Revolution and Civil War, episode 22

Let Them Stew

In April 1944 Japan launches Ichigo, its largest offensive of the war in China, to destroy the American air bases and open a land route to Indochina, and Chiang Kai-shek's armies break before it. The episode follows Chiang and Stilwell through the siege of Hengyang, Roosevelt's demand that Stilwell command all of China's forces, the message Stilwell delivers in person and Chiang's answer, which is to have him recalled, while the first American observers fly to the Communists at Yan'an; it gives real time to the season's sharpest argument over Chiang's record, whether he lost the war's last years through corruption and stubbornness or was let down by an ally that gave little and asked much. It leans on scholars, with a few observers of the time quoted through them.

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Transcript

Last time, Chiang Kai-shek sat beside Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo, and came home with a promise that Manchuria and Taiwan would be returned to China. Behind the photographs, his American chief of staff, General Joseph Stilwell, was telling the Allied camp that Chiang had gone back on his word. Within days, the landing from the sea that Chiang had been promised for Burma was cancelled. And Roosevelt asked Stilwell a question out of the blue: how long did he think Chiang could last? This time, we find out. Because that year, Japan came very close to answering the question for them. In the autumn of 1943, Japan's high command looked at the war and did not like what it saw. The Americans were advancing across the Pacific, and the great gains of early 1942 were starting to look fragile. So, as in 1941, Japan decided to double its bet. It would throw one last massive blow against the Asian mainland, and knock China out of the war for good. They called it Operation Ichigo, which means Number One. The plan was laid out on the fourth of January 1944. It had two aims. Destroy the American air bases in central China, and open a route by railway all the way from central China to French Indochina. Why the air bases? Because from them, American bombers could reach Japan itself. Ichigo was the largest operation the Japanese army ever carried out. Half a million men and 200 bombers, with fuel for eight months and ammunition for two years. At the same time, in a second operation, Japan was to send 85,000 men from northern Burma into British India. What stood in the way was an army worn down by years of attrition, from Japanese attack and from its own government's corruption and incompetence. Fewer men were volunteering, so more were simply seized. Conscripts were often marched off roped together, to somewhere far from home, because near their own villages they might just run away. Inflation had eaten soldiers' pay. And some of the best Chinese troops left were not in China at all. They were in Burma, beside Stilwell. Those were the Y Force, from Yunnan, in the southwest, with up-to-date equipment. On the night of the eleventh of May 1944, 72,000 of them waded across the Salween River in western Yunnan, to link up with Stilwell. Stilwell had grown deeply pessimistic about Burma, and that gloom helped push Marshall and the American chiefs toward a new plan: beat Japan without a great land campaign in Asia, and in China put the air war first. That was more or less Chennault's strategy all along. And nobody seems to have discussed the change with the supreme commander of the China Theater, Chiang Kai-shek. In mid-April, the blow fell on Henan. Chiang's own war ministry was slow to see it coming. Its chief was sure, well into the spring, that any Japanese attack would come in the south. Only in May did it become clear that the blow would fall along the railway through the middle of the country. Henan was the province on the Yellow River that had been flooded in 1938 and starved in the famine of 1942. The defence of the old city of Luoyang was in the hands of two generals, Jiang Dingwen and Tang Enbo. Chiang was on the telephone, directing it himself. He asked Stilwell for five hundred tons of gasoline from the stores kept for the new American B-29 bombers, to fuel Chennault's fighters over Luoyang. Stilwell, who believed Chiang had brought all this on himself, said no. The B-29 was America's new long-range heavy bomber. A force of them was being based in western China to strike at the Japanese home islands. The Chinese divisions in Henan fought, as usual, with no armour, a few old cannon, and two rifles, mostly old ones, for every three men. Luoyang held for fifteen days, and lost 21,000 men before Chiang ordered the withdrawal. Afterwards, Jiang Dingwen wrote his own account. He had known there were not enough troops, he said, and when he asked for more, he did not get them. He hinted that the fault was higher up. His troops should have attacked early, but Chiang's permission did not come until the first of May, and by then it was too late. Orders went astray everywhere. Two whole armies never got the message to march to Luoyang, and went on following the previous order to head somewhere else. And the confusion, Jiang hinted to Chiang, had begun with Chiang's own orders: "Mr. Chiang, you can still remember this". But the part of his account that chills is about the people. "The people of the mountains in western Henan attacked our troops, taking guns, bullets, and explosives, and even high-powered mortars and radio