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With war on the horizon in the late 1930s, many Americans, still
angry over the outcome of the Great War, determined not to get
involved in another global conflict. Called isolationists or
anti-interventionists, many of them, especially the America First
Committee, focused their attention on the European war when it
broke out in September 1939. Most were less interested in Japan's
aggression in East Asia, which left an opening for another
isolationist group, the Committee on Pacific Relations, which
opposed war with Japan right up to the day of the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor. In this first full study of pro-Japan
isolationists, Roger B. Jeans provides a detailed history of the
committee, which was launched in September 1941, a scant ten weeks
before the beginning of the war. Its driving force was Missourian
Orland Kay "O. K." Armstrong, who traveled widely during the late
1930s and early 1940s recruiting prominent Americans for his
movement against war with Japan. He and his colleagues were often
critical of US policies and of China, the victim of Japanese
aggression. As a result, they were often ostracized as
pro-Japanese. Jeans draws on previously untapped sources-the
personal letters of committee members and the dossiers the FBI
compiled on them-to paint a rich picture of this little-known
group.
With war on the horizon in the late 1930s, many Americans, still
angry over the outcome of the Great War, determined not to get
involved in another global conflict. Called isolationists or
anti-interventionists, many of them, especially the America First
Committee, focused their attention on the European war when it
broke out in September 1939. Most were less interested in Japan's
aggression in East Asia, which left an opening for another
isolationist group, the Committee on Pacific Relations, which
opposed war with Japan right up to the day of the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor. In this first full study of pro-Japan
isolationists, Roger B. Jeans provides a detailed history of the
committee, which was launched in September 1941, a scant ten weeks
before the beginning of the war. Its driving force was Missourian
Orland Kay "O. K." Armstrong, who traveled widely during the late
1930s and early 1940s recruiting prominent Americans for his
movement against war with Japan. He and his colleagues were often
critical of US policies and of China, the victim of Japanese
aggression. As a result, they were often ostracized as
pro-Japanese. Jeans draws on previously untapped sources-the
personal letters of committee members and the dossiers the FBI
compiled on them-to paint a rich picture of this little-known
group.
Colonel John Hart Caughey, a US Army war plans officer stationed in
the Chinese Nationalist capital of Chungking, was an eyewitness to
the battle for China in the final months of the war (1944-45) and
beyond, when he rose to become head of the Theater Planning
Section. In frequent letters to his wife as well as in several
diaries, he chronicled the US military's role in wartime China,
especially his life as an American planner (when he was subject to
military censorship). Previous accounts of the China Theater have
largely neglected the role of the War Department planners stationed
in Chungking, many of whom were Caughey's colleagues and friends.
He also penned colorful descriptions of life in wartime China,
which vividly remind the reader how far China has come in a mere
seventy-odd years. In addition, his letters and diaries deepen our
understanding of several of the American leaders in this Asian war,
including China Theater commander Albert C. Wedemeyer; Fourteenth
Air Force chief Claire L. Chennault (former commander of the
"Flying Tigers"); US ambassador to wartime China, Patrick J.
Hurley; famed Time-Life reporter Theodore White; OSS director
William ("Wild Bill") Donovan; Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander
of the Southeast Asia Command; and Jonathan Wainwright, who was in
command when the American forces in the Philippines surrendered in
1942, and who stayed for a few days at Caughey's Chungking
residence on his way home after several years as a Japanese POW in
Manchuria. In his writings, Caughey also revealed a more appealing
side of Wedemeyer, whose extreme political opinions in the postwar
era probably cost him the post of US Army chief of staff. By making
Caughey a member of his planning staff, Wedemeyer made possible an
extraordinary experience for the young colonel during the war.
Caughey also rubbed shoulders with Nationalist leader Chiang
Kai-shek and traveled to the battlefields in Southeast China with
the commander in chief of the Nationalist Army, He Yingqin, along
with a number of other Chinese and American soldiers. Following the
Japanese surrender, Caughey chronicled the resumption of the power
struggle between the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese
Communists, largely postponed during the conflict. Shortly after
the war, he had a brief encounter with the number two Communist
leader, Zhou Enlai, whom he was to get to know much better during
the Marshall Mission to China.
When the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists and
occupied the mainland in 1949-1950, U.S. policymakers were
confronted with a dilemma. Disgusted by the corruption and, more
importantly, failure of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist armies and
party and repelled by the Communists' revolutionary actions and
violent class warfare, in the early 1950s the U.S. government
placed its hopes in a Chinese "third force." While the U.S. State
Department reported on third forces, the CIA launched a two-prong
effort to actively support these groups with money, advisors, and
arms. In Japan, Okinawa, and Saipan, the agency trained third force
troops at CIA bases. The Chinese commander of these soldiers was
former high-ranking Nationalist General Cai Wenzhi. He and his
colleagues organized a political group, the Free China Movement.
