| From the archives of The Memory Hole |
by C. C. Hiles
Lt. Commander Charles C. Hiles, U.S.N. (Ret.) has had extensive naval service in the Far East. While presently immersed in exhaustive studies of the military and political implications of Pearl Harbor (the December, 1966 Rampart Journal featured his review of Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision), he is also engaged in the preparation of an extensive review of the current work by Dr. Forrest C. Pogue, on the career of General George C. Marshall.
General George C. Marshall is probably the most controversial historical figure of our time; excoriated and detested by many of his contemporaries, eulogized and deified by others, he still remains for the average American an almost totally unknown figure, except for those who are inspired and animated by motivations that are oriented more toward political propagandistic objectives than to historical truth and accuracy.1
It is more than likely that not one American in ten thousand associates the name of Marshall with the perilous situation now confronting the nation in Vietnam. Yet, although the general public has become more or less apathetic respecting the heavy penalty exacted in blood and dollars for waging a futile war that ended so catastrophically for the world in 1945, it is certainly interested in the direct causes for the potential disaster that faces us today. It was from Marshall's China mission in 1946 that ensued for America two bloody conflicts in Asia — the Korean War and the current Vietnam War, politely and apologetically referred to, respectively, as a "police action" and a "war of liberation."
The Far Eastern situation at the close of World War II presented a phantasmagoria of geopolitical skulduggery and ideological conflicts that were inevitable after the Teheran and Yalta conferences. The two top Allied leaders, Roosevelt and Churchill, while fighting shoulder to shoulder to destroy the Axis powers, had long since been at cross-purposes, each of them working toward terminal objectives that were diametrically opposed, each to the other.
Churchill and the Dutch and French allies envisaged a restoration of their lost empires after the Japanese had been defeated and driven out; Roosevelt had determined on democratizing (Soviet style)2 Southeast Asia. His secret commitments to Stalin at Teheran and Yalta had this in view.3 Chiang Kai-shek had been deceived into believing that the allied victory would result in restoring Chinese autonomy under his own rule; this had been the bait to keep him fighting the Japanese.4
And so, when World War II had ended and the Axis powers had been defeated, Southeast Asia was in a state of ferment, with large groups of the people rising to combat both the old colonial system of rule and the new threat of communist hegemony. The old powers, worn out with the long years of warfare, were completely inadequate to cope with, on the one hand the rising tide of nationalism and hatred of the colonial system, and on the other hand the latest threat of communism, which the United States had unleashed upon them through the instrumentality of two misguided Presidents and a compliant Chief-of-Staff, ably abetted and assisted by various civilian gentry in the several executive departments, especially that of State.
Into this witches' cauldron of seething ideology, betrayal, and hopelessly confused and baffling diplomatic situations, that would have taxed the ingenuity of a Metternich or a Talleyrand, was thrust the one man who was probably the least qualified for the task of producing, diplomatically, politically, or militarily, some semblance of order out of complete chaos.
It is quite likely that this was precisely why General Marshall was selected for the mission. To exploit and implement the incredible policy of communizing Southeast Asia there was required a man with a singleness of purpose who was not handicapped by any particular scruples of propriety, protocol, or the niceties of international relationship, and who would ruthlessly bludgeon his way through the thicket of outrageous betrayal and Oriental indignation to satisfy his Washington superiors. Marshall met all of these requirements, and we are still paying the price for his preposterous performance which, eventually, culminated in raising to power our three most powerful enemies in the Far East today — Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Ho Chi Minh.
