Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  On December 28 in Chungking, China’s wartime capital for the next seven years, Stilwell was to have a personal meeting with Chiang Kai-shek. By now he had been authorized to return to Peiping preparatory to the end of his tour in May and so his stay in Chungking was short, lasting only from December 19 to 31. It was enough to decide that the remote provincial 500-year-old city with its steep streets and steps climbing up from the river, its open sewers and dank fogbound climate in winter was a “sloppy dump.” The meeting with the Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang lasted for only fifteen apparently agreeable minutes. “Very cordial,” Stilwell recorded. “Both looked extremely well. They were quite frank. Gave me a photo and their blessing.” The signed photograph subsequently occupied a prominent place in Stilwell’s living room in Peiping, perhaps more in defiance of the Japanese than from admiration of the Generalissimo.

  Summarizing his judgment of China’s leader in a G-2 report less than a month after their meeting, Stilwell wrote, “Chiang Kai-shek is directly responsible for much of the confusion that normally exists in his command.” The reason, Stilwell believed, was his suspicion of rivals. Fearing to delegate authority or to trust his subordinates, Chiang wished to hold as many strings as possible in his own hands. His “first consideration is to maintain his own control over the best troops and material so that his position cannot be threatened.”

  In private notes Stilwell added, “He wanted to keep all his subordinates in the dark because he didn’t trust them…If they all knew nothing they couldn’t very well get together and dicker.” Describing the factors that were one day to become his own frustration, he wrote that the Generalissimo “never assigned good artillery to divisions because he didn’t want to let any get away from him—divisions had only MGs and TMs [machine guns and trench mortars]. The same old mistrust kept him from making his army efficient. He was always thinking of what he could save for later on when perhaps his own position would be threatened.” Further, he never had a proper information service. “He had a ring around him, half-informed, and they gave him a distorted view of everything. He never went to see for himself…real supervision was always lacking.”

  Whatever his opinion of the Commander-in-Chief, Stilwell was thinking in terms of the Chinese as future allies. He believed that the United States and Japan must inevitably come to war. For a long time he had been assembling material and forming judgments of the divisions and commanders which could be most useful in a joint effort. While he had small respect for Chinese military leadership in general, he had a good opinion of individuals’ capacities and told his assistant, Captain Corn, to keep his eyes peeled for capable, forceful commanders. With massive American help in organization, training, equipment and supplies, planning, direction and command, if possible, Stilwell believed the Chinese could fight effectively against the Japanese. The shape of the future was already in his mind. Of a particular general whom he regarded highly, Ku Chu-tung, he wrote that if ever the United States were to fight alongside China against Japan, this man would make a good Commander-in-Chief of Chinese forces “to carry out operations under the direction of American officers and staff.” He named his favorite Shang Chen as one who would “work in well as an adviser on the American staff.”

  On the last day of 1938 he left Chungking by air for Kunming in Yunnan, now the main air base of Free China and the starting point of the Burma Road. At the Hotel du Lac he spent the evening in dinner and long talk with Chennault with no foreshadowing of the conflict between them that was to come.

  The last months in Peiping were bitter under the Japanese occupation. Only with the greatest difficulty could his new Japanese-speaking assistant, Captain Frederick Munson, convince him to pay an official call on General Okamura as necessary to the functioning of the Military Attaché’s office. Stilwell grudgingly agreed but announced he would not go in uniform, and when argued out of that position, balked at wearing a sword, and when persuaded of this formality, had no reserve left but to refuse positively to go in breeches and boots, the inseparable accessories of the Japanese officer. Grimly in military slacks he marched off to tea with China’s conquerors and managed to get into an argument on the innocuous subject of the temple deer at Nara.

