CHAPTER 23
BEFORE describing the end of Japan, and the breakthrough of the American ships from the Pacific, it is necessary to review the fate of China up to this point. After all, China had been one of the principal causes of the war in the Far East. This conflict, which had spread so widely, had begun as the result of the refusal by Chiang Kai-shek to come to terms with Japan. China had not ceased to count. But, after the intervention of the United States, it had taken a relatively minor part in the military affairs of the nations.
Before the conflict was enlarged, Chiang had calculated that, if he held out, sooner or later Japan would come into collision with other Powers. He had resolved, and it was more or less public knowledge, that, when this time came, China, which for four years had borne the fury of the Japanese offensive, would retire from the actual fighting, and would leave it to the fresher forces which should become engaged to complete the wearing down of Japan, of which China felt that it had done enough. Without fighting further, Chiang Kai-shek counted on being able to join in the eventual share-out of territory, and in the other benefits, when the world was rearranged at the general peace. In this, events had gone more or less as Chiang expected. Chiang, the simple and, in the eyes of the sophisticated statesmen of the West, rather primitive soldier, seemed at the time to have his judgement vindicated, his diplomacy confirmed.
It appeared to the Americans that China, poor in resources for making war, now held the best cards. The United States had chosen to take up the challenge of Japan. But it had handicapped itself by the decision to concentrate on fighting Germany first, Japan afterwards. In the interval before it could concentrate its whole attention on Japan, allies in the East seemed likely to be of greater moment to the United States than the United States was to them. It became a major preoccupation with it to keep China in the war, at the cost of offering it all possible inducement to stay. China could have all that it asked, in exchange for its willingness that the total commitment of American force in the Far East should be delayed. In the long run, the United States believed that the use of Chinese territory was indispensable for making it geographically possible for the Allies to defeat Japan; it had no confidence that Russia, which also had a land army able to get to grips with Japan, would ever, in the way that events were shaping themselves, break its neutrality with Japan. For the United States, China represented the corridor along which their armies might eventually proceed, and get at Japan on level terms. In the meanwhile, China was to be the subject of a holding operation: to be kept in the war at all costs. For this the Americans were prepared to pay a great deal, and they had insufficient regard for the fact that the Chinese were accustomed to considering long-term as well as the short-term interests of their country. Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters could read their balance sheets and were masters at calculating profit and loss.
The impediment lay chiefly in geography. With the fall of Burma, the precarious link with Chungking along the Burma Road was interrupted. China was cut off. Between it and the Americans there was the enormous barrier of the Himalayas. To keep China in the war, the Americans, with ingenuity, tried by every means to circumvent the obstacle. They organized an airlift to China over the mountain ranges from India; they sent American officers to re-train the Chinese Army; they put continual pressure upon India to demonstrate that China might eventually find aid there. In immediate aid, China was given a large Anglo-American loan: America subscribed $500 million and Britain £50 million: this relieved its immediate financial problems.
This aid the Allies intended for China as a whole. It was directed to whoever in China would fight Japan. Chiang Kai-shek’s aim was to engross it all for himself. It was to ensure that his hold over the country was continuously and decisively strengthened; it was to deny aid to those who might threaten it. In his thinking at that time dollars counted for more than morale in the upkeep of government. He saw danger principally in one fact – that the communists, the party of revolution, might obtain the economic backing which would transform the situation, and put them on equal terms with the Government. In a China in which the ferment of revolution was working ever more actively, in which communism had already mastered the circumstances of the war, it was essential that the communists should be denied their share of foreign aid, even at the cost of their military efficiency as allies against Japan. Technically, the Kuomintang and the communists were still allies; they were pledged together to fight Japan; the American aid, on a reading of the military situation, should have been divided between them. That it should not became the governing aim of Chiang’s policy. He was still the embodiment of Chinese nationalism, but he was first and always a warlord.