equipment". They surrounded soldiers and killed officers, he wrote, and took the army's stored grain, so that the men went without food for days. It was truly painful to say, he admitted. "In the end the damages we suffered from the attack by the people were more serious than the losses from battles with the enemy." A report to the government was harsher. Its authors charged that Jiang Dingwen and Tang Enbo had paid no attention to political and military matters, and spent their time getting rich. Their divisions were undermanned, because their officers had padded the rolls with soldiers who did not exist, to claim the pay. Tang Enbo, the man who had been a hero at Tai'erzhuang six years before, took the worst of it. When the enemy was crossing the Yellow River, a critic named Guo Zhonghuai wrote, Tang "didn't himself lead from the front, but retreated . . . relaxing and taking a dip in the hot springs." In the end Tang fled with two telegraph operators and twenty or thirty bodyguards, out of touch with his own army. Tang's elite troops, his critic said, were used to carry the baggage of officials escaping the battle zone. "No wonder they didn't fire even one bullet." "But he didn't even know where his armies were," Guo wrote, "so how can he order them to attack?" When the Japanese took northern Henan, they found the government granaries still full. The million bags of flour they captured could have fed 200,000 soldiers for five months. Tang said the peasants had been misled by collaborators into seizing the army's weapons. In fact, the villagers had simply picked up the weapons the soldiers threw away as they ran, to defend themselves against the Japanese. Tang had behaved inexcusably. And yet his flight had an echo of Stilwell's own walkout from Burma two years before. Stilwell was not remotely corrupt, and he could care deeply for his men. But he could also drive them beyond reason, and let his personal feuds overrule his military judgment. Remember what Henan had been through. The farmers had seen their land flooded, their grain taken as tax, and their families starve. Now the government asked them to fight for it again. This time, they would not. When the army tore up roads by day to slow the Japanese, villagers sometimes went back at night and mended them. Theodore H. White, the Time correspondent who had exposed the famine, saw it too: commanders absent, officers using army transport to move their own property, oxen seized from peasants, and soldiers disarmed by their own countrymen. Within three weeks, the correspondent wrote, the Japanese had taken every objective, and "a Chinese army of 300,000 men had ceased to exist." An American diplomat in the northwest reported that 60,000 to 70,000 Japanese troops had met only token resistance, and that the whole war zone was shattered. The worst loss of all, he wrote, was the wheat: "Loss of wheat crop, best in years, most serious loss." The way west, into Shaanxi, now lay open. Then Japan turned south, toward Changsha, in Hunan. In the air, Chennault's fighter pilots flew three and four missions a day, through and under the weather. They wreaked havoc among the Japanese, and their losses were horrendous. Nearly half the pilots of one fighter group were killed or captured that summer. Chennault begged Stilwell to release supplies and transport set aside for the B-29s. Stilwell answered that "until the emergency is unmistakable, the decision will have to wait." Two days later the Japanese surged out of Wuhan into Hunan. The commander there was General Xue, who had held Changsha before with great bravery. But this time the Japanese knew his plan, because he had used it before. "His units were three years older," the correspondent wrote, "their weapons three years more worn, the soldiers three years hungrier than when they had last won glory." And Chiang would not send Xue supplies. He suspected Xue of disloyalty, and that suspicion mattered more to him than the city. Chennault was outraged. Changsha fell on the eighteenth of June 1944. Its commander, General Zhang Deneng, had pulled out without orders, with trucks said to be full of his own belongings. Chiang had him shot, though he was one of his favourite generals. It was not only Xue whom Chiang distrusted. Reports had put Zhang Fakui, commanding in Guangdong and Guangxi, under suspicion too. So Chiang let the American supplies flown over the Hump go entirely to Chennault's air force, and did not press for arms for the armies defending Changsha and Hengyang. His fear of disloyal generals mattered more to him than holding those cities. And Stilwell, who never hesitated to oppose Chiang, did not question it. Over the next two months he plainly preferred that Chiang suffer a serious defeat in eastern China, because it would strengthen his own claim to take over the whole Chinese army. Chiang and Stilwell would both bear some of the blame for what came next. Chiang knew what was happening. In seven years of war, he wrote, the military situation had never been as serious as it was now. The American ambassador, Clarence E. Gauss, wrote in June of a general gloom and a somewhat defeatist attitude spreading through Chongqing. What hurt morale most, he said, was that the peasants of Henan had turned on their own army. Chiang gave a gloomy speech at the Central Military Training Academy. "Everybody has adopted the mentality that the Japanese are too strong and we are too weak," he declared. Later he