  Drawing up a balance sheet of Japanese qualities to relieve his feelings in private, Stilwell allowed them six good qualities—industrious, brave, persevering, organized, disciplined, patriotic—as against 26 bad—ranging through arrogant, cynical, truculent, ruthless, brutal, stupid, treacherous, lying, unscrupulous, unmoral, unbalanced and hysterical. Almost any foreigner having to accommodate to the Japanese in China during these years would have shared Stilwell’s sentiments, if not his facility in expressing them. To maintain correct relations under the provocative insolence and swagger, and worst of all the stream of bland inside-out distortions of fact, was mortifying to the soul. Even Sir Robert Craigie, British Ambassador in Tokyo, while on a visit to Shanghai described himself as so “utterly weary of the policy of appeasing Japan” and so “nauseated by being polite to the little blighters,” that he felt constantly humiliated and “emotionally and even maybe mentally upset.” He suffered a recurring dream in which, wearing a general’s gold-braided uniform, he commanded a landing party near Tokyo and was suffused by a tremendous joy at the order to go “all out in retaliation against the dirty little bastards.”

  What really tortured Craigie and Stilwell and many others was the passivity of their own countries in the face of Japanese aggression. Frustration was acute as despotism advanced and the democracies threw it chunks of appeasement to buy themselves the illusion of safety. In addition, Stilwell faced his own depressing professional prospects. The first star of a brigadier general which made all the difference in a military career appeared to have receded beyond his reach. In another year he would have passed five years without a promotion which, combined with more than 30 years in the Army, made retirement mandatory. His old friend Honeycutt and nine others of his class including two junior to him were already generals. Though he had friends and advocates working for him, writing letters to the War Department, and though their pressure had succeeded in having his name put on the eligible list, McCabe’s disparaging Efficiency Reports were a nearly insuperable block. Assigned by his new orders to an unpromising job he believed “they’re trying to put me out to pasture” and saw his career ending in undistinguished desuetude among the retired colonels.

  The time came for departure on May 1, 1939. Discouragement was in the air. Far away in Chungking the winter fogs had lifted, enabling Japanese terror bombing of the undefended city to begin. America was still selling scrap to Japan. No sign of help for China was in prospect. In nearly two years since the incident at Marco Polo Bridge, the improved and concerted military resistance that Stilwell had hoped for had not evolved.

  On their last day in China, on board the riverboat from Tientsin to Taku, the Stilwells joined a friend, Mrs. Edmund Clubb, wife of an Embassy official, who too was going home. As they opened a lunch basket to picnic on deck they saw floating by the drowned body of a man clutching a drowned child still attached by a rope to the piece of wood used by houseboat families as a life preserver. It had been inadequate. As a symbol of everything sad and wrong in China the sight of the dead bodies in the river at that particular moment was unbearable. Wordless, the group picked up their lunch and went below.

  —

  In America three days earlier Stilwell’s fate was entirely changed by an unexpected development: over the heads of 34 senior officers George Marshall was appointed Acting Chief of Staff, to succeed to the full position on September 1. With conflict approaching, Marshall’s urgent concern was to replace the Army’s dead wood with men of action and initiative. One of the first two names he sent up for promotion to brigadier general was Stilwell’s.

  On August 3, on board ship just coming into Honolulu after a three-month tour through Siam, Indochina, Malaya and Java, Stilwell learned of his promotion by radio message. “It can’t be true,” he said t
o Win. “Don’t say a word about it. I’m going up on deck to have a walk and try to digest it.” But on the Army transport the news had already spread and people crushed around to congratulate him. Everyone joined in the excitement except for one family who outranking the Stilwells had preempted the best cabin. Now entitled to it, Stilwell had no intention of pressing the claim but told Win during the stay-over at Honolulu, “Let’s let them be a little uncomfortable and think we might.”

  Suddenly in the outpouring of congratulatory letters everything he might have accomplished and every good quality he might claim seemed to be recognized. “Ever since I bit on your damned Smirkäse joke 20 odd years ago I have been convinced you deserved it,” wrote Sherman Miles. Common to many of the letters was pleased surprise that an officer of pronounced “independence of thought” and “energy of execution,” as a major of the Infantry expressed it, had made it against the odds. The news, the letters said, restored confidence in the Administration; at last Headquarters had made a good promotion in spite of everything: “We knew Marshall would do right by the Army and he has.” There was real delight in the messages. “It makes you feel like throwing the old sombrero right through the roof,” wrote one friend. “Hot dog—you should have had it long before,” wrote Willie Whipple. “I have always said so. So has all 1904.” “The average excellence of the general officer list has gone up considerably since yesterday,” pronounced a colonel of Artillery.

