Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

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  In China the Government, followed by the diplomatic corps, withdrew from Nanking to Hankow 400 miles up the river where Stilwell came in the first week of December 1937. With the rail routes from Peiping blocked by the battle front, the journey now took eight days, first by sea around the Shantung peninsula, then via the Lunghai line to Chengchow, then southbound to Hankow. Already “quite fed up with everything and everybody,” as Win wrote to her daughters, Stilwell boarded the train at Hsuchow in a swarm of refugees: “13 occupants in 8 seats, didn’t dare get up to go to the toilet. Cold…no food, no water.” After two days and two nights he drank the cold tea from a sleeping passenger’s teapot, for the first moisture in 44 hours.

  For the next eight months Hankow (or, in its triple character, Wuhan) was the capital of unoccupied China. The Generalissimo had his headquarters across the river in Wuchang on the south bank. In Hankow itself the foreign missions crowded into the Western-style buildings of the Concessions facing the river where the U.S.S. Luzon, flagship of the Yangtze patrol, lay at anchor. The city was a chaos of thousands of people rushing around “like ants on a hot rock,” in Stilwell’s phase: officials, hangers-on, journalists, profiteers, refugees, welfare committees and all the hectic influx of war. Devotion and energy mixed with laxity and indifference. As always, the uncaring treatment of the common soldier excited Stilwell’s wrath. “The wounded left in the north station and everywhere. Not wanted, and they realize it and expect it and pay the price of living by dying….Why didn’t CKS organize a medical service or at least a stretcher bearer service?”

  A week after Stilwell reached Hankow, on December 13, 1937, Nanking fell in circumstances dreadful even for China. During the time bought in the trenches in Shanghai no preparations for the defense or evacuation of Nanking had been made with the result that losses in men and matériel when the capital fell were enormous. The arsenal was taken intact as was the Red Cross Hospital with all its precious supplies and the wounded in their beds, as well as the rolling stock in the railroad station and vehicles and stores of all kinds. With no defense lines established to cover the withdrawal of soldiers or civilians, the human loss was as great.

  Determined to make an example of the capital that would bring the war to an end, the Japanese achieved a climax to the carnage already wrought in the delta below. Fifty thousand soldiers hacked, burned, bayoneted, raped and murdered until they had killed, by hand, according to the evidence witnessed and collected by missionaries and other foreigners of the International Relief Committee, a total of 42,000 civilians in Nanking. Groups of men and women were lined up and machine-gunned or used alive for bayonet practice or tied up, doused with kerosene and set afire while officers looked on. Reports by missionary doctors and others dazed with horror and helplessness filled church publications in America. Much of the photographic evidence that later reached newspapers abroad came from snapshots taken by the Japanese themselves which they gave for developing to ordinary camera shops in Shanghai, whence copies made their way to the correspondents.

  In the Yangtze delta whole towns were devastated with acres of houses left in smoldering ruins or in rubble from bombing. In deserted streets the only living creatures were dogs unnaturally fattened by feasting on corpses or a few starving humans wandering like ghosts among the debris. The population that survived disappeared from the area in a mass migration. Rice crops rotted in the fields. Along the roads past blackened ruins and burned-out farms, Japanese troops moved, driving stolen donkeys and water buffaloes, artillery wagons tied with pigs and chickens, and carts loaded with loot pulled by peasants lashed between the shafts.

  Not a few Chinese including members of the Government believed peace with Japan preferable to ruin but the majority would not have permitted a surrender or settlement. “CKS can’t quit,” wrote Stilwell. “Called on the country, it responded. Now he must go on.” Japan too had to go on although dangerously extended and with no definite goal in sight. After Nanking, on December 17, Chiang Kai-shek publicly reaffirmed his decision to continue resistance to the utmost by a strategy essentially Chinese. “The time must come,” he explained, “when Japan’s military strength will be exhausted thus giving China the ultimate victory.”

