Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The Nine-Power Treaty was the crown. Its four principles in magnificent language laid down all that was necessary for the achievement of that elusive goal of universal—or almost universal—desire: a strong, independent, united China. It pledged the contracting parties: (1) “To respect the sovereignty, independence and territorial and administrative integrity of China. (2) To provide the fullest and most unembarrassed opportunity to China to develop and maintain for herself an effective and stable government.” (3) To maintain the principle of “equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all nations….” (4) To refrain from taking advantage of conditions in China “to seek special rights or privileges” which would abridge the rights of citizens of friendly states.

  What this amounted to was a pledge by the signatories to respect the integrity of China without a pledge to defend it if violated. By giving the force of treaty to the American doctrine of the Open Door, it reaffirmed in the American mind a feeling of moral guardianship for China. It expunged the guilt for Shantung without costing any commitment to action. It was at once so high-principled, so innocuous and apparently so pro-Chinese that the Senate, whose way with treaties was not usually so amiable, voted to ratify it 66 to 0. In the absence of a reliable government of China, the signatories did not offer to give up the unequal treaties but they made gestures toward modification. They promised to convene a commission to “examine” extrality and another to “review” the customs problem and grant an increase in customs revenue if not the tariff autonomy that China asked for. Both these bodies eventually met in 1925 and 1926 and reached decisions but by that time new eruptions of domestic chaos and Chinese-foreign conflict prevented their taking effect. A promise by Britain at the Conference to restore Wei-hai-wei was ultimately fulfilled in 1930.

  The Washington Treaties taken together seemed a grand self-denying ordinance, a miracle of respect for international order. Everyone who wanted to believe in peace and collective effort could believe that the treaties had indeed achieved disarmament, international equity and the safeguarding of China. Their structure was a general forswearing of aggressive intentions which, lacking sanctions or guarantees, would last only as long as community of interest lasted. While Japan’s reigning moderates at the time had as much reason to be satisfied with the results as the other signatories, her nationalists of the Army and Navy regarded the Washington Treaties with malevolence. They resented Japan’s inferior position in the restrictions, as they regarded them, on their freedom of action in China. Their hostility was given added cause within a year. In November 1922 the United States Supreme Court confirmed an earlier Act of Congress limiting acquired citizenship to “free white persons,” thus in effect ruling that Japanese could not become American citizens by naturalization. In 1924 after clamorous agitation by the western states, Congress enacted the Japanese Exclusion Bill. As a gesture hardly conducive to goodwill, it did not augur well for the Washington Treaties.

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  As an agent of the Military Attaché, Stilwell was sent to report on one provision of the Washington Treaties: Japan’s evacuation of Siberia scheduled for September 1922. In that month he went north on a journey that took him to Manchuria, Siberia, Korea and Japan.

  The focus of present ambitions and future conflict, Manchuria was China’s wide frontier region north of the Great Wall. Larger than France and Germany combined, it was rich in fertile grasslands, coal and iron, grain and water power. It was the heartland of rival colonialisms, Russian and Japanese. Russian territory curved around it like a horseshoe, reaching on the east to the Maritime Province on the Sea of Japan. The Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway crossed Manchuria from west to east and the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway (SMR) from south to north. Japan’s interests in Manchuria were in the hands of the Kwantung Army, a virtually independent force like the Anglo-Indian Army. Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, headquarters of the Kwantung Army and the railway, was Stilwell’s first destination.

  He disliked it at once. “No Chinese mail goes out from this buggerly place, only Jap mail. I went till I found a Chino letterbox, by god.” As the center of the coal and steel empire of the SMR, the city was “buzzing…with big business chances. Everybody has a scheme to get rich but there is always some drawback.” He went on to Harbin, center of 100,000 White Russians, and from there east by train to Vladivostok. Japanese evacuation, as he noticed in towns along the way, seemed to be in no hurry. In fact the troops appeared to be “evacuating from east to west. No one knows what they are doing….Two planes buzzing around. No ships in to take them off.” The area was still in the aftermath of war and revolution. Exploring, talking and walking around, Stilwell found “Japs digging away on hill to west of town just over Amur bay. The arrogant little bastards were…all over town this a.m. in American cars, posting M.P.’s and sticking out their guts….They need a kick in the slats in the worst way….They have systematically bothered and annoyed Americans about passports…and seem to go out of their way to make people despise and hate them.”

