Albert C. Wedemeyer, 92; Soldier-Diplomat Helped Shape Postwar Policies

Albert Coady Wedemeyer, one of the few ranking staff officers who shaped America’s military strategy during World War II and its diplomatic policy in the years immediately following, is dead.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the four-star general died Sunday at a retirement center at Ft. Belvoir, Va. He was 92 and had been in declining health after moving earlier this year to the Belvoir Woods Health Care Center from the farm he called “Friends Advice” in the small community of Boyds, Md.

He died four decades after the disagreements that split American and British planners had become the stuff of history.

Born in 1897 in Omaha, Wedemeyer entered West Point in 1915. He graduated in 1919, a member of a class that included such celebrated combat soldiers of World War II as Anthony C. McAuliffe, commander of the 101st Airborne during the Battle of the Bulge; Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Al Gruenther, who would rise to become the supreme commander in Europe.

But Wedemeyer’s skills lay not in command, somewhat to his chagrin. Like his mentor, George C. Marshall, Wedemeyer--who longed for duty with troops--found himself assigned to a prewar succession of staff positions.

Caught behind a large number of World War I veterans on the promotion lists, Wedemeyer and his classmates spent 17 years as lieutenants, and four more as captains. They finally achieved the rank of major in 1940 only after then-Chief of Staff Marshall reformed the Army’s promotion policies to eliminate what he privately termed “the arteriosclerosis.”

In the meantime, the young officer served on a succession of posts in the caste-conscious, socially isolated peacetime Army--at Ft. Benning, Ga.; twice in the Philippines; in Washington, and in Tientsin, China, then widely regarded as the Army’s choicest assignment in those sleepy between-war years.

It was while traveling on an Army troopship to the Philippines in 1923 that the lean, blond Wedemeyer met his future wife, Elizabeth Dade Embick, daughter of an Army colonel.

They were married in 1925 on Corregidor Island in Manila Bay. Their first son was born the following year, their second in 1928. Six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren also survive him.

Wedemeyer came to be a member of a small circle of soldier-scholars. Unlike many, he was an outspoken supporter of Germany as a major power--perhaps because of his own Germanic heritage.

In June, 1936, the Army sent then-Capt. Wedemeyer to attend the German War College in Berlin. (A handful of German officers were training at American military schools.) The two-year tour had a profound influence on him and his later career. He learned the evolving principles of blitzkrieg and the Luftwaffe’s innovative use of aircraft as artillery for fast-moving armored columns. He also came to share the German general staff’s realpolitik and its abiding antipathy to the Soviet Union. Wedemeyer returned to the United States as one of the few men in the U.S. Army with an appreciation for the war-making machine that the Wehrmacht would unloose in September, 1939. He also returned a fervent anti-communist.

“I was convinced that the American people did not want to supplant Nazism by communism,” he wrote in his best-selling autobiography, “Wedemeyer Reports!”

That prejudice was to cloud his future career as a diplomat, although Marshall would remain a stalwart defender of the newly promoted major he assigned in 1941 to the war plans division of the General Staff.

Almost immediately Marshall--who had trouble remembering names--put “that long-legged major in war plans” to work on the so-called Victory Program, the secret, vitally important national estimate of what manpower and industry were necessary to defeat the Axis.

Thus Wedemeyer found himself, ironically, drafting the master industrialization plan that would lead to the defeat of a nation he admired, Germany, while the United States allied itself with a political system, communism, that he despised.

Mountbatten’s Deputy

It was at the 1943 Quebec Conference that British Adm. Louis Mountbatten asked for Wedemeyer to serve as his deputy in the newly created Southeast Asia Command. Marshall agreed, and Wedemeyer, by then a two-star general, found himself in New Delhi.

On Oct. 28, 1944, Marshall ordered Wedemeyer’s transfer to Chongqing, China, to replace the outspoken Joseph (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell as commander of the China Theater. More important, Wedemeyer was also to assume Stilwell’s post as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader.

