Reviewed by: The Marshall Mission to China, 1945–1947: The Letters and Diary of Colonel John Hart Caughey ed. by Roger B. Jeans Dong Wang (bio) Roger B. Jeans, editor. The Marshall Mission to China, 1945–1947: The Letters and Diary of Colonel John Hart Caughey. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. xxiii, 289 pp. Hardcover $84.00, isbn 978-1-4422-1294-7. This documentary volume adds to the collection of sources on the Marshall Mission to China from December 1945 to January 1947. The letters and diary edited by Roger B. Jeans—largely from the John Hart Caughey Papers at the George C. Marshall Research Library—throw a personal light on the American efforts at mediation between the two political rivals, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government (GMD) in Chongqing and Nanjing and Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) based in Yan’an. A legion of American advisors in China—including Joseph W. Stilwell, Patrick Hurley, George C. Marshall, Albert C. Wedemeyer, and John Leighton Stuart—personified this peacemaking endeavor as well as underlining the limits of American influence in China in the midst of a domestic Chinese revolution. Parts 1 and 2 provide useful background information, drawn from solid archival and secondary materials, on the Marshall Mission to China and on Colonel John Hart Caughey, respectively. In November 1945, Patrick J. Hurley resigned his position as ambassador to China. While the China question was debated and politicized in Congress, President Harry Truman appointed General of the Army George C. Marshall as his special representative to China with the personal rank of ambassador. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, thirty-four-year-old Caughey was regarded as one of the general’s “bright boys” (p. 9). He served as executive officer, Marshall’s closest subordinate in the political tinderbox of postwar China. Caughey’s letters and diary, reproduced in parts 3 and 4, strengthen our understanding of and lend color to various aspects of the Marshall Mission. The volume as a whole complements existing accounts of the Marshall Mission, including Marshall’s own work, Marshall’s Mission to China, December 1945–January 1947: The Report and Appended Documents; The Forgotten Ambassador: The Reports of John Leighton Stuart, 1946–1949, edited by Kenneth W. Rea and John C. Brewer; John Robinson Beal’s Marshall in China; Larry I. Bland, Roger B. Jeans, and Mark F. Wilkinson’s George C. Marshall’s Mediation Mission to China, December 1945–January 1947; and War and Peace with China: First-hand Experiences in the Foreign Service of the United States, edited by Marshall Green, John H. Holdridge, and William N. Stokes. This book illuminates the positive achievements of the period, such as the unprecedented cooperation between Nationalist China and the United States at the diplomatic, economic, military, and cultural levels. While these turbulent years reveal the roots of the conflict that divided the United States and the People’s [End Page 97] Republic of China after 1949, when viewed in long-term perspective, they also suggest that in some sense Americans and Chinese were drawn closer together through their embattled relationship. The Caughey archive underscores the fact that the Marshall mission was hobbled from the outset by its contradictory objectives, as the government’s instructions to him show. Marshall was told that the United States must side with Chiang, even if he proved obdurate, lest a disintegrating China and Soviet dominance in Manchuria thwart the “major purpose of our war in the Pacific.” “The existence of autonomous armies such as that of the Communist army is inconsistent with, and actually makes impossible, political unity in China.” It was in the United States’ interest that Chiang end the conflict with the Communists, democratize his government, and maintain peace and unity by broadening “the bases of that Government . . . to include other political elements in the country”—because the United States could not support Chiang by “military intervention in an internecine struggle.” “With the institution of a broadly representative government, autonomous armies should be eliminated as such and all armed forces in China integrated effectively into the Chinese National army.”1 Documents in this volume clearly show that the following impossible goals doomed...
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May 16, 2016
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