Our Far Eastern policy has been under constant fire ever since the close of World War II and the collapse of Kuomintang China. It has been and is a matter of public debate, but disappointingly, the public airing of Far Eastern issues has not been accompanied by nor has it helped increase public knowledge on this vital aspect of our foreign policy. So pervasive has the China question become that it has greatly influenced and has even altered the complexion of domestic politics. It has been a primary factor in the dismissal of a five-star general; it was an issue in the recent presidential campaign and is probably talked about and discussed by Americans as few questions of foreign policy ever have been in times other than those of full-scale war. Yet, all this talk, publicity, propaganda, charge and counter-charge, have not led to an enlightened public opinion on our Far Eastern policy; on the contrary, it has probably led to greater confusion and misunderstanding than prevailed before the debate on the China question began.
I
It is vital to us and to our future welfare that this confusion be dispelled and that myth be replaced by reality. This can be done only through knowledge and understanding—through an enlightened public opinion. For in the ultimate analysis, our foreign policy—which is a democratic foreign policy—is formulated, in large part, by public opinion. Of course, this does not always hold true, and it should be recognized that public opinion on matters of foreign policy and diplomacy is almost impossible to ascertain. This, despite the fact that there are numerous pseudo-scientific public-opinion polls which make a point of measuring and testing public opinion on abstruse and complex issues of foreign policy. Theoretically, and often in practice, public opinion molds foreign policy through the men the voters elect to office. These men, the duly elected representatives of the American public, like the public itself, are susceptible to all kinds of pressures in the realm of foreign affairs. Motivated by the same forces and pressures which motivate their constituents, these public leaders sometimes base their actions upon uninformed or purposely distorted opinion, ignorance, and propaganda. Yet, despite the exceptions and complications, it is as it should be in our great democracy—the final criterion in assessing public opinion is the ballot-box.
But the exceptions are important; for, it is more than a mere truism to recognize that public opinion does not always influence foreign policy. Oftentimes in complex and crucial questions there is no public opinion capable of doing any influencing. In too many instances it has been and is the opinion of a small group, lobby, or special interest which has become or is the spokesman for an amorphous, intangible public opinion. Regardless of the dominant influences molding public opinion, it is obvious that in our democracy, if foreign policy is to remain democratic, it is not and probably cannot be grounded only on the narrow realities of power. Ideas, good and bad, many of them completely divorced from fact or the realities of power, influence foreign policy. The American public understands little of the facts of international relations, or of power politics, and in most instances it does not have the necessary information by which to be guided. Too often the American public is swayed in the field of foreign policy by opinion about opinion, by concepts without facts or understanding. Actually, ideas and images created by those ideas sway, mold, and direct that all-pervading but intangible thing—public opinion. This has been true in the past and is true in the present. Americans, in general, have not understood the Monroe Doctrine, but have been firm in their support of the idea for which it stood. They have not understood President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Good Neighbor Policy, the Policy of the Open Door, the Four Freedoms, and the Truman Doctrine. Yet, these are all essentially ideas or concepts that are or were implemented by deed and word as a larger part of American foreign policy. All have been supported, in varying degrees, by the American people.
II
In this realm of ideas and foreign affairs has stood out the image of a China, weak, backward, and incapable of assuming a place among the select leaders of the world. A giant, yes, but with muscles of putty. There is much real historic evidence to support this view of China the weak giant, China the backward technological adolescent trying to do a man’s job in a man’s world. Never in the lifetime of living men has China been strong, powerful, or fully united. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, China has been the prey of foreign powers, particularly those of the Occident; she has been branded with the stigma of backwardness and inferiority—extra-territoriality. China has been the land to be exploited, the land of ninety-nine year leaseholds, of colonies, of foreign economic concessions, of a tariff system controlled by foreigners, a land whose greatest city, Shanghai, was not a Chinese city, but a modern island on the land, foreign in design, control, and makeup. No great power would ever have permitted such debasement; no important power could, and still remain independent. Nonetheless, Americans have lived with the image of an independent China. Weak, yes, but still independent. To them China has always been the land to be protected from evil foreign aggressors by the altruism of the United States; the land to be saved, illogically, by the myth of the Open Door Policy.
