Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Nanking held no charms. “What would I do if ordered to Nanking?” Stilwell asked himself and wrote down as a preferable alternative, “Go home and retire.” Even Peiping’s charm was fading under the deep Japanese inroads suffered since the establishment of the East Hopei Political Council. On the north field of the Legation Quarter Japanese infantry and cavalry engaged in daily exercises to the accompaniment of shrill bugling. Japanese officials in cars bearing the flag of the Rising Sun sped through the streets. Japanese officers rode about on horses invariably too large for them which they could not mount without assistance; in case of need orderlies trotted along behind on foot. Japanese businessmen and other civilians filled the hotels, opened their own cafes and brothels, played on the golf courses. Groups of Japanese schoolchildren on conducted tours of Manchukuo and north China visited the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace. Stilwell, needless to say, resented them as did every other devotee of China, but with his extra supply of animus, a little more so. During his trip through Honan he had encountered some Japanese being hazed by the local police and recorded, “I enjoyed that and egged them on.”

  In this state of mind a tour through Manchukuo required a certain self-restraint. He interviewed the Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs of the “autonomous” state who turned out, by no great surprise, to be Mr. Ohashi, a Japanese. “We are all that stands between Russia and her goal of the sovietization of Asia,” this official announced. In reply to Stilwell’s questions Mr. Ohashi said that “of course the Russians intend to expand further” in the Far East and that the situation was “extremely critical for Japan.” If Manchukuo and Japan were defeated, China would fall an easy victim; therefore Japan faced a “terrible crisis” which must be decided within the next five years one way or another. The date was then September 1936. Stilwell’s report to MID on the interview was widely circulated within the Government.

  In October Chiang Kai-shek was assembling his forces for a sixth and final extermination campaign against the Communists during which he hoped Japan could be kept quiet by the good offices of Britain and the United States. The United States was asked by the Chinese to urge a policy of moderation on Japan, but was not anxious to interfere. When the Chinese Ambassador called to inquire what would be the American attitude in the event of a clash, Secretary Hull could only reply that “our country is of course intensely interested in peace” and that “we earnestly hope no clash will occur.”

  Stilwell too was prodded. A Chinese colonel came to him with a proposal from his superiors for an “understanding” between the United States and China to stop Japan, to be followed by the establishment of a mixed Sino-American General Staff in Washington to devise military plans. “America can stop Japan if she takes action,” Stilwell was told, but if she failed to act Japan would gain control of China’s resources to America’s detriment. Stilwell commented in his report, “It looks like another manifestation of the Chinese desire to get somebody else to do something they are afraid to do themselves,” and he added shrewdly, “possibly an intimation that they have no intention of offering resistance unassisted.”

  He too had been struck by the Taoist motto on the virtues of inaction which he had copied down from an example in the Great Audience Hall of the Forbidden City. Only the first two characters for Wu Wei, or “Do nothing,” were given there, leaving the Chinese viewer to add mentally, “and all things will be done.” Deciding that “Do nothing” exemplified the Chinese character, Stilwell concluded, “They are constitutionally averse to influencing events.” Though there were increasing exceptions to this proposition, his finding represented a fact of life in the Orient that made for infinite impatience among Westerners, as Kipling noted when he wrote the epitaph, “A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.” By contrast, Europeans and their American descendants had been driven by the impulse to change the unsatisfactory, to act, to move away from oppression, to find the frontier, to cross the sea. They were optimists who believed in the efficacy of action. The people of China, on the other hand, had stayed in one place, enclosed by a series of walls, around house and village or city. Tied to the soil, living under the authority of the family, growing their food among the graves of their ancestors, they were perpetuators of a system in which harmony was more important than struggle.

