against their taxes. Few believed him. The great newspaper Da Gongbao sent its own reporters to cover the famine, and in February 1943 printed a frank account of the disaster. The government banned the paper from publishing for three days. And then a foreigner went to see. Theodore H. White was an American correspondent for Time magazine, Henry Luce's magazine, the same Luce who had flown into Burma with the Chiangs. Luce wanted to protect the good name Chiang enjoyed in America, and he had White's reports from China toned down. White spent two weeks travelling through Henan, and he saw everything the Chinese reporters had seen. His dispatch of the twenty-second of March 1943 still blazed through Time's editing. "Dogs eating human bodies by the roads, peasants seeking dead human flesh under the cover of darkness, endless deserted villages," he wrote. Beggars swarmed at every city gate, the correspondent wrote, and babies were left "to cry and die on every highway." He saw a refugee whose leg had been cut off by a train, and a woman on trial for eating her baby, who said in her defence that the child had died first. White was not allowed to attack Chiang directly. But he made his view clear. "Most terrible of all is the knowledge that the famine might have been averted," he wrote. He ended his dispatch with the feast local officials gave him at the end of his journey: chicken, beef, water chestnut, bean curd, and "three cakes with sugar frosting." What did Chiang know? "I heard that the Henan famine was serious," he wrote in his diary in April 1943, "and that the officials were ignorant of it." A week later he sounded more alarmed. "In the Henan famine area, people are starving, dogs and animals are eating corpses. It's unbearable to hear about this dreadful situation." Yet he took only limited, inadequate measures. His diary that spring shows a man at the end of his strength. "The economy is weak, the military and political situation is depressing, and the worst time is now." Six years of war, he wrote, had exhausted his strength and dulled his mind. And the quarrel with Stilwell was pulling his eyes away from Henan. The famine killed some four million people. The blame lands on Chiang's government. The grain tax in kind, the decision to send paper money rather than grain, and corruption were all choices made in Chongqing. But it was not the only government that year to make the same mistakes. From July to November 1943 a famine of about the same size, around three million dead, struck Bengal, in British India. There too the newspapers were censored, grain was taken away to feed troops while people starved, and the British war cabinet refused to divert ships to bring food. And unlike the British in India, Chiang did not have a global empire behind him, or a subcontinent out of the line of fire. In the end, the famine was a kind of tragedy in the old Greek sense. People could have acted better, but there was no obviously better choice for Chiang. His government may well have kept fighting only because of the grain tax, and the peasants paid for it. They did not forget. Within a year, the peasants of Henan would have their revenge on the state that had squeezed so much out of them.

While Henan starved, the most famous woman in China was in America. Soong Mei-ling was Chiang Kai-shek's wife, from the rich and powerful Soong family, and she had been schooled in America from childhood. On the seventeenth of November 1942, with the American scholar Owen Lattimore and her own doctor and nurse, she flew back to America in an American air force plane. It was a second home she had not seen since she graduated from Wellesley College in 1917. Harry Hopkins met her at the airfield on Long Island, and on the long ride into New York she talked at length about giving Asia priority in the war. Hopkins was Roosevelt's closest adviser, so close that he lived in the White House. She also volunteered something new. Forgetting her own earlier support for Stilwell, she said the general had forced her husband to act against his better judgment in Burma. She was not well. She checked into a New York hospital and took the entire twelfth floor. Her doctors wrote to Chiang of prolonged fatigue and devastating emotional strain. She had an intestinal parasite, serious sinus trouble, a dependence on sedatives, and needed extensive dental work. Visitors