Chiang Kai-Shek

Chiang

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was the prominent leader the Nationalists in China, also known as the Kuomintang, in the late 1920s. “In 1927 [Chiang’s forces] “marched north from Canton to unify the country,” causing a fear of “anti-foreign attacks” among the small U.S. contingent that had been based in that country after the conclusion of World War I.[1] In the run up to World War II Chiang was the Chinese leader whom the Roosevelt administration had placed its hopes upon for thwarting Japanese imperialistic designs on the Chinese mainland and the corresponding threat to U.S. interests in the region. During the war, Chiang was a burdensome ally, demanding ever more resources from the United States, but never actually delivering on his promises to fight the Japanese. His relationships with the commander of U.S. ground forces in the region, Lt. Gen. Joseph Stillwell, and “U.S. General Claire Chennault, commander of the Fourteenth Air Force,”[2] waxed hot and cold, mostly cold. The two U.S. commanders disagreed as to the best way to defend China against the Japanese. Each preferred the capabilities of his own service. Air power, being at that time regarded by many international leaders as the ‘thing to have,’ was naturally preferred by Chiang who tended to side with Chennault. His designs of an air defense of the Chinese mainland never materialized, as Stillwell surmised, because Chiang was never serious enough about ‘boots on the ground’ to properly defend Chinese air fields. The Japanese overran them.[3] Chiang’s weakness forced the Allies to expend scarce resources in the Pacific theater and prolonged the fighting there. 

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[1] John Whiteclay Chambers, II, Ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 116.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.