With Friends Like These: World War II Advisory Efforts and the Origins of Sino-U.S. Competition

Sara B. Castro, Mission to Mao: U.S. Intelligence and the Chinese Communists in World War II (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2024); Zach Fredman, The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

Confucius says, “To have friends come from afar to visit, is that not, indeed, a joy?” Not always, as it turns out — at least when those friends are Americans coming to help in World War II.

This is the argument of two recent books documenting the fractious cooperation between the United States, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Nationalists during the 1940s. Sara Castro, a historian of intelligence at the U.S. Air Force Academy, follows the “bottom up” history of the U.S. “Dixie” Mission to the Communists in their hinterland base at Yan’an. Zach Fredman, who studies the history of the United States and China at Duke-Kunshan University, tells a corresponding story of how U.S. military assistance to the Nationalists — what he calls an “alliance-cum-occupation” — bred an enduring Anti-Americanism in China, even as it helped win the war.

At a moment when the conversation about Sino-U.S. relations is characterized by an “odd mix of mendacity, amnesia, and half-truths,” both Fredman and Castro provide reliable histories that double as cautionary tales. In the 1940s, Americans — often with the best of intentions and considerable skill — got China wrong. They did so, Fredman and Castro argue, because chauvinistic U.S. attitudes (in addition to more mundane bureaucratic frictions) distorted analyses, inhibited cooperation, and engendered resentments. It is unclear if U.S. military leaders and area experts in the 2020s will avoid these same pitfalls. An appreciation of past challenges might help — or at least save the time and pain of learning the hard way all over again.

A “Forgotten Ally” No Longer

The significance of China’s role in World War II (or the Pacific War, or the War to Resist Japanese Aggression, depending on your politics) has been a subject of debate for several decades. For most of the 20th century, professional and armchair historians in the United States tended to downplay and even degenerate the importance of China in the war. Reading backward from the Nationalist defeat in the Chinese Civil War (1927–49), many portrayed Chiang Kai-shek’s army and political apparatus as inept or, worse still, wantonly corrupt. Illustratively, the senior U.S. officer in China, Gen. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, referred to Chiang as the “peanut”: diminutive, incompetent, and as much an impediment to U.S. designs as an asset. The Communists — viewed through the prism of Cold War tensions — were likewise suspect partners. So too were any number of U.S. “China Hands” who worked with Mao Zedong during the war. The underappreciation was so pervasive that historian Rana Mitter’s 2014 reassessment could describe China as the “Forgotten Ally” of World War II. The Beijing Review offered mostly positive feedback of Mitter’s book in a review titled, “China: A WWII Ally that Should Not Be Forgotten.” Other historians like S.C.M. Paine, Hans van de Ven, and Erez Manela, have likewise worked to rehabilitate China and its contributions to the war.

There is ample reason for all revisionism — indeed, it was overdue. For a start, count the casualties. Estimates vary widely owing to the scale of destruction, but it is certain that millions of soldiers and ordinary Chinese citizens died tying down the Imperial Japanese Army in mainland Asia. Accounting for these deaths is both morally and strategically essential. Then there are the origins of the war: World War II starts in China, either in Manchuria in 1931, or at the Marco Polo bridge in 1937. It ends there as well, with Soviet armies crashing into the heart of Japan’s mainland empire. Finally, consider the prominence of China in the postwar aspirations of U.S. leaders. Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned Chiang Kai-shek’s China as one of the four policemen of the international order. From start to finish, China was both a crucial combatant in and theater of World War II.

With this broad interest in China’s World War II as a backdrop, historians Sara Castro and Zach Fredman have authored two excellent studies of a more particular and contemporarily relevant set of questions. What did U.S. assistance (successful, attempted, and often frustrated) with the “forgotten ally” look like from the ground up? What can this perspective say about the unraveling of Sino-U.S. relations in the late 1940s? And, critically, how does that legacy — of expectations dashed by misapprehension — affect the present?

