Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The regimental commander was Colonel Isaac Newell, formerly Military Attaché in Peking, tall, gray-haired and dignified, a polished model of the attaché type, admired by the regiment, with a wealthy and stately wife who suited 15th Infantry traditions. Some of these were not of a nature to be endearing to Stilwell. According to a prescribed custom, officers when in uniform and not under arms “will carry a riding crop or swagger stick of standard 15th Infantry design.” All officers and first sergeants wore sabers when on duty. Courtesy calls at “frequent intervals” were encouraged, to develop “regimental esprit and unity.” Boxer service graves were visited on Memorial Day. During his tour each officer received one month’s detached service for travel in north China.

  A program to teach officers and men the rudiments of spoken Chinese had been introduced in 1924. Lessons, held one hour a day four times a week, were compulsory for officers but voluntary for the men, and all who passed the examinations were entitled to wear a sleeve patch with the character (Chung) in red on a green ground. As the first character of (Chung Kuo, meaning “Middle Country,” namely China), the Chung by itself adorning the American uniform and signifying “middle” caused occasional puzzlement to Chinese observers. The effect of the language program on the enlisted men was evidently not spectacular for Stilwell after a time found it necessary to persuade one of the younger officers, Lieutenant Timberman, who had achieved some fluency, to teach the noncoms enough Chinese to ask their way.

  The overall command, established for reasons of rank and prestige, was held by a brigadier general designated commander of United States Army Forces in China (USAFC). This post was held by General Castner, an overwrought and unstable man in his sixties who wore unkempt clothes in contrast to the 15th’s reputation for classy dressing and was not from West Point. The regiment came under his direct control in December 1926 when headquarters of the 15th Infantry and USAFC were merged. Proud of his physique and prowess in walking, Castner had a passion for physical exercise which may have been one reason why Stilwell understood him and was one of the few officers with whom Castner never quarreled. Coming from a command in the wilder reaches of Alaska, he was going to teach these tea-drinking s.o.b.’s some real soldiering and “reduce the fat men of the regiment to a workable condition.” To prepare for the worst, in the face of the Red antiforeign crusade which he, and indeed many others, saw overwhelming Peking as in the days of the Boxers, he resolved to train the regiment to relieve the Legations in three days of forced march. As he explained to the War Department, it might be a “vital necessity” in the future and he personally trained for the event by walking daily around the Tientsin Race Course.

  Service in the 15th Infantry offered certain noticeable contrasts to service in America. On field exercises the campsite was policed, according to U.S. Army traditions, down to the last horse dropping, potato peel, wisp of straw, tin can and piece of string, and the latrines duly filled in, until on one occasion a delegation of elders from a nearby village waited on the commanding officer to ask politely if the campsite could be left unpoliced as they could make use of the debris. After that, latrines were left unfilled and refuse ungathered. Within minutes after the troops’ departure the place was as clean as a kitchen floor.

  There was small opportunity to apply the principles of soldiering taught at Leavenworth. Because the regiment’s original mission was to protect the Legation staff in Peking, it was considered an organ of the Legation and in 1922 had come under the control of the State Department. It served under the rather paradoxical injunction to avoid conflict, imposed by American policy which was concerned not merely to keep out of trouble but also to avoid inhibiting Chinese national development. As a result the regiment was militarily incapable of carrying out its mission in a crisis. If challenged, it could only bluff, a maneuver which it had performed with éclat during the recent war of the northern tuchuns. In 1924 destitute and disorganized units of Wu Pei-fu’s army were streaming toward Tientsin, raising the prospect of sack and plunder. Asked by the city for protection, the 15th Infantry scouted the enemy, which proved to be a wounded and bandaged battalion mostly between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, with one donkey cart of pots and blankets as supply train and one officer on a pony. Setting up five outposts where rice, cabbage and tea were dispensed to the forlorn soldiers in exchange for their arms, the 15th managed to divert and partially disarm them. In gratitude the citizenry presented the regiment with a white marble memorial gate which thereafter stood in the Compound in proud testimony of Can Do’s deeds.