admitted that the retreating army had robbed, raped and murdered. "Of course," he said, "this sort of army will lose." In Yan'an, the capital of the Communists in the northwest, the reaction was different. Pyotr Vladimirov, the Soviet adviser there, recorded that "the CCP leadership rejoices at the news of the defeat suffered by Chiang Kai-shek's troops". Whenever Chiang suffered a defeat, Vladimirov thought, Mao's side gained by it. And Stilwell? He was in the jungle in Burma. That spring his Chinese troops and a unit of American commandos seized the airfield at Myitkyina, though a few thousand Japanese held the town itself for three more months. Stilwell fought in the trenches with his men, with real courage. But it was a small battle. At the same time, nearly a million Chinese and Japanese soldiers were fighting each other in eastern China. The American press gave Myitkyina far more attention. Marshall hailed it as a brilliant victory. The battle that really decided Burma was fought in India. By early May, Mountbatten's forces had broken the Japanese siege of Imphal and Kohima, with the Royal Air Force flying in 19,000 tons of supplies and 12,000 reinforcements. The Japanese retreat that followed in July was the worst defeat their army had yet suffered, with 55,000 casualties. Nothing like that weight of air power was ever available to Chennault and the Chinese. On the day the town of Myitkyina finally fell, Stilwell found time to ask Marshall to sack Chennault, for insubordination. Chennault's offence was that he had warned Chiang that the Japanese were preparing a huge offensive. Washington said no. Removing Chennault just before the expected collapse in eastern China, it warned Stilwell, could open him to the charge that he had caused it. There was one more twist. In June the Y Force attack on the Salween front collapsed, when 1,500 Japanese drove back 10,000 Chinese. Chiang, furious, sent two more armies from the north to join it in Burma, armies that were badly needed against the Japanese offensive at home. Whatever else he was doing in 1944, Chiang was still pouring men into Stilwell's campaign.

After Changsha, the next city in Japan's path was Hengyang, a hundred miles to the south. Chiang badly needed to win there. A victory, he wrote, would be a blessing from heaven, and would "dissolve the diplomatic crisis and deliver us to safety." Once again he would not back General Xue. Instead he ran the defence himself, through commanders loyal to him, which added to the chaos. But this time he had a general who was willing to fight. His name was Fang Xianjue, and Chiang trusted him. At first it worked. Chennault's fighters and bombers wrecked the Japanese supply lines so badly in early July that the attack on the walled city ground to a halt. Then for a week the American planes sat on the ground for lack of fuel. As Stilwell wished, the army chiefs in Washington still refused to let Chennault touch the gasoline stored for the B-29s at Chengdu. On the ground, Fang threw back three waves of Japanese assaults, reportedly killing 7,602 Japanese soldiers. But he lost most of his regulars, 19,380 men, and by the middle of July his front line was held mostly by auxiliaries and service troops. And his supplies were running out. Chiang did not fly supplies in. So Chennault went straight to Stilwell, without telling Chiang, and asked for a single air drop of ammunition into Hengyang. Stilwell refused. One drop, he said, would set a precedent for demands that could never be met. On the twentieth of July, Stilwell's own chief of staff in Chongqing, General Tom Hearn, suggested a token drop of two hundred tons. Stilwell's reply was to recall, with satisfaction, Chennault's old boast that he could beat the Japanese from the air alone. Neither Chennault nor Chiang had ever claimed that. Turning down another plea for supplies, Stilwell was plain about why he was waiting. "I do not see how we can move until a certain big decision is made." The big decision was whether Stilwell would be given command of the whole Chinese army. Chennault then offered to turn a thousand tons of his own share of the supplies flown over the Hump into arms and ammunition for the men in Hengyang, with or without Chiang's approval. The Hump was the dangerous air route over the mountains from India, by then the only real way supplies reached China. Stilwell turned that down too, and told Hearn, "The time for half-way measures has passed." "The cards have been put on the table and the answer has not been given. Until it is given let them stew." Let them stew. Neither man comes out of Hengyang well. Chiang and Stilwell both acted irresponsibly, and their pique and prejudices cost the lives of thousands of the Chinese soldiers both of them claimed to respect. In the end it was Chiang who did more. He saw how much it mattered that China be seen to fight, and he ordered the armies nearby to break through to the city. They tried. American observers with Stilwell's command reported that three Chinese armies took heavy casualties trying to break the ring around Hengyang, and three more suffered badly attacking the Japanese supply lines. The city was defended heroically. But it fell on the eighth of August. After the war, the government built a memorial there, out of 5,000 skulls gathered from Chinese soldiers who had never been buried. The Chinese armies in 1944 were not winning. But no one who saw Hengyang could say they were not fighting.

