By early 1938 the Japanese had practically wiped out the small, Italian-trained, incompetent, corrupt Chinese Air Force. Claire Chennault, an American Army Air Corps (AAC) captain in his late forties, retired for deafness and insistence on (contrary to AAC doctrine) the vulnerability of bombers to pursuit aircraft, was retained by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and Mme. Chiang as air adviser. Chennault looked like the warrior that he was—pitted face, cold straight-on gaze, thin lips, aggressive jaw. As Stilwell was the epitome of the foot soldier, Chennault was that of the open cockpit fighter pilot. These two warriors, both in Hankow during the summer of 1938, would be teamed together four years later in rancorous association.
The Chinese offered no resistance to the Japanese capture of Hankow. In contrast to its savage behavior following the seizure of Nanking, the Japanese army occupied Hankow in a relatively orderly fashion. Life for those of us who stayed behind—thousands of terrified Chinese and several scores of uneasy foreigners—meant virtual captivity; checkpoints within the city and no leaving it without a tightly controlled pass.
My work was political reporting and drafting notes advising the Japanese of the location of American properties in Central China and placing on the invading forces responsibility for damage to any of these properties or harm to any Americans by bombing or other military action. I also made, with reluctant Japanese permission, extended trips into Japanese occupied areas to check on the welfare of isolated Americans. On one of these assignments, involving the evacuation of Americans from a mountain resort held by Chinese Communist guerrillas and besieged by the Japanese, I underwent the stimulating experience of being shot at by the Communists.
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The State Department transferred me in the autumn of 1940 to its Far Eastern (FE) Division, where I was put to work as the junior of two China desk officers. As our windows in the old State-War-Navy building, later housing presidential executive offices, faced the west wing of the White House, one of my duties was to keep at a fixed level all window shades in FE visible from the Executive Mansion, lest President Roosevelt’s eye be affronted by a spectacle of irregularity across the street in the cathedral of American diplomacy. In addition, I moved about the Department prodding other divisions to do things that my superiors wanted done and collecting concurring initials on FE’s draft telegrams. These menial activities were a valuable introduction to the way things were done.
My education in this respect was furthered by acquaintance, originating from Georgetown socializing, with Lauchlin Currie. He was a brisk, little, rimless-bespectacled Harvard economist who had been acquired by Roosevelt as a special assistant. Currie was developing, when I met him, an interest in Chinese affairs and after several social meetings took to phoning me at FE to ask for information or my comments on Chinese events. I thought it odd that he should occupy himself with matters so evidently outside of his expertise. But then this spontaneous straying into other jurisdictions to dabble therein was characteristic of the helterskelter Roosevelt administration.
Naturally, I was flattered by the attention from a presidential aide. At the same time, this contact made me uneasy because Currie was clearly out of channels. By orderly governmental procedure he should have dealt with an Assistant Secretary or certainly no one lower than chief of division. I let my immediate superiors know of Currie’s queries. They expressed no opinion, but I sensed they did not approve of the connection. In the absence of orders forbidding me to respond to requests from the White House, I felt that it would be priggish of me—or at least awkward—to tell a special assistant to the President to take his questions elsewhere.
The President set an example for Currie in operating out of channels and undercutting the man in charge. Roosevelt frequently bypassed his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to deal directly with the Under Secretary, Sumner Welles. This was, of course, the President’s prerogative, and in a sense it was understandable because, while Hull was useful in coping with Congress regarding foreign policy, his knowledge of foreign affairs was limited and his approach simplistic and moralistic. In contrast, Welles was a highly competent professional diplomat.
Good management practice, however, dictated that if Roosevelt had not, for whatever reason, wished to deal with the man he had put in charge of foreign affairs, he should have replaced the Secretary with someone in whom he had full confidence. But FDR did not work that way. He was a politician, not an executive. The confusion that he, his White House staff, and his special emissaries sowed in the conduct of American foreign relations was to grow with passage of time and the emboldenment of Roosevelt’s virtuosos.
Dr. Stanley K. Hornbeck, PhD exercised with some pomposity his mandate as political adviser to the Secretary in Far Eastern matters. Having been promoted from chief of FE, he regarded the division as a fiefdom obligated to serve him. Substantive papers were accordingly submitted to him for approval, or simply for information. An inveterate memo-writer, Hornbeck reacted in pedantic writing to almost anything that came to his clutterpiled-high desk. These indiscriminate memoranda on matters trivial as well as weighty fluttered back to FE throughout the day.
Hornbeck had some academic background in China, but little grounding in Japan. He was morally indignant over Japan’s invasion of China and sympathized with the Chinese. But in that he was no different from most of us in the China service.
As assistant to Hornbeck, a studious young man named Alger Hiss read and screened stacks of papers coming to Hornbeck’s office. I did not envy him his job, working exclusively with the ponderous fussbudget. Alger was amiable, but as he was not in the channel of communication between Hornbeck and the FE, those of us who were junior officers in FE had relatively little contact with him.
Roosevelt had delegated to Hull the tedious and, in terms of domestic American politics, risky business of negotiating with Japan for a lessening of tension between the two countries. The Secretary’s principal adviser in this crucial endeavor was Hornbeck. Also participating in the negotiations, but subordinate to Hornbeck, was the man who had been my chief at Mukden, Joseph Ballantine, a rumpled, nervous and rather engaging Japan specialist.
The May to December 7, 1941 negotiations with the Japanese Ambassador took place at the State Department in strict secrecy. My fellow junior officers and I were in uneasy ignorance of what was transpiring. We drew up a statement expressing our opposition to any deal with Japan at the expense of China. This we presented to the Chief of FE, Maxwell M. Hamilton. In considerable agitation he told us, in effect, not to meddle in matters beyond our province and intimated that the Army and Navy (both urgently trying to strengthen themselves) wanted the State Department to play for time, at least to delay if we could not avoid hostilities with Japan.
My colleagues and I had acted on a misapprehension. The risk was not a sell-out of China. Rather, the risk was cornering Japan so that it had no alternative but to fight. Hull and Hornbeck were rigidly pro-Chinese and, both temperamentally and as a matter of principle, incapable of making a compromise deal with Japan for a modus vivendi, or what is now called peaceful co-existence. While I doubt that such a deal was then possible, given the rising antagonism in the American public toward Japan in 1941, the Hull-Hornbeck combination ensured that no compromise could be negotiated. And so the United States and Japan moved inflexibly, almost as if they were predestined to do so, toward war. And the American Armed Forces did not get the time that they wanted for preparation.
I was off on a blithe fortnight’s vacation when the Japanese attached Pearl Harbor. From Texas eastward was unknown territory to me. So I had eagerly embarked on a scanning tour through the south. Roark Bradford introduced me to the unique charm of his New Orleans, to pleasant but vapid bayous (lacking the redolence of similar Asian waterways), and to the improbable settlement of Chinese and Slovak shrimpers on the Grand Isle of the Cajuns.
By comparison, the Gulf coast eastward was bland. And then Charleston, South Carolina, more coherent and sedate than New Orleans, architecturally harmonious, a graceful city on a personal scale. It was in this agreeable setting, on a placid Sunday midday, from excited conversations on the street and turned-up radios, that I heard the news of Pearl Harbor.
I was surprised, but not astounded, and reproached myself for not having anticipated something like