Comments by "Arthur Mosel" (@arthurmosel808) on "Military History not Visualized" channel.

Actually, China didn't have a modern army, but several Westernizing Armies. Following this conflict, which led to real strong attempt to standardize the Army, which actually helped with fall of the Manchu Dynasty.
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Stillwell was lucky few US troops were under his command. No one checked the survivors of the Chinese forces under his command. The US force Chiang to accept him as Chief of the General Staff of the National Chinese Army. After using Chaing's last mobile troops (essentially what he used to stop Japanese offensives) to save the Brits in Burma. This destroyed the units. Stillwell than marched out with the survivors to India, out of command for a fairly long period of time acting more as a corps commander than the Chief of Staff of an Army.. Chiang commented that if was a Chinese officer that he would have him shot for dereliction of duty.
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@jacqueslefave4296 No, Stillwell was gone but the animosity between him and Chiang lingered on. It was abetted by the left lean in the State Department and the anti-Chiang mood in the OSS in China. The problem was so bad that some supplies actually were sent to the Communists. After the war, it was worse with arms and ammunition embargoed. The last embargo was finally terminated shortly before the Nationalists fell in 1949. One stark example was the Nationalist request for 7.92mm German ammunition captured to be shipped to China (most of the army there used weapons in that caliber). The request was denied and the captured ammo dumped the Baltic. There are many other issues but that alone is one of the worst.
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The Boxer Rebellion didn't result in a Chinese win. Plus actually read what happened including the massacre of Europeans and their families in other parts of China. This doesn't even comment on what was done to Chinese Christian's throughout China.
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@condorX2 Not exactly right. The British and others started opium as a major trade item much earlier. The Chinese refused to buy European products, barbarians couldn't make anything that they needed. They believed that the only things worth anything were produced there. If you wanted to buy Chinese s I lk, tea, etc.; you needed to buy it. Opium already was in China as a luxury item imported in small quantities on camel back over the silk road. The British found that India produced huge quantities of opium and the British East India Company (called John Company) began to import it by the shipload. It moved from luxury item to a cheap escape from the despotic and corrupt governments; while at the same time providing the silver needed to buy Chinese goods. For decades this continued, until the government finally realized the problem; and tried to stop it. This led to conflict between John Company and independent traders which got the British government involved. Unless you dig into it you will miss some very interesting facts. John Company operated on a Royal Charter for which it paid the Crown (of course that also meant the King). It was a stock company owned by many of the nobles and wealthy, including the Royal family, who therefore personally profited from it as investors. Finally taxes on both the auction of the opium harvest and its subsequent sale enriched the government and the crown without mentioning the profit on tea and other trade goods brought into Britain and its colonies from China. It was until after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 that this changed because the Crown took direct control and didn't. Want a direct involvement in that trade. Cotton then became a major crop, re during t he need for US cotton which had an impact on the US Civil War (by the way, the French started buying cotton grown in East Africa around the same time, again reducing the need for US cotton). So, there is alot of threads that are usually ignored when you see this war discussed.
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I know that I typed better than that; here are some corrections. North Africa and Egypt not East Africa. The comment about cotton being grown in India was about it replacing the need for Southern cotton removing any need for the government to tie itself to the slave owning Confederacy. Similar reasons applied to France. An interesting point is that the conditions for the poor who actually grew the cotton wasn't much better than that of slaves in the Confederacy; they just weren't out right slaves and part of a system even cheaper to run than slavery.
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The problem for the Qing was that these trained armies were really not national armies. They were mainly raised by leaders authorized by the government. These groups weren't mutually supportive, lacked common doctrine between armies, and often did not have common arms. Although earlier, during the First Sino-Japanese War, there was a Northern fleet under one leader and a Southern fleet under another. The Southern fleet contributed nothing to the war. The leader of the ground forces in the North had the most effective army during the Taiping Rebellion, but since it was recruited on personal ties and there was no retirement policy many units now were old men, addicted to opium because of boredom and inactivity. The funds for these forces had been cut due to fears of him growing too strong. Many of the same type of problems continued into the Boxer Rebellion period. This decentralized issue continued beyond the Boxer Rebellion and was a factor in the expulsion of the Quin Dynasty in 1911 (best of my memory on the year, my best sources are stored at the moment).
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@jacqueslefave4296 I avoided details of how Red the State Department and parts of the OSS were. One of my favorite laugh (but not because it is funny) is that Senator McCarthy somehow turned into the House UnAmerican Activity Committee. He didn't serve on the committee, those were Representatives, it was a committee of the House of Representatives, not a joint committee of Congress. McCarthy was used by the left to discredit the committee due to his own behavior and history. A trove of classified US intelligence intercepts of communications with the Soviets from some of the left's so called "innocents" was released during the brief period of openness before the Putin era began. It was released in book form, the Verona Report is the name if I remember correctly (I have stored somewhere). The communists made a lot of valuable recruits during the Trust Operation during the late 20s and early 30s. That operation gave the Soviets access to funds and both legal and illegally obtained technology; as well as the recruitment opportunities.
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@jacqueslefave4296 The book i mentioned actually had intercepted messages photo copied in the back. Little was done with the info to avoid tipping off the Soviets that we had basically gotten inside their communications systems. So, paranoia exists, but even paranoids can be right.
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@jacqueslefave4296 I suspect, that we disagree in our opinion of who is a war criminal or even what a war crime is, especially in terroris t and guess Rolla warfare. So, since most of that is opinIon, let's not go tnere.
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