On the morning of November 23, 1948, three weeks after the fall of Mukden, standing on the bleak Nanking airfield, chilled by the biting wind off the turbulent Yangtze River, I watched disconsolately as the Australian Air Force plane lifted over the city wall and headed east toward Tokyo. With Communist armies advancing toward the Nationalist capital, the dependents of foreign diplomats were being evacuated. Audrey, to whom I was newly engaged, the daughter of Chester Ronning, minister-counselor of the Canadian Embassy, was aboard the plane with her mother, two siblings, and other women and children of the Canadian and Australian embassies. As the plane disappeared into the clouds, I wondered when I might see Audrey again. We’d had so little time together.
I climbed back into my jeep. Glancing at the rows of Nationalist B-24 and B-25 bombers and P-38 fighters on the tarmac, I thought of how impressive they looked, and yet they had been so ineffectual in operations against the Communists. Washington had provided Chiang Kai-shek with a sizable air force, much of it delivered since the end of the war against Japan. It comprised 939 aircraft in 15 squadrons. More than 5,000 personnel had been trained by American instructors. But the performance of the air crews was ranked as being of the lowest order by frustrated officers of the Air Advisory Division of JUSMAG. The bomber and fighter pilots habitually clung to such high altitudes in combat operations so as to render the Nationalist Air Force virtually useless. Fighter strafing runs were usually carried out ineffectively at altitudes of 1,500 to 2,000 feet. Parachute drops to beleaguered garrisons and units were often made from such high altitudes that the supplies frequently drifted into the hands of besieging Communist forces. Some American advisers believed that the poor performance by the pilots was deliberate, reflecting their lack of belief in the cause for which they supposedly were fighting. General Barr bluntly said he thought that the Chinese pilots simply did not want to kill any of their compatriots, irrespective of whether they were “enemy” Communists.
For weeks prior to the fall of the Manchurian cities, there had been frequent frenzied scenes at the Nanking airport. Nationalist transports were swooping in from the north, harbingers of the imminent fall of some city to the Communists, bearing the families and concubines of generals and senior officials, together with large cases of personal belongings. Observing the traffic, I thought of what better use might have been made of those transports—rescuing troops from Communist encirclements on the Manchurian plain.
I drove from the airport into Hsinchiehkow, the central district of Nanking, where most of the government offices and the best shops were located. The approaches to the city were guarded by well-armed Nationalist army divisions under the cover of the air force, but the capital nevertheless was gripped with a pervasive sense of impending doom. The war was going badly for the Nationalists on all fronts. Whereas the Nationalists had begun the year with almost a three-to-one numerical superiority in military manpower, the Communists now held the advantage in terms of combat effectives. They had taken the initiative in all sectors. The Communists admitted to suffering at least 300,000 casualties in two years of aggressive offensives, but the losses had been more than made up by Nationalist defections and recruiting. To the northwest of the capital, beyond the Huai River, which flowed east to west about one hundred miles north of Nanking, one million troops of the opposing camps were moving into confrontation on the approaches to both Nanking and Shanghai for what would become one of the largest military engagements in history. I drove past hundreds of Nationalist soldiers in disheveled yellow uniforms, stragglers and deserters from the defeated armies in the north, wandering aimlessly through the streets. Thousands of refugees from the carnage of the war zone, among them elites fleeing Communist purges in the countryside, were camped with their families on the sidewalks, huddled against buildings for shelter. The city was under martial law. Police stood with fixed bayonets at street intersections. Gendarmes had been deployed to beat back mobs clamoring to loot shops in which speculators were selling hoarded stocks of rice at ever soaring prices. There were pitiful sights of refugee families squatting before restaurants hoping scraps would be thrown to them. Each morning sanitation trucks patrolling the streets picked up the bodies of those who had died of hunger or cold during the night.
