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On my way from the United States back to Mukden in 1937 word came of the July 7 encounter between Japanese and Chinese troops near Peking that sparked the beginning of Japan’s attempt to conquer China south of the Great Wall. As Manchuria was already under Japanese control, I had no difficulty in returning to my post through Japan and Korea. But I was not to remain long. In less than a year I was transferred to Hankow, doomed to be overrun and captured by the invading armies. I assumed that I had been so favored because Mukden had conditioned me to living under the heel of the Japanese Army, and because, were misfortune to befall me, as a bachelor, my demise would be less extensively mourned than in the case of a man with wife and children. The dear old Department was considerate in such matters.

I was not so much as scratched, although we were bombed a bit. This was something of a novelty in 1938, unless one were an Ethiopian or a Spaniard. Air raids, troop movements, wounded soldiers arriving from the front, Soviet “volunteer” airmen and German military advisers in the streets, hordes of dazed refugees fleeing before the oncoming enemy, students rushing about the city pasting patriotic posters on walls and calling on everyone to resist the foe, and finally the Communists planting dynamite in key buildings to greet the invaders with a scorched earth—all of these made for a lively scene.

In Hankow I picked up strands of previous acquaintanceships: Colonel Stilwell, who, as Military Attaché, was observing the course of hostilities; Pinky Dorn, serving with him as Assistant Military Attaché; and Edgar Snow, reporting the war and less overtly violent forms of politics. His Red Star over China had recently been published and he had suddenly risen from journalistic obscurity to international acclaim without having been spoiled.

Because of the constricted wartime living at Hankow, with the American and British correspondents and officials concentrated in offices, apartments, hotels, and bars in a short strip along the bank of the Yangtze, and because of a mounting sense of crisis and doom from the approaching Japanese armies, the twenty or thirty Anglo-American newsmen and officials shared a feeling of camaraderie. My apartment in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building became one of the eating, drinking, debating, and recreational centers for the “last ditchers,” as we called ourselves.

A Marine Corps captain, Evans Carlson, whom I had known in Peking, came to Hankow from North China, where he had been observing firsthand the Chinese Communist Eight Route Army. Carlson was fortyish, a lanky, rawboned fellow, less homely than Abraham Lincoln, less handsome than Gary Cooper. He was unpretentious and direct; also a bit wanting in skepticism. Although at President Roosevelt’s request he wrote personally to FDR regarding the situation in China, I do not recall his ever mentioning this unusual relationship. It had begun in 1935 when Carlson commanded the President’s Marine guard at Warm Springs and Roosevelt took a liking to the rugged, idealistic officer, who had already served two stints in China.

Carlson was the first American military man to visit Communist-held areas. He came to Hankow greatly impressed by what he had seen of Communist troops and guerrillas, their exceptional esprit de corps, discipline, and solicitude for the civilian population. The Eagle Scout behavior of the Communist soldiers contrasted with the often dispirited, disreputable life style of other Chinese troops. Carlson reported his enthusiastic admiration of the Communist forces. This raised senior American military eyebrows. When he voiced his views to the press, the Navy attempted to muzzle him. Inspired to bear witness, Carlson resigned and in the United States publicly praised the Chinese Communists and prophesied a harmonious, unified, democratic China victorious over Japan, if only Americans would stop selling war materiel to Japan.

This did not happen. Carlson found himself back in the Marines in time for World War II. He was given a battalion, popularly called Carlson’s Raiders, in training which he incorporated lessons learned from the Chinese Communist regulars and irregulars. Perhaps Carlson’s most lasting contribution to the art of war and to American history and culture was lexicographical. By adopting the Chinese Communist slogan “gung ho”—work together—as a motto for the Raiders, he introduced the phrase into the American vulgate where it is now defined in a sense less reflective of the original Chinese meaning than of Carlson himself—“wholeheartedly, often ingenuously, loyal and enthusiastic.”