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  The international horizon was darkening in 1936, with Fascism emboldened and the democracies infirm. In February extremist Japanese officers attempted a coup d’état by multiple murder of elder statesmen which, though it failed, had a subduing effect on opponents of militarism. In March Hitler occupied the Rhineland unopposed. In May Mussolini annexed Ethiopia; the League’s empty sanctions against Italy were called off and the British fleet, not to be provocative, withdrew from the eastern Mediterranean. Chiang was not the only one who failed to resist. At Geneva a small lonely cloaked figure, the exiled Haile Selassie, in a last appeal to the powers to come to his support, warned, “…and if they do not come, the West will perish.” In July rebellion of the right, supported by the dictators, brought civil war to Spain. Here resistance, abetted by the Communists, began. The passion of the world’s anti-Fascists focused on Spain, the “united front” became an active force, and though the democracies behind a screen of “nonintervention” tried not to look, sides were being drawn for the coming struggle. This was clear enough to Japan which in November joined Germany in the Anti-Comintern Pact.

  In China the Communists appeared to be bearing the torch of resistance. They made a notable impression by launching an offensive in Shansi in 1936, ostensibly against the Japanese, but actually to reconnoiter base areas, recruit peasants and collect grain and money. Their military engagements took place chiefly against the local forces of Yen Hsi-shan, but their propaganda for patriotic resistance to Japan, combined with some shooting of landlords and tax collectors, aroused wide enthusiasm in the region.

  Stilwell went to Taiyuan and Fenchow in northern Shansi early in March to investigate this adventure and concluded that despite its slogans of “Down with Yen Hsi-shan” and “Down with Japan,” the Communists had been motivated by food shortage in Shensi and had “no definite goal beyond the search for new areas where they can subsist.” In his G-2 report he pointed out that the penetration had been made easy by the poor performance of Yen Hsi-shan’s troops. One brigade took no part in trying to prevent the crossing into Shansi “because it was not in their sector.” Another was ambushed by the Reds “as a result of a telephone communication from the Fenchow garrison commander who thought he was talking to his own troops.” “If China’s armed forces are to be judged on the basis of performance, it is idle even to speak of resisting Japan.”

  The Communists nevertheless augmented their propaganda campaign for resistance. In August they issued an open letter to the Kuomintang expressing their willingness to join forces in an All-Chinese Democratic Republic for resistance to the invader. Since a genuine coalition of implacable enemies was not a real possibility, their ulterior object was to push Chiang Kai-shek into open conflict with Japan.

  “What carries the Communists?” Stilwell asked himself in an undated note. “Some moral support there. What is it?” The question is followed by a tantalizing suggestion, “How about a letter to Ho Lung asking him?” Ho Lung was commander of the Communist Second Red Army who had operated in the Hupeh-Honan border region from 1928 until November 1935 when he set out with his troops on the Long March a year after the main group. When or where Stilwell made his acquaintance or how he proposed to get a letter to him is not mentioned in his papers.

  “They have good intelligence work,” his notes continued, “good organization, good tactics. They do not want the cities. Content to rough it in the country. Poorly armed and equipped, yet scare the Government to death.” These were the factors, in visible contrast to the decline of the Kuomintang, which impressed foreign observers. Stilwell had been learning what he could about the Communists for some time and evidently sharing his information with fellow at
tachés. A note from the British Embassy in February 1936 thanked him for “a most interesting brochure on the Chinese Communist situation.”

  Familiar with the plight of the Chinese peasant and unfamiliar with Marxism, Stilwell regarded the Communists as a local phenomenon and a natural outcome of oppression. “Carrying their burdens of famine and drought, heavy rent and interest, squeeze by middlemen, absentee landlordism,” he wrote of the farmers, “naturally they agitated for a readjustment of land ownership and this made them communists—at least that is the label put on them. Their leaders adopted the methods and slogans of communism but what they were really after was land ownership under reasonable conditions. It is not in the nature of Chinese to be communists.”

