The Marshall Mission

The arrival of Marshall in Nanking was welcomed by all parties. Chiang Kai-shek hoped that Marshall would soon perceive, after a personal experience of the realities, where American interests lay. The Communists, as Miss Utley reports on page 10 of The China Story, "Welcomed General Marshall with open arms."

The Chinese Reds were fortunate, Miss Utley continues, in that their leading representative in Chungking was the handsome, intelligent, and charming Chou En-lai, now foreign minister of the Peiping government. Chou En-lai had for years shown a singular capacity for converting American journalists to the belief that the Chinese Communist Party was composed of liberal agrarian reformers, who should be backed against the despotic, reactionary government of Chiang Kai-shek. I again quote Miss Utley:

"Soon it became apparent to those of us who were in Chungking at the time and were frequently invited to General Marshall's residence, that Chou En-lai had succeeded in captivating him. Any doubts General Marshall may originally have had as to the truths of the State Department thesis about the "progressive" Communists and the "reactionary" Nationalists had obviously been dispelled. The fascinating Chou En-lai had evidently finally convinced General Marshall that the Chinese were not "real" Communists, or that they could be detached from their Russian affiliation provided only that they were helped by America to bring "democracy" to China. Marshall had long since come under the influence of his old friend, General Stilwell, who believed in the liberal professions of the Chinese Communists. Chou En-lai merely completed his conversion."

I call up another friendly witness to the happiness brought to the Communists by Marshall's arrival. This one is Robert Payne, the author of the seemingly authorized and certainly idolatrous biography entitled Mao Tse-tung, Ruler of Red China. Writes Mr. Payne on page 207:

"In the early days of 1946 there was a breathing spell for the Communists, Gen. George Marshall had been sent to replace General Hurley. He was a man of an entirely different caliber. He made a serious effort to understand the opposing camps. He visited Yenan and commented favorably upon the Communists' social policies, and he detested the servility [sic] of most of the Kuomintang officers he met. Urbane, polished, sensitive to social forces, he refused to accept the claims of either side in the quarrel, his preferences remaining with the liberal groups in the center, though for the most part these had long ago despaired of the reactionary policies of the Kuomintang."

I ask you to pause with me for a moment while we analyze the language of Payne. You will note the use of the term "reactionary" to describe the Kuomintang. That was standard operating procedure for the Yenan Reds, as it was, and still is, for all those in America who follow the Communist line on China. We shall meet with that epithet for the Kuomintang later in the language of the soldier-statesman who was sent to China presumably to work out a solution of the civil strife in that country, which would accord, first, with the international interests of the United States, and secondly, with the interests of the people of China.

The job of George Marshall in China scarcely called upon him to pass upon the relative social reform program of the contending parties. Both were reformers, both claimed to be the heirs of Sun Yat-sen, A commission of social workers or practicing sociologists could have weighed those matters far more expertly than this old soldier. He was called upon at a critical stage of world history, with Russia looming down from Manchuria and with that country already visibly embarked upon its scheme of world conquest and consolidation, to consider where the struggle in China fitted that larger picture, and to extract from it something that suited his own country's welfare and security.

The spectacle of General Marshall, ignoring the world interests involved in China and the menace of the Russia he had done more than any other man to seat in Manchuria, and solemnly inspecting the soup kitchens and nurseries of Yenan, would be laughable were it not so heavy with portent.

The point to dwell upon here is that Marshall showed throughout his stay in China that he accepted the party line for innocents, that the Communists are a party of social reform devoted to the well-being of the masses. In that light they had his sympathy. It is no wonder that the prevailing opinion of the Marshall mission has been that it was the venture of a gullible man not yet apprised of what was a truism to students of politics and the world in 1946, namely, that communism was a drive for power by a disciplined minority with welfare as its cloak, precisely as Nazism was an enterprise of gutter intellectuals to gain the power of a great state and then of Europe in the guise to Germans of what its name meant: national socialism. That view of General Marshall does insufficient credit to his mentality and is far too pat. Reform was not, in my opinion, Marshall's prime consideration in China, although he sometimes made it appear so. Neither was peace. What it was we shall consider later when we have treated the evidence further.

It is unnecessary, I think, to follow the course of the endless, frustrating negotiations Marshall conducted in China. He had commissioned himself to provide a political solution of the civil war "satisfactory to both sides." The specific solution was a new government which would include representation from the Communists and the minor parties, a government that could function with a parliament, courts and the rest, but a government with two armies. For that was what allowing the Communists to have a part of the national army, to be stationed in areas under Communist political control, meant.

As finally worked out but never, of course, put into practice, the Republic of China was to have fifty divisions, the Peoples Republic of Yenan ten divisions. I have only to state the solution which Marshall was bent upon imposing to exhibit its absurdity. Such a proposal did not look to a permanent government in the western sense, it looked only to a truce in the struggle for all China. The Kuomintang wanted a stable government representing the consensus of all political opinion with a parliament affording a forum in which issues might be debated and resolved. The Communists wanted participation in a national government with a private army and regional ascendency on the side.

I have studied the White Paper on this subject and I am referring only to it concerning General Marshall's activities. Chapter Five of the White Paper deals with the Marshall Mission. It contains a footnote which says, "The bulk of the material for this chapter has been drawn from the files of General Marshall's mission."

