George C. Marshall: Education of a General, 1880-1939 by Forrest C. Pogue

Author:Forrest C. Pogue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs
Published: 2020-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

14 ~ Lessons in Chinese

“Out here the pot boils over and appears to grow daily more involved.”

— Marshall to Pershing,

October 30, 1925.

Assigned as executive officer of the 15th Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel (he had been promoted to that rank in August 1923) Marshall on arrival in Tientsin actually took acting command and held it for two and a half months until the new commanding officer, Colonel W. K. Naylor, came from Washington. The regiment with headquarters and service companies and two of its battalions totaled about a thousand men.449 One rifle company was in Tangshan; the rest of the men were in barracks in the American compound in Tientsin, where they had been for twelve years and where they would remain until 1938 on a mission unique in the American Army.450

The Americans occupied buildings which until the War of 1914 had belonged to Germany, on what had been the Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse and now was Woodrow Wilson Street. In the same compound was the headquarters of Brigadier General W. D. Connor, commanding United States Army Forces in China — a command that had existed only about a year and had been set up principally to keep the Army in close touch with the American Minister at Peking and with various foreign and Chinese officials.451

Down Woodrow Wilson Street, which as it went along became Victoria Road, Rue de France, and Via Italia, were the concessions of Britain, France, and Italy respectively, each quartering its contingent of troops. Adjacent was a detachment of the Japanese Army, which occupied a patch of Japanese ground. Until the Bolshevik Revolution there had been Russians in that vicinity too. Yet all these men in foreign uniform did not constitute an international force or, in the proper sense, even an occupation force. They were rather an extraterritorial police, each separately engaged in defending the lives, property, and commercial interests of its own nationals and in keeping open the lines of communications from Peking to the sea. All but the Americans had taken up residence in Tientsin in 1901 in accord with the Protocols that the powers imposed on China after the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion. The United States acquired similar rights under the settlement but, except for leaving a small legation guard in Peking, did not exercise them until the revolution of 1911 again raised threats of anarchy and a fresh effort to drive the foreigners out.452 It was then, early in 1912, that two of the three battalions of the 15th Infantry moved in from the Philippines, occupying quarters for which they paid rental instead of claiming a particular area as a concession. In the First World War the Germans were forced to give up their concessions; the Russians after the Bolshevik Revolution voluntarily relinquished theirs. Britain, France, Italy, and Japan held on to their respective areas, while the United States undertook generally to guard the quarter once assigned to the Germans.

For Tientsin itself the foreign garrisons, providing an effective defense of the city amid the chaos of civil war, were more obviously blessing than burden.

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