A celebration had broken out in dismal Chungking on news of  Pearl Harbor, with its promise of powerful allies for China. Since his realm was the Middle Kingdom around which the world revolved, Chiang Kai-shek quickly proposed to make his miserable capital the seat of a supreme allied council to plan the war against the Japanese. In no way did any of this playacting change the realities. For more than a century no Chinese régime had been able to modernize itself sufficiently to resist the aggressions of foreign powers. Considerable amounts of outside assistance and counsel, not only Russian and German, had been frittered away.

Now it would be Washington's turn. Shocked by Japan's initial successes, during the early part of the war Roosevelt and his  strategists on the Joint Chiefs envisioned the eventual mating of American air and naval power with Chinese manpower in a campaign to smash the Japanese. This wasn't a British, or even more important, a Chinese vision. Anthony Eden believed that to mobilize China a revolution would be necessary, while Chiang Kai-shek foresaw that modernization might risk his personal rule. Campaigns ravaging the countryside would strengthen his Communist rivals.

In the end, FDR would be unable to bring China on board.(1)

FDR's people, in fact, differed among themselves as to how to begin. Furnishing Chiang Kai-shek with an American-equipped air force of American mercenaries under the charismatic  Chennault had captivated the president, Knox, Morgenthau and Hull, but encountered resistance from the services, where it spelled a loss of pilots and planes. A mercenary outfit had been necessary in the first place because the Chinese had proved unable to field an effective air contingent on their own. Within an alliance it might prove a complication, a distraction and a drain on American resources. Moreover, Stilwell carried with him into China a grudge against Chiang Kai-shek, whom he was supposed to serve as chief of staff, and, he hoped, as commander of Chinese troops. The Generalissimo, who probably  counted on a figurehead American general as a way of gaining influence in the States, instead found himself saddled with Stilwell, an irritant and a danger, a stubborn expert, fluent in Chinese, eager to reform China and with ideas of his own about strategy. For a long time Chiang was unable to persuade the Americans to recall him  because he was protected by George Marshall to whom both the president and Henry Stimson heavily deferred. A more unharmonious cast for a great enterprise could scarcely have been assembled.

The duo of Marshall and Stimson would hold sway in the monstrous Pentagon, having compiled a record of happily vetoing FDR's brainstorms, such as sending a National Guard division to Hawaii, B-17s to Joe Stalin, or impulsively donating to Churchill the contents of a convoy caught halfway to the Philippines by the outbreak of the war; Stimson threatened to resign over that one. Probably remembering the trenches of France, FDR had reservations about ground war; Stimson, on the contrary, who had previously served in the Army and as secretary of war, loved to be called colonel and thoroughly deferred to Marshall, the Army and the Army way of doing things. He deplored FDR's administrative mess.(2)

Marshall and Stilwell had soldiered together in the Army's 15th Infantry Regiment when it was stationed at Tientsin to help protect the foreign embassies in Peking from a repetition of the Boxer outrages. Duty in Tientsin was something else. Chinese servants did all the KP and fatigues; Army privates carried swagger sticks. Like many western officers, Stilwell was impressed with the patient ragged soldiers in the warlord bands, and mused that with proper training something could be made of Chinese recruits. His critics thought he itched to be an ever-victorious leader of peasant Chinese levies, on the model of the legendary Briton, Chinese Gordon, who had put down an uprising in China in the eighteen-sixties, only to come to a bad end in Khartoum at the hands of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies.(3)

From the outset, Stilwell and Marshall were unenthusiastic about Chinese demands for weapons, but FDR encouraged Chiang's brother-in-law T.V.Soong to set up China Defense Supplies in Washington; it included so many of the president's friends as consultants that one observer said it looked to him like a New Deal agency. It would procure arms and naturally be a lobby for China. But the War Department had originally dispatched a mission to the theater to advise on what could be profitably utilized, and Stilwell was charged with actually releasing the munitions to China. Typical of the madcap Rooseveltian management, the mission was independent of the American embassy, while Chiang complained that he had to ask his own chief of staff, Stilwell, for supplies. T.V. Soong, a Harvard graduate, hoped to westernize his country, and was regarded as a rival by the suspicious Generalissimo.