found her perfectly made up, with long lacquered nails. To Eleanor Roosevelt she seemed nervous, hardly able to bear anything touching her. In early February 1943 she left the hospital and went to stay with Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park, and then at the White House. News of her release after a mysterious illness of three months, and of her stay with the First Lady, set off a wave of admiration. In her meetings with the President she pleaded for the military aid America had promised, above all fighter planes. On the eighteenth of February 1943 she went to Capitol Hill. She spoke first to the Senate without notes, and then to the House from a prepared text. She was only the second woman, and the first private citizen, ever to address a joint session of Congress. She wore a simple black Chinese dress with a high collar, slit to the knee, and on her breast the jewelled wings of the Chinese air force. The Texas congressman Sam Rayburn introduced her as "one of the outstanding women of all the Earth". She told the Senate that the Chinese were fighting for the same cause as the Americans, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, which rang across China as "the gong of freedom of the United Nations, and the death knell of the aggressors." And she told a story. An American pilot, coming back from a bombing raid on Japan, had bailed out over China, and the peasants who found him greeted him "like a long lost brother." He told her later, she said, that "he thought he had come home when he saw our people; and that was the first time he had ever been to China." She did not tell what that raid had cost China. In April 1942, sixteen American bombers had taken off from an aircraft carrier and hit Tokyo and other Japanese cities. They were supposed to land afterwards at airfields in the Nationalist part of Zhejiang, but none of them did. Japan answered with fury. Its troops destroyed all the airfields Chennault had built in Zhejiang, and committed atrocities against the people around them. Chiang lost 30,000 men resisting that punitive campaign. What went down very well in America had a terrible cost in China. Her speech ended with a demand. It was not enough to have ideas and proclaim them, she said: "it is necessary that we act to implement them." It was a clear challenge. Put aid for China first, and stop criticising its government. She had come, after all, because she feared that rumours of corruption and of a China unwilling to fight would turn Americans against helping. The congressmen and the public were swept off their feet. Washington was won over, and on the speaking tour that followed she was mobbed by adoring crowds across the country. There was steel under the charm. At a White House dinner, someone asked how she would deal with the troublesome American union leader John Llewellyn Lewis. Eleanor Roosevelt remembered that "her beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat." Not everyone was dazzled. Graham Peck, the American propaganda man in Chongqing, thought her triumph was a sign of collapse. "I do not think she really began to disintegrate until she went to America," he wrote. And her husband, watching from Chongqing, was colder still. "After my wife's visit to the White House," Chiang wrote, "I'm certain that it's American policy just to make use of us without any sincerity." That spring the Stilwell problem got worse. When the Japanese pushed up the Yangtze, Chiang pulled 70,000 troops away from the force Stilwell was training in Yunnan for Burma, and the two men had what Stilwell called "a hell of a session". In Washington, Mei-ling and her brother, T. V. Soong, now China's foreign minister, lobbied for China separately and at cross purposes, until she went home to Chongqing carrying a grudge against him. Roosevelt, meanwhile, was souring on Stilwell. He complained to Hopkins about how "our show is running in China." Stilwell, he said, hated the Chinese, and his messages were "sarcastic." Her brother put the case against Stilwell on paper, in words worthy of Stilwell himself. "Stilwell does not smoke, drink, or chew. He would make a typical highly regarded Boy Scout leader in any country". But, the memo went on, he was completely unfit to be a major military leader. Hopkins did not need persuading. He was tired of what he called Stilwell's "violent intransigence."

