Marines To Stay On Job In China
New York Times: Sunday, November 25, 1945. Page 4.
-No Prospect of Early Leaving, Wedemeyer Says – Expects MacArthur Visit
-REDS LOSE KEY HARBOR
-Repatriation of Japanese Goes Slowly – U.S. Officers Not Admitted to Manchuria
By Henry R. Lieberman, by Wireless to the New York Times.
SHANGHAI, Nov. 24 –There appears little prospect of an early evacuation of North China by United States Marines as Lieut. Gen. Albert C. Wedermeyer, American theater commander, told a press conference that his instruction from the War Department did not cover an “immediate withdrawal.”
At the same time he declared that he and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had invited Gen. Douglass MacArthur to visit China and that the Supreme Allied Commander had “expressed a desire to come as soon as his official duties in Tokyo permitted.”
When he was asked when the Marines would “pull out” of North china General Wedermeyer reiterated the stand that his job is to implement policy and not make it. He said that until he got instruction regarding the withdrawal of the Marines he could not answer the question.
“I am just a pick and shovel man doing my best to carry out instructions from Washington, “he added.
General Wedermeyer asserted that his directives required him to assist the Chinese Government to disarm the Japanese and repatriate them to their homeland. Following his recent disclosure that one-third of the 1,090,000 Japanese troops in China proper are still not disarmed, he said today that out of 500,000 Japanese troops and civilians between the Yellow River and the Great Wall, only 35,000 will have been repatriated by Nov. 30.
-Rate is 3,000 a Day
“We have facilities for repatriating 3,000 Japanese daily,” General Wedermeyer said. He added that at this rate it would take six to eight months to get the Japanese out of North China.
With Chinese troops movements competing with the repatriation problem for scarce shipping space, General Wedermeyer told the conference the Chinese Government has requested the United States to make additional vessels available to transport Government forces northward. He added that the War Shipping Administration was now studying this request.
Denying Communist claims that the United States Army had committed itself to train and equip seventy Nationalist Government Divisions, General Wedermeyer said that the wartime contract with Chungking called only for training and equipping thirty-nine divisions. By the end of the war, he said, twenty of those divisions were completely trained and equipped and the remaining nineteen were in various stages of American sponsorship.
Now that the war is over, he continued, the equipping of these nineteen divisions is being completed by making available to the Chinese lend lease material that was either en route to China or in Army storehouses here when the war ended. The Chinese Army, he saod, is completing its own training program formerly carried out under the auspices of the United States Army’s Chinese Combat Command.
-Says Question is for Chinese
Parrying a question as to whether the Government forces now engaged against the Communists include wartime American-sponsored divisions, General Wedermeyer said that such a query should be addressed to the Chinese authorities. He conceded, however, that some of the units of the Thirteenth Army that were transported to Chinwantao, on the Hopei coast, by the United States Seventh Fleet were trained and equipped earlier by the Americans.
American cadres have been assined to assist the Government troops embarking by sea for North China and debarking there, General Wedermeyer said. He added, however, that United States liaison groups would not accompany Chinese land forces entering Manchuria.
The general confirmed earlier reports that united States Army personnel who went to Manchuria at the time of the surrender to gather intelligence and pave the way for the entry of Chinese Government forces had been asked to withdraw by the Russians. The theater commander who declared there were no Army personnel in Manchuria have said the withdrawal of the first Americans entering the northeastern provinces had been requested by a Soviet consul, whose name he remembered as Danovich.
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