At first, the prospects appeared bright for Chiang. His more distant ambitions, of being the supreme force in Asia at the end of the war, buoyed him up when his Government, as the result of the intensification of the blockade, suffered blow upon blow. Chiang was sanguine: this perhaps explains why he took phlegmatically even the worst of news. Both his enemies, Japan and Chinese Communism, were being trampled into ruin by the United States. His long-term prospects were heady. His standing in Washington mattered more to him than military realities in the Far East. In this he was served zealously, alike by plausible Chinese and by foreigners over whom China had cast its spell.
Chiang, in order apparently to gratify his sense of importance, struck out in directions which caused surprise, and ways which were unwelcome to his allies. He had insisted on visiting India, in February 1942, and seeing Indian affairs for himself. He could urge that India had suddenly become vitally important for China, both as a base, and as transit territory for American supplies. The bad relations between the Government of India and Indian nationalists were a menace to China, because they could result in a situation which interrupted communication. Chiang insisted on studying matters for himself, and tried, by personal diplomacy with the Viceroy and Indian leaders, to bridge the gap between them.
The British were annoyed. They found Chiang extremely ill-informed, and privately judged that, in the guise of a mediator, he was prospecting the ground for Chinese intervention in case the military necessity in Europe should compel a British withdrawal from India. They objected to the need for providing Chiang and his wife with banquets at the moment when, too late in the judgement of many observers, they had become conscious of their desperate state. Especially, though, they demurred at the increased prestige which his interest brought to the Indian Congress in its duel with the Viceroy.
Chiang Kai-shek could not blame the Indian Administration for a failure to back him. This somewhat lethargic Government went out of its way to provide, with energy and great speed, the institutions which were needed to bind the two Governments together in their war effort. On the Indian side, a China Relations Department was brought into being, to whose good offices a thousand things were owing: the Department did everything, from supply to strengthening military cooperation. It was efficient, it was prompt, it cut through delays. It was so much out of character for the Government of India that it quite astonished the Chinese.
In spite of these inducements to be up and doing, China remained more or less militarily inactive. The performance of Chinese troops, in the rare actions in which they were engaged, was unmemorable. Nor was this surprising. Their armies were shockingly organized; relations between officers and men were deplorable. The officers were increasingly arrogant and corrupt; they embezzled the wages of the soldiers; they were often brutal and ignorant. The soldiers either were separated for many years from their families, or, if they had news of them, were rightly disturbed at the news of worsened conditions in the countryside. The rank and file had nothing to fight for.
Chiang Kai-shek chose, in March 1943, to publish under his name a highly controversial book. It was written in Chinese. The book was called China’s Destiny. It contained the familiar story of the unjust dealings with China by the Great Powers, the unequal treaties, the shearing away from China of her dependencies. Thus it revealed that China still nursed her grievances when it might have seemed better policy to have concealed them. The Powers which had done China its past wrongs had now shown a willingness to repair the damage, and the exposure of China’s wound could only damage their cooperation. The effect of its publication was to cause mistrust, rouse suspicion, and generate bad blood. Madame Chiang Kai-shek shrewdly advised against an English translation: this did not appear therefore until 1947. The book, however, had come to the attention of the West’s China hands when it first appeared in Chinese, and therefore it had precisely the effect which Chiang wanted to produce.
Chiang, in his relations with his Allies, followed the tactics of ‘threatening to fall’. He advertised that his position was calamitous. The weaker he was, the more anxious the Americans were for him, and the greater the efforts which they were willing to make on his behalf. Naturally he led them on; and he was helped by the chance that President Roosevelt revealed, from the United States’ entry into the war until his death in 1945, an extraordinary partiality for China. The accidents of personality played here a fateful part. Roosevelt, active in Washington, had an even greater influence on events by the climate of opinion which he germinated, than by the measures he took as head of the American Government. He was himself endowed with no special perspicacity, but he did surround himself with able men who dwelt much on the shape which the world must take as a result of the war; and he became convinced that, round a firm Sino-American axis, the Asian countries were destined to revolve. American aid would supply strength to China; China would revert to its traditional art of radiating its great civilizing influence out across its borders.