Admittedly, on his mission to China in 1946 as the emissary of President Truman and the State Department, General Marshall was charged with the implementation of no more than what then passed as United States foreign policy, for which he cannot be held accountable, but that he fully relished the role and amply demonstrated his lack of vision and statesmanship—even military sagacity and competence—in dealing with matters of such grave import to all of Southeast Asia and the best interests of the United States is a matter of indisputable record.5 Clothed as he was with unlimited authority and freedom of action, and being in close contact with the situation that then prevailed in Southeast Asia, there was much he could have done to influence Washington into following a more intelligent, equitable, and realistic course in shaping U.S. policy in the Far East, had he so desired or been capable.6 Marshall must, therefore, be adjudged as the one individual who, wittingly or unwittingly, contributed most to bring this nation and the rest of the world to the present crisis which, seemingly, cannot be resolved without another major conflict.
His mission was both political and military, but primarily to reconcile the opposing factions of Nationalists and Communists in China, who were fighting for control after the war had ended, and to bring the two groups together under a coalition government.
Almost all of the accounts of Marshall's mission to China deal, principally, with the problem of China proper and his relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, now an expatriated Chinese leader who rules what is left of Nationalist China from the Island of Formosa, thanks to the bungling machinations of General Marshall.7 What is not generally known concerns his relations with the leaders of what was then a part of the former French empire of Indochina.
In the pursuit of his aims, Marshall attempted to juggle ancient kingdoms about like pawns on a chessboard, completely ignoring such vital desiderata as long-established traditional boundary lines, ethnological groupings, economic considerations, and the loyalties and political wishes of the peoples involved; if, indeed, he possessed even the most elemental knowledge of such matters.
As part of his program to coerce Chiang Kai-shek into taking the Chinese Communists, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, into Chiang's government, Marshall was scheming to integrate into Nationalist China the northern portion of the ancient kingdom of Vietnam called Tonkin province. In so doing, he blandly ignored the claims of France (a U.S. ally in the recently ended war), who was attempting to recover rights of nominal suzerainty over Indochina, of which Vietnam was a part and which had been lost when Japan invaded the country after the fall of France in 1940, and he rode roughshod over the heritage and autonomy of a "liberated" country, Vietnam.
Marshall's conceit and disregard for propriety, tact, and punctilio were fully exemplified on the occasion of his meeting in 1946 with Bao Dai, hereditary emperor of Vietnam, a nation that was founded before the birth of Christ.8 Marshall's approach to Bao Dai was more typical of a Roman proconsul in a conquered Gaul than that of an American general in a friendly land.
Bao Dai was in Nanking, where Marshall had gone to confer with Chiang Kai-shek and to attempt to browbeat him into a re-reconstitution of his government by a coalition of the Nationalists and Communists. Marshall went to see Bao Dai, pursuing much the same tactics he was following with the Generalissimo — bribery if it worked, or coercion if it did not:
Marshall offered Bao Dai big things but his conditions were exorbitant. The final clause, in essence, was "Do not have too many ambitions. Vietnam is only an artificial country. Tonkin is really a meridional province of China and must go back to her"! (Italics and mark added.)9
The offer of Tonkin was presumed to render the deal for Chiang Kai-shek more palatable but Bao Dai balked at the Marshall proposal to turn over part of his kingdom (the province of Tonkin) as a bribe for Chiang Kai-shek.
Tonkin did not belong to China in any sense of the word. It was an integral part of Vietnam which, before the French conquest, had been an autonomous kingdom (styled by the Vietnamese as an empire) that had been free of Chinese rule for more than four and one-half centuries before Marshall was born!10 The Vietnamese three off the yoke of Chinese rule in 939 A.D. and after a tenuous 500 years of independence, characterized by internecine dynastic internal struggles for power and resistance to Chinese invasion, they arrived at a modus vivendi with China which endured until the time of the French conquest. Under this mutually acceptable arrangement, the Vietnamese, in return for a guarantee of their nominal sovereignty and legitimate succession of their own rulers, agreed to the payment of a triennial tribute to China.
The province of Tonkin and that part of the middle province of Annam north of the 17th parallel form the North Vietnam of today — our present bete noir in Southeast Asia. It is from Hanoi, the capitol of what was then the provincial seat of Tonkin, that Ho Chi Minh now faces and defies U.S. occupation of South Vietnam.
