Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [148]
A Nationalist soldier found his unit unexpectedly under fire while escorting sixty Japanese POWs. “At such a moment [our commander]407 was in no position to consider his orders to treat prisoners well. He had to take resolute action. At the word, our machine gunners opened fire, and we rid ourselves of the encumbrance.” Rural areas feared the depredations of the Nationalist army at least as much as those of the Japanese. Peasants had a saying: “Bandits come and go. Soldiers come and stay.” Modern Chinese historians argue, however, that the fact that their own people inflicted atrocities upon each other was, and remains, a domestic matter of no rightful concern to foreigners; that nothing done by Chiang or Mao mitigates the crimes of the Japanese.
At the cost of deploying a million men, the occupiers maintained almost effortless military dominance over the forces of Chiang, and never sought to challenge Communist control of Yan’an Province. At the November 1943 Cairo Conference, President Roosevelt insisted upon anointing China as one of the four great Allied powers, assisted by Stalin’s acquiescence and in the face of Churchill’s contempt. Yet Roosevelt’s crusade to make China a modern power languished in the face of poverty, corruption, cruelty, incompetence, ignorance on a scale beyond even U.S. might and wealth to remedy. It was characteristic of the cultural contempt which China harboured towards other societies that even in the darkest days of the Japanese war, almost all Chinese retained a profound disdain for the Americans and British. Additionally, as Christopher Thorne has argued408, the U.S. never satisfactorily resolved its purpose. Did it seek to help China win its struggle against the Japanese? To create a strong China? Or to support the regime of Chiang Kai-shek? These objectives were probably unattainable, and certainly irreconcilable. Thorne omits a fourth, which weighed far more heavily with the U.S. chiefs of staff than any altruistic desire to aid the Chinese people. Just as in Europe Soviet soldiers were doing most of the dying necessary to destroy Nazism, Washington hoped that in Asia the expenditure of Chinese lives might save American ones.
All these aspirations foundered amidst the chaos and misery of China, and the inability of Chiang Kai-shek to fulfil the role for which Washington cast him. In 1944, Chiang’s economic recklessness and a Japanese initiative which flooded southern China with $100 billion of counterfeit money created catastrophic inflation, which ruined the middle class. A quarter of the population of Nationalist areas were by then refugees, victims of the forced mass migrations which characterised the wartime period. A drought in the south is thought to have killed a million people. Some American personnel were making fortunes running a black market in fuel and supplies. Even as Chinese people were dying of starvation, some Nationalist army officers sold food to the Japanese.
A visiting American intelligence officer delivered a devastating report to the War Department in May 1944:
Chinese troops are underfed, improperly clothed, poorly equipped, poorly trained, lacking in leadership…Because of “squeeze,” men are lucky to get 16 oz of their 22 oz daily rice ration. Almost all are illiterate. Motor maintenance is a problem, as they run a vehicle until it stops before any inspection is conducted. Trucks are usually overloaded 200%. Most drivers operate at an excessive rate of speed at all times. Along the Salween river, I was informed that not a shot had been fired since last November…that not over 2000 Japanese opposed fifteen Chinese divisions. Most of the troops appeared to be loafing. A Chinese army subsists locally and lives off the country…During the first week of February 1944 Lt. Budd, railhead officer at Kunming, dispatched