Roosevelt saw rightly that the crisis in East Asia was due ultimately to the collapse of the political power of China. The United States would restore it. This time there would be no imperialists to undermine it again; President Roosevelt was satisfied that the eastern role of Britain and other colonial Powers was coming to an end and he had a curious blind spot in relation to the Soviet Union’s inheritance of Imperial Russian pretensions in world politics. Asia would be safe again, except from its own dissension, and what power would thrive better in this atmosphere than China. He gained comfort from the signs that China’s appetite for its historic greatness was beginning to recover. He became convinced that he was serving alike the interests of the United States and also all the world by throwing his mantle over China.
Roosevelt had an extraordinary power of communicating his vision to the public. In this case, however, he preached mostly to the converted. The United States’ attitude towards China in the later stages of the war was rather unbalanced. If one nation can be said to adopt another, the United States adopted China. The United States has been liable to periodical phases of extreme partiality to certain foreign countries; in its fervent feeling towards China at this time, it outdid itself. The United States was hallucinated; like Titania by Bottom the Weaver. The reality was that the United States became enthusiastic for the tyranny of the Kuomintang, which was passing increasingly into the most reactionary hands; the Americans saw it, not as it was, but as a democratic party full of vigour and promise. In place of a military rabble, the United States saw in the Chinese Army an inspiring force, which was a mixture of a romanticized version of the American armies of the Revolution and the Civil War. Where there was evident and apparently irreparable economic ruin, it saw lively economic promise. China’s intellectual and artistic life, which, to the trained eye, was in the ruins of a great cultural past, appeared to the USA to be full of a fresh, imaginative view of the world. China appeared as nearly a new Utopia. The United States of course produced its realists, who protested against its romantic illusions, but they could scarcely make themselves heard against the newspapers and radio, which almost all of them followed the fashion.
Roosevelt’s policies, the American hallucination, the realities of geography and of logistics in the East, produced, between them, a mood of accommodation to China which bewildered the rest of the world. China was pitied, but the United States postponed coming to its aid with immediate and effective military succour. It was encouraged by the United States to pass its time in discussing its growing ambition. American patronage ensured that China’s claims were not regarded as simply ludicrous. Men like Winston Churchill took a sceptical view, but it was hardly worth their while to oppose the United States over this. In war, naked strength is in the last resort the thing which counts; but prestige may be manufactured by handfuls of dedicated officials and the few statesmen who matter, and may, in the short run, pass for strength. China was in this condition, and advanced by several degrees in the world’s esteem.
All the while that this was happening, the Chinese press, which was of course under strong Government influence, had, as was natural in the relations between states, been biting the hand which fed it. The newspapers were full of articles which attacked the United States very bitterly. They made use of the stale propaganda methods of the Nazis early in the war in Europe. They claimed that the United States would fight until the last Chinaman; they envisaged that China, having made great sacrifices for democracy, would be a certain loser at the peace, and would itself be sacrificed. They painted a picture of the riotous life lived by Americans in luxurious camps in the midst of the poverty of China. This mood, when it became known in the United States, took a little of the glow out of the American feeling for China. But the work of the China lobby had been very far-reaching, and the suspicion that the Chinese were ungrateful was lightly borne by American philanthropy.
Although there was much criticism of Chiang Kai-shek by some Americans with a clearer vision, too much can be made of occasional Sino-American friction. In particular, the incompetence and bad morale of the Chinese were probably overrated by some American experts. There was no real likelihood of China making a separate peace. Chiang Kai-shek had steered China’s policy since the earliest years of the conflict, but, by the latest years, China had probably steered itself. The muddle, constant criticism, and apathy misled the United States. China, though it detested war, was averse to surrender. It would have opposed Chiang if he had wished to make a dishonourable peace with nearly as much compulsive force as it had done when it suspected him in 1937. China’s mood was frightening. It had not the least enthusiasm for the war; it was profoundly weary of it; but it was determined to continue to resist. If ever a war had in fact been a ‘people’s war’, this was one, even though there were large and respectable elements of the population who were cooperating with the Japanese. The Government was forbidden by the nation to make peace: by a nation which, by all reasonable arguments, yearned for peace. The war seemed likely to continue indefinitely.