The White Paper is obviously a highly prejudiced document. It is impossible to form a final opinion of China's sellout from it alone because so much has been left out. So much of it is phrased and tailored to convey a certain viewpoint toward Marshall and his policy.

For example, where the editors needed to balance the recalcitrance of the Communists on some point which is tangible, they resort to intangible reports of what some unidentified officials of the Republic of China were saying (not doing) so that they might blame them also for the failures. This is in line with Acheson's bringing forth, at the Russell hearings, an anonymous document from an anonymous chamber of commerce in an anonymous town signed by anonymous men, setting forth all of the Communist party-line arguments against the Republic of China, and it was a fantastic sight to see a few Senators during the reading of this anonymous document nodding their heads and smiling as though they were receiving valuable and trustworthy information.

Where it became necessary to recount some Communist outrages against United States Marines in July, the authors of the White Paper first meticulously related an attack upon a peace delegation that went from Shanghai to Nanking, an attack which the White Paper says was committed by "an organized group of Kuomintang secret police." This is on page 171. Turn the page and you come to a paragraph describing as "part of Communist activities during this period" the kidnaping of seven Marines in East Hopei and, this I quote:

"A deliberate Communist ambush of a United States Marine-escorted motor convoy bound from Tientsin to Peiping, during which 3 Americans were killed and 12 wounded."

That is surely a restrained treatment of that occurrence. Considerably greater emotion was displayed by the writers in describing the incident at Nanking.

One gathers that since the alleged assailants at Nanking were Kuomintang police, the victims were Communists. You can be sure none of the Marine victims of the Communists were Communists. This is taken, may I remind the reader, from an American Government document printed at the expense of Americans. I find similarly biased matters throughout the White Paper, but it is General Marshall's own record of his mission, hence I quote from it hereafter.

At the outset of his mission, Marshall arranged a ceasefire between the contending armies by compelling Chiang Kai-shek to give up the cities of Chihfeng and Dolun to the Communists. That truce was in effect when General Marshall returned to the United States on March 11. It was generally observed by the forces of the Republic. On the 15th of April, however, there was a resounding breach when the Yenan Reds laid siege to the important city of Changchun in Manchuria, which lies on the railway from Mukden to Harbin. Three days later the Reds had Changchun. That day General Marshall returned to Nanking.

Chiang, finding the truce broken to his disadvantage, ordered his forces to recapture Changchun. A month later the Nationalist forces defeated the Reds in a battle south of Changchun and, with the Reds in flight to the northward, the Nationalists easily retook Changchun on the 23rd of May.

At this time the advantage lay with the forces of the Republic. This was before, mind you, the Yenan Reds had been able to train their conscripts with the new weapons handed them by the Russians. The Nationalists streamed north out of Changchun, headed for Harbin. It is possible, and the Nationalist generals so thought, that victory in Manchuria and the control of the railway lines as far as Harbin lay open to them.

General Marshall had other plans. He had been busy since his return, seeking to restore the truce. With the Nationalist victory he redoubled his efforts until, as described in the White Paper, they mounted to something like a frenzy. The Reds were clamoring at his heels, demanding that he call off the enemy. Chiang went to Mukden and the wires were kept hot between Marshall and him.

At length, Chiang yielded, and on June 6 a new truce was put into effect. Several times extended, it lasted until early in July, but in the meanwhile no political issues could be settled.

I want to be fair about this; I do not want to give you a hasty judgment, but throughout the Marshall mission the progression of events seems to have been this:

Marshall obtained concessions from Chiang to meet Red demands, whereupon, having gained a point, the Reds levied new demands. It was the familiar technique of Petrograd in 1916. Whenever the Kerensky government yielded a point to the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet, the Soviet presented a new demand more exorbitant than the preceding one. I think it is evident and a reading of the White Paper on these negotiations that Yenan Reds never appeared in good faith. They did not want agreement but disagreement.

They were playing for time in which to avail themselves of their resources in Manchuria, meanwhile conducting a barrage of insulting propaganda against the United States in the free press of Kuomintang China aimed ar enfeebling the already feeble will of the Truman administration to help the Republic of China.

The June 6 truce was being steadily whittled away during July. Aggressive action was being taken, primarily by the Communists, and never for an instant did they cease the guerrilla activity, the destruction of the railway lines, the blowing up of dams and bridges, the damaging of mines and factories which were making a nightmare out of the efforts to reestablish the communications and the economy of China. By mid-July the forces of the Republic had gained control of many strategic points and the Reds increasingly were thrown back on hit-and-run activities.

It was during July that the outrages I have mentioned, along with others less grievous, took place against the 50,000 marines who were stationed at Tientsin and other points. It was during July that the shrill denunciations of the United States over the radio and in the Red press reached a crescendo. On July 7 the Yenan officials issued a manifesto denouncing the United States in bitter terms for giving assistance to the Chinese Republic. We were sending a military advisory staff to Nanking, the advisory service which, it will be recalled, the Joint Chiefs had advised General Wedemeyer they approved in November. The Government at Washington was negotiating with Nanking over the sale of surplus war materials left behind on the islands of the Pacific.

It was on the 21st of June that Chou En-lai suggested to Marshall that the United States undertake the training of Communist troops slated for the National army. Let me put this episode in the framework of the Marshall mission. The Reds were everywhere obdurate in the negotiations, they were violating the truce wherever it was profitable, they were attacking Americans and, apparently acting upon orders from Moscow, uttering the same billingspate simultaneously in Shanghai, Nanking, Manchuria, and cities of America.

