Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  After Congress in September enacted compulsory military service (for men between twenty-one and thirty-five, who could not be required to serve outside the Western Hemisphere or for more than one year), the 7th was filled with 85 percent draftees. Tanks, trucks, mortars, guns, vehicles, ammunition, all the tools of soldiering, were scarce. Men trained with wooden rifles and fired TNT for artillery shells. True battle training was unattainable because the public and the draftees had not accepted the reality of the urgency. Press and parents objected to exposing the draftees to rough conditions. The mood was reflected in the OHIO movement—Over the Hill in October—which infected the one-year men. Stilwell’s program allowed little time for that sentiment. He held battle maneuvers and parades to foster pride in the Division and often led marches himself to instill morale. Through his training and tactical skill he forged a division that was to excel in the great maneuvers of 1941.

  He was never happier than when making soldiers and would often sit at ease among the enlisted men discussing tactical problems with characteristic quick turns of the head and fleeting wisps of smile. The General in battered hat, hiking boots and lumberman’s sweater, almost indistinguishable from civilian workers around the post, was soon being referred to as Uncle Joe, or Galloping Joe in tribute to his walking capacity. He walked all over the hills and dunes of Fort Ord Reservation and often covered half the twelve-mile distance from his home to Headquarters on foot. In September 1940, on news of his promotion to major general, he was greeted at the post by artillery lined up for a thirteen-gun salute, a Cavalry guard of honor with band and a massed group of staff officers, arranged by Dorn not without mischief. “Who the hell planned this?” the General growled in furious embarrassment as he climbed out of his car to receive the salute.

  Addressing the assembled troops he was purposely brief. He did not believe in long speeches on occasions of promotion, he said, on the principle that “the higher a monkey climbs a pole, the more you see of his behind.”

  In a “black cat” or off-the-record talk to the San Francisco Press Club at this time Stilwell said that war with the Japanese was certain; that the United States should have slapped them down in the case of the Panay; that procrastination was giving them choice of time and place for battle. He said that given command of a properly armed and equipped Chinese army with two American divisions to act as spearheads he could run the Japanese out of China in six months because the Japanese were efficient but unimaginative and rigid. They worked by the rules, becoming confused by unorthodox tactics.

  This low opinion was universally shared by foreign military observers who watched the Japanese performance in China. Falkenhausen and the other German advisers who were frequently at the front, and from whom Stilwell collected much information on Japanese tactics, used to tell him how easily Japanese officers could be identified because they could always be seen peering through glasses or looking at a map or wearing swords, and that proper marksmanship could have reaped a harvest among them. Captain Carlson, after observing the battle of Shanghai in 1937, wrote that the Japanese war machine was “revealed as a third rate army.” He described them as lacking initiative and resourcefulness, trained by rote and doing everything by formula, and when the formula did not work, knowing no alternative. Because of their dependence on heavy equipment and air and artillery support, their forces were “cumbersome on the march and expensive to maintain.” After further observation in 1938 he reported “inferiority of striking power, poor coordination of transport, poor coordination of airforce and ground troops, inferiority of weapons, poor direction of artillery fire and lack of imagination and initiative on the part of leaders.” Significantly Carlson acknowledged that “many of the errors they are making in this war will not be repeated.”

  The judgments of Stilwell and Carlson and others, though exaggerated by antipathy to the Japanese, were not invalid for the performance in China and were to have unfortunate effect. They reflected the general tendency of Westerners to assume that because the Japanese were imitative they were not to be feared. “There is little to learn from Japan in the domain of military implements or inventions, and less in what concerns strategy or the art of war,” pronounced Colonel Bentley Mott, the dean of American Military Attachés in 1937. It was his complacent judgment that in these matters Japan was simply an imitator and “continues to follow in the wake of Western progress.” No awakening was ever to be more painful.

  In September 1940, the month of Stilwell’s promotion, Japan joined the Axis, officially aligning herself, in Ambassador Grew’s phrase, as one of the “predatory powers.” From this time on, the President and his advisers believed, as recorded by Secretary Stimson, that the United States “would be drawn into the war eventually,” and were reinforced in their conviction of the necessity of sending aid to Britain and by some means or other to China. A loan of $50 million to China was quickly approved in November less than two months after one of $25 million in September. Joint staff talks were arranged to be held with the British as soon as the Presidential election would be over in November.

  The fundamental decision from which all else followed was taken at this time, more than a year before the United States became a belligerent. The President in conference with the two service Secretaries, Stimson and Knox, and the two service chiefs, Marshall and Admiral Harold Stark, agreed, in the event of the United States being drawn into the war, on a basic strategy of primary action in Europe while maintaining the defensive in the Pacific. This “Europe first” strategy reflected the recognition that Europe was the site of world power and the belief that it always would be. It was to determine the shape of the war including Stilwell’s role and profoundly affect the relation with China.

  On the understanding that there must be no commitment to offensive action by the Army until it should be prepared to take it, Anglo-American staff talks began in January 1941. ABDA (American-British-Dutch-Australian) staff talks on cooperation in the Far East were held at Singapore in April. Since the United States could give no promise of joint action the conversations were less effective than they might have been.

