Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

by Rana Mitter

Yet the Civil War, once started, went badly for the Nationalists, in large part because of Chiang Kai-shek’s judgments. During the war against Japan, Chiang had played an appallingly bad hand much better than might have been expected. During the Civil War, his judgment appears to have deserted him. In particular, his decision to extend his lines to try and recapture the northeast—the region which was the Communist heartland where Mao was underpinned by strong support from the neighboring USSR—was spectacularly ill-judged. In 1945–1946 George Marshall had encouraged Chiang to try and recapture the region, but had become much more pessimistic about the possibility by the spring of 1946.14 As 1947 ground on, the Communist general Lin Biao’s brilliant campaigning in north China drove the Nationalists further and further back. While major cities were still under Nationalist control, along with the rail lines, the territory was now Communist—an echo of the situation under the Japanese just a few years earlier. In the autumn of 1948 General Wei Lihuang found himself with some 300,000 Nationalist troops facing some 700,000 under Lin Biao.15 By November the region’s major city of