By then, in Washington, the patience had run out. The defeats at Luoyang and Changsha had set people muttering, in Chongqing and in Washington. Marshall told Roosevelt that the time had come to put China's remaining military strength in the hands of someone who could use it against Japan. In Marshall's view, only one man fitted the bill. Stilwell. So in early July, Roosevelt sent Chiang a message. He had no intention, he wrote, of dictating on matters concerning China. But China was "on the brink of collapse". He knew what Chiang thought of Stilwell. He still believed Stilwell was the best man to save the situation, and he asked Chiang to bring him back, put him directly under Chiang, and "give him real military authority," including over the Communist armies. Marshall warned Stilwell to do everything in his power not to offend Chiang. Stilwell promised, as a country boy, to avoid unnecessary irritations. In his diary he wrote, "The cure for China's trouble is the elimination of Chiang Kai-shek." For Chiang, the request was stunning. Nothing like it had happened in China's history as a sovereign state, except when foreign dynasties had conquered the country. He saw three choices, he wrote: "refuse; accept; or postpone and see." He chose to wait. His reply was polite, and it said yes, in principle. But Chinese troops, he warned, were not as easily directed as the few fighting in Burma, and doing it in haste would cause misunderstanding and confusion. He asked Roosevelt to send a personal representative, someone with real power, to work with him and to sort out his relations with Stilwell. And he flatly contradicted his own earlier warnings. "China is not on the brink," he told Roosevelt. "I can guarantee victory." His envoy explained to Roosevelt that the Chinese army was a web of personal and regional loyalties that needed subtle handling, and that Stilwell had already quarrelled with Chinese officers and officials. The question, he said, was whether Stilwell could really command once every Chinese soldier was under him. For a moment it seemed to work. His envoy, H. H. Kung, saw the President, and Roosevelt wrote to one of his admirals, "There is a good deal in what the Generalissimo says." Chiang wrote in his journal like a calm sage of the old school: "All I can abide by is the heavenly principle and the eternal law". Even America's flirtation with the Communists, he thought, might be turned to his advantage. Then, while Roosevelt was in Hawaii, the army chiefs in Washington sent Chiang another message. If Chiang's decisions stifled the war against Japan, it warned, America and China would have "limited opportunity for further cooperation." In effect it threatened to end the alliance itself. Chiang told himself the words were not really the President's. Still, he wrote, "we must be psychologically prepared to fight this war alone." And when Roosevelt urged him to make a military deal with the Communists, Chiang began to suspect America wanted him to accept Mao's rule in the north, two Chinas, to avoid a quarrel with the Soviets after the war. Then, almost together, came news of the attempt on Hitler's life and the fall of the Tojo cabinet in Japan. Japan's surrender, Chiang thought, would not be long in coming. He believed that if he could avoid a break by giving Stilwell command for a while, with some controls, the crisis would pass. After the war, he thought, the Russians and the Chinese Communists would push America to his side anyway. After Hengyang fell, Chiang sank into despair. He was convinced that "Roosevelt has already determined that he has to overthrow me." "The evil forces of the whole world are uniting to oppress and insult me," he wrote. "It's like hell has opened up to swallow me." He even thought about resigning, to force the Americans to see they had no one else. Two days later he decided against it. "It's too dangerous for the country." Roosevelt thought he could push him around because he would never resign, Chiang wrote. And Roosevelt needed Chinese soldiers to fight the war, "otherwise he'd have to send over a million American troops to East Asia to sacrifice themselves." At that point there were some 27,739 American troops in China, most of them airmen. He had resigned once before, in the Manchurian crisis of 1931, and been back in power by the start of 1932, because no one else could hold the country together. Instead he wrote that he must swallow the humiliation and wait for his chance. And if it came to the worst, he would cut the tangle with a sharp knife. On the tenth of August, Roosevelt told Chiang he was sending General Patrick J. Hurley as his personal representative. Hurley was a tall, boisterous, strong-headed Oklahoman, a hero of the First World War, who had been secretary of war under President Hoover. He had grown up next to a Choctaw reservation and had learned the Choctaw war cry. He arrived in Chongqing on the seventh of September, to settle the details of the new arrangement under which Stilwell would command all Chinese troops. At the end of August, ambassador Gauss saw Chiang and urged a compromise with the Communists. Chiang "did not seem to realize that time is on the side of the Chinese Communists," Gauss wrote afterwards. Chiang felt the pressure from every side, and he wrote, "The psychological pressure from the Americans is especially great." And then, "This is imperialism fully-exposed." Even so, Chiang gave ground. He agreed that all his war zone troops would come under Stilwell, even the divisions guarding against the Communists in the northwest. But he added a steep price: America would provide all the supplies those troops needed. On the fifteenth of September, Chiang called Hurley and Stilwell to a meeting. Stilwell had just come back from Guilin, a city on the edge of collapse, and in his diary he blamed Chiang. What they ought to do, he wrote, was shoot the Generalissimo and the rest of the gang. In Burma, the Y Force was under heavy Japanese attack at the village of Longling. Chiang asked for the other Chinese force, at Myitkyina, to attack east and take the pressure off. Stilwell refused. Those troops needed rest. Then, Chiang said, if that could not be done, he would pull the Y Force back across the river to defend Kunming. Stilwell was appalled. It would wreck the whole Burma campaign. He did not talk it over with Hurley. He rushed off a radio message to Marshall, saying that Chiang, whom he called a "crazy little bastard," was about to reverse everything in Burma. He implied that Chiang was deliberately starving the Y Force of men. In fact Chiang had just rushed the 200th Division and 10,000 replacements to it. And he followed it with a note to T. V. Soong, saying he had been "delayed, ignored, double-crossed, and kicked around for years". He demanded "nothing less than full power" over the Chinese army. If he did not get it, Stilwell wrote, America should leave China and set up its Asian base in the Soviet Union. Stilwell's message reached Marshall in Quebec, where Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting about the war in Europe. It caused extreme alarm. Roosevelt feared a disaster in Burma, weeks before he faced the voters in a presidential election. Marshall's staff drafted a letter for the President to send to Chiang, more insulting and threatening than any before it. And when the reinforced Y Force broke through on the Salween front, Stilwell did not tell Marshall that his alarm was out of date.

