The China Mission Read online

  THE

  CHINA

  MISSION

  GEORGE MARSHALL’S UNFINISHED WAR,

  1945–1947

  Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  To Darin

  “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

  – WINSTON CHURCHILL

  “So long as I do not give a damn about what they say in the future, I probably will be able to do a fair job at the present time.”

  – GEORGE MARSHALL

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Oh! General Marshall, We Communists Honor You

  I. WINNING THE PEACE

  1. Peace Is Hell

  2. Horrid Dilemmas

  3. Marshall Is Too Big

  4. The Committee of Three

  5. Unity Out of Chaos

  6. First Lord of the Warlords

  II. SEEK TRUTH FROM FACTS

  7. If the World Wants Peace

  8. Balance of Mistrusts

  9. Fighting While Talking

  10. Umpire on a Battlefield

  11. Sisyphus in China

  12. George Marshall Can’t Walk on Water

  III. LIMITS OF POWER

  13. The Rock and the Whirlpool

  14. At the Point of a Gun

  15. All of Chiang’s Horses and All of Chiang’s Men

  16. Into the Fire

  Epilogue: Losing China

  Postscript: Substitutes for Victory?

  A Note on Names and Quotations

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources

  Illustrations Insert

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  Oh! General Marshall, We Communists Honor You

  Soon, such a scene would become unthinkable. It was a cold morning in early March 1946, a rocky airstrip laid along a broad, barren valley in China’s northwest, lined by mountains of tawny dust blown from the Gobi Desert. Six months earlier, one war, a world war, had ended. Six months later, a new war, a cold war, would be under way. Yet here stood General George C. Marshall and Chairman Mao Zedong, two of the great antagonists in the war to come, in intent conversation. Each wore the uniform of his army: the crisp khaki of a five-star general, the plain tunic of a revolutionary. On this morning, they spoke of friendship and peace.

  Mao had pledged to give up armed revolution, to embrace old enemies, to join in building a democracy, in keeping the peace of a new and better world. “I can tell that an unprecedented era of progress awaits China,” said Marshall, a man not given to grand pronouncements, as he prepared to board his plane. Mao was equally grand: “The entire people of our country should feel grateful and loudly shout, ‘long live cooperation between China and the United States.’ ”

  The afternoon before, searching for this airstrip, Marshall’s pilot had gotten lost in a tangle of gullies where a wrong turn could end against the side of a mountain. The remoteness was not incidental. Mao’s Communists had come to this “mountain fastness,” as Marshall described it, to take refuge and rebuild after the Long March. Most came to know the place as the “cradle of revolution,” but its name, Yenan, meant “long peace.”

  Marshall’s arrival in Yenan was to have signaled that the Communists’ time in the wilderness was over. When the plane landed, its pilot spotting the 1,000-year-old pagoda that marked a hill above town, a large crowd was waiting, 6,000 people by the count of Yenan’s Emancipation Daily, summoned by Mao. The aircraft was itself a symbol of American might, a C-54 Skymaster sent under Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill and outfitted in the wood and leather of an aristocrat’s club before being returned to the United States for use by one of its great heroes.

  When Marshall had emerged from the plane and shaken hands with Mao, a cheer went up from the assembled cadres. A Communist honor guard fired a salute, then stood straight and tall, instructed to impress, as Marshall strode past in review. A band of five hundred (again by Emancipation Daily’s count) played a song written for the occasion: “Let us extol your great spirit! You have used your power to extinguish the fire of war sweeping the plain. Oh! General Marshall, let the red troops pay you their highest salute. We Communists honor you.”

