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By Root 1196 0

Manchuria were captured by the Japanese, who were as confused as the Allies by the tangle of Communist loyalties between Mao and Stalin. In December 1944, Japanese intelligence in Manchuria reported to Tokyo that they had caught two Chinese Communist agents in Dalian, who had been in contact with the local Soviet consul. These men confessed under interrogation to membership of a thirty-strong network of agents in Manchuria, in wireless contact with the Communists in Yan’an. Their group, the prisoners asserted, “at present were mostly inactive790 awaiting a revolt in Manchuria or a Soviet-Japanese war.” It is today impossible to guess whether the captured agents were in reality reporting to Yan’an or to the Soviets.

In addition to the reconnaissance groups791, the Russians formed guerrilla refugees into a regular unit, the 88th Independent Brigade. Four of its battalions were Chinese. The fifth was Korean, commanded by Kim Il Sung, who later became ruler of North Korea. Their ranks were stiffened by some Soviet officers of Chinese and Korean origins. In the canteen at their base forty miles from Khabarovsk, they celebrated the German surrender with Russians who offered toasts to victory and to Stalin. The Chinese immediately called for another toast: victory over Japan. The Red Army men enthusiastically joined in. From that day on, the former guerrillas anticipated Soviet entry into the eastern war. When at last it came, the Chinese were bitterly disappointed when the Russians deployed only a handful of the Chinese trainees, committing the others to internal security duties in Manchuria and Korea. Stalin’s Chinese clients were deemed a political asset more than a military one.

JOHN PATON DAVIES and his kind forever afterwards believed that, in the winter of 1944–45, the United States lost a historic opportunity to achieve an understanding with China’s future, in the person of Mao, which it sacrificed by clinging to the past, in the person of Chiang. This was naïve. There is no more reason to suppose that Mao would have honoured promises to American capitalists, made under the duress of war, than did Chiang. Both were playing a game with the Americans, Chiang with greater apparent success, Mao with much shrewder understanding of his own people. Edgar Snow, the U.S. journalist who knew Mao for many years and who became one of his most effective Western propagandists, recorded a conversation with him in the 1930s: “Both of us felt792 a growing conviction that the Communist-Nationalist war in China would in the long term prove more important than the Japanese war…Mao correctly predicted the Japanese attack on Western colonies in Asia, Russian intervention in a general war to defeat the Japanese—and end colonialism in Asia. He told me to expect the Japanese to win all the great battles, seize the main cities and communications, and in the process destroy the KMT’s best forces…at the end of a war which he thought might last ten years, the ‘forces of the Chinese revolution’ would…emerge as the leading power in East Asia.”

This seems both a plausible illustration of Mao Zedong’s shrewdness and a convincing view of his agenda. In 1945, the U.S. remained implacably unwilling to send military aid to Yan’an. For this, much abuse has been heaped upon Hurley and his kind by liberal contemporaries and historians. Yet the Americans were surely right. It would have availed the Allied war effort nothing to ship arms to the Communists. These would have been used against the Japanese only in showcase operations to impress foreign spectators. By now, the minds of U.S. policy-makers as well as Chinese principals had become fixed upon shaping post-war realities, rather than promoting Japan’s defeat on the Asian mainland.

In January 1945, Wedemeyer chaired a meeting with the British at which he asserted emphatically: “Under no circumstances is any material help793 to be given or negotiations entered into with any provincial authorities or military leaders who are not, repetition not, directly controlled by and owe allegiance to central authorities.