It was the Americans who had to serve in China who were naturally less affected by the pronounced American enthusiasm for all things Chinese. Their position was extremely difficult; they suffered much less from the delusions which were making American policy, but they were expected to act as if they did so. The attitude of the much-tried American General Joseph Stilwell deserves study. His mishaps are part of the misunderstandings of the time.
He was a naturally bilious man aptly nicknamed ‘Vinegar Joe’: he was extraordinarily suspicious of everyone, especially of Americans who fawned on Chinese; of all British, with whom he had to be in alliance but whom he suspected of outwitting the United States, and of the Chinese, above all of Chiang Kai-shek, whom he saw playing a gigantic confidence trick on the United States. The irony was that he, who had few illusions, was inclined to be grimly friendly towards China, and, in a professional manner, to defend its interests.
After Pearl Harbor, when American aid began to pour into China, it was clearly desirable to appoint someone to be responsible on the spot for its distribution. A commander was needed for the American personnel who were militarily active in or near China. A military expert was also necessary to work out joint military plans with the Chinese. Stilwell, as a person of unquestionable experience, and available immediately, was appointed. He had spent most of his career in China, with some dedication had studied the Chinese language since 1919 (when he had been appointed the first Chinese language officer in the history of the US Army), and had served for many years in a quasi-diplomatic status in the American Embassy. At Roosevelt’s insistence, in his instinct to mix up America’s affairs with those of its Allies, Stilwell was given by Chiang Kai-shek the Chinese rank of his Chief-of-Staff.
When, as described earlier, the British formed their South-East Asia Command in 1943, Stilwell was appointed as the deputy of Mountbatten. From a comparatively minor position, he had accumulated appointments, all of which gave him authority. Few men in the war were in a position of such power.
The multitude of functions was a mistake. With such divergent pressures upon him, no man could have made a success of being a loyal servant of the United States and China. For a joint post to be workable, there must be coincidence of interests between the countries to which a man is jointly responsible. Stilwell, in serving Roosevelt and Chiang, had an impossible task. Much as Roosevelt respected the role that China was destined to play, the interests of the United States and China were different. Stilwell had decided that he would be through and through American: he would serve the United States and would correct Roosevelt’s rather eccentric judgement.
The difficulty was increased because Stilwell’s own judgement was defective. He did not see that, for the issue of the war, it really was unnecessary for Chiang to fight much more. Roosevelt himself had probably glimpsed this truth. But Roosevelt erred because he supposed that it was necessary for the United States to make strenuous efforts to keep China in the war. China would have remained belligerent in any circumstances, and its real interests, which Chiang saw very clearly, were all against making a separate peace. Having won credit with the Western Allies, China would have been suicidal to fling it away by becoming a renegade towards the end of the war, in which the difficult part had been the beginning. Nor would it have gained any advantage by doing so. The United States and Britain were satisfied as long as China remained formally at war, and turned a blind eye to the reality of much of China’s wartime record.
Stilwell, however, did not perceive this. He had a mania to drive China back to war: both its bureaucrats living in comfort in Chungking, and its wretched conscripts herded to war by force. Chinese guile, Chinese pretence that it was doing much more than it was, he exposed with relish. Stilwell obtained Chinese agreement that thirty Chinese divisions should be allotted for cooperation with the British from India for the operations in Burma and to reconquer South-East Asia. To facilitate these operations, the Ledo Road was constructed across the southern slopes of the Himalayan mountains through dense jungles.
It linked the Calcutta-Dimapur-Ledo rail line up the North-East Frontier of India (in Assam) with a south-easterly cross-country track right across North Burma via Myitkyina and Bhamo until it joined the route of the original Sino-British Burma Road, north of Lashio, to Kunming and Chungking. The Ledo Road was one of the major engineering enterprises of the war.