Actually, China’s independence was compromised in the first war she lost to the Occident. Her debasement began when she lost the so-called Opium War to Great Britain in 1842. By the resulting treaty of Nanking, China lost Hongkong, and what was perhaps worse, her status as a completely sovereign or independent nation. From that time on, China, on her own strength, never won a foreign war. Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Japan, all defeated China or extorted land and concessions from her under the threat of war. These powers followed the practice, established by Britain in 1842, of first defeating China and then forcing her to pay the costs of the conflict. In this way the colossus of the Orient was securely enmeshed in foreign controls; national sovereignty became a mockery. Still, China was not destroyed; she was saved from the fate of Africa—partition. But she was not saved from this fate by the crusading and righteous zeal of the United States, nor by her own strength and power. Internecine strife, enmity, and jealousies among the powers themselves was all that kept China from being partitioned in the nineteenth century. Again, in World War II China was saved from almost complete domination by Japan not by her own might alone, but by the aid of the United States and of the allied powers. In this instance, it is true that only the United States and China’s formidable mass of territory stood between a free China and a Japanese-dominated China. But we did not aid China because of any high-flown moral reasoning, or because we sought to preserve the principle of the Open Door. We fought Japan to save ourselves; we fought not because Japan violated the principle of the Open Door but because Japan slammed the door shut in our face.
III
Down to the close of World War II then, this was the China most Americans knew—a China which was gallant and unbowed in adversity, but not strong enough to stand on her own feet. After the war with the destruction of the Axis powers and the victory of the United Nations, of which China was one, an attempt was made to create a China of major-power status. But the cloth did not fit the man. China was accorded a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations along with the United States, Russia, Great Britain, and France, not because she merited it as a major power in fact, but because President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed, despite Winston Churchill’s objections, that Asia should be represented by a permanent member on the Security Council. Japan, which had been the only great power in the Orient, was in eclipse, a thoroughly defeated enemy. China, which had fought the enemy longest, was the logical choice for the permanent seat. In fact, it seemed to many Americans at the time that it was a just reward. Just or not, it did not accord with the realities of power. China was still incapable not only of assuming great power responsibility but of keeping order in her own house.
Not only did World War II thrust China into the undeserved status of a major power, but it also upset the balance of world power in other vital ways. It destroyed the old array of great powers, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, the United States, and Russia. Out of the wreckage of war emerged what the exponents of power politics call the “super-powers.” Some writers and statesmen maintained there were three super-powers in the post-war world, the United States, Russia, and Great Britain, but most of them spoke only of two super-powers, the United States and Russia. Dominant power, it was pointed out—in government, in the press, over the air, in the armed forces, the nation’s colleges and universities, and throughout the land—was now in the hands of the two super-powers. The great powers of yesteryear had been reduced to secondary or even tertiary status in the new balance, or perhaps it would be better to say, imbalance of power.
Actually, this concept of two great super-powers arrayed against each other with the rest of the world aligned on either side is an over-simplification of present-day international politics. It is an unwarranted polarization of all world power into two easily comprehended concentrations controlled by two opposing systems of government and ways of life. It is a symptom of cold-war thinking which concentrates on Russia to the exclusion of all else.
