China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (45 page)

We see here what would become a signal feature of Chinese Communist propaganda, a superheated, demonizing, radically simplifying an inescapable rhetorical extremism, a barrage of exaggerations, distortions, and lies, that was among the tools the Chinese Communists learned from the Leninist-Stalinist model. The Communists’ irritation with the United States, moreover, was not confined to Mao’s speeches and Yenan’s propaganda machinery. It was reflected in events taking place in the embattled territory of China where the war continued and soldiers died. On May 28, 1945, a five-member American team led by Major
F. L. Coolidge was parachuted behind enemy lines near the town of Fuping in Hebei province. Known as the
Spaniel Mission—after the dog of one of its members—it was an OSS operation aimed at collecting information about the pro-Japanese puppet government.

The Americans knew that the Communists had succeeded in infiltrating Chinese army units that were ostensibly loyal to the collaborationist Nanjing government. In 1945, these puppet forces came under ever greater scrutiny by American
intelligence, especially the secret operations, or SO, arms of SACO, the cooperative organization jointly commanded by the American naval officer Milton “Mary” Miles and his chief Chinese collaborator,
Tai Li, the head of Chiang’s secret police. Among SACO’s subdivisions was a propaganda production unit that put out slick and clever misinformation aimed at demoralizing both Japanese soldiers in China and the puppet forces, and, in the case of the latter, at encouraging the belief that Japan was nearly defeated and that they should think about defecting before it was too late.

One poster, distributed in occupied territory, consists of a dark and melancholy image of a woman tending to a dying man. It represents itself as a warning by the puppet government about infectious diseases coming from Japan, where because of the “
many unburied bodies of
bombing victims” the drinking water had become polluted. The aim was indirectly to persuade Japanese soldiers in China that their relatives back home were in dire straits. Another poster, this one aimed at Chinese collaborators, shows a knife pointed at the back of a receding man. “Save your life, protect your family,” the text reads. “
For eight years the enemy has forced you to work for him. Now he must rush to the defense of his homeland. Is he going to leave you behind him? No. You are a danger. You know too much and you must die.… Already in Canton and Fuzhou these assassinations have begun. What can you do? Desert him now. Save your life.”

Puppet troops faced with defeat might, the Americans believed, be susceptible to recruitment. They knew that some of the weaponry in the hands of the Communists was not, as the Communists often claimed, captured from the Japanese, but
had come from bribes paid to the well-armed puppet troops. Now
the Spaniel Mission was being dispatched to contact the Communists and to carry out joint intelligence operations to determine the extent to which the puppets could be turned against their Japanese masters, providing intelligence and perhaps cooperating in sabotage. It was, in short, exactly the sort of cooperation against the common enemy that the Communists had been pleading for since the middle of 1944.

Within two days, the Spaniel Mission’s five members were captured by Communist guerrillas, who subjected them to intense questioning, then brought them to two senior Communist political commissars, who made the decision to detain them indefinitely. They stayed in detention, despite American protests, for four months and were released only a month after the end of the war in September. The reason given for this hostile treatment at a time when the United States and the Communists were cooperating over such things as the rescue of downed American fliers was, as the chief American scholar to examine this incident has written, that “
no prior notice had been given to Yenan,” and therefore the assumption in Yenan was that “the Spaniel mission must have ulterior motives to organize people against the Communists.” Another historian of Sino-American relations in this period has written that the Communists, already disillusioned by the partiality Hurley and Wedemeyer were showing to the central government, feared that this effort to contact Chinese puppet government troops was part of an effort to turn them against the Communists.

A SACO propaganda poster warning that the Japanese will murder Chinese collaborators as they withdraw. The caption reads: “When the angel of death arrives, all affairs cease.”
(illustration credit 8)

A few months later, in August, with the men of the
Spaniel Mission still detained and cut off from contact with American headquarters, General Wedemeyer vehemently protested their treatment directly to Mao, who was in Chungking for talks with Chiang. Wedemeyer argued that as China theater commander, he had the authority to operate behind enemy lines and that “it is not always feasible” to get permission in advance either from Communists or Nationalists who might be operating in the same areas. Numerous such missions had been dispatched before, Wedemeyer said, and local commanders had “recognized and accepted [the American agents] as friends and co-workers,” taking them in “and
treating them kindly.”

Maochun Yu of the U.S. Naval Academy, the author of an account of the OSS’s wartime activities in China, concludes that the Communists didn’t want the Americans to discover that Yenan’s propagandistic portrayal of their valiant struggle against the Japanese and the puppet regime was essentially false, and that in many areas they and the supposed Japanese enemy observed an unwritten truce, carrying on barter and the selling of arms but rarely fighting. In fact, the Spaniel Mission made exactly such an observation, reporting to American headquarters that the Communist claim of fighting an active guerrilla war against Japan “has been
grossly exaggerated,” and that Yenan’s actual policy was “to undertake no serious campaign against the Japanese or puppets.” The Communists could well have detained the Spaniel Mission and kept it incommunicado because they didn’t want any foreigners in the vicinity to make such observations.

When Mao was confronted by Wedemeyer about the arrest of the Spaniel Mission members, Mao recapitulated the friendly and cordial treatment given to the
Dixie Mission in Yenan, the implication being that the Communists had no policy to treat Americans badly. “
I consider the Fuping incident to be very unfortunate,” he said. But the warm reception of the Dixie Mission had been months earlier, before the collapse of the Hurley negotiations, before Hurley’s April 2 press conference, and before the explosion of the Amerasia Affair. It is likely that Mao did not order the arrest of the Spaniel Mission, though it seems unlikely he wouldn’t have been quickly informed of it, and could, had he wanted to, have ordered the quick release of the detained men. It also seems that the Eighth Route Army commander who was so suspicious of the Americans dropping into Fuping was following a general order. On June 11, 1945,
Wilbur J. Peterkin, acting head of the Dixie Mission in Yenan, reported to Wedemeyer, “
All communist headquarters have been instructed to arrest and disarm and hold all unauthorized Americans encountered anywhere.”

There was in this sense a signal difference between the Spaniel group and the Dixie Mission members, like Raymond Ludden, who traveled in the company of Communist guerrillas behind enemy lines. The Dixie Mission was authorized, its members accompanied by what later travelers to Communist China would call “minders,” official guides who chose the places to visit and the people to be met. The Spaniel Mission operated without minders, and was therefore “unauthorized.”

Whatever the reasons for the treatment of the Spaniel Mission, the
unfriendliness and suspicion that it demonstrated foreshadowed what was to come when, after eight long years of conflict, the war against Japan suddenly came to an end. With the war against Japan won, the United States and the Communists would no longer have a common enemy, and its disappearance would strip away the incentive to cooperate, leaving behind many reasons for each to see in the other a mortal foe.

PART III

Victory and Failure

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hearts and Minds

M
a Yingchu was the sort of man whose support the Chinese government needed but lost, to the tremendous benefit of its mortal rival the Communists. He was one of those figures of influence in China who straddled both the centuries and the era. He was born in 1882, the seventh year of the Guangxu emperor, and educated during the last years of the Qing dynasty, the decadent and deeply conservative mandarin China of silk robes and imperial government, but he spent his career in the new China, a country whose educated class was engaged in a deep self-examination, seeking the reasons for its long decline and a formula that would enable it to be wealthy and powerful, as it had so often been in its past.