Stilwell, and the toadies who clustered round him on his American staff, made no secret of the fact that they greatly desired that American and Chinese forces should get into many of these regions in advance of the British, and they wished to eradicate British influence where it still survived. They considered the British Empire obsolete and effete, and they had no desire to see it re-established. They counted on a peace settlement which would create an Asia of self-determining nation-states, always the American ideal, as 1919 had shown in Europe. For this, they considered it of first-class importance that they should end the war in military possession of disputed territory. But the thirty Chinese divisions proved to be a paper force. Only a fraction was ever available. For Stilwell’s aim, there was to be no Chinese manpower.
Stilwell, in his vigour for the war, could get little response from the Kuomintang officials, and from Chiang Kai-shek personally. He became increasingly obsessed with the fact that Chiang was employing 200,000 of his best troops for cordoning off the area that was occupied by the Red Army; and that this Army, alone of China’s military forces, had proved that it was anxious to fight, and had shown the value of its guerrilla strategy against the Japanese. But it was prevented by the Kuomintang from playing its part in the war. Chiang, in his fear that substantial economic aid would reach the communists, and would make them dangerous to him, blockaded them shamelessly.
Stilwell denounced him to the Americans as a bad ally: Chiang complained that he could have no confidence in such a Chief-of-Staff. To do him justice, he could say that Stilwell had not grasped the fact that the civil war in China was continuing. The merger of the armies, which was to have taken place by the pact which Chiang made with the communists and the Young Marshal of Manchuria at the time of the Sian kidnapping, had never been carried out. The communists had laid down their own strategy in their war with Japan, and, as by their guerrilla methods of war they penned Japan more and more to the towns, they continually occupied a larger and larger area of the country. All the while the communists were consolidating their hold. Was Chiang to assist them by removing his forces which kept them under surveillance?
The problem was difficult; Chiang was notable for his obstinacy, which had established him where he was; Stilwell was notorious for pertinacity and for courting disfavour. With Stilwell’s agreement, a whitewashing of the communists took place in America. The news about them was surprising, and cheered an America which was hungry for hopeful news. It was said that they were not real communists at all; they were Jeffersonian democrats, simple rural reformers, who desired only to fight for their country, and they were held back by Chiang Kai-shek, the real nature of whose Government had by this time become plain. They were a brand-new and unexpected ally, waiting to be used against the Japanese if the United States would sanction it. Chiang Kai-shek, treating this as a threat of American repudiation of him, fulminated, and put the blame on Stilwell. He supposed him responsible for the agitation in the press.
By the autumn of 1944 the breach between Chiang and Stilwell had become wider, beyond reconciliation. Chiang officially demanded that Roosevelt should dismiss Stilwell. Roosevelt, though his confidence in Chiang had been half-changed by Stilwell – but not his confidence in China – consented.
With the fall of Stilwell there vanished a plan which had been dear both to him and to Roosevelt. This was for the re-training and modernization by American officers of the entire Chinese Army. The United States was characteristically ready to take responsibility for this gigantic task; but it required Chinese consent to the appointment of Stilwell as Chief-of-Staff, and Chiang would not trust such authority to any foreigner.
Admittedly it would have been difficult; there would have been storms, and, whilst Stilwell’s attitude to the communists was at best ambiguous in the view of Chiang Kai-shek, it was clear that there were many fundamental principles on which the two men were divided in any reform. Stilwell would certainly have wanted to incorporate part of the Red Army, and much of its system of command and administration. Neither of them would compromise. But Chiang, in winning his point that there should be no foreign command in his Army, sacrificed the possibility of ending the war with a re-born, reliable, modernized force.
The war was very depressing when seen in these years from Chungking. Air raids, which had been plentiful, had died down, and had become rare. But with this there had come hunger and a dreadful boredom with nothing to distract people from being conscious of their extreme discomfort. The city was overcrowded: it was full of refugees. The lives of most people had become a nightmare because of inflation; it was still under a semblance of control; it was to reach fantastic proportions, as in Germany during the period at the end of the First World War, only when the war was over; but already inflation in China cast very deep shadows, and it had become the main impediment in life.