  The impression was reinforced after a week’s visit to Japan and a week in Japanese-governed Korea on the way back. He found an aggressive chauvinism in Japan that was lacking in China. As the only people of the East to be completely sovereign in their own land and effective in modern terms as well, the Japanese were feeling the pricking in their blood of the master-race sensation. Besides requiring a subject people to validate it, this expressed itself in seizing every available bureaucratic contact to annoy and domineer foreigners who had for so long walked the East as superiors. “Made to wait for meal on boat,” Stilwell recorded, “Japs already eating.” “Serving Japs first and out of turn, e.g., at ticket window, etc. Close scrutiny of papers. Insistence on lengthy questioning. Open sneers met everywhere.” He recognized these as “petty annoyances” and they did not interfere with his pleasure in visiting remembered places in Japan. In the fragrance and quiet of the pine woods on the hills about Miyajima with its view over the straits, he felt, “I could lie on the back of my neck here for months.” He liked the country but not the people who reminded him of the Germans. They were, he decided at the end of his visit, “pale imitations of the Germans without the latter’s brains and ability. Patriotic, well-organized, brave, artistic, swellheaded and stupid.”

  In 1923 before his tour as language officer was due to end, Stilwell reported on two more journeys to widely separated regions of China. In April, traveling by riverboat and on foot without interpreter or companion, he went on a month’s tour of three provinces on the south bank of the Yangtze: Chekiang on the coast and Kiangsi and Hunan inland. Here there was no scope for road-building for the population owned no wheeled vehicles except wheelbarrows. Goods were waterborne or carried on shoulder poles along trails that followed the dikes between liquid paddy fields or climbed straight up mountainsides. Filtered through mist, the mountains suddenly and surprisingly were seen to be Chinese paintings come true. The countryside was more appealing than the north, with chestnuts in blossom, sails of junks moving along the canals, decorative clumps of bamboo, pagodas with tinkling windbells and the springtime fragrance of beanflowers. Water buffalo, guided in circles by boys stretched lazily on their backs, turned waterwheels to fill an endless chain of buckets for irrigating the fields.

  Stilwell reported a heavy traffic in opium protected by the local tuchun’s troops, in contrast to Japan where the drug had never taken hold. In Hunan the official opium inspector, charged with suppressing the trade, was paid 40 coppers a day by each of the 100 opium shops for protection. Stilwell’s boatman was an addict and Stilwell had to buy him some smokes “to keep him from crying. 50 coppers a day, two or three smokes or he is miserable.”

  He met and mingled with every kind of Chinese from tycoons in the boat cabin adjoining his, “with all the fixings including slaves…and four-storied dinner pails,” to the “cheerful boat crew, wet or dry, hot or cold, hungry or fed, always on the jump and always jollying each other.” The
boat was filled with “syphilitics and Chinese violin players.” Leaving the river, he hiked through the countryside for several days, covering twenty or thirty miles a day. The populace suffered from oppression by local troops, “mostly rape and robbery.” Roads were mere wheelbarrow tracks in appalling condition. Only a Chinese could have the patience and energy to push a heavily loaded wheelbarrow over them. The people appeared friendly to foreigners and, Stilwell reported, “universally consider the U.S. the best friend of China. They nowhere evince the slightest interest in the politics of their own country and ask only to be left alone to make a living as best they can.”

  Coming down to Hangchow, which Marco Polo had declared unsurpassed in magnificence, Stilwell was disappointed. He thought the West Lake, famous for the beauty of its temples and pagodas, was pretty enough but overrated, with “a lot of Chinese-foreign monstrosities of houses…like a second rate American seaside summer resort.” He finished his trip at the city celebrated by Arnold Toynbee a few years later as

  You Smyrna weeping London’s tears

  You London racked by Smyrna’s fears,

  Busy, detestable Shanghai,

  Our anchor’s up, Thank God. Good-bye.

