Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Within a month came the first. In the collapse of northern resistance Chang Tso-lin saw his imperial vision vanish and realized that he must protect his own domain, if indeed he had not already waited in Peking too long. He retreated to Manchuria in his private train of 20 cars fully loaded with personal property and followed by most of the rolling stock of the Peking-Mukden Railway. For three days locomotives, coaches, cabooses, deluxe wagonlits and freight cars packed with men rolled through the Tientsin station where, in the vacuum of power left by his departure, the 15th Infantry and other garrisons stood guard. On June 4 as the lead train approached Mukden it was blown up by a bomb and Chang Tso-lin was killed. That the Japanese had eliminated him no one doubted, either because they feared he would come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek or because he may have refused to cooperate with them on terms they demanded. In either case they overreached themselves—for the time being—for Chang’s son, the Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, contrived the assassination some months later of the two leading pro-Japanese ministers and raised the Nationalist flag over Manchuria.

  In Peking at last, the Northern Expedition had reached its goal. After arrangements with local tuchuns the Nationalists took over the former capital officially on July 3, marching down Legation Street to the “thunderous silence,” as an observer wrote, of expressionless onlookers. In contrast to the big northerners, Chiang’s troops “seemed small and campaign-worn.” Simultaneously they took over Tientsin in a blaze of sunshine that sent the mercury up to 111 in the shade. Talking, shouting and the intervention of strange and complicated political committees and governmental bureaus occupied the next days, as reported by the American Consul, “and we are becoming settled to the new disorder of things.” Chiang Kai-shek paid a ceremonial visit to the grave of Sun Yat-sen in the Western Hills to report the consummation of his dream of China united—at least nominally—under the rule of the Kuomintang.

  Cancellation of the unequal treaties remained a primary object and the powers were amenable to some concessions on the theory that this would give prestige to the new government and assist stability. As the first to negotiate a step toward revision, the United States signed a treaty on July 25 restoring tariff autonomy to China as far as America was concerned. On October 10, the 18th anniversary of the Revolution, the Nationalist Government assumed the rights and titles of national government based on a one-party system and on the period of “tutelage” which according to Dr. Sun’s plan was to follow military unification. Sovereignty resided in the Party, executive power in the Central Executive Committee of 36 members and real power in the Steering Committee whose chairman was the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, Chiang Kai-shek. If this was not exactly the democracy that China’s Western friends had in mind, they pretended that it was, and China under the influence of the Western legacy adopted the nomenclature. The concept itself remained where it had always been, outside the Chinese frame of reference.

  Peking was renamed Peiping, meaning “northern peace” instead of “northern capital,” for it was not to be the seat of the new regime. The Government remained at the southern capital of Nanking, partly because it did not feel safe away from the territory of its own troops and could not afford to maintain rice-eating southern troops in the north, and partly because the status of the Legation Quarter of Peking was a “face-destroying” factor.

  To protect his victory Chiang Kai-shek moved swiftly in an effort to control a crucial danger—the private armies whose numbers despoiled the country and whose existence deprived any central government of secure authority. He summoned Feng Yu-hsiang, Yen Hsi-shan and Pai Ch’ung-hsi, each of whom controlled an army of about 230,000, to a Disbandment Conference in Peking in July. A national army not to exceed 60 divisions of 15,000 men each, or a total of 900,000, was agreed on, as against an existing total of 2,225,000 men under arms. Six disbandment areas were drawn up, but in the test none of the generals proved willing to carry out the reductions. A second Disbandment Conference held at Nanking in January 1929 also failed to accomplish results. The chieftains returned each to his own base to operate as independent and uncertain allies, or sometimes opponents, but not as subjects. In the coming years alliance, schism and rebellion went on as before. In the south the Kwangsi-Kwangtung armies of Li Tsung-jen, Pai Ch’ung-hsi and Chang Fa-kwei, and in the north those of Feng and Yen, were to move in and out of armed dissidence, in shifting combinations with and against each other, with and against Chiang Kai-shek, but never, ever, in common cause. Canton in 1931 for the nth incredible time supported a separatist regime under the persistent Wang Ching-wei. Chiang Kai-shek’s Government was never to be free of these challenges by rival members of the pack, never to be wholly secure in authority. The necessity of bargaining and maneuvering to keep the challengers off balance and maintain his own was the condition of his rule.

  As 1928 came to a close, Stilwell, recognizing disbandment as the “real problem,” pointed out in The Sentinel that the announced agreements were only on paper and that the private armies were in fact recruiting, not disbanding. Summarizing the new regime, as he saw it, he wrote that it was now the fashion to expect the best of the Nationalist Government, to believe that China was now unified, the Government competent and responsible and the period of reconstruction fairly begun. “Cold facts,” however, should be examined. The outer provinces were still carrying on private wars without allegiance to Nanking. Conflict between radicals and conservatives within the Kuomintang was unresolved. Until the military was subordinated to the civil authority disbandment would not be achieved. Eighty percent of tax revenue which should have gone to industrialization was absorbed in support of armed forces. Though the Kuomintang now enjoyed favorable propaganda abroad, Stilwell remained skeptical of the likelihood of real progress.

