Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  A general Allied offensive all along the front beginning with the American attack in the Meuse-Argonne sector was launched at the end of September. The vigor of the American assault, despite fresh tactical errors which caused the relief of seven generals, frustrated Ludendorff’s last hope of an orderly withdrawal to a firm position on Germany’s frontier. On October 5 came the “TREMENDOUS NEWS,” as Stilwell recorded it, that the Germans had appealed to President Wilson for an armistice. Wilson turned it down on the ground that armistice could only be granted by the Allied Commander-in-Chief. For another month, behind the crescendo of guns in the continuing battle, the Germans maneuvered desperately for position until no room for maneuver was left. Emissaries were sent to ask an armistice of Foch. On a winter morning in the fifth November of the war the Western Front at last fell still.

  The IVth Corps was assigned to occupation duty in the Coblenz area with headquarters at Cochem on the Rhine. A man of many distastes, Stilwell made no exception of the enemy. On the march into Germany he described the Burgermeister of Nonweiler as a “typical savage, bowel-less, brutal, grouchy, sullen, boche son-of-a-bitch. He got up and bowed when we left.”

  While the statesmen assembled in Paris, Stilwell fumed in Cochem. “Sitting, just sitting,” he wrote to his wife in January, “and hoping our addle-pated boob of a president will soon weary of the applause, homage, and other mush that he is receiving so that peace negotiations can begin and the American Army can go home.” A stream of distinguished personages came to visit including the Prince of Wales whom Stilwell, of all people, was detailed to attend. Fortunately he found him “quiet, unassuming, well brought up, well-mannered and likeable.” George Marshall too came by and, evidently not amused, “sounded off about Schmeercase and named the author.”

  On the recommendation of General Briant Wells, who had joined the IVth Corps as its new Chief of Staff in October, Stilwell was promoted to the temporary rank of full colonel and received the Distinguished Service Medal, a newly created order to reward noncombat service. Wells developed a great liking and admiration for Stilwell whom he reported to be “unusually intelligent” and “one of the most capable G-2 officers developed in the war.” “Nothing but praise of your section,” he wrote, “has come from any of the Divisions that have served with the Corps.”

  On May 7, 1919, the draft of one of history’s more fallible documents, the Treaty of Versailles, was completed. Upon the anticipated signing of the Peace Treaty, the IVth Corps was deactivated, bringing Stilwell’s occupation duty to an end. Like many others during those disillusioning months of 1919 he had not been edified by the spectacle of the Peace Conference and his taste of inter-Allied cooperation was sour. “They are all trying to belittle our army and our achievements….Bickering and trading back and forth….Incident of French and Belgians dickering about Luxembourg three days after the Armistice….Nothing generous or spontaneous in relations between Allies…watching each other, always trying to put something over.” He prepared to go home in a frame of mind he would find already growing in America, “thoroughly convinced that what we want to do is stay home and mind our own business and get ready to pound anybody that gets in our way. League of Nations!”

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  Among the disappointments suffered at the Peace Conference none was greater than China’s. The trouble with the terms of the Peace Treaty was not inherent iniquity but the gap by which they fell short of the expectations aroused by President Wilson. Wilson’s promises of a just peace, self-determination and all the rest of the Fourteen Points, which had so lifted the spirits of the world and fired the nationalism of ardent young Chinese as of other hopeful peoples, withered at the touch of hard realities. One reality was Japan’s secret agreements with the Allies about Shantung. In addition, though Japan had contributed nothing to combat, she was a military and naval power to be reckoned with. China’s only reality was her wants. Her bill for cancellation of the unequal treaties was simply ignored, which made her concentrate with all the more fervor on Shantung. She had a weak case in law, having had herself reaffirmed the transfer of German rights to Japan in return for Japanese loans. But she had a strong case in public opinion based on natural sovereignty and the spirit of the Fourteen Points. Her strongly nationalist delegates, all graduates of American universities, made the most of this at Paris.

  Angered by the refusal of the Conference to make a declaration of racial equality, the Japanese too turned all their pressure upon Shantung. It became a major issue of the Conference and the source of exquisite embarrassment to President Wilson. His own principles, the advice of his delegation, the passionate pleading of the American Minister to China, Paul Reinsch, and the force of American public opinion aroused on the Shantung issue by missionary societies, all urged China’s cause. But Japan’s case, in which the Allies had been snared and tied, could not be denied without disrupting the Conference. Torn by all its other quarrels, the Conference was on the edge of disintegrating anyway. Wilson had staked his political life, and indeed his soul, on obtaining the Covenant of the League of Nations—the cure, as he saw it, for all international ills—as part of the Peace Treaty. When Japan threatened to bolt unless given what she wanted, thus providing the excuse for other defections, Wilson saw the prospect of the whole structure that was to save the world and make him immortal collapsing. Against the advice of Secretary Lansing and other American delegates, who believed the proposed Japanese bolt to be a bluff, he yielded. At its last meeting on April 30, 1919, the Council of Five confirmed Japan as successor to all German concessions in Shantung. As a conciliatory gesture Japan offered the verbal promise to “restore eventual sovereignty” to China. In turn, Wilson took comfort in the theory that once the League existed, it could correct any unfortunate sacrifices incurred in the process of creating it.

