Document created: 10 October 2003
Air University Review,
July-August 1974
Lieutenant Colonel
Gordon K. Pickler
In the two years since the President’s visit stimulated Americans to rediscover China, there has been renewed interest in long neglected aspects of American-Chinese military and political involvement before 1949. So many publications recalling this chapter of American history have been hatched that the recent bibliography contains over 200 worthwhile books and lengthy articles. This vigorous outpouring is occurring in other countries as well, especially in the Soviet Union, where a number of memoirs have been produced recollecting magnanimous Russian deeds for the Chinese. A lengthy book, China’s Special Region, by Peter P. Vladimirov, who was a Comintern agent and a Tass correspondent to Yenan during the 1940s, appears to be the most promising. According to Leo Guiliow of The Christian Science Monitor, the book’s first printing of 150,000 copies sold out in one day. By far the most successful in the English language has been Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prizewinning biography, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945, which has excited and whetted appetites for more about this phase of American relations with China. Although her work has been the most widely read and has received the most glowing reviews, it is not the most accurate, comprehensive, and penetrating one. Of all the publications produced in the last two years, that distinction belongs to the aptly titled Dragon by the Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters with China and One Another by John Paton Davies, Jr.* His subtitle denotes the book’s great scope—the external and internal competition and collision incidental to the struggle over which group would have predominant control, the Chinese themselves or one or more foreign powers.
*John Paton Davies, Jr., Dragon by the Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters with China and One Another (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972, $10.00), 448 pages.
The author witnessed firsthand most of the strife in China during the 1930s and ’40s. Born in 1908 to a missionary family in China, he stayed on with his parents most of his impressionable youth and returned to America only to attend a university. In the turbulent thirties, he went back as a young clerk in the U.S. Foreign Service. During most of the war years of the forties, he was General Joseph W. Stilwell’s political affairs adviser. Subsequently, Davies was shifted to Moscow and then served in other important diplomatic posts. Later, along with other China specialists, he was caught up in the McCarthy Red Scare. Although he stoutly countered successive charges of disloyalty, he was dismissed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. As happened to many other “old China hands,” his reputation and career languished for fifteen years until the State Department reinstated his security clearance in 1969.
Dragon by the Tail is a readable and absorbing book. It abounds in vivid character sketches of personalities and descriptions of Chinese cities. The background chapters on geography and Chinese society and politics are broad-ranging, brilliant, yet succinct. His explanation of the traditional Chinese concern for “face” exemplifies his keen understanding of the Chinese psyche and his ability to convey this in highly perceptible images. Davies treats Chinese Communist and Nationalist figures with equal detachment and subtle understanding. Chu Teh, the founder of the People’s Liberation Army, finally receives recognition as a dominant, mature revolutionary figure who had lived a full-spirited life even before the beginning of the famous Chu-Mao collaboration. Regarding American personalities, students of Chinese-American relations are now privileged to have many incisive evaluations of the U.S. diplomatic and consular officials in China and their counterparts in the Far Eastern Division of the State Department in Washington. To understand the predilections on which American Far East policy was based, one must have a measure of the policy-makers’ personal biases. This is one of the prime values of Davies’s work.
In this vein, the book highlights an American who was extremely influential in creating a favorable impression for the Nationalist government and who has never been given his due for vastly influencing China policy. This was Lauchlin Currie, the “prototype of the professor come to a position of influence in the White House.” (p. 211) Currie was also the archetype American who, during a short visit to China, became overawed by Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek and their sense of purpose and who, on returning, undertook to entangle his government’s fortunes with those of the Nationalist Chinese. Although General Stilwell and Ambassador Patrick Hurley, that vilified envoy of FDR, have been the subject of numerous books and articles, surprisingly none has ever appeared about Currie. He was the leading figure pushing for action at the highest executive and legislative levels of government to get authority to assist China and then implement the official and unofficial commitments. He was able to undertake a number of projects with a reasonable degree of certainty of their success. As a former Harvard professor of economics who had joined the New Deal earlier in the thirties and was in 1941 a member of the State Department on loan to the White House as special assistant, he had direct access to the President through Harry Hopkins.