It was under those circumstances that on June 19, Marshall's faithful friend, the Under Secretary of State, Acheson, appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in behalf of that project. Already in China sixty-nine American officers had been earmarked for the training program and 400 tons of equipment set aside to start the project. The hearings were being held on a bill submitted by the State Department as an aid-to-China bill, but which contained the joker relating to training the Communist forces. We are indebted to Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers (R., Mass.) for bringing the crucial part of these hearings—which never were published—into the Congressional Record recently.

"The Communist leaders have asked," Acheson testified, "and General Marshall has agreed that their integration with the other forces be preceded by a brief period of United States training and by the supply of Minimum quantities of equipment."

Mrs. Rogers reported that she sought unavailingly to find out who had written the bill. Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, who was also testifying for the bill, said that it came from the State Department. Acheson mentioned a State, War, and Navy Coordinating Committee, but Mrs. Rogers found, upon consulting her Congressional Directory for 1946, no listing for such a committee. She did find a State Department coordinating committee with Dean Acheson as chairman.

"Among its members [said Mrs. Rogers] were Alger Hiss and John Carter Vincent. Mr. Hiss also is listed as Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. Mr. Vincent is listed as Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. Both positions, as you know, had an important bearing on the matter before the committee at that time. I think my question, which was never answered, was pertinent then and that it is pertinent today in the light of the tragedy we are undergoing now in Korea."

Is the matter clearer now?

There was a colloquy further in the hearings between Mrs. Rogers and Dean Acheson in which she pressed him as to what assurances we might have that the Chinese Communists would not use our arms against us. The Under Secretary referred to the United Nations as a guarantor of the peace, then he said:

"I think we can rest assured that the Chinese will not do that."

The chairman rescued Acheson from the questioning, but he concluded:

"I am sure we do not need to worry."

It was during this same period, with Marshall seeking to placate the Yenan Reds while at the same time using his great power to wring concessions out of Chiang Kai-shek in the interest of a unified Chinese government, that the State Department was taking quite another line in Europe. I turn to Sumner Welles's book Seven Decisions That Shaped History, page 217, where the author asserts that the late President would never have continued the Marshall policy in China. I quote again:

"He [Roosevelt] would never have permitted his representative in China to pave the way for a repetition of the same tactics in the Far East by trying to browbeat Chiang Kai-shek, as General Marshall did, into bringing representatives of the Chinese Communist Party into the Chinese Cabinet. It is, in fact, a strange anomaly that this Government in 1946 urged Prime Minister de Gasperi, of Italy, to oust the Communists who were then in the Italian Cabinet. De Gasperi's decision to take that step was in the highest degree salutary. It was probably the chief reason why a successful coup d'etat in Italy that year was prevented. Yet in the autumn of that year General Marshall, as President Truman's special representative in China, was informing Chiang Kai-shek that all American assistance would be withdrawn unless he broadened his Government by appointing Communists as well as other liberal elements to the Cabinet."

What the former Under Secretary of State overlooked was that Marshall had provided at Yalta that Russia should have Manchuria and, furthermore, Acheson at Madison Square Garden heartily endorsed Russia's demand for friendly neighbors.

Marshall's entire mission was one of submission to Yenan. In July he gave his clearest manifestation of subserviency when he vetoed the appointment of General Wedemeyer as ambassador to China in obedience to the wishes of Chou En-lai. For this appalling circumstance I refer the reader to pages 6097-6100 of the Russell Committee transcript, and for detailed background to the column of Constantine Brown in the Washington Star and many other newspapers of June 13, 1951.

From those sources we learn that Marshall originally approved Wedemeyers appointment but that in July, yielding to Chou En-lai, he called Acheson, saying Wedemeyer would not do. The appointment was on Truman's desk, Wedemeyer was awaiting his commission, when Acheson sent for him to say that his appointment had been voided. He read Wedlemeyer part of Marshall's telegram, saying, "the Communists are protesting violently." Upon the recommendation of Chou En-lai, endorsed by Marshall, Dr. Leighton Stuart, a missionary educator, was then appointed. Chou En-lai was a one-time pupil of Stuart's.

It is the immemorial custom among civilized states to clear the appointment of an envoy with the government to which he is to be accredited. In this case, the appointment was cleared with the chief of the rebels in arms against that government. The American ambassador to the Republic of China was chosen by the Yenan Reds.

Marshall's first Chinese intervention gave the Communists two cities by a species of fraud perpetrated by the Reds. His second checked the victory of the Nationalists at Changchun, halting them in their tracks and giving the Reds a chance to regroup, retrain, and prepare for more decisive action later. His third intervention occurred in August. Its long-range effects were far more disastrous. It may not be wide of the mark to say that more than any other factor it made the victory of Russian imperialism in China inevitable.

I refer to the imposition by Marshall of an embargo on the sale and shipment of arms from the United States—an interdict promptly seconded by the British—to the Republic of China. By this act and a further minor restriction en the Nationalists' ability to obtain ammunition, Marshall declared the United States neutral in the struggle of China to remain free of Russian domination. Using Marshall's own boastful language:

"As Chief of Staff I armed 39 anti-Communist divisions, now with a stroke of the pen I disarm them."

And, while he was arbitrarily shutting off the flow of arms to one of the great Chinese contestants, the flow of arms, of men, of training, and of moral support from Russia to the other continued unabated.

What occasioned this momentous decision?