A week before Audrey’s departure I had looked on stunned as the eight hundred American officers and enlisted men of JUSMAG were evacuated overnight in a pell-mell rush. In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had decided to withdraw the advisers hastily, believing that JUSMAG could no longer serve a useful purpose and that Nanking would soon be in the hands of the Communists. In the JUSMAG compounds, tons of warehoused supplies were abandoned as well as personal possessions in family apartments of officers, everything from record players to fancy draperies. The leavings disappeared within hours as former Chinese employees and scavengers ravaged the premises. I walked through the empty American Officers’ Club, where I months earlier met Audrey at a dinner hosted by the American military attaché. The leader of the club’s White Russian band would strike up our favorite song, “Golden Earrings,” as we entered the club. The swank club, a palatial residence with stately gardens, once occupied by Wang Ching-wei, president of the Japanese puppet regime during World War II, now stood stripped, empty, discarded sheets of music littering the bandstand.
General Barr, frustrated and bitter after the withdrawal of his advisory group in unseemly haste, fired off a report on November 18 to the Department of Defense on his relations with Chiang Kai-shek and his generals, in which he said: “No battle has been lost since my arrival due to the lack of ammunition or equipment. Their military debacles in my opinion can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership and many other morale destroying factors that led to a complete loss of the will to fight. The complete ineptness of high military leaders and the widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the Armed Forces could in some measure have been controlled and directed had the above authority and facilities been available. Chinese leaders completely lack the moral courage to issue and enforce an unpopular decision.” Barr, who shared the contents of his report with me, also told the department that the military situation had deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of U.S. troops and a secure American supply pipeline could provide a remedy. But the general recommended against any such commitment, which he said would require thousands of American troops.
The general had been frank and forthcoming when Chiang Kai-shek solicited his advice, but his guidance was rarely heeded. As he departed, Barr had reason to recall Marshall’s caution at the time he was appointed chief of JUSMAG a year earlier:
I am willing that General Barr should make his advice available to the Generalissimo on an informal and confidential basis and that the Army Advisory Group should supply advice with respect to reorganization of Chinese Army Services of Supply should that be desired. I am, however, not willing that we should accept responsibility for Chinese strategic plans and operations. I think you will agree that the implications of accepting that responsibility would be very far-reaching and grave and that such responsibility is in logic inseparable from the authority to make it effective. Whatever the Generalissimo may feel moved to say with respect to his willingness to delegate necessary powers to Americans, I know from my own experience that advice is always listened to very politely but frequently ignored when deemed unpalatable.
Amid the chaos in the capital, in a modern Nanking office building erected in an inner courtyard of the old “Heavenly” Palace built by leaders of the Tai’ping Rebellion who with a distorted view of Western Christianity had risen up against the Qing dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century, the Generalissimo sat behind a massive desk defiantly warding off entreaties by panicky ministers. The vice president, Li Tsung-jen, and other leaders of the ruling KMT Party and government were eager for peace talks with the Communists, but the Generalissimo thwarted them at every turn. A lean, erect indomitable man, the sixty-one-year-old Chiang was unshaken in his conviction that ultimately he would defeat his Communist foes. This was the essence of what I heard him declare at one of his rare press conferences in the palace. Presumably it was also the import of the message he asked Madame Chiang Kai-shek, his Wellesley-educated wife, to convey to Washington in personal appeals to President Truman and Secretary of State Marshall for a new infusion of massive assistance.
I was appalled by the evident ineptitude and corruption of Chiang’s regime, but I was not totally without sympathy for the struggling Generalissimo. After establishing Nanking as his capital in 1928, the Generalissimo had found little time to unify China and transform the “Southern Capital” of the Ming emperors into the proud Nationalist capital he envisioned. In 1931, four years after he had marched to Peking from Canton, the southern metropolis where Sun Yat-sen founded the Chinese Republic, and succeeded in compelling the northern warlords to bow to him, the Japanese attacked in Manchuria and then, in 1932, at Shanghai. Renewing their advance in 1937, the Japanese seized Nanking, where their troops slaughtered as many as 200,000 people and raped, according to reliable foreign accounts, some 20,000 women. Chiang fled to Chungking, which became his temporary wartime capital. When he returned to Nanking in 1946, he was still at war with Mao Zedong in a divided China, but he began rebuilding his capital. He also settled a score, as best he could, with the Japanese. Soon after I arrived in 1947, I went outside the city to a large dusty field and watched as three Japanese generals among those who had been in command in Nanking in 1937 were hauled roughly from the back of a truck, their hands tied behind their backs. Forced to their knees, they were executed, each with a single pistol shot to the back of their shaven heads, while Chinese spectators jostled and jeered behind a cordon of Nationalist soldiers.