  Britain repeatedly asked what the United States would do if Japan attacked Singapore or the Netherlands Indies. The Americans could give no answer. They believed as did the British that if Japan attacked anyone it would be one of the European nations already fighting against Germany. At a meeting of Marshall and Stark with the two service Secretaries in December, “all four agreed” that the war could not be won without the United States becoming involved but they had no idea how this would be brought about. The Japanese too were considering the problem. The Navy, having come to the conclusion, as stated by Admiral Yamamoto, that “We will have no hope of winning unless the U.S. fleet in Hawaiian waters can be destroyed,” began that winter to work on the planning operations for attack on Pearl Harbor.

  The Chinese in October 1940 presented America with a new request that was to have enormous sequel. They asked for an air force of 500 American planes manned by American pilots who would fly in the service of China, together with a large loan to finance the project. Chiang Kai-shek presented the need as dire and urgent and offered alluring promise of a large return. Speaking the mind of his air adviser, Colonel Chennault, he argued that American planes manned by American pilots could effect a “fundamental solution” by destroying the Japanese Navy in its own bases. Long-range bombers could “carry the war into Japan proper”; medium bombers and fighters by harassing the sea-lanes could forestall a Japanese attack on Singapore, prevent Japan from exercising control of the Chinese coast and from bombing the Burma Road which had just been reopened by the British. Chiang stated that China’s economy and morale were on the verge of collapse and that if the planes did not come in time, that is before Japan bombed the Road or closed the sea-lanes by taking Singapore, “it would be too late and China’s position would be extremely if not hopelessly critical.”

  Chiang Kai-shek saw the aid for which he had so persistently asked going t
o Britain. He was determined that China which had been fighting when Britain was still appeasing ought to have first consideration once the bounties started to flow. While Chennault was pursuing brilliant visions of sinking the Japanese Navy, Chiang was interested in the strengthening of his own position that an air force with all its war material would provide. He admitted to Ambassador Johnson that he was more anxious about the Communists who, he feared, were “taking advantage” of the situation, than about the Japanese.

  The Communists had in fact renewed action against the invader in recent months. The war against Japan was both their safeguard against the Kuomintang and their avenue of appeal to the people. They needed it. Fearing defeatism after the fall of France and the possibility of Chiang making a settlement with Japan in terms certain to involve an anti-Communist crusade, they launched a “100 regiments offensive” by the 8th Route Army in Hopei and Shansi to keep the war alive. The guerilla attacks provoked a campaign of terrible retaliation by the Japanese on a newly devised Senko-seisaku (“three all”) principle—kill all, burn all, destroy all—which left provinces blackened and massacred.*2

  Renewed Communist activity was not welcomed by Chiang Kai-shek any more than by the Japanese and was soon to move him to action. Disliking especially the presence of the Communist New Fourth Army south of the Yangtze, he ordered them back across the river to the north and in the course of this operation, in January 1941, executed a surprise attack on the New Fourth which recalled his coup in Shanghai in 1926. Thereafter the united front was only a facade for underlying enmity.

  The quest for an air force was vigorously pursued in Washington in person by its progenitor, Colonel Chennault, in company with T. V. Soong, the envoy charged with satisfying China’s needs in the United States. Chennault was a fighter pilot by choice and temperament, a fanatic of aerial pursuit who had studied his subject to its last turn and twist, applied imagination and daring, and contributed new skills, maneuvers and capabilities. Fifty years old in 1940, he had started life as a high-school teacher in Texas, took officer’s training in 1917 after the United States entered the war, was commissioned in the Infantry Reserve but transferred to the aviation section of the Signal Corps and served without going overseas in the war. Joining the Army Air Corps after 1920 he experimented and tested fighting tactics of his own devising and taught them at Flying School and at the Air Corps Tactical School as well as in a textbook he wrote entitled The Role of Defensive Pursuit. He hectored the Air Corps on his dogma of the value and importance of pursuit aviation and the necessity of fighter escort. Since the Air Corps had adopted the contrary Douhet theory which assumed that successive waves of bombers would be self-protecting against pursuit attack, Chennault was not popular. Grounded by deafness and feeling the sense of persecution that afflicts men with a mission when they are not listened to, he retired in 1936. Disciples who had flown for China recommended him and he was snapped up by Chiang Kai-shek in the following year.

  Hard, wiry and weathered like Stilwell and about his size with a face scarred from the windstream of open cockpits, Chennault combined great professional skill with a touch of megalomania. He was given to extremes. His meeting with Mme. Chiang Kai-shek in 1937 “was an encounter from which I never recovered.” When she “tripped into the room bubbling with energy and enthusiasm” he was “completely captivated” and wrote in his diary that night, “She will always be a princess to me.” As a boy of fifteen he had developed a similar crush on his stepmother and never afterwards found “another companion whom I could so completely admire, respect and love.” His interest was not China per se but air power. Moving over the country by air to Hankow or Chungking or Kunming, he knew little of the ground—the rivers, the wheelbarrow tracks, the walled villages, the grave-marked countryside or the life of “Old Hundred Names.” He worked with the G–mo’s entourage, and being unhampered by ideology was not troubled by, if even aware of, the betrayal of origins and decline into despotism of the regime.