  The limits permitted to the 15th Infantry were distilled in an order given to an officer in the winter of 1925–26 when Chang Tso-lin’s troops were reported marching toward the restricted zone outside the city. Captain Matthew B. Ridgway, a future four-star general, was told to take as many men as he needed and go out and “divert” a force of 12,000 of Chang’s troops. He was to use “bluff, expostulation or entreaty,” but under no circumstances to fire. In view of these limits he took only two men on Manchurian ponies, shadowed the marching Chinese column all day and returned home, mission accomplished.

  Given the inherent contradictions of its position, the regiment’s withdrawal had been recommended by Castner’s predecessor, General William D. Connor, when he went home early in 1926 to become Commandant of the Army War College. One of the select brains of the Engineers and a former number one at West Point, Connor had looked around him while in China and noted a “spirit of nationalism” developing. In recent brushes with warlords’ forces, he pointed out, “we escaped conflict by as narrow a margin as I considered possible.” He urged withdrawal of all foreign garrisons simultaneously, and if that were not practicable, then of the American alone, “for I believe that all things considered our continued presence there is harmful to the interests of the United States.” The War Department agreed with him on “the wisdom of eventually withdrawing from Tientsin” and periodically discussed the matter with the State Department and the Legation. But the point of decision was never reached and the regiment was to remain for twelve more years until new events made its helplessness unmistakable.

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  When Stilwell came to Tientsin as battalion commander in 1926 he found the person and formed the connection that was to be decisive for his future. This was his acquaintance from World War days who was now serving as Executive Officer of the 15th Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall. Their tours in China overlapped for only eight months, but it was long enough for what had been mere acquaintance to grow into a bond of mutual respect. Of any other two men the relation might have been called friendship, but these two closed personalities left few references to each other at this stage, and Marshall was not a man easily claimed as a friend. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute, courtly and distant, closing all conversations with his cool “Thank you very much,” he never called anyone by his first name and rarely got the last name straight. As befitted Pershing’s particular protégé, he was, in the opinion of one soldier of the 15th Infantry, “the most military looking man in the entire army.”

  The Stilwells took tea at the Marshalls’ two days after their arrival and went again to a “special court dinner” in the same week. Stilwell felt sufficiently easy to borrow his host’s coat. At a dinner party given by the Marshalls on another occasion one invited couple was late and after a brief wait the host announced they would go in to dinner. Just after soup was served the doorbell rang. Stopping the number-one boy as he was going to answer it, Marshall went to the door himself and the guests heard him say, “I’m sorry, but dinner is nearly over,” and then the door was firmly closed. As a childless man, Marshall became fond of and friendly with the Stilwell children but with most adults he remained aloof, leaving an impression of someone “higher up.”

  Seen through Marshall’s eyes (Stilwell’s diary at this time was limited, for unexplained reasons, to laconic references to handball) the Nationalists’ Northern Expedition appeared likely to “leap into contro
l of North China any month,” as he wrote to Pershing, and the Legations “have the wind up pretty badly.” Even as he wrote mobs spurred on by radical agitators overran and looted the British Concessions at Hankow and at Kiukang farther down the river. Britain evacuated her nationals rather than make an issue of Hankow and decided to concentrate reinforcements at Shanghai. In their first yielding of territory since the Opium Wars, the British negotiated with Eugene Chen the relinquishment of the Hankow and Kiukang Concessions while diehards thundered red-faced in their clubs and the Empire quivered. Elsewhere missionaries, for all their efforts to be differentiated, were again being assaulted like any other foreigners and driven to evacuate many outlying stations.