* * *

Here at Hankow in the summer of 1938 I also formed new acquaintanceships, some of which were renewed elsewhere or otherwise affected my life, particularly in the McCarthy era. One of these new acquaintances was Chou En-lai, then acting as the principal Communist representative with Chiang Kai-shek’s National Government. This was under the wartime arrangement of a so-called united front between the two mutually hostile regimes.

Fine featured, animated, quick-witted and magnetic, Chou was well equipped for another and more productive function—public relations with foreign journalists and officials. For a Communist oligarch he was remarkably catholic in his interests and vivacious in his manner. This was for Chou the beginning of 37 years of dealing with foreigners, continuing even into the period when he was Prime Minister.

Close to the Communist delegation was a middle-aged woman named Agnes Smedley. Agnes was indelibly American—not Booth Tarkington American, rather Upton Sinclair American, with a touch of Calamity Jane and the Wobblies. She had been born into the squalor of a turn of the century Colorado mining camp and grown up in poverty, bitterness, and anger. A rebel by temperament and a writer by vocation, she championed the poor and downtrodden; initially, of all things, the cause of Indian independence from British rule during World War I. In the 1930s she was in China and appalled by the poverty and oppression that she encountered. She associated herself with the Chinese Communists and left-wing organizations, visited the Communist headquarters at Yenan, and, with the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, joined Communist guerrilla units in the countryside.

Garbed in the shapeless gray cotton uniform of the Communist Eight Route Army, complete with puttees, cloth shoes and a limp cap on her lank brown bob, Miss Smedley arrived in Hankow from guerrilla country. She was in straitened circumstances, so the American Episcopalian Bishop, Logan Roots, a practicing Christian, took her in and gave her bed and board. They were spoken of as the Moscow-Heaven Axis. And Agnes entertained herself—and the Right Reverend Roots—by addressing him as Comrade Bishop. The Manchester Guardian employed her as a correspondent, which ameliorated her financial plight and made her a member of the international press corps.

Agnes also solicited medical supplies for the guerrillas and money with which to buy such supplies. The British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel) was one of the more forthcoming donors to her wounded and sick guerrillas. Sir Archie respected this ill-favored, fervent woman and learned from her about a China and Chinese to whom very few foreigners had access. So did most of the foreign correspondents.

Although she maintained that she was not a Communist, Agnes was generally regarded as one and was certainly closely associated with them. Because she was unruly, nonconformist, and at once cynical and pitying, I doubted that she was a Communist Party member—and that the Party would accept her for membership if she applied. It did not seem to me that a Party member would have said to me, as Agnes did, that while she respected and was fond of Chu Teh (whose biography she was writing) and other Communist fighting men, she disliked the principal political figures in Yenan: “They’re too slick.” I wondered if Agnes might not, given the opportunity, forsake fellow-traveling.

Shortly before the press corps left Hankow in the face of the Japanese advance—the embassies had gone earlier—I had a casual dinner for some of those who were about to depart, among them Agnes. After dinner she was momentarily sitting by herself so I went over to make conversation. Where was she going, I asked. Back to the guerrillas, “That’s where I belong.” I then delivered some thoughts on the degenerative course of revolutionary movements, that if the cause with which she identified herself came to power she would be disillusioned, her faith in the revolution betrayed. Why didn’t she give up the kind of life she was leading and function like other correspondents? “I can’t,” she said with tears in her eyes, “There is no other way for me.”

I regretted what I had said. She did not need my lecturing. She was already aware of what I warned. And I had not suggested any acceptable alternative. Indeed, there probably was no other way for her.

For several months after she left I received brief letters from Agnes reporting what was transpiring in the guerrilla areas. She was our only source of firsthand information from that amorphous zone. And then I lost all contact.

Jack Belden, the young, bright, moody United Press correspondent, groused to me about how shabbily UP treated him and then asked what I was being paid as a Vice Consul. I told him something in the neighborhood of $3,500 a year, as I now recall it. Jack flared up, “I’m as good as you are.” So he wired UP that unless it raised his salary to whatever it was that I was paid, he would quit.