  Evans Carlson wrote, “One of the convictions I carried away from China with me was that the army needed a man such as you as a general officer…I hardly need say that I would be proud to serve under you in combat.” Other China veterans were happy that the “damned China gang” had received fitting recognition at last. After the long displeasure of MID, it was ironic to learn from an officer of its naval equivalent, ONI, that Stilwell’s reports had kept that department “oriented on the war in China.” “No one in years received a generalship who deserved it more,” this admirer wrote. He knew Stilwell would justify it in the field “if war should come in the near future as it looks like it may.”

  A month later the war began in Europe.

  * * *

  *1 See map on this page.

  *2 McCabe’s predecessors as head of MID, Brigadier General H. E. Knight in 1935 and Colonel F. H. Lincoln in 1936, had found Stilwell “especially well suited” for his assignment and “keenly intelligent” with “a love of and flair for this work.”

  Part Two

  9

  The Rush to Prepare 1939–41

  THE UNITED STATES ARMY that Stilwell returned to in September 1939 ranked, with Reserves, 19th among the world’s armed forces, after Portugal but ahead of Bulgaria. In percent of population under arms it ranked 45th. The active Army numbered 174,000 men, less than two-thirds the peacetime strength authorized by Act of Congress in 1920. It had only three organized divisions, none of them more than 50 percent complete, whose complements were scattered among a number of posts with no opportunity for divisional training owing to the shortage of motor transport. In addition, there were six partly organized divisions, two Cavalry divisions but not one Armored division. There were no corps troops, army troops or GHQ troop units. Training as a field force was inadequate; equipment, modern in 1919, was obsolete. Owing to shortage of funds, maneuvers were held only once every four years for a two-week period with only five days of “very limited action.” The continual paring of appropriations by Congress had reduced the Army, reported its new chief, General Marshall, “to the status of that of a third rate power” with less than 25 percent readiness to fight.

  The theory that allowed this condition was that the Army was a last and unlikely resort needed only for defense of the United States which in any case was well protected by its oceans. Military policy did not contemplate another expeditionary force outside the hemisphere. After the last overseas war the national consensus was “Never again.” The immediate object before Marshall was to bring the Army up to strength and make it ready in training and equipment for modern combat. “To make good soldiers out of good materials,” had decreed General Sylvanus Thayer, father of West Point, “they must be drilled by competent men; to make a good army out of the best men will take three years.” The task was formidable enough in itself without the primary difficulty of persuading Congress to supply the funds.

  Brigadier General Stilwell was assigned to command the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Division at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. During a month’s leave before taking up the post he lectured on the Sino-Japanese War at West Point, an occasion memorable for his reply to a Cavalry officer’s question on the role of the horse in the fighting in China. After a thoughtful pause Stilwell replied, “Good eating, if you’re hungry.” He went on to Washington to report on China and to allow himself the agreeable opportunity to “have it out with McCabe” whom he now outranked. It was a sublime moment; heads popped out of every door as the new general strode down the corridor, and during his talk with McCabe, unhappily not recorded, Stilwell took care to leave the door open for the benefit of listeners.

  As a general he was now entitled to an aide which presented something of a problem because an aide, like a swagger stick, was a concept in conspicuous waste that made Stilwell’s hackles rise. Aides were “door-openers and coat-hangers,” but he solved his personal problem by selecting a congenial spirit, Captain Frank Dorn, who had already served under him in China for four years. A West Point graduate of 1923, known as Pinky for his complexion, not his politics, Dorn at thirty-eight was a handsome humorous bachelor of cultivated mind and versatile talents, gifted as an artist, with sufficient natural irreverence and intellectual curiosity to make him a stimulating companion. Stilwell approached the subject with some embarrassment. “I know what you think of aides,” he said to Dorn, “and I know what you think of generals. I’ve got a proposition for you. I’ll be a new kind of general and you can be a new kind of aide. Don’t answer now. Think it over and send me a telegram.” The proposition was accepted.