Bao Dai's obstinacy, while it eventually cost him his hereditary claims to Vietnam, achieved one great objective in the light of today's menace to a free world. A profound student of the Vietnam debacle contends that "had Bao Dai yielded in 1946 to George Marshall, North Vietnam would have been communized eight years earlier."11
At the time of the Marshall mission, Ho Chi Minh had already established a tenuous hegemony over Tonkin, but was experiencing serious trouble with Chiang's own henchman, General Lu Han. It was a critical period for Ho Chi Minh and there is a Machiavellian touch to this neat attempt at betrayal. Had Marshall been successful in eliminating Bao Dai and winning Chiang over in this "deal," with Lu Han under control of a coalition Nationalist-Communist government, Ho Chi Minh would have been freer to consolidate his position in the north at the time and to proceed faster with his plans for a unified Vietnam under a Communist regime — in which case there might never have been any North and South Vietnam to wrangle over today. Marshall's mission would have been even more complete than he had originally hoped for.
On the other hand, had Marshall been acting in the best interests of the United States by supporting Chiang Kai-shek, Bao Dai, and the French, a solid front could have been established against further Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. As it turned out, while Bao Dai could not stave off eventual dissolution, he did at least delay it for the time being, as a result of which we do have a bridgehead now in Vietnam, tenuous as it appears to be, unless we go for all-out war with Ho Chi Minh, the results of which are extremely problematic because we still have Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai to contend with.
China's fate was to be practically settled before Marshall returned from his mission and Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai eventually picked up their loot, but the ultimate loss of Bao Dai's hereditary kingdom was to be deferred until after the Battle of Dienbienphu in 1954, when Ho Chi Minh's forces liquidated the last remaining French stronghold in Vietnam, and the final settlement of suzerainty for that unhappy land passed into the hands of the Geneva conference which was then meeting for a general settlement of other Asian problems.12
Bao Dai had successfully resisted Marshall's coercion in 1946 but in the interim he had, unfortunately, cast his lot with the rapidly deteriorating French control for his claims to sovereignty over Vietnam against his powerful but unpopular opponent (supported by the United States), Ngo dinh Diem,13 and was caught between two fires — Ho Chi Minh on the one hand and Diem on the other. The communist-dominated settlement at Geneva resulted in securing Ho Chi Minh's position in the north while facilitating Diem's eventual ascendancy in the south, with Bao Dai left out in the cold, thus setting the stage for America's greatest problem of today in Southeast Asia.
The conference actually settled no political boundaries but it recognized the 17th parallel (the military line of demarcation established after the battle of Dienbienphu) for the time being as the separation point between the northern and southern "zones," pending "free general elections by secret ballot," to be held in 1956 to determine the will of the peoples of both "zones" respecting re-unification of Vietnam under a single ideology.
The southern zone (now known as the Republic of South Vietnam) comprised that portion of Annam south of the 17th parallel and the southernmost province of Cochin China, which Ho Chi Minh is now attempting to annex to North Vietnam in order to achieve re-unification of both countries under a Communist regime.
It is, indeed, strange how the political pendulum swings back and forth, and how the American public can be hoodwinked from year to year and day to day. Our foreign policy has undergone a complete reversal since 1946-54, and our heroic proteges of that era are the villains of today. The same Ho Chi Minh who is now castigated as our arch-enemy in North Vietnam, presented for Washington and the American liberals a far different visage in that past era when he was being hailed as a "native George Washington"!14
From 1954 until the present (1967), there has been strife, discord, and bloodshed in South Vietnam, occasioned by Ho Chi Minh's support of the Vietcong guerrillas and his attempts to infiltrate and take over the so-called showcase of democracy, and by a local internecine battle for control of the country and opposition to Ho Chi Minh. Since the United States was a party to the impotent Geneva Accord, there was entailed an obligation to enforce it.15 This has resulted in American armed intervention, ostensibly to combat Communist expansion to take over the southern republic, but apparently as much to promote American interests, with a dire threat of another great war.