“My orders for assignment to China came as a bombshell,” Wedemeyer acknowledged in his autobiography. Wedemeyer the soldier suddenly found himself in the delicate position of diplomat with no training and no warning.

“Using honey for my part instead of vinegar,” Wedemeyer sought to woo Chiang. He was no more successful in convincing the generalissimo to field an army against the Japanese than Stilwell had been. Instead, with Wedemeyer’s tacit cooperation, Chiang hoarded military supplies for the postwar struggle with Mao Zedong’s communist forces. “Although it took me some time to acquire confirmation of the ruthless objectives of the Chinese communists, I had no illusions concerning them from the outset,” Wedemeyer said later.

The war ended with Chiang jockeying for position with the communists in a renewal of civil war that had wracked that country since the early years of the century.

When the U.S. ambassador to Chongqing, Patrick V. Hurley, resigned in 1945, his political duties fell to Wedemeyer. By then a three-star general, Wedemeyer thus became the first of the military men who would redirect American diplomatic policy in the decisive years after the war. (That group included, among others, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, later ambassador to the Soviet Union; Gen. Lucius D. Clay, U.S. high commissioner in West Germany; and two future secretaries of state, Chief of Staff Marshall, and a young colonel then on Wedemeyer’s staff, Dean Rusk.)

Wedemeyer lined up behind Chiang, despite “the weaknesses and the oppressive character of the Nationalist government and its decreasing popular support,” as he wrote later. But “communist totalitarian tyranny would be infinitely worse,” he continued.

Wedemeyer found himself at odds with the policies of his former chief, Marshall, who spent 1946 as a special envoy in China attempting to end the civil war in that weary nation.

Marshall, Wedemeyer wrote in his autobiography, “approached the problem of unifying China on the false supposition that the Chinese communists were not real communists under Moscow’s command but simply a Chinese faction that could be induced by diplomatic negotiations to come to terms with the Nationalist government.”

Effort Collapses

Marshall’s yearlong effort to sponsor a coalition government in postwar China collapsed, leaving Chiang’s Nationalists to futilely fight off Mao Zedong’s communists. Inexorably, communist field armies pushed Chiang’s beleaguered forces into smaller and smaller pockets.

When the Nationalists fled to Formosa in 1949, Republican Party leaders, including the querulous Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, demanded to know “who lost China.” Seeking to embarrass President Harry S. Truman and the Democratic Party, McCarthy and other members of what would become known as “the China Lobby” attacked Marshall as a traitor.

Wedemeyer, named ambassador to China in l947, found himself at the center of one of these “who-lost-China” squabbles when his report on the Nationalist government was suppressed by Truman. GOP spokesmen charged that the report was withheld from the public because Wedemeyer, by now considered an expert on China, had contradicted Truman’s policies.

In fact, Marshall, then secretary of state, had recommended embargoing the Wedemeyer report--finally released two years later--because it described the Nationalist government as “corrupt, reactionary and inefficient,” so much so that it could not win the loyalty of the people of China.

But Chiang’s partisans in the United States chose to ignore the criticism and hear only Wedemeyer’s call for the communists to lay down their arms.

Controversial Report

In 1947, Wedemeyer authored a report on China and Korea that called, among other things, for an American-directed, South Korean force capable of defeating any Soviet-supported invasion from the north. The report was considered so controversial that President Truman decided not to make it public.

Wedemeyer’s frustration led to his retirement in 1951. The following year he backed conservative Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), but then supported the GOP ticket headed by his old friend from the war plans division, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1956, he retired from business to write his book, and to take on the role of senior statesman. He was 59 and he had, in the words of the oblique Chinese curse, “lived in interesting times.”

Yet his moment had passed. Neither Eisenhower nor the much younger John F. Kennedy called upon Wedemeyer to serve as one of their foreign policy wise men. The first found him too soft, his anti-communism always tempered by practical realpolitik; the second found him a relic of another era.

He would live in retirement at his farm through successive administrations, attending annual Bohemian Club gatherings north of San Francisco, staying in touch with many of the nation’s most influential, but no longer himself at the heart of great events.

In 1985, he was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, by President Ronald Reagan.