  In reply Japan severed relations (up to now maintained), and frustrated and angry, caught in the fatal entanglement of war without limits, drove on, forced to send more and more divisions until their strength on the mainland numbered more than a million. As time went on repeated peace overtures were made to Chiang Kai-shek, first through the German Ambassador in China, later through an American, Dr. John Leighton Stuart, president of Yenching University, but on terms that would have left Japan in control of the country. Whether because he would not or could not, Chiang did not give in. As Ambassador Johnson reported, “The present Chinese Government is in no position to make peace and it is not in a position to make determined war.”

  On December 12 the event most dreaded by the American Government—an incident involving American bloodshed—occurred. Coinciding with the fall of Nanking, the Japanese in an excess of arrogance bombed and sank the U.S.S. Panay a few miles above the capital, causing two deaths and 48 casualties. After the first attack in which the Panay’s captain was wounded and the guns put out of action, low-flying planes came back on a second run to bomb the already sinking ship and to damage two Socony tankers and smaller craft alongside, all of which like the Panay had American flags painted on their decks and awnings. Ladybird and Bee of the British Yangtze patrol were also damaged. Japanese shore guns fired on the ships after the planes flew off and Japanese motorboats pursued the escaping crew with machine-gun fire. Because of Washington’s anxiety to keep Americans out of trouble, the ships of the Yangtze patrol were being used as bomb shelters for the Embassy staff during the air raids on Nanking, and the Japanese Army and Navy had been supplied with maps showing their exact location and movements. So deliberate was the attack, it could not seem like anything but a direct challenge.

  Stilwell’s recorded reaction, characteristic of him in fateful moments, was reduced to a minimum: “Panay bombed and sunk yesterday. Great to-do.” Almost anything might follow, including war. For the moment Stilwell was beset with anxiety about one of his Assistant Attachés, Captain Roberts, who was on board the Panay at the time and, as it later developed, took charge after the disabling of the skipper and led the escape of the crew ashore. By afternoon he learned Roberts was safe and became furious at the Ambassador who had known since morning and had failed to inform him.

  Next day tension eased slightly when, as Stilwell put it, “Japs apologize. ‘Very sorry for you.’ Couldn’t see the insignia. The bastards.” He did not mention the Panay again but it cannot be doubted that the necessary swallowing of this incident by his country added to his black mood at this period.

  The Panay touched off nothing for when there is no will to war, war does not happen, and neither Japan nor America was ready for confrontation at this time. Alarmed at the wild exploit, the Government in Tokyo apologized promptly and within ten days accepted in full American demands for indemnities. Many Japanese in Tokyo went to the American Embassy to express regrets. Roosevelt considered seizing Japanese assets as a form of preventive sanction against further provocation but he was forestalled by the full apology. Otherwise official American reaction was restrained. In the armed services, which were conscious that American naval forces were inadequate to force the Japanese to behave, the feeling prevailed that anything that might touch off a showdown should be postponed. Public reaction in so far as it was represented by Congress was not to roar but to shrink. The House immediately took up the Ludlow Resolution requiring a national referendum before a declaration of war could become effective. Previously its sponsor had been unable to collect the necessary number of signatures to bring the measure before a Committee of the Whole. Two days after the sinking of the Panay he had more than enough and the resolution was later defeated only after heavy pressure by the Administration and
only by 21 votes.

  A notable result of the Panay affair, in order to remove a further possibility of friction with the Japanese, was the withdrawal from China two months later of the 15th Infantry. Long under discussion in Washington and urged by the Army because of the tight restrictions on the regiment, it was a case, according to one American newspaper, “of doing the right thing at the wrong time.” To the tears of local women the Can Do troops marched out, played through the streets of Tientsin by the bands of the other foreign regiments and even serenaded by Japanese bugles.