Early on the morning of the nineteenth of September 1944, Stilwell received a radio message for Chiang, marked to be delivered in person. He saw at once that it was "hot as a fire cracker." "Mark this day in red on the calendar of life," he wrote in his diary. "At last, at long last, F.D.R. has finally spoken plain words, and plenty of them, with a firecracker in every sentence." The letter told Chiang not to pull the Y Force back, and to reinforce it at once. If he failed, the land route to China would be cut, and "you must yourself be prepared to accept the consequences and assume the personal responsibility." It said, "I have urged time and time again in recent months that you take drastic action" against the disaster closing in on China. And above all, it demanded "General Stilwell in unrestricted command of all your forces." It was perhaps the most uncompromising note anyone had ever written to Chiang Kai-shek. Its only warm words were in the closing lines, which Roosevelt himself had almost certainly added. Stilwell drove out to Huangshan, Chiang's retreat in the hills outside Chongqing. Inside, a meeting was already under way, on the final terms of Stilwell's new command. Chiang was there, with Hurley, T. V. Soong, the war minister He Yingqin, Bai Chongxi, and others of the Military Council. On the table lay the draft commission making Stilwell commander. At about half past five an orderly told the Generalissimo that Stilwell had arrived. Chiang asked for him to join them for tea. "We will be glad to have him." Stilwell asked first to see Hurley alone. On the long veranda, he showed him the message. Marshall had ordered that since it was in the nature of an ultimatum, Stilwell was to deliver it himself. Hurley read it. "No chief of state," he told Stilwell, "could tolerate such an insult as this letter." And he told Stilwell what had happened that morning. Chiang had agreed to every condition for Stilwell's appointment, and to every demand in the letter Stilwell was about to hand him. "Joe, you have won this ball game," Hurley pleaded. If Stilwell delivered the message, he risked damaging relations between China and America for generations. Stilwell would not wait. "No Pat, the President sent this message to me to deliver to the Peanut, and I'm going to give it to him right now." They went back in. Chiang, about to sign command of his army over to a foreigner, seemed in a good mood. "I have a message from the President of the United States to the Generalissimo," Stilwell said, and handed the English text to the interpreter. Hurley stepped forward and took it, to spare Chiang. There was a Chinese version, he said, and he handed Chiang that instead. The Chinese translation turned out to be even blunter than the English. Chiang read it in silence. Then he put down the letter, and turned his empty tea cup upside down. "I now understand," he said. In Chinese, Stilwell asked whether that gesture still meant the party was over. A Chinese staff officer nodded. Yes. The meeting was over, and with it any chance that Stilwell would ever command the millions of men in China's armies. Out on the porch, Stilwell, who did not yet see what he had done, said he hoped Hurley had not been offended at being bypassed. Hurley said that with a disaster this serious in front of them, that was "insignificant." When everyone else had gone, Chiang was left alone with T. V. Soong. And he broke down, in what was described as "compulsive and stormy sobbing." When he had collected himself, he told Soong he was sure the letter was Stilwell's doing. Stilwell, he said, would have to leave China. He was not wrong. Roosevelt and Marshall had believed Stilwell's claim that Chiang's refusals had made the trouble in Burma worse. Chiang began drafting a reply. Soong called in Joseph Alsop, an American journalist close to Soong and to Chennault. Alsop was astounded by what he read. Chiang's draft was addressed to Roosevelt as "The hope of the world and the light of the West." Soong and Alsop cut the flattery and made it much tougher. Their version declared Stilwell unwelcome and blamed him for China's fearful situation. That night Chiang wrote in his diary that the afternoon had been "the most severe humiliation I have ever had in my life." He called Hurley back for a late, private dinner. He was deeply offended by the letter's tone, he said, and there could be no more talks "while Stilwell remains in China." He showed Hurley the reply that Alsop and Soong had written. Hurley was aghast. It was far too strong, he said, and he pleaded with Chiang to think again. The next day Chiang went further. Through Soong, he warned Hurley that if Stilwell was not careful, "his life could be in danger at any time and any place." Stilwell had no idea. When Hurley told him how angry Chiang was, without saying he wanted him gone, Stilwell thought it was funny, a sign that Chiang was about to give in. That night he wrote to his wife that he had played the avenging angel, and sent her a poem. "I have waited long for vengeance— At last I've had my chance. I've looked the Peanut in the eye And kicked him in the pants." The household had heard Chiang sobbing, and the rumour spread through the city. "Rejoice with me," Stilwell told his wife. "The dope is that after I left, the screaming began and lasted into the night." Hurley's own report to Roosevelt a few days later was optimistic, and did not mention Chiang's anger. At Stilwell's request, he even took out a line saying the two men were fundamentally incompatible. For that moment of satisfaction, Stilwell would pay a heavy price. America and China would pay a heavier one, for a quarter of a century.

