I missed this when it started, which was October 10, so I'll note it here. This was day two of Operation Beleaguer, the Marine Corps occupation of northeastern China's Hebei and Shandong provinces from 1945 until 1949.
Members of the 1st Marine Division in China. Two Chinese women appear in this photograph, one dressed in Western clothing, even though the Marine Corps attempted to strictly prevent romances breaking out between Marines and Chinese civilians. People are people, so such interactions are essentially impossible to stop, but this particular story is very understudied, in part because Asian women were not covered by the War Brides Act, but marriages nonetheless occured. 5,132 Chinese women entered the United States as spouses of servicemen after World War Two, which included women who married Army Air Corps servicemen who had served in China during the war. This is, overall, a small number, and indeed its must smaller than the number of Japanese women who married U.S. servicemen after 1950, which reflects official policy, cultural differences, and lingering US prejudice in the period against the Chinese.
It was not a combat operation, although some combat would ultimately occur, but focused on the repatriation of more than 600,000 Japanese and Koreans that remained in China at the end of World War II to their homelands. Having said that, the looming crisis in post war China in which a seemingly defeated Communist Party began to advance in the country's civil war was not far from anyone's mind and the primary mission of force was to prevent the People's Liberation Army from accepting the surrender of Japanese soldiers in Northern China and to secure that region of China for the Nationalist Government, which had been an American ally throughout the war. Landings actually commenced as early as September 30. By the end of the operation in 1949, the 1st Marine Division would be a covering force for the evacuation of foreign nationals.
U.S. Marines had been in China well before World War Two, but in this instance the it was effectively a different Marine Corps than the one that had existed up until 1940. The Marine Corps had only been a major combat force once previously, and that had been during World War One when the 4th Marine Brigade had been part of the US Second Division. The 1st Marine Division dated back only to February 1, 1941 when the military started to enormously expand in anticipation of going to war. Given its prior history, only the Marines themselves really anticipated being a major ground combat element in the war, ultimately expanding to six divisions. Six divisions is a huge Marine Corps, but the Corps was dwarfed in size by the Army, even in terms of Pacific combat, where the Army deployed twenty two divisions.
With the end of the war the service began to return men quite rapidly to civilian status and members of the Marine Corps, the vast majority of whom were wartime volunteers, anticipated the same. Prior to the war Marines tended to be career oriented to a high degree, and frankly about as rough of set of characters as could be imagined. By 1945 most of them were toughened civilians in uniform, comparable to volunteers in the U.S. Army, and some were conscripts. Nobody anticipated being sent into China, even though prior to the war Marines had served there.
Because the military was in fact demobilizing, this would prove to be a problem for the 1st Marine Division in China, as it soon began to suffer attrition due to members being discharged. It's combat efficiency dropped, and at the same time, it became increasingly obvious that the Communists were going to win the Chinese Civil War.
While going to China was a surprise to the Marines, the found when they arrived that the Chinese were wildly enthusiastic about their appearance. No doubt their showing up meant not only that they were liberated from the Japanese, but also from the Communists and the Nationalist, at least for a time.
On this, while we're jumping way ahead of our story, it's also worth noting that this points out a problem in the "who lost China" line of the Republican Party following the evacuation of the Chinese Nationalist from the mainland. There are a lot of elements to that story, but the GOP at the time, suddenly shocked following the Berlin Blockade and then the fall of the Nationalist government in China, looked for somebody to blame.
It might be noted at first, that they should have looked at themselves. The GOP had been actively highly isolationist prior to World War Two and evcen leading up the last year before the war there were strong elements within the party that opposed entering the war. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor followed by the German declaration of war on the U.S. solved that for a time, but upon the restoration of peace, the main branch of the GOP returned to isolationism. The US didn't become isolationist as the 79th Congress remained controlled by Democrats. The 80th Congress did not, but it was somewhat ineffectual for that period (which is nothing compared to today). The 80th Congress, however, notably presided over the fall of China.
Be that as it may, some have suggested that US inaction over China was due to the penetration of the US by Soviet spies in the 1930s, and there may be a little to that, but only a little. M. Stanton Evans hinted at that in his revisionist biography of Joseph McCarthy, which is quite well done and a good read. But even there, the suggestion was that Communist elements managed to hold up arms shipments to the Nationalist. Even were that true, any follower of this site could see that in 1945 China was awash in arms and yet at the same time the Nationalist were losing battle after battle.
It is something worth exploring. Before the war with Japan, the Nationalist were winning. After the war, it just took five years for them to lose.
Anyhow,, realistically, looking at Operation Beleaguer, what really could have been done? The US was not going to be able to send U.S. troops into a Chinese Civil War right after World War Two. There was no public will for that at all and no moral within the U.S. military that would have allowed for that to have occured.
Elsewhere in China, the Shangdang Campaign ended in communist victory.
German general Anton Dostler was sentenced to death in Rome for war crimes.
The Norwegian Supreme Court upheld the death sentence imposed on Vidkun Quisling.
Last edition:
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