comply with since the press, radio commentators, members of Congress, and numerous other officials expressed a keen interest in the contents of the report and wanted to hear from Wedemeyer. As Wedemeyer says it soon was evident that “…a clamp had been put down by the President and the Secretary of State….Marshall accepted full responsibility for this decision”[1]  Later, a representative of the State Department informed Wedemeyer that Marshall wanted to delete certain portions of the report so they could publish it. Wedemeyer refused to comply.[2] He reluctantly concluded that he had been naïve to ever believe that the State Department would change its negative attitude toward China, and its positive attitude toward the Communist influence. Wedemeyer came to believe that if his report suited the policies of the State Department that they would have published the report with great fanfare as evidence of the correctness of their past policies. Since the report did not endorse their policies they were deceitfully suppressing it. The “official” explanation for the “suppression” of the report given under oath to the Congressional Committee and to the press was that it contained “confidential material the publication of which might cause embarrassment to the nations concerned.”[3] When it finally came to public light in 1949 it was too late to have any impact. The Communists took over in 1949.

Wedemeyer was justifiably outraged by the deceit of the Administration in attempting to use him as a prop for their failed policy, and equally disappointed in Secretary of State Marshall for caving in to the Administration. Wedemeyer never lost his admiration for General Marshall and always believed him to be one of the greatest of Americans heroes both as a military man and as a statesman. There is only one area where Wedemeyer ever found fault with Marshall and that is in his belated understanding of the Communism menace, and even here Wedemeyer found reason to go easy on his former chief. In Wedemeyer’s view, Marshall “failed” in his 1945-46 assignment to settle the Communist/Nationalist civil was not because he was incompetent, but simply because he had not had the time or the exposure to fully understand the fact that no combination of political arrangement between these two opposing forces would ever work One had to succeed and one had to fail. Marshall, in his failure to understand this was not alone. The majority of political leaders, and the bulk of the American public believed that Russia and Communism were our gallant allies and should be accommodated in the post war conferences in almost every instance. Over time Marshall changed his mind, and this undoubtedly played a part in the surprising appointment of Wedemeyer by President Truman to send him to China in 1947 as a special representative to render a report and recommendation. But it took a lot of schooling, and a few severe “body blows” by the Russians to bring Marshall around, and even then he never made a complete turnaround.

Nowadays it is common for Military Leaders to immediately rush into print with “exposes” and critiques immediately after retirement; indeed, some don’t wait for retirement. In Wedemeyer’s case he did contemplate resignation and speaking his mind in order to bring home the truth to the American people, but his soldierly instincts won out and he kept his silence until 1958 when he published his Wedemeyer Reports!  Is it any wonder that he included an exclamation mark in the title?[4]

[1] Wedemeyer Reports! p. 396.

[2] Wedemeyer Reports! p. 397.

[3] Wedemeyer Reports! p. 398; Wedemeyer’s report was subsequently published in Dean Acheson’s  famous 600 page “White Paper” of 1949 along with numerous other documents, correspondence, and writings.

[4] Barbara Tuchman, the noted historian in her hagiography of General Stilwell found the exclamation mark somewhat offensive.