The New Army

(See Cover)

Nanning fell. Far south in China, Chinese armies snapped the railroad lifeline (now at last referred to as a line of retreat) for Japan's armies in Malaya, Thailand and Indo-China. Farther north, other Chinese armies hacked doggedly at the same strategic artery whose seizure by Japan a year ago brought China to the brink. On the central coast a third Chinese force, having dislodged the Japanese from the port of Foochow, fanned north and west, preparing a possible landing zone for U.S. forces.

It remained to be seen how much of their gains the Chinese could hold. But to China, after eight years of unrelieved defeat and retreat, the battle news last week came like the crash of a victory gong.

Behind the resurgent Chinese armies (U.S.-trained, U.S.-supplied, U.S.-supported) was the cool, clear organizing and strategic brain of a tall, tactful American, the commander of all the U.S. forces in China and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's chief of staff--Lieut. General Albert Coady Wedemeyer. He was the youngest (48) of U.S. theater commanders and one of the least known to the U.S. public. But all of his past now seems like a long (sometimes circuitous) march toward his predestined task in China.

Marching through Georgia. Wedemeyer was born to soldiering and cradled to the strains of military music. His grandfather, a music master, emigrated from the politically seething Germany of 1840, organized a band for the Union Army and marched it through Georgia, presumably with General William Tecumseh Sherman. His father, Captain Albert Anthony Wedemeyer, served as a U.S. Army bandmaster in the Spanish-American War.

Young Wedemeyer's real love was the Army. He was in grade school when he first announced that he was going to West Point. With the help of the popular Nebraska politician (who was to become the late great liberal Senator), George W. Norris (see BOOKS), and some stiff boning for entrance exams, Wedemeyer got there in 1917. Fifteen months later, the first of the 20th Century's world wars caused his bobtail graduation as a second lieutenant.

As a young officer, he was not distinguished. In 1923 he was sent to the Philippines--an assignment memorable chiefly because on the way he met and (in Corregidor) married Dade Embick. (Her father, now Lieut. General Stanley D. Embick, is chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board.)

Marching through Berlin. Five years later Lieut. Wedemeyer was sent out to the 15th Infantry at Tientsin, China. The vast, stirring nation, slowly shaping from revolutionary chaos into a modern nation under the hand of young Chiang Kaishek, fascinated the U.S. officer. He studied Chinese. But Wedemeyer turned down a chance for a career in the China service. In 1934 he was back in the U.S.

Somewhere along the routine line, something had happened to Wedemeyer. He began to study economics, foreign affairs, history and the new concept of air power. A mind that can be as cold and rigorous as a steel trap had found something to bite on. In 1936, Wedemeyer (now a captain after 15 years as lieutenant) graduated from the General Staff School at Leavenworth with such high honors that he was chosen to attend the German General Staff School, Berlin's famed Kriegsakademie.

The minds inside the bullet heads of the Wehrmacht officers hit the receptive mind of the U.S. captain with the impact of a robomb. German officers,* he found, were less flexible than U.S. military men. But they lived, breathed and dreamed war. They understood war as politics and peace as politics.

Later the War Department frisked Wedemeyer's memory for tidbits about Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and other Nazis. It showed scant interest in his incisive opinions about the Wehrmacht's masterminds and master weapons. Only one man took the captain's technical report seriously--Brigadier General George Marshall, then assistant chief of staff of the War Plans Division. Marshall had a long talk with the military student from Germany. When he became Chief of Staff, he remembered Wedemeyer.

General's General. So in 1941, the year the Wehrmacht turned from its victories in the West to overrun the Balkans and penetrate Russia, Wedemeyer was assigned to the War Plans Division. His job was to draw up the first overall war plan for the U.S. After Pearl Harbor, his estimates became the basic pattern of the U.S. war effort. By 1942's end, Wedemeyer was a member of Marshall's inner group, a key figure in overall strategy. He had become a general's general. He accompanied General Marshall on all the great conferences from Casablanca through Teheran. He had an important hand in Allied Mediterranean strategy and in the planning of the Normandy invasion.

When the Southeast Asia Command was set up (1943), Lord Louis Mountbatten chose Wedemeyer as his U.S. aide. At first the Southeast Asia Command looked like a dead end to Wedemeyer. Then one morning last October, he was handed a sealed envelope. He had been chosen U.S. Commander in Chief of the China Theater.

Moment of Destiny. Lieut. General Wedemeyer's directive from Washington was simple: help China forge an effective fighting force. In Chungking Wedemeyer faced a vortex of Chinese distrust, U.S. resentment, war weariness, political intrigue, near catastrophe. Two rare qualities were needed to cope with the problem--a mastery of soldiering in its highest reaches, and a talent for coalition war.

