Chiang Kai-shek as war leader. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), President of the Republic of China and C-in-C of the Chinese armed forces, was appointed supreme commander of the China theatre (see
China–Burma–India theatre) by Churchill and Roosevelt in December 1941. In December 1936, in what became known as the Sian incident, he was kidnapped by rebel army officers in the city of Sian (Siking). They wished to force him to abandon his campaign of suppression against the Chinese Communist party; to form a united front with the communists and all other patriotic forces; and to lead China in a war of resistance against Japan whose occupation of
Manchukuo and further encroachment into Chinese territory were soon to culminate in the Marco Polo Bridge Clash and the start of the
China incident. When Chiang stubbornly refused to treat with the rebels, preferring, as he saw it, death to dishonour, some were prepared to kill him. Others, however, including the communist leader
Chou En-lai, believed that despite the role he had played in the past, only Chiang was capable of leading the whole nation against the Japanese, and eventually a compromise was reached which allowed Chiang to return to the capital in safety, with the communists agreeing to incorporate themselves, at least in theory, into the national army under the generalissimo's command. The widespread and largely spontaneous rejoicing which followed Chiang's return to Nanking seemed to confirm that he was indeed the leader which China needed for the war of resistance.
It was not true, as many (particularly on the left) argued at the time, that Chiang was prepared to appease the Japanese virtually indefinitely. On the contrary, from the mid-1930s and with the assistance of German officers (first General Hans von Seeckt, then
General von Falkenhausen), he had been working hard to train and equip an effective army. He replaced the one-time Soviet instructors at the Whampoa military academy with 30 Germans and the purchase of German arms was arranged through their connections. Between 1936 and early 1937 Chiang and his senior officers, together with their German advisers, worked out a plan of strategic retreat, which involved a fighting but orderly evacuation of most areas north of the Yangtze River. Shanghai would be the pivot for a move upriver, if necessary as far as Chungking.
Behind this plan lay two basic strategic considerations. First, Chiang was convinced, correctly, of China's military and industrial inferiority
vis-à-vis Japan. Second, he expected that a combination of casualties and overstretched supply lines would steadily weaken the Japanese. Moreover, they would be forced to carry the burden of controlling and governing an area that might (and in the event did) considerably exceed that of Japan itself, both in territory and population. Chungking, in the distant western province of Szechwan, was thought to be a viable economic base from whence his National, or Kuomintang (KMT), government could play a prolonged waiting game. It was hoped that the enemy would eventually realize they had been drawn out to the end of a limb, and that there was nowhere they could go but back.
Chiang genuinely believed that war with Japan would eventually become inevitable, and he was prepared to fight it. However, quite apart from building up his armed forces and his industrial base, he also saw a united home front as a necessary prerequisite for successful resistance. This meant not only holding together, and sometimes fighting, the disparate collection of politicians and military leaders whose loyalty to the KMT government was frequently tenuous in the extreme, but more particularly, eradicating the communists. Chiang saw the latter as a disease of the heart, whereas the Japanese were only an external disorder which would eventually go away, however distressing it might be at the time. Yet he paid more attention to the physical elimination of the communists and their supporters than to the underlying social and economic conditions which were their seed-bed. Critics of the regime were struck by the contrast between the bloody suppression campaigns against fellow Chinese, on the one hand, and such phenomena as the failure to counterattack against Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931, the failure to support the courageous Nineteenth Army in Shanghai during the Japanese attack there in the spring of 1932, the signing of the Tangku truce in 1933, and the Ho-Umezu agreement of 1935. These could all be explained by the concept of trading space for time. However, this policy was not well understood, and it was not in the nature of Chiang or of his government to go to great lengths to explain it. It was also true, however, that the communists, who wanted active battle against Japan as a stepping-stone to their own victory, did not want the policy to be understood, and devoted great and successful efforts to this end.
China's war of resistance against Japan began with the Marco Polo Bridge incident on 7 July 1937. Once again, Chiang and many of his colleagues would probably have much preferred to postpone the conflict and make concessions to Japan. But because of the pressure of the united front that had been formed following the Sian kidnapping, they finally felt compelled to resist. Thus Chiang was forced into a war which he did not believe he was yet ready to fight: a war that would prove equally disastrous both to Japan and to the KMT.
