A strong Nationalism made us great, as it has all nations that have risen to world power. To maintain this power, however, requires the intelligence and wisdom of our Founding Fathers, who, by their use of initiative, ingenuity, enterprise and prayerful determination, made us the Historic United States. Is it possible that recent generations of American men and women have lost these qualities and have failed to achieve complete maturity? I keep asking myself: Is “civilized” man intelligent enough, in the light of his own past experience, to stop this human tragedy now, and perhaps for a foreseeable future? Or, will he become hopelessly and irrevocably lost in the futile contemplation of an idyllic dream that is ages old, but that never has become a reality, and never will. PROLOGUE _Oh Man, thou feeble tenant of an hour, Debased by slavery, debauched by power; Thy love is lust; thy friendship a cheat; Hypocrisy thy smile; thy word deceit— Thy nature ennobled but by name, The very beasts might bid thee blush for shame._ LORD BYRON CHAPTER I _Incompetence or Treachery?_ “The greatest single mistake made in China, leading to our present debacle, was the withdrawal of United States forces from the Peking, Tientsin, Chingwangtao triangle in 1947.” This was done obviously at the direction of President Truman, General George Marshall and the State Department. This statement comes from Major General William Arthur Worton, Chief of Staff, Third Amphibious Corps, U. S. Marines in China, 1945-1946, but with twelve years prior experience there. He adds: “Twenty-five thousand men easily could have maintained this important triangle—Peking, Tientsin, Chingwangtao—which would have kept the Chinese Communists from moving South of the Great Wall. They were not strong at that time, and a display of American strength in Nationalist China would have served as a deterrent to them.” Instead, our withdrawal of U. S. forces from this strategic area was the first show of American weakness that gave the lie to both Nationalist and Communist Chinese, if not to the whole of Eurasia. The Russians constantly had complained that the Americans were occupying sovereign territory of China, but the request for us to do so had been made in 1945 by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government for the purpose of disarming the Japanese and of stabilizing the country. General Worton, with five officers and a handful of men first moved into the area in August, 1945, turning the civil government of China over to the Nationalists. A month later, a force of sixty-five thousand U. S. Marines moved in and occupied the area, and from then on to 1947, there was relative peace and quiet.