The United States is now employing an army of nearly half a million men in an attempt to undo the mischief that General Marshall, the "greatest living American," created more than twenty years ago in the name of these United States.
General Marshall was probably most responsible for America's presently intolerable position vis-a-vis the Communists of Southeast Asia. And yet the American public has been — and will be — asked to honor and revere the memory of this "master of global strategy." Marshall, the statesman; Marshall, the selfless, modest, dedicated public servant, the military leader who boasted in 1946: "As chief of staff I armed 30 anti-Communist divisions. Now with the stroke of a pen I disarm them."16 The heavy hand of the inept Marshall lies over the world today like the pall of death; the decisions he made, which were fully supported by the Truman administration, were so momentous and so far-reaching as to affect the lives and fortunes of every living soul today as we grapple with the problem and endeavor to find solutions to counteract those decisions.17 It is from General George Marshall that the people have inherited a barren, desolate wasteland, sown with dragon teeth. We may well attribute to General Marshall the role of a modern Cadmus, but there is little hope that the fruits of his labor will destroy themselves!
If there is validity to the currently declared American policy respecting Vietnam, and if any merit attaches to the action now being taken to support that policy, then the inevitable conclusion we must draw from the foregoing brief of the problem is that the thinking and concepts of official Washington, as exemplified by the Truman-Acheson-Marshall policies of the 1946-54 era, were totally fallacious, unrealistic, and anti-American. Certainly, an element of doubt is projected into the picture as to whether the nation is now actually implementing a strong policy of containment of communism within its present bounds of control and influence in Southeast Asia, or whether it is engaged in another game of high-powered international politics, only remotely related to communism.18
If it is true that our objectives are solely confined to bringing to the Vietnamese all of the blessings of a free nation and its institutions of pure democracy, then it appears incredible that an armed force of close to one-half million men, added to their own rather pretentious armed manpower, cannot succeed in subduing the adverse elements that militate against those objectives; unless such elements represent, in fact, the wishes and determination of the majority of the Vietnamese people, in which case we are violating, not only the Geneva Accord, but our own concepts of political freedom as well.
but however it may be, it certainly behooves the people of America to take a closer look at the problem and to demand from the Washington government a more comprehensive exposition of American aims in Vietnam that are consistent and compatible with the terrific cost in blood and dollars of such aims and with the possibility of universal disaster as the ultimate consequence of failure. In all events we should endeavor to avoid another Marshall debacle in the Far East.
Requiesat in Pace!
The ultimate in cynicism was reached in 1953 when General George C. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in preference to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was obliged to be content with the honors of literature.19 The distinction between the two allied leaders as promoters of peace somehow escapes the naivete of the writer; as the prime warhawks of their time (excluding the master of them all, who did not survive long enough to tax the credulity of the award board at Stockholm), for them the sprouting of the wings of the dove appears, to say the very least, rather incongruous; and a choice between them would seem to be completely academic.
Certainly, Marshall inspired no peace, nor did he ever promote it. The cold facts are, that by supporting — even advancing — President Roosevelt's weird, inexplicable policy of inviting the Soviets to "freeload" in a war that was already won, he actually did more to delay, disrupt, and discourage peace, and to foment more wars to come — and come they did — than any other individual of his time. The bitter Korean War — the first war America ever failed to win — and the Vietnam War, which we cannot seem to win and which we cannot afford to lose, bear full testimony to that verdict. No proof is needed beyond a casual (if one can be casual under such circumstances) look at the world today in its agony of suspense and the uncertainties of the next moment to come, which may well put an end to its suffering for all time. Both of these wars were the end products of Teheran and Yalta and the Marshall mission to China; by what devious rationalization they may be construed as harbingers of peace is something that lies far beyond the reach of this humble critic's mentality. But, may General Marshall rest forever in the peace he brought us; no one else can!
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