Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  On September 18 the Army transport rounded the Shantung promontory just at dusk when the jagged coastline and the brown batwing sails of Chinese junks were outlined against a rose-colored sunset. Two days later the ship came into Chinwangtao, a Treaty Port at the northern frontier of China proper near where the Great Wall comes down to the sea and the mournful chant of fishermen hauling in their nets rises twice a day. A 250-mile railroad trip southward via Tientsin brought the travelers to their destination, the famed city in the plain, Peking.

  North China and Peking

  Stilwell spent the next ten days looking for a house and exploring one of the great capitals of the world. Here the old mandarin class mingled with venal adventurers, the new China throbbed with plans and hopes of reform, foreigners lived a charmed, hedonistic existence and the silent Altar of Heaven lay in eternal marble perfection open to the sky. Within moats was the Forbidden City with enameled tiled roofs of Imperial yellow and three artificial lakes dotted with islands. On the islands were pagodas and painted pavilions and the palace where the last Emperor had been imprisoned by his aunt. Gnarled willows and cypresses grew along the shores, and miniature hills with rocks and caves simulated the mountain scenery beloved by Chinese painters. An ancient carp caught in one of the lakes, it was said, wore a gold plate engraved with the name of Yung-Lo, a Ming emperor of the sixteenth century.

  Upper-class residences were hidden behind walled streets. Each had its courtyard garden with lotus pool and teahouse, peonies in flowerpots, honeycombed rocks carved by hundreds of years of trickling water, and a moon window in a wall. Springless covered Peking carts bumped over the cobblestones, camels from the northwest moved with the haughty dignity of the desert, Buddhist priests in saffron robes stood among the red columns of the Lama Temple, dust storms blowing off the plains periodically tortured the capital and its residents. Outside the walls the plain stretched away to the Summer Palace and the Western Hills where the Monastery of the Azure Cloud and other temples were sheltered by ancient pines. From the Hill of the Jade Fountain springs flowed down to fill the lakes and moats of the Forbidden City.

  Within the Legation Quarter were the foreign residences and hotels, the polo grounds, the stately American Legation at the top of the street, dignified banks and business offices, but none of the roaring commerce of Shanghai. Peking was not like the Treaty Ports; foreigners here even held intercourse with educated Chinese. Peking was the center of intellectual as well as official life. It was the site of the National Peking University, the Peking Union Medical College founded by the Rockefellers, Tsing-Hua College founded by American Boxer indemnity money, Yenching and many other missionary-founded colleges. It was the fount of the renaissance movement dedicated to making China over through the written vernacular pai-hua, considered by its promoters the single most important instrument for modernizing the country. Pai-hua would make possible the spread of literacy and give popular access to modern newspapers, a recent Western import regarded by the conservatives with the utmost repugnance.

  Besides diplomatic corps and journalists, educators and missionaries, the capital attracted art collectors and sinologues, travelers who came through and never left, and retired foreigners who settled here from choice because life was gracious and placid and money went far. With abundant servants, a summer home in the western hills, the Golf Club and Race Club for the Legation set, picnics in summer and pheasant hunting in fall, Peking for the foreigner represented, in the phrase of a nostalgic resident, “the years that were fat.”

  The Stilwells and Horsfalls together took a Chinese-style house outside the Legation Quarter at No. 3 Pei Tsung Pu Hutung near the east wall. Like all Chinese houses it was built on one floor in a series of connected quadrilaterals, each around a courtyard, and had paper in the windows instead of glass. A house with four bedrooms, dining room, living room, library, office and servants’ quarters cost at this time $15 in American money a month, with cost of servants in proportion. The usual officer’s family employed five or six servants at a cost of about $35 in American money plus squeeze, the commission on every transaction that is the heart of Chinese life. At the time of the birth of their fourth child, a daughter named Alison, in February 1921, the Stilwells employed a number-one boy who was butler, manager and general factotum, a second houseboy, two cooks, a wash amah, a baby amah and a coolie.

