For example, Dr. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall—Ordeal and Hope (New York: Viking Press, 1967). Two volumes of Pogue's tetralogy have appeared.
U.S. Foreign Relations, 1941, Vol. IV, Far East (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 81-94.
Prior to President Roosevelt's sudden, inexplicable, and completely unexpected demarche at Teheran, later to be implemented at Yalta, the entire world had been led to believe that, with the end of the war, all of the principles of the so-called Atlantic Charter, embracing the "four freedoms," would form the basis of all the postwar settlements, guaranteed by the great powers. For the Chinese this meant, not only a free, autonomous China, but also a restoration of Manchuria and Formosa to Chinese hegemony and an independent Korea.
All of this, presumably, had been settled on the last day of the first Cairo conference of 1943, when a joint communique to this effect was prepared by President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, to be universally broadcast after the coming Teheran conference. Elliot Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), pp. 66-67. But during the secret meetings with Joseph Stalin at Teheran, beginning the very next day and continued afterward at Yalta some fifteen months later, all of these rosy prospects for a war-weary world, especially the Chinese people, were to be washed down the drain by President Roosevelt's incredible decision to allow the Soviets to enter the Pacific War—too late for any benefits to Roosevelt and Churchill but soon enough for Stalin's objective of taking over control of the greater part of East Asia.
For the military justification of this fateful, far-reaching decision, again we have General Marshall to thank, since he, among all the other leading American military leaders, was the prime advocate of Soviet intervention in the Pacific War—a contingency we now realize was completely unjustified, militarily and politically, and which spelled the end of freedom and self-determination for half of humanity. Felix Wittmer, Yaltal Betrayal (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1961), pp. 37-39, 80. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), pp. 748-49. For supplementary reference see John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (New York: The Viking Press, 1946); William Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950); George N. Crocker, Roosevelt's Road to Russia (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959).
U.S. Foreign Relations, op. cit.
For a comprehensive and authoritative study of Marshall's mission to China, see Anthony Kubek, How the Far East Was Lost (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963) and General Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedmeyer Reports! (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958).
That Marshall was more than just a mere emissary for President Truman and had been largely instrumental in formulating the disastrous policy for post-war China and, moreover, had been vested with full powers to act independently in implementing such policy, appears to be well substantiated by Secretary of State Byrnes, in his comment on Marshall's preparations for the mission: "Thereafter, the President made no change in that policy except upon the recommendations of General Marshall or with his approval." (Italics added.) James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harpers, 1947), p. 226. This should dispel any doubts whatever that Marshall had been given the widest margin of judgment and discretion to act, and to make such recommendations he felt were necessary, with the fullest assurance that such recommendations would be favorably received by the President.
Kubek, op. cit.
For Marshall's attempt to browbeat Chiang Kai-shek into submission, see Kubek, op. cit. p. 339, footnote 95.
Marvin E. Gettleman (ed.), Viet Nam: History Documents, and Opinions on a World Crisis, with intro. by Gettleman (Greenwich, Connecticut: a Fawcett Premier paperback, 1965), p. 10
Hilaire du Berrier, Background to Betrayal (Boston and Los Angeles: Western Islands, 1965), p. 18.
How often have we encountered that "meridional" proposition in the study of our trials and tribulations in the Far East! First, it was the 38th parallel in Korea, and here it was finally to be the 17th parallel in Vietnam. Seemingly, our own despoilers of the Far East could find no better medium of measurement for whacking up the loot and fomenting more wars to come.
The conclusion of the Geneva convention left much to be desired by way of guarantees of its lofty expressions of policy for the new states of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; generally, these amounted to no more than high-sounding rhetoric that provided no definite settlement of political problems, but undertook to "respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity, and the territorial integrity of the aforementioned states, and to refrain from any interference in their internal affairs." (Italics added.) Gettleman, p. 153. This portion of the Geneva Agreements was not signed by any of the conferees but was approved by voice vote (Gettleman, p. 154), an omission that was to open the door for repudiation later on and to an abrogation of the provision for self-determination for Vietnam, which read, "General elections shall be held in July, 1956, under the supervision of an international commission...." (Ibid. p. 153.) It is only fair to note here that, at the close of the conference, Walter Bedell Smith, the American delegate, in a final declaration, injected an element of ambiguity into the American position respecting future commitments: "In connexion with the statement in the Declaration concerning free elections in Vietnam, my government wishes to make clear its position which it has expressed in a Declaration made in Washington on June 29, 1954, as follows:
In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections, supervised by the United Nations to ensure that they are conducted fairly." (Gettleman, pp. 156-7.)The International Control Commission, however, was never able to secure the cooperation of the two hostile governments in Vietnam as a prerequisite for holding the elections. The Viet Minh (Hanoi), feeling confident of victory, appears to have been reasonably cooperative (Gettleman, p. 160), but the Saigon government, supported by Washington, refused even to participate in the preliminary consultations (Ibid., p. 162).