  As Chiang Kai-shek’s troops advanced on the key city of Shanghai their battle was fought for them and the way opened by Communist-organized strikes and demonstrations involving 100,000 workers which the defending forces of the warlord Sun Chuan-fang, despite savage efforts and a hundred beheadings, were unable to suppress. The Concessions saw the specter of revolution. Frenzied consultations took place among the treaty powers. Britain announced the sending of three brigades. The United States, shrinking from the prospect of armed intervention in China, cautiously moved 250 Marines from Guam as far as Manila and only after three weeks’ hesitation moved them on to Shanghai. As Chiang’s troops reached the outskirts and a state of emergency was declared, 1,500 more Americans and 1,500 Japanese were landed to supplement 9,000 British and the Shanghai Volunteer Force. Foreign residents prepared for siege and employed the labor of hundreds of Chinese to dig trenches and put up barbed-wire barricades and concrete blockhouses.

  At the height of the crisis 5,000 American Marines arrived led by the Congressional Medal hero General Smedley Butler, veteran of every Marine engagement from the Spanish-American to the World War, including the Siege of the Legations. He promptly exasperated fellow commanders by his unheroic declarations to the press. His mission, he announced, was solely to protect American lives, not treaty rights. This was the principle steadfastly maintained throughout the Chinese turmoil of 1925–28 by Coolidge’s Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, a self-taught lawyer and former Senator from Minnesota. American forces in China, he insisted, were not sent to fight for the International Settlement or any other treaty provision but only to safeguard American nationals directly threatened. General Butler refused to give Shanghai hope of anything more. Asked by the press how many troops would be needed for an armed invasion of China sufficient to suppress the Nationalist movement, he replied with a sound sense of realities, “Half a million and it would probably require a million more before the end of the first year.”

  On March 24, a day before the Marines landed, Nationalist forces entered Nanking and let loose a day of fearful terrorism against foreigners that was to go down as a date of reckoning in the relations of China and the West. In a campaign deliberately but anonymously instigated, troops rampaged through the city, yelling and shooting, attacking foreigners, looting and burning foreign homes, killing six foreigners including the vice-president of Nanking University, John E. Williams. Others took refuge on Socony Hill, the Standard Oil property, from which they were able to escape over the walls to gunboats in the river only when the British and American commanders, after an agony of hesitation, opened fire to keep off the attackers. A missionary’s wife, Pearl Buck, cowering with her family in the tiny one-room hut of a poor Chinese woman she had befriended, listened to the ferocity outside and thought, “The whirlwinds were gathering…and I was reaping what I had not sown….We were in hiding for our lives because we were White.”

  After Nanking the missionaries could no longer dissemble. They were reaping what they, no less than all foreigners, had sown—the failure to treat Chinese as equals. As news of the “massacre” of Nanking leapt by telegraph across China and other outbreaks followed, they fled to the rivers and gunboats and protection of the Treaty Ports. Eventually 2,500 took refuge in Shanghai and other Concessions and 5,000 left the country. Schools, colleges, hospitals and YMCAs closed down or were taken over by the Nationalists. Later in the early 1930s the missionaries began coming back but were never to reach the numbers of the period before Nanking.

  Meanwhile the Treaty Ports were in full outcry over the Nanking outrage and clamoring for a “strong” policy. The Legations urged punishment of the guilty, indemnities, ultimatums and sanctions and, in case of noncompliance, plans for punitive action. The difficulty was that no one was sure, then or since, where to place responsibility: on the local commander, known to be feuding with Chiang Kai-shek, or on the Nationalist command or on the Communists and radicals of Hankow who presumably provoked the attacks in order to embroil Chiang Kai-shek with the foreigners. The last was the explanation put forward by the Japanese who feared the revival of Russian penetration of China via the radicals and believed Chiang Kai-shek represented a group with whom they could accommodate. “Steps already taken by the Japanese with Chiang,” reported the American Minister, John V. A. MacMurray, “seem to give confirmation of a relationship between them.”