For millions of Americans it is not too difficult to realize that they are citizens of a new super-power, a nation whose might is seriously challenged by only one enemy, another super-power, Russia. There are no complexities—so baffling to the human mind—in this concept of foreign relations. Russia and the Marxist Communism it fosters are the source of all evil. If it can be overcome, all will go well with the United States and the rest of the non-Communist world. This kind of thinking is not restricted to the uninformed nor to the average newspaper reading, radio-listening, television-viewing American; it can be found in all levels of government, including the higher military circles. Priding themselves on being up-to-the minute, those who reason in this way base their ideas upon what they term a realistic assessment of military-power relationships. For in the last analysis, power is based upon a military decision. Of course, military power rests upon many factors: a strong economy, modern industry, adequate resources, a virile and united people, and other essentials. Yet, to be meaningful in international relations these things have to be transplanted into armies, navies, and airforces.
IV
Power and military might in the new postwar world are things Americans are aware of as they seldom have been before. But by no means are all Americans elated over this new power thrust upon them, for power brings responsibilities. Many Americans would shun these responsibilities which are world-wide and not easily understood. They would withdraw from the world of power politics and attempt to build their own world, an isolated world of the nineteenth century. Be that as it may, most Americans, internationalists and isolationists alike, know that we are engaged in a tremendous world struggle and that we are the focal point on one side in this struggle. But what most Americans either do not know, or are unaware of, is that other sources of power have manifested themselves in the post-war world. That is, sources of power outside of Russia and the United States. These new sources of power are various forms of Asiatic nationalism. In a number of instances the new power has been controlled and dominated by Soviet Russia, but it is a mistake to view it merely as another manifestation of Soviet power, or merely the conquest of another area by one of the rival super-powers. If we are to have an effective and enlightened foreign policy, Americans should see this new rise of power in Asia for what it is.
China, at the close of World War II, as was previously indicated, was divided against herself. Civil war tore apart the land and the people; the newly won great-power status was a farce. For over three years after the surrender of Japan the forces of General Chiang Kai-shek and those of Mao Tse-tung fought, until finally in 1949, despite American aid, the last of Chiang’s nationalist armies, a mere remnant, was driven into the sea and Nationalist China became the island of Formosa, two hundred and twenty-five miles long. On October 1, 1949, the victorious Chinese Communists proclaimed the Chinese People’s Republic with Chou En-lai as premier and Mao Tse-tung as party leader. This was followed by a year of consolidation, and by organization of Chinese economic and social life along Marxist lines. Then, in November, 1950, Chinese Communist forces struck from Manchuria into Korea and turned General Douglas Mac-Arthur’s Home-for-Christmas-Offensive into a desperate retreat. Communist China had come to the rescue of North Korea in the war which had started six months earlier by Communist aggression against the Republic of South Korea. For the first time in history a Chinese army met and pushed back a modern major army of the West. Although the forces fighting in Korea are under the banner of the United Nations, to all practical purposes the bulk of the fighting has been done by American armed forces. Hence, not only had the Chinese met and bested, for awhile at least, a modern western army, but the army of a super-power.
V
Clearly, this was not the China of 1842, nor even of 1945. Whether we like it or not, for good or evil, China is today a major power, a power to be reckoned with militarily and diplomatically, and one which is not friendly to the United States. It is a great power in the sense of being able to dominate other areas and of being able to force decisions on other national or colonial states through military might or through the threat of military action. China is today a unified land of approximately 500,000,000 intelligent, industrious, civilized human beings under the heel of an efficient and ruthless totalitarian regime. Just as Americans have too often in the past overlooked the portent of events in Asia, they failed to see the world-shaking significance in the victories of General Chu Teh’s Red armies over the demoralized Kuomintang forces. With the eclipse of Chiang Kai-shek and the complete ascendancy of Mao Tse-tung, an epoch had ended in Asia and a new one had begun.
Not only did a new way of life begin, not only were the traditions of thousands of years defied, changed and destroyed, but China’s relations with other peoples of the world were suddenly reversed. She had become, with the backing of the U.S.S.R., a major factor in the international struggle for power.