  Uproar greeted the event in China. Public fervor had already been excited by reports of the dispute in Paris. Students of the National University of Peking, center of the progressives and intellectuals of Young China, were organizing a demonstration for “National Humiliation Day” on May 7 to commemorate the signing of the Twenty-one Demands. When news came of the Shantung award and of its acceptance by pro-Japanese members of the Anfu government, the students assembled in a mass meeting of 3,000 on May 4. Shouting “Down with the traitors!” “Return Shantung!” “Boycott Japanese goods!” they paraded through the streets and attacked the homes of the puppet ministers. The protest spread overnight to Shanghai, Nanking, Hankow and Canton, with shops closing everywhere as students swept through the streets calling for the boycott. The students, who commanded the traditional Chinese respect for scholars, exercised a forceful influence and the boycott they started was taken up by the merchant class and newly formed labor unions. The May Fourth movement developed into a conscious effort to destroy Japan’s market in China that was to last for a year. In providing the rallying point for reinvigorating the nationalism of the new China it had a wider effect than anything since the Revolution. Unable to repress it, the Government was finally forced to dismiss the most compromised ministers and approve the refusal of the Chinese delegates at Paris to sign the Peace Treaty.

  In America the fate of a remote peninsula in the Yellow Sea became the focus, however artificial, of a tremendous struggle in domestic politics. Since President Wilson had made the League of Nations inseparable from the Peace Treaty, his opponents in the Senate were obliged to defeat the Treaty and for this purpose fastened on Shantung as its “outstanding iniquity.” The oratory swelled noisily. “A conspiracy to rob,” “an infamy,” “shameless,” “damnable,” “inexcusable” resounded in the Senate and the press. Especially the Western Senators exploited the issue in response to anti-Japanese sentiment in their states where the Oriental Exclusion League was agitating for bills against alien land ownership. Shantung became a double-barreled gun against Japan and Wilson.

  Japan’s rise as a naval power, her real and supposed activities in Mexico and possible threat to the Panama C
anal, her seizure of the Pacific islands, her too eager intervention in Siberia, all combined to give a picture of general aggressiveness which was exciting American antagonism. A powerful Japan whose aim was world hegemony was seen as a direct threat to American interests in the Pacific and Far East, a subject to which the Senate gave great importance and the Hearst press gave its most horrendous attentions. It proclaimed China to have been “outrageously robbed” by a “wily, tricky, fight-thirsty Japan” and suggested “implications of actual war” in American relations with Japan. Senator Hiram Johnson of California, home of the Oriental Exclusion League, orated weekly on the “blot on American honor.” But no one equaled the pitch of moral indignation reached by Senator Borah who denounced the Shantung clause as “so immoral and unrighteous that…we dread even to think about it. We loathe to be forced to attempt to defend it.” He loosed his horror for Wilson and the League in a tirade of exaggeration: “…dishonor and degrade…war will inevitably follow…revolting injustice…outside the pale of respectability…shocks the conscience…naked, hideous and revolting…a monster…no parallel.”

  When the press and public men could expend such passion on Shantung and even talk of war, the public could hardly be blamed for assuming the issue to be a major American interest. A few voices, who could not match the boom of Borah and the other “Irreconcilables,” suggested that China’s case did not altogether justify all the emotion. “Why,” asked the editor of Current Opinion, “should America shed blood to protect China, as Senator Borah suggests, when she is unwilling to protect herself, unless our own interests are involved to a sufficient extent to justify it?” The echo of that fundamental question would go on resounding through several decades.

  The mark left by Shantung on both America and China was historic. Besides aiding American rejection of the League, the issue gave Americans a sense of guilt about China and it gave the Chinese a new injection of nationalism which revived the failing and dispirited Kuomintang, preserving it for eventual power.

  In the midst of this tumultuous struggle Stilwell returned home in July 1919. By September, in the general reduction of temporary ranks, he was once again a captain as he had been before the war began.

  4

  Assignment to Peking: Years of the Warlords, 1920–23

  TEN DAYS AFTER HIS RETURN from France Stilwell’s career took the decisive turn that connected him thereafter with China. He could see as soon as he came home that a swollen army, combined with the war-disgusted mood of the United States, did not offer a promising outlook for advancement in a military career. Not possessed of a temperament to wait patiently for fate’s offerings, he went down to Washington on July 25 to take a hand in his next assignment. He called on a former classmate, Chauncey Fenton, now an officer in the personnel division of the War Department, and asked bluntly, “How about sending me as far away from home as possible?”

  “That’s a funny thing,” Fenton replied. “We were just talking this morning about sending men to Japan and China.” He told Stilwell about the program of the Military Intelligence Division (MID) for sending officers to these countries for language training. With both proficiency in languages and previous service in Intelligence, Stilwell was a natural candidate. He asked for Japan. “All the Japan jobs are filled,” Fenton said. “How about China?”