These reservations notwithstanding, during the first two years of the war Chinese determination to resist was largely unbroken, and Chiang Kai-shek became the heroic symbol both at home and abroad of that resistance, which surpassed all Japanese expectations. In Shanghai the Chinese forces obeyed their orders to hold out for six weeks and, in the hope of involving the western powers, with their International Settlement and substantial interests in the city, either as mediators or combatants, Chiang decided to postpone the retreat for at least another week. In all, the battle for Shanghai lasted from 13 August to 9 November 1937. When the retreat came, what was to have been an orderly evacuation turned into a near riot, with each man for himself; but as the Chinese armies moved further inland the Japanese lost their chance to force them to surrender, and thus their hopes for an early victory.
Japanese frustration and anger at Chinese resistance resulted in the rape of Nanking. Chiang has been criticized for making a stand in the indefensible capital rather than behind it, from which equal time could have been bought with far less loss of life. During the battle for Shanghai, no preparations had been made for the defence or evacuation of the city. But quite apart from Nanking's symbolic importance, Chiang's aim was to engage world attention, and possibly foreign involvement, because of the presence of the embassies. The fate of the city certainly had a major impact on the way Japan was viewed in the west and further steeled Chinese determination to resist.
Following the fall of Nanking, the Japanese failed to encircle the Chinese at Hankow, the next stop upriver. After Hankow fell, Chiang's German advisers were dejected, seeing no alternative but surrender. Chiang, however, was quite unmoved, and his armies subsequently made a successful defence at Changsha and several other important cities. By the time Chiang had established his wartime capital in Chungking, the Japanese had had to abandon their advance and set about consolidating their territorial gains. Even in territory they occupied, pockets of resistance continued, especially near Hsüchow, where Chinese troops won a major battle at Taierhchwang. In June 1938 Chiang implemented a
scorched earth policy by ordering the dynamiting of the Yellow River dykes.
However, once Chiang had established his wartime capital in Chungking, and as the war stabilized and changed its nature, corruption and demoralization set in at an alarming rate, and the problems and weaknesses of Chiang's leadership became increasingly obvious. With a virtual stalemate on the ground, both communists and nationalists were able to turn their attention to their abiding mutual enmity, and the New Fourth Army incident of January 1941, in which KMT troops destroyed a communist HQ unit, marked the effective end of the united front. Chiang became increasingly reluctant to use his best troops against the Japanese, particularly following the entry of the UK and USA into the war against Japan. For much of the later years of the war, some half a million KMT troops were employed in sealing off Southern China from the communist armies in the North, and the best equipment was hoarded for the inevitable showdown with the communists after the Japanese had been defeated by the Western Allies.
Despite his appointment as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the China theatre, Chiang had little interest in the war outside China except as it affected his own position.
General Brooke observed of him at the Cairo conference (see
SEXTANT) that he had no grasp of war in its larger aspects, but was determined to get the best of all bargains. Chiang was not the only Chinese whose response would have been that China had been fighting the Allies' war alone for two years, and that a debt was owed. But such an attitude did not serve to make him more popular with Allied leaders, or, increasingly, with the US Congress, though his wife (see
Chiang, Madam) made a triumphant visit to the USA which brought large financial and propaganda rewards to China. His notoriously bad relationship with his Allied Chief of Staff,
Lt-General Stilwell (see also
China–Burma–India theatre), added to this (although it has to be said that Stilwell was a poor diplomat, despite his excellence as a soldier), and Chiang's prickliness and meddling detracted from the only positive contribution played directly by Chinese troops outside China, in the
Burma campaign.
A major point of disagreement between Chiang and Stilwell concerned the use of
air power. The former accepted fully the argument of
Maj-General Chennault who commanded the Fourteenth USAAF in China, that he could defeat both Japanese and communists with air power alone. In the event, the Japanese Chekiang-Kiangsi offensive, which was launched in May 1942, proved, as Stilwell had expected, that the air force could not even halt the Japanese advance on its own bases. Victory had to be won on the ground. Chiang, however, was neither willing nor able to make the changes that would have been necessary to achieve such a victory, and the reasons for this are instructive.