The extent of the inflation was a novelty in human history. In Chungking, prices rose by two hundred and fifty times in the two years 1942–4. The price index of goods, quoted at 100 in 1937, was 125,000 by 1945. How to cope, how to find money, became the overriding concern of everyone, including all the Army officers, and the events of the war sank a long way behind. Another stunning blow had been dealt at human society, seen from a Chinese perspective, and strong suspicions grew up as to whether life could ever be normal again, even if peace was restored. It was the classical effect of an uncontrolled inflation. ‘If you wish to make a revolution,’ Lenin had said, ‘first debauch the currency.’
In spite of this, many people were growing very rich out of wartime enterprises and profiteering, but they hid themselves, and no bright plumage lit up the drab scene. Only gossip and scandal circulated wildly. The inflation had the usual effects in disintegrating the society. The corruption became impudent. One day, when a general of the Indian Army was paying a visit to the city, a cousin of the Chinese Finance Minister called on him by night, and outlined a plan of partnership by which the two could make a fortune. All that was necessary was the use of the general’s means of transport, and of his prestige to keep official interference at arm’s length.
To keep their armies in the field, the Chinese had to make more and more use of conscription. It was an ordinary sight to see in the countryside, even close to Chungking, squads of soldiers being deported to fighting areas; the soldiers were all chained together. Across the length of the huge country, there was constant, small-scale, sporadic action, which, though of little military consequence, did much material damage. The Japanese occupying the cities were harried, and in many parts of the country could not venture, except in great force, into the countryside; they raided and massacred sporadically. Insecurity was constant; the war had apparently ceased to have a reason and the possibility of an end.
In parts of the country, however, the war seemed to have run its course, to be exhausted, and to have fought itself out. It was succeeded by the armed forces on both sides following the age-old instincts for trade. The armies became trading organizations. Trading is a passion with the Chinese; with the Japanese it is familiar. As soon as the armies stood still, the Chinese put out their feelers, and the Japanese, who were not paid very highly and welcomed some supplement to their wages, responded. The metamorphosis of the barbaric Japanese conquerors into the scheming Japanese traders was curious to watch. The attempts by high Japanese officers to restrict the trade were in vain. The Japanese generals, even at the highest level of direction of the Japanese Armies, were too deeply engaged. China, by the action not of its Government or of its soldiers but by the private enterprise of its merchants, had woven a web of commerce. Within a month or so of conquest it snared the Japanese as well as their opposite numbers and bound them in all sorts of ways to courses of action which aimed at the satisfaction of private wants rather than the advancement of Japan’s public enterprise of subjugation. And so it was to continue until the end of the war. The spectacle is of exuberant trade springing up and flourishing wherever the two belligerents came in contact. Patrolling warships operated most. The Japanese Navy was particularly notorious for doing traffic with the Chinese. This was very well attested by watchers in Hong Kong in the months before the island was invaded.
Stilwell’s fall in 1944 coincided with the last great military effort in China by the Japanese. During 1943 and the first part of 1944, the Americans had built up a new war machine on Chinese soil with which they had at last succeeded in reaching the heart of the Japanese war effort, and which held out hopes of being deadly. This they did by expanding greatly the activities of General Claire Lee Chennault. This man had begun by recruiting a private air force, mercenaries, drawn from the staff of American airlines and college youths. They were known as Chennault’s Flying Tigers. In the summer of 1941, while the United States was still neutral, this force, put at the service of the Kuomintang, proved itself indispensable for the air defence of Chungking. Later, when the United States entered the war, it was incorporated in the United States Army, and Chennault also returned to it. In the course of time he established airfields in South-East China, and from there B29 bombers began the first systematic bombardments that the Japanese had had to endure. By prodigious efforts, huge stockpiles of munitions, fuel and other supplies were flown over the ‘hump’ of the Himalayas to the new forward airfields which 300,000 Chinese coolies had built under American direction. It was exceptionally costly in terms of time, manpower, airlifting capacity and expense, and it proved to be an almost entirely unproductive diversion from more useful enterprises.