  In the Tsinan Incident and the problems of disbandment—or nondisbandment—Stilwell had fixed upon two factors whose development would be critical for China and ultimately affect his own history along with hers. This took no gift of second sight but interest, awareness and readiness to observe at first hand the realities of China during the two and a half climactic years of her modern history.

  Stilwell returned to the United States in April 1929, taking with him as a small dividend the handball championship of the Orient.

  * * *

  *1 Western-educated Chinese preferred the anglicized version of their names.

  6

  “Vinegar Joe,” 1929–35

  WHEN STILWELL CAME to the Infantry School at Fort Benning as head of the Tactical Section in July 1929, the “Benning Revolution” under Marshall’s impetus was in progress. The object of the revolution was to teach by practical experience instead of by the field manual and the classroom battle. Tactics, as the heart of the military art, the area where a man must think on his feet, was the key faculty.

  Benning was the basic tactical school of the Army. Under the old system the officer was trained to solve a book situation on the basis of information about the enemy far more complete than would have been available to him on a real battlefield. At exercises of the 15th Infantry in China Marshall had watched an officer who was supposed to envelop the flank of an enemy become paralyzed because he could not draft a written order for 70 men on the basis of the inadequate data on the terrain given to him. When he learned that this offier had stood first at Benning he formed “an intense desire to get my hands on Benning.” Once in charge, he threw out the book in favor of realistic exercises that would train for initiative and judgment rather than for the correct solution.

  Marshall needed men of similar mind on his staff who would be willing to experiment, to accept new solutions, to welcome the unorthodox if it showed that the student was thinking for himself in the field. Knowing Stilwell to fit this prescription, he held open for him the principal staff post as head of the First or Tactical Section. Stilwell shared Marshall’s belief, inherited from Pershing, in short simple orders focused on the objective to be reached without detailing every st
ep on the way. On the real battlefield where the enemy does not wait, quick decision at the company and battalion level was needed. The purpose of Marshall’s revolution was to unparalyze this ability and prepare a body of combat officers for the actual duty of leading troops.

  From experience in the World War Stilwell knew that the methods and principles of command had to be suitable for the rapid training of officers from civilian life who could again be called upon in another war. It was necessary to develop, as he put it, “something easy to teach a big emergency force.” Simplicity was his key. Wars are not won by “fancy tactics….Only simple and direct measures have any chance at all.” He condensed military power at the tactical battlefield level to “Move, shoot and communicate.”

  The Marshall years at Benning, open to new ideas, argument and active thinking about military development, were stimulating for their own sake. In the presence of a future wartime Chief of Staff they were incomparable as a nursery of high command. Marshall in his own words had a “wicked memory.” Though mediocrity made little impression on him except as a “momentary irritation,” he never forgot an impressive performance or an unfortunate dullard. Among the officers who served on his staff or in the Advanced Course at this time were the future Generals Omar Bradley (as head of the Weapons Section), Matthew B. Ridgway, Courtney Hodges, J. Lawton Collins, Walter Bedell Smith and many others who were to become army and corps commanders.

  Stilwell left classroom lecturing largely to subordinates but himself supervised every tactical exercise. His habit was to propose a “screwball idea,” ask for reactions and test them out. Student officers found that his tactical problems presented challenging situations requiring original solutions. He taught by applying principles in action and “throwing out anything that does not make common sense.” In actual maneuvers he showed what the classroom could not—that field telephones break down, runners get lost, orders are misunderstood, maps are often wrong and complicated movements “always go wrong.”

  Benning prepared officers for the company and battalion, not the headquarters, level. The view from a battalion command post, as Stilwell wrote, is not the same as the view from a division or corps. What is a line on the map to the higher command is a sector to the combat officer, with particular terrain features that determine his action. A unit never gets lost on a map as it can on the ground, especially at Benning where most of the terrain resembled a jungle. Stilwell constantly emphasized evaluation of terrain as the basis for decisions. The pine forests around Benning, making it impossible to observe artillery support, obstructed the use of field artillery and required the infantry to depend on mortars for “quick action up front in thick country”—exactly the situation he was to meet in Burma.

  Mechanized warfare and the immense tactical changes it would bring dominated military thinking. Stilwell studied the theory of combined mobility, penetration and surprise that was to become the blitzkrieg in action and he contributed occasional articles to the Infantry Journal but his thinking remained essentially pragmatic rather than speculative. “Don’t assume anything—Look!” summed up his creed as it did his critique as umpire of maneuvers in 1932.

  After the first year Marshall described him as “a genius for instruction.” In reply to the routine question on an Efficiency Report as to the highest command the officer could be recommended to hold, he wrote “qualified for any command in peace or war.” Sensitive to Stilwell’s inability or reluctance to talk about himself, he commented that “modesty and unassuming methods have prevented this officer from being widely known as one of the exceptionally brilliant and cultured men of the army.” He judged him “farsighted. Highly intelligent…a leader…” and even rashly added “tactful,” which during the rest of Stilwell’s four-year tenure at Benning proved to be not the most enduring of his qualities.

