Yaolee Chen

HIS 359 Oral History

Robert McCoy

 

                                                      World War II

     Before I could tell you the U.S.-Taiwan relation in January 1945, I must readdress the history of China and Taiwan.  The people of the East Asia traditionally believed that Taiwan, whose old name was Formosa, was a provincial of the Chinese domination[1].  So, in 1945, when Chiang went back to Taiwan, the Taiwanese was to welcome the Chiang, thinking our official government was coming back.  But, when Chiang went back to Taiwan, he massacre and killed the civilians of the Taiwanese people.  What Chiang had done was a bloody and an unacceptable action in our sight.  The Taiwanese loved peace, but not the use of the violence.

      A Chinese tradition was that if the victorious one did not do both occupying the land and killing the elites of the defeats, he did no win the war. The Westerners had found the Japanese committed an international crime for attacking the civilians in the war[2].  What the Westerners thought was unacceptable was acceptable by the Japanese and the Chinese.  The Japanese massacre the Chinese in Nanking[3], and the Chiang Kai-Shak the leader of the Chinese Nationalist blood-washed the Taiwanese civilians.  The Chinese Communist Party did not think the US won the war in China, 1939-1949, and it was why we had the Korea war and Vietnam War.

     Chiang was a schoolmate of Eisenhower, and Chiang graduated from Western Point Military School.  Since 1911, Sung –Ya-Sun appointed him to be the president of the Independent Chinese Nationalist, Chiang Kai-Shek built the intrastate railways and fixed the construction in the major capitals in China.  As in 1939, German invaded Poland and Mussolini invaded Italy, Japan had invaded the northern east of China earlier in 1937[4].  Japan planned to conquer the land of China in three months, in observing the weakness of Chia-Kai-Shek.  The Japanese already endangered China from without, and the Chinese Communist Party convulsion from within, Chiang would accept any help from any side to fight against the Japanese.  Chiang Kai-shek declared that "one minute before the last hope is lost, we still hope for peace." When peace did not come, however, most Chinese had no regrets. United to face a common enemy, the whole country rallied behind the national government and Chiang Kai-shek. For the first time in the history of the Republic of China, regional militarists responded to the call of the central government. All of the political parties unanimously declared their full support and cooperation with the national government of Chiang Kai-shek in the War of Resistance against Japan. The leader of the Chinese Communist Party Mao promised the leader of the Nationalist Chiang that the CCP would help Chiang to fight against the Japanese.  But Moa was a liar.  Mao actually had spent only 10% of the military force to fight against the Japanese.  The CCP under the leadership of Mao spent 20% of the strength to fool around the Nationalist Party[5], which was the Koumintang; and the CCP used the rest of strength, which was the 70% of its military force to strengthen itself.  When the World War II was over, the CCP of Mao became a rival of the Nationalist of Chiang, and they began to fight against each other.  Chiang originally set the capital of the Independent Nationalist in Chang-An in the central China and had to move its capital down to the southern east of China at Chungking.  Since the wartime till 1949, the US had supports the military forces of Chiang, like the Office of Strategic Services, (which was the Green Breets or CIA today)[6], Chiang Kai- Shek even under the supports from the US, kept loosing the wars, city after cities.  Chiang was then looking for a refuge.  In 1949, Taiwan suddenly acquired a world-wide importance and came within the sphere of active interest of the United States. This happened when the National Government of China, defeated on the mainland by the Chinese Communists, followed the precedent of the defeated Ming dynasty of three centuries earlier and took refuge in Formosa. As a result of this and other far-reaching developments in the Far East, the fortunes and the future status of the island became inextricably enmeshed with the problems of the United States in relation to China as a whole, to Korea, to Japan, to the Far East in general, and to global power relationships.  Chiang and his troops left China for Taiwan, and the peace treaty divided the China into the Communist China and the Free China.  The capital of the Free China was set in Taipei, Taiwan in 1949[7].