I take you again to the White Paper, where, on page 181, Marshall's own files explain why he embargoed war supplies to China, I quote:

"With respect to United States military aid programs, General Marshall was being placed in the untenable position on the one hand between the two Chinese groups while on the other the United States Government was continuing to supply arms and ammunition to one of the two groups, namely, the National Government."

The situation was obviously not only untenable but to General Marshall intolerable. The Republic of China was winning its campaigns to subdue the rebellion. Something obviously had to be done to keep the Republic of China from winning the civil war which the Yenan Reds continued at all times to agitate by their aggressions. The Russians were providing for the Reds. That aspect of the situation was satisfactory. It was now necessary to pull the plug on the Republic of China. Otherwise Russia might not have a friendly neighbor and the United States and the West would have a progressive and prosperous China with a hopeful future as a powerful containing force against Russian imperialist aims in Asia. The prime author of the Yalta sellout could not stand idly by and see that happen.

I ask again, supposing that Marshall was acting in good faith—which I deny—did he regard himself as an impartial arbiter of China's destiny with no responsibilities to his native land which had honored him extravagantly and was, to put the matter on its lowest terms, paying the bills for his venture into power politics?

I throw in also the reflection, which will strike home to those American liberals and leftists who eagerly besought sanctions in behalf of the Spanish Government in the 1930s: The ground upon which they based their argument was that the republican government at Madrid was the legal and recognized government and hence entitled to our assistance against the Franco rebels. Marshall's embargo in China was applauded by these same liberals and leftists. The shoe was on the other foot in China, but the liberal-leftists unblushingly forget the arguments they had used in the Spanish civil war. Their inconsistency is only apparent, however, not real. What you must look for with the gentry of the left is the hard line of consistency that runs to Moscow. They never deviate from what serves the cause of Soviet imperialism.

I invite you to give ear to the insincere, devious language with which Marshall recounted his embargo in the White Paper. That is on page 181, and it reads:

"Action was therefore taken in August to suspend certain portions of these programs which might have a bearing on the continued prosecution of hostilities in China. Licenses were not granted for the export to China of combat-type items of military equipment and in late September shipments of combat items from the Pacific area to China were temporarily suspended."

The language thus quoted is the kind of language we have grown accustomed to from the State Department when they wished to conceal something. What Marshall did was to get from Truman an order forbidding export licenses in the sale of materials of war to China. He got also a similar order from the British Government. This left Nanking high and dry. There were no other markets into which they could enter. Does his language make that clear? I think not. This is the same sort of calculated deception that emanated from Marshall when he testified in the MacArthur hearings.

The embargo was put on in 1946—it lasted for a year, sufficient time to enable the Reds to launch their massive operations in 1947—and the White Paper came out in the summer of 1949. Times had changed. The people were uneasy over what had happened in China. They were coming to resent the fact that our ancient ally, China, was being overthrown by the Communists, with Russia standing by in Manchuria. They had begun to wonder if there was not something deeply sinister, perhaps treasonous, in what the American Government had been doing in China. And so the brief and ambiguous reference in the White Paper to what was the crown and seal of Marshalls' destructive mission, his embargo, was followed by weasel words of reassurance:

"This ban was imposed at a time when the National Government was gradually increasing the tempo of its military campaign and when its reserves of material were ample. The ban apparently had little effect, since it was not until November, when the National Government had reached the peak of irs military holdings, that the National Government issued an order for the cessation of hostilities. By that time the government's forces had occupied most of the areas covered by its demands to the Chinese Communists in June and during the later negotiations and had reached what turned out to be the highest point of its military position after VJ-Day."

What Marshall and his editors here are saying is that the forces of the Republic of China were at a high tide of victory in August and the fall of 1946. That was true. It is possible that Marshall acted in the nick of time. Obviously the choking off of supplies to the Generalissimo's forces would not take effect at once.

The aim of the words about the state of Nationalist affairs is obvious. It is to assure the readers of the White Paper that the embargo did not hurt Chiang Kai-shek's cause and that it brought him to a cease-fire in November. That statement is false on two counts. The embargo stifled the cause of the Republic of China, and the ceasefire had no relationship whatever to it. We shall soon come to the ugly details and connotations of this cease-fire.

The enemies of the Republic of China have made much of the declining morale of its armies in late 1947 and 1948. The enemies of the Republic of China never ascribe the declining morale to the shortage of bullets, rifles, and machine guns. Much has been made of the capture by the Reds of Nationalist equipment. The legend has been spread that American supplies were sold by venal Chinese generals to the Reds. Some Nationalist generals did defect to the Reds as the war went along. A great deal of propaganda today has been made over the fact that, when the victorious Red armies, Russian-trained Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese entered Peiping in 1949, they paraded in American trucks, they wore American parkas, and they exhibited guns made in the United States. Where did those items, none of them battle-stained, come from? They were part of the 800,000 tons of equipment turned over to Russia as bribery for the Russian war in the Far East which did not eventuate.