The Japanese were not inclined to wait while America surmounted the technical challenges involved in carrying out very long-range strategic bombing raids over the Japanese home islands. Spurred on by the early bombing runs, Japan decided that it was necessary to renew their military effort against China. They had halted large-scale military campaigning at the end of 1938, and, during the years since then, it had seemed that they were best served by letting time work for them. They hoped that the discomfort, and the upset from the perpetual strain of trying to appease the communists, would in the end induce Chiang Kai-shek to submit his stubborn neck to peace negotiations. They could place their trust in Chinese racial dislike of the country’s Western Allies. During this period, the Japanese were satisfied with the steady stream of defections from the Kuomintang to the side of the Wang Ching-sei Government and its Japanese guardians of law and order. It occurred as a natural by-product of fraternization, propaganda, a desire for greater material comfort and an interest in self-preservation. By 1942, the communists estimated, and published with some smugness, that twenty-seven Kuomintang generals had gone over.
Times had changed. In 1944 the Japanese Army in China gathered itself together and commenced an offensive which they named Ichi-Gō (literally, ‘Operation Number One’). It was an exceptionally ambitious plan designed to extend Japanese control deep into the interior of China and possibly to open the way for yet another attempt to seek a negotiated peace with Chiang Kai-shek or his forces. The campaign was in part prompted by the need to establish secure overland communications extending from Manchuria and North China right the way through to Japan’s forces in Occupied South-East Asia. This need sprang from the fact that Allied attacks had decimated Japanese merchant shipping. One of the main purposes of the whole campaign, however, was to capture and dismantle the American air bases on Chinese soil.
The first phase of Ichi-Gō opened with an onslaught to clear out the Chinese nationalist forces from northern Honan which had concentrated on the plains of central Honan. For some time these had remained undisturbed along the Japanese flanks south of the Yellow River and north of the Yangtze, where thus far the southernmost sector of the Peking-Hankow Railway had lain beyond the limits of the Japanese occupation zone. If any of the Chinese armies were to stand fast, they were simply to be minced. And so the Japanese plan was put into effect.
The new Japanese offensive burst upon China like a thunderclap. Lieutenant-General Okamura Yasuji (Neiji), who had distinguished himself in the Japanese campaign against Hankow in 1938 but who had languished since then as the Japanese Army Commander-in-Chief within the comparative backwater of North China, was given his big chance. At the head of 150,000 troops drawn from his forces in North China and from far-off Manchuria (where they had passed the war in idleness, watching Russia), his powerful forces swarmed across central Honan. There was far more devastation than had occurred in the bad old days of Chiang Kai-shek’s bandit-suppression campaigns. The Japanese Army found in its renewal of the Chinese war an opportunity to work out its feeling of frustration. The new divisions roared through the seaboard of Central China and cut a broad swath further inland, not meeting any Chinese Army able to stand up to them in pitched battles. Where there was a struggle, as in Hunan, the Chinese, when they were eventually broken, were set on by an enraged population, who blamed them for having disturbed the unofficial armistice. To such a squalid end had the Chinese Army’s defence of the country been reduced.
Thirty-four Chinese divisions simply evaporated into thin air. As the Chinese nationalist armies melted away, the Japanese winkled out scattered pockets of resistance. In the next phase of the campaign, however, the Japanese planned to adopt even more extreme measures. The pressure upon the Chinese air bases became too perilous for the Americans to endure. They had to abandon one airfield after another across the whole of South-East China. Priceless equipment and supplies had to be destroyed in the path of the Japanese offensive.
The loss of General Chennault’s airfields drew the world’s attention once more to China’s weakness. It settled a controversy which had been going on among strategists. One side had taken the view that Chennault had proved that land operations were unnecessary: it was enough to build airfields in distant places, lightly protected by guerrilla operations, and leave the air forces to carry on the war. The other side had argued that, without a properly equipped and efficient army, airfields were entirely vulnerable. The latter view proved correct; and it was found that the Chinese armies were inadequate to safeguard them.