  Language officers studied at the North China Union Language School, founded in 1910 to teach missionaries and later expanded to include the many foreign advisers in the Chinese service as well as businessmen and any others who wanted to learn. Employing 100 teachers for 300 students, the school taught the direct method by ear for fast results. The first-year course, with five hours of classes a day, began with six months of listening and speaking and drill in the sound and meaning of words. This was followed by six months of reading, translating and conversing with tutors. At the end of the year the student was supposed to know 700 characters and converse without pain. He also attended seminars and lectures on Chinese history, religion, economics and current affairs. The language officer, after his first year, added study of technical and military terms. Travel, both for his further acquaintance with the country and for fact-finding missions in the service of the military attaché, was part of his duty. He was required to take examinations each year and at the end of his three- or four-year tour he was supposed to know 3,000 characters and speak fluently.

  Dr. William B. Pettus, founder and director of the school, complained that Stilwell and Horsfall had picked up a bad accent in California which could lead to confusion, for even the most fluent foreigner could encounter difficulties. Dr. Edward Hume, an old-timer who spoke perfect Chinese, told Stilwell that once in the countryside he had asked two farmers the way to Changsha. They looked blank, and after repeating his question several times he gave up. As he walked on, he overheard one farmer say to the other, “It sounds just as if the foreigner were asking, ‘Is this the road to Changsha?’ ”

  Stilwell acquired, like all foreigners, a Chinese name derived from the sound of his own, in his case Shih Ti-wei, written . The surname meant “history” and the first name “to direct” or “lead in the right direction” (to) “majesty” or “prestige”—a provocative collection. Between classes he enjoyed wandering through the fairs and markets and streets of shops. His first purchase was some carved ivories and he began to collect inlaid fan handles and to accumulate Chinese furnishings for his future house in Carmel.

  He met the charm and cruelty of China side by side. Kite-flying was a favorite sport with kites fashioned in the form of dragons, castles or butterflies with gauzy tinted wings. Hung with whistles or bells or wooden chimes, they filled the air with color and motion and, as an observer described it, “a soft unearthly music…as of oriental cherubim.” Executions were equally popular, watched by eager crowds as the victim with hands bound was kicked to his knees and his head severed by a stroke of the heavy sword to admiring shouts of Hao! When the blood spurted women and children rushed forward to dip strings of copper coins in it which were then hung around the children’s necks to frighten away evil spirits. Nearby under a roofed plaza might be found a storyteller in gown and skullcap holding in rapt attention an audience of perhaps a hundred coolies and workers who squatted in total silence as they listened to a tale of ancient heroism and legendary deeds. The narrator softly clapped bamboo sticks in rhythm to his recital or changed into song for philosophical passages or beat a drum for the martial parts.

  The seduction of China was at work. Stilwell had been in Peking less than a month when he answered a War Department questionnaire on preference of service by marking “Military Attaché, China,” as his only desired post; all others, including “West Point,” he marked “No.”

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  Two months before Stilwell arrived, three warlords, each a remarkable personality, had combined in alliance for just long enough to oust the Anfu government and had then turned upon each other to vie for the dominant power th
at went with control of the capital. The winner who now held Peking was Marshal Wu Pei-fu, a gentlemanly mandarin and graduate of the classical examinations; the loser was Marshal Chang Tso-lin, ex-bandit and lord of Manchuria; the holder of the balance of power was the “Christian General” of peasant birth, Feng Yu-hsiang.

  Wu Pei-fu sincerely regarded himself as a public servant with concern for public order and the hope, larger than personal ambition alone, of restoring national government to China. A slender fine-boned man with amber eyes in a narrow head and the aquiline nose that indicated well-born lineage, he spoke in the cultivated vocabulary of the mandarin and was regarded by the diplomatic corps as the favored candidate for the strong man China so badly needed. For the benefit of an American journalist he exhibited a picture of George Washington on the wall of his yamen*1 and told his visitor that it was his desire to do for his country what Washington had done in uniting the thirteen colonies. He maintained discipline among his troops and even regularly paid them their whole pay which earned him the dislike of other chieftains but gave him an army that would not readily desert and won him the allegiance of the countryside which was spared the curse of marauding soldiers. In an effort to reconstruct representative government Marshal Wu recalled the parliament of 1913 and restored the ever-available Li Yuan-hung. But though a lion in war, Wu was infirm in politics; his arrangements proved unstable and the “Mukden Tiger,” Chang Tso-lin, was waiting in the wings.

