The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949

By Zach Fredman

After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, leaders in China and the United States had high hopes of a lasting partnership between the two countries. More than 120,000 U.S. servicemen deployed to China, where Chiang Kai-shek's government carried out massive programs to provide them with housing, food, and interpreters. But, as Zach Fredman uncovers in The Tormented Alliance, a military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States. The first book to draw on archives from all of the areas in China where U.S. forces deployed during the 1940s, it examines the formation, evolution, and undoing of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of China during World War II and the Chinese Civil War.

Fredman reveals how each side brought to the alliance expectations that the other side was simply unable to meet, resulting in a tormented relationship across all levels of Sino-American engagement. Entangled in larger struggles over race, gender, and nation, the U.S. military in China transformed itself into a widely loathed occupation force: an aggressive, resentful, emasculating source of physical danger and compromised sovereignty. After Japan's surrender and the spring 1946 withdrawal of Soviet forces from Manchuria, the U.S. occupation became the chief obstacle to consigning foreign imperialism in China irrevocably to the past. Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek lost his country in 1949, and the U.S. military presence contributed to his defeat. The occupation of China also cast a long shadow, establishing patterns that have followed the U.S. military elsewhere in Asia up to the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469669595

Zach Fredman

Zach Fredman is assistant professor of history at Duke Kunshan University.

Book preview

Cover: The Tormented Alliance, American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 by Zach Fredman

The Tormented Alliance

The Tormented Alliance

American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949

ZACH FREDMAN

The University of North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fredman, Zach, author.

Title: The tormented alliance : American servicemen and the occupation of China, 1941–1949 / Zach Fredman.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2022]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022015060 | ISBN 9781469669571 (cloth; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469669588 (paperback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469669595 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—China. | United States—Armed Forces—China—History—20th century. | United States—Military relations—China. | China—History—1937–1945. | China—History—Civil War, 1945–1949. | China—Foreign relations—1912–1949. | United States—Foreign relations—1933–1945. | United States—Foreign relations—1945–1953. | China—Foreign relations—United States. | United States—Foreign relations—China.

Classification: LCC UA26.C58 F74 2022

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015060

Cover illustrations: Top, Alfred T. Palmer, Tank Driver, Ft. Knox, Ky., 1942; bottom, interior of U.S. Army Air Force DC-3 transporting Chinese soldiers, 1943. Both photos courtesy of Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information collections, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Chapter 2 was originally published in a different form as Lofty Expectations and Bitter Reality: Chinese Interpreters for the U.S. Army during the Second World War, 1941–1945, Frontiers of History in China 12, no. 4 (September 2017): 566–98. Chapter 5 was originally published in a different form as GIs and ‘Jeep Girls’: Sex and American Soldiers in Wartime China, Journal of Modern Chinese History 13, no. 1 (September 2019): 76–101.

To my family

Contents

Figures and Maps

Acknowledgments

Chronology of Wartime Sino-American Relations and the U.S. Military Presence in China

Introduction

1 Making Our Friends at Home

China’s Hostel Program

2 Communicating without Understanding

China’s Interpreter Program

3 Unequal Partners

Military-to-Military Relations

4 Living with the U.S. Military

Chinese Civilians

5 GIs and Jeep Girls

Sexual Relations

6 Everything Comes Undone

The Postwar Occupation

Epilogue

The Occupation of China’s Long Shadow

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Maps

Figures

1.1 Huang Renlin towering over Chiang Kai-shek and Brigadier General Frederick McCabe, Ramgarh, India, 1943

1.2 Hostel No. 1, Kunming

1.3 Night soil collector in Chongqing

3.1 Chinese cadets and American instructors at Ramgarh

4.1 AVG blood chit: This foreigner has come to help China fight. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, rescue him.

