Books: Seven Years of Valley Forge

THUNDER OUT OF CHINA (325 pp.)—Theodore H. White & Annalee Jacoby —William Sloane Associates ($3).

In hardship and tragic travail, Chungking was to modern China what Valley Forge was to revolutionary America. But Valley Forge lasted one winter and Chungking lasted seven years.

To people living in a different civilization on the opposite side of the world, the events of those seven years seemed strange and complicated. Thunder out of China, Book-of-the-Month for November, makes them comprehensible to Americans.

In the early summer of 1939, when the bombings of Chungking began, Theodore H. (“Teddy”) White* was a young man just a year out of Harvard, summa cum laude, who had been traveling around the world on a history scholarship. He joined the Chinese in their heroic retreat to the mountains, taking a job in their Ministry of Information. Within a few months he left the Ministry, became a TIME correspondent for the rest of the war in China. Pain without Fear. He suffered dysentery and malaria. Once all his possessions were destroyed by bombs. Occasionally he was called home for a few months, but he was always eager to return to China. One of his returns was made on a Dutch ship loaded with dynamite, which sailed unescorted across the Pacific.

He saw Australia, Indo-China, India, Burma and Sinkiang during the hottest times of the war. He flew so many combat missions with the Fourteenth Air Force (and was awarded the Air Medal) that the editors at home finally ordered him to stop risking his life. He visited Communist headquarters at Yenan. He did not leave China for good until he had flown to see the surrender at Tokyo Bay.

Annalee Jacoby saw nearly as much of the war. Having gone to Chungking for the United China Relief, she and her fiance, TIME Correspondent Melville Jacoby, retired to Manila in November 1941 in order to be married under slightly less uncertain conditions. Within two weeks the Philippines were attacked and their wedding trip was a 2,500-mile voyage in a small boat from Corregidor to Australia. There, shortly afterward, Jacoby was killed in an airfield accident. After two years in the U.S., Annalee Jacoby returned to Chungking in 1944 to look after TIME’S office during the intervals when White was in the field.

Death without Bullets. Thunder out of China is often an eloquent book. White’s picture of famine in Honan is one of many moving passages:

“There were corpses on the road. A girl no more than 17, slim and pretty, lay on the damp earth, her lips blue with death; her eyes were open and the rain fell on them. People chipped at bark, pounded it by the roadside for food; vendors sold leaves at a dollar a bundle. Ghostlike men were skimming the stagnant pools to eat the green slime of the waters. Once our horses sheered off violently from two people lying side by side in the night, sobbing aloud in their desolation. . . .”

Feudalism & Indignation. More telling even than its vivid pictures of battles in which ill-equipped and starving soldiers went down to disaster is the book’s account of why & how the war was fought as it was: of the patriotic exultation which followed the successful retreat to Chungking; of the deterioration of morale that came with years of hardship, inflation and retreat; of the grinding gears of personalities that culminated in the dismissal of General Stilwell; of a peasantry born in the Middle Ages to die in the 20th Century; of the ancient corruption of Chinese government which existed side by side in Chungking with the most unselfish patriotism.

For if Chiang at Chungking was something of a George Washington at Valley Forge, he was also something of a Charlemagne, employing feudal warlords to command armies, relying on corrupt administrators who had never learned efficiency or unlearned feudal brutality.

White and Jacoby make an obviously sincere and not wholly unsuccessful effort to be fair. Yet the same inner flame which made them such tireless reporters of the war gradually heats their indignation till it boils over in angry judgments of Chiang himself as well as of corrupt men in his administration.

They are not blind to the dangers of Communism, but as their condemnation of Chiang grew, they came to prefer the Communists by comparison. Wars cannot be fought anywhere without inflation; in a country as poor as China they cannot be fought without starvation. Yet in the end White and Jacoby lay both of these catastrophes at Chiang’s door.

Reform & Responsibility. For the Communists to practice drastic reform as they made war was relatively easy, for in partisan warfare anything that disorganizes society operates to the enemy’s disadvantage. For a government which is trying to maintain real armies in the field, anything that tears society apart—in China’s case, an unreformed feudal society—made warring on the enemy more difficult.

However good Chiang’s reasons were for tolerating old evils, he remains morally answerable for tolerating them. But White and Jacoby go much further in their judgment: they indignantly describe the government’s frequent indifference to the welfare of its people in terms commonly applied to systematic fascist cruelty.

To speak of “the Chinese people who were profoundly good, and the Chinese Government, which was profoundly bad” is anachronistic. Both Chinese people and government have barely emerged from the Middle Ages; the adjectives, so applied, belong to the 20th Century.

The same warm indignation at the oppression of Oriental man leads Thunder out of China to other wrenched conclusions. One of these is that in India in 1942 the Congress Party “flung away the greatest opportunity for Indian freedom in hundreds of years” by not ordering a revolution—although revolution at that time would have brought in the Japanese and might have lost the war.

Tears for Civil War. White and Jacoby also believe that in the first few months following V-J day, the U.S., by taking the side of Chiang against the Communists, plunged China into civil war. Neither White nor Jacoby was in China at the time or they would have known why at war’s end U.S. Marines were sent to guard the railroad from Peiping to the sea. Over ‘that railroad, which the Communists had cut, went the coal needed for Shanghai, coal to run all the railroads whose operation is vital to prevent famine in the interior.

The Communists were in fact already attacking Chiang through the railroad, just as he was attacking them by sending troops to occupy North China. In opening the railroad the U.S. half-heartedly took Chiang’s side in order to prevent the immediate disintegration of newly freed China into a chaos and poverty far exceeding that of Japanese occupation. Not till General Marshall was sent to China did the U.S. adopt a firm policy: to keep communications open and put pressure on both sides to get together.

But the indignant judgments which White and Jacoby make do not destroy the basic validity of their book. It is an eloquent and informative chronicle of how the Chinese people for seven desperate years fought and suffered for freedom.

* Not to be confused with British Humorist T. (for Terence) H. (for Hanbury) White, author of the October Book-of-the-Month, Mistress Masham’s Repose (TIME, Oct. 14).