Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [154]
Generalissimo promised would fight hard to hold [Guilin-Liuzhou] area for at least 2 months, as it was it fell without a fight. The troops that melted away so quickly…were by Chinese standards well equipped and fed…I have now concluded that G and his adherents realize seriousness of the situation but they are impotent and confounded. They are not organized, equipped and trained for modern war. Psychologically they are not prepared to cope with the situation because of political intrigue, false pride and mistrust of leaders’ honesty and motives…Frankly I think that the Chinese officials surrounding the G are actually afraid to report accurately conditions…their stupidity and inefficiency are revealed, and further the G might order them to take positive action and they are incompetent to issue directives, make plans and fail completely in obtaining execution by field commanders…efficiency of Chinese combat units…is very low.
Wedemeyer was fearful that the Japanese planned to take Kunming, terminus of the Hump air route, and strove to concentrate Chinese forces to defend it. To the dismay of Mountbatten and Slim, he withdrew from Burma the American-trained Chinese divisions, the best troops in the Nationalist order of battle, and airlifted them to the Yunnan front. Yet they arrived there as the crisis passed. The Japanese halted. They had achieved their aim—to open a land link to their own forces in Indochina, at a time when the sea passage was threatened by American blockade. In the Allied camp, it was recognised that the closure of Ichigo was the result of a policy decision by Tokyo, owing nothing to the Chinese Nationalist army’s powers of resistance. After almost three years of herculean effort by the United States, the employment of a quarter of a million Americans on the Asian mainland, Washington was obliged to confront the fact that the Japanese could do as they chose in China; that the country was as much a shambles as it had been in 1942, save that thanks to American largesse the regime’s leader and principal supporters, together with a few U.S. officers, were incomparably richer. None of this constituted a case for retaining Stilwell in his former role. Hurley was thus far correct, that it was absurd for the most senior American soldier in China to be entirely alienated from the man endorsed by the U.S. as its national leader. Washington belatedly realised what Chiang had always understood—that America was stuck with him; that no threats of withdrawing support unless conditions were met had any substance, because the U.S. administration had no other Chinese card in its deck.
For the rest of the war, Wedemeyer suffered familiar frustrations about the shortcomings of America’s huge, hopeless ally. If Stilwell’s successor managed to avert a showdown with Chiang, he saw nothing to diminish his contempt for Asians. Stilwell recorded an earlier conversation with Wedemeyer. “Al stated that424 he thought the British and we should permit the Germans and the Russians to beat each other into pulp…that Britain and the United States were the guardians and legatees of the only civilisation worth preserving.”
Through the winter of 1944, Allied diplomats and soldiers speculated freely that Chiang’s regime might collapse, that by default Tokyo might find all China at its mercy. “In about six months the Japanese have advanced…a distance of roughly 500 miles over comparatively poor l[ines] of c[ommunication] against a considerable concentration of Chinese troops, supported by the American/Chinese air force operating from well-prepared forward bases,” reported Mountbatten’s intelligence chief in a gloomy appreciation on 2 December 1944. “Economically they have secured adequate rice to maintain their forces but, of greater consequence, they have denied to the Chinese