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When Gardner Cowles, publisher of Look magazine, prevented Madame Chiang from flying to the U.S. with Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie after his 1942 tour of China, she gouged her nails into his cheeks. In her tumultuous progresses across America, this startling beauty charmed reporters and addressed both houses of Congress, but created unpleasantness by clapping her hands to summon White House servants. Stafford Cripps, the British Labour politician who met the Chiangs in 1940, enthused with characteristic foolishness that he found them “perfect dears392, so kind and simple and natural.” This was perhaps because Cripps never encountered the KMT’s notoriously brutal secret police, or maybe because the generalissimo offered him a job. Madame Chiang’s close alliance with Gen. Claire Chennault, whose buccaneering flying exploits had made him a national hero in the United States, served the regime well until at least 1944, when Chennault’s star waned in Washington, as American leaders came to understand that he was a wildly over-promoted adventurer.

2. Barefoot Soldiers

AFTER PEARL HARBOR, Chiang’s armies began to receive massive American support in kind and in cash, much of which the generalissimo and his supporters pocketed. Since there was no overland link between British-ruled India and Chiang’s territories between 1942 and early 1945, all supplies had to be flown five hundred miles “over the Hump” of 15,000-foot mountains to Kunming, the nearest accessible landing ground in China, at staggering cost in fuel, planes and American pilots’ lives. In December 1942, the Hump air shuttle shifted a mere thousand tons a month. By July 1944 it was carrying 18,975 tons. This was an extraordinary logistical achievement, but remained a negligible contribution to the Chinese war effort; especially so as most of these supplies were stolen and sold long before they reached Chiang’s soldiers. Much of the matériel which remained was absorbed by the needs of the U.S. air forces in China. It was simply not feasible to airlift arms and ammunition on the scale needed to equip a Chinese army. From beginning to end, Chiang’s formations lacked indispensable heavy weapons to match those of the Japanese. For all the strivings of American generals, diplomats and military advisers, most of the fourteen million men drafted into the Nationalist army between 1937 and 1945 served as hapless victims rather than as effective combatants.

Xu Yongqiang, in 1944 an interpreter with the Nationalists, watched new intakes of men herded in from the provinces: “Most recruits came simply as prisoners393, roped together at bayonet point. They had so little training that it was easy to see why they were no match for the Japanese, who for years had been schooled to kill. It was inhuman! Inhuman! There were no such things as civil rights in China. For eight years, it was the peasants who had to fight the Japanese, both for the Communists and the Kuomintang. The middle class stayed at home and made money. The big families did nothing at all.” Chiang Kai-shek once encountered a column of recruits roped together. With his own cane he beat the officer responsible, and later summoned the general in charge of conscription to beat him also. The episode highlighted one of Chiang’s many weaknesses. He identified problems, but failed effectively to address them. Recruitment remained chronically corrupt. The rich always escaped. Press gangs waylaid wanderers. Gunner officer Ying Yunping said bitterly: “If only more people394 had been willing to fight! There were all those intellectuals, who spoke endlessly about how much they loved their country, but wouldn’t themselves lift a finger to defend it. They just talked a good game.”

The war in China baffled foreign observers, because it bore so little resemblance to conventional military operations. Huge bodies of soldiers straggled hither and thither across great tracts of landscape. Guns were sometimes fired. Towns and villages were occupied or abandoned. Chinese movements, however, seemed