Despite the unpromising prospects of China, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at least during the early years of the war were convinced of its importance. Admiral King put the case:" In the European theater, Russia was most advantageously placed for dealing with Germany in view of her geographical position and manpower; in the Pacific, China bore a similar relation to the Japanese. It should be our basic policy to provide the manpower resources of Russia and China with the necessary equipment to enable them to fight."(4)

This didn't extend to granting China the representation on the Combined Chiefs of Staff or the Munitions Assignment Board it repeatedly asked for. And Chiang was greatly aggrieved. The Chinese could be difficult. Far from the patient, longsuffering types Pearl Buck portrayed in her novels, Americans encountered stiff-necked, antiforeign officials imbued with ‘face' and confident they could beguile any westerner.

Into this wonderland rode Franklin Roosevelt with his schoolboy  sentimentality about China, and his anticolonial streak--he repeatedly told Churchill who disliked the Chinese régime Britain really should give up Hong Kong--and Joseph Stilwell, with his feeling  that he had been kicked around during his tour as military attaché in Peking. Stilwell always referred to Chiang as ‘Peanut' and, thanks to his secret police, Chiang of course knew it. In mid-1941, Chiang asked FDR to recommend  a political adviser, intending  to use him to increase his influence in Washington. FDR came up with Owen Lattimore, a self-made expert on Mongolia, afterwards under lively suspicion of being a Communist agent, who went on Chiang's payroll for a year helping him draft demands for American assistance. Among Lattimore's sponsors were two genuine Red agents, Harry Dexter White at the Treasury, and Lauchlin Currie, FDR's White House staffer for China. White and Currie regularly passed information to Moscow, and Moscow hoped that Currie could be used to influence the impulsive president. The USSR was currently on record as supporting the Chiang Kai-shek régime as a more effective force against Japan than the Chinese Communists. For whatever reason, Currie took the side of Chiang Kai-shek and Chennault in the disputes with Stilwell and Marshall .(5)

Stilwell started for China in February 1942, the long way around via the South Atlantic because the Allied positions in Asia were collapsing. He arrived in time to ‘command' the Chinese troops forces that Chiang had sent into Burma, and in April and May of 1942 to be driven out by the Japanese, along with the remains of Chinese and British formations and perhaps a million pitiful refugees, all struggling through the mountains to India during the monsoon.  Stilwell refused to be flown out and proceeded to lead a heterogeneous group on an arduous  jungle hike into India. At the end of it he became an instant hero by asserting in an interview in New Delhi: "I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we should find out what caused it, go back and reclaim it." He submitted a sulphurous report to Washington, blaming the ‘Limeys' and the Chinese, and when he next saw Chiang Kai-shek he recommended with a straight face that several Chinese generals be shot for disobeying his orders--they had been obeying the Generalissimo behind the American's back. The War Department suppressed his report.(6)

Churchill was visiting Washington in June 1942 when news came of Erwin Rommel's defeat of the British in the Libyan desert, and the capture of Tobruk. In the emergency FDR approved the diversion of planes ticketed for the China theater, and Lewis Brereton was ordered to the Middle East with a few B-17s that had survived the Philippine and Dutch Indies campaigns, all without first notifying the Generalissimo. Chiang threatened to quit the war. He then presented "Three Demands," exorbitant and impossible to meet: he wanted American ground troops, aircraft and additional resources for the "Hump." The Hump was the infamous air ferry route from India to China, the only link after the loss of Burma, which struggled over mountains soaring higher than any in the continental United States. T.V. Soong had airily described the route as negotiating  comparatively level terrain.(7)

The War Department naturally wanted to regularize Chiang's American Volunteer Group--which became known as the Flying Tigers--by absorbing the unit into the army. Chennault was reluctant, especially when he was given a commission with a date of rank one day later than an old rival, Clayton Bissell, who became air officer on Stilwell's staff. The Flying Tigers managed to survive the Burma débacle, and continued to harass the Japanese, although their claims, like all claims out of China, were exaggerated. Some of their free spirits were supposed to have taught Chinese porters words of welcome for Bissell when he deplaned in China. "Piss on Bissell! Piss on Bissell!" Or so the story went.(8)