Currie, with a storehouse of information and dynamic personality, had undertaken a fact-finding mission to China for President Roosevelt in January 1941. Although Currie knew little about China as a civilization, the President believed his eager assistant was qualified to determine the seriousness of China’s plight as well as its immediate military requirements. He left China convinced of the worthiness of the Nationalist course and determined to exert a diligent and persistent effort to assist China in building a powerful air force. Moreover, he sought to influence other, more hesitant American leaders to this end. Subsequently, he worked with such vigor and forcefulness for China that some cabinet members felt he had aligned his interests with those of the Chinese.
When Currie returned to the U.S., President Roosevelt charged him with overseeing China’s Lend-Lease program. This included developing contacts between the beneficiary government and the War Department in attempting to expedite Chinese requests. To this end, Currie asked Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson for backing to procure favorable action on the first huge Chinese requisition. Included as part of an enormous order for war materiel, the aircraft request alone amounted to almost $500 million and would have required over one billion tons of shipping capacity. The Chinese had requisitioned 2800 pursuit ships, 856 bombers, 1056 trainers, and 66 transports, or a total of 4778 planes, to be delivered over a period of eighteen months. The War Department rejected every detail of the request, but Currie was undaunted. Eventually, after a persevering effort, he obtained the transfer of 66 Lockheed-Hudson and Douglas medium bombers for China. He then attempted to influence the President, and should be given a great deal of the credit for swaying him, to approve a proposal to send a cadre of flying instructors, along with technical and maintenance personnel, to advise, train, and maintain a revitalized Chinese air force. In effect, the President agreed to dispatch an air advisory mission to China. It was this decision that resulted in creation of the American Advisory Group, which became popularly known as the “Flying Tigers.”
Overly anxious to placate the Chinese, Currie sent a dispatch in July 1941 to Madame Chiang heralding the President’s approval of the 66 bombers and the decision about the air mission. However, the British government, which had first option on the planes, had not formally agreed to release them. Not until early September did the British agree to make available from their sources the bombers that Currie had promised prematurely, and actual delivery did not start for months. The Chinese soon learned that a favorable action on Currie’s part to allocate aircraft did not, of itself, produce them. When no deliveries took place, as sometimes happened, Chinese resentment at the failure to follow through exacerbated relations between the two governments.
President Roosevelt again dispatched his congenial and sympathetic representative to China in July 1942. Currie’s mission was to placate the Chinese government. He spent much time in July and August trying to smooth relations between General Stilwell and Generalissimo Chiang. Currie mollified the latter by vague promises of increasing China’s air power—thought to be the end-all, cure-all for China’s military invigoration—and of working for Stilwell’s recall. Currie subsequently tried quite vigorously and persistently, like most other Stilwell detractors, to use the General’s negative qualities against him. (pp. 250-54)
Especially engrossing for those interested in the political uses of air power are the book’s accounts of the U.S. government and its nationals’ playing a major role in the development of Nationalist Chinese military and civil aviation. Davies makes clear that this involvement often substituted for a lack of other initiatives. There was no consistent American policy toward Nationalist China in the thirties and forties, and Washington’s agencies and representatives often worked at cross-purposes. Still, from the Davies narrative, one can discern three distinct objectives that the U.S. sought in providing aid in the form of aviation assistance to the Chinese Nationalists:
Davies tells why and how these objectives were pursued:
Following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, China’s air arm was quickly decimated, and the Nationalists sought help from the major aviation powers. The United States equivocated in its response, but the Soviet Union quickly extended aid to China’s air force. In the interest of its own security, Russia wanted to divert the attention of the Japanese from the Soviet Far East by tying them down in central China. At the same time Soviet flyers could gain combat experience and become acquainted with Japanese air tactics. Moscow sent aircraft, volunteer pilots, and maintenance personnel. Soviet airmen engaged the Japanese in aerial combat above China’s major interior cities, bombed and strafed Japanese river and coastal shipping, attacked Japanese airfields in China, and made forays against targets on Taiwan. The Japanese, in turn, attacked Russian air bases in China. By the time the undeclared war in China’s skies ended for the Russians in 1941, Moscow had sent about 700 planes. Approximately 2000 Russian aviators had actively participated in the hostilities, shooting down about 425 Japanese aircraft.