     The Westernization in Taiwan had begun earlier in the 17th century when Captain Lippermann found the island Formosa (Taiwan) on his way to Indochina.  Lippermann, a Portuguese, sent troops and built the capital Tai-Nan in the south of Formosa under the permission of the Chinese Emperor Ch’ian-Long of the Ch’ing Dynasty.  The Portuguese occupied the capital for 18 years, 1624-1642[8].  A Chinese troop of rebellious, led by Zhung Zh-Long, came to Formosa and fought against the Portuguese.  The Portuguese were very tuff to fight against with.  The war took six months; and finally, Lippermann and his troops left Formosa.  But since, the French troops occupied the north of Taiwan for months.  The Spanish navy fought at the French troops on the north coast of Taiwan.  The British navy fought against the Chinese troops on the east coast of Taiwan.  In the 19th century, because the Chinese government had pre-occupied Taiwan, the lengths of the time that the Westerners occupied the island were only months or weeks, a foreshadowing of the weakness of the Western military power.  In the late Ch’ing-Dynasty, the power of the Chinese government declined and gave the island to Japan in 1895[9].  By the eve of Japanese colonial rule in 1895, Chinese settlers had occupied plains and established a booming agrarian economy centered on rice and sugarcane. Japanese rule was instrumental in bringing about a green revolution and in expanding commodification and export of both crops. In the course of half a century of colonial rule, Taiwan was transformed into a food supplier in a new division of labor with Japan. Agroindustry, particularly the sugar industry, formed the core of colonial Taiwan's embryonic industrial sector.   Till 1949, after the war ended, the Taiwanese welcomed the Chinese immigrants as the Taiwanese did in the late 19th century.  But these new immigrants led by Chiang Kai-Shak were not very friendly to us.  They came to slain the people of the Taiwanese.

     Though the US military supported the Chiang, my father never blamed on the US military supports[10].  My father was a pupil of the elementary school when the WWII hit at Taiwan in January 1945.  What he had seen was that the US helicopter dropped the bags of food to the Taiwanese people.  Back in the 17th century, the Portuguese government translated the first Bible into the Taiwanese language.  The Taiwanese also remembered the people from Holland, who often set jars of milk on their heads while walking in the markets.  The Taiwanese remembered the several castles, which were built by the Europeans and were still in Taiwan today.  My grandfather remembered the free cigarettes from the British companies, and my father remembered the free flour and dry milk dropped from the US aircraft.  The Westerners were the angels to the Taiwanese.  Taiwanese had its own culture that was different from the people of the mainland China[11].  When my parents, and their neighborhood, and their friends saw the brutal actions, which Chiang had done to the Taiwanese, they were angry.  In their mind, the US represented good[12], but the Japanese and Chiang represented evil.

          The Japanese hurt by the war the most.  In the Second war, about 1,500,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in action, and roughly 500,000 Imperial Navy sailors. More shocking was the death toll of civilians: probably 600,000 lost their lives in the War. This was due not only to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the wholesale fire bombings of Tokyo, Nagoya, and other cities, but to the hardships and atrocities perpetrated on Japanese civilians in Korea, China, and Okinawa. Thousands of families were left broken and destitute in the collapse of Japan's colonial empire.  The Japanese created the war because it invaded the northern east China; and the people who hurt most by the war were the Japanese[13].

     When I asked my father about his war experience in Taiwan, he answered:

It was a time of the Japanese government ruled over the Taiwanese people, I was a pupil in a Japanese elementary school. The Japanese and the Taiwanese students were segregated.  A higher education was for the Japanese only, the Japanese thought all the other races were inferior, but the decent of the Japanese Emperor,

During the war, the Japanese school leaders wanted the volunteers to fly the crafts and drop themselves into the fire places of the American tanks, for doing so one Japanese-trained Taiwanese pilot could destroy one huge American tank.  The Japanese school leaders had violated to what the Westerners called the wartime international laws, for impelling the death of the civilian lives.  The Japanese school leaders honored the Taiwanese who had done the self-sacrifice, a glorious death.  “A huge American tank would be burned and a huge number of American navies would be killed by a Japanese trained pilot[14],” my father said.

          My family in Taiwan[15] have a good experience with the American culture today.  Marin Monroe acts my mom’s favorite movies.  My first sister believes that the US war today is to arrest Osama bin Laden.  My third sister find no place to live but in the American.  I personally also receive the economic support from the US government for a higher education.  The Taiwanese Defense Department, as well, depends on the US military support today.  The people in Taiwan welcomed the populist’s culture.

    Less than a year after the end of the Second World War, American officials had made ambitious plans to provide military assistance to several foreign nations. In the spring of 1946 President Harry S. Truman asked Congress to approve long-term arms aid to the Philippines, China, and Latin America. He also requested authority to send military advisers to any foreign country whenever he thought that such help would advance the national interest. While the administration's plans were not so extensive as to constitute a program of "peacetime lend-lease," as they were characterized by one awestruck observer, they were nonetheless remarkable.  Never before, except in time of war, had the United States used military assistance as a major, continuing instrument of national policy.

