Session 9: Foreign Military Aid and Assistance to China

These papers by Professor ZHANG Baijia (Department of History, Beijing University ) and Professor Maochun YU (Department of History, U.S. Naval Academy) provoked a lively and sometimes heated debate over the nature and importance of foreign aid to China during the war. To a certain extent, the two papers overlapped each other in subject matter, though Professor Zhang devoted more space to German and Soviet aid than Professor Yu who spent the major part of his paper in viewing American aid and, in particular, the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and the Roosevelt administration in the management and disbursement of that aid.

Together, the two presentations illuminated difficulties, both domestic and internal, in the transfer of foreign aid to China that were both domestic and external. As an ardent nationalist, Chiang Kai-shek was understandably suspicious of the motivations of the powers who intervened in China after 1937, yet as a wartime leader of his nation, he desperately needed their help. In addition, Chiang's efforts to secure such aid for national reconstruction and national defense were complicated by the seismic political shifts abroad in the 1930s. The myth of America 's "special relationship" with China was undercut during the decade by the Depression and by American isolationism. German aid -- which came with the fewest strings attached -- dried up soon after the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact. Soviet assistance, which at times included the active participation of Soviet military personnel (as fighter pilots) was on-again-off-again, given Stalin's rapidly shifting priorities. American aid, which constituted the bulk of the assistance to China during the war, was a program frequently riven by the divergent and contradictory objectives of Chiang Kai-shek and the Roosevelt administration.

For his part, Chiang not only had to battle against the common Japanese enemy, but also had to consolidate his power at home, which meant reserving sufficient force for the eventual showdown with the Chinese Communists. To Chiang, therefore, American aid to the Communists was an abomination. But the Roosevelt administration had global priorities which did not necessarily include China and thus China fell in status to a secondary and, at times, a tertiary theater. For this reason it was willing to pursue initiatives that might speed the Pacific War and assist possible landings on the north China coast, where the Communists were influential and formed the most likely allies.

All of this would have troubled wartime Sino-American relations in any event, but a range of difficult and forceful personalities - Chiang himself, Joseph Stillwell (roundly castigated in his paper by Professor Yu), Claire Chennault, Patrick Hurley, and others - exacerbated the situation and left a legacy of tortured postwar relations between China and the U.S.

These papers - while not entering the postwar "who lost China " debates of the 1950s -- pointed up the complex international dimensions of the war. To that extent, they underscore an important and ongoing problem in modern war: the difficulties of conducting coalition war. More specifically, it pointed up an historical truth: the problem of a coalition involves more than a common enemy, it involves national and personal interests, doctrinal and technological issues, and questions of perceived comparative advantage. These are issues that will continue to be of interest to historians of modern warfare, not just to East Asian specialists.