As the Soviet government had increased the Chinese Air Force’s ability to resist the Japanese in the air and boosted Chinese morale, American consular officials, attachés, and air advisers in China became concerned over the possible political consequences of the Russian aid. The Americans welcomed the Russians’ efforts to counter Japanese aggression, but at the same time they expressed apprehension that Moscow might gain a dominant position in Chinese aviation.
When the war in Europe forced the Soviets to withdraw most of their advisers from China, the Chinese government increased its efforts to secure American aid. The Generalissimo and his representatives petitioned Washington officials for support, and Claire L. Chennault and Chinese agents were dispatched to the United States to provide the military expertise for the campaign. Sympathetic Washington officials like Currie got the President to approve forming and equipping the force that was to become the Flying Tigers.
Other efforts to obtain assistance for the Chinese met with some success when China was included under the Lend-Lease Bill. However, the program provided very limited assistance in the way of aircraft to the Chinese Air Force. Although President Roosevelt promised deliveries of fighters and bombers as a sop to the Chinese government, the U.S. Army Air Force only grudgingly provided assistance. It believed the aircraft would be wasted—the Chinese would either crash them or fail to maintain them. Washington was alerted concerning the likelihood of such an eventuality as early as 1942 by the very perceptive Davies, who had held discussions with Nationalist General Yang Chieh. The latter had represented China in the negotiations for Soviet supplies and had warned Davies that America should be more tough-minded than the Russians had been. (pp. 248-49)
The Chinese general pointed out that the Russians had afforded impressive support and had added to the difficulties of the Japanese in China but had grown disillusioned and frustrated. The Russians had too quickly agreed to supply credit for military equipment and aircraft, and at lower prices than could be obtained in the West. However, the Russians saw this equipment misused and the aircraft crashed by inexperienced Chinese pilots who would not follow or had not understood Russian instructions. Their anger mounted as the Chinese hoarded material that scarcely found its way into combat against the Japanese. General Yang Chieh warned Davies that he should counsel his government against becoming similarly disillusioned. The U.S., after assuming the task of rebuilding the Chinese Air Force in 1941 and helping fight in the skies over China, eventually became even more deeply involved and disillusioned than had the Russians.
While the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were primarily interested in helping China ward off Japanese aggression, their competition in training and outfitting the Chinese Air Force had broad political implications and ramifications—in that the outcome might be that one nation or the other gained control over Chinese aviation and thus was assisted in gaining dominance over the Chinese government. Chennault clearly understood this and closely followed Russian activities, as he indicated in his book, Way of a Fighter. Davies points out that Chennault’s superior and antagonist, Stilwell, did not do so. However, in reflecting about this dedicated fighting soldier, trying to carry out what he thought was his mission, Davies charges that the War Department “squandered” Stilwell’s talents. All of his efforts and energy were wasted in what Davies termed a “self-defeating mission.” (p. 341)
We have in Davies’s work a lively, unerring account of China’s historical development and U.S. involvement with her until 1949. His truthful, unhurried narrative of Chinese-American relations is illuminating even for the expert. Although some authoritative manuscripts remain unfinished—notably the fourth volume of Forrest C. Pogue’s work on General George C. Marshall and the reminiscences of old China hand and aircraft salesman William Pawley—Dragon by the Tail is the best produced thus far. Readers and students who have had no previous exposure to Chinese-American relations during the World War II years and are unaware of the polemical aspects between governments and military figures should consider Davies’s book an excellent introduction and reliable reference.
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Lieutenant Colonel Gordon K. Pickler (Ph.D., Florida State University) is Chief, Military Environment Division, Directorate of Curriculum, Air Command and Staff College, Air University. His preceding assignment was as squadron navigator and chief of a Vietnamization program, Tan Son Nhut AB, Vietnam. He was a combat crew member in B-57s and B-47s for twelve years before attending Air Command and Staff College. While a faculty member there, 1966-69, he was selected for the Air University Ph.D. program.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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