     The US war in Korea, a new era dawned with the passing of the Cold War, the dominant dynamic in world politics in the years after World War II. During the Cold War era, the Korean security agenda was defined largely by considerations of the U.S. global strategy of ideological competition with the Soviet Union. U.S. strategy, as reflected in the Truman Doctrine, was to stem the tide of communist expansionism and contain Soviet power within its existing border. This containment policy was put to the test in Korea when war resulted from the communist North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950. The dominant analytical paradigm of this era regarding the Korean peninsula was geopolitical thinking; Korea played a sensitive role as the buffer and fulcrum in the balance of power among the major powers surrounding the Korean peninsula.[16] The US general MacArthur, when reached to the boarder of the North Korea and China, a huge number of Chinese soldier emerged from the boarder to help the North Korea.  MacArthur insisted on the using of the total war that is to have war with China.  But disagreed by Henry Truman, the battle left to Eisenhower.  As a football player, the last three months of the war was very brutal.  The war was end.  But, all the countries of the Chinese culture were threatened, the countries includes Taiwan, Japan, Singarport, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao, Thailand, Gao, Median, and Hong Kong.  The political and economy in Taiwan was insecure; and after Vietnam War, the rich and wealthy Taiwanese tried their best to live aboard because the Communist China may have war with Taiwan at any time.  In the 1970s, the Taiwanese self-produced weapons to make up the insufficient weapons they purchased from the US.  The “Greater China”, which once represented the economic prosperity of Taiwan, represents the strong military defenses of Taiwan today.  The “limit battle” was to prevent more people from the involvement into the wars, but the results were that more Asians had to spend more time and energy to prepare for the wars.  And the wars today are more destructive and powerful than ever before.

    The US had better not to use the military power because we might not win the war. 

When they say, as they said before and will say again, that collectively, as a nation, they must be equal with ourselves and that 'equality' implies an equality of arms, then a man who has renounced vengeance and is undeluded by ideologies, even by his own, will know what answer to give . . . It would be an expense of spirit to hate them meanwhile, but suicide to trust them.

Charles Morgan, Reflections in a Mirror, 1946

Disarmament and arms control are firmly associated in the public mind with efforts to maintain international peace through compromise and negotiation. However, there is a much older type of disarmament, which is not the product of give and take but is imposed upon a defeated enemy. Forced disarmament is the subject of this essay. It was used frequently in the ancient world as an alternative to massacre or enslavement and it is the United Nations' policy today in Iraq. It was part of every major peace settlement from the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, through the Paris negotiations in 1815 and 1919, to the postwar agreements in 1945. Democracies almost automatically have recourse to it when they are in a position to impose peace upon their enemies, yet relatively little thought has been given to its efficacy[17].

     George Kennan was to say that the US “politically” to secure the peace of the world, but he misspelled the world “politically” with “militarily”.   What my father remembered about the war was the bags of flours and dry milk power dropped down from the US helicopter.  It was not the atomic bomb dropped in Japan made my father thought the US was an angel.  The books says:  In 1945, the US air force was sent to help Chiang, but only the Chinese pilot was capable to catch the Japanese.  In 1950s, it was by fortune that the Soviet did not invade North Korea, the United States presented a resolution calling on North Korea to cease hostilities and withdraw its forces to the thirty-eighth parallel[18].  In 1975, the North Vietnam seized Saigon as the US and the South Vietnam official flee.  The American might be not a fighter, but a good politician.


[1] Formosa: A Problem for United States Foreign Policy,
Book by Joseph W. Ballantine; Brookings Institution, 1952

[T]he island of Formosa was of little concern to the United States or to the world at large. For several centuries prior to the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, it was an integral part of China. Thereafter, for fifty years it was a colony of Japan. At the conclusion of the Second World War, it reverted to China.

[2] Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II,
Book by Yuki Tanaka; Westview Press, 1998

The C Class, which covered "crimes against humanity," consisted of crimes against civilians of any nationality.