The question of stopping the flow of combat items from reserve dumps in the Pacific, raised in my quotations from the White Paper, brings to light a telltale piece of behavior upon Marshall's part. He acted, of course, in both instances—the embargo and the one under question—under pressure from Chou En-lai. Marshall was under heavy abuse in Communist organs in China and America. His good faith and his integrity were being called into question. And so, in an attempt orally to appease Chou En-lai and to attest his fidelity to the impartiality of his course, Marshall prevaricated to his friend about the nature of the surplus stores. In this connection I quote from page 180:

"General Marshall had explained to General Chou En-lai the background of the negotiations [between Nanking and Washington] leading to the signing of this agreement . . . and had explained that the surplus property in question did not contain combat material bur consisted of machinery, motor vehicles, communications equipment, rations, medical supplies, and various other items which would be of considerable value in the rehabilitation of the Chinese economy."

The prevarication in no way damaged the cause of Chou En-lai, because Marshall got an order from Truman barring the shipment to the Republic of China of any material other than what he had told Chou En-lai was in the stores. So, while on the face of it he lied to Chou En-lai and justified the pressures upon him by the Communist press, actually he was only anticipating what he could get Truman to do.

I have recently talked to one of the officers in charge of the "roll up" of American surplus materials for shipment to China,. He stated that Acheson's story about the amount of military material we have shipped to China would defy the abilities of Ananias, even when Ananias was operating at the pinnacle of his ability. For example, he pointed our that the tanks which we dumped into China had their guns spiked and the breeches blown. He stated further that, when the President asked him about the value of the surplus material shipped to China about that time, he told the President that he could best compare it to a situation in which he was asked to redecorate the White House, and he had, say, $2,000,000 to do the task, and he spent all of that money for baby-grand pianos in which the wires were all cut and the keyboards destroyed, and then was to announce to the American people that the White House really was decorated because he had spent $2,000,000 doing the job.

At this precise moment Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung were ordering a general mobilization, which meant the conscription of the farmers' lands throughout the areas controlled by their forces, the kind of conscription which filled their ranks in Korea. Did Marshall seek to discipline the Reds for that as he had just disciplined the Generalissimo? Do not be absurd, He could not discipline the Reds, even had he wanted to, which I, of course, doubt. He had no leverage on the Reds. The only party to this quarrel which he could injure was the Chinese Republic. We have seen how he did so in his third major intervention.

We come to his fourth deadly blow at the friends of the United States in the Republican Government.

As the White Paper states, the forces of the Generalissimo were rapidly expanding their gains during September. The Reds were alarmed. The propaganda machines at Shanghai, New York, and Moscow were busy spewing out abuse of the Americans in China and our Government's supposed assistance to China. The great objective of the Yenan Reds at this moment, they having won their campaign to stop American aid to China, was a truce. The Generalissimo was pushing too hard. The objective of the propaganda campaign being waged with great intensity in the United States was to get the Americans' military mission, which was idling its time away in Nanking, and the Marines out of China.

We may treasure the force and nature of the get-out-of-China drive of the American Communists by examining one major rally with which they were seeking to bring pressure upon Marshall in China and upon the administration in Washington. This one took place in San Francisco, beginning its three-day sessions with a mass meeting on the 18th of October. Brigadier General Carlson, whom we have met before with Stilwell as a disciple of Agnes Smedley, presided. Paul Robeson was vice chairman. Among the celebrated participants in this rally were Harry Bridges, Bartley Crum, Joe Curran, Frederick Vanderbilt Field (the self-proclaimed Communist), Guenther Stein (the Soviet spy), Harrison Forman (the Soviet apologist), Congressman Marcantonio (the Soviet mouthpiece), and his colleagues, Hugh de Lacy and Ellis Patterson.

Likewise prominent on the platform were these leaders of the intellectual and political life of Hollywood: Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, and John Garfield. The rally passed resolutions denouncing Chiang Kai-shek as a reactionary and demanding that this Government at once withdraw our forces from China.

The Yenan Reds had been besieging the city of Tatung in northern Shansi Province since August. Late in September the Generalissimo's forces began a retaliatory movement upon Kalgan. Thar city, which is described in the White Paper as "one of the political and military centers of the Communist Party," had grear strategic importance, inasmuch as it commanded the Kalgan Pass through the mountains from China into Manchuria. The Reds had seized Kalgan with Marshall's blessing soon after VJ-Day, and it was through the Kalgan Pass that multiplied thousands of Red conscripts had marched into Manchuria, there to be outfitted and trained for the expected campaign from the north against the Republic of China. So valuable did Yenan consider Xalgan that Mao Tse-tung announced that he was lifting the siege of Tatung in the hope of deterring the Nationalist attack on Kalgan.

With the Generalissimo's forces pressing steadily north toward Kalgan, Chou En-lai began his supreme effort to bring about, through Marshall, a cease-fire. As a gesture of annoyance, Chou En-lai had quit Nanking for Shanghai in mid-September and Marshall had to communicate with him thereafter at long range, making, however, one visit to Shanghai to beseech the Red leader to yield on a point under discussion.

At issue in these times was the whole impossible endeavor of Marshall to force an amalgamation of the party of the Republic and the Reds at Yenan into a parliamentary system, an endeavor likened by General MacArthur to the generally accepted impossibility of making oil and water mix. The discussions centered upon Communist agreement to enter in good faith into the various agencies and organs that had been proposed under the Political Consultative Conference's terms of the preceding January, a council of stare divided among the Kuomintang on the one side and all other parties on the other; a national assembly and a new executive yuan, or cabinet.

The heart of the issue was this: Chiang Kai-shek insisted that the Communists nominate their representatives to these bodies and get ready to make them work before he called off hostilities. The Reds demanded the cease-fire first. Having found through long and distracting experience that the Reds never lived up to any agreements whatsoever, the Generalissimo felt that there must be some quid pro quo as an earnest of good faith.

