The Secretary at Waterloo

t was his record on China policy that was supposed to be Dean Acheson's Waterloo, and his critics welcomed him on to the battlefield. But when he walked into the MacArthur hearing last week on the day set aside for his explanation of that policy, Dean Acheson was obviously determined to be the Wellington of the battle, not the Napoleon.

This was the Secretary of State's case, as he made it:

What the U.S. had to do. After V-J day, China as a nation had to be created --it did not exist. The Nationalist government actually controlled only the southwest corner of China; even before the war, it had not had control over all the nation, never had more than brief (1928-31) and nebulous authority over Manchuria. By war's end, the Communists had an army of 1,000,000; they controlled a fourth of China's population--about 116 million--and about 15% of its area. Most of the rest was still in Japanese hands. The Reds in the North were ready to move in wherever the Japanese moved out.

The U.S. did all it could. Faced with this situation, the U.S. carried out one of the greatest manpower transfers of all time: whole Nationalist armies were airlifted across the country to take over from the surrendering Japanese; 50,000 U.S. marines were shipped in to hold ports and railroads for Chiang Kaishek; some 3,000,000 Japanese--civilians and soldiers --were shipped back to Japan. "That was a tremendous undertaking," said Acheson. ". . . And it was that undertaking which permitted the Chinese government to get back into areas of China which it would have had the most difficulty in even getting into . . ."

The U.S. did not sell out China at Yalta. The Far Eastern concessions awarded to Russia at Yalta were made because 1) the military feared 1,000,000 U.S. casualties if Russia did not enter the war against Japan, and 2) they gave Russia only what she would probably have grabbed anyhow. The concessions, though made without consulting Nationalist China, actually met with the Nationalists' approval; Chiang gladly wrote them into a treaty with Stalin and regarded that treaty as "very valuable."

The U.S. did not force coalition on Chiang. Chiang himself aimed for a political settlement with the Chinese Communists, welcomed U.S. help in negotiating it. He, like the U.S., wanted to avoid civil war with the Reds. General Marshall went to China in 1945 not to appease the Communists, but to bring about a ceasefire. Without it, the Nationalists would never be able to occupy North China or Manchuria, or stabilize what they had.

U.S. policy had full support at home. Top U.S. military men endorsed what the U.S. was trying to do*; later critics of U.S. China policy had not raised their voices at the time. And though critics now accuse the Administration of not having done enough to help Chiang, the Republican 80th Congress in 1948 chopped $107 million off the China funds requested by the Administration.

The Nationalists brought about their own collapse. The Nationalists let their power float away in a swamp of corruption, inefficiency, disloyalty and appallingly bad generalship. They ignored all U.S. advice to put in crucially needed political reforms. The U.S. provided military and political advisers to Chiang's government, gave it more than $2 billion of economic and military aid. The Nationalists repudiated U.S. military advice. They persistently overextended themselves politically and militarily, trying to reach for the far when they had not even gotten a firm hold on the near. Their generals got caught up in what General David Barr, chief of the U.S. military mission to China, called "the wall psychology," holing up in cities, surrendering their mobility, while the Reds chopped them down city by city, gobbled up tons of abandoned Nationalist equipment and turned it back on them. By November 1948, Barr reported: "I am convinced that the military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of U.S. troops could effect a remedy. No battle has been lost since my arrival due to lack of ammunition or equipment."

* As his proof of general agreement in the aim of the Marshall mission, Acheson produced a dispatch dated Dec. 7, 1945 and signed by MacArthur, Wedemeyer and Admiral Raymond Spruance. It read: "It is suggested that the United States' assistance to China . . . be made available as a basis for negotiation by the American ambassador to bring together and effect a compromise between the major opposing groups in order to promote a united democratic China." Said MacArthur last week: "Any inference . . . that I sponsored . . . a political coalition of such diametrically opposed forces is a prevarication without color of factual support." Said Wedemeyer: "Out of context . . . If it is possible of interpreting that statement to mean that I was approving a coalition government . . . it did not faithfully convey what was in my mind." Said Spruance: "I am convinced that General Marshall's full purpose was to avoid civil war in China. At that time we did not know as much as we do now about the Communists."

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