My grandfather was a diplomat to China at the time. speaking about Pearl Harbor in an interview in ‘85:
MCKINZIE: You were in Peking when war in the Far East was actually underway?
RINGWALT: My wife and infant daughter were sent home in October '39, and I came home on leave in '41 just before our war with Japan broke out. A young Japanese language officer then stationed in Peking and I estimated that I could get home and he couldn't. My leave was due in October and his leave was due in January. Shows how closely we figured when the war was coming. And he lost; he was interned, and I got home.
MCKINZIE: What did you do then during the war years?
RINGWALT: In '41 I went to visit my wife's family in Richmond, I remember, until my leave expired on the date known as December 7, 1941. I went to Washington by train and got in a taxi at the station with my wife; the driver turned the radio on, when we heard the announcement over the radio that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. So, I didn't go to the little flat we had reserved but went straight to the State Department and said, "What can I do to help?" There wasn't a damn thing Foreign Service Officers could do to help then, because it was out of the hands of the State Department and became a matter for the military to handle. So I diddled around various odd jobs in Foreign Service administration for a year and a half, and then pressure was exerted to send China language officers back to the field; and so I went to China via South America, Africa and India -- we couldn't go across the Pacific, of course -- and arrived in China in March of '43 and stayed until August of '45.
MCKINZIE: And you were there at the time a number of American missions went out to China then to try to...
RINGWALT: Oh, yes. Everybody came out to save China.
MCKINZIE: Could I get you to comment on any of those missions that came out to save China from itself?
RINGWALT: Well, I think the silliest mission was General [Patrick Jay] Hurley's mission, if anybody should ask me.
MCKINZIE: In what sense? General Hurley being silly or...
RINGWALT: Yes, General Hurley being silly, no question about it. We always had the impression, but we never had it confirmed, that he had been such a damn nuisance in Washington that Roosevelt decided to send him as far away as possible to get him out of his hair, and that was how he finally got to China. Apparently he arrived without any instructions whatever from Washington, and -- this is what he told us anyhow -- and he said, "If I haven't been given American policy, I shall make American policy."
So he himself sat down and made American policy for China and said, "This is what we should do." His idea of American policy and ours differed somewhat.
MCKINZIE: Well, that's one reason it's difficult for me to talk about China affairs during and immediately after the war: everyone has a different view of what American policy actually was. Roosevelt seemed to be a little slow in making up his mind exactly what he wanted, and then the situation changed and as Roosevelt faded out and Truman came in there was a period in there where I think it would have been difficult, don't you, to say exactly what U.S.-China policy was?
RINGWALT: I never did learn. I don't know yet. I think Mr. Roosevelt had the idea that when the war was over, Great Britain and France might get together and gang up on the United States; so, he decided it would be a hell of a good idea to have another country in partnership with the United States, stand up to Great Britain and France, and, of all countries, he chose China, and of all people he chose Chiang Kai-shek to head postwar China. That's my basic impression of what that was all about. And he couldn't bother -- he wasn't particularly interested -- to learn anything that went contrary to his
idée fixe, if you like.
MCKINZIE: What about the idea that if American aid were to be given, whether it be wartime aid or postwar aid, it had to be given with certain guarantees that it would be used for "proved purposes?"
RINGWALT: Well, we tried that. It didn't work. You couldn't make him do this; he was a stubborn old son of a gun, I'm talking about Chiang Kai-shek.
MCKINZIE: Yes.
RINGWALT: General Stilwell used to call him "The Peanut."
MCKINZIE: Among other things.
RINGWALT: When he didn't call him a son of a bitch.
MCKINZIE: Back then, in the latter part of the war, what kind of duties did you have? Where were you stationed?
RINGWALT: I went to Kweilin, the idea being that, as I understood it, I would be the Consul General in Canton in exile, so to speak. The Japanese had taken over Hong Kong and Canton, and so Kweilin was the closest place we could get to Canton and Hong Kong without running the risk of capture. Refugees from Hong Kong and Canton and that area in Southeast China were constantly passing through, and it was of interest to find out from these people what the situation was in Hong Kong and in Canton, then Japanese occupied areas. I stayed in Kweilin until the Japanese captured it and then went to Chungking, in the summer of '44, if I remember correctly. In Chungking I was the senior political officer, and I used to pass on to Washington reports from other officers from various parts of China. It was chiefly a bookkeeping job, but I'd take them and read them and comment on them, if I wanted to, and then forward them to Washington.
MCKINZIE: Could I ask you to comment on the mind-set, to use a modern word, of the people who were in the China Service? Everyone talks about "old China hands," as if they had some special insight into the Oriental mind and into politics and into the whole thing.
RINGWALT: Some did and some didn't. I think the dumbest officer I ever saw was born in China; never heard him speak a word of Chinese. One of the brightest I ever saw was Jack Service, who was born in China. So, you have a wide spectrum.
MCKINZIE: But no particular unifying characteristic?
RINGWALT: John Davies was a very bright officer, also born in China.
MCKINZIE: How much speculation about the future of China was going on among the people in the China Service? Was it optimistic at the end of the war?
RINGWALT: It was generally agreed that sooner or later the Chinese Communists were going to win, and what was the use in opposing a movement which was almost unopposable.
MCKINZIE: Was this because of Chiang Kai-shek's...
RINGWALT: Chiang Kai-shek was dumb, and his methods were not very clever, and the assistance we sent to Chiang Kai-shek to use to fight the Japanese, mostly went to build up his army to protect himself against the Communists in a future war. In the event that was what happened. We used to send arms and money and equipment and advice, and he would ignore all of the advice. In lieu of that, he just built up his own little clique, so the Nationalists could hold, he hoped, when the war was over, against any Chinese Communist attempts to take over the country.
MCKINZIE: You mentioned that there was nothing that could be done about that, that you couldn't really force him to make changes.
RINGWALT: We tried awfully hard….