After driving through the littered streets of Hsinchiehkow, scribbling notes on the pitiful scenes and trying to put Audrey’s departure out of my mind, I drove to the Associated Press compound in the northern district to meet Harold Milks, the bureau chief. I had just left the International News Service and joined the AP as his deputy. The unexpected move to the AP came after a falling out with INS. I had been transferred from Peking to Nanking as a staff correspondent, but without the reward of pay sufficient to live comfortably in a city in which a hefty sack of the inflated local currency was necessary to buy a restaurant meal. The breaking point came when I received a circular letter addressed to the INS foreign staff stating that living allowances would no longer be paid. Young reporters, eager to get a start as foreign correspondents, were typically being paid shoestring salaries by INS and the United Press. In my case, the timing was incomprehensible. The Civil War was at its height, and my copy was receiving wide play around the world. Also, unbeknownst to my INS bosses, I had just received tentative job offers from the New York Times and the Associated Press. I was sharing a house with Henry R. Lieberman, the Times bureau chief, Christopher Rand of the Herald Tribune, and other correspondents. Lieberman had offered me a job which gained the approval of Ted Bernstein, then the foreign news editor, and I had already begun filing stories to the Times without a byline during Hank’s absence in the field. Fred Hampson, the AP bureau chief in Shanghai, had also offered me a job. I messaged good-bye with some satisfaction to Barry Farris, the editor of INS, and awaited a final word from the Times. One morning, it came in the form of a cable: “Negative on Topping,” signed by Cyrus Sulzberger, the chief correspondent for the Times, a nephew of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher. I had never met Cyrus Sulzberger, who was based in Paris and had the final say on hiring for the foreign staff. Within the hour, I telephoned Hampson and took the job with the AP. It was a move I never regretted. I worked for the AP for the next eleven years in China, Vietnam, London, and Berlin before joining the Times in 1959. I came to regard the AP as the most essential and finest news organization in the world.
On that November morning in 1948 just after Audrey left Nanking, I sat pensively for a time in my jeep in the courtyard of the AP compound looking eastward to the pine-covered slopes of Purple Mountain. Audrey and I had often picnicked there. Sitting beside the old observatory on the peak, sipping cold wine from a thermos jug, we would gaze down on the city that was encased in the twenty-two-mile-long brick wall built by Ming emperors. Chiang had sought hastily to dress up his capital soon after his return from Chungking. But the city lacked the grace of Peking and the dynamism of industrial Shanghai or commercial Canton. With scant planning, broad pretentious boulevards, swept every morning by Japanese prisoners of war dressed in green overalls, had been slashed across the city. They were lined with government office buildings whose blue and green tiled roofs were failed imitations of the classical Ming style. Side streets remained as they had been for hundreds of years, the only additions being two-story slapdash buildings and refugee shacks. The rich dwelled behind compound walls shutting out the misery of the impoverished living in the narrow, crooked cobbled alleys. Patches of rice fields were plowed by water buffalo. Mercifully, the stagnant ponds dotting the city came alive with color in the spring with the bloom of the giant lotus. Perched on the southern bend of the Yangtze, 150 miles from Shanghai, Nanking was accursed with a foul climate, four months of unbearably humid heat in the summer, and a dank winter of penetrating cold. Only when the spring came, when the fruit trees blossomed and the hillsides adorned with temples and shrines turned vivid green, did the successors of the emperors who resided here seem to inherit the Mandate of Heaven bestowed on the former imperial rulers.