4.2 Airfield construction in Yunnan

4.3 Three American soldiers and a Chinese traffic officer in Chongqing

5.1 Chinese women and American enlisted men at a badminton exhibition organized for U.S. Army headquarters in Chongqing

5.2 The Nanping Theater on GI Street, downtown Kunming

5.3 Lively Jeep Girls: three images from a larger series titled Allied Soldiers in Chongqing

6.1 American marines and their dates in Qingdao

E.1 The U.S. military presence in 1940s China as portrayed during the Resist America and Aid Korea campaign, 1950

E.2 Image of Chiang Kai-shek and an American serviceman as portrayed during the Resist America and Aid Korea campaign, 1950

Maps

China, December 1941

The U.S. military in Southwest China

Chinese retreat from Burma, 1942

North China, 1945

Acknowledgments

I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to my family for their unwavering support over this long project. This book is dedicated to my parents, Gerald Fredman and Carol Rogers Collins, who never gave up on me despite everything I did to test their patience. My sister Rachel let me sleep on her couch for a month when I began research and, along with my brother Ben and sister Rebecca, has always believed in me. My cousin Miles Liss, stepfather Gary Collins, and in-laws Zhou Chang’an and Zhang Mingqing have all been helpful beyond the call of duty. Tom Price deserves mention alongside family for taking me under his wing and convincing me to move to China, setting me on the path that eventually led to this book. There is no way I could have completed this project without the love and support of my wife, Wenjing, who stoically persevered through three transpacific moves to different universities and countries over a two-year stretch. I’m tremendously grateful for every day together, and I can’t imagine a better friend, partner, co-parent, and travel companion. Thank you to our daughter Sylvia, for bringing so much joy to our lives.

I feel truly privileged to have attended graduate school at Boston University. Andrew Bacevich is a national treasure and everything one could hope for in an advisor. His mentorship and unflagging support over the past decade helped make this project possible, while his scholarship, teaching, and contributions to public debate in the United States will always be the model I aspire to. While most graduate students would be lucky to have one great advisor, I had two. Brooke Blower always remained steadfast in championing my work. She was also a voice of constant support and encouragement and, to this day, another inspiring model as a thinker, scholar, and person. Joe Fewsmith helped me understand Chinese history and probably treated me to more meals than all my other professors combined. Louis Ferleger was generous with funding, while coursework and conversations with Eugenio Menegon, Jonathan Zatlin, Jon Roberts, Brendan McConville, and William Keylor provided sound advice and helped me craft my work as a historian. David Atkinson, D. J. Cash, Mark Kukis, Sarah Childress, Amy Noel, Aaron Hilter, Anshul Jain, Jeremy Weiss, and Andrew David made my time spent in Boston engaging and festive. I am also grateful to the BU History Department for supporting my semester at the University of Cambridge, where conversations with Arne Westad, Matthew Jones, Andrew Preston, Rana Mitter, and Hans van de Ven helped get this project off the ground.

Fellowships at Nanyang Technological University and Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding were crucial to this book’s development. In Singapore, Masuda Hajimu and Wen-Qing Ngoei taught me how to write a book proposal. K. K. Luke, Chen Song-chuan, Els van Dongen, Uganda Kwan, and Daniel Chua provided valuable feedback on various parts of the manuscript. Lin Ling-Fei was a terrific office mate and friend. I was equally fortunate to spend a year with the fantastic community of professors, staff, and postdocs in Hanover, New Hampshire. Conversations and seminars with William Wohlforth, Jennifer Lind, George Yin, Andrew Bertolli, Andrew Shaver, Sheri Zaks, Stephanie Freeman, and Ore Koren helped me strengthen my arguments. I am especially grateful for the warm welcome, thoughtful advice, and continued friendship offered by Jennifer Miller, Udi Greenberg, and Edward Miller.

As a faculty member in the Division of Arts and Humanities at Duke Kunshan University for the past three years, I have been fortunate to be part of a rigorous, supportive, and fun-loving intellectual community. I am indebted to division chairs James Miller and Kolleen Guy for their generosity with funding, advice, and timely breaks in my teaching schedule. Colleagues at DKU, including Scott MacEachern, Qian Zhu, Nellie Chu, Bryce Beemer, Lincoln Rathnam, Yu Wang, Selina Lai-Henderson, and Ben Schupmann, each read parts of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions. Mengjie Zou tracked down obscure published sources, and research assistants Qi Pan and Sirui Yao helped with various pressing tasks in the last stages of the work.

