ABSTRACT
Both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had devoted considerable military resources to helping the Nationalist Chinese hold the Japanese forces at bay before and during the Pacific War. When it ended, even more military assistance was sent to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) coalition forces fighting against the communist oriented People’s Liberation Army (PLA), led by Mao Tse-Tung. The State Department calculated that by February 1947 the US had spent the equivalent of one billion dollars since the end of the Pacific War without establishing economic stability.1 However, the Truman administration continued military support for Chiang with the introduction of the China Aid Act early in 1948, proposing a loan of $338 million for economic assistance and $125 million for other purposes. The Republican anti-communists in Congress sought even more funds and the dispatch of US army officers to advise Chiang. Secretary of State General George Marshall opposed the suggestion, saying that it could lead the US to committing troops. It was then unofficially estimated that a successful US invasion of China would require seven divisions concentrated in Manchuria and another fifteen divisions distributed over the other parts of China, which was a commitment far beyond the military capacity of the US.2 Although the US had committed itself to the European Recovery Program (Marshall Aid) costing $5.3 billion, the anti-communists in Congress and elsewhere continued their attacks on the limits on aid to Chiang and thereafter blamed Truman and his officers for ‘the loss of China’.3 However, reports continued to emerge of Chiang’s corruption in China, including the special briefing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 2 November 1948 by the Intelligence Division, which announced ‘the widespread lack of confidence in the Generalissimo and his government’ and that ‘China’s only hope lies in supplanting the government which by its blunders, corruption and incompetency has brought the country to the brink of Communist rule’.4