As staff general, Wedemeyer tirelessly studied China's beaten, war-weary, underfed, ill-armed, wretchedly conscripted army of 300 divisions which had to be whipped into shape. It was backed by a blockaded, withered economy producing some 10,000 tons of steel a year, supported by a transport system lacking a single effective railway, and equipped with less than 5,000 obsolescent trucks. It held a front almost 1,500 miles long. Its weapons were an international hodgepodge. But the invincible fact was that somehow this massive army existed, and somehow it fought on.

Wedemeyer began by amputation. He pointed out the absurdity of a nation of China's industrial weakness attempting to support 300 divisions (the U.S. maintains only about 100). China's able Minister of War, General Chen Cheng, saw the point. Within seven months, from the amorphous mass of the Chinese Army a hard core of elite troops began to take shape.

Army within Army. Wedemeyer's U.S. forces--only a few thousand--formed the nervous system of the new Chinese Army. The only combat Americans in China were the men of Major General Claire Chennault's redoubtable Fourteenth Air Force; their coordination was a key factor. Then U.S. ground troops, under Major General Robert ("Uncle Bob") McClure, a Guadalcanal veteran, were organized in a network of liaison units running like a stiffening spine through selected Chinese divisions.

A new Service of Supply was set up. Americans and Chinese determined what could be brought in by air over the Hump,* what by trucks over the Stilwell Road, what could be expected from Chinese war production, now rising smartly under U.S. guidance and the able direction of China's scholarly WPBoss Dr. Wong Wen-hao. Proper supplies were then carefully pumped out to field units. For the first time, China's armies were adequately fed, paid in hard cash, given ammunition and guns in a steady flow.

On the Chinese side, Generalissimo Chiang streamlined the command of his field forces, began to clean up the worst abuses of a chain-gang system of local conscription. Now the Generalissimo works out basic strategy with Wedemeyer, transmits his orders directly to his field commanders. Wedemeyer informs McClure and McClure's network supervises the execution. But in action, Chinese officers are solely responsible. The result is that U.S. officers train and fight alongside Chinese infantrymen and artillerists. The Americans have set up veterinary, signal corps, transport and general staff schools to teach U.S. techniques. These institutions were conceived by General Stilwell and were in existence when Wedemeyer arrived. But Wedemeyer welded them into a cohesive whole. Seldom had the traditional friendship of two great peoples been so tested and proved on the battlefields and in the headquarters which are the brains of battle.

Himalayan Headaches. The personal and technical difficulties which had to be surmounted to accomplish this job and keep it going were Himalayan. For Wedemeyer it meant a twelve-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job. Paper work and conferences were endless. The stream of visitors at the General's Chungking headquarters includes diplomats and production experts as well as military personnel. But from 4 to 5 each afternoon is reserved for the Generalissimo--and often Wedemeyer uses the hour to call on Chiang.

Wedemeyer and his staff have received unprecedented cooperation from the Generalissimo. From the beginning, Chiang appreciated Wedemeyer's cordiality, recognized his brilliance. When the American, in a daring battle maneuver last fall, flew crack Chinese units from Burma* and the Chinese Communist border region (with Chiang's assent) to stop the Japanese advance in Kweichow, Chiang's opinion was confirmed. How well Lieut. General Wedemeyer has succeeded in the diplomatic part of his job was indicated last week when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek accepted an invitation to be Wedemeyer's guest at supper. Not since he became President of China has Chiang ever accepted such an invitation from a foreigner. But the Generalissimo has a good reason to be grateful. The new army forged by Wedemeyer is clearly superior to anything ever seen in China. Few can appreciate better than Chiang Kai-shek how much this new army will strengthen his Government for the internal and external trials that lie ahead for China.

Political Implications. To her allies (the U.S. and Britain), the Chinese successes meant that the advance units of China's potential military might were slowly, doggedly beginning to move forward along the long road to Tokyo. Politically, the Chinese successes foreshadowed the emergence of China as a Far Eastern power whose political destiny might well prove to be the political destiny of democracy in Asia and in the world.

Nothing in Lieut. General Wedemeyer's orders gives him franchise to interfere in China's internal and external affairs. But the organizer of China's dawning victory could not fail to be in some degree the architect of China's future. And China's internal and external problems could not fail to influence the organization of victory.

These problems were twofold: 1) internal political disunity (the Chinese Communists) and reform (at Chungking); 2) China's relations with Russia. The two problems were organically connected by many visible and invisible layers of ragged political nerves and morbid social tissue.