  Stilwell’s vinegar was at a high level during the winter in Hankow, “the bunghole of creation.” He was depressed by the climate, “raw, grey, drizzly, chill,” by China’s situation, by the endless frustrations in the way of carrying out his professional task and by the blank incomprehension at the Washington end. The Chinese War Ministry had refused permission to visit the front and Stilwell could get no reliable information on the military situation in Hankow nor could his assistants in the field, probably because, as Captain Roberts suggested, the Chinese had none. Stilwell believed they were “entirely at sea about future Japanese operations” and were not anxious to have foreign observers at the front see and report on the poverty of command and poor performances. Since Stilwell had officially asked for permission to visit the front from the Foreign Minister, he could not “slide out” to the front unofficially, as Captain Dorn had discovered to be the best method. Dorn managed to skip back and forth from the Japanese to the Chinese side six or seven times in the course of his duty and bring back the first accurate reports of Chinese troop movements. His chief glowered in Hankow. “So I sit here and chew my nails,” and comparing the surroundings to his house in Peiping, “work myself into a black rage.”

  Especially he was galled by the badgering of MID, which in the hands of a petty despot and pedantic bureaucrat, Colonel E. R. W. McCabe, pestered him with demands for daily operational reports, questioned every expense, issued orders to his staff without consulting him, made demands without relation to the battle situation or even to the normal geography of China and informed Stilwell that it was “embarrassing to receive so little information” from him. “Bastards in Washington don’t like me,” Stilwell concluded with some truth for there was certainly a quality of vendetta in McCabe’s treatment, although he was hounding other attachés too. He kept a little black book called his “SOB book” in which to record his dislikes.*2

  In Consul Jarvis’ apartment, where Stilwell had found living quarters, he felt at ease—“he and I talk the same language”—and at the office where they shared a room, “we say ‘Christ’ together frequently.” But with others of the “embassy bunch” he felt there was “always a strain in the air….I have the feeling that I don’t really belong.” He had forgiven the Ambassador who was always kind, pleasant, ready to talk and to call Stilwell in when visiting personages came. With the Government now preparing to withdraw to Chungking and Johnson under instructions to go when they did, he left Stilwell free to decide for himself and thus rated along with Jarvis in the category of “good egg.” Nelse, as he had now become, confided that he had met the same difficulties in dealing with the Chinese as Stilwell had. Offering to explain these to the War Department, Johnson wrote a “masterpiece,” causing Stilwell to regret he had composed and mailed to his wife an uncomplimentary poem about the “Ambastardor.” Unable to resist a punning nickname, he had “thought that one up on the train and my trouble is now not saying it—it comes out too easily.” This was indeed his case. When Win replied that she had not received the poem Stilwell was appalled at the possibility that it might have fallen into the wrong hands—and promptly rewrote and mailed her another copy, tempting fate again.

  Friends and cordial hours were part of his life too. Some of the Chinese, especially the mayor, were “delightful” and he enjoyed a reunion with Feng Yu-hsiang, his road-building client of 15 years earlier who was in town to join the “dicker” over reorganizing the Government to let in the Reds. “The old boy looks well and hopeful. Says they can go on for six months.” Nor were Stilwell’s prejudices flexible. “The pleasantest people in town are the British Navy people,” he reported astonishingly. Invited to lunch by their Admiral L. G. E. Crabbe, he enjoyed it and pronounced his hosts “good eggs….The French are okay too.” Even the “limey consul” was a good egg. He found his most congenial company among certain of the journalists, usually the more venturesome freelances sympathetic to revolutionary China who, like Carlson, roamed the country “from the heart.” Agnes Smedley and Jack Belden were of this company. Belden especially, a great romantic and idealist aged twenty-eight, moody, driven, alternatively gay and despondent, “a sad, ragged, torn, incredible character,” as a friend described him, became a close companion and valued informant. Failing to obtain a job after graduating from college at the bottom of the depression, he had shipped as a seaman and jumped ship at Shanghai in 1933. Since then he had explored China and learned Chinese, living by a variety of fringe jobs in journalism until hired by the United Press after the Japanese invasion. He would periodically disappear on excursions through the intricate corridors of Chinese affairs, bringing Stilwell reports of Chinese movements and intentions and an abundance of material on the reputations of commanders and the inner relationships that governed them.

