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Originally Posted by Reggie Steer
During WWII Japan invaded China. The U.S. supported Chiang Kai Chek by giving him weapons and support to drive out Japan. It worked. Yay....victory!!!!
Then Mao Tse Tung beats Chiang Kai Check, driving him out of China and into the island called Formosa - which was renamed Taiwan.
The problem was that when Mao beat Chiang, all of the U.S. weapons were left in China and became Mao's. Oops!!!
this isn't how it happened
Soviet Union bankrolled both KMT and CCP
in wwii we started sending them supplies and money but they embezzled most of it
russia did the heavy lifting fighting the japanese in china and handed over all the captured japanese weapons to the ccp, the kmt appealed to us to aid them and we initially did a little bit but then decided to cut off aid because as incredibly difficult as it is to believe today, popular support in america was for the ccp and the kmt had shown themselves to be incredibly corrupt and incompetent
you should read this
https://www.marshallfoundation.org/l...948-aid-china/
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I endeavored to persuade them time after time that it was not within their
capability to settle the matter by force; the odds were too heavy against them.
Furthermore, there were conspicuous ineptitude and widespread corruption among the
higher leaders. The consequent low [p.160/161] morale of the Chinese Govermnent
Armies has been a factor of great importance to the military situation.
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ARGUMENTS AGAINST GIVING MILITARY AID TO CHINA
We have had many proposals for this Government to support the Chinese military
program. That is easy to say, but extraordinarily difficult and dangerous to do. It involves
obligations and responsibilities on the part of this Government which, I am convinced, the
American people would never knowingly accept. We cannot escape the fact that the
deliberate entry of this country into the armed effort in China involves possible
consequences in which the financial cost, though tremendous, would be insignificant
when compared to the other liabilities inevitably involved.
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the
ranks of the army, these farm boys who were given at least an understanding of their
weapons and who were accommodated to the violent change from their quiet, restricted
life on the farm to the rather, at best, demoralizing conditions, in the divisions of the
Chinese Army. What actually happened was, they would take boys straight off the farm
and they would be in, often on the next day. They were just helpless. There was no
firmness in the troops and they suffered tremendous losses of arms. They—the
Communists—used to give me lists of the take in certain victories. I assumed them to be
exaggerations, but I found in private investigation; that a great amount had sound
foundation. The fact of the matter was the armies had just ceased to be effective
instruments, and the use of their material and all that was on a very wasteful basis.
we gave them some military surplus, notably our 55k marines who secured important regions in china left their equipment behind for the nationalists, but by and large we saw them as a corrupt group that were a lost cause and not worth supporting
we also gave them millions to build airfields previously and were pretty fed up that they embezzled most of that money instead of building airfields
they brother in law of Chiang was in charge of the countries finances and used a bunch of forex schemes to enrich his family and destroy their currency in the process
in 1938 the nationalists killed millions of their own citizens in by artificially flooding a region to slow down the japanese advance, the japanese were only slowed down incrementally but millions of chinese died as a result
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood
in 1943 there was more deaths when the kmt confiscated grain from starving farmers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chines...2%E2%80%931943
that's how utterly terrible and incompetent the kmt was that the average american actually viewed mao favorably, just a few decades later when mao came into power and began his own list of terrible deeds we soon forgot how we'd previously considered him the better option