To defeat the Japanese in conventional warfare, it would have been necessary to train and equip a modern army. This had been begun under the German advisers, but the war came well before more than a small proportion of Chiang's forces could have been called modernized, and it was these that he was now keeping in reserve. Stilwell had shown in both Burma and China itself that, properly led and equipped, Chinese troops were more than a match for the Japanese. But these conditions were rarely met, and as the war dragged on, the condition of the common soldiers deteriorated more than ever. Conscripts were treated like criminals, and even a nationalist supporter such as Liu Yutang conceded in 1945 that the army had lost the support it had enjoyed from civilians in 1937–8 before the stabilization of the front. Yet to reform the army from the base up, and to improve the conditions from which the common soldiers came and would be asked to fight for, would have involved the very social revolution which Chiang was seeking to avoid.
In fact Chiang, aloof and reserved at the best of times, was often surprisingly ignorant of actual conditions. He surrounded himself with a ring of men not much less ignorant than himself, and certainly corrupt (which he was not), who gave him a highly distorted view of what was happening. He rarely went to see for himself, and real supervision from the top was notably lacking. His minister of war and chief of staff, Ho Ying-chin, a man with little modern military knowledge, kept the army loyal through manipulation of cliques and control of supplies and funds. When this situation resulted in a plot by young officers to rid the army of their corrupt and inefficient seniors, Chiang's only response was to execute 16 of the young generals and arrest 600 officers involved in the plot. He took no action against those at whom the plot was aimed, for the latter were all his own confidants.
Even had he wished to do so, however, the very nature of his power base would have made such changes virtually impossible. As the US diplomat John Service wrote in a memorandum, Chiang ‘has achieved and maintained his position in China by his supreme skill in balancing man against man and group against group, by his adroitness as a military politician rather than a military commander, and by reliance on a gangster secret police’. Accordingly, he became a prisoner of the complex of interests riddling the top levels of China's military structure. He was unable to be too free with the armies under the war zone commanders, and exercised undisputed control only over the ten armies which came directly under the central government. He also had to guard against any other general becoming too powerful, which meant that success was not always rewarded.
It was, of course, his genius as a military politician which had made him indispensable to the Sian kidnappers, for only he could bring together such a diverse group of interests. Only Chiang could have won over his erstwhile enemies, the Kuanghsi warlords, who numbered amongst themselves Li Tsung-jen, the victor of Taierhchwang. But Chiang could only hold the balance, not weld them into a single force. And, characteristically, he did not allow Li to follow up his victory, thus considerably reducing its effect. Stilwell had similar experiences.
The limitations of Chiang's success as war leader were never clearer than at the time of Japan's
ICHI-GŌ offensive, phase one of which was launched in April 1944, and phase two in June, when, despite their reverses in the Pacific, the Japanese were able to strike further into China than ever before. Yet, despite the disastrous situation, Chiang was probably not unhappy to see the force of the offensive directed against the dissident south-west. Central government troops were not engaged. The widely hated and corrupt KMT General Tang En-po, who had fled before the Japanese advance, was subsequently rewarded by Chiang with the command of fourteen US-equipped divisions, and entrusted with disarming the Japanese in the wealthy lower Yangtze-Shanghai region following the Japanese surrender.
At the end of the war, the Chinese had not been defeated, but neither had they defeated the Japanese. Moreover, by having virtually abandoned North China, and having in large part lost the hearts and minds of the people in the areas controlled by his own forces, Chiang, who had always equated strength with armament, ignoring organization, motivation, leadership, and basic care of his own troops and civilians, virtually ensured that he would lose the civil war he had always known would be inevitable. On the other hand, it was under his leadership that China had fought Japan single-handed for over two years, and for the rest of the war tied down a million Japanese troops who could not be used elsewhere. Apart from his skills as a military politician, this was achieved in large part by what his erstwhile Australian adviser William Henry Donald described as his hardheaded, unyielding, and uncompromising stubbornness.
Flawed as he was, Chiang was not devoid of positive attributes as a leader, hence the recognition even by his enemies that he had an essential role to play. He faced many difficulties, of which those posed by the Japanese were only a part. He lacked, however, the qualities which would have enabled him to override those difficulties and entitled him to be ranked as one of the great war leaders.
Richard Rigby
Bibliography
Botjer, G. , A Short History of Nationalist China, 1919–1949 (New York, 1979).
Boyle, J. H. , China and Japan at War, 1937–1945 (Stanford, Calif., 1972).
Tuchman, B. , Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 (New York, 1970).