Chou En-lai steadily dinned into Marshall's ears his demand for a truce before the Nationalists took Kalgan. In support of his demands, Marshall astonishingly threatened the Generalissimo with the statement that, without the truce, the Reds "would be driven to seek outside support such as Russian aid." I quote that from page 187 of the White Paper. Chiang Kai-shek, in general, replied, and I quote from page 190;

"It was absolutely essential to the national welfare that the Government gain control of Kalgan and that the occupation of that city by the Government would do much to prevent further military action by the Communists."

Meanwhile, two weeks earlier, Chou En-lai, at Shanghai, had threatened that unless Marshall brought about a meeting of the Consultative committee against Chiang Kai-shek's objections, he would, and I quote from page 186 of the White Paper, "be compelled to make public all the important documents in the negotiations since the June truce period." What that touch of blackmail hinted at I do not know.

The White Paper omits any reference to what Chou En-lai had in his possession that might prove sufficiently damaging to spur Marshall on to greater efforts.

So matters stood at the beginning of October. The Generalissimo could see daylight ahead through his military operations. The Reds were panicked. On the 4th of October Marshall urged the Generalissimo in the strongest terms to leave Kalgan to the Reds. When Chiang Kai-shek still insisted on some evidence of good faith from Yenan, Marshall returned to his quarters resolved, as he put it in a message to Truman dated the next day, to play his ace. That consisted of his self-directed recall to America, a sign that the United States was not only abandoning its efforts to find a solution in China but severing its tenuous link to the Republic of China.

Marshall wrote the President, and this may be found on page 192 of the White Paper:

". . . that this is the only way to halt the military campaign and to dispel the evident belief of the Government generals that they can drag along the United States while carrying out their campaign of force."

In these controversial days he repeatedly lectured the President of China regarding what he called his campaign of force. There is no evidence in the White Paper that he ever sermonized Chou En-lai about the campaign of force which the Reds had been conducting wherever they could since the truce of June had been broken by them. The evidence of Marshall's partiality to the Reds infuses every page of the White Paper at this point.

In this connection let me read an incredible passage on page 205 of the White Paper:

"General Marshall stated that he wished General Chou to determine formally from the Communist leaders at Yenan whether specifically they wished him to continue in his mediation role and asked that the matter be viewed as a plain business proposition without regard to Chinese considerations of face since he was not interested in face. He explained that his sole interest was the question of whether he could render some service to China by way of mediation. General Chou stated that he sympathized with the request by General Marshall and that he would place the question before the appropriate Communist authorities at Yenan."

I believe that in this revelatory passage we have additional insight into Marshall's true relations with the Communists in China, and perhaps into those at a far higher level.

Marshall did not so conduct himself with humility and a desire to please before the great adversary of the Reds, the President of China. To Chiang Kai-shek, Marshall prided himself upon speaking with direct and forceful candor. He never, so far as the White Paper discloses, asked the President of China, "How am I doing?" If his attitude toward the Yenan Reds was that of a solicitous subordinate, toward Chiang Kai-shek, it was one of master, with only one reservation: He could not as a rule expressly order the President of China to do his bidding.

Even that became possible after he dictated to Truman the order for his recall, allowing Ambassador Leighton Stuart to show the text to Chiang Kai-shek. The scheme worked. The Generalissimo, who, through thick-and-thin, resisted Japanese threats and blandishments and rejected during this period advances from Moscow for a common front against the Americans, remained as always steadfast in his friendship for the United States. I think it is not well understood that during this trying period the Russians had made and were to make further overtures to Chiang Kai-shek, offering his regime a full partnership in a great Sino-Russian state enterprise to exploit the riches of Manchuria and hinting that if he agreed he would have no further trouble with his domestic Reds. To join up with the Russians meant, however, trouble with America, because the proposed deal made permanent and legal hash of this country's desires for the open door in Manchuria. Perhaps Chiang Kai-shek, who viewed the Russians with a cautious eye on good and sufficient grounds, also feared getting into their clutches.

In any case he surrendered to Marshall, The White Paper puts it this way, and I quote from page 192:

"When word reached the Generalissimo through Ambassador Stuart of General Marshall's action, the Generalissimo expressed his willingness to stop military advances against Kalgan for a period of 5 days, perhaps even longer if the American mediators insisted, on condition that the Communist Party would immediately participate in meetings of both the five-man committee and the committee of three (these were agencies by which they had been trying to reach political understandings) and that Kalgan would be the first issue negotiated. The Generalissimo also requested that General Marshall and Dr. Stuart discuss the matter with him the following morning."

Marshall's ultimatum, reflecting the get-out-of-China agitation, stirring the American leftists and liberals at that moment, had worked. Although the Communists, as could have been anticipated, rejected any and all proposals arising from the truce negotiations, Marshall now had the upper hand and nothing but an unconditional ceasefire by the Republic of China would satisfy him.

It was during these days that Marshall put the dignity of the United States in his pocket and went to Shanghai to implore Chou En-lai to make at least some face-saving gesture. Chou En-lai, as you might suppose, refused to take his friend off the hook. Agreement, peace, and the welfare of China were far from the thoughts of Chou En-lai.