  This analysis was a normal one of the time. Foreigners who would have considered Communists at home a vicious menace looked on them locally as an indigenous product of the ancient wrongs of China and as reformers who were trying to do something about it; “not Communists at all,” as Consul Jarvis said to Stilwell. The Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, organ of the American business community, which at home would have taken the view of the Chamber of Commerce, declared that the Chinese Communists had some “very intelligent notions…not primarily communist at all but open to anyone.” In short, they were practicing obvious measures of reform. Their military organization and treatment of enlisted men in contrast to the usual Chinese habit impressed Colonel George A. Lynch, commander of the 15th Infantry during Stilwell’s tenure as Attaché and a fellow West Pointer. Observing them in Kiangsi in 1932 when he was traveling in China on leave from the Philippines, he found they did not press-gang soldiers, did pay them and did not let them prey on the civilian population. “This procedure presents a very strong contrast to that of the territory under the control of the Nanking Government,” he reported to MID. As a result, desertions from the Kuomintang forces to the Communists were numerous.

  Two years later Arthur Ringwalt, American Vice-Consul in Yunnanfu, describing what he saw of the Long March as its units passed through the southwest, wrote of the strong morale and “almost fanatical unity of purpose” exhibited by the Communists. Though poorly equipped, underfed and worn out by years of fighting, they were led by men seasoned in hardship and as a group showed “a dedication and disinterestedness not seen in a large body of forces in China since the Taipings.”

  The foreign public knew almost nothing of the Communists. It was thus a sensation—and an unpleasant one in Nanking—when in November 1936 the China Weekly Review published a sympathetic series of interviews with Communist leaders and an eyewitness report of their substate at Yenan in Shensi by the first foreign journalist to have visited them, Edgar Snow. Reprinted widely both in China and abroad, published in book form as Red Star Over China, Snow’s account gave the world its first news of the heroic Long March and the first pictures of Communist personalities, way of life, beliefs and intentions. He made the most of their espousal of the anti-Japanese cause, which in the climate of the 1930s, when people felt fiercely about the fight against Fascism, exercised a strong appeal and overshadowed their Marxism.

  As Mao Tse-tung explained it in his interview with Snow, the defeat of Japan took precedence over social revolution because it was necessary first to defeat foreign imperialism and win independence; only then could the struggle for socialism succeed. For that reason he was willing to join forces with the Kuomintang against the imperialist enemy. Mao was very convincing. “For a people being deprived of its freedom, the revolutionary task is not immediate Socialism but the struggle for independence. We cannot even discuss Communism if we are robbed of a country in which to practice it.” He stated frankly that the defeat of Japanese imperialism in China would hasten the victory of world socialism by destroying one of imperialism’s most powerful bases. “If China wins its independence the world revolution will progress very rapidly.”

  Other American journalists followed Snow to Yenan and found their simple-living hosts attractive. Sharing the work of the soil, earnest in talk, brave in experience, they appeared in refreshing contrast to the faded promise of the Kuomintang. Since they seemed to put revolution second the foreign journalists gave it scant attention; “Communism” appeared, as it had to Stilwell, just a label.

  In December 1936 Chiang Kai-shek went up to Sian to unloose the sixth anti-Communist offensive, and stepped into the most bizarre experience ever to befall a modern chief of state. He was kidnapped by Chang Hsueh-liang, intended commander of the offensive, in an endeavor to persuade him to abandon the civil war and agree to the united front against Japan. The Young Marshal’s troops, exiles from their Manchurian homeland, were not anxious to fight the Communists. With tanks, bombers and ten divisions mobilized, Chiang had come to insist that they take the field. The drastic kidnapping followed, appalling China and astounding the world.

  Chiang’s death was momentarily expected, not the least by himself, and indeed advocated by some of the Young Marshal’s associates. What saved him was that he was necessary. All at once men in Sian, in Yenan, in frightened Nanking, above all in Moscow, saw the same prospect—chaos in China if Chiang were eliminated, with extended civil war and no gainer but Japan. Before his kidnapping Chiang was neither popular with the public nor enthusiastically admired by his supporters but he was the repository of the habit of obedience to the head of the family, and the sense of security under that authority which in the political life of China is transferred to the head of state. There was no one of enough stature to succeed him and no party that could have held office for more than three months. If the civil war was to be stopped and the country’s united energies turned against Japan, only Chiang could do it. Ironically the Communists, who joined in the negotiations that followed the kidnapping, became the instrument of his survival, less through their own volition than because Moscow insisted on it. Acting in their national interest the Russians preferred Chiang Kai-shek to chaos in China with its resulting advantage to Japan.