There are many in the United States who readily acknowledge Communist China’s new found unity and internal strength. But they point out, with good logic, that mere numbers, large territory, and internal unity, although important, are not in themselves the essential factors in present day great-power status. In assessing China as a military power they explain that her major weakness is in matériel, in her inadequate, backward, or almost non-existent industrial capacity and in her dependence on the U.S.S.R. They say that economic strength, not military potential alone, that the big factories, not the big battalions, win modern wars. World War II is a prime example of this, and even the Korean conflict, to them, substantiates this thesis. In Korea, for the first time, the Chinese Red forces encountered a western army well-equipped with the modern implements of war, planes and tanks. China’s massed manpower, while powerful enough to win a temporary victory over the better-equipped armies of the West, was not strong enough, even with Russian tanks and equipment, to exploit the initial advantage and fight through to final victory by driving the United Nations’ forces into the sea.
To many, the Korean test-case proves that China alone is incapable of waging a full-scale war against a major western power. The Chinese Communist armies with their almost limitless source of foot-soldiers might be able to dominate and coerce by the sheer force of massed numbers, or even by the mere threat of them, areas contiguous to China or within marching distance on the Asiatic mainland, but nothing more. China’s handicaps are too great for her to be considered a major military power. Her primitive economy, her lack of industry, her inadequate communications, most of which are vulnerable to bombing, her lack of air power, and above all, her lack of sea power, are such major deficiencies that she cannot reasonably be compared to other first-rank military powers. China cannot be considered a major economic, political, and military power until she is developed economically and industrialized, as well as organized and unified—not until she is capable of waging war and sustaining the war effort well beyond her frontiers. As yet, she cannot do this.
VI
To the American man in the street this certainly is logical and above all comforting. But is it valid? Can we readily assume that Communist China is no threat to world security because she is backward, has no industry, air power, and sea power? This is false security. As the pre-World War II generals and admirals underestimated Japan and blatantly maintained that we could whip her, a backward Asiatic country, in a week or two if war were to come, so we are sadly underestimating Red China.
Already Red China has started the process of building and maintaining modern military strength. She has even started a program of limited industrial expansion. But even more portentous, she has access to the military equipments, industrial resources, and other aid of the Soviet Union. She has greatly improved her internal communications; she has proved her ability within the span of a mere year to move thousands of troops from the extreme fringes of the vast expanse of land that is China to Korea. It is true that these lines of communication were not subject to bombing attacks, but even in Northern Korea where they are, China’s movement of troops has been successful. Chinese railroads are now perhaps more efficient than they have ever been. New lines have been laid, new tracks have replaced the old, and new rolling stock has been added. Textile factories in such centers as Shanghai and Hankow are now producing more than they ever have, particularly cotton uniforms for Red soldiers. Even small arms are apparently being produced in good quantity. Furthermore, the big and decisive weapons of modern war—tanks, heavy artillery, jet planes, and some rumors indicate even submarines—are being supplied by Soviet Russia. But perhaps just as significant is the fact that the Chinese Reds have demonstrated their ability to use the weapons of modern war, and to use them effectively.
Americans were stunned by the sudden emergence of what they had thought was a non-existent Communist Chinese airforce from out of Manchuria, equipped with the latest model Russian jet fighter planes. They, were further shocked and dismayed when they learned that the enemy planes were as good as, and in some instances superior to, the American jets. All of this was not mere rumor, it was revealed to them by their own Airforce Chief of Staff, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, when in November, 1951, he announced grimly that Communist China had become “almost overnight . . . one of the major air powers of the world.” To this he added that the Russian-made and Chinese-flown MIG-15 jet fighter plane “in many respects can outperform our own F-86,” our best plane, the Sabre jet.
