From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (94 page)

Expectations on both sides were quickly shattered. Those Americans who came into contact with Chiang's China soon discovered that popular images bore little resemblance to reality. The Nationalist government was weak, divided internally, riddled with corruption, and lacking in popular support. The heroic leader depicted by Luce, a veritable Asian George Washington, sought mainly to preserve his own power. The largely conscript army was a slightly organized rabble, by no means ready to undertake operations against the Japanese. In any event, Chiang refused to risk it in combat, counting on the Americans to liberate China while he subdued his internal rivals.
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China was even more disappointed with the United States. Despite the president's rhetoric, China was not admitted to the Allied inner circle. It remained a second-class ally whose role was to keep Japanese troops busy until the European war was won. The wars in Europe and the Pacific continued to have top priority, and precious few supplies were allocated for China. Even when supplies were available, it took superhuman efforts to get them to Chungking. When the Japanese closed the Burma Road in 1942, supplies had to be shipped to the west coast of India, transshipped by rail across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent, and then flown over the perilous hump of the Himalayas to Chungking. Increasingly frustrated with the paucity of U.S. aid, Chiang issued only slightly veiled threats to quit the war. We are "on a raft with one sandwich between us, and the rescue ship is heading away from the scene," an equally frustrated Stilwell complained. "They are too busy elsewhere for small fry like us."
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Stilwell and Chiang agreed on little else, and their relationship quickly soured. The acerbic general, appropriately nicknamed "Vinegar Joe," had served in China in the 1920s, knew the language, and had great affection for the people. He wanted to build an effective army to fight the Japanese, but his efforts to reform the army threatened Chiang's key power base, and the generalissimo naturally balked. Stilwell despised Chiang and filled the pages of his diary with venomous outbursts against a man he called in his more generous moments "the Peanut," at other times a "grasping, bigoted, ungrateful little rattlesnake."
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He sought full control over U.S. aid to bend Chiang to his will.

To get around Stilwell and challenge China's low place in the Allied pecking order, Chiang sent his wife—the couple had been named
Time
's "Man and Wife of the Year" in 1937—to the United States in 1942 on a personal lobbying mission. The daughter of a wealthy, U.S.-educated Shanghai father, the diminutive, beautiful Mayling Soong, in Barbara Tuchman's words, "combined graduation from Wellesley College with the instinct for power of the Empress Dowager."
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Her delicate stature only slightly obscured an iron will and a cruel streak. She lingered in the United States for six months. Privately, she railed against Stilwell. In speeches to huge and adoring throngs in major U.S. cities and especially in a remarkable February 1943 appearance before a joint session of Congress—the first Chinese and only the second woman to address that body—she openly challenged the Europe-first strategy and the low priority assigned aid to China. She received a four-minute standing ovation. Madame Chiang "enthralled and captivated Washington as few other official visitors have ever done," the
New York Herald-Tribune
enthused.
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Unwilling to alter the nation's strategic priorities, increasingly disillusioned with Chiang, and weary of "the missimo's" lobbying, FDR appeased his disgruntled ally with expedients.
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As part of its broader assault on imperialism and to palliate Chiang, the United States in 1943 relinquished extraterritoriality, one of the most galling features of the unequal treaties imposed on China in the mid-nineteenth century. It also eliminated the immigration restrictions that had been a special irritant in Chinese-American relations since the 1880s. Roosevelt promised Chiang that territories taken from China by Japan since their war of 1895 would
be returned. He boosted China as one of his Four Policemen who would assume responsibility for regional stability after the war. He did not include Chiang in Big Three summit meetings, but he met privately with the generalissimo in Cairo en route to Tehran in late 1943. Over Stilwell's vociferous objections, he approved a proposal advanced by Gen. Claire Chennault, another U.S. adviser in Chungking, to launch a major bombing campaign against Japanese positions in China.

An already tattered alliance all but came apart in 1944. Chennault's aerial attacks had disastrous consequences, provoking a massive Japanese counteroffensive that produced huge Chinese losses and strengthened Japan's position in coastal China. The more Americans saw of the Nationalist government, in the meantime, the more they complained of corruption, greed, and venality, including the embezzlement of substantial funds by Chiang's family. In contrast, the Communists based in Yenan province projected an image of efficiency and order. Their suave spokesman, Zhou En-lai, told Americans what they wanted to hear, promising to take the fight to the Japanese. The Communists also staged a huge July 4 celebration in Yenan, and Mao assured U.S. visitors that the most conservative American businessman would find nothing objectionable in his program. A frustrated Roosevelt administration demanded that Chiang put Stilwell in full command of the army and mount operations against the Japanese. More ominously, the United States insisted on sending observers to Yenan. These moves shook to their foundations the Sino-American alliance and indeed Chiang's entire approach to the war.
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The generalissimo fended off the immediate U.S. threat. He grudgingly acquiesced in the sending of Americans to Yenan. After a series of incredibly complex moves and countermoves in an intricate diplomatic chess game, he finessed U.S. demands to put his troops into action. He wangled the appointment of the peripatetic Hurley as personal U.S. representative to his government and then used the new appointee to get rid of the despised Stilwell.
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Chiang's short-term successes backfired, contributing to a major shift in U.S. policy that would disastrously affect his long-run interests. His demonstrated unwillingness to fight combined with the success of General MacArthur's island-hopping campaign in the Pacific brought a top-level decision to avoid major military operations on the East Asian mainland. China would continue to be a peripheral player; its status as a
second-class ally was confirmed. U.S. postwar visions also changed. The Yenan observers, who called themselves the Dixie Mission since they were in "rebel" territory, were welcomed by an orchestra and chorus performing Chinese classics and in turn hastily improvised a choral group to sing American "classics" such as "My Old Kentucky Home." They were impressed with the Communists' professionalism, efficiency, and apparent willingness to fight and viewed their hosts as "backsliders" from pure Marxist ideology. Some Americans concluded that Mao's forces would win a civil war and advocated U.S. support for them. Others feared that a Communist victory might bring Soviet control of and U.S. eviction from China.
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Most conceded that Chiang's China could not act as regional policeman. To avert a looming civil war, the Roosevelt administration set out to bring the Nationalists and Communists into a coalition that would produce some semblance of order and maintain U.S. influence in a vital region after the defeat of Japan and the demise of Western imperialism.