American relations with China were so bad in September 1942 that Lauchlin Currie felt free to recommend a clean sweep. Fire Stilwell, along with Clarence Gauss--the disillusioned and ignored American ambassador to China--and get rid of T.V. Soong.(9) Roosevelt, who hated confrontations, actually dispatched Currie to see Marshall with the news that he wanted Stilwell replaced. The general responded frostily, "He does, does he?" (10) Stilwell remained, along with the disorder. FDR sent Wendell Willkie, his 1940 opponent, to China, as part of a world tour, probably a  ploy to influence the 1942 elections, and Willkie was lobbied and bewitched by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and also lobbied by Marine Colonel James McHugh, the naval attaché in Chungking, who had an ancient feud with Stilwell. McHugh was presently to exit the theater via New Delhi, where he told the British that the Chinese had no faith in a planned Allied offensive to retake Burma. This involved a British move from India, a Chinese move from Yunnan, and a drive by Chinese troops who had fled into India and were being trained by Stilwell at a former Italian prisoner of war camp. FDR refused to discipline McHugh, and insisted that Marshall commission another actor for the Chinese drama, Joseph Alsop, a distant relative of the Roosevelt clan, who had been working for Chennault and was caught and interned when the Japanese captured Hong Kong. After he was exchanged, Alsop hurried back to China, where he provided another unofficial channel to the White House. Still another largely autonomous presence in China was the naval mission sent by Admiral King to get the China coast ready for the return of the American Navy.(11)

FDR could not help but notice that, in the short run at least, not much could be expected from Chiang Kai-shek, and American officialdom reflected the realities. Often ignored Chinese sensibilities. On the basis of the opinion, shared by many others, of Evans Carlson, a Marine officer, whom he had met while the officer was stationed at Warm Springs, FDR seemed to think that, perhaps, the Chinese Communists weren't really dyed-in-the-wool Reds, but he couldn't afford to deal with open Communists. If Chiang could be sustained, China might succeed Japan as a stabilizing force in the Far East. He represented an opportunity to offset Russian and British influence. Possibly a friendly host for American business. The British, on the other hand, were nervous that a rising China would be a model and possible sponsor for a free India. Their nerves weren't helped by FDR's frank advocacy of immediate independence for India.

FDR made genuine sacrifices for the Chinese cause. Madame Chiang Kai-shek came to the United States in November 1942 for medical treatment and accepted an invitation to stay at the White House. She addressed the Congress in a clinging black cheongsam slit up the side, and FDR concluded that she was intent on ‘vamping' leading administration figures. The British were not alone in fearing that she might reorient Allied strategy. But Morgenthau testified that the president was "just crazy" to get her out of the White House, where she conducted herself as a Manchu empress. At one point she summoned Churchill to a lunch in New York, but he passed it up.(12)

Marshall stubbornly defended the beleaguered Stilwell, only in early 1943 to draw the following remarkable comments from the White House:" Stilwell has exactly the wrong approach in dealing with Generalissimo Chiang...when he speaks of talking to him in sterner tones, he goes about it in just the wrong way. All of us must remember that the Generalissimo came up the hard way to become the undisputed leader of four hundred million people... to create in a very short time in China what it took us a couple of centuries to attain...He is the Chief Executive as well as the Commander-in-Chief, and one can't speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco."(13)