His troops received parachute training as well as other types of
combat and intelligence instruction at agency bases. Subsequently,
several missions were dispatched to Manchuria-the Korean War was
raging then-and South China. All were failures and the Chinese
third force agents were killed or imprisoned. With the end of the
Korean War, the Americans terminated this armed third force
movement, with the Nationalists on Taiwan taking in some of its
soldiers while others moved to Hong Kong. The Americans flew Cai to
Washington, where he took a job with the Department of Defense. The
second prong of the CIA's effort was in Hong Kong. The agency
financially supported and advised the creation of a third force
organization called the Fighting League for Chinese Freedom and
Democracy. It also funded several third force periodicals. Created
in 1951 and 1952, in 1953 and 1954 the CIA ended its financial
support. As a consequence of this as well as factionalism within
the group, in 1954 the League collapsed and its leaders scattered
to the four winds. At the end, even the term "third force" was
discredited and replaced by "new force." Finally, in the early
1950s, the CIA backed as a third force candidate a Vietnamese
general. With his assassination in May 1955, however, that effort
also came to naught.
Gwen Terasaki's Bridge to the Sun, an idealized memoir of her
marriage in the 1930s and 1940s to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki
Hidenari, is still widely read as an inspiring tale of a 'bridge'
between two cultures that waged savage war against each other from
1941 to 1945. However, neither this memoir nor charges that
Terasaki was a master spy and a double agent are the whole
historical truth. In Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied
Japan, Roger B. Jeans reassesses Terasaki Hidenari's story, using
the FBI's voluminous dossier on Terasaki, decoded Japanese Foreign
Ministry cables (MAGIC), and the papers of an isolationist, a
pacifist, and an FBI agent and chief investigator at the Tokyo war
crimes trial. Jeans reveals that far from being simply a saint or
villain, Terasaki, despite his opposition to an American-Japanese
war, served as a Foreign Ministry intelligence officer, propaganda
chief, and liaison with American isolationists and pacifists in
1941, while using all means to protect Hirohito during the postwar
occupation.
This book breaks new ground in our understanding of a pivotal
period in the history of American foreign policy, the early Cold
War, and the struggle for dominance in China between the
Nationalists and Communists. The famous Marshall Mission to China
has been the focus of intense scrutiny ever since General George C.
Marshall returned home in January 1947 and full-scale civil war
consumed China. Yet until recently, there was little new to add to
the story of the failure to avert war between the Chinese
Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek, and the Chinese Communists,
led by Mao Zedong. Drawing on a newly discovered insider's account,
Roger B. Jeans makes an invaluable contribution to our
understanding of Marshall's failed mediation effort and the roles
played by key Chinese figures. Working from the letters and diary
of U.S. Army Colonel John Hart Caughey, Jeans offers a fresh
interpretation of the mission. From beginning to end, Caughey
served as Marshall's executive officer, in effect his right-hand
man, assisting the general in his contacts with the Chinese and
drafting key documents for him. Through his writings, Caughey
provides a rare behind-the-scenes view of the general's mediation
efforts as well as intimate glimpses of the major Chinese figures
involved, including Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Chiang, and Zhou Enlai.
In addition to daily contact with Marshall, Caughey often rubbed
shoulders with these major Nationalist and Communist figures. As a
meticulous eyewitness to history in the making, Caughey offers
crucial insight into a key moment in post-World War II history.
Gwen Terasaki's Bridge to the Sun, an idealized memoir of her
marriage in the 1930s and 1940s to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki
Hidenari, is still widely read as an inspiring tale of a "bridge"
between two cultures that waged savage war against each other from
1941 to 1945. However, neither this memoir nor charges that
Terasaki was a master spy and a double agent are the whole
historical truth. In Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied
Japan, Roger B. Jeans reassesses Terasaki Hidenari's story, using
the FBI's voluminous dossier on Terasaki, decoded Japanese Foreign
Ministry cables (MAGIC), and the papers of an isolationist, a
pacifist, and an FBI agent and chief investigator at the Tokyo war
crimes trial. Jeans reveals that far from being simply a saint or
villain, Terasaki, despite his opposition to an American-Japanese
war, served as a Foreign Ministry intelligence officer, propaganda
chief, and liaison with American isolationists and pacifists in
1941, while using all means to protect Hirohito during the postwar
occupation.
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