China and the Helping Hand, 1937-1945

Abstract

OSS IN CHINA: Prelude to Cold War by Maochun Yu. 340 pages. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. 1996. $35.00. In this masterful monograph, Maochun Yu undertakes almost impossible task of writing the history of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in China during World War II. Yu's research experience shows timing is everything. Previous attempts to write about this subject were handicapped by the bitter partisan debates over who lost China, the American intelligence service's real role in the immediate postwar period and in 1970s and Cold War-era revisionism. Since the mid-1980s, the US government has declassified many wartime intelligence records. Yu is one of the first scholars to exploit this valuable new resource. He also interviewed former OSS members or their families, made fresh use of previously published memoirs and judiciously used the growing library of Chineselanguage material on wartime intelligence operations. The result is a fascinating, readable, but ultimately depressing, look at the OSS in wartime China. Quite simply, Yu relates a dismal story of American intelligence failure and shows how it influenced immediate postwar SinoAmerican relations. In his epilogue, he draws conclusions about the ways the CIA benefited from the OSS's China experience. Yu's findings underscore the China Theater's secondary role in the Pacific War. China was at the end of a long and perilous logistic lifeline. The primary goal was to keep Chiang Kaishek from reaching an agreement with Japan, withdrawing from the war and releasing more than one million Japanese troops for use in the Pacific. The OSS emphasized organizational and operational independence at the expense of its mission, gathering and analyzing intelligence to further the war against Japan. This problem is reflected in institutional and personality conflicts. The fighting between American civilian and military intelligence organizations was ferocious, encompassing the Departments of the Army, Navy, Treasury and Commerce as well as the State Department and Office of War Information interests. The rivalry also included the British and French (Free French and Vichy) and conflicts between the Kuomintang (China's ruling party) and the Chinese communists. George Marshall, Ernest King, Milton Miles (head of Navy intelligence in China), Joseph Stilwell, Clarence Gauss (American Ambassador to China), Albert Wedemeyer (Stilwell's replacement), Claire Chennault, Tai Li (head of Chinese intelligence), Michael Lindsay, John Keswick (British intelligence chiefs) and many lower-ranking officials all held grudges against the OSS in general and its chief, General Wild Bill Donovan, in particular. …