A few individuals who read and reread this manuscript deserve special mention. Wen-hsin Yeh, Prasenjit Duara, Andrew Bacevich, Edward Miller, Carlos Rojas, and James Miller read the book cover to cover for my manuscript review and helped make it what it is now. Erez Manela, Steven I. Levine, and two anonymous reviewers at the University of North Carolina Press read every chapter and gave me crucial feedback that guided my follow-up research and proved essential to the book’s completion. It has been a great pleasure to work with the University of North Carolina Press, and I am particularly grateful to Brandon Proia, who has played an integral role at every stage in the life of this book.

Portions of this book have been presented at a variety of conferences, lectures, and workshops at the Australian National University; Renmin University; Chongqing University; the University of Hong Kong; Nanyang Technological University; Mississippi State University; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Merrimack College; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the London School of Economics; Oxford University; the University of Birmingham; the University of Manchester; the Summer Institute China in a Global World War II at the University of Cambridge; the Uneasy Allies conferences at Duke Kunshan; and panels at the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, the American Historical Association, the Chinese Society for Military History (Taipei), and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. I wish to thank a host of scholars who listened patiently and provided feedback: Shuge Wei, Chang Jui-te, Daqing Yang, Seung-joon Lee, Ch’i Hsi-sheng, Joshua Howard, Jonathan Henshaw, Henrietta Harrison, Xu Guoqi, Priscilla Roberts, Jian Chen, Hans van de Ven, Ke Ren, Mary Brazelton, Chi-man Kwong, David Cheng Chang, Linh Vu, Covell Meyskens, Zhiguo Yang, Yanqiu Zheng, Chunmei Du, Mary Louise Roberts, Elisabeth Leake, Aaron O’Connell, Meredith Oyen, Andrew Rotter, Charles Hayford, Guo Haiying, Henry Marr, Jonathan Hunt, Asa McKercher, Zhong Zhong Chen, James Cameron, Chris Capozzola, Daniel Immerwahr, Kristin Hoganson, Jay Sexton, Mary Kathryn Barbier, Alan Marcus, Julia Osman, Barak Kushner, and Lyle Goldstein. The contributions of Jamie Miller and Judd Kinzley to this project have been enormous. Without their support, I would have lost my way long ago.

This project, which involved sustained research in mainland China, Taiwan, the United States, and Myanmar, would not have been possible without the help of many key individuals and institutions. Yao Zexun, Yuan Zujie, Chang Jui-te, Deng Hegang, Tai Chun, Liu Xun, and Mr. and Mrs. S. T. Lung have assisted me in ways too plentiful to enumerate. Archivists and librarians in Kunming, Chongqing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Tianjin, and Taipei were unfailingly supportive and understanding, especially those who helped me decipher difficult handwriting or looked the other way when I exceeded daily print quotas. Margaret Wong, Thant Thaw Kaung, and the late Raymond Lum facilitated a fruitful, last-minute visit to the Myanmar National Archives, based on a hot tip from Sergey Radchenko. In the United States, I am indebted to Megan Harris at the Veterans History Project, Kurt Piehler and Mike Kasper at the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience, and Hsiao-ting Lin at the Hoover Institution. I am also grateful to archivists and staff at the National Archives and Records Center, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, the Harvard University Archives, the U.S. Army Center for Military History, and the Marine Corps History Division. The research and writing of this project was made possible by grants from Boston University, St. Catherine’s College at the University of Cambridge, the Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center and Chancellor’s Office, the Association for Asian Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

An earlier version of chapter 2 was published in the December 2017 issue of Frontiers of History in China. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published in the September 2019 issue of the Journal of Modern Chinese History. I am grateful to be able to reprint portions of these articles in revised form.

Chronology of Wartime Sino-American Relations and the U.S. Military Presence in China

China, December 1941

The U.S. military in Southwest China

The Tormented Alliance

Introduction

A military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States. That is the truth this book uncovers. It is a conclusion that I resisted over the course of my research—after all, the annex to Hague IV of the Hague Regulations of 1907, which remain in force today, defines a territory as occupied only when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.¹ According to this definition, U.S. military commanders never ruled over Great Britain, Australia, or China during the Second World War, when together these three countries hosted several million American servicemen as allies. But the closer I looked at Chinese history, the harder it was to draw any other conclusion. In the end, nearly a decade of evidence documenting the unraveling of the U.S. alliance with Nationalist (Guomindang

[GMD])

Party leader Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (ROC) during World War II and the Chinese Civil War left me with no other conclusion. To agree to a U.S. alliance, from the Second World War on, is fundamentally to accede to U.S. occupation.