Last June when he returned to the United States, America’s leading combat flier, Colonel Francis S. Gabreski, also spoke words which jarred American complacency toward Red China’s military competence. In an interview carried by the Los Angeles Times he maintained that the best Red pilots fighting over Korea were as good as any Nazi ace he ever fought in the skies over Europe. He spoke from close and dangerous experience. His record? Six and a half MIG-15’s destroyed over Korea and twenty-eight aerial victories in World War II. Whatever be the results of the air duels between MIG-15’s and Sabre jets, Red China has demonstrated she has a powerful airforce and that with Russian help, it can be a serious menace. Just as we underestimated the Japanese and their military prowess in World War II, we have underestimated Russia’s ability to produce and to deliver first-class war equipment to her Chinese ally, but worst of all, we have sadly underestimated Communist China’s ability to use it effectively.
VII
Many so-called experts, military and civilian, have demonstrated cogently that Red, China is not a major power because one measurement of a major power is the ability to conduct successfully a protracted war well beyond national boundaries, not merely contiguous boundaries. Red China is incapable of doing this. She could not, for example, invade the United States, and it is even doubtful that she could carry the war to the United States. But is this a valid criterion? Could either of the two generally acknowledged super-powers carry a successful invasion of the other’s homeland? Does Soviet Russia have the necessary navy and airforce to mount an invasion of the United States? Do we have the requisite army and manpower reserve to mount a successful invasion of Russia? Either the United States or Russia, through air, sea, and other peripheral attacks, could carry the war to each other, but probably neither could conquer with foot-soldiers. Yet, these are the super-powers, and against each other they apparently cannot conduct a successful, protracted, land-conquering war.
Granted that our strategic position toward Red China differs from that toward Russia, granted that we are a world power with the most advanced technological machine for the making of war yet devised by man, still could we successfully mount and sustain an invasion in the vastness of China? Japan, with a modern military machine, for fifteen years fought a backward, disunited China, and was not able to conquer her. All that Japan was able to do was to occupy and hold the major sea ports, the principal road and rail centers, and the major road and rail lines; the areas in between, the vast bulk of rural China, the real China, defied Japan. Japan held in its hands the strategic features of China which would of course be immediately neutralized in case of war by bombing, conventional and atomic. It this enough? If Japan could not conquer China in fifteen years, could we in less time, without endangering the national welfare by pinning down a great land army in China’s limitless acres? What of the debilitating effect upon our economy of such a conflict, an economy already strained by world-wide anti-Communist commitments?
Could we afford to become embroiled in China in view of the aggressive tendencies of the other super-power, Soviet Russia? While we were deeply committed on the Chinese mainland, what if Russian or satellite troops marched into Europe or into the oil-rich Middle East? Certainly China is no mere satellite power, as are the countries of eastern Europe, not one we could fight in a diversionary war; she is a power in her own right, one to be reckoned with. Moreover, she is backed, through a treaty of alliance and Marxist ideology, by the human resources and industrial might of a powerful ally. Together, Red China and Red Russia control approximately one-fifth of mankind. This overwhelming aggregation of power cannot be ignored; it cannot be pushed aside by ignorance and misconception. It is not an aggregation of power whose strength comes solely from Russia; China alone is a formidable foe. It is a dangerous sophistry to perpetuate the myth that Communist China is a giant with feet of clay and muscles of putty.
VIII
By harnessing and manipulating the twin forces of an aroused nationalism—the desire for national independence and freedom from foreign control—and the yearning of the Asian masses for social and economic reform, the Chinese Communists have captured a source of energy which counter-balances western technical superiority, at least on the Asiatic continent, and at present that is where it counts. In other words the Communists have seized and imprisoned in the coils of Marxism the Chinese national and social revolution; they have capitalized on it, and hence control a China of considerable vigor and unity. The potential was always there, the Communists did not create it; they merely have molded it to their own purposes, and those purposes bode us no good. They have thus far amply demonstrated that massed Asian man-power counterbalances, and in Asia oftentimes outweighs, western machine-power, especially when backed by the U.S.S.R. and based on a “sanctuary” unmolested by the United Nations. They have in their hands the greatest reservoir of massed peasant-power in the world.
