Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Lattimore’s report gave a revealing view of China’s resentments. The Chinese noticed that Britain and the United States were warning Japan off in all directions—from Indochina, the Indies, Siam and even Siberia—but not from Yunnan where a threatened drive on Kunming might close the Burma Road. Their suspicion was growing that the Western nations, to gain time, might be tacitly encouraging the Japanese “to make a little war on us because we are able to stand such a lot.” They believed that American effort to improve transport over the Burma Road was not to help China per se but to keep China fighting Japan so that America and Britain would not have to fight her. “They consider they have been fighting our battle for four years and it’s about time we got involved and started fighting their battle for them.” They resented all the pacts and commitments being made on all sides with everyone but them and deduced from these the “Europe first” strategy which they considered ominous for China. It indicated that the democracies believed the war could be won in Europe which would leave China nowhere at the peace table and would restore the British Empire at its heart “enabling it to reach out and rebuild its peripheries.” The Chinese wanted the war won first in Asia. This would give them time, while the Allies then pursued victory in Europe, to improve their position for the peace conference.

  It was the old problem of 1919, of the whole century since the First Opium War—the impotence of the Middle Kingdom in an era dominated by the West, the galling fact that the sense of cultural superiority did not translate itself into power, that China somehow could not harness the capacity to substantiate her due place in the world.

  If the Chinese had more confidence in themselves, Lattimore reported, they would “start winning for themselves the victory they want in the East. They would abandon their present insistence that they haven’t the artillery and planes,” and start working out less orthodox methods, concentrating on guerilla warfare. “But they don’t have that confidence.” The political and military high command did not trust the people and were afraid to let go their monopoly of power. They had been building up political machines in order to be ready to extend their control over occupied China when it should be liberated from the Japanese. But in the end, he predicted, they would be at a disadvantage if “victory in the East were won primarily by the Great Powers, not by China herself.”

  Chiang Kai-shek did not see it that way. Trying to make himself heard, his voice rose to a shriek about the threatened Japanese drive on Kunming which he now insisted was the key to the Pacific and could not be defended without air power. The 100 fliers and P-40s of the AVG had just reached a British training base in Burma at this time and were barely ready for action. Chiang called urgently for the British Air Force from Singapore to lend them support and for the United States to add airplanes from the Philippines. His argument and appeal were endorsed by General Magruder. In a telegram to Churchill and Roosevelt on November 2 Chiang raised the cry that if Kunming were lost and China cut off, the morale of the Chinese Army and people would be “shaken to its foundation” and “for the first time in this long war a real collapse of resistance would be possible.”

  Worried by the Hull-Nomura talks in Washington, he enlarged his prophecies of doom to instill the fear that China’s collapse would lead the rest of Asia to succumb to Japan. Any compromise by the United States with Japan or relaxation of the embargo, he warned, would cause the Chinese people to feel that they had been “completely sacrificed” by the United States with the result that the morale of the entire people would collapse and “every Asiatic nation will lose faith, and indeed suffer such a shock in their faith in democracy that a most tragic epoch in the world will be opened.” Thus the collapse of China’s resistance could be an “unparalleled catastrophe to the world and I do not indeed know how history in future will record this episode.”

  This prospect was the President’s greatest worry even though it was never clear to Washington how seriously Chiang Kai-shek’s frenzied cries should be taken. In the opinion of Ambassador Gauss, who had replaced Johnson, “the continuance indefinitely of China’s resistance to Japan must not be taken for granted.”

  In the tortured councils of the Japanese Government November was the last hour of decision. The talks in Washington offered no realistic hope of breakthrough toward an acceptable settlement in China or even a compromise modus vivendi with the United States. Without new sources Japanese oil stocks could not be stretched beyond two years. Germany had already gone far toward establishing leadership of her sphere; if Japan did not move now to gain control of Asia, the wave of the future might leave her behind. If action were postponed until spring, the United States would be that much better prepared. On November 5 the Privy Council met for five hours in the presence of the Emperor and agreed that the negotiations in Washington should continue and preparation of the military arm be completed at the same time; if the one produced no results by the end of the month, the other would be ready to act.

  With proposals and counterproposals, with American and still some Japanese efforts to stave off the inevitable, with warnings and readings of the “Magic” code and knowledge of Japanese intentions up to a point, the days of November unrolled toward the most premonitored surprise attack in history.

  * * *

  *1 Willys Peck, Counselor of the Nanking Embassy in 1936, wrote of “the bottom of the void into which (we sometimes feel) we drop our reports to Washington.” The Consul in Yunnan, A. R. Ringwalt, voiced the same complaint: “Especially in an outport like this one gets the feeling that one is merely writing for one’s own amusement, and that reports when received are merely filed away without any notice having been taken of their content.”

  *2 The method was to surround a given area and destroy everything in it to make it uninhabitable. Based on Japanese records, a two-month “mopping-up” campaign in one district of Hopei resulted in 4,500 killed, 15,000 houses burned and 17,000 persons deported to Manchuria.