  When Stilwell met ineptness or stupidity he could be acid and it was one such occasion at Benning that earned him the famous nickname. After a particularly caustic critique of performance in field exercises, a student officer returned to barracks and drew a caricature of Stilwell with a none-too-benevolent expression rising out of a vinegar bottle with three Xs on the label. Pinned on the bulletin board, it was widely appreciated, not the least by its subject who asked if he could keep the original and had photographs made of it which he sent to all his friends.

  The vinegar element in his character was best understood and explained by his steady friend, General Wells, who wrote to him many years later apropos of a “sour” newspaper picture, “Whenever you wear that expression it is because something or somebody has created a situation that is inherently cock-eyed—at times, even, it stinks.” Among Stilwell’s other characteristic expressions, Wells went on, were “one of utter hopelessness and one of disgust….It was when decisions or actions taken were so obviously screwy but which nevertheless had to be endured, that developed on your countenance some of the pain that was in your soul….It isn’t Vinegar, Joe—it’s just something else that looks like it.” Wells’ conclusion was perhaps too charitable for undeniably there was acid, though balanced by humor and human kindness, in Stilwell’s makeup, as he himself recognized. He liked to tell a story of himself when once in a bitter black mood he was walking alone in a Chinese town and was accosted by a Chinese merchant who bowed and said, “Good-day, Missionary.”

  “Why do you address me as ‘Missionary’?” Stilwell asked with a terrible scowl.

  “Because you look like one,” the Chinese replied.

  “And why do I look like a Missionary?”

  “Because of your calm benign expression, Sir,” was the reply.

  “So don’t suppose the Chinese lack a sense of humor,” Stilwell could add when he told the story.

  In an essay written for his family about himself and his wishes for them, he admitted having been at times “unreasonable, impatient, sour-balled, sullen, mad, hard, profane, vulgar….” It was a formidable list for a man to acknowledge and all of it true. Though he was a gentleman when he chose, in society that he enjoyed as with the French at Verdun, and perfectly at home with good manners, he allowed himself to give an impression of boorishness with certain people. It was his way of expressing dislike, and perhaps unconsciously, uneasiness. His use of profanity, too, was a kind of verbal thumbing his nose at pretentiousness. His language when the occasion was suitable could be coarse and in his diary the four-letter words were chronic. Scatological rather than sexual, they give an impression of a rather large fund of hostility.

  Stilwell seemed to enjoy the sensation of dislike, and in his diary would work himself up to it, starting out with a reasonably biting remark and then, as if led on by the taste, going on to more and crueler slurs. The inspiration was generally people he regarded as putting on airs such as “nauseating” Americans who pretended to an English accent.

  The rich and the snobbish he especially excoriated, often with what seems superfluous vigor. From some hidden source in his nature or past experience he had acquired a chip on his shoulder about the rich. Having been brought up himself in comfortable circumstances, he had as a result of a certain rigidity on his father’s part no private income of his own as a mature man. On his father’s death in 1933 his circumstances did not change appreciably because, except for a few stocks to his son, Dr. Stilwell left the bulk of his estate to his widow who was to live until 1942. Living on an Army officer’s pay with five children, Stilwell doubtless felt at a disadvantage during the prosperous 1920s, but during the depression when an officer was at least assured a secure job and a fixed income, the military felt better off than many others.

  The Stilwells did not have expensive tastes. He did not join other officers in hunting or polo, neither did his wife ride nor did they play bridge nor, when in China, join in the club life of the foreign colony. When they entertained at home they served, to the horror of harder drinking friends, sparkling burgundy. The horse, perhaps because it was the traditional appendage of the rich and snobbish, continued to excite
Stilwell’s extreme antipathy. Bored on one occasion by a fellow-officer’s interminable talk of horses, he exploded in a letter to his wife, “If there is anything that gets my goat it is one of these idiotic horse-lovers….If there is a woodener, less intelligent animal on earth than a god-damned hammer-headed horse, show him to me. All prance and fart and no sense.” Having vented his feelings, he immediately apologized for a “vulgar” letter.

  Lesser vulgarities he used easily and seemingly without pejorative content: limeys for the English, frogs for the French (“met a frog and his wife on shipboard”), huns and squareheads for Germans, wops for Italians, chinks or chinos for Chinese, googs for Filipinos, niggers or coons for Negroes. Terms not commonly used by a man of Stilwell’s class and education, they convey, like his swearing, the impression of a person not on the whole charmed by his fellowman. He was in fact “pretty close to a misanthrope,” in the words of a fellow-officer. But the source of the misanthropy was hidden and after long acquaintance the colleague confessed that in the end there was always something elusive about Stilwell; he had never figured him out.

  The pleasures Stilwell enjoyed were homemade or self-propelled. He was an indefatigable organizer of amateur theatricals and pageants, played tennis for casual sport and kept in physical trim by regular cross-country running or handball, two of the most energy-consuming of all forms of exercise. In khaki pants and T-shirt he could be seen two or three times a week trotting smoothly and easily through the pine woods at Benning. In a five-mile race he came in a mile behind at the finish but reported to his children that he felt few could do it at all at the age of forty-eight.