Knowing this, we simply cannot afford to ignore Red China’s newly acquired de facto great-power status. Korea has made plain that despite modern technological advances in warfare, the foot-slogging infantryman is still the decisive element in modern warfare. As recent tests in Nevada have shown, even the atomic bomb has not made him obsolete. And it is precisely the foot-slogging infantryman who gives Communist China her enormous military potential. The turbulent nationalism, the Communist indoctrination, and the ability of the Chinese soldier to withstand hardship and live off the country are critical factors which do much to offset superior western equipment and know-how.
But even western know-how and technology, as Korea has demonstrated, are not beyond the ken of the Chinese. The Soviet Union has reaped and can continue to reap tremendous military advantage merely by supplying tactical instruction and arms and equipment to its Asiatic cohorts. We and our principal allies, Britain and France, are weakest precisely where Red China is strongest—in man-power resources. Many critics, military and otherwise, of Communist power, point out that population is but one factor in great-power status, that mass without leadership, in war as in peace, is useless. But Communist China has developed an astute political and an excellent military leadership with years of experience under the most adverse and trying conditions. American military men have expressed high regard for Chinese Communist generalship. Those American officers who advised Chiang Kai-shek in his long civil struggle as well as those who have met the Chinese Reds in Korea do not scoff at the military prowess of the Communists. For warfare under the special military, economic, and social conditions of modern Asia, the Chinese Communists have an excellent set of battle-hardened and politically indoctrinated military-political leaders.
In addition to producing a new found leadership capable of exploiting her power to advantage, Communist China has apparently proved her ability to get along without the West. All of this, much to the dismay of the West. In the early days of the Korean conflict many advocates of a China blockade vowed that China would be forced to her knees when cut off from trade with the West, that backward, non-industrial China needed, indeed could not get along without our manufactured goods. Economic realities they declared would make the Chinese, Communists or not, see things our way because they needed our manufactures more than we needed China’s raw materials. Over two years have passed, and China seems stronger than ever. Apparently with help from the Soviet Union, Communist China has been able to feed her vast armies and to fight inflation. What she has done may not seem adequate by western standards, but it is remarkable by Asiatic standards. This then is the new China of 1952: Communist, totalitarian, aggressive, and avowedly antagonistic to the United States.
IX
Our thinking and our Far Eastern foreign policy should be geared to the actual present-day status of the new Red China, whether it pleases or displeases us. Our concepts of power and great-power status should not be chained to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilist concepts of power and national strength which emphasized colonies and sea power, nor should they be wedded to nineteenth-century concepts of imperialism and national greatness. This is not the world of dependent colonies and of national greatness measured by the size of surface navies. Our two major opponents are both land-powers, with neglible naval establishments, yet they pose a threat to us and to the world as great as any in the past. They control colonies or their equivalent, satellite countries, not through a navy or other means of overseas control, but through land armies; they have followed the path of overland imperialism. Both Communist China and the U.S.S.R. have at their disposal sources of power with which Americans have never before had to deal. The Soviet Union is without doubt the greatest threat on a worldwide scale (it would be incredibly naive to believe otherwise), but in Communist China the most numerous people on earth are aroused; they are strong, united, and powerful. They have it within their power to plunge the world into a great holocaust; they can, if we are not careful, engage us in a prolonged land war in Asia while Europe is smothered by Russia’s Red army.
China is today a major power in the world. This has been tacitly recognized by the United States and by the countries of the United Nations. For example, on May 27, 1952 the Christian Science Monitor carried the outline of a disarmament proposal to be laid before the United Nations Disarmament Commission. Under this proposal the over-all limits on armed forces for individual nations would be: 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 men for the United States, Russia, and China, and 700,000 to 800,000 men for France and Great Britain. Never before has China been accorded, even in a proposal, such imposing recognition of her military might.
China’s Communist leaders with such enormous power in their hands pose a threat not only to the United States but to the non-Communist world as a whole. The American people should be made aware of the new imbalance in the world balance of power.
