Rocky Trail in the Far East
Ambrose, Stephen E.
Rocky Trail in the Far East by STEPHEN E. AMBROSE For the past thirty years the United States has been engaged, one way or another, in an Asian war. In the late 1930s we gave aid and some...
...In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come...
...StilwelFs mission was America's supreme try in China...
...Such nonsense can be written only by men who simplify everything...
...She is forthright and honest, hiding none of the unpleasant facts about Western exploitation of China and its people...
...In Roots of Involvement: the United States in Asia 1784-1971, they accept almost all the assumptions about the nature of the world that guide the actions of the American center, and they are simplistic in their judgments...
...Mao's armies in Korea proved his judgment correct...
...She is uncompromising in denouncing Chiang Kai-shek as a front man for the landlords, mandarins, and the West...
...he never slackened and he never gave up...
...Tuchman's conclusion needs to be quoted in full: "In great things, wrote Erasmus, it is enough to have tried...
...Combat efficiency and the offensive spirit, like the Christianity and democracy offered by missionaries and foreign advisers, were not indigenous demands of the society and culture to which they were brought...
...Vietnam is a tragic accident...
...So the Korean and Vietnamese wars become history's fault, whatever that is supposed to mean...
...From 1941 to 1945 we fought Japan for control of the Pacific coast of Asia and its offshore islands...
...At first the nobles fought but they soon got over that and made the people do it for them...
...Liu replied, "University students and graduates are all cowards...
...He made the maximum effort because his temperament permitted no less...
...So we send them to the front and they get killed off and in that way we are eliminating our bad elements...
...Only such realism, based as it is on a full understanding of why we expanded into Asia in the first place, can ever get us out of our generation-long war there...
...We have fought for thirty years for white man's rule in Asia through a policy that can be described only as permanent war in the East...
...Besides, "The Chinese learned long ago to make the lower classes do the fighting...
...They conclude this section by, in effect, throwing up their hands: "History had laid a heavy, special burden on the American people—a burden they could not put down for decades to come...
...As an example, they make a major point in their introduction of examining the background of America's involvement in Asia...
...Barbara Tuchman, in her truly superb study, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911'1945, does tell the details of the Roosevelt involvement in China...
...I know because I am a university man...
...621 pp...
...All we wanted to do was help...
...The American effort to sustain the status quo could not supply an outworn government with strength and stability or popular support...
...In fact, the Roosevelts pushed dope— hard stuff, opium...
...Stilwell's own judgment was that the Chinese, given decent treatment and proper leadership, would make excellent soldiers, as good as any in the West...
...History is not solely to blame, as Kalb and Abel see it—accident played a role too...
...China was a problem for which there was no American solution...
...Through StilwelFs eyes, Tuchman allows us to see the real nature of the relationship between the Chinese elite and the masses...
...In the early days of World War II, Stilwell talked with one of Chiang's officers, General Liu...
...In the late 1950s we sent military advisers to South Vietnam...
...From 1950 to 1953 we fought the North Koreans and Chinese...
...Both qualities are boons on television, where they have only two or three minutes to describe a situation, but these qualities hardly stand Kalb and Abel in good stead when they try to write a book...
...Such a study would have saved them from the absurdity of stating that the Cold War began when Stalin refused to participate in the Plan...
...She does far more, of course, beginning with her treatment of Stilwell, a fascinating character whose personality, contradictions, and temper she describes with great skill...
...They would run...
...The impulse was not Chinese...
...Stumbling is the key word, and the key to their attitude...
...Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945, by Barbara W. Tuchman...
...It does not occur to the authors that these wars came as a result of choices made by the men who held power in the United States...
...The authors searched and searched, but they could find "no substantial evidence that the United States was driven [into Vietnam] by imperialist motives...
...Instead, "we found a rich, generous, and powerful nation stumbling, step by downward step, into the longest, most costly, and most disruptive war Americans have ever fought...
...Our motives were good...
...Kalb and Abel, in short, cannot escape the notion that America is fundamentally good and always acts for altruistic motives...
...This sounds romantic and lovely, especially since the authors do not tell us what the Roosevelt family did in China...
...As an added bonus, she has long digressions on Twentieth Century Chinese history, concentrating on China's relations with the West...
...Marvin Kalb of CBS News and Elie Abel, formerly of NBC News, undertake an answer, but unfortunately precisely those qualities that make them stars on television doom them to failure as analyzers...
...Instead they deal with what they think is happening in Vietnam and Asia generally, then discuss American reaction...
...10...
...Roots of Involvement: the United States in Asia 1784-1971, by Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel...
...In the late 1930s we gave aid and some financial support to China...
...Recent Chinese losses of 600,000 men, Liu said, was "really a good thing...
...Franklin Roosevelt's mother, they write, "had lived in China as a small girl, and he himself loved to tell over and over again stories of the dealings members of his family had had with various Chinese dignitaries and merchants in the earlier decades of the Nineteenth Century...
...The Chinese soldiers are all bandits, robbers, thieves and rascals...
...A study of America in the postwar world would have helped them understand the Marshall Plan, for example, and the motives behind it...
...Yet the mission failed in its ultimate purpose because the goal was unachievable...
...we have had more troops in South Vietnam in the 1960s than General Douglas MacArthur had in the Pacific in World War II, plus a far larger Air Force...
...Had they paid the slightest attention to American society, its structure and its needs, Kalb and Abel might have learned something and advanced our understanding...
...It does not occur to them to turn things around, to examine Asian reactions to American initiative...
...Macmillan...
...After 1954 we supplied arms and other material support to the South Vietnamese, Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, the British in Malaya, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, and South Korea...
...W. W. Norton...
...We have gone back to the early days of the Republic," they claim (and imply that others have not done so), "in our search for understanding . . ." Yet they cover a century and a half, including World War II, in less than fifty pages, barely enough for them to make some meaningless, albeit glittering, generalizations...
...They bribed the dignitaries and sold to the merchants...
...From 1964 onwards we have engaged in a major war in Southeast Asia...
...Unlike Kalb and Abel, she realizes that the West went to China to make money there, and proceeded to do so whatever the cost to the Chinese...
...8.95...
...In 1946 we helped the French re-enter Indochina and put up the money for the French war effort there...
...Stilwell asked why Chiang did not make use of the educated class of officers...
...Why...
...Even the Yellow River Road that Stilwell built in 1921 had disappeared twelve years later...
...336 pp...
Vol. 35 • June 1971 • No. 6