  Stilwell’s opinion matched Toynbee’s, if for different reasons. “This town would ruin anybody in no time. The babes that twitch around the hotels need attention so badly that it is hard not to give it to them.”

  Outer Mongolia, where he went a month later in June 1923, was as remote in kind as in distance from the fleshpots of Shanghai. Urga, the capital, was 650 miles and three days’ journey by car from the rail terminus at Kalgan on the Great Wall. Stilwell slept in Mongols’ yurts on the way, or when these were unbearable, in the open. Sovereignty of the area as between China, Russia and “independent” Mongolia was moot. No one seemed to know who was head of state; the government was a farce. He reported that the Mongols were determined not to let the Chinese regain control and he believed the country would remain permanently detached. In Urga the hand of Russia was everywhere visible. Five hundred Red troops, both infantry and cavalry, equipped with some machine guns dominated the situation. Their ammunition was meager. Owing to lack of railroads and deficiency of other transportation, campaigning in the area would present great difficulty. He watched the lamas, who numbered 15,000 in Urga, at their prayers and thought them “dirty, depraved and degenerate.” Syphilis was rampant, the women barren and, he rather sweepingly reported, “the almost entire absence of children make it possible that in fifty years more the Mongols will be extinct.”

  Four years had now passed since Stilwell received the China assignment in 1919 and his tour as a language officer had come to an end. On the roadbeds of Shansi and Shensi, in the villages and squalid inns of his one-man travels, he had come to know men and places far outside the foreigner’s usual circle of Treaty Port, Legation Quarter and missionary compound. He had functioned with Chinese under Chinese conditions.

  On July 9, 1923, he sailed with his family for home, four months after his fortieth birthday. “Here it is,” he wrote on that day, “middle-aged man now.”

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  *1 Residence headquarters.

  *2 Three of his dialogues are reprinted in the Appendix.

  *3 Feng was on his first trip to the United States. He went on to visit the U.S.S.R. and was killed en route in a fire on a Soviet ship in the Black Sea.

  5

  The “Can Do” Regiment and the Rise of Chiang Kai-shek, 1926–29

  ON HIS RETURN to the United States, Stilwell at forty went back to school. There was not much else to do in the American Army in 1923, four years after the Great War was won. Whereas defeat in war galvanizes military development, nothing contributes to military desuetude like total victory. Withdrawn again behind its oceans, with no visible menace on the horizon, with Japan seemingly taken care of by the Washington Treaties, the United States basked in the Coolidge sun. The stockmarket climbed, flappers and bootleggers flourished and the Army moldered. A reduction of forces in 1922 had slowed promotions to an imperceptible crawl; American forces were not in action anywhere; the only hope of advancement lay in postgraduate training.

  While still in China Stilwell had requested assignment to the Infantry course at Fort Benning in Georgia, which admitted 250 Infantry officers divided into the company course and the advanced course. Stilwell applied for and was assigned to the latter whose leading graduates usually went on to the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Unless an officer had passed through Leavenworth he was unlikely to be a candidate for high command. Stilwell took the Infantry course at Benning in 1923–24 and stayed on an extra year as Assistant Executive Officer to the Commandant, General Wells, his friend and admirer from the World War.

  He reached Leavenworth for the school year of 1925–26. What Leavenworth taught was “solution of the problem” based on statement of mission, analysis of the enemy, choices of action, solution, decision and plan. In lectures, map problems and terrain exercises the course covered mobilization, movement of units, march, relief, supply, reconnaissance and security, delaying action, withdrawal, change of direction, pursuit and all those maneuvers which man has indefatigably devised to make a science out of fighting. The course was exacting and the pressure to excel so great as to cause a series of suicides in the 1920s that later led to the closing of the school.