He quit. As he was then without income, I invited him to stay at my apartment. One night on the way back from a restaurant dinner with friends Jack disappeared. For days thereafter we checked with the police, hospitals, and military intelligence—no Jack. We gave him up as probably dead, fallen into the Yangtze or victim of foul play.

Some ten days later he casually walked into my apartment. He had on impulse gone to the railroad station and boarded a northbound troops train. It delivered him to the front. There for about a week he was caught in a battle and Chinese retreat—days of swirling confusion and terror. Stilwell was delighted to receive Belden’s account of the engagements and rout. Although the Military Attaché had gotten to other fronts, notwithstanding obstacles placed in his way by the Chinese High Command, which was ashamed of the condition and performance of its forces, he had not at that time been able to visit the front north of Hankow. Jack had brought him eyewitness, participant reports of action, to which the official communiqués bore scarcely any resemblance.

Belden slipped out of Hankow ahead of the Japanese. I did not see him again until 1942, in Burma, again with Stilwell.

Hankow, summer 1938, changed for a time the outlook for Freda Utley—a middle-aged woman of versatile convictions, each successively proclaimed with passion. Born in England, Miss Utley began life as a British subject. But while at university she joined in 1928 the Communist Party, thereby adopting an allegiance above that to King and country.

She married a Soviet citizen, went to the Soviet Union in 1930 where she worked in the Comintern, and soon became disillusioned with at least Soviet Communism. She later claimed that she did not transfer her British CP membership to the Soviet Party and that she let her British membership lapse. The detention of her husband by the Soviet authorities further alienated Miss Utley. She was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1936, and headed to China.

At Hankow, she met the Chinese Communist delegation, also Snow, Carlson, Smedley and others having firsthand acquaintanceship with the Chinese Communists. With exhilaration she found a new faith, one in the Chinese Communists, whom she described in her book China at War (1939), as having abandoned the goal of dictatorship, adopted a policy of reform along capitalist and democratic lines and become, in sum, like radicals in the English Nineteenth Century sense of the word. At the same time, as she testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1950, she decided to expose the Soviet Union for what it was, “even if my husband was still alive and it led to his death.” Such was Miss Utley’s sense of civic duty.

Her attachment to her Chinese Victorian radicals did not last long. I would later learn that because of their approval of the Soviet-Nazi pact, she had turned against them with fury.

By early 1938 the Japanese had practically wiped out the small, Italian-trained, incompetent, corrupt Chinese Air Force. Claire Chennault, an American Army Air Corps (AAC) captain in his late forties, retired for deafness and insistence on (contrary to AAC doctrine) the vulnerability of bombers to pursuit aircraft, was retained by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and Mme. Chiang as air adviser. Chennault looked like the warrior that he was—pitted face, cold straight-on gaze, thin lips, aggressive jaw. As Stilwell was the epitome of the foot soldier, Chennault was that of the open cockpit fighter pilot. These two warriors, both in Hankow during the summer of 1938, would be teamed together four years later in rancorous association.

The Chinese offered no resistance to the Japanese capture of Hankow. In contrast to its savage behavior following the seizure of Nanking, the Japanese army occupied Hankow in a relatively orderly fashion. Life for those of us who stayed behind—thousands of terrified Chinese and several scores of uneasy foreigners—meant virtual captivity; checkpoints within the city and no leaving it without a tightly controlled pass.

My work was political reporting and drafting notes advising the Japanese of the location of American properties in Central China and placing on the invading forces responsibility for damage to any of these properties or harm to any Americans by bombing or other military action. I also made, with reluctant Japanese permission, extended trips into Japanese occupied areas to check on the welfare of isolated Americans. On one of these assignments, involving the evacuation of Americans from a mountain resort held by Chinese Communist guerrillas and besieged by the Japanese, I underwent the stimulating experience of being shot at by the Communists.