  Small and delicate in physique, the renowned Manchurian Marshal had started life as a common soldier in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, progressed to bandit, accepted an offer of amnesty, and in return for bringing in his troops received command of a garrison outside Mukden. From this base he acquired wealth by supplying first the Russians and then the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War. He now wore on his black satin skullcap a famous pearl said to be the largest in the world. His halls in Manchuria were filled with carved black teak furniture, silken rugs, bronzes, jars of jade, scroll paintings and precious porcelains. He shared his domain in delicate balance with the Japanese, who maintained in Mukden the headquarters of their growing industrial development of Manchuria.

  Around these two Marshals in the struggle for control of north China other factions and tuchuns combined and recombined. The most considerable was Feng Yu-hsiang, less because of his prodigious stature than because, like Wu, he took care to build up a loyal and effective army. As a young soldier in the armies of Yuan Shih-kai he had become converted not only to Christianity but also to the gospel of the Revolution according to Sun Yat-sen, and he believed that moral indoctrination in addition to food, clothes and pay was necessary to make good soldiers. During the shifts and confusions of the Republican years he had joined forces with Wu Pei-fu and in 1920 was appointed Military Governor of the northwest province of Shensi. He married the Chinese secretary of the YMCA in Peking, baptized his soldiers with a hose and taught them to sing evangelical hymns and marching songs to the words “We must not drink or smoke” and “We must not gamble or visit whores.” He disapproved of Wu’s drinking and as a hint once presented him at a banquet with a rare porcelain vase from which Wu poured a glass to drink a toast to the donor, only to spit it out at the first mouthful on discovering it to be water. While Feng did not altogether approve of Wu, he believed him to be working for the same ultimate object as himself—a unified China free of foreign control—and this being the case was more inclined to side with him against Chang Tso-lin than vice versa.

  In the years 1920–23, when Stilwell was in Peking, Feng fought in alliance with Wu first against a combine of various tuchuns and then in 1922 against Chang Tso-lin when the Tiger renewed his bid to gain north China. Often the military engagements were fought within ten miles of the capital, sometimes causing the city gates to be closed for a week at a time. At night residents could watch the tracers of artillery fire from the roof of the Peking Hotel. At the boom of cannon the hotel trembled as if from a minor earthquake. Once when Stilwell was absent bullets came flying through the streets, some passing through his house. Mrs. Stilwell placed all the children under tables and ventured out to the neighboring home of a missionary from which she could telephone to the Legation to report being under fire. The danger was taken casually: she was advised to return home and let it pass.

  The subject of study of a military attaché and his staff is the soldiery of the host country. Stilwell began his acquaintance with the Chinese soldier, whom he was one day to command, under the conditions of the tuchuns’ strife. He saw Wu Pei-fu’s men march off to war in a long gray file accompanied by mule-drawn two-wheeled carts carrying ammunition, bedding and supplies. These were superior arrangements; the average warlord’s troops had only squeaking man-powered wheelbarrows for supply trains. Many in Wu’s army, as in others, were barely more than fourteen years old but they were well equipped with knapsacks, trench picks, shovels, lanterns, teapots, oiled paper umbrellas, alarm clocks and hot-water bottles. They were followed by coolies bearing coffins on poles as reassurance to the soldiers that, if killed, their bodies would not be left unburied on the plains. On the gray cotton uniforms, padded in winter, common to all Chinese troops, Wu’s men wore red armbands to distinguish their allegiance. As a rule these armbands were not sewed on but fastened with a safety pin for easy removal when armies changed sides.

  Military performance of the average army was not sharp. When soldiers reached the field of battle they would stand for a few minutes, look around, unsling their rifles, fire a haphazard shot or two without aiming through the sights and then sit down. Cannon were fired recklessly, often missing their targets by a quarter-mile or more. If it rained the paper umbrellas blossomed down the line like a sudden sprout of mushrooms and fighting ceased. Wu’s army was better than most and in 1922 in combination with Feng’s drove Chang Tso-lin back to Manchuria.