  Although his promotion to general had eliminated personal bitterness, Stilwell still felt angry and impatient with American policy. From where he stood Washington appeared to lack understanding of how developments in the Far East were affecting America and to be paying too much attention to Europe. Like every other serious foreign service officer he felt his reports had not penetrated the realm of policy-making, perhaps not even been read.*1 He believed the main concern of his country was going to be Asia and that the United States in its relative quiescence before the Japanese advance was ignoring a situation that would be more important than Europe in the long run. Convinced that war with Japan was coming, he thought the focus on Europe kept Washington from recognizing the danger. Anyone fresh from the physical presence of the Japanese in China, from the arrests and gun-prodding and purposeful humiliation of foreigners, despaired of conveying the actuality of Japanese menace to officials behind desks in Washington.

  Marshall, to whom Stilwell poured out his argument, assured him that his reports had been read, that the situation was understood, if far from met, and that “your job, Joe, is to go on down to Fort Sam and help us out.”

  Stilwell reached Texas on September 24. As brigade commander he served as second in command of the division to General Walter Krueger. The Army, in search of speed and mobility, was using the 2nd Division to experiment with a streamlined triangular formation of three Infantry regiments amounting to 11,000 men instead of the 22,000 of the old square division. Galvanized by the German blitz in Poland, the 2nd Division and companion units of the Third Army entered into a winter of strenuous training, living in the field, marching and sleeping on the ground, often in rain and freezing weather. In field exercises in January Krueger put Stilwell in command of the attacking “enemy” force, a role which because of the élan he brought to it was to become his regular part in maneuvers. American training was geared to repel the invader, and with Stilwell leading the invasion, according to a colleague, “there was never
a dull moment.” His ideas and surprises and unexpected tactics, witnessed by Marshall on a visit in January, upset routine patterns and broke rules. In Dorn’s words, “He wanted to win, not just play.”

  —

  At the planning level in Washington, although overseas action was not contemplated, the War Department had drawn up a Protective Mobilization Plan for a force of 500,000 in an emergency with an eventual army of 1,200,000. But no action to mobilize the nation’s industries for the vast effort to arm and supply such a force had been taken. Roosevelt shied off from the necessity for fear of arousing the public and reviving charges of economic “dictatorship.” He was equally reluctant to ask for all the appropriations that Marshall wanted for fear of exciting opposition in Congress just when he was trying to persuade it to revise the Neutrality Act. The prior urgency as he saw it, as the crisis temperature mounted in Europe, was to obtain repeal of the arms embargo so that when the time came America could aid the Allies to win quickly before she could be drawn into the conflict. It was obvious to the Administration if not to the isolationists that American security depended ultimately on the British fleet. Britain’s survival as a sovereign nation was an American vital interest in a sense that China’s was not.

  The country clung to neutrality, the last nostalgia of the American dream to have done with the Old World’s quarrels, as long as it could. Then came September 1939. The smashing of Poland by the frightening armor of 56 German divisions and 1,400 planes shook Congress sufficiently to repeal the arms embargo in November after a month’s debate, although the isolationists managed to retain the cash-and-carry provision.

  American sentiment was more prepared to be partisan in the Far East than in Europe. Partly this was due to guilty conscience about China and partly to the curious fact that it was permissible to be at once isolationist and anti-Japanese. The old-style thunderers like Senators Borah and Hiram Johnson managed to be both vociferous against war and bellicose against Japan without stumbling over any internal difficulty. Roosevelt had no difficulty at all in July 1939 in getting Congress to agree to give the required six months’ notice to Japan of intention to terminate the existing Trade Treaty, opening the way to possible economic sanctions. This gesture, in response to a campaign of extreme harassment that Japan was conducting against American and especially British presence in China, was intended to show that the United States was not going to withdraw and to give Japan some cause for caution.