Chiang did not send his reply at once. Instead, as if to show Hurley he could cooperate, he approved Stilwell's plan to save Guangxi, ordered the execution of a commander who had given up the town of Quanzhou without a fight, and gave Bai Chongxi command of two threatened war zones. And Stilwell, apparently thinking his command would come any day, at last ordered about two hundred tons of ammunition flown to Guilin and Liuzhou. It was the first real supply by air that he, or Chiang, had sent to the armies fighting the Japanese offensive in Hunan and Guangxi, in five months. When Chiang's answer finally went to Washington, it was an indictment. Burma, he wrote, had sucked away China's men and supplies, and the Japanese had taken the chance to strike in Henan and Hunan. Stilwell had shown complete indifference. He had released almost nothing of China's Lend-Lease to the armies in China itself: "60 mountain guns, 320 antitank rifles, and 506 bazookas." "We have taken Myitkyina," Chiang wrote, "but we have lost almost all of east China, and in this, General Stilwell cannot be absolved of grave responsibility." Hurley sent it on with his own blunt comment. "Today you are confronted with a choice between Chiang Kai-shek and Stilwell." And Chiang told his party's leaders that if America cut off all aid, the unoccupied part of China could hold out alone, if need be in just four provinces. When Chiang's note reached Washington, Marshall and the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, urged Roosevelt to push the crisis over the brink by cutting off all American aid. Roosevelt refused. But Marshall insisted that if Stilwell could not command China's armies, no American would. Marshall vetoed the President's idea of putting Chennault in Stilwell's place. Instead he suggested Stilwell might at least stay on to finish the road across north Burma. Stilwell, a four-star general, was willing to accept the demotion. Chiang said no. That night, in Chongqing, Hurley could not sleep. He had done everything he could to save Stilwell. At two in the morning he dictated a message to the President, strongly recommending Stilwell's recall. At daybreak he took it to Stilwell and showed it to him. Stilwell read it, and said, "Pat, that must have been a difficult message for you to write." Hurley said it was the most disagreeable service he had ever done for his country. Chiang, he told Roosevelt, responded well to persuasion and reacted violently against coercion, and Stilwell was incapable of understanding him. "Stilwell's every act is a move toward the complete subjugation of Chiang Kai-shek." Roosevelt gave way. Stilwell was to be recalled at once, and General Albert Wedemeyer would take his place as Chiang's chief of staff. "THE AX FALLS," Stilwell wrote on the nineteenth of October. "I am 'recalled.'" Before he left, he gave a scathing account of Chiang, his army and his regime to three American journalists, among them Theodore H. White. The next afternoon he paid a farewell call on the Generalissimo. Chiang wore a dark blue Sun Yat-sen jacket over a black Chinese robe, and he was neither vindictive nor gloating. Chiang was conciliatory. "It is very unfortunate we cannot work together." They had very different personalities, he said, and it might be good for them to work in different places for the same common goal. Stilwell answered that whatever the Generalissimo thought of him, he hoped he would remember "my motive was only China's good." Chiang offered him China's highest honour for a foreigner, the Grand Cordon of the Blue Sky and White Sun. Stilwell turned it down, and in his diary recorded exactly where he had told Chiang he could put it. He wrote a note to the Communist general Zhu De, regretting that he would not serve with him. He wrote nothing to any of the Chinese generals who had fought beside him, not even Sun Liren. Days later he took off for Delhi. He would never set foot in China again. To the end, he thought himself blameless. On an undated sheet of paper he wrote that his relations with Chiang had always been impersonal and official, and that once a decision was made, he had done his best to carry it out. The road he had fought for in Burma did open, joining the Burma Road from India. Chiang named it the Stilwell Road, as a tribute, or perhaps so that the folly would carry its author's name. By then far more came over the Hump than the road could ever carry. And the young Chinese soldiers who had died building it and fighting for it were soon forgotten. One of them, Huang Yaowu, was sixteen in Burma. Years later he asked of his dead comrades, "In my heart, they are martyrs who died for the motherland. They died for a good cause. But who remembers them now?" Four days after Stilwell left, Wedemeyer took over all his posts. He had planned the Normandy invasion under Marshall, and he was as tactful as Stilwell was blunt. At their first meeting he found Chiang a small, graceful, fine-boned man with "black piercing eyes and an engaging smile." But he saw the same deep flaws in Chiang's armies that Stilwell had. Within days he decided that the Generalissimo and his officers were "impotent and confounded." Then came the newspapers. