When the US was gung ho for China

Boston Globe

11-07-2025

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As they talked through the significance of the attack, Carlson and Zhu De imagined the possibility of a US-China alliance against Japan. Casting their minds further, they envisioned a broader world war where China, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union would join forces against Japan, Germany, and Italy.
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They were years ahead of the course of events, but as they sat by the fire that night, the Marine and the Chinese general agreed on one thing: If the United States and China should fight together against Japan, the two countries would surely go forth from that war as close friends and allies.
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The United States did not join the war then — the isolationist sentiments of the American public were just too strong. But the idea of an alliance stuck in Carlson's mind. In the coming months he would travel more than 2,000 miles through Japanese-occupied North China in the company of Communist patrols, studying the tactics of Zhu De's guerrilla forces and imagining how the US and Chinese militaries could complement each other's strengths.
In the Communist fighters, Carlson saw qualities he doubted his own countrymen could match. Their willingness to suffer, to fight through deprivation. Their endurance in spite of having no rear support, carrying their meager rations with them on the march. Their weapons were makeshift. Many had no overcoats and wore only felt-soled shoes in the bitter cold. Yet their morale was breathtaking. They worked together in tight-knit groups, bonded by a shared mindset. To a man, they were ready to give their lives for China's future.
Carlson came away from that experience an evangelist of guerrilla warfare, convinced that Zhu De had invented, as he told FDR, 'a style of military tactics quite different from that employed by any other military force in China, and, indeed, new to foreign armies as well.'
After Pearl Harbor finally dragged the United States into the war in Asia, Carlson got his chance to put what he had learned in China into practice. With the patronage of President Roosevelt (and Roosevelt's oldest son, James, as his executive officer), Carlson formed the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, one of the first American Special Forces units in World War II. He trained them to fight like the Chinese of the Eighth Route Army.
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A patrol by Marine Raiders on Guadalcanal.
Marine Corps History Division
Writing to a friend from Guadalcanal just after the Raiders completed a grueling month-long jungle patrol behind enemy lines in 1942 — during which they killed 488 Japanese combatants while losing only 16 of their own — Carlson gave all credit for his methods to the Chinese. 'We used Eighth Route Army tactics almost exclusively,' he wrote. 'The old master's philosophy is the guiding force in my organization.' The 'old master' was Zhu De.
Carlson was not a Communist, and he didn't really believe the Chinese were, either. They seemed so different from the Soviets that he always called them the 'so-called Chinese communists' in his letters to Roosevelt. But he agreed with them that fighters who possessed a strong political understanding of why they were fighting, and what they were fighting for, would be far more effective on the battlefield. Carlson ran his Raiders as a democratic outfit, all as equals, blurring the lines between the officers and enlisted men — because, as he put it, if they were going to fight a war to protect democracy, then they had better practice it in their own ranks.
Navy Admiral Chester W. Nimitz decorated Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson on Guadalcanal on Sept. 30, 1942.
National Museum of the United States Navy
Carlson's Raiders were darlings of the wartime US media. Their Chinese-derived motto, 'Gung Ho!,' entered the English lexicon and has stayed there. Taken from the Chinese characters for 'work' and 'together,' Carlson's 'gung ho' meant cooperation, harmony in the ranks, the courage to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the group. It was the ethos of his battalion and he hoped it would catch on more widely in the United States. 'Americans may not understand Chinese,' read one ad in a wartime newspaper, 'but they DO understand the meaning of 'Gung Ho!''
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Today, Americans don't give much thought to the fact that we were allies with China in World War II. The current hostility between our countries is as dark as at any time since the Cold War. At last count, the Pew Foundation's survey of global attitudes found that
But Carlson is a reminder of how positively Americans used to view China itself, and the Chinese Communists in particular. To the wartime media, Carlson was the 'No. 1 Guerrilla.' Life magazine celebrated him as 'a student of Chinese guerrilla fighting [who] teaches his men both how to fight and what they fight for.' Universal Pictures made a movie about him in 1943. The title: 'Gung Ho!' Carlson didn't need to hide his ties to the Chinese Communists in the 1940s — indeed, they were the most public part of his work, the foundation of his mystique.
How quickly it all fell apart. The defeat of Japan in 1945 reawakened the latent Chinese civil war between Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, or KMT. President Harry Truman took the side of the KMT, but he was betting on the wrong horse. Chiang would lose China and retreat under US protection to Taiwan — leaving an unfinished civil war across the Taiwan Strait that remains the most likely source of a future US-China military conflict. Just five years after the defeat of Japan in World War II, the hopeful alliance between the United States and China gave way to the slaughter of each other's soldiers on the battlefields of Korea.
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Evans Carlson in 1944.
National Archives
Carlson died of a heart attack in 1947, so he did not live to see the full ramifications of this unraveling. But he saw it coming. Crippled by wounds sustained on Saipan in 1944, he spent his final years railing against Truman's support for Chiang Kai-shek. He called for the US Marines to withdraw from China, insisting that the United States must stay neutral in the civil war while the Chinese figured out their own destiny. This did not endear him to the anticommunists, for the actual Communists in the United States, following Moscow, were calling for the exact same thing. They wanted the United States out of China so the Soviets could shape the outcome there. For Carlson, it was more principled: He knew that the conflict in China was too vast, and its historical roots too deep, to depend on the short-term interventions of any outside power, be it the US or the USSR.
At the end of World War II, Evans Carlson was still the only American military observer who had spent substantial time in the field with the Chinese Communist armies. He maintained (correctly, as it turned out) that even with US support there was no way the KMT could win a civil war against them. But with FDR gone, nobody in power wanted to listen to him anymore. Carlson died predicting that Truman's support for Chiang Kai-shek would prove to be the greatest mistake the United States had ever made in East Asia. Looking at where we are today, it's not entirely clear that he was wrong.
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