Reform advanced again last week. In Chungking the dominant Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) held an important Sixth National Congress. It re-elected the Generalissimo as its Tsung-Tsai--Director General. It passed resolutions calling for broad social reforms. It approved the Tsung-Tsai's proposal for a constitutional convention next November and for a limited withdrawal of Kuomintang influence from the Government. It held out China's hand to Russia and urged a continuation of "the policy of seeking a political solution of the Chinese Communist problem."

Not in years had the Generalissimo and his one-party regime turned a more promising face toward liberalism and democracy. But from Yenan's one-party regime came only snorts of doubt and disapproval. The Seventh Chinese Communist Congress had just met. Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung, Communist Chief of Staff General Chu Teh and other party leaders bravely flexed their political muscles and claimed that they commanded a regular army of 910,000 men (last fall it was 570,000), 2,200,000 partisans, 1,200,000 party members and territories inhabited by 95,000,000 Chinese. They called Chiang's proposed constitutional convention a "mockery of democracy," charged that it would be Kuomintang-packed, accused Chungking's "ruling clique" of preparing to launch a civil war.

The U.S., through the hearty and sensible good offices of Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, had tried fervently to bring China's hostile factions together. But all of Pat Hurley's shrewd good nature and his Choctaw war whoops had failed to turn the trick. The Ambassador, after a report to Washington and a call at Moscow, was back in Chungking. He had conferred with Marshal Stalin, presumably on Russian intentions in East Asia. One report said that he had smoothed the way for a visit to the Kremlin by China's Acting Premier T. V. Soong and for a possible improvement in the increasingly chilly relations between Moscow and Chungking. Another report said Hurley was double-checking on Stalin's attitude toward the Chinese Communists (Foreign Commissar Molotov is once supposed to have dismissed the Yenan group as "margarine Communists").

Yenan's stiffening attitude toward Chungking had its counterpart in Moscow. Where two years ago there was relative aloofness between Russia and Chungking, there is now undisguised hostility. Moscow's War and the Working Class has tossed epithets like "Mihailovich" and "Quisling" at Kuomintang leaders. Izvestia has belittled T. V. Soong's administrative reforms. Bolshevik has praised Yenan's army and called Chiang's troops "passive spectators at best" in the fight against Japan. A Russian bestseller, Alexander Stepanov's novel Port Arthur, claimed Manchuria's key port as "Russian soil."

In the high political wind blowing across Asia's steppes, these might be no more than straws--but they were disturbing straws and they blew consistently in one direction. Nor could the men who are trying to hold together the pieces of China's political puzzle fail to be aware of the political pattern which Russia had imposed on Eastern Europe in the course of its liberation. To them the threat of a bloc of Soviet-dominated buffer states, torn from China, and extending from Manchuria to Sinkiang (see map) was very real. Should their fears be realized, a climacteric change would have taken place in the pattern of contemporary history.

The Issue. These fears and those of many friends of China and of democracy were set forth last week by two students of Russian and Chinese affairs--Max Eastman, onetime Communist editor, and J. B. Powell, former editor of Shanghai's liberal China Press, who lost part of both feet as a result of mistreatment in a Japanese prison camp. In Reader's Digest they wrote:

"The question whether China goes democratic or totalitarian is the biggest political question of today. . . . American modes of influence are cultural persuasion, the example of prosperity, skilled technical assistance, capital investment, and above all, military and economic supplies. Russia's weapons are conspiratorial organization and party-controlled propaganda, leading to seizure of power and a liquidation of all democrats, and if necessity arises, military invasion in the name of liberation'. . . .

"ProCommunists are playing the same game in Asia that succeeded so brilliantly in Eastern Europe. . . . But there is one big difference--that is the size of China. To sell out Chiang Kai-shek to the Chinese 'Tito' [Mao Tse-tung] will not add a paltry 13,000,000 to the totalitarian Colossus. It will bring under totalitarian regimentation 450,000,000 people. This vast population, united in their policy with the Soviet totalitarian empire of some 200,000,000, would certainly threaten the hope for a democratic world."

Whether these fears were exaggerated or groundless, history might soon tell. In any case, one deterrent to their realization might well be the new Chinese Army which Lieut. General Wedemeyer was forging. In this sense, last week's military successes might not only have started China down the hard road to Tokyo, but down the harder road to peace, justice and freedom for all nations.

* One of them, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, now a war prisoner (see INTERNATIONAL), wrote Wedemeyer a long letter in 1940, explaining just how the German breakthrough in France was accomplished. * Latest available figure: 50,000 tons a month, or three times more than the best tonnage of the old Burma Road. * Last week it was announced that an entire army (China's Sixth Army) has been flown in from Burma by U.S. transport planes.

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