  A steady advocate of the hard line, MacMurray insisted that the situation, if not “resolutely met, will mean the downfall of western influences and interests in the Orient.” Kellogg refused to be stampeded, the more so as startling events in Shanghai now revealed Chiang Kai-shek as a leader to be encouraged, not embarrassed. He appeared not only as the harbinger of “order” in China at last, but also of order in alliance with the right people.

  Until their entry into Shanghai, the Nationalist advance was generally regarded by the Treaty Ports as “the Red Wave on the Yangtze.” The profound split between right and left in the Kuomintang was not yet known to foreigners. The Hankow government, with Borodin and Bolshevik influence dominant, appeared to be in control. But Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters, if they were to achieve power in their own right, had to have the revenue and loans they could only obtain in alliance with capitalism. Labor troubles, peasant uprisings and antiforeign riots alarmed property-owners in their own ranks and property-owners whose support they needed. Communists working with the Kuomintang, including Mao Tse-tung, were busy organizing rent strikes and anti-landlord demonstrations among 2,000,000 peasants of Hunan, and Mao was promising that soon all over China “several hundred million peasants will rise like a tornado…and rush forward along the road to revolution.” Chiang needed the support of landlord families. Communist organizers were equally active among the proletariat and labor unions of Shanghai. Chiang was determined that the great metropolis of commerce, banking and foreign trade must not fall like Hankow under left-wing control. Shanghai was where the break had to be made.

  Nationalist forces numbering about 3,000 had entered the city on March 22, less by their own military prowess than by virtue of the strike action inside the city and the demoralized flight of Sun Chuan-fang’s forces. Arriving by gunboat, Chiang Kai-shek made contact with merchants and bankers through his former connections and secured a loan on the security of his assurances. As Commander-in-Chief he had already absorbed into his army and given commands to apostate officers of the northern forces, many of them fellow-alumni of Paoting Military Academy, whose presence strengthened his hand against the left. Through agents he learned of the plans of the revolutionaries who were collecting arms by night for the coup by which they hoped to capture control. At this point, on April 6, a raid by Chang Tso-lin’s police on the Soviet Embassy far away in Peking disclosed documentary evidence of the extent of Soviet penetration under Borodin’s guidance of Chinese affairs. Besides the documents, nineteen Chinese Communists including the leader of the party, Li Ta-chao, were arrested on the premises and subsequently executed by strangling on charges of treason.

  Chiang Kai-shek made a wider sweep. On the night of April 12–13, assisted by agents of the Green Society and police of the French Concession, he carried out a bloody purge of the left, disarming and hunting down all who could be found and killing more than 300. The revolution was turned from R
ed to right. Chiang’s coup was both turning point and point of no return. He was now on the way to unity but he had fixed the terms of an underlying disunity that would become his nemesis. Hankow expelled him as a traitor but he had the advantage in armed force and established his own government at Nanking.

  Chiang was now seen by foreign watchers as no Red after all but, as Secretary Kellogg discovered with pleasant surprise, “apparently a leader of the Moderates.” American policy consequently leaned over backwards not to embarrass him with responsibility for the Nanking outrages. Resisting MacMurray’s insistence on punitive measures, Kellogg put forward the sensible principle that “leadership inheres in moderation as well as forceful action.” President Coolidge was equally calm. In times of revolution it was not always possible to protect the lives and property of foreigners, he said in a speech to newspapermen at a dinner of the United Press, and he had “no doubt” that when a real government emerged in China it would “make adequate settlement for any wrongs we have suffered.”

  So much sweet reasonableness was possible because public opinion was not calling for anything else. “We were convinced that the country at large would be wholly opposed to applying any sanctions whatever,” Under Secretary Joseph Grew told the French Ambassador. No demagogue came forward to make political cause of the defense of Western treaty rights in China. On the contrary. “Four hundred million people,” trumpeted Senator Borah, “imbued with the spirit of independence and national integrity are in the end invincible. There is no power that can master them or hold them in subjection.”