FDR personally had a go at the intractable problems of the China theater nine months later, in 1944, when he met Chiang at Cairo. Chiang had risked leaving China for an allied conference held at the Mena House hotel at the foot of the Pyramids. By then, Allied successes in Europe and the Pacific had lessened the attractiveness of the Chinese ally. A three-cornered impasse had developed. The British were lukewarm about an amphibious campaign to recover Burma. The Chinese would not move without it. Minus the Burma gateway, there was little hope for the American scheme for training and equipping a Chinese army that would drive out the Japanese. Churchill happily gave it up when Chiang kept backing and filling, and Roosevelt and Hopkins held several discouraging private sessions with Chiang, his wife interpreting. What they said was unknown in Washington, for, typical of FDR's sloppy ways, no notes were kept. There were reports that back in China rivals were stirring in Chiang's absence; Stilwell claimed that FDR spoke favorably of going with any promising successor, and maybe even assassinating the Generalissimo. Stilwell had been drawn into intrigues  in Chungking and his chief of staff dutifully explored various assassination scenarios.  FDR had held out the attractive possibility of China helping administer the eventual postwar occupation of Japan, but in the end, after the defection of his allies, the president had to give up on a ground campaign in China.(14)

 FDR had always been attracted by Chennault's air power approach as opposed to Stilwell's emphasis on building a Chinese army. Told Chennault to write directly to him, and increased the airman's share of tonnage over the Hump. But when the Japanese moved against Chennault's airbases, as Stilwell predicted they would, FDR proceeded to speak sternly in a message to Chiang drafted by Marshall. Stilwell, who was being pushed by Marshall for commander-in-chief of Chinese forces, couldn't resist handing it personally to Chiang, who lost tremendous face and insisted on Stilwell being recalled. Chiang Kai-shek's first choice for his replacement was Dwight Eisenhower.

FDR took on the burden of personally defending his  policies before a body known as the Pacific War Council, which was set up  during the dark days following Pearl Harbor as "something to mollify" the smaller allies in the Pacific who were seeing their territories fall to the Japanese and were denied any real voice in Anglo-American councils. It had no powers beyond voicing concerns. Roosevelt chaired it in person, assisted by Harry Hopkins. Consequently he was put in the position of defending MacArthur and Stilwell, whom he disapproved of, against the complaints of the Australians and Chinese. The Council lasted until the spring of 1944, and allowed Allied representatives to let off steam on such matters as the intense Dutch desire to return to Indonesia. FDR used the palaver to express his ideas for postwar trusteeships over Japanese islands, and reluctance to restore French rule over the Vietnamese, whom he regarded as little better than savages.  He put Quezon on the Council. He remained critical of British imperialism, particularly after he suspected he contracted a tropical bug in Bathurst, Gambia, on his way back from the conference with Churchill at Casablanca. Bathurst he denounced to Churchill as "that hell-hole of yours." He eventually tired of the Pacific War Council and it died in the spring of 1944, possibly in part because of his physical decline.(15)

On June 15th, 1944, a week after the Normandy invasion, and a time when the Marines were poised to descend on Saipan, the key to Japan's inner defenses, great excitement prevailed in the Chinese province of Szechuan. A clutch of American generals and newsmen had gathered at airfields painfully laid down by coolie labor, to witness the inauguration of ‘strategic bombing' of Japan from Chinese bases. Inasmuch as Szechuan was fairly remote from the bombers' objectives, the reasons for its choice weren't readily apparent. But huge silvery planes--B-29s-- had been flying in from India. Behind them lay the will and determination of Hap Arnold and Franklin Roosevelt, a surprising combination.(16)

FDR had begun to stress air power after he saw how the German air force had been used to intimidate British and French leaders. After his beloved fleet had been punished at Pearl Harbor, he had insisted on a counterraid against the Japanese homeland. He believed that aerial bombing from China would improve the Chiang régime's morale and effectiveness, help keep China in the war, an argument not easy to counter, even though the way the Doolittle raid had been handled had infuriated the Chinese. But by early 1943 it looked as if the Germans had lost the initiative in Europe and that resources might be available in the not too distant future to put the screws on Japan. Prominent among these resources was the new Boeing bomber, the B-29 Superfortress. And whatever coolness had existed prewar between FDR and Arnold  gave way to their eagerness to begin the bombing of Japan at the earliest possible moment.

