If you want to know what a snake Stilwell was, read General Claire Chennault’s book
The Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of Claire Lee Chennault (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949). Chennault served in China with Stilwell and saw firsthand the disastrous results of Stilwell’s treachery and military incompetence. Chennault spends many pages in his book detailing how Stilwell sought to sabotage the Nationalist cause and how Stilwell’s military blundering costs thousands of lives. But, for now, I’d like to quote part of Chennault’s account of how Truman and Marshall saved the Communists from defeat and enabled them to ultimately take over China:
Stripped to its essentials, here is what the Marshall mission did to China. It forced a truce to the Chinese civil war at a time when the Central Government forces were winning. When the Generalissimo naturally balked at endorsing a policy that meant military disaster for his forces, Marshall applied pressure in the Stilwell manner by shutting off the flow of all American military aid to China including war surplus bought and paid for by the Chinese. This aims embargo lasted for nearly a year. He also summarily scuttled a Sino-American agreement made in September 1945 whereby the United States agreed to supply China with planes and equipment for an eight and one-third group air force including four-engine bombers. Marshall also extracted a promise from the Generalissimo not to use the Chinese Air Force already in China against the Communists on the grounds that this would constitute “offensive action.” Restricting the Chinese Air Force deprived the Generalissimo of his most potent weapon. It was also implied that discussions regarding a $500,000,000 loan to China could not be resumed until a truce was effected in the civil war. Marshall did not know then that the most effective Washington opposition to the Chinese loan was coming from Henry Wallace, a man whose position on Russia has since become quite clear.
The truce sponsored and pushed by Marshall, with all the diplomatic resources of the United States at his disposal, forced the Generalissimo to halt his anti-Communist offensive at a time when it was on the verge of wiping out large bodies of Chinese Communist troops. Some fifty truce teams each were dispatched to trouble spots all over China. Each was headed by an elderly American colonel specially picked for his white hair to impress the Chinese. Here are some specific examples of what they accomplished.
North of Hankow some 200,000 government troops had surrounded 70,000 Communist troops and were beginning a methodical job of extermination. The Communists appealed to Marshall on the basis of his truce proposal, and arrangements were made for the fighting to cease while the Communists marched out of the trap and on to Shantung Province, where a large Communist offensive began about a year later. On the East River near Canton some 100,000 Communist troops were trapped by government forces. The truce teams effected their release and allowed the Communists to march unmolested to Bias Bay where they boarded junks and sailed to Shantung.
The worst fiasco was at Kalgan Pass. This gap in the North China Mountains is a historic gateway between China and Manchuria. At the end of the war there were no organized Communists in Manchuria.
Chinese Communists flocked from their base in northwest China through die Kalgan Pass to join the Russian troops in Manchuria. When the Chinese government troops occupied Manchuria they found the great industrial centers stripped bare of machinery and the tremendous arsenals of the famed Japanese Kwantung Army empty. There was no trace of either the Kwantung Army or its equipment.
Early in 1946 a government offensive captured Kalgan and sealed off the pass, trapping nearly a million Chinese Communists in northwest China who were moving toward Manchuria. The Communists complained that they were merely returning to their prewar homes in Manchuria. Marshall made strenuous efforts to get die Generalissimo to open the Kalgan Pass for these Communists. Eventually the Generalissimo yielded, withdrew his troops in June 1946, and the Communist horde poured into Manchuria. The Communists then broke the truce by fortifying Kalgan Pass. A year later Chinese government armies had to fight a bloody campaign to recapture the pass they voluntarily evacuated under the truce.
In January 1947 the mystery of what happened to the Japanese Kwantung Army equipment was solved. The poorly armed Chinese Communists who marched north the year before now swarmed south from Manchuria armed with Japanese rifles, machine guns, mortars, tanks, and artillery. They even had Japanese aircraft but no gas or pilots to operate them. The Russians had simply turned over the Japanese equipment to the Chinese Communists and thus endowed them with a rich military legacy.
Conservative estimates of the Japanese military stockpile in Manchuria seized by the Russians appraise it as sufficient materiel to supply a million men for ten years of fitting. By using Japanese munitions the Russians avoided the necessity of investing their own resources and are able to claim that no Russian arms were sent to China. . . .
It was these troops who marched under a safe-conduct of the American-sponsored truce through Kalgan Pass and returned with Japanese arms that won the decisive battles in Manchuria in the summer of 1947. They were opposed by the government’s American-trained divisions. While the Communists were being rearmed by the Russians, the government divisions had their supplies cut off by what Marshall freely admits was a ten-month embargo on American military supplies to China. Since these Chinese divisions had been equipped in the spring and summer of 1945 their arms, ammunition, and trucks badly needed replacement. Two years of hard campaigning had worn their rifle barrels smooth, exhausted their ammunition, and battered the trucks they relied on for transport and supply. All of their equipment was American and without American replacements, spare parts, and ammunition, it was virtually useless.
It did not take long for the well-armed Communists to chew up the government divisions armed only with the worn remnants of two-year-old American equipment and minus an effective air force. The Chinese armies that Stilwell and Wedemeyer trained in India and West China perished early in 1947 on the frozen Manchurian plains. The stage was set for the final mop up of Manchuria in the summer of 1948 and the Communist offensive into North China. . . .
Marshall also sought, as part of his orders, to force the Generalissimo into a variety of political changes including formation of a coalition government with Communists in the cabinet.
At the time of the Marshall mission the Chinese Communists terms for entering the Chinese National government were one third of the cabinet members including the War Minister, retention of a Communist army of forty-eight divisions, and the governorships of all provinces where the Communist troops then claimed occupation of a majority of the area. The fate of Czechoslovakia has since proved how fatal this would have been to the existing government of China. Inclusion of Communists in a coalition front is a standard preliminary tactical maneuver in a Communist seizure of power. It is a technique that may well be attempted again in China if the Communists feel that an attempt to gain complete military victory may cost more than they can afford.
The Generalissimo had been dealing with Communists inside and outside the Chinese government for more than twenty years. He spent part of his education in Moscow's Communist academies. He thoroughly understood the Communist motives and techniques and knew that a Communist minority in a coalition government would actually result in complete Communist domination of China. (pp. xiii-xv)
Incidentally, Chennault, as have many other authors, debunks the idea that Stalin would have intervened to keep the Communists from losing. Stalin was afraid that openly helping the Maoists would provoke a military confrontation with United States. He knew that the virulently anti-Soviet Douglas MacArthur was in Japan, and, of course, he knew that the U.S. had nukes. In fact, Stalin was so afraid of provoking an American military response that he actually tried to get Mao to stop at the Yangtze River after Mao had smashed Nationalists forces in Manchuria and was routing Nationalist forces that were north of the Yangtze (see also Jonathan Fenby,
Chiang Kai Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004, pp. 453-458, 481-491)
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