In China, that occupation exposed gaping flaws in the American way of war. Each side brought to the alliance expectations that the other side was simply unable to meet, resulting in a tormented relationship across all levels of Sino-American engagement. By anchoring larger Sino-American struggles over race, gender, and nation, the U.S. military in China transformed itself into a widely loathed occupation force: an aggressive, resentful, emasculating source of physical danger and compromised sovereignty, and—after Japan’s surrender and the spring 1946 withdrawal of Soviet forces from Manchuria—the chief obstacle to consigning foreign imperialism in China irrevocably to the past.

Both countries still benefited from the alliance-cum-occupation, often against massive odds. With last-minute assistance from the Soviets, the two countries beat Japan into submission without invading its main islands or vanquishing Japanese forces in China. While the war raged, the United States bolstered China’s ability to tie down Japanese troops, preventing their redeployment in the Pacific at a relatively low cost. U.S. troop strength in wartime China peaked at around seventy thousand men, and the ROC received only 3.2 percent of America’s foreign lend-lease aid.² Just delivering supplies to China past the Japanese blockade was an enormous logistical challenge, leading to a space-annihilating breakthrough that became a pillar of postwar American power.³ The Hump air bridge connecting India to Southwest China across the Himalayas proved, according to its commander, that the U.S. military could fly anything anywhere anytime.⁴ American airpower also helped put an end to the Japanese terror bombing of Chinese cities, including the wartime capital of Chongqing, where Chiang’s government fled after the Japanese occupied Nanjing in 1937. The ROC carried out its own unprecedented logistical mobilizations—interpreter and hostel programs that overcame the language barrier and kept American personnel in China housed and fed.⁵ These efforts enabled the ROC to emerge from the war with an elite corps of U.S.-trained-and-equipped army divisions.

The alliance facilitated Chinese diplomatic and political gains. In 1943 alone, the United States rescinded its extraterritorial rights in China, ended its anti-Chinese immigration policy, and accepted that all Chinese territories lost to Japan since 1895 would be restored to Chinese sovereignty. Two years later, the ROC’s great power status was affirmed with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But Chiang lost his country in 1949, and the U.S. military presence contributed to his defeat.

In 1942, Chinese welcomed American soldiers as mengyou, meaning allied friends. Unlike U.S. troops stationed in the prewar Chinese treaty ports, these Americans, the Chinese believed, came to China to help crush foreign imperialism, not perpetuate it. Many Chinese elites had aspirations for the alliance beyond Japan’s defeat, seeing the U.S. military presence as a means to transform American perceptions of China and uplift the Chinese nation. U.S. officials had a similar vision. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make China a pillar of a new, non-imperialist postwar order.⁶ Army training material for China-bound personnel emphasized racial equality, and senior American commanders believed in their unique capacity to mentor Chiang’s armies and impart effectiveness.

These lofty ambitions still appeared viable in 1943 in light of China’s stunning diplomatic achievements, but by mid-1945 they had crashed and burned. Chinese who came into contact with GIs now felt anger and alienation. The Chinese Nationalist government’s complicity with the American racism and violent misconduct so blatantly on display in Chinese public life—much of it targeting women—drained Chiang’s regime of legitimacy. Most American personnel, for their part, openly dismissed Chinese as thieving, corrupt, ignorant, and filthy Chinks and slopes, unworthy of American tutelage. The tormented alliance staggered on after Japan’s surrender with the arrival of fifty-three thousand U.S. marines and sailors, hailed as liberators in formerly Japanese-occupied coastal cities. But wartime patterns of mutually damaging Sino-American engagement continued, only now occurring in an entirely new geopolitical context, allowing Mao Zedong’s Communists to harness resentment against the U.S. military presence and deploy it as a powerful tool in their struggle to seize power.