Now Chiang Kai-shek was invited to sit at the top table. The Allies were strangely divided, and that hurt Chiang more than anyone. The Soviet Union was still neutral in the war against Japan, so Stalin could not be seen at any conference that included Chiang. Stalin refused to attend the next summit if Chiang came, and Chiang did not want to meet Stalin anyway. So there would be two conferences: one at Cairo, for America, Britain and China, and one at Tehran, where Stalin would meet Roosevelt and Churchill. Cairo, in the end, was the only major conference of the war that tried to make a full settlement of the war between China and Japan. To prepare, Roosevelt sent an envoy to Chongqing, Patrick J. Hurley, a tall, boisterous Oklahoman who had been secretary of war under President Hoover. Chiang was moved. The President's chivalry and nobility, he wrote privately, had reached a state of sublimity. In his diary he planned to take a high moral position at Cairo, and in particular not to ask for material aid. He wrote, "I want moderation as my only principle. In general, I don't want to bring any great shame upon myself." And he wrote down what he wanted most: Manchuria, Taiwan and the Penghu islands returned to China, an independent Korea, and Japan's factories and shipping in occupied China handed over as reparations. Before leaving, he approved the plan Stilwell had drawn up for Cairo: an all-out Allied effort in early 1944 to reopen a road to China through Burma, by land, air and sea, American arms for ninety Chinese divisions, and 10,000 tons a month over the Hump. It was what Chiang had wanted for Burma all along, overwhelming force. Stilwell wrote "victory" in his diary, as if he had wrung it out of Chiang. And to show his new trust, Chiang asked Stilwell to give China's report at the conference. Stilwell went back to his room and wrote, "I heard him rattle his tail." His diary had turned mean. Before Cairo he even called the American President "rubber legs." In Cairo, Marshall suggested Stilwell might leave China, since he was so badly treated there. Stilwell wanted to stay. "Then stop your outrageous talking!" Marshall ordered. Stilwell protested that he had not called Chiang Peanut openly. "My God," Marshall said, "You have never lied. Don't start now". Stilwell did not stop. At dawn on the twenty-first of November 1943, the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang landed in Cairo. Chennault met them and took them to their villa. The conference opened the next day at the old Mena Hotel, looking out on the pyramids. At the first full meeting, the only woman in the room was Soong Mei-ling. The British army chief, Alan Brooke, wrote that as she shifted her legs under her slit skirt, he thought he heard "a suppressed neigh" from the younger officers. Her husband he described as "a cross between a pine marten and a ferret", with no grasp of war in its larger sense. What the British general did not understand was that Chiang meant to settle everything that really mattered directly with Roosevelt. To him, the other meetings were never the decisive ones. For the first time Chiang met Winston Churchill, the man who had loomed so unpleasantly in his mind for three years. Churchill had clear contempt for the Chinese in general. They talked for half an hour, with Mei-ling interpreting, and it went better than Chiang expected. The next day they talked for an hour, and Churchill and Mei-ling laughed as he said, "You think I'm a terrible old man, don't you?" A senior British diplomat noted simply, "Winston fell for Madame Chiang Kai-shek." Churchill thought Chiang calm, reserved and efficient, and Madame most remarkable and charming. Chiang thought Churchill calm and resolute. After four days of talks, he would change his mind. The real fight was over Burma. Louis Mountbatten laid out the British plan, a much smaller campaign than the one Chiang had approved: a bridgehead across the Chindwin and an airborne landing on the railway to Myitkyina, with a landing by sea only on the Andaman Islands. Chiang insisted, again and again, that a major landing from the sea and command of the Bay of Bengal were essential. Without the navy, he told the meeting, "the mere concentration of land troops would not bring about sure victory". The big sea operation had a code name, Buccaneer, a landing across the Bay of Bengal. That evening the Chiangs dined with Roosevelt, with only Hopkins there besides. Mei-ling often corrected her husband's interpreter. The two leaders seemed to agree on almost everything. Roosevelt firmly endorsed the return of Manchuria and Taiwan to China, and they agreed that colonial empires had to end. Roosevelt even suggested that Chinese troops should be the main occupying force in Japan after the war. "This was very significant," Chiang noted, "but I didn't say Yes or No clearly." Chiang summed up