* * *

The State Department transferred me in the autumn of 1940 to its Far Eastern (FE) Division, where I was put to work as the junior of two China desk officers. As our windows in the old State-War-Navy building, later housing presidential executive offices, faced the west wing of the White House, one of my duties was to keep at a fixed level all window shades in FE visible from the Executive Mansion, lest President Roosevelt’s eye be affronted by a spectacle of irregularity across the street in the cathedral of American diplomacy. In addition, I moved about the Department prodding other divisions to do things that my superiors wanted done and collecting concurring initials on FE’s draft telegrams. These menial activities were a valuable introduction to the way things were done.

My education in this respect was furthered by acquaintance, originating from Georgetown socializing, with Lauchlin Currie. He was a brisk, little, rimless-bespectacled Harvard economist who had been acquired by Roosevelt as a special assistant. Currie was developing, when I met him, an interest in Chinese affairs and after several social meetings took to phoning me at FE to ask for information or my comments on Chinese events. I thought it odd that he should occupy himself with matters so evidently outside of his expertise. But then this spontaneous straying into other jurisdictions to dabble therein was characteristic of the helterskelter Roosevelt administration.

Naturally, I was flattered by the attention from a presidential aide. At the same time, this contact made me uneasy because Currie was clearly out of channels. By orderly governmental procedure he should have dealt with an Assistant Secretary or certainly no one lower than chief of division. I let my immediate superiors know of Currie’s queries. They expressed no opinion, but I sensed they did not approve of the connection. In the absence of orders forbidding me to respond to requests from the White House, I felt that it would be priggish of me—or at least awkward—to tell a special assistant to the President to take his questions elsewhere.

The President set an example for Currie in operating out of channels and undercutting the man in charge. Roosevelt frequently bypassed his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to deal directly with the Under Secretary, Sumner Welles. This was, of course, the President’s prerogative, and in a sense it was understandable because, while Hull was useful in coping with Congress regarding foreign policy, his knowledge of foreign affairs was limited and his approach simplistic and moralistic. In contrast, Welles was a highly competent professional diplomat.

Good management practice, however, dictated that if Roosevelt had not, for whatever reason, wished to deal with the man he had put in charge of foreign affairs, he should have replaced the Secretary with someone in whom he had full confidence. But FDR did not work that way. He was a politician, not an executive. The confusion that he, his White House staff, and his special emissaries sowed in the conduct of American foreign relations was to grow with passage of time and the emboldenment of Roosevelt’s virtuosos.

Dr. Stanley K. Hornbeck, PhD exercised with some pomposity his mandate as political adviser to the Secretary in Far Eastern matters. Having been promoted from chief of FE, he regarded the division as a fiefdom obligated to serve him. Substantive papers were accordingly submitted to him for approval, or simply for information. An inveterate memo-writer, Hornbeck reacted in pedantic writing to almost anything that came to his clutterpiled-high desk. These indiscriminate memoranda on matters trivial as well as weighty fluttered back to FE throughout the day.

Hornbeck had some academic background in China, but little grounding in Japan. He was morally indignant over Japan’s invasion of China and sympathized with the Chinese. But in that he was no different from most of us in the China service.

As assistant to Hornbeck, a studious young man named Alger Hiss read and screened stacks of papers coming to Hornbeck’s office. I did not envy him his job, working exclusively with the ponderous fussbudget. Alger was amiable, but as he was not in the channel of communication between Hornbeck and the FE, those of us who were junior officers in FE had relatively little contact with him.

Roosevelt had delegated to Hull the tedious and, in terms of domestic American politics, risky business of negotiating with Japan for a lessening of tension between the two countries. The Secretary’s principal adviser in this crucial endeavor was Hornbeck. Also participating in the negotiations, but subordinate to Hornbeck, was the man who had been my chief at Mukden, Joseph Ballantine, a rumpled, nervous and rather engaging Japan specialist.