  Over the course of that evening, Marshall had conferred with the top leaders of the Communist Party—Mao, the diplomat Zhou Enlai, the military chief Zhu De—about China’s future as a democratic great power. (Mao “sits and masks his face completely,” an aide wrote in his diary, but “Marshall told him frankly what was expected.”) He had toasted their common future at a banquet. (“All were satisfied,” the official press reported.) He had sat for two hours in a freezing auditorium and watched a Communist troupe perform songs about revolutionary heroics, beneath a proscenium hung with images of Lenin and Stalin that he did not fail to notice. He had toured the ruined town center in a jeep, a model of vehicle he had ordered built and shipped around the world a few years before. (Mao would ride in a sun-bleached van that had printed on the side, “Presented to the heroic defenders of China by the Chinese Hand Laundry, East 42nd street New York NY.”) He had spent the night in an eight-room outpost of American soldiers and spies—the Dixie Mission, America’s station behind rebel lines.

  Despite an aversion to triumphalism, Marshall could not help but feel that this was something of a victory tour. He had been in China for two and a half months. By all appearances, he had done the impossible again. In World War II, he built the American military machine and led it to victory—“armies he called into being by his own genius,” as Churchill put it. Then, when the war was over, Marshall was tapped for a last mission. President Truman needed him in China. It would be a short mission, a few months. This time, rather than win a war, his charge was to save the peace.

  China was supposed to take its place as one of the Big Four powers that would together rebuild the postwar world. But the central government, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang, the Nationalists, had few of the attributes of a modern power, and only loose control over much of the country’s territory. Here in the northwest, Mao’s Communists had gained strength and followers, threatening a battle for the future of China. For the United States, that would have dire implications, whether or not the Communists had a chance of winning—and few, not even Stalin, thought they did. Truman’s instruction to Marshall was to go to China, bring Chiang and Mao together in a single government, and avert a war. American power would be used to create “a strong, united, and democratic China.”

  In a matter of weeks, Marshall had achieved what even cynics were calling a miracle. Under his guiding hand, the Nationalists and Communists agreed to a cease-fire in a civil war that had raged on and off for two decades. They settled on the principles of a democratic government, listening as Marshall explained the Bill of Rights and read aloud from Benjamin Franklin’s speech to the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near perfection as it does.” They signed off on a plan to merge their troops into one national army. Mao told his followers that they were entering “a new stage of peace and democracy.”

  And so on the airstrip in Yenan this cold morning, as he shook hands with Mao in the shadow of the magnificent C-54, Marshall could be forgiven for speaking in uncharacteristically grand terms. In Washington, they were saying he had saved China. In China, he was being called a “god of peace.” As Marshall himself had reported to Truman, there was hope that “peace will really reign over China.”

  That same day, March 5, 1946, 7,000 miles away, Marshall’s admirer Winston Churchill was also speaking of the future. His was a darker prophecy. In Fulton, Missouri, with Truman on the stage beside him, Churchill warned of an “iron curtain” falling between the West and the Communist world. And he was no
t the only one sounding such a warning. Senior American officials were decrying Stalin’s treachery. The American army was announcing a ban on Communists in the officer corps. American newspapers were reporting on the theft of atomic secrets by Soviet spies. There were dark currents everywhere.

  On the airstrip that morning, Marshall could see the way to a different future. There would be no Chinese civil war and no Communist China. Autocrats would become democrats. An enduring alliance between the United States and China would serve as a pillar of stability in Asia. China would help keep order and calm across the globe, Chiang and Mao a bridge between the Americans and Soviets. Marshall, the revered general, a man of war for almost fifty years, would end his career and go off into retirement with a valiant stroke for peace.

  But history would flow from Churchill’s words that day, not Marshall’s. Over the next ten months of his “short” mission, Marshall’s achievements would collapse. The agreements he brokered would fracture. Civil war would come after all. There would be talk of World War III, of American boys fighting Soviet boys on Chinese battlefields. A few years later, Mao and the Communists would conquer China. Soon enough, American boys would fight Chinese boys on Korean battlefields. Millions of Chinese would perish in the throes of revolution. Once Marshall’s plane took off over the mountains that morning, Mao would not meet another high-level American representative until Richard Nixon’s visit twenty-six years later.