the evening as exceedingly satisfactory. Roosevelt had treated him like an old friend. Roosevelt told his son Elliott the next morning that he had learned more talking to the Chiangs than in four hours with the generals. But he still wondered why Chiang's troops were not fighting, and why he kept his best men watching the Communists. Then came a famous misunderstanding. Mountbatten called on the Chiangs to explain why the bigger plan, aiming at Mandalay, was impossible. Decades later Mountbatten told a story: that the Generalissimo evidently did not understand the word monsoon, and Madame Chiang explained that he "does not know about monsoons." The story stuck, as proof of how hopeless Chiang was. But his own memos and diaries often discuss the rainy season in Burma and what it meant for the fighting. He knew about the rains. He just did not know the English word. And that same afternoon, Mountbatten reported to the Allied chiefs that Chiang had accepted his plan and would back it enthusiastically. He had misunderstood. An hour or so later, Chiang told Marshall over lunch that he opposed the British plan, because it would lead to heavy losses and possibly defeat. Remember that lunch. It is about to matter. On Thanksgiving Day, the twenty-fifth of November, the Chiangs sat in white wicker chairs in the American ambassador's garden with Roosevelt and Churchill for the famous photographs. At five that afternoon Chiang and Roosevelt met again, for seventy-five minutes. Roosevelt said his biggest headache was Churchill, because Britain "simply does not want to see China become a power." On Burma they agreed again that a landing from the sea was needed. And Roosevelt told Chiang America would arm and train a full ninety Chinese divisions, just as Chiang wanted. Pressed by Roosevelt, Chiang even said he would form a unity government with the Communists during the war, provided America made sure the Soviet Union respected China's rights in Manchuria. Earlier, Roosevelt had assured him that Buccaneer, the landing from the sea, would go ahead alongside the campaign on land. On the last day, Mei-ling went to see Roosevelt alone. Chiang, forgetting his promise to himself, had asked her to raise a loan of a billion dollars to fight China's inflation, and she came back saying Roosevelt had readily agreed. He had not, quite. Roosevelt later said he had told them it would be hard to get past Congress. Chiang was having the experience so many of Roosevelt's friends and enemies had: warm words that made you feel in perfect agreement, even when Roosevelt had told someone else nearly the opposite that same day. On the twenty-seventh, the Chiangs made a quick dash to see the pyramids, and flew home. On the first of December the Cairo Declaration was announced, signed by America, Britain and China. The Three Great Allies, it said, were fighting to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. "They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion." Japan was to be stripped of the Pacific islands it had taken since 1914, and "all the territories Japan has stolen" from China, Manchuria, Taiwan and the Penghu islands, would be restored to the Republic of China. Korea, in due course, would be free and independent. Chiang wrote that the whole world treated Cairo as a great victory for China. The picture of the Chiangs beside Roosevelt and Churchill made an enormous impression on the Chinese people. For the first time in more than a century, the leader of China had been treated as the equal of the leaders of the West. On his way home he called Cairo "an important achievement" in his revolutionary career, and wrote that if he won the lands he sought, it would likely be "the greatest foreign policy success in Chinese history." He gave much of the credit to his wife, and awarded her China's highest honour.

But behind the photographs, the Americans were telling a different story about Cairo. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, after his session with Chiang, Roosevelt told Marshall and Stilwell that Chiang was ready to carry out the Burma plan, on two conditions Roosevelt fully supported: control of the Bay of Bengal, and a landing from the sea at the same time. Late that night, Hopkins sent for Stilwell. Stilwell wrote down what Hopkins told him: the Generalissimo, as of six o'clock, did not like the plan. "My God. He's off again," Stilwell wrote in his diary. The next morning, Marshall told Mountbatten that in the evening Chiang had met Roosevelt again and had "gone back on every single point to which he had agreed to before lunch." Mountbatten went to Hopkins, who gave him what the British commander called the lowdown. Mountbatten came in at eleven that morning. "He is fed up on Peanut. As who is not," Stilwell wrote. And on the twenty-seventh, after seeing the Chiangs off, Stilwell went to Mountbatten and