The Yan’an Mission

Castro has produced the best account of the U.S. Army Observer Group Yan’an mission to the Chinese Communist Party base in Shaanxi Province (1944–47). This “Dixie Mission” (apparently the nickname evoked rebel forces and was much easier for telegraphists than the formal title) was organized under the auspices of U.S. Army intelligence but included a healthy proportion of Office of Strategic Services operatives. The mission hoped to connect with the Chinese Communists and ascertain a sense of Mao’s capabilities and intentions. Dixie succeeded in linking up, and in some forms of cooperation. After nearly crash-landing a C-47 into Yan’an, Army officers and their Office of Strategic Services colleagues huddled in cave dwellings (like most people in Yan’an), risking carbon monoxide poisoning from fires in the winter cold. Living with the Communists, the Dixie members produced reports, gathered weather data, and worked to build out networks to recover downed airmen.

Despite these achievements, Dixie suffered from substantial limitations, most self-imposed. Castro argues that these were at once bureaucratic and ideological. Bureaucratically, the mission fell afoul of competing U.S. and Chinese interests. U.S. Army intelligence wanted to control information coming out of Yan’an and sparred with the Office of Strategic Services over personnel allocations and analytical judgements. For his part, Chiang Kai-shek wanted to keep tabs on any and all Americans interacting with the Communists. As an unfortunate result, U.S. intelligence on the Chinese Communists was biased by Mao’s arch-enemy Chiang. More corrosively, Castro says, even the savviest of China hands brought with them an implicit cultural superiority born of the Open Door era. Castro calls this “imperial hubris”: a misguided sense of U.S. responsibility over the Chinese. With paternalism baked in, Dixie was never likely to gain authentic insights about the Communists or their revolutionary agenda.

Historians of the Dixie Mission almost always convey this sense of hubris through the same anecdote: the arrival of Gen. Patrick Hurley to Yan’an in November 1944. An Oklahoman, he alighted from his C-47 in dress uniform, letting out a Choctaw “war-whoop” as he did — much to the befuddlement of the Chinese. Just who was this American, and why on earth was this his choice of first impression? Castro, sensitive to the social and cultural dynamics of the Dixie Mission, captures a Chinese response that is still more revealing of the moment and its incongruity. On witnessing Hurley’s arrival, Zhou Enlai turned to the Americans on the flightline, and said, in effect, “stall him” while Zhou scrambled to find Mao and hastily organized an “honor guard” to match the American general and his pretensions.

Today, Yan’an has changed quite a bit from the cave-living days of the 1930s and ’40s. Commonly referred to as a “holy land” of the revolution, the city hosts the monumental Yan’an Revolutionary Memorial Hall. A museum on site celebrates the foreigners that arrived in Yan’an to work with the Communists. These foreigners provided assistance, but also more critically a sense of international recognition. That the U.S. Army and American intelligence services were once welcome in this “holy land” is at once an uncomfortable irony for the Chinese Communist Party and essential context for those hoping to understand the trajectory of Sino-U.S. relations. Castro’s story is a prologue to the present.

Mission to the Nationalists

Zach Fredman shares the goal of revising China’s place in World War II and tells a corresponding story about the United States and the Nationalists. Relative to Castro’s interest in Yan’an, Fredman casts his net across a wider geographic range and “spectrum” of historical actors. His narrative stretches from Chongqing to Burma to Washington, DC, and from the highest echelons of authority down to the latrines and mess halls of ordinary soldiers. Throughout, he argues that even when ostensibly cooperating with the Chinese, U.S. servicemen undermined their effectiveness through bad or misguided behavior: sexual misconduct, racism, unequal living standards, and bad-faith conflicts over strategy. Looking beyond the war’s end in 1945, Fredman contends that the U.S. military, as a result of these actions, transformed in the eyes of many Chinese into an occupying force. In doing so, U.S. troops played into the hands of Communist propaganda. Partnering with the United States won Chiang Kai-shek material and tactical aid, but cost him his anti-imperialist bona fides with his own people — a bad bargain.

 Tormented Alliance grows out of an award-winning dissertation, but to the book’s credit, it does not read like a thesis warmed up for publication. It is lively and pugilistic. Fredman’s style benefits from a diverse set of sources, accumulated from archives in mainland China, Myanmar, Taiwan, and the United States. By comparison, Castro works mostly from U.S. archives, supplemented by official compilations of Chinese documents. These collections obviously have biases and gaps, but given research restrictions in the People’s Republic of China, they are often the best available materials. That is especially true for researchers who face additional challenges in mainland China as U.S. government employees.

