Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [155]
Wedemeyer persisted with ambitious plans to rebuild the Nationalist armies. He had sufficient tact and discretion to sustain a relationship with Chiang, at the cost of quarrelling bitterly with the British. As the Chinese predicament worsened, acrimony increased between U.S. officers committed to Chiang and Mountbatten’s people, wearied to despair by what they regarded as a grand American futility. Americans believed that British strategy was driven chiefly, if not exclusively, by a preoccupation with resurrecting their own empire. On 9 December 1944, Mountbatten’s chief political adviser, Esler Dening, reported to the Foreign Office in London: “General Wedemeyer told me with conviction425 that there would not be a British Empire after the war…At present the question was whether to prop up a tottering China with props which may not hold, or to hit the Japanese hard where we have the forces to do it. [This] seems already resolved in favour of the former. If props hold, America will get the credit and if they do not, we shall get the blame.”
The only happy man in all this was the generalissimo. He deluded himself that he had gained all his objectives. Supplies flowed up the Burma Road in ever-increasing quantities. Yet Chiang would pay a heavy political price for his military failure. The U.S. no longer deluded itself that Japan’s forces in China could be defeated by the Chinese. Washington thus turned to the only other power capable of doing so—the Soviet Union. Through the winter of 1944–45, with increasing urgency Washington solicited Russian participation in the war against Japan. Chiang believed that he had played his cards with brilliant skill, by preserving American support for his regime on his own terms, without conceding any scintilla of domestic reform. Yet the consequence would be a great Russian army’s descent upon Manchuria, with the endorsement of the United States.
“Nineteen forty-four was the year in which Chiang Kai-shek’s policies completely collapsed, along with his defence of China,” says a modern Chinese historian, Professor Niu Jun of Beijing University. At a period when elsewhere in the world Allied arms were decisively ascendant, in China alone did the Japanese remain victorious. It is mistaken to dismiss the generalissimo as an absurd figure. He knew his own country better than did the Americans. He understood that no Chinese army could defeat the Japanese. His willingness to surrender territory, of which China possessed so much, rather than to confront the enemy on terms which suited Tokyo, was more realistic than the grandiose visions of Stilwell, Wedemeyer or Roosevelt. “Chiang did some big things426 for China,” says a historian of Manchuria, Wang Hongbin. “He ended the domination of the warlords, and he fought the Japanese. He was criticised for failing to oppose the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, but what else could he realistically do? He lacked the military means to resist. His strategy was simply to wait for a chance to engage the enemy on favourable terms. Is not that what the Americans and British also did in the Second World War? The Americans did not understand China. They wanted this country to do much more than it was capable of.”
Chiang’s regime was ultimately doomed by its corruption, and by the generalissimo’s inability to translate some shrewd conceptions into any sort of reality. He liked to proclaim sonorously: “I am the state.” But, by surrounding himself with thieves and sycophants, he denied his government the services of subordinates who might have rendered it sustainable. The generalissimo would ultimately discover that his achievement in forcing the Americans to indulge his regime on his own terms merely ensured its collapse. John Paton Davies wrote: “Stilwell’s big mistake, in which I sometimes