By examining day-to-day interactions between American military personnel and an entire spectrum of Chinese, along with efforts by U.S. and Chinese authorities to manage the U.S. military presence, this book offers a new story about the formation, evolution, and undoing of the U.S.-ROC alliance. It is a tale that has never been told before, and one with implications for the present day.

---

Not long after beginning research, I discovered that the rise and fall of the U.S.-ROC alliance turned upon the actions of a much larger cast of characters than scholars have recognized. More than 121,000 American soldiers, sailors, and marines deployed to China during the 1940s, making this military presence the largest sustained engagement between Americans and Chinese that has ever taken place in China (only ten thousand Americans lived there before the war, and less than seventy-two thousand were living there in 2010).⁷ Yet most studies have reduced this encounter to a story about the contentious relationship between Chiang and General Joseph Stilwell, who served until October 1944 as Chiang’s chief of staff and commander of U.S. forces in China. Throughout the Cold War and into the early 2000s, popular writers and scholars took Stilwell’s disparaging conclusions about Chiang as their starting point, arguing that Chiang’s defeat in 1949 resulted from his myopic refusal to follow Stilwell’s advice, his corruption and authoritarianism, his unwillingness to fight the Japanese, and his desire to let the Americans win the war for him while he hoarded U.S. aid to fight the Communists.⁸ Hans van de Ven’s landmark study War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 demolished what he called the Stilwell myth by documenting the GMD’s undeniable contributions to the joint war effort against Japan and Stilwell’s profound flaws as a military commander.⁹ Subsequent studies by Rana Mitter and Ch’i Hsi-sheng, among others, have bolstered van de Ven’s crucial reappraisal of Stilwell and the Nationalists.¹⁰ My book adds another dimension to this revisionism by revealing how everyday interactions between U.S. forces and an entire spectrum of Chinese contributed to the unraveling of the relationship from the bottom up.

I also learned through my research that it is simply not possible to separate U.S. military support for the ROC during the war against Japan from U.S. military support for the ROC after Japan’s surrender. Unlike much of the previous scholarship on wartime Sino-U.S. relations, which takes Japan’s August 1945 acceptance of the Allied demand for unconditional surrender as its beginning or end point, this book treats all operations involving or catering to U.S. military personnel in China throughout the decade as an interlocking series of events.¹¹ President Roosevelt’s April 1941 approval of the Chinese government’s secret plan to recruit American pilots to defend China’s skies as part of the American Volunteer Group (AVG) marked the beginning of U.S. military intervention undertaken to bolster the Nationalists. Within weeks, the ROC established its interpreter and hostel programs, which evolved into the Nationalist government’s key alliance-building initiatives after Pearl Harbor. Japan’s surrender did not bring the fighting to an end in China (or elsewhere in Asia), nor did it signal the end of U.S. military intervention to shore up the Nationalists, which continued on a large scale through January 1947 and did not fully cease until the last marines departed Qingdao in May 1949. V-J Day made it possible for Americans to regard their job in China as finished, but the transition to peace was not so straightforward.

My search for sources connecting operational and lower-level Sino-American interactions to the alliance’s high politics took me across mainland China, Taiwan, and Myanmar. I started in Kunming, where I spent weeks trying to decipher a room full of smudgy, handwritten archival finding aids. I began to doubt that I would ever get my hands on an actual archival file, but the records eventually came, and after three months of transcribing any file that made reference to American soldiers, I departed with a ninety-six-page Microsoft Word document. For the remainder of my time in China, I tried to be more judicious in my transcriptions, scouring local court, city government, social affairs bureau, garrison command, and police records at municipal and provincial archives from all parts of the country where U.S. troops deployed. Most of these have never been used before. I also pored over newspapers, memoirs, alumni newsletters, local gazettes, and oral history transcriptions. Visits to the Academia Historica in Taipei and the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing yielded central government, foreign ministry, and high-level military records. When battlefield diaries pointed beyond the border, I followed them to Yangon and combed through colonial Burmese intelligence reports from Bhamo and Myitkyina.

The making and unmaking