The May to December 7, 1941 negotiations with the Japanese Ambassador took place at the State Department in strict secrecy. My fellow junior officers and I were in uneasy ignorance of what was transpiring. We drew up a statement expressing our opposition to any deal with Japan at the expense of China. This we presented to the Chief of FE, Maxwell M. Hamilton. In considerable agitation he told us, in effect, not to meddle in matters beyond our province and intimated that the Army and Navy (both urgently trying to strengthen themselves) wanted the State Department to play for time, at least to delay if we could not avoid hostilities with Japan.

My colleagues and I had acted on a misapprehension. The risk was not a sell-out of China. Rather, the risk was cornering Japan so that it had no alternative but to fight. Hull and Hornbeck were rigidly pro-Chinese and, both temperamentally and as a matter of principle, incapable of making a compromise deal with Japan for a modus vivendi, or what is now called peaceful co-existence. While I doubt that such a deal was then possible, given the rising antagonism in the American public toward Japan in 1941, the Hull-Hornbeck combination ensured that no compromise could be negotiated. And so the United States and Japan moved inflexibly, almost as if they were predestined to do so, toward war. And the American Armed Forces did not get the time that they wanted for preparation.

I was off on a blithe fortnight’s vacation when the Japanese attached Pearl Harbor. From Texas eastward was unknown territory to me. So I had eagerly embarked on a scanning tour through the south. Roark Bradford introduced me to the unique charm of his New Orleans, to pleasant but vapid bayous (lacking the redolence of similar Asian waterways), and to the improbable settlement of Chinese and Slovak shrimpers on the Grand Isle of the Cajuns.

By comparison, the Gulf coast eastward was bland. And then Charleston, South Carolina, more coherent and sedate than New Orleans, architecturally harmonious, a graceful city on a personal scale. It was in this agreeable setting, on a placid Sunday midday, from excited conversations on the street and turned-up radios, that I heard the news of Pearl Harbor.

I was surprised, but not astounded, and reproached myself for not having anticipated something like this—at least as to timing. For the previous year in Hankow at a Sunday luncheon at my apartment for three American and two Japanese naval officers, a Japanese captain, exhilarated by gin and beer, had knotted a table-napkin around his head and proclaimed to the hung-over American gunboateers, “When we attack you, it will be on a Sunday morning.” And of course they would, I thought at the time.

Back at FE I encountered a hushed, frantic search of records—had we passed to the military all of the messages from the Embassy at Tokyo that might have warned us of the attack? Two were of importance. One in mid-November was a general reminder that the Japanese were accustomed to strike first and then declare war. The other, earlier, relayed a report from the Peruvian Ambassador in Tokyo that an inebriated Japanese naval officer had told a member of his staff that should war come, it would begin with a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. FE had not been remiss, as I recall, in keeping the military informed.

Responsibility for the United States being caught napping went, of course, beyond slighting unverifiable warnings from the American Embassy in Tokyo. The disaster of Pearl Harbor occurred because American officials, civilian and military, and the American people did not sense the desperate daring of the Japanese, underestimated Japanese power, assumed near-invulnerability, and thought that if Japan expanded its China war into a Pacific war, it would strike only southward to Malaysia and the Dutch Indies.

Stimson, then Secretary of War, and Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, belittled the danger from Japan. And ten days before Pearl Harbor, Hornbeck offered five to one odds that Japan would not be at war with the United States by December 15. General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines earlier in 1941 had assured Washington that he could defend the islands. The Army persuaded itself that the newly developed B-17 bombers could not only rout any attack on the Philippines but even interdict an attempt by the Japanese to advance southward toward the Indies.

Although American deciphering of Japanese cables revealed to the very few at the pinnacle of American authority that after November 29 Tokyo would abandon attempts to find peaceful accommodations, the President and his high command did not interpret this ominous intelligence as indicating that the powerful American military complex in mid-Pacific was under threat of imminent attack. To suggest that a Japanese task force might venture undetected halfway across the Pacific, with a surprise attack cripple the American fleet and air units in the Hawaiian bastion, and then get away with slight losses—such a scenario, if presented before December 7, would have been dismissed as preposterous.