Fredman’s sources allow him to tell six stories he finds representative of the Sino-U.S. alliance involving housing, interpreters, strategic debates, interactions with ordinary Chinese, sexual relations, and the occupation after 1945. He argues that in all these areas U.S. servicemen managed to alienate their Chinese counterparts. Fredman demonstrates this by focusing on the interpersonal dynamics of the alliance. U.S. servicemembers enjoyed better living standards, casually disrespected Chinese officers, and precipitated a “Jeep Girl” crisis through sexual relations (consensual or not) with Chinese women. U.S. Army leaders stressed, Fredman notes, that “anti-Chinese racism was toxic to the alliance” because it played into Japanese propaganda about “Asia for the Asians.” American military personnel, nonetheless, brought the same assumptions of Open Door imperialism to Nationalist Chongqing that Castro detected in Communist Yan’an. Mao later cited that condescension to discredit Chiang as a “running dog” of the U.S. empire. For Fredman, the big takeaway is this: although the Nationalists benefited from U.S. cooperation — gaining material support and great power status in the form of a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council — Chiang mortgaged his regime’s existence by becoming a junior partner to the United States.

Tormented Alliance is an important work, and quite convincing as an account of the Sino-U.S. experience in China during the 1940s. At times, however, Fredman seems keen to make a generalizable point about the United States, its military, and empire. He begins by staking out the position, “A military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States.” Published in the wreckage of the 2021 American withdrawal from Afghanistan (which Fredman covers in the last two paragraphs of the book), it is easy to understand the sentiment. Indeed, to its credit, Fredman’s research should be evaluated alongside related arguments about U.S. imperialism and militarism by Andrew Bacevich, Cynthia Enloe, and Daniel Immerwahr. He shows clearly that U.S. military advisors in China acted functionally as occupiers.

But only the Americans? Were British advisors in China occupiers too? Or the Soviet experts who made their way to the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s? Was Yan’an occupied by the United States? Moreover, alliances and occupations are not created equally. Swedish and Finnish leaders might be surprised to learn they volunteered for occupation by the United States when they joined NATO.  Also, empirical work (and anecdotal experience, for what it is worth) shows that relations between local populations and U.S. military bases are more complex than their depictions in much of the academic literature.

The Present and the Past

All of this makes for fascinating history, but the books are also politically salient. While the black-and-white pictures or archaic spellings (“Chungking”) may seem antiquarian, the nature of U.S. aid and empire in Asia is as relevant today as it is sensitive. Reinvigorated defense cooperation with the Philippines, Australia, and Taiwan has brought advisors back to region. In doing so, they inherit generations of historical baggage from earlier alliances and occupations — perhaps none more consequential than the U.S. relationship with China during the last multipolar, great power war. Ignorance of this period presents quotidian risks, like giving offense through naivete (“oh, did you not know about that time when?”) or duplicating knowledge that already exists (“actually, we have already done that”). It also puts U.S. officers and experts at a narrative disadvantage when engaging with counterparts from the People’s Republic of China. Castro and Fredman’s books are “contemporary history” in the sense that though temporally removed, they are also necessary background to understand the present. Encountering this story — of “American Empire” in China and Asia — for the first time in the form of Communist Chinese propaganda would be a poor introduction.

As importantly, Castro and Fredman offer an implicit warning about the power of biases and cultural chauvinism to defeat the good intentions of intelligent people. Promoting deterrence and cooperation in the Indo-Pacific will hinge on an authentic understanding of attitudes in Taipei and Beijing, and for that matter Canberra, Manila, Tokyo, and Seoul. That task was difficult in the 1940s because of U.S. prejudices. In an era of “America First” nationalism and reflexive suspicion toward China, it seems nearly impossible. These books, and the warning they issue about the embedded assumptions of U.S. imperialism, will help anyone interested in improving on the performance of their predecessors.

Tommy Jamison is an assistant professor of strategic studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. The views here do not represent the positions of any U.S. government agency.

Image: United States Archives

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