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times came home from China with his story already written. On a stopover in Cairo he slipped past the military censors, keeping the draft in his jacket pocket while his bags were searched. On the thirty-first of October, Roosevelt himself allowed it to be published. The recall, the Times man wrote, "represents the political triumph of a moribund, corrupt regime that is more concerned with maintaining its political supremacy than driving the Japanese out of China." Above all, he accused Chiang of a "basic unwillingness" to fight the Japanese. He called Chiang's government unenlightened, cold-hearted and autocratic. And he called Stilwell the ablest field commander in China since "Chinese Gordon," as if the two best leaders of Chinese troops in eighty years had both been Westerners. He never asked Hurley, or Soong, or anyone else for the other side, and he never mentioned the ultimatum Stilwell himself had delivered. A week later, Roosevelt was re-elected. In Chongqing, Chiang read the translations of these articles. The Communists, he wrote, were using this perverted propaganda to stir things up. He knew the fallout from the Stilwell affair would go on for some time. So who was right? This is the sharpest argument of this whole season, and it is still alive. Here the sources disagree. One side is the case against Chiang. Stilwell said his officers padded their rolls and stole from their own men. A Chinese critic charged that Tang Enbo took a dip in the hot springs while his army ran. Chiang would not send supplies to a general he distrusted, even to save a city. And he wanted to keep his best troops for the coming fight with the Communists. At the end of 1943, Stilwell's political adviser, John Paton Davies, had written that Chiang was "probably the only Chinese who shares the popular American misconception that Chiang Kai-shek is China." In Henan in 1944, an army of hundreds of thousands simply dissolved, and the peasants disarmed it. The other side was put most plainly by Stilwell's own successor. Wedemeyer, for all his doubts about Chiang's officers, concluded that the Nationalist government, "far from being reluctant to fight," had shown "amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan." Industrial, united France had surrendered in six weeks. China was still fighting after more than seven years, and nearly three million casualties. Many of its best troops were in Burma, a target of doubtful worth, because the Allies held to the fiction that Chiang had to fight there to show his value. And the Allies had decided at the start of the war that China would never be a main front. It was hard to expect the Chinese to see themselves as expendable. By the end of 1944, more than a million government soldiers had died. Between 1940 and the end of 1944, the Communists, who Stilwell and others said were carrying the war, lost only about 70,000. What is not in dispute is who won the argument at the time. Stilwell had won the battle of words, and Chiang's government never fully recovered from it. And Ichigo went on. Guilin fell on the twenty-fourth of November, and the Japanese came closer to Chongqing. Before it fell, Graham Peck, the American propaganda man, found Guilin gripped by a shrill hysteria. The city was like "a floating amusement park, adrift in a stormy sea," swarming with refugees. Wedemeyer advised moving the capital to Kunming. Chiang refused. If the Japanese came, he meant to make his last stand in Chongqing, "to survive or perish." Then he would stay too, Wedemeyer said, and Chiang was impressed. The attack never came. In December the offensive stalled, and the corridor Japan had won was soon of little use, its bridges and railways smashed by Chennault's planes. It was the furthest the Japanese got in the whole war. They held more of China than at any time before. But the American air bases were simply moved further inland, and from the Pacific island of Saipan, now in American hands, American bombers could reach Japan anyway. Ichigo failed to win Japan the war. But it cost the Nationalists 750,000 more casualties, and the great farming and recruiting provinces of Henan and Hunan. It nearly broke Chiang's regime, draining its resources and crippling its leadership. The man who gained was Mao. Ichigo boosted the Communists politically and militarily, and cost them almost no casualties at all. Ambassador Gauss resigned soon after Stilwell's recall. His parting advice to Wedemeyer was, "We should pull up the plug and let the whole Chinese Government go down the drain." Hurley took his place. And when Chiang learned that Wedemeyer would keep control of China's Lend-Lease, just as Stilwell had, he wrote, "It's clear US policy hasn't changed at all," and, "This makes my heart bitter." Still, Chiang took Stilwell's going as a sign that America was sincere about helping China, and he wrote, "This is the greatest comfort for me in the new year."