  “All right, make it China,” Stilwell agreed, and so it was arranged. As of August 6, 1919, he was appointed the first language officer for China to represent the Army.

  With the Intelligence Division much enlarged by the war, the General Staff had decided to put the gathering of information by military attachés, hitherto haphazard, on a systematic basis. MID planned to develop a well-chosen, well-trained corps of attachés having, it hopefully prescribed, “detailed knowledge of the language, military establishments, political conditions and customs of foreign nations” and “a true appreciation of…their probable reactions in peace and war.” As things worked out, the coveted appointment as military attaché which, at least in the larger posts, required a private income, continued to be handed around among a small group who made up the “attachés’ clique.” But apart from the attaché himself, graduates of the language program were needed to serve the enlarged scope of the Intelligence Division, in particular its Far East section.

  Qualifications for the post were general “military efficiency”—meaning the sum of an officer’s rating on his Efficiency Report—language proficiency, availability and willingness. The age limit was thirty-five and appointees were to be drawn only from the combat arms: Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery. At thirty-six Stilwell was overage, but since he fitted the qualifications as if carved for them in every other respect, his nomination went through with remarkable and unbureaucratic despatch.

  At this moment China was making front-page news. Headlines flared the “Rape of Shantung,” the “Crime of Shantung,” the “Shame of Shantung” and various other heated pejoratives. Even after Shantung helped to accomplish defeat of the League and the ruin of Wilson, the issue was carried over into the Presidential campaign of 1920 and the wrong done to China was used by the Republicans as a favorite stick with which to beat the Administration. From his front porch Harding presented China as America’s ward, now betrayed. As a result of the return of the Boxer indemnity, he said, China had placed her faith “in the example, in the democracy, in the justice of the United States” only to find that several millions of her people were delivered over to a rival nation at Paris. But in the Senate, Harding went on, some steadfast Americans had said “No” and had “kept the plighted faith in the lesson we taught China some twenty years ago.”

  As the Chinese saw it and as the leaders of the May Fourth movement tirelessly preached, the lesson America had taught in 1919 if not in 1900 was the perfidy of the Allies and the folly of relying on foreign friends. To Americans, however, Harding’s version was the governing concept of their relation to China at the time Stilwell entered the Chinese phase of his career.

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  With his wife and children Stilwell left in August 1919 for California where he was to spend the first year of his Chinese language studies at the University of California at Berkeley. It took him less than a month to conclude that the course there was inadequate and progress frustrated because there was no one to talk Chinese to after school. He reported to MID that he and his fellow-officer in the program, Captain Lloyd P. Horsfall, would do better to transfer to school in China at once where they could hear and practice the spoken language. Though his recommendation was confirmed by other language officers no action was taken.

  Of all languages Chinese, because of its tone system, needs to be learned where it can be heard and spoken in daily use. The meaning of a word depends on which of four tones in Mandarin and which of eight tones in Cantonese is used to express it. The difficulty of the written language derives not so much from the several thousand individual characters that must be learned by sight as from the complications involved in using and understanding them in combination. A well-educated man may know 6,000 characters, a scholar 8,000 or 9,000, while for ordinary daily use 3,000 are adequate. These can be recognized with knowledge of about 1,000 basic forms.

  Chinese characters are composed of any number of brush strokes, from one, as in —, meaning “one, unity, all, uniform,” to more than 20, as in (22 strokes), meaning “bay, bend of a stream.” Although they seem to the Western eye a mysterious forest with no clue to the maze, they contain a definite principle of order. They are classified in dictionaries under 214 radicals, such as , “man”; , “woman”; , “mouth”; , “mountain”; , “work” or “workman” (originally a carpenter’s square); “roof”; , “cart” (a two-wheeled vehicle viewed from above). The radicals were originally pictographs which gradually became stylized. The rest of the language is represented by the addition of what are called “phonetics” to the radicals; for example, the character (lun), meaning “to discuss, discourse” is made up of the radical , meaning “words,” plus
the phonetic , pronounced lun and meaning “to arrange, set in order,” which indicates both sound and meaning: “to set words in order,” i.e. “to discuss.” Not all phonetics, however, are so helpful or logical. Some indicate neither sound nor meaning.

  There are approximately 880 phonetics which together with the radicals (some of which double as phonetics) make up the 1,000 basic forms a student must know to be able to read and write all Chinese characters. The task requires persistence, hours of practice and constant review, which obviously limits not only the number of foreigners willing and able to accomplish it but the number of Chinese who could achieve literacy before pai-hua, a written form of the vernacular, was introduced.

  Mandarin or official Chinese was the normal language of the provinces north of the Yangtze (and of some in the south) and the administrative language for the country as a whole. All officials were supposed to be able to speak it. While Mandarin and Cantonese and various other dialects were mutually unintelligible, all of literate China was united by the written language.

  While in California Stilwell spent his summer leave of 1920 at Carmel where he purchased a tract of five lots on the Point overlooking the ocean for a future home. Promoted to major in July, he sailed with his family and the Horsfalls for China on August 5, 1920.