On October 13 Marshall laid down the law to the Generalissimo, saying, according to page 197 of the White Paper:

"The important factor was the immediate cessation of hostilities and that even if the Communists were forced to submit to various agreements by the pressure of government military action, there could be no healthy results from political negotiations and the reorganization of the government as the bitterness engendered thereby would be too deep and the spirit of revenge and distrust too great."

In other words, you have the Reds on the run, they have refused at all times and on all occasions to act in good faith concerning the future of China, but do not press them. If you do, they may get mad and will not play.

Three days earlier Kalgan had fallen to the Nationalists, Chihfeng also on the same day. There was talk of a new offensive in Manchuria, and the Nationalists were marching on Communist-held towns in the province of Kiangsi. The situation grew urgent. In the last hours of his independence, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to issue a new basis for negotiations, an eight-point tender which, had the Reds ever been willing to make terms, would have fetched them. Quite naturally, they flatly rejected it.

The military situation had by now grown so menacing to the Reds that party negotiators and agitators, who had been sheltered under Nationalist protection in Nanking, Shanghai, and Chungking, besought transportation from the United States authorities to Yenan and were flown there in army planes.

Marshall and Stuart handed the Generalissimo a draft of a statement to be issued by him on November 7. This statement, whether the Generalissimo knew it or not, was his last straw. In it the mediators, if such they may be called, put the Generalissimo on record for an unconditional cease-fire.

He protested, he made his last stand, saying, and I am quoting from page 205 of the White Paper:

". . . that he could not support an unconditional termination of hostilities before his military and political leaders, and that he stood practically alone in the belief (among his associates) that matters could be settled by peaceful negotiations."

Yet Marshall was adamant. When the Generalissimo asked him to reconsider his views with another draft in mind, Marshall replied, and this appears on page 205 also:

". . . that he would need an opportunity to consider with Dr. Stuart the points of view expressed by the Generalissimo as he was seriously concerned whether he should participate, as a representative of the United States Government, in the preparation of a paper in accordance with the points of view he had indicated, which were contrary to the views of General Marshall and those, he thought, of the United States Government."

He had scarcely bothered to glove the mailed fist. This was, of course, a threat. How different from Marshall's inquiry of Chou En-lai as to what the big boys at Yenan thought of his exertions.

Chiang Kai-shek yielded the next day, issuing an unconditional cease-fire order to all his forces.

Did this humiliating capitulation save him and his Republic? Did it lift the embargo? Did it bring cooperation from Yenan? It most certainly did not.

It did bring the Communist armies a much-needed respite, however—another breathing spell in the sense of the biographer of Mao Tse-tung. The legions he and the Russians were training in Manchuria with Japanese and American stores were not yet ready to march. That would come later. And what shall we say of the effect upon the morale of the fighting forces of the Republic? They had been stopped in their tracks after long, weary, bloody campaigns across the face of northern China and Manchuria with victory in sight. They could not but read in all this—coming on top of the embargo and the partiality of Marshall for the Yenan Reds—the desertion of China by its ally, America.

The cause of the Republic of China reached its high-water mark at the time of the enforced truce. The Generalissimo's armies would make some gains thereafter, but the balance had been tipped, and slowly, gradually, the advantage would come to lie with the armies of Yenan and Moscow,

The United States had thrown its weight on the side of Moscow in the struggle for command of the allegiance and resources of China. That was the plain meaning of Marshall's fourth and last intervention. That struggle, which might have been settled honestly by Chinamen in battle, would now have to be settled in battle by Americans as well as Chinamen, but, as we shall see later, the interventions of Marshall were not at an end.

Marshall, his mission completed, was to stay in China until early in January 1947. Chiang Kai-shek, carrying out his promises of political reform, convened the first national assembly on the 15th of November. The Yenan Reds, of course, stayed away. They wanted no part of any democratic institutions unless they had full control and could subvert them to totalitarian purposes. Chou En-lai came to call on Marshall on the next day, the 16th, to ask for an American airplane ride to Yenan:

"He [Chou] expressed fear that the National Government would undertake offensive operations against Yenan and said that if this occurred it would mean the end of all hopes for a negotiated peace."

I have quoted from page 208 of the White Paper. I have heard of idle threats all my life. Chou's threat to end all prospects of a negotiated peace if Yenan were invaded strikes me as the choicest example I have ever heard of the idle threat.

General Marshall hastened to offer United States Army transportation for all Red personnel in Republic of China territory, adding, with a tender touch of solicitude, and I am quoting from the White Paper:

". . . that while he had no information of Government plans for an attack on Yenan, he would deplore such action and oppose it strongly. He also said that if such an attack occurred he would consider that it terminated his mission."

In summing up his impressions of the breach in negotiations represented by Chou's departure for Yenan, Marshall thought the Nationalists obdurate because, as I find on page 209 of the White Paper:

". . . they were thoroughly convinced that the Communists would not carry out any agreement reached . . . and that the Communists would merely disrupt any government in which they participated."

The experience of all Europe had by that time developed the hard and immitigable fact that you could not do business with Communists in your government. The Kuomintang was, as we will all agree, entirely correct in its appraisal of the situation, Marshall explained the refusal of the Yenan Reds to make a single concession toward accord and peace in very innocent terms:

"The Communist Party had to be feared itself through its own suspicions."

This is on page 210 of the White Paper.