staggered him. Chiang, he said, had ordered him "to obtain a complete reversal of every point". So the story went round the Allied camp. Chiang had agreed before lunch, and gone back on everything after it. Here the sources disagree. On one side stands what the Americans and British said at the time: Marshall's word to Mountbatten, and Stilwell's report that Chiang had ordered a reversal on every point. On the other stands the paper trail. Roosevelt's own log shows no other meeting with Chiang that evening after their session ended at a quarter past six, and none of Roosevelt, Chiang, Hopkins, Churchill or Elliott Roosevelt ever mentioned one. The meeting "before lunch" had been with Mountbatten, the one where he misunderstood Chiang. What Hopkins passed on was almost certainly that Chiang did not like the British plan, which Chiang had told Marshall himself over lunch. And the charge of a second reversal on the twenty-seventh came only from Stilwell, whose own diary does not mention hearing it. Read that way, Chiang did not reverse himself in any real sense at all. On the twenty-sixth, Churchill and Madame Chiang told Mountbatten that Chiang agreed on every point, as he had since his meeting with Roosevelt. Then the ground moved under all of it. At Tehran, Stalin told Roosevelt and Churchill that Europe must come first, and promised to join the war against Japan only after Germany was beaten. Churchill argued that with that promise, it hardly mattered whether China stayed in the war. Roosevelt fought for Chiang, as stubborn as a mule, in his own words. Only eighteen to twenty landing craft were needed for the landing in Burma. But with the invasion of Europe months away, Churchill refused to give any British boats. Roosevelt overrode his own chiefs of staff, and agreed that the British could put off their landing for a year. On the fifth of December, Buccaneer was cancelled. On the seventh, Roosevelt and Churchill told Chiang that no landing craft could be spared for the Bay of Bengal. Go ahead in north Burma without the landing, or wait until November. His greatest diplomatic victory was already going sour. Back in Cairo on the sixth of December, Roosevelt had twenty minutes with Stilwell. Out of the blue, Stilwell recorded, the President asked him, "How long do you think Chiang can last?" Stilwell said the situation was serious, and another Japanese offensive like the last one might overturn him. Roosevelt said that then they should look for some other man or group of men to carry on. On two sheets of paper, Stilwell jotted down what he took the President's wishes to be. One said keep China in the war. The other said that if Chiang flopped, back somebody else. In his diary, Stilwell called the President "a flighty fool." And back in Chongqing, after the greatest triumph in the history of China's foreign affairs, Chiang confessed to his diary that what he mostly felt was fear and worry. He had reason. His secret police chief had uncovered a plot by young generals to seize him when he landed. They said they only wanted to force him to clean the corruption out of the government and army. Chiang had them shot or imprisoned. And a southern general was gathering commanders around him in case the Chongqing government collapsed. When Chiang ordered him to the capital, he simply refused. So what had the alliance given China, so far? Some real things. American aid came to 630 million dollars in supplies and a 500 million dollar loan, and China held a million and a half Japanese soldiers away from the Pacific and Southeast Asia. In India, on his way home, Chiang inspected some 33,000 Chinese troops trained by Stilwell's men, all healthy, each carrying a modern weapon, something no Chinese army had known before. And at Cairo, a promise that Manchuria and Taiwan would come home. But the Burma Road was gone, Henan had starved, the sea landing was cancelled, and the President had asked the American general who controlled China's supplies how long Chiang could last. Vinegar Joe and the Peanut were headed for a break. Next time, the quarrel between Vinegar Joe and the Peanut comes to a head. And Chiang will have to decide what his American alliance is really worth to him.

Sources

• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 187-188, 188-190, 191-192, 198-200, 200-201, 201-203, 203-204, 204-207, 207-208, 217-219, 228-230, 232-234, 241-243, 243-245, 245-246, 246-248, 248-249, 249-251, 251-252, 252-254, 254-256, 256-257, 260-261
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 312-313, 315-316
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
• United States Department of State, United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949 (the China White Paper) (1949), p. 519, https://archive.org/download/VanSlykeLymanTheChinaWhitePaper1949/Van%20Slyke%2C%20Lyman%20-%20The%20China%20White%20Paper%201949.pdf