  Despite his efforts and those of the Russians at Lanchow he had not succeeded in the short time since 1937 in training a group of Chinese combat pilots numerous or effective enough to dispute the skies with the enemy as the RAF was doing over England. His great contribution was the organization of an air warning system by radio manned by spotters in the occupied area, which was so efficient that Chinese headquarters were often warned of raids while Japanese bombers were still warming up at their bases. It gave some protection to the cities but it did not fight back. In default of readiness to take the offensive on the ground, which Stilwell so often complained was not “in” the Chinese, Chennault’s proposal of an American-manned air force offered a magic substitute. Air power was the philosopher’s stone, the Aladdin’s lamp that could make wishes come true. As conceived by Chennault it offered Chiang a marvelous short cut, an instrument of power without effort, an accretion of war material in his hands, and a sword in other hands to strike the Japanese. As the Aladdin of this operation, Chennault was a favored associate.

  The list of requirements brought by Soong to Washington included American ground crews, training planes, parts, field equipment and various schemes for credits, purchase of arms and aircraft, and exchange of military missions. Suggested financial assistance was now enlarged to a request for a joint Anglo-American loan of $200–$300 million. Besides the B-17 heavy bombers to sink the Japanese Navy, Chennault’s program asked in Chiang’s name for a proportionate number of medium bombers and fighters to make up an air force which could “also support the counteroffensive I am preparing with a view to retaking Canton and Hankow.” The quality of fantasy in his proposals was present from the start.

  Asking for 500 planes was “like asking for 500 stars,” Soong was told by Secretary Morgenthau, the main mover of money and arms to supply America’s friends during this period. The United States did not have on hand enough planes to meet its own minimum requirements. Shortages in all branches of matériel were such, according to a War Department survey in September, that the Army could not activate and maintain in the field a combat-ready force of more than 55,000, and then only at the cost of depriving the rest of training equipment. Present production rates gave no hope of equipping the expanded Army, Navy and air arm, while at the same time filling British needs, before April 1942. Even that dateline could only be achieved by increased rate of output and longer working hours.

  Yet everyone—the President, Morgenthau, Stimson, Hull and the Joint Board of the armed services—favored planes for China, less for China’s sake than to buy time for America to arm. The governing object of American policy was to keep Japan from provoking conflict by southward expansion at least until April 1942. Chennault’s plan of offensive operations by a pseudo-Chinese air force using American men and materials promised to perform this service. The presence of air power over her sea-lanes would deter Japan, it was believed, from embarking on the fatal drive to the south.

  The strategic object was uppermost but there was also an undertow of desire to help China from natural sympathy and conscience. A company of sympathizers in the White House, State, Treasury, Army, Navy and other agencies “have proposed, pushed, pulled, pounded, sweated and sworn,” wrote Stanley Hornbeck, in their efforts to promote American aid to China. “I wanted so much to give these poor men who have been fighting so hard for four years everything we can,” as Secretary Stimson expressed it on a later occasion. Roosevelt’s view was rather more hard-boiled. “Is he still willing to fight?” he asked when a message came from Chiang Kai-shek in the course of negotiations about the airplanes. Told that this was the purport of the message, he exclaimed, “Wonderful! That’s what I have been talking about for four years.” He was impressed too by the threat of collapse. “I have real fear that the domestic situation in Free China will deteriorate unless we do something fast,” he told Sumner Welles.

  But more alluring than either strategy or sympathy was the prospect of American-flown B-17s actually hitting Japan. The Generalissimo’s proposal
advocated the air raids on the theory that the experience of being bombed might cause the Japanese people “to demand an end to aggression.” Since he could hardly have believed in this fanciful notion himself he may have thought it would appeal to the Americans, which it did. It supplied the rationale for a natural instinct to deliver a punch in the eye from which Cabinet members are not immune. Exasperation had been building up under the necessity of swallowing provocations politely ever since the sinking of the Panay. China’s inability to retaliate while her country was ravaged and cities bombed with impunity had denied Americans even vicarious release. Astonishingly, Secretary Hull proved “a bundle of fervor and vitality” on the bombing project. His Tennessee mountain blood was fired. “What we have got to do, Henry,” he told Morgenthau, “is to get 500 planes to start from the Aleutian Islands and fly over Japan just once….That will teach them a lesson….If only we could find some way to have them drop some bombs on Tokyo,” he added, leaving Morgenthau speechless. The Secretary of the Treasury too was very taken with the idea, believing that “overnight it would change the whole picture in the Far East.” T. V. Soong had persuaded him of the G–mo’s thesis that it “would have a very decided effect on the Japanese population.”

  Soong himself was enthusiastic, and when Morgenthau asked about the danger of bringing retaliatory bombing on China he replied, “They are doing it anyway….This would give us the chance to hit back.” Even Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador, shared the enthusiasm. Informed by Morgenthau that he was going to try to get four-engined bombers and crews for the Chinese “with the understanding that these bombers are to be used to bomb Tokyo and other big cities,” Lothian agreed “that it might change everything.”