On the 1st of December, Marshall, in a talk with Chiang Kai-shek, firmly warned the Generalissimo that he could not expect to subdue the Yenan Reds because they were too strong and that, therefore, it was imperative—and his words are taken from page 212 of the White Paper—"that efforts be made to bring them into the Government." Three days later Marshall heard from Chou En-lai at Yenan. The Red leader, who is the Foreign Minister at Peking at this moment, imposed utterly impossible terms for reopening negotiations. He also snubbed Marshall's placatory request, noted above, for a judgment from Yenan on his endeavors. The White Paper so records it:

"General Chou En-lai's message made no reply to General Marshall's request for an indication by the Communist Party of its attitude toward his mediation effort and posed conditions which the National Government obviously could not be expected to accept. It appeared that the Communist Party had, in effect, rejected American mediation."

The terms called for the dissolution of the National Assembly, which was, at the moment, adopting what the White Paper was to call with some reservation "on its face a democratic document." They called also for the relocating of all Chinese troops to where they stood in the preceding January when the Reds had certain advantages.

We have heard much of the necessity of reform in China. Although a bit grudgingly, the White Paper paid tribute to Chiang Kai-shek's progressive accomplishments in the Assembly:

"He did exercise a determined personal leadership, assisted by almost all other groups and individuals in the Assembly, in opposing the extreme right-wing group. The Assembly adjourned on December 25 with the Generalissimo in full and confident control of the situation, having demonstrated his ability to override the Kuomintang reactionaries and having restored his prestige through his action in securing the adaption of a constitution of a democratic nature."

That was not good enough for Marshall. On page 215 of the White Paper we read:

"The passage of the constitution was only the beginning, and the only guaranty of an honest reorganization of the Government and a genuine enforcement of the constitution lay in the development of a truly liberal group in China."

In his farewell statement, made January 7, 1947, when Marshall departed for his reward in the Secretaryship of State, he spoke approvingly of the liberals in the Chinese Communist Party:

"It has appeared to me [page 687 of the White Paper] that there is a definite liberal group among the Communists, especially of young men who have turned to the Communists in disgust at the corruption evident in the local governments—men who put the interest of the Chinese people above ruthless measures to establish a Communist ideology in the immediate future."

The January 7 statement of General Marshall's must be read in one of two ways. It is, in my opinion, the most fantastic utterance ever to come from an American in an exalted position. If it is read as a propaganda document in behalf of Communist world objectives, it makes sense. It is in that case a highly intelligent, effective piece of work, calculated to confuse the American people concerning the situation in China but to fill them at the same time with reassurance that things are coming all right once the liberals in the Communist Party and the other liberals obtain control of affairs from the dominant reactionary group in the Government. How dominant they were we have just seen in the results of the National Assembly.

If, on the other hand, you try to understand the statement as the report of an American who was sent to China to advance his country's interests and the interests of the free world and to arrest the advance of Communist terror and Russian imperialism, you will be dumbfounded. You will then have to fall back upon the origin of this mission, the well-disclosed intentions of Marshall, the author of his own directives, and the climate in the Department of State with Acheson, Vincent, and Hiss managing Far Eastern policy.

I urge that you reread this statement in the White Paper.

There is nowhere in it a phrase suggesting that the United States has a stake in what happens to China. There is no indication of any special interest on the part of the country whose representative Marshall presumably was. There is, mark my words, no suggestion that the Chinese Communists were anything more than a political party, wholly Chinese in character, working toward a Communist regime in China, it is true, bur first, and I quote, "advancing through the medium of a democratic form of government of the American or British type."

That is the subtlest, most disarming of all the adroit passages in the statement. The new constitution, he concedes, is "in all major respects in accordance with the principles laid down by the all-party Political Consultative Conference of last January." He continues, "it is unfortunate that the Communists did not see fit to participate in the Assembly since the constitution seems to include every major point that they wanted."

To the careless reader that would appear to make the Communist Party neglectful of its own true interests in refusing to sit in the Assembly.

Nowhere in this remarkable letter is there any hint that the Reds of Yenan belonged to a worldwide imperialistic system, that they were in league with and under command of the Kremlin; that in Manchuria, ceded at Yalta, Russia was supplying the strategic direction, the training, and the supplies so that these liberals could take over all China and thus add it as another vast and teeming province to the dominions of Moscow. Nowhere is there any reproach to Russia for having broken its good faith in Manchuria over and over, for having prevented the China with which it was bound in the treaty of August 1945 from exercising its sovereignty over Manchuria.

I repeat: if you read this letter as coming from an American emissary, loyal to his country and his institutions, you are first puzzled, then indignant, and you finally conclude that its author is the greatest incompetent ever sent abroad by this or any other country. If you read it as a propaganda document in behalf of other interests, another country and civilization, you will be struck by its persuasiveness and force, and the brilliance of its author.

The silence of Marshall's letter regarding the rampant Bolshevist conspiracy to rule the world is deafening. Had the letter been written in the early 1940s it might have been put down to innocence of Russia's lethal intentions. Coming in January of 1947, after Marshall had been cheek-by-jowl with Russian imperialism in Manchuria for thirteen months, after every other informed man in the non-Communist world had scanned the darkening skies and read therein the outline of Soviet expansion, the letter admits only the most damaging conclusions.

A sober epitaph was written on the Marshall mission by General Chennault, who observed, in the foreword to Way of a Fighter:

"The net result of Marshall's mission to China was much the same as Stilwell's earlier experience. The trend of a gradually stronger central government was reversed and the military balance shifted again in favor of the Chinese Communists."