 Some prewar Army and Navy experts had held that the nation had no need for a land-based bomber with a radius of more than three day's march for the infantry. But in 1939, the possibility existed that the Germans might establish themselves in South America, and a plane that could welcome them became an attractive proposition. Almost two years were to pass before the first experimental model flew, and the B-29 program survived a costly accident and constant trouble with the engines, which tended to catch fire. Air Force planners were determined that the ‘mistakes' that had plagued the deployment and the operations of the B-17 weren't repeated with the giant new aircraft which had a radius of 1700 miles with a four-ton bomb load, bristled with machine guns and could bomb by radar. They felt that the B-17s sent to bomb the German industrial structure had been diverted to the African campaign, and for other tactical purposes. In the end, the solution adopted was novel. Why not have the B-29s commanded and their operations directed from Washington! As the Twentieth Air Force they would first operate from China and India, and from the Marianas after their capture. The Marianas would put most of Japan within range. The president informed Chiang Kai-shek that he, FDR, would boss the B-29s, an arrangement that blunted protests from the Chinese, the British, and MacArthur, all of whom wanted a piece of the action. So, an ‘independent' American air force had at last been achieved. Never mind that according to air force historians, on hearing of the independent RAF bombing contingent during the Great War, a witty French general had quipped, "Independent of whom? Of God?"(17)

In October 1943, Arnold regretfully informed the president that he would be unable to begin bombing Japan from China in the succeeding March, as he had hoped. He drew a reproof from the White House:" The worst thing is that we are falling down on our promises to China every single time... I do not see why we have to use B-29s. We have several other types of bombing planes."(18)

Chungking may have been encouraged by the B-29s' presence in China. It was paid handsomely for constructing the airfields. But the logistics were ridiculous. The B-29s had to fly their own gas into the Chengtu fields; they sometimes didn't have enough left to maneuver into formations on their missions. The only industrial targets within range and conceivably worth their attention were the steel industry's coke ovens, and they didn't hit much of them. After the Marianas were secured, a B-29 wing moved into Saipan, and by late November they were over Tokyo. The campaign from China was a waste and an egregious failure, and when the bombers were relocated to the Pacific, it was partly to prevent Chiang and Chennault from pressing for control. The B-29s in the Marianas eventually abandoned any pretense of precision bombing, and followed the practice of the RAF over Germany: firebombing the Japanese cities.(19)

FDR was determined to raise China to Great Power status by hook or by crook. He sponsored treaties by which in 1943 both the United States and Great Britain gave up their extraterritorial rights in China. No more gunboats like the Panay sailing the Yangtse. Furthermore he had decided to pressure Churchill to return Hong Kong to the Chinese. He hoped that Chiang would strengthen his government by concessions to the Chinese Communists as Lauchlin Currie had suggested on his initial trip to China in 1941. Chiang discouraged the idea, but the Americans noted that the Chinese Communists controlled territory in North China near where American troops might one day operate. Weather stations and the return of downed American fliers could be arranged. The Reds could be useful. Why not arm them, supply them and use them. This was the reef on which Joe Stilwell foundered.

Chiang had asked for an American political adviser to help him deal with Stilwell, and there soon appeared in the theater Brigadier General Patrick Hurley, once secretary of war under Hoover, and one of the many personal representatives Roosevelt employed in preference to using the State Department. Stimson had no work for him at the moment. He wore a chestful of campaign ribbons and had been wounded in an air raid at Port Darwin while trying to organize blockade running to his friend Douglas MacArthur on Bataan. He had made the arrangements for Chiang Kai-shek to come to Cairo. Hurley was the embodiment of the stage  version of the self-made American: bluff, hearty, once a miner and cowboy, given to Choctaw war whoops. He had been attorney for the tribe. He had hoped to be appointed ambassador to Australia to help out MacArthur. Later on FDR had used him in the Middle East and had to be talked out of appointing him military commander in the area where as a special envoy he dealt with ticklish Arab oil and Jewish homeland issues. Like FDR, he distrusted British colonialism.(20)

Off he went to Chungking hoping to bridge the gap between Stilwell and the Chinese leader. He failed through no fault of his. Stilwell was finally hustled out of China in October of 1944, under orders to keep mum lest Tom Dewey's presidential campaign make an issue of mismanagement in the China theater. At risk was the administration's line about the heroic Chinese struggling against the Japanese invader. Stilwell had partisans in the press who began exposing the ineptitude and venality of the Kuomintang régime, and calls were heard for working with the Chinese Communists, the ‘agrarian reformers.'