Atop Purple Mountain looming on the outskirts of the city, on an evening in the spring of 1948, I asked Audrey, then nineteen, a slender, beautiful blonde, to marry me. She was a student at Nanking University and taught English at Ginling Women’s College. The university had disintegrated into shambles just after Audrey left, with police agents swarming over the campus beating up and arresting militant students. They had joined with students at other universities in demonstrations demanding an end to the Civil War and termination of the American intervention in support of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. Audrey’s most disturbing memory of her last days in Nanking was an exchange with a Chinese government official. As she was being driven in the company of the official to the Canadian Embassy residence from a diplomatic reception, looking out on beggars and refugees on the streets, she exclaimed: “Seeing the suffering of these people must be very painful to you.” The official shrugged and said: “We don’t think of these as people.” It was a remark that went to the heart of the Nationalist government’s inability to rally the masses to its support in the Civil War. Apart from teaching at Ginling, Audrey worked as an assistant to Captain Wong, the dentist of the American Military Advisory Group. One of her tasks was to chat with Madame Chiang Kai-shek in a reception room while the Generalissimo was being fitted for a new pair of false teeth. In fun she once asked the dental technician to carve her initials on one of the Generalissimo’s molars. Rebuffed by Audrey when he asked for a date, the technician put aside the plot.
Dutifully, after that evening on Purple Mountain when Audrey gave her assent to marriage, I waited for an opportunity to ask Audrey’s father to bless our engagement. Although friendly with Chester Ronning, I was still somewhat hesitant about seeking his consent—a Jewish boy born in Harlem of eastern European immigrants asking the hand in marriage of a young woman whose Lutheran family traced its ancestry to Norwegian aristocracy. Like other correspondents, I had often sought out Ronning as a source for news and political analysis. Born in China of missionary parents, Ronning spoke fluent Mandarin, his first language, and was widely regarded as Canada’s foremost expert on Asia. Serving in Chungking during General Marshall’s mediation mission, he had become very friendly with Mao’s deputy, Zhou Enlai, who, like Ronning, was first educated in a missionary elementary school. It was a friendship that through the next thirty years would have a significant influence on Western relations with China.
As minister of the Canadian Embassy, Ronning was also on good terms with President Chiang Kai-shek. When Chiang learned that Ronning in his youth had been a cowboy broncobuster in Alberta, Canada, the Generalissimo invited him to ride and exercise his spirited Arabian horse. It was one of several steeds captured from the Japanese. The stable boys were Japanese prisoners of war. In the summer of 1946 Ronning was a guest of the Chiangs in their Kuling residence, a vacation retreat on Mount Lushan in Kiangsu Province. He was especially close to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who often confided in him. She once told him of her distress about being pictured in the American press as something of a snob. It had been reported that while staying at the White House she had brought her own purple silk bed sheets. She explained to Ronning that it was not hauteur but a matter of being allergic to the detergents used in the United States to wash bed linen. During the Kuling visit Ronning was startled on one occasion when Madame Chiang came to him weeping. In a burst of temper during a quarrel the Generalissimo had whipped out a pistol and shot her pet German shepherd dog. It was a rare insight into what disharmony there might have been in this celebrated marriage. The Generalissimo relied on his wife to enlist American support in the Civil War and to present a sophisticated, cultured face to the Western world that would cloak his own stiff warlord image. In 1931, on her insistence and prior to their marriage, although very much the Confucian authoritarian, he joined the Methodist Church. Madame Chiang told foreigners in later years that the Generalissimo had become a devout Methodist who read the Bible every day, neither smoked nor drank except for ceremonial toasts, the latter a dubious accolade, since her husband’s propensity for scotch whiskey was well known. The Generalissimo’s professed Christian piety and anti-Communist stand were factors in winning him support in the United States from such notables as Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, himself a son of a China missionary. Perhaps the most influential member of the “China Lobby,” a group of American supporters of Chiang Kai-shek, Luce was unremitting in his support of Chiang during World War II and throughout the Civil War.
Pursuing Audrey, in the summer of 1948 I made my own visit to Kuling, where the Ronnings were vacationing. From Hankow on the Yangtze, where I had gone to cover the catastrophe of a great flood, I traveled by riverboat to a landing at the foot of Mount Lushan. The only means of reaching Kuling was to be carried by sedan chair up a narrow path cut into the mountainside. I felt guilty about riding a swaying sedan chair on the backs of four bearers but then persuaded myself this was work needed by them to feed their families. In Kuling, I stayed in the Ronning bungalow and strolled with Audrey among the mountain pines. One day, her father and I hiked up the mountainside, and I told him that Audrey and I wished to marry. We walked on in silence for a time, and then after posing only one question— “Do you love her?”—he gave his assent. When Audrey left Nanking for Canada, she wore my ring. She next heard of me under the most extraordinary circumstances.