  In his effort to form a national government Wu Pei-fu had invited the adherence of Sun Yat-sen, but Sun, who held the title of President of China, conferred by the rump Kuomintang parliament, refused. He wanted to unite China under the Three Principles of the Kuomintang program: Nationalism, Democracy and the People’s Livelihood. But all his schemes and alliances failed and his various partners turned against him. He repeatedly proposed to the American Minister his grand plan for the Western democracies to invest in a new government for China but it found no takers. The plan hardly fitted with Sun’s unabated nationalism but in the heartbreaking decade since the Revolution he had come to believe that China could not be lifted by her own bootstraps. In the hope of gaining the north he even entered, at one point, into a far-fetched alliance with Chang Tso-lin which, not surprisingly, had no practical results.

  Failed by the West and by his own countrymen, he turned for help where it was offered, to revolutionary Russia, and made alliance with the Comintern in January 1923. In 1919 Soviet Russia had announced the waiving of all Czarist treaties and concessions, causing a tremendous impression in China as the first Western power to give up anything voluntarily. When it came to the practice, the Soviets had second thoughts and proved unwilling to give up the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria or their rights in Mongolia. Nevertheless, to Chinese disillusioned with the progress of their own Revolution, the attraction of Moscow was strong and conversions to Communism began. On its side the Soviet Union was looking for friends and for another base for the ultimate advance of world revolution. While acknowledging that under present conditions China was not ripe for Communism, the U.S.S.R. agreed to aid the Kuomintang to achieve national unity and independence. Under the terms of the alliance with Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese Communists, who had formed their own party in 1921, were admitted into the Kuomintang as collaborators in the goal of regenerating the country and for the time being agreed that the Kuomintang should assume the leadership of the national revolution.

  Sun Yat-sen no more than any of the warlords was able to establish himself as a national ruler. He had a political philosophy but no power; the warlords had power
without a program. He founded and formulated the Revolution but fell short in command and organization. He was, a contemporary suggested, part St. Paul, part William Jennings Bryan, but even had he been part George Washington, part Lenin, he would have been hard put to prevail over his old and intractable country. In the absence of a monarch, sectional interests prevailed; functioning statehood eluded the nation’s grasp.

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  Stilwell had been in Peking only six months when he found an opportunity to break away from Legation life and become acquainted with China on a working level. Following the severe famine of the previous year, 1920, the International Relief Committee of the Red Cross borrowed him from the Army to serve as Chief Engineer of the road-building program in Shansi. He was to be in the field for four months from April to July 1921, working daily with Chinese officials, village magistrates, contractors, construction bosses and laborers, sleeping and eating the Chinese way, supervising the work on foot or horseback, bossing, cajoling, bargaining, playing the game of “face,” learning Chinese habits and characteristics and interrelations. He had no training or experience in engineering beyond what he had learned as an undergraduate at West Point, but he had self-confidence, and like Ulysses he was never content to stay long in one place. Hearing of the road-building project and eager for a chance to move out and use his newly acquired Chinese under real conditions, he asked for the job. Leading as it did to a mission of greater consequence the year afterwards, the road-building in Shansi played a significant part in deepening the Chinese channel of Stilwell’s career.

  The Shansi road was designed partly to give work to famine refugees but chiefly as a step in long-range famine control through improved transportation so that in the future surplus grain could be imported into the stricken areas from the northwest provinces which never suffered famine. Away from the railroads and rivers, China was virtually without roads for wheeled transportation. The Chinese Government did not make a habit of relief projects. Emergency distribution of food stores, if undertaken at all, was never done in time to prevent mass starvation. Accustomed to the Western impulse to “do something,” China let the foreign activists do what they could but the Oriental attitude did not insist on man conquering his circumstances. Centuries of calamities inured the Chinese to their recurrence; masses would die but more masses would be born. In the famine of 1920, reported to be the worst in forty years, “incredibly filthy and ragged bands of staggering skeletons with staring eyes, no longer human beings,” headed in long lines for the towns and crowded the small railroad stations. The countryside was sere with no sign of spring grain; only the grave mounds stood out against the brown earth while the wind whirled clouds of yellow dust over deserted homes.