Free China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein

chief of staff and who would also have control over the all-importantLend-Lease supplies for China, the tons of aviation fuel, weapons, and ammunition that came from India every month. He received Wedemeyer in a spacious reception room adorned with beautiful Chinese paintings and etchings on the walls, rugs on the polished floor, teakwood tables, chairs with marble inlay, and vases with flowers. Servants in long blue robes glided in and out with tea and refreshments. There were so many curtains and screens drawn around the room that Wedemeyer, no innocent abroad, wondered “how many people might be listening in and noting what we said.”
    “Please, please,” said Chiang, the only English words he spoke, gesturing Wedemeyer to a divan and then sitting next to him on it. It was a gesture of equality. He would not have sat on the same couch with Stilwell. “He seemed shy but keenly alert,” Wedemeyer noted, and he constantly and nervously fluttered a fan. Hurley, who had been appointed the American ambassador a few weeks earlier, was present, as wasT. V. Soong.
    The meeting was an opportunity to exchange pleasantries and to repair the wounds of the Stilwell debacle, but not to get into detailed discussions. Wedemeyer told the Generalissimo he was sure “we would have no difficulties in bringing about an efficient, carefully coordinated employment of American and Chinese forces against theJapanese.”
    Respectful as he was of Chiang’s feelings, Wedemeyer had no illusions about the condition of China’s armies. The Japanese were on the offensive, threatening the important cities of Guilin and Liuzhou, both sites of American air bases, yet Wedemeyer found the Chinese to be strangely “apathetic and unintelligent.” A bit later, on December 4, in a cable to Marshall, he had changed his mind, but only somewhat. “I have now concluded,” he wrote, “that the Generalissimo and his adherents realize seriousness of situation but they are impotent and confounded. They are not organized, equipped, and trained for modern war.” Among the problems was “disorganized and muddled planning” that was “beyond comprehension.” The Chinese soldier was not only not properly equipped, he was also not properly fed, and Wedemeyer soon realized that this inadequacy, which resulted in malnutrition and disease, “underlay most of China’s military problems.”
    This assessment seemed to correspond with Stilwell’s harshest judgments, but in fact Wedemeyer was not only more tactful than his predecessor, an attribute that enabled him to establish a cordial relationship with Chiang, but also more sympathetic, more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. WhileAmerican public opinion was souring on Chiang—or, at least, was now privy to the disillusionment illustrated by the New York Times coverage—and whileAmerican diplomats and military officers in China were forming an anti-Chiang consensus, Wedemeyer became convinced of Hurley’s assessment that the Gimo was a great man and the only one who could lead China. Others felt that way as well, so that the United States government ended up in a kind of warts-and-all resignation about Chiang, an unenthusiastic acceptance of the fact that, as FDR once said about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastazio Somoza, he may be a bastard but he’s our bastard.
    At the end of 1944, a young congressman from Montana,Mike Mansfield, who had been a marine stationed in China and had taught Far Eastern history at Montana State University, was dispatched by FDR on a three-month fact-finding mission in China.“Conditions,” he wrote to Roosevelt in January 1945, “are really bad.” The main problem, Mansfield felt, was the rift between the Nationalists and the Communists, which sapped China’s strength in the face of the common Japanese foe. In addition, he wrote, the Nationalists were corrupt and incompetent, their army ill supplied, badly fed, and poorly led. And yet, he concluded, “Chiang is