[3] The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,
Book by Iris Chang; Basic Books, 1997

[4] “Contending Political Forces During the War of Resistance” by Tien-Wei Wu from China's Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937-1945,
Book by James C. Hsiung, Steven I. Levine; M.E. Sharp Inc

 

[5] Mao's China: Party Reform Documents, 1942-44,

We have several hundred thousand Party members; in complete unity with the people, they are engaging in a bitter and unprecedented struggle against our national enemies

 

[6]A Secret War: Americans in China, 1944-1945, by Oliver J. Caldwell; Southern Illinois University Press, 1972

[7] Formosa: A Problem for United States Foreign Policy,
Book by Joseph W. Ballantine; Brookings Institution, 1952

[8]Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan: Land Tenure, Development, and Dependency, 1895-1945,
Book; Westview Press, 1995

The expansion of maritime commerce throughout East Asia in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, in the wake of the arrival of the European powers, brought an end to the isolation of Taiwan. The Dutch East India Company colonized the southwestern part of the island in 1624, pacified the deer-hunting aborigines, and recruited Chinese labor from the mainland for rice and sugarcane production. The Dutch fostered Taiwan's lucrative trade in deerskins and sugar with southern China and Japan. In 1661 the Dutch were expelled by Koxinga (Cheng Ch'eng-kung) and his Fukienese soldiers, who retreated to Taiwan to escape the conquering Ch'ing empire. To settle his army, Koxinga carried out large-scale military colonization on aboriginal land. Koxinga's heir surrendered to the Ch'ing in 1683. During Ch'ing dynasty ( 1644-1911) the abundant uncultivated land in Taiwan attracted massive Chinese immigration as population peaked in the prosperous and peaceful eighteenth century. Chinese immigrants from Fukien and Canton created rice and sugarcane fields, encroaching on the aborigines' traditional hunting grounds.

[9]Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan

 

[10]Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945-1950,
Book by Chester J. Pach; University of North Carolina Press, 1991

[11]Dynamic in Taiwan's Postwar Development : The Religious and Historical Roots of Entrepreneurship,
Book by Ian A. Skoggard; M. E. Sharpe, 1996 Introduction

In the last forty years, Taiwan has undergone a remarkable transformation, metamorphosing from an apparently poor agrarian society into an affluent industrial nation. The speed of this transformation has exceeded that of developed countries during their period of early industrialization: twice the rate of growth of the United States and Japan, and three times that of England. While it is recognized that the state, foreign capital, and the restructuring of the world economy had much to do with Taiwan's growth, the Taiwanese people were also a proactive force in their country's transformation. Although the roles of families and entrepreneurs are acknowledged, the local history and culture in which families and entrepreneurs were embedded has not been fully explicated, and thus the impression has been that these local agents were "hollow men" merely reacting to exogenous forces or behaving according to a narrow familial ethic, or that their motives and behavior can be assumed to be no different than their Western counterparts'. This study attempts to correct this bias by regarding local culture and society as a unique realm of power, and a force in Taiwan's postwar development.

 

[12]Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945-1950,
Book by Chester J. Pach; University of North Carolina Press, 1991

I think the concern I have run into is this, is this the beginning of the United States taking on an obligation to supply military assistance to every country in the world? . . . If we once take on the obligation, establish the precedent, where do we wind up?

-- Paul G. Hoffman, Economic Cooperation Administrator, 20 April 1949

[13] War Responsibility and Japanese Civilian Victims of Japanese Biological Warfare in China,
Journal article by Mariko Asano Tamanoi; Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, 2000 p 13

[14]Williamson Murray. A War to be Won.  (Cambridge, The Belkrap Press of Harvard UP, 2000)

“In autumn 1944, B-29s began to appear over Japan, but they were too few in number and their bombardments too imprecise to be more than a nuisanc” (503).

In the late 1944, the Japanese were few in number to fight back.

 

[15] United States-Taiwan Security Ties: From Cold War to beyond Containment,
Book by Dennis Van Vranken Hickey; Praeger Publishers, 1994

Introduction: Taiwan is situated between Japan and the Philippines and lies approximately 100 miles off the coast of the great land mass of Asia. At 14,000 square miles, it is roughly the size of the state of West Virginia. The island is home to 20 million people, 14 million motor vehicles, and the government of the Republic of China ( ROC or Taiwan).

[16]Korea and the World: Beyond the Cold War,
Book by Young Whan Kihl; Westview Press, 1994

[17] Enforced Disarmament: From the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War,
Book by Philip Towle; Clarendon Press, 1997 p.1

The Road to Confrontation: American Policy Toward China and Korea, 1947-1950,
Book by William Whitney Stueck; University of North Carolina Press, 1981p.9

The action was made possible by the absence of the Soviet Union, which had been boycotting the body since mid-January to protest the continued seating of Nationalist rather than Communist China. American leaders regarded the resolution as...