  In the United States, the question would be put crisply: Who lost China? In the angry debate, many Americans would give Marshall and his mission a bitter share of the blame. Ultimately, he would be remembered for leading the Allies to victory in World War II, for forging a new model of global leadership as secretary of state, for the effort—the Marshall Plan—that saved Europe and became shorthand for American power at its best. But others would remember him for this mission—some as the man who lost China, some as the man who kept his country from a more catastrophic fate there.

  The scene that morning on the airstrip would become the high-water mark of hope—not just for China, but for a different kind of world, for a new order of peace after the worst war ever known. “The next war,” Marshall had said in the final hours of the last one, “might destroy the world. It must not come.” When hope broke apart, the scene that morning would also become the image of failure, of weakness, of betrayal.

  Not long before, it would have seemed unthinkable that George Marshall could have gotten this far, face-to-face with these men, on this airstrip, on this mission. Not long after, it would seem unthinkable that he ever could have come here at all.

  I

  WINNING THE PEACE

  CHAPTER 1

  Peace Is Hell

  Just minutes before the phone rang, George Marshall pulled up to a stately brick house in Leesburg, Virginia, stepped onto the porch with his wife, Katherine, and stopped to reflect in a way he had not in years. The day before, November 26, 1945, he had marked the end of more than four decades in the United States Army. His tenure as army chief of staff, the capstone of that career, started the morning Hitler invaded Poland; a call with news of Wehrmacht divisions crossing the border woke him at 3 a.m. Six years later, when Emperor Hirohito surrendered over Japanese radio, Marshall was long since ready to pass leadership of the army to his protégé, General Dwight Eisenhower. On the last day of 1945, Marshall would turn 65.

  For weeks, he had listened as the good and the great praised him as few Americans had ever been praised. The previous day, in a ceremony in the courtyard of the new Pentagon building, he received a special citation from President Harry Truman: “In a war unparalleled in magnitude and in horror, millions of Americans gave their country outstanding service. General of the Army George C. Marshall gave it victory. . . . To him, as much as to any individual, the United States owes its future.” Earlier, Truman had paused during a press conference to call Marshall “the greatest military man this country ever produced—or any other country, for that matter.” Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, told him, “I have seen a great many soldiers in my lifetime, and you, sir, are the finest soldier I have ever known.” (In his diary, Stimson had referred to Marshall as “the strongest man there is in America . . . the one on whom the fate of the war depends.”) In naming him Man of the Year, Time magazine pronounced that the American people “trust General Marshall more than they have trusted any military man since George Washington.” Stalin said he would trust Marshall with his life.

  At the Pentagon ceremony, when Truman pinned an oak-leaf cluster on Marshall’s uniform, some in the audience noted a broad smile on the stoic face. It was a smile less of satisfaction with feats behind than of anticipation of quiet years to come. After Truman had agreed to Marshall’s resignation, Katherine had seen an immediate change in her husband: “At breakfast he was carefree, the heavy lines between his eyes began to disappear, he laughed once more.” One of his wartime code names was Atlas; with war over and retirement imminent, Katherine watched a burden lift from his shoulders. Marshall made no secret of his relief. “We are off again this morning,” he wrote General John Pershing, his mentor, before leaving the capital, “and I soon hope to be able to clear my skirts pretty generally of Washington involvements.” He could hardly be blamed. On the home front, few had endured a harder war, and no one had done more to win it.

  On this bright late fall afternoon, Marshall could look across his lawn and instead of troubling over the world’s freedom, contemplate his own. Katherine had found this house, forty miles up the Potomac from Washington, when the war’s end was a distant hope. As soon as he saw it, Marshall recognized that it could be a true home after decades of wandering. Now he was here, with little to preoccupy him beyond his books, vegetable garden, and hunting trips. “My ambitions are clearly defined and very simple,” he wrote a friend, “a little of home life for Mrs. Marshall and me . . . my limited activities, whatever they may be, of a strictly nongovernmental or political nature.” They went inside, and Katherine went upstairs to rest.