"In his book, Mandate for Change, Eisenhower wrote: 'I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh.'" David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 156.
Joseph R. McCarthy, America's Retreat from Victory (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1954), p. 6.
This statement was again quoted in somewhat more subdued language by Admiral Charles Maynard Cooke, who commanded the U.S. Seventh Fleet in Chinese waters in 1945-46. The admiral was testifying in 1956 before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on internal security. He stated that Marshall told him personally in August or September of 1946 that "with the embargo we had in effect first armed the Chinese Nationalists and then disarmed them." Kubek, op. cit., p. 339. This was Marshall's way of describing his complete embargo of U.S. arms and ammunition to the Nationalist armies from August, 1946, to July, 1947, in his efforts to coerce Chiang Kai-shek into accepting the Chinese Communists into his government, well knowing that Soviet Russia was pouring unlimited supplies of munitions into China to aid the Communists. Kubek, p. 337.
For another recognized authority on the details of this denial of assistance to Chiang Kai-shek, see Freda Utley, The China Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959), p. 13.
The devastating effect of Marshall's embargo may be measured by an excerpt from a New York Times report for June 22, 1947, quoted in part by Kubek (op. cit., p. 338): "The guns of the Nationalist armies were so worn and burned that 'bullets fell through them to the ground.'"
Freda Utley summed up the failure of Marshall's mission succinctly in a capsule that is probably the most realistic and fair-minded assessment yet made by any student of the problem: "If one reads the White Paper on China, issued by the State Department in 1949, one is struck particularly with the fact that General Marshall apparently never conceived of the outcome of his thirteen months' mission to China as momentous to the future of the United States. There is no indication that he realized that he was ...a representative of the United States whose security would largely depend upon the outcome of the 'civil war' between a friendly government and Stalin's satellites." Utley, op. cit., p. 18.
As late as August 12, 1964, President Johnson expounded United States policy respecting Vietnam: "For ten years, through the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration, and this administration, we have had one consistent aim—observance of the 1954 (Geneva) agreement" (italics added), further stating that these "agreements guaranteed the independence of South Vietnam." Gettleman, op. cit. p. 163, footnote 15.
This statement of policy has a magic appeal for American support but, unfortunately, it is scarcely a half-truth. The agreements did not guarantee anything specifically for South Vietnam; in fact, North and South Vietnam were not mentioned as separate entities, being designated as "zones" (of Vietnam). The eventual objective of the accord was the elimination of the military separation point (the 17th parallel) and the emergence of a re-unified Vietnam under either the Hanoi government or the Saigon government, as expressed by the "national will," to be determined by the general elections to be held in July 1956, which never took place, due largely to obstruction by the Saigon and Washington governments and in a lesser degree by the Hanoi regime. Thus, it will be seen that, irrespective of the merits of combating or containing communism, the Johnson administration has been less than honest in supporting its policy of intervention in Vietnam with United States commitments to the Geneva Accord. Gettleman, pp. 151-4, from The Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference (July 21, 1954).
There is further cause for questioning the validity of Washington's claims and it is most disturbing and distressing. Two short citations will serve quite adequately to strip off the mask of hypocrisy: "...The above sources indicate strongly that the United States government is not so much interested in the freedom and independence and self-determination of the people of Southeast Asia as it is in controlling the use of the vast resources of Asia and the Western Pacific. Former President Eisenhower in his speech to the governors' convention, August 4, 1953, Seattle, Washington, supports this view in these words: 'If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The peninsula, the last bit of land hanging on down there, would scarcely be defensible. The tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming.' New York Times, August 5, 1963 (italics added).
"This has further support from U.S. Senator Gale Magee of Wyoming in a Senate speech, February 17, 1965: 'The empire in Southeast Asia is the last large resource area outside the control of any one of the major powers..... In the hands of one...it can upset the balance in the world.... I believe that the conditions of the Vietnamese people and direction in which their future may be going, are therefore at this state secondary.... I.F. Stone's Weekly, March 1, 1965" (italics added). Hugh B. Hester, "New Blitzkrieg Peace Offensive," The Churchman, February, 1966, pp. 10-11.
Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill—British Bulldog (New York: Exposition Press, Inc., 1955), pp. 321-22.
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