  Officers stayed up to study until 2 A.M., wives grew bored and irritable, but Stilwell, though he called it a “hell of a year,” did not join the frenzy. Older than the average as he had been younger than the average at West Point, he was more than twenty years out of the Academy and did not consider it worth bucking for the highest grade. He knew he would pass and that was enough; the rest was “rot.” He studied what was necessary and almost insulted his colleagues by going to bed at ten. Among the hard workers in his class, Dwight Eisenhower, West Point Class of 1915, graduated number one. Stilwell emerged with the Commandant’s notation on his report, “Common sense and a sense of humor.”

  Seized by his periodic urge to remove himself from the United States, he had applied for the Ecole de Guerre, the French staff college. The assignment had already been approved when he learned of a chance to return to China. Willie Whipple, a West Point classmate now at the War Department, sent word of an opening as battalion commander in the 15th Infantry, the American regiment stationed by Boxer Protocol in Tientsin. Would he like to have it? Stilwell threw France over and grabbed for it. Eagerness came to the surface for the first time since he had come home and throughout his term at Leavenworth he pelted Whipple with anxious queries. His friend assured him there would be no hitch. “You are considered the most qualified field officer for this duty, being such an excellent Chinese,” he wrote in February, but Stilwell continued to fuss. “Don’t worry,” Whipple soothed in March, “Nobody else is going to get it….Have no fear regarding the birds who have Senators in back of them….You have me in back of you. It is all settled.” When orders had not come through by April, Stilwell resorted to telegrams. “Keep your shirt on,” replied Whipple, the orders would come, as they did before the term was over. After a summer’s leave spent at Carmel, the Stilwells once more, on August 20, 1926, boarded the Army transport for China. “We all felt,” wrote Mrs. Stilwell, “we were going home.”

  Tientsin spoiled that illusion. Shorn of its walls after the Boxer Rebellion, it represented the foreign foothold in north China where foreign troops were stationed. The Concession area had been razed and rebuilt in heavily ugly late-Victorian Western style. Life there had not the charm of Peking and China was not the China the Stilwells had left three years before. Momentous change was boiling in the south, about to bring forth a leader, a climax of strife and a national government at last.

  It began with the order to “Fire!” given by a British Inspector of Police against Chinese students and workers demonstrating in the course of a textile strike in Shanghai on May 30, 1925. Twelve Chinese were killed and 17 wounded.
The Shanghai Incident, as it came to be called, was only one incident in a train of history but, like those other shots from British rifles called the Boston Massacre, it was fuel for an upheaval that led to sovereignty.

  The Kuomintang, by this time infused with new strength by its alliance with the Comintern, was already on the way up. The most significant help Sun Yat-sen had received from the Russians came in the form of two foreign advisers, Michael Borodin for civilian affairs and a man known as Galen for military affairs, who later as Marshal Vassili Bluecher was to command the Soviet Far Eastern Army. Borodin was a calm and deliberate man with a long view of history whose influence over his clients grew until he came to be called the Emperor of Canton. The Russian advisers, together with Russian arms and other material support, marked the turning point in Kuomintang fortunes. Revolution, Dr. Sun was told, was not to be accomplished by relying on opportunistic alliances without a common goal. Its first requirement is an indoctrinated armed force of its own. Accordingly a Military Academy with thirty Russian instructors under the direction of Galen was founded at Whampoa in 1923. For reciprocal indoctrination and training Dr. Sun sent a military mission to Moscow headed by a thirty-seven-year-old disciple of outstanding qualities, Chiang Kai-shek.

  In 1924 Dr. Sun had proclaimed his program of the Three Principles—Nationalism, Democracy and the People’s Livelihood—with inspiring effect throughout China. But lured as ever by the prospect of power through arrangement, he accepted an invitation from Chang Tso-lin and Feng Yu-hsiang in Peking to join a conference of “reorganization” for national union. While in Peking he died of cancer on March 12, 1925, leaving behind his Principles, a movement and a successor already steeped in the realities of Chinese power politics.