Such a feat would have been difficult to pull off by the most skilled of diplomats in the best of circumstances, but in the hands of the inept and opinionated Hurley in the volatile climate of wartime China it was doomed from the start. As ignorant of China as of the Middle East, Hurley assumed his customary role of buffoon. He referred to Chiang and his wife as "Mr. And Mrs. Chek," to Mao as "Moose Dung," and to Zhou as "Joe N. Lie." On one occasion, upon landing at Communist headquarters, to the shock of all present, he let out a Cherokee war whoop. His Yenan hosts soon referred to him as "the Clown."
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His antics concealed the hard edge to his diplomacy. A virulent anti-Communist and unabashed partisan of Chiang, he set out to construct a coalition with the Communists as junior partners. When U.S. diplomats on the scene questioned the wisdom of his approach, he branded them disloyal and demanded their recall. This first clumsy effort to avert civil war in China failed miserably by late 1944, sending FDR casting about for alternatives. It set the stage for civil war in China and the postwar Red Scare in the United States. The China tangle, in turn, presaged the host of complex political problems the United States would confront as the focus shifted from winning the war to securing the peace.

In the year after the Tehran Conference, the Allies sealed the Axis fate. The Red Army had liberated all of Soviet territory by early 1944, and in the summer it mounted a massive offensive across Eastern and Central Europe timed to coincide with the Western allies' invasion of France. Following their successful D-Day landing at Normandy on June 6, the United States and Britain began the liberation of France and the drive toward Germany. Hitler's defeat was assured; the only questions were the time it would take and the costs that would be incurred. Allied forces also made significant progress against Japan. After reversing the tide of battle at Midway in the summer of 1942 and Guadalcanal later in the year, U.S. forces began an arduous and bloody advance across the islands of the South and Central Pacific to Japan. Following the air and naval battle of

the Philippine Sea and the climactic battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the greatest and last naval engagement of the war, the United States was poised to liberate the Philippines. In the meantime, new B-29 Superfortress bombers, with vast range and a huge payload, mounted a devastating aerial campaign against the Japanese home islands.

With Axis defeat all but certain, the postwar issues that had been put on hold inevitably moved to the forefront. In the economic realm, Americans began planning early and used their economic clout to impose their will. Haunted by bitter memories of the Great Depression and fearing a postwar reprise, they set out to correct the problems they fervently believed had caused that catastrophe and the resulting war. As much as they squabbled among themselves, most U.S. officials—even Hull and Welles!—agreed that eliminating trade barriers was the key to postwar peace and prosperity. America's huge wartime productivity underscored the need for foreign markets once hostilities ended. "Commerce is the lifeblood of a free society," FDR proclaimed in 1944, and the "arteries" which carried that "blood stream" must not be "clogged again . . . by artificial barriers created through senseless economic rivalries."
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Without revealing what sort of "payment" might be expected, the administration included in the lend-lease master agreements negotiated with all recipients provisions for eliminating trade barriers. A major target was Britain's imperial preference system, and negotiations with London were especially difficult and ultimately inconclusive. At Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1944, forty-four nations agreed to establish an American-designed International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the so-called World Bank), funded at $7.6 billion, to help provide the capital to rebuild a war-torn world. To avoid the currency manipulations that had disrupted trade and provoked nasty political disputes in the early 1930s, they also created an International Monetary Fund to stabilize currencies as a basis for postwar trade expansion. The United States contributed most of the money to these important postwar institutions and thereby controlled their operations.
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While FDR held his cards close to his chest on political issues, the nation engaged in a full and often emotional discussion of its postwar role. Wilsonians used the horrors of a second world war to proclaim vindication of their hero's ideas and pressed for unqualified U.S. support for a
reincarnated and reinvigorated League of Nations. In 1944, Hollywood produced a hit film entitled
Wilson
that portrayed its subject and his dreams as the tragic victims of personal and partisan squabbling. Responding to Luce's 1941 call for an "American Century," Vice President Wallace proclaimed the "century of the common man" and advocated a "people's revolution"—a global New Deal—to ensure that all peoples had "the privilege of drinking a quart of milk every day." Sumner Welles and contract bridge guru Ely Culbertson advocated an international police force; others proposed a world federation. Wendell Willkie's stirring account of his global tour,
One World,
stressed that the shrinkage of distances had brought peoples together and made peace indivisible. It enjoyed the highest sales of any book published in the United States to this time. Alarmed by the rampant idealism of Wallace and Willkie, Yale University political geographer Nicholas Spykman urged a realpolitik approach to the postwar world. Journalist and onetime Wilsonian Walter Lippmann's 1943 book,
U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic,
echoed Spykman in calling for a foreign policy based on the balance of power. An instant best seller, it was excerpted in the
Reader's Digest
and, most remarkably, appeared in a cartoon version in the
Ladies' Home Journal
. Polls taken in 1942–43 indicated broad popular support for U.S. participation in an international organization. Congress jumped out ahead of the White House in late 1943 by approving separate resolutions to that effect.
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