But one American decision of that summer would outlast every quarrel in this episode. In June 1944, Roosevelt had sent his vice president, Henry A. Wallace, to Chongqing, to calm Chiang down and push him toward cooperation with the Communists. Chiang told Wallace he had no confidence in Stilwell's judgment. And Wallace pressed him to let an American military mission go to Yan'an, to see the Communists for itself. Chiang had written that it was only reasonable that he should strongly refuse. Only weeks before, the first American journalists allowed into Yan'an had sent home glowing reports. One called it "a Chinese Wonderland City." Mao told them his party had never wavered in supporting Chiang Kai-shek, and that all of China's problems came down to one phrase, "lack of democracy." He gave way. Mao was nervous too. On the fifteenth of July, Vladimirov, the Soviet liaison, sat up with Mao through a long night. "He looked tired," the Russian noted, as Mao paced up and down, dropping cigarette ash everywhere. "America's position is of tremendous importance to our future," Mao told him. On the twenty-second of July 1944, an American Douglas transport came in to land on the yellow soil of Yan'an. Mao Zedong and Zhu De had come to the airfield to meet it, in new matching uniforms. There was martial music and a parade of soldiers. And Vladimirov stood waiting with his Leica camera to record the moment. Zhu De was the commander in chief of the Communist armies, Mao's partner since the earliest days of the Red Army. The plane veered off the runway in a cloud of dust, and stopped short as its propeller fell off with a clatter. Fortunately, no one was hurt. The Americans became known as the Dixie Mission, a joke about Union missions behind Confederate lines in the American Civil War. There were nine of them, and ten more came a month later. The military side was led by Colonel Barrett, a Chinese speaker and old China hand. The political reporting was done by John S. Service, a young American diplomat from the embassy in Chongqing. Vladimirov thought Service "young, full of bounce, and has a good retentive memory." What Service saw dazzled him. There were no bodyguards and no pomp. Mao and the other leaders were spoken of with respect everywhere, the diplomat wrote, "but these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking." "Morale is very high," he wrote. "The war seems close and real. There is no defeatism, but rather confidence." The Communist program, he reported, "is simple democracy ... much more American than Russian in form and spirit." He did notice one odd thing. Everyone seemed to think alike. "In their thinking and expressions there is a noticeable uniformity." The Americans felt, Service wrote, that they had "come into a different country and are meeting a different people." There was a simplicity of life and dress, and no sign of beggars or desperate poverty. He noticed the folk dancing and peasant art that Mao had demanded in 1942, that culture should meet the peasants where they were. At a banquet on the twenty-sixth of July, Mao sat next to Service and asked whether America might open a consulate in Yan'an. If the Americans left as soon as the war with Japan ended, Mao told him, that would be "just the time of greatest danger of a Kuomintang attack and civil war." Mao and his comrades promised the Americans everything. That summer Mao was even ready to rename his party, to sound less communist. And these experienced American officers believed a great deal of it, remarkably easily. The mission's conclusion was that the Communists had turned away from Moscow, and that "American friendship and support is more important to China than Russian." In the years of the Cold War, Service, Barrett and the others would pay dearly for what they wrote from Yan'an, when America began asking who had lost China. Vladimirov saw a different place. He wrote of an "oppressive, suffocating atmosphere in the party". People there, he said, had given up all initiative in their haste to redeem themselves from sins they had never committed. Behind the music and the parade, Yan'an had a secret the Americans had flown straight past. Next time, we go back a few years, to see where that atmosphere came from. It came from a campaign the party called Rectification, and the terror it brought to Yan'an.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), p. 343-345
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 241-243, 249-251, 251-252, 254-256, 256-257, 267-269, 269-270, 272-273, 273-275, 278-279, 279-281, 281-282, 282-283, 285-286, 286-288, 288-289, 289-291, 292-294, 294-296, 296-298
• Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), p. 29-30
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), p. 315-316
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)