  It was then that the phone rang. Marshall had never been a man of unnecessary words. During the war, his efficiency of approach could be unnerving. “General Marshall speaking,” he would say when answering the phone, and then expect the caller to go right to the point. When the point was made, the conversation was finished. Even by Marshall’s standards, this call was short. Almost the only thing that could be heard from the Leesburg end of the exchange was Marshall’s “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Later, Katherine came downstairs. At first Marshall said nothing. But the radio was on, and there was a news flash: “President Truman has appointed General of the Army George C. Marshall as his Special Ambassadorial Envoy to China.” Marshall rushed to explain—he had not wanted to tell Katherine about the call until she had a chance to relax. Just the day before, he had celebrated the end of the longest-ever tenure of an army chief of staff, the nation hailing his already unsurpassed record of service. But the president had called, and he needed Marshall to take on a final mission.

  A few hours earlier, President Truman had been dealt a shock of his own. He was scheduled to join his cabinet for lunch in the West Wing. For Truman, half a year into an accidental presidency, even a meal with his own administration could feel treacherous. When Roosevelt named him his running mate for the 1944 election, the senator from Missouri made an unlikely vice president. As president, he was thought by many—including some in his own cabinet—to be not just unlikely, but ludicrous.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Truman spat as he walked into lunch, a rolled-up yellow sheet of teletype in his hand. He passed the sheet around. It was a report of trouble he did not need, another challenge to his authority when they seemed to come from every direction.

  For the past year, the United States’ man in China had been a wealthy Oklahoman named Patrick Hurley. Earlier in the war, Hurley, a veteran of Herbert Hoover’s cabinet, had been casting about for a role that would accord with his self-image. Marshall, hoping to get him out
of the president’s hair, thought to send him across the Pacific. There his exuberance might even do some good. The United States had made much of its alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s China. Japan’s push into the Chinese mainland a decade earlier had in a sense marked the real beginning of World War II, and in the face of aggression and hardship, Chiang and his people presented a picture of brave resistance in the face of Axis brutality. Since Pearl Harbor, the United States had been proud to stand with them. It sent an American general to serve as Chiang’s chief of staff and American planes over the Hump of the Himalayas to keep Chiang supplied.

  But before long, there was a strong undercurrent of acrimony beneath the surface solidarity. Chiang thought Washington was not doing enough for him; Washington thought he was not doing enough for it. From the American perspective, a large part of the problem in the Chinese alliance was the parlous state of Chiang’s domestic alliances—especially with the Chinese Communists. Until the Japanese invasion had forced them together, the Nationalists and the Communists had been a decade into their own struggle to the death; round after round of Nationalist extermination campaigns drove Mao’s Communists into the 6,000-mile retreat of the Long March and ultimately their refuge in Yenan. With the arrival of a common enemy, however, they were supposed to fight together, in a united front backed by the United States and the Soviet Union. But to many Americans, Chiang still seemed more focused on weakening his old Communist enemies than on joining with them to defeat the Japanese. And what supplies and weapons were not stored away for internal battles to come were, the gossip went, siphoned off by corrupt generals and officials. Hurley was supposed to take care of all that.

  He crossed the Hump all mustache and bluster. “I can handle these fellows,” he said, “they’re just like Mexicans and I can handle Mexicans.” When he landed for his first visit to Yenan, he let loose a Choctaw war whoop. He became better known for his dirty mouth (he referred to Zhou Enlai as a “motherfucker” and wanted to tell Chiang a lewd joke) than his silver tongue (“I am opposed to being leaked on by the career men in the State Department”). Mao called him the Clown. Nationalist officials called him the Big Wind. And when the Japanese surrendered to end World War II, Chiang and Mao went back to frantic preparations for civil war, despite Hurley’s repeated efforts to bring them together.