X
China’s new might has been concealed, in large measure, from the American public by two divergent streams of propaganda and misinformation. First, there is the more important and more pervasive anti-Communist view which presents China as completely dominated by Russia, as a mere puppet unable to stand on her own feet, incapable of independent action. To those who support this view, all evil comes from Russia. Without Russia, China would have remained the true and staunch ally of the West under the benevolent leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Then there is the line supported often by Communists and pro-Communists which claims that all would have been well with China, and that it would have remained our true and tried friend, if only the American government had not supported Chiang Kai-shek. Both concepts have so dominated the avenues of information to the American public that the more profound and perhaps truer appraisal of China’s position, and ours in relation to it, is obscured or never fully recognized. It is the circumstance that China’s position today is a result of the convergence of Marxism and fundamental nationalism, and that American foreign policy, correctly or incorrectly, could do little to change or direct the internal workings of Chinese society and the Chinese state.
Just as the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 heralded the advent of a new major power from Asia in the world family of nations, so has the Chinese revolution of 1949 and the Chinese Communist intervention in North Korea of 1951. These are unpleasant facts, but they must be faced. Our statesmen, military leaders, and especially our fighting men, are placed at a grave disadvantage in opposing this new source of Communist power if they are unaware of its actual and potential strength. Our people, also, are placed at a disadvantage. This democracy can succeed and continue to prosper only so long as the people know the true estimate or the precise size of the tasks before them. If we are to build solidly our own strength to match that of our enemies, real and potential, we must stop thinking in terms of two super-powers arrayed one against the other; we must recognize Communist China for what she is—a major world power—and forge our Far Eastern policy accordingly.
Lieutenant DeConde graduated from San Francisco State College and from the U. S. Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School, Chicago, Illinois, in 1943. Assigned to duty aboard the U.S.S. Whitney (AD-4) in south Pacific waters, he served in various capacities as an officer of the line. He was released to inactive duty in January, 1946. He received his M.A. (1947) and Ph.D. (1949) degrees from Stanford University where he majored in U. S. diplomatic history and international relations. For the past five years he taught history at Stanford University and Whittier College, California. Now research associate in the history of American foreign relations at Duke University, he is the author of a number of articles in American diplomatic history and of a book, Herbert Hoover’s Latin American Policy (Stanford University Press, 1951).
★
A FORTY-EIGHT-STAR ADMIRAL
Contributed by VICE ADMIRAL SIR JOHN A. COLLINS, K.B.E., C.B., Royal Navy
Just as the Pacific war was drawing to a close, I had occasion, at short notice, to shift my Flag to a destroyer and enter Manila Bay. I had spent some two years operating with the Seventh Fleet in the South-West Pacific and so was no stranger to the U. S. Navy.
Lying close to our track to the anchorage was a U. S. Flagship with her Admiral’s Flag lying dead at the truck. We could not make out whether it was a one-, two-, or possibly three-star Admiral, so my Flag Lieutenant made a signal, Flag deck to Flag deck, “How many stars on your flag?” Back came the answer, “Forty-eight.”
Perhaps it’s an old joke in the U. S. Navy, but it was a new one to us. Anyway, as I was only a one-star at the time I had no hesitation in piping first!
A NEW INTERPRETATION
Contributed by ROBERT G. ALBION
On September 23, 1947, Secretary Forrestal left the Navy Department for the Pentagon to take up his duties as first Secretary of Defense. As he emerged from the long, low building on Constitution Avenue where he had labored for seven years, the Marine Band struck up “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” To one bystander, that tune suggested different words. Turning to a neighbor, he asked “Why is the band playing ‘The Bear Went Over the Mountain?’ ” “I don’t know,” was the reply, “it must have something to do with the Russian situation.”
(The Proceedings will pay $5.00 for each anecdote submitted to, and printed in, the Proceedings.)