The American advance across the Pacific, however, now provided the long-range bombers with safer havens. By mid-September 1944 orders were given to withdraw the last of the B29 bombers from China to the relative safety of the Mariana Islands. Two months later, they began to operate in earnest. But the usefulness and importance of China to the Western Allies had changed sharply.
The beginning of 1943 had seen the last great western incentive offered to the Chinese. In that year, the West (following the diplomatic precedent already set by Japan) had made the gesture of terminating their right to maintain Treaty Ports in China. The largest tool of imperialism was renounced. The Japanese renunciation of extra-territorial rights had been hemmed in by restrictive conditions. The Allies led by the United States were now far more ready to sacrifice commercial interests to suit their broader political objectives. The negotiations, which the Western Powers had pursued desultorily since the 1920s, were accelerated, and agreement was reached. If the war had ultimately grown out of China’s endeavour to extirpate these foreign footholds in China, it had, by this decision of the Allies, been won. Later in the year, Roosevelt had secured an Allied statement of the intention to associate China as an equal Power with themselves in remoulding the pattern of the world at the peace conferences. Other countries may have had their tongue in the cheek at this, but Roosevelt had his way.
Nevertheless the period of excessive complacency towards Chiang Kai-shek was immediately after this brought to an end, or was very much qualified, by the events of the Teheran Conference in November 1943. Just before had come the high point of Chiang Kai-shek’s apotheosis. At the conference at Cairo of Roosevelt and Churchill, which Chiang Kai-shek had attended – but Stalin, because of his neutrality towards Japan, did not – Chiang had reached the peak of his fortunes. He received a pledge from the Allies that Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores would be returned to China at the peace.
On leaving Cairo, Churchill and Roosevelt went to Teheran for a meeting with Stalin. They were told for the first time that Russia had begun to make troop dispositions to enter the war against Japan as soon as Germany was defeated.
This changed the picture of the war. China would no longer be indispensable to the Allies. Japan could be reached in other ways; all attention was now focused on obtaining Russia’s eventual permission to operate from Russian bases in the Maritime Provinces. The huge new factor of the Red Army operating against the Japanese in Manchukuo had to be digested. From that time on, China was no longer treated with such careful solicitude as it had been hitherto, though it was not solely the reason for the change of attitude. China still enjoyed the delusive grandeur which had been built up in President Roosevelt’s time, and communicated by him to the public, but this was a wasting asset.
China, as an object of strategic concern, became of secondary importance. Chiang Kai-shek, his suspicions and ambitions, no longer held the centre of the picture. The war, which had originated in the crisis in China, was to come to an end with the fate of China of apparently small concern to the Great Powers, which now pressed on towards the final kill.
In the course of the war, a profound change had, however, come over the prestige of the Kuomintang and of the communists. They had both of them engaged in warfare, which they had fought by different means using different arms. They had been in competition with each other. The upshot, though it was not yet definite, was that, in the judgement of the various important groups of Chinese society, the communists had shown themselves more durable than the Kuomintang. True, the Kuomintang was, technically, to be one of the victorious powers. But the Kuomintang had lost face irrevocably.
It was not so much that the communists had shining victories to their credit. They had latterly fought very little. But their Government survived the war with an infinitely better morale than the Kuomintang.
Soon after the war, the two Governments would come into open conflict. Support would vanish away from the Kuomintang. It would transfer itself to the communists.
The Kuomintang had plenty of opportunity to see how unpopular its régime was becoming, and plenty of opportunity to take up some more popular course. But it kept obstinately on its disastrous career. As it became manifest that China, thanks to its Allies, was to be on the winning side in the war, there grew up naturally a discussion about the form that post-war politics was to take. Similarly the Kuomintang could have met the public half way, and announced the approaching end of its party dictatorship. But its reply, as the demand for this grew, was to increase the size of the secret police. Its activities became intolerable. The Kuomintang gave every indication that it would continue unreformed.