IF ONLY HE'D FOUGHT MAO MORE AND THE JAPS LESS:

[T]he view of Chiang in the United States has softened in recent years -- a trend marked by the 2009 book The Generalissimo, a major biography by the historian Jay Taylor, which gave Chiang more credit for his brave leadership under impossible circumstances than previous historians. The view of Chiang has also shifted on both mainland China and Taiwan, reflecting changing political circumstances in both places. For Beijing, which just held a splashy military parade on Sept. 3 to celebrate its wartime victory over Japan, there have been far fewer negative comments about Chiang, intransigent anti-Communist though he was. Conversely, on Taiwan, the one part of China that he was able to preserve from Maoist dictatorship, Chiang's stature has steadily declined.

Why the shift? Especially in the United States, there's the realization that getting rid of Chiang would in all likelihood have not produced a happy result. It is hard to imagine that it would have altered the tragically paradoxical outcome of World War II in Asia: The United States fought for four years to prevent a hostile power, Japan, from controlling China, only to see the country fall to a Communist dictatorship closely allied to the Soviet Union, an even more menacingly hostile power.

Furthermore, many Americans at the time subsequently underestimated both the magnitude of the task that Chiang faced as his country's wartime leader and his achievements against extraordinary odds. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any alternative Chinese figure doing much better.

Contrary to popular perception, for example, Chiang did fight: He mounted a brave, veritably suicidal, resistance to the initial full-scale Japanese invasion of 1937. According to Stilwell's replacement, Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, the battle for Shanghai, in which China lost thousands of its best troops, was at the time the world's bloodiest battle since Verdun in 1916. Japan's military leaders had predicted that the war in China would be over quickly. It could have been -- if Chiang surrendered and joined forces with the Japanese in a renewed effort to eradicate the Communists. But while that may have been tempting, Chiang never did. His defiance tied down a million Japanese troops who otherwise would have been available for battle against American forces. For the first four years of its eight-year war of resistance against Japan, until Pearl Harbor pushed the United States into the battle in December 1941, China fought alone.

It was this that so impressed Wedemeyer. While Stilwell saw the Chinese leader as "a grasping, bigoted, ungrateful little rattlesnake," Wedemeyer was unrestrained in his admiration. Chiang's call on China's people to "sacrifice and fight to the bitter end" was, Wedemeyer believed, "more gallant and resolute than Churchill's famous 'blood, sweat and tears' speech." Given his situation, moreover, his military strategy of "endeavoring to dissipate Japanese strength and forcing the enemy to overextend his lines" made perfect sense, Wedemeyer felt, and so did his diversion of troops to prevent Communist expansion. Chiang understood -- as most Americans, focused exclusively on the defeat of Japan, did not -- that once the war ended there would be a fight to the finish between him and the Communists. Chiang maintained, to any Americans who would listen, that if successful the Communists would impose a totalitarian dictatorship allied with the Soviet Union. And Mao's total victory in 1949 proved him right.

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