  While Chiang’s fate was still uncertain, the foreign military attachés were ordered to Loyang, nearest Nationalist base to Sian, which was in the hands of the rebels. Though less crucially concerned than Russia, the Western powers too feared chaos in China and hoped the attachés by their presence might exert some pressure for Chiang’s release. The trip proved superfluous. Stilwell reached Loyang on Christmas Day just as the Generalissimo, followed to the world’s astonishment by his erstwhile captor, flew in by plane. News of the release brought wide popular demonstrations of joy and relief. Chiang Kai-shek’s prestige was enhanced and Chang Hsueh-liang was placed under house arrest which was to last, in greater or lesser degree of surveillance, from that day to the present.*2

  Although every effort was made for the sake of face to avoid giving the impression that Chiang had entered into any bargain for his release, in fact he had agreed to call off the sixth extermination campaign and arrange some form of nominal coalition against Japan with the Communists, who in turn agreed to desist from war on landlords and submit their armed forces to Nationalist command. Intricate negotiations on conditions were conducted during the following months with neither side having reason to trust the other and with neither having abandoned the goal of the other’s ultimate destruction. The Kuomintang understood well enough that the Communists wanted active battle against Japan as a stage on the way to their own victory and were consequently determined not to be drawn so deeply into resistance as to play their opponent’s game. Chiang Kai-shek’s aim was still to avoid and postpone outright conflict with Japan until the foreign powers should become involved and bring him enough help to defeat Japanese and Communists both, leaving him at last a clear and independent victor.

  The West was impressed by the evidence of national unity and joint effort after Sian. Communist divisions were formed into the 8th Route Army under the authority of Nanking and maintained offices and even published a newspaper in the capital. To Washington it appeared from the reports of Ambassador Johnson and others that real ch
ange, real effort to democratize the regime, real cohesion, might at last be under way.

  The Japanese too saw a signal in the outcome of Sian. They recognized that the Chinese were developing that sense of national unity which as their Minister of War, General Sugiyama, put it in May 1937, could “obstruct Japan’s peaceful advance at its very foundation.” The Kwantung Army and militarists in Tokyo began to press for direct action.

  Stilwell was not overimpressed by the facade of reconciliation after Sian. “The present talk of democracy in China is glib and meaningless,” he wrote in an estimate of the Sino-Japanese situation early in 1937. He expected the Government would “follow a policy of delay, insisting that they are preparing to fight but with no intention of doing so. They hope to have their problems solved by someone else.” China’s deficiencies were so great that outside help appeared to be the only solution. Vis-à-vis Japan, he wrote, China’s only assets were “numbers, hate and a big country. She has neither leaders, morale, cohesion, munitions nor coordinated training.” Furthermore, in a war Japan could blockade her ports.

  Stilwell’s travels on land and sea in the 1920s and 30s

  But Stilwell knew too Chinese native capacity which made him believe in the Chinese potential. In studies of the Taiping invasions of the north in 1853–55 and of the campaign of the Imperial General Tso Tsung-t’ang to suppress Moslem rebellion in Chinese Turkestan in the 1870s, he found a “lesson for those who believe that the Chinese have degenerated beyond hope.” To anyone who doubted Chinese military ability, Tso’s campaign, “one of the most remarkable in history,” offered proof to the contrary. Combining “caution with daring” and “initiative with perseverance,” Tso had shown “a complete grasp of the situation,” executed well-planned actions with “prompt and vigorous pursuit,” and found solutions that might have baffled more celebrated leaders. Giving credit to the soldiers as well as their commander (not a habit of military historians), Stilwell found it difficult to overrate the Chinese troops and their leader “for this brilliant piece of work.” These studies clearly helped to shape the convictions he brought to his future role in China.