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By Root 1150 0

went along with him, was to think that he could strike a bargain with the generalissimo…Had Chiang been able and willing to do what Stilwell asked, China might well have emerged from the war a great power…As Chiang could no more reform his power base than overcome his idiosyncrasies, the bargain was doomed—as was Chiang.” U.S. ambassador Clarence Gauss, who was replaced by Hurley shortly after Stilwell’s sacking, wrote perceptively in the autumn of 1944: “Time is on the side of427 the Chinese Communists…as time goes on, the Kuomintang’s influence and control in free China is deteriorating if not yet disintegrating; and…if the Soviet Union should come to make war upon the Japanese…defeat of the Japanese continental armies would probably leave the Communist forces and their regime in a strong political and military position.”

From the winter of 1944 onwards the war effort in China, which had never synchronised with events elsewhere, lapsed into a pattern wholly at odds with them. While in Europe and the Pacific the Allied march to victory gained momentum, in Chiang Kai-shek’s land the enemy retained power to advance at will. The occupation of swathes of new territory did nothing to mitigate the hopelessness of Japan’s wider circumstances. “Ichigo was a success in a narrow sense,” said Japanese staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki, “but it did not help our overall strategic position. We still had a million men in China who were denied to the Pacific campaign. Our success in overrunning the B-29 airfields in China simply meant that the Americans moved their bases to the Marianas.”

The Japanese advance made a mockery, however, of Washington’s claims that China was a serious partner in the Grand Alliance. The country was like some dowager stricken in years and heavy with rheumatism, unwillingly obliged to dance at a ball. The effort was painful, the achievement pitiful. The Japanese had no wish to extend their Asian perimeter until American assertiveness forced them to do so. The principal consequence of the huge Allied commitment was to intensify the miseries of China’s people. Li Fenggui, a Communist guerrilla from a peasant family in Shandong Province, was one of eighty-nine young men who left his village to fight. Afterwards, just four returned. The community’s experience was mirrored throughout China. The Chinese people paid a terrible price for participation in the Second World War, while contributing almost nothing to Allied victory.

NINE

MacArthur on Luzon

1. “He Is Insane on This Subject!”: Manila

THE LARGEST CAMPAIGN of the Pacific war, second phase of MacArthur’s drive to recapture the Philippines, began on 15 December 1944. Elements of Sixth Army landed on Mindoro, just south of Luzon. The island was of comparable size to Leyte, but the Japanese mounted no significant ground defence. The operation became, in the words of an American engineer, “just a maneuver for shore party units.” Within a fortnight, airfield construction teams accomplished on Mindoro what had proved so difficult on Leyte—the creation of strips from which large numbers of aircraft could operate.

The Japanese knew that a landing on Luzon would not now be long delayed. On 2 January 1945, Yamashita moved his headquarters to the pine-clad summer resort town of Baguio, 7,400 feet up in the mountains of the north. From there, he planned personally to direct the “Shobu” group, 152,000 strong, one of three such commands into which he divided his army. The second “Kembu” force on Bataan and around Clark Field had 30,000 men, the third “Shimbu” group another 80,000 south of Manila. Staff officers described Yamashita in those days as possessing a mellow, fatalistic calm. He spent hours reading the essays of a Buddhist priest. In the evenings, he often wandered into the staff mess and gossiped to whichever officers were on hand. He was not above chatting to his private soldiers. His mind seemed much on the past. He expressed concern about the welfare of Allied prisoners on Luzon, and told his superior Field Marshal Terauchi that he intended to relinquish