A month after Stilwell left, Hurley flew up to the Communist headquarters to try to find a formula to unify the Communist and Nationalist regimes. He testified: "For 2 days and 2 nights we argued, agreed, and disagreed, and pulled and hauled my five points until they were finally revised and signed by Mao Tse-tung...The day after I returned...Dr.Soong came to my room and said: ‘You have been sold a bill of goods by the Communists.'"(21)

The Yalta agreement signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in February 1945 removed any doubt about the inferior status of China among the Powers. Stalin agreed at long last to enter the war against Japan, a step devoutly wished by Washington strategists at the time. They reasoned that the Soviets could tie down Japanese armies in Manchuria and prevent them being ferried to the Home Islands to resist an American invasion. Stalin exacted a price in the restoration of the old Czarist privileges in Manchuria, which Russia had lost in the war with Japan. Ostensibly to preserve secrecy about the Soviet intervention, Chiang wasn't to be told of these concessions immediately, but the heads of the three powers agreed that Stalin's demands would be met, "unquestionably." In return, Stalin agreed to turn over Chinese territory occupied by the Russian forces to Chiang Kai-shek's representatives. The arrangements were to be ratified by a Russian-Chinese agreement. Chungking didn't like the price, but there was no way to keep the Soviets out of Manchuria, and by continuing to work with Chiang, Stalin seemed to be keeping his options open and avoiding a civil war in China, and a possible clash with the United States. He actually advised the Chinese Communists to come to terms with Chiang.(22)

General Albert Wedemeyer succeeded Stilwell in China. Late in February 1945, while he and Hurley were on their way to Washington, the embassy in Chungking sent a message recommending that the United States begin to aid the Chinese Communists as a way of pressuring Chiang into a political agreement with them. The choleric Hurley concluded that he had been stabbed in the back by the diplomats, and he was sustained by a feeble FDR who, with a little more than a month to live, declined to change his approach. Hurley was then sent by FDR to obtain the cooperation of Churchill and Stalin in support of Chiang. He was on the way to Moscow after meeting with Churchill, when he heard about FDR's death. He reported that Churchill had been cooperative, but still deplored the American decision to concentrate its resources in Asia on assisting China, slowing British efforts in Burma and the prospects of an early recovery of British, French, and Dutch dependencies in Southeast Asia. Churchill said that FDR's policy toward China was the ‘great American illusion.' Hurley stood by his guns, reaffirming the president's determination that the British divest themselves of Hong Kong.(24)

The president had gone from being a good friend to France to a definite dislike of the DeGaulle régime. He appeared to feel that the French had lost their battle with the Germans due to a lack of national resolve, and he was vehement about not aiding them in regaining their colony in Indo-China, where he thought they had a bad record as a colonial power. On the other hand, without elaborating, he thought the Dutch had a good record in Indonesia.(25)

He believed that when the Chinese Communists found that the USSR would recognize Chiang's authority in Manchuria, they would come to terms with the Chungking regime. Stalin advised the Chinese Communists that it would be safer to settle with Chiang, but he told the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas that the Chinese comrades listened politely, and went back and did as they felt best. Meanwhile, Albert Wedemeyer proceeded to show that it was possible to work with the Generalissimo without the rancor of the Stilwell years. Wedemeyer had been through a rough experience at the very outset of the war, when, although entirely innocent, he was suspected of leaking the Victory Parade estimates to Senator Wheeler and the isolationist press. He had been an exchange student at the German war college and was of an isolationist turn of mind. Marshall protected him from the ire of the White House, but didn't use him in the European theater where his experience would have been helpful. Wedemeyer made much progress in preparing the Nationalist forces to reoccupy their territories and kept to the policy of supporting the Chungking regime.

In sum, to the end of his days, FDR continued to do his best for Chiang Kai-shek, but the substantial American assistance given never changed Chinese policy.(26)