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