  Agnes Smedley whom Stilwell often met to talk about the Communists found him “tough, gruff, battle-scarred…direct and honest,” and was struck by his compassion for the wounded. Working then for the China Aid Council, she was packing supplies on a truck one day when he came by and demanded, “What are you doing?”

  “Loading this truck with medicine. What are you doing?”

  “I’m standing here watching you,” he said scowling. “I’m also telling you that the warehouse of the International Red Cross is jammed with a new shipment of medicine including the new sulfa drugs.” He told her to go there and demand some for the troops.

  In January 1938 his pressure finally broke through obstructions and he was able to go on the first of many journeys which over the next year and a half were to take him to embattled areas in many parts of China. On a bitterly cold trip through Kiangsi and Hunan, he found the active front had melted away but there was no peace talk anywhere in the area. The provincial governors talked in terms of three years’ resistance and had begun training programs in guerilla tactics. The Chinese were sold on guerilla warfare, Stilwell noted, but munitions and equipment would be a serious problem. When asked by a Chinese officer what his own strategy would be, his reply, “Make use of numbers and attack,” was not welcomed.

  Through a friendship formed with General Shang Chen, commander of the 20th Army Corps in Honan, Stilwell was able to leave again, this time for Kaifeng and Hsuchow, western and eastern ends of the Lunghai line. He was so glad to be leaving the miasma of Hankow that a last-minute message from the War Department suggesting that he go to Lanchow “on the way back” from Kaifeng caused more of a shrug than an explosion. He merely commented, “I wonder if they know where it is.” Lanchow, port of entry for Russian supplies coming across central Asia, was close to the border of Inner Mongolia, 600 miles northwest of Kaifeng.

  In Honan his confidence in the Chinese revived. They were gaining experience, organizing and improving the flow of replacements, and he began to believe that if they could reach the point of taking the initiative and attacking, which might be within the year, “the turning point will be reached.” The trip was so cold that he did not take his clothes off for a week nor his shoes for fear he would not be able to get them back on. Frozen feet caused a few days’ agony but afterwards “I was all set for 30 or 40 miles.” Accompanied to Hsuchow by Shang Chen, whom Stilwell considered one of China’s dependable commanders, he was finally able to see China’s army at the front, upon which his pessimism returned. He decided “the offensive is not in them.” If they would attack at night they could “nullify the Jap superior gun power by reaching the position at daylight” bu
t they will not. “CKS is no soldier. Shang Chen is good. And Pai—that’s all.”

  A talk with a Kuomintang officer, General Liu, recorded with Stilwell’s remarkable gift for catching character in dialogue, distilled for him the attitude of the governing class. Yes, losses had been heavy, General Liu admitted, about 600,000, but that was “really a good thing….The Chinese soldiers are all bandits, robbers, thieves and rascals. So we send them to the front and they get killed off and in that way we are eliminating our bad elements.” Asked how much pay a soldier received, he replied $8 a month and “if he got any more he wouldn’t fight.” As to the duration of the war General Liu thought at least one year or two. By that time the Japanese would be broken financially, their soldiers would be homesick and the foreign powers would have entered the war. Actually the more ground Japan occupied the better because they would be that much more easily absorbed. “In the long run the Japanese will disappear, absorbed by the Chinese as were the Mongols and the Manchus.” Asked what China would do for salt and motor fuel if blockaded, he replied that the more territory Japan occupied the smaller would be the part left to China, “so we won’t have to move around so much then” and would need less gasoline.

  Asked why greater use was not made of the educated class as officers, General Liu replied that “University students and graduates are all cowards. They would run. I know because I am a University man.” Besides, “The Chinese learned long ago to make the lower classes do the fighting. At first the nobles fought but they soon got over that and made the people do it for them.” The English used Indians to fight for them, he pointed out, the French used Moroccans and Annamites and now the Japanese were using Mongols and Manchurians.