Upcoming Episodes!
Episode 205 (coming February 18!): Marshall, Blake, and Mike discuss America’s view of China from the 1920s through the early 1940s and the strong influence Americans raised by missionaries in China — notably Henry Luce and Pearl Buck — had on that view. Chiang Kai-shek emerges as the leader of the Republic of China, and Americans contribute money to Chiang and his family in the belief that they will use it to modernize China. But their corruption, Chiang’s inability to gain control of the entire country from warlords and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists, and war with both the Communists and Japan obstruct that modernization — and make it unlikely that China will emerge from World War II as one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” of the postwar world.
Episode 206 (coming March 4!): Mike leads our discussion of the American experience in China during World War II. Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Roosevelt, and General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell are the central figures in this episode, which explores many aspects of the war's often-overlooked China-Burma-India Theater and introduces us to the Flying Tigers, the Burma Road, Merrill’s Marauders, and the “Over the Hump” cargo flights from India to China. Roosevelt’s postwar goals for China, differing advice FDR gets as to how to handle Chiang, and Stilwell’s fraught relationship with Chiang drive our narrative, as issues of military strategy, operations, logistics, and reform lead to disagreement between “Vinegar Joe” and the Generalissimo—and to their disdain for one another.
Episode 207 (coming March 18!): Mike again leads us in our narrative of how America’s goals for China in World War II continued to meet frustration during the second half of the war. We meet General Claire Chennault of Flying Tigers fame, whose ideas for how to fight in China contradict those of his bitter rival General Joseph Stilwell but gain favor with Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang — and for a while, with Franklin Roosevelt. Ultimately, the war in China ends in frustration for America, and Mike, Marshall, and Blake discuss how the historiography of the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II has changed — but still can obscure a more basic American misunderstanding of Chiang, his government, his military, and his Communist rivals during the war.
