Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to loan $500,000,000 to Nationalist China.
US poster for China relief. This is obviously an idealized poster, but its interesting in that the family is shown in typical Chinese dress for the time, with the Nationalist soldier pretty accurately shown with a export pattern contract M98 Mauser and attired in German inspired clothing, including the feldmutze adopted by the Nationalist Chinese Army.
This doesn't seem surprising now, but in retrospect, Nationalist China's road to being an ally of the United States was a circuitous one. The Nationalist had been a Soviet client since 1921 and remained one even after the Communist were removed from the Kuomintang, the event that brought about the Chinese Civil War. Indeed, while the Soviets also supported the Chinese Communist Party, it operated to force the CCP to make accommodations to the Kuomintang even while the two were fighting against each other. Moscow's hand was so heavy that it can be argued that Stalin essentially prevented a Communist takeover of China before 1949 through its actions. A pre-war effort by the Japanese to secure a treaty with the USSR that went beyond being a mere non-aggression pact had included, as part of its conditions, that the Soviets quit supplying the Nationalist, which the Soviets refused.
Soviet volunteer aviators with the Nationalist Chinese. Soviet aircrews fought with the Nationalist until the German invasion of the USSR, making their volunteer effort earlier than the American one.
Indeed, the Soviets not only supplied aid and material to the Chinese Nationalist, they supplied a group of volunteer aviators. The US AVG came about only after the Soviet effort concluded. The Soviets, therefore, aided the Nationalist in real terms longer, and in some ways, more concretely, than the US did, right up until the late 1930s when the US became very interested in Japanese aggression in China.
Soviet I-16 fighter in Nationalist Chinese use. This aircraft was a popular fighter of the 1930s and saw service early in World War Two, by which time it was obsolete.
At the same time, Nationalist China received significant support from Nazi Germany as well.
Poster symbolizing German and Nationalist Chinese military cooperation, and also demonstrating the very close appearance of their respective uniforms. The German pattern helmets used by the Chinese were of the late M35 pattern, making them a more modern pattern, for example, than that usually shown worn by the Finns, who retained the old M16s until later patterns were supplied to them during World War Two.
German aid to the Chinese Nationalist military dated back to Weimar Germany, and China had been one of the outlet nations which allowed the Weimar government to basically bypass restrictions on the size of the German officer corps. This continued on into the 1930s with it going so far as to see one of Chiang Kai Shek's children, an adopted son, receive German military training, while another saw an education in the USSR, showing the nature of the relationship between the two countries and the Nationalist.
Chiang Wei-kuo.
The Germans pulled towards the Japanese in the late 1930s, although that relationship was not anywhere near as seamless or trusting as sometimes supposed, and was more than a little cynical on the German side (it was much less cynical on the Japanese side). As this occurred the Germans began to slowly abandon the Chinese, although not before the Chinese Nationalist Army was essentially equipped in a fashion that distantly mirrored the German Army's to a significant extent. The Nationalist Chinese fought the Second World War principally armed with German infantry weapons, and they even acquired a handful of tanks from the Germans before Japanese protests caused the supply of such things to cease.
Chinese soldier guarding American P-40s. He's armed with a contract German M98 Mauser and his uniform, sans footgear, is basically German in pattern.
The United States, in contrast, had never actually been a major military supplier to anyone prior to World War Two and only stepped into that role with China very late, indeed basically at the same time it started to supply the British in the Second World War.
It should be noted that in spite of all of this aid, from all of these various sources, and in spite of the fact that the Nationalist Chinese fought much better than they have been credited as doing, massive corruption existed within the Nationalist Chinese ranks which enormously depleted their effectiveness. Vast amounts of aid were wasted or subject to corrupt diversion and the plight of the Chinese enlisted man a bad one, which accounted for a massive desertion rate.
The US can be regarded as having been naive throughout this period in regard to China in every fashion. The Nationalist Chinese fought much harder than they're credited with against the Japanese, as noted, but the Nationalist were not in a position to expel them and their own internal corruption hindered their effectiveness. Chiang clashed with his American advisor's views, although he was always extremely polite to them even though he knew that some, such as Gen. Stilwell, held him in contempt. The long history of his political movement demonstrates that it was one of complicated political beliefs which in fact included some sympathy to the very hard left, but the government was not a democratic one during Chiang's control of it, something he attributed to wartime and civil war conditions.
Wartime pro British Nationalist card.
During the war the US military mission to China would become significant, but wartime conditions also meant that the OSS mission was more than a little sympathetic to the Chinese Communists and, in fact, included members who were Communist themselves. The rapid collapse of the Chinese Nationalist, who had held out throughout the 1930s, raised questions that have still never really been fully answered about how that came about, but it is clear that the Truman administration simply had no real sympathy for the Nationalist and had grown tired of them. Here too, the US failed to appreciate China and where things were heading, once the Nationalist had lost the favor of their final patron, the United States. Chiang, for his part, partially attributed his 1949 defeat to the corruption that has always existed in his movement, and he diligently worked to eliminate it once he was exiled to Taiwan.
Oddly, Chiang Kai Shek has undergone a bit of a rehabilitation in Communist China in recent years, with some scholarly articles reassessing his leadership favorably. It's hard to know what to make of this.
On this same day, and on the same topic, more or less, Joseph Stilwell was designated Chief of Staff to Supreme Commander, China Theatre, which meant he was Chief of Staff to Chiang.
Stilwell didn't get along with Chiang and was outraged by Chinese corruption and military inefficiency, both of which were very real as noted. He became more vociferous about his views as the war went on, and was ultimately partially recalled because of this. He referred to Chiang as peanut, and his views might be best illustrated, in part, by this poem he authored.
Also on this day, as Sarah Sundin's blog reports:
February 2, 1942: : US 808th Engineer Aviation Battalion arrives in Melbourne to build airfields near Darwin, Australia. Allied ships begin withdrawal from Singapore to East Indies.
At this time, there was a real fear that the Japanese would land on Australia.
On the Eastern Front, the Germans were forced to supply the troops surrounded at Kholm by air.
Life Magazine featured a P-47 on its cover, a stunning thing to realize in that in 1942 the common American fighter was the over matched P-40. The P-47 would go on to be one of the great convoy escort aircraft of the war and obtain a reputation as a terrific ground support aircraft. The plane had made its first flight in 1941 and had not yet gone into service, but the fact that it was at this stage meant that the US had already leaped an entire aircraft generation ahead of any other combatant in the war.
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