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By Root 1031 0

preliminary to invasion of the Japanese home islands. Okinawa exercised an important influence on the development of events thereafter, through its impact upon the civilian, military and naval leadership of the United States. To capture an outpost, American forces had been obliged to fight the most bitter campaign of the Pacific war. The prospect of invading Kyushu and Honshu in the face of Japanese forces many times greater than those on Okinawa, and presumably imbued with the same fighting spirit, filled those responsible with dismay. At the end of June 1945, staff planners assumed that Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, would take place four months thence. To the U.S. chiefs of staff, however, any alternative which averted such necessity would be deemed welcome.

So dramatic was the succession of events which crowded into the last months of the war that it is hard to grasp the notion that, in June, the prospect of the atomic bombs did not loom foremost in the consciousness of the U.S. chiefs of staff. At that stage, their hopes of achieving victory without Olympic rested chiefly upon blockade, incendiary air bombardment and Russian entry into the Japanese war. All of these represented more immediate realities and more substantial prospects than the putative fulfilment of the Manhattan Project. The course of the Second World War had so often astonished its participants that no prudent men, even those at the summits of Allied power, could feel assured of how its last acts would play out.

SEVENTEEN

Mao’s War

1. Yan’an

U.S. SOLDIERS AND MARINES fighting for their lives in the Ryukyus and Philippines, Slim’s men in Burma, Australians in the south-west Pacific, would have found it grotesque had they known how the leaders of their great Asian co-belligerent spent the spring of 1945. Both rival parties for dominance of China held national congresses. True, desultory skirmishing with the Japanese persisted while the Nationalists were meeting in Chongqing, the Communists in Yan’an. The Americans wrung their hands in despair and disgust as the Japanese continued to expand their perimeter southwestwards across the Nationalists’ Yunnan Province, resisted with conviction only by the Stilwell-trained Chinese divisions. Neither Chiang nor Mao was any longer interested in contributing to Japan’s defeat. That could be left to the Americans in the Pacific. What mattered to them now was to gird their loins, gather their political and military forces, for the civil war that must follow the expulsion of the Japanese from China. The Communist Congress lasted fifty days, from 23 April to 11 June, its ideological writhings coinciding with the agony of Okinawa. Its chief achievement was to confirm the absolute dominance of Mao Zedong. His “thoughts” were thenceforward paramount in every aspect of Chinese Communist creed and deed.

Mao had almost a million men under arms, or what passed for arms among the guerrillas—they lacked artillery, air support and heavy weapons. The question of what these forces did during the Japanese occupation baffled most Americans at the time, and has remained a focus of controversy since. For decades after their domestic victory in 1949, the Communist rulers of China asserted that their followers, unsupported by the Americans, had alone waged effective war against the Japanese. Such Western propagandists as Edgar Snow made extravagant claims for the military successes of the Communists against the occupiers. They contrasted the energy and aggression of Mao’s people with Nationalist passivity and sloth. Here is a characteristic Snow flourish: “Though their enemies denounced775 the Communists’ beliefs and attributed to them every shameful excess they could imagine, no one could deny they had wrought a miracle in arms…Rarely in the history of modern war or politics has there been any political adventure to match this in imagination or epic grandeur. The job was done by men who worked with history as if it were a tool, and with peasants as if they were raw material.”

American officers of the 1944