• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1040 0

” A British hand pencilled on the War Office copy of this minute: “Yennan?” Wedemeyer urged everyone present to “come clean” about any “undeclared operations.” The British in Chongqing agreed with their American colleagues about very little, but they endorsed Hurley and Wedemeyer’s view that it was pointless to arm Mao’s people. The British military attaché signalled to London on 27 December 1944: “Seeing that the Communists have not been equipped794 with modern weapons nor organised and trained to operate with them, I consider that they would be of negligible value for at least a year, even if given all the facilities enjoyed by the central gov forces since 1928. They have never carried out regular ops against the Japs, but have contented themselves with occupying territory from which the Kuomintang tps have withdrawn.”

In March 1945 Hurley abandoned his attempt to forge a coalition between Mao and Chiang, and became implacably hostile to Yan’an. The ambassador conducted a dramatic purge of all those whom he deemed Communist sympathisers, including Service and Ludden. He had become convinced that the United States must support Chiang, and Chiang alone. A British visitor met Hurley in 1945. He afterwards asserted that the U.S. ambassador “despised the Chinese [and] asked795 whether I did not agree that they were hopeless people who must have a strong man on top to keep them in order.” As so often when others waver, one man passionately committed to a course of action—Hurley—got his way. America withheld support from Mao, whose guerrillas remained largely passive until August 1945.

John Paton Davies admitted later that he had been mistaken to suppose that Mao Zedong was amenable to democracy. However, the American diplomat was impenitent in his judgement about the virtues of what he and his colleagues saw, liked and admired about Mao’s camp in 1944–45: “Yan’an provided the great mass796 of the population, which had been without hope, with an affirmative, personal way out of the swamps of despair. The way out was through rustic nationalism, based on organized rustic resistance to the Japanese invaders, and a novel feeling of having some say in the shaping of one’s individual destiny.”

It was unquestionably true that Mao’s people in Yan’an were building a base of popular support—however deluded were the Chinese people about Mao’s ability to improve their lives—quite lacking for Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. Christopher Thorne has written perceptively about the enthusiasm of generations of American foreign policy-makers for identifying a nation’s “great man,” and fixing upon him—sometimes to the point of obsession—as friend or foe. Americans, Thorne argues, are far less comfortable assessing movements and ideologies than categorising individuals. American policy in China represented a spectacular example of this proclivity. Chiang had become unequivocally the chosen “great man” of the United States. Though Washington grew deeply disillusioned about the Nationalists’ will or ability to assist the Allied cause against the Japanese, and acknowledged the chronic corruption and incompetence of Chiang’s government, they stuck with him.

Even if the U.S. had decided to ship military aid to the Communists in 1945, the logistical difficulties were so great that the Japanese would not have been much inconvenienced. No more than the Nationalists were the Communists capable of inflicting defeat upon a regular Japanese army. American support for the Communists might have spared the Chinese people from their later civil war, by hastening the fall of Chiang: it was plain to all but the most blind and bigoted foreigners in China in 1945 that if its people were granted political choice, Chiang must fall. But aid to Mao could not have altered the course of the Second World War in Asia.

Exposure of the delusion that the U.S. could determine the future of China cost Americans only money, but was paid for in blood by the Chinese people. By the spring of 1945, Wedemeyer in Chongqing was making hasty plans for American troop landings at Chinese ports