  10

  “I’ll Go Where I’m Sent” December 1941–February 1942

  IN CARMEL ON A SUNNY SUNDAY MORNING, warm for December, General and Mrs. Stilwell were holding open house for new junior officers from Fort Ord. Doors onto the garden were open, and viewed from windows of the upstairs living room, the surf of the sparkling Pacific rolled and crashed majestically upon the beach. Guests were in civilian clothes because military uniform was not worn off post; Sunday comics were scattered about the house. The telephone rang. Answering it, Mrs. Stilwell heard the excited voice of a friend cry, “Win, turn on your radio! Pearl Harbor is being attacked!” A frantic search for a radio followed; one was found and plugged in while everyone crowded around to listen, stunned. The realization flooded over them: out there, on the immense blue ocean beyond the window, war had begun.

  Attack had been expected in Southeast Asia. No one had expected the Japanese to fling themselves upon the American battle fleet 3,300 miles across the Pacific in an act of such extraordinary daring. The boldness of the offensive and its awful success was as astonishing as it was frightening. The Japanese, hitherto consistently underestimated, were now suddenly credited with awesome and fearsome capacities and expected to descend upon the United States at any moment. Within hours the panic rumors were being telephoned to Ford Ord: the Japanese fleet was ten miles out of Monterey; San Francisco was expecting an air raid; a periscope had been sighted off Cliff House, another off Point Lobos.

  Stilwell was responsible, under Lieutenant General John L. De Witt, commander of the Fourth Army, for the Southern Sector of the Western Defense Command covering the California coast down to the Mexican border. This was the area where invasion could come, whose defense, owing to the naval losses at Pearl Harbor, now depended on the unready Army. Besides a population of 5 million, the region contained 80 percent of the nation’s aviation industry, all of it within naval gun range of ships at sea. Stilwell himself believed California beyond Japan’s reach but the weight of his responsibility caused a recurring “sinking feeling” a
t least once a day. Alarm and confusion were all around him, Fourth Army Headquarters in San Francisco suffered periodic fits of extreme “jitters” on the telephone and he was conscious of the inadequacy of his forces, especially of ammunition.

  Sitting at his desk in San Bernardino, headquarters of the Southern Sector, biting his cigaret holder almost in two, he told the War Department he had enough small arms ammunition for a few hours of combat and practically none for artillery. When the officer at the Washington end promised to do “the best we can,” Stilwell roared, “The best you can! Good God, what the hell am I supposed to do? Fight ’em off with oranges?” On the news that the Japanese had attacked Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Malaya on the same day as Pearl Harbor, and Midway on the day after, California’s alarm mounted. Frantic demands for guards were coming in from aviation plants, radio stations, railroad bridges and tunnels, dams, power plants, aqueducts, reservoirs, oil wells, hospitals, shipbuilding docks and harbor defenses—with each installation making a crucial case of its own need. So many units went out on guard duty that training had to be halted.

  Stilwell’s days were a succession of tours up and down the coast, conferring with mayors and the Marines and Navy, investigating rumors, protecting airfields, organizing warning procedures, answering queries, arranging billets for extra units sent from the East, trying to locate additional ammunition, while alarms and rumors continued. A Japanese fleet of 34 ships was reported somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles on December 9. After anxious hours Stilwell recorded, “Not authentic (sinking feeling is growing).” The enemy ships had been identified as 14 trawlers of the Monterey fishing fleet speeding home for shelter. On December 10 came the incredible news that Britain’s newest battleship, the Prince of Wales, and the battle cruiser Repulse, sent to the Far East in November to deter attack on Singapore, had been sunk by Japanese aerial attack off the coast of Malaya, losing Britain command of the sea in those waters. (“My God, worse and worse.”) On December 11 Germany and Italy, in fulfillment of the Axis Pact and at the request of Japan, declared war on the United States. Another alarm, this time from Fourth Army Headquarters itself, reported, “The main Japanese battle fleet 164 miles off San Francisco. General alert of all units.” After sickening hours, this too proved unchecked. (“Good Christ! They’ll kill me.”)

  On December 13 Western Defense Command reported air attack on Los Angeles to be imminent and a general alarm to the population was being considered. Concluding that the casualties and panic resulting from a “general alarm” would be as serious as from air raid, Stilwell decided to disbelieve the report. “Ammunition a little better….The 125th due in 24 hours….Two battalions ready and two in reserve for 175 miles of coast. (The old sinking feeling.) Six tanks coming from Ord (the others won’t run)….A division coming from somewhere—ten days. Sent out an air recon….AA [antiaircraft] coming in….Lingayen landing repulsed…Dec. 14. One week of war. Wake and Midway holding….Philippine divisions shot ’em up at Lingayen….Good job. In fact most of the despised people (Chinese, Russians, Greeks, Filipinos) are doing the best work for civilization.”

  Nerves were taut and some broke. “R—— wants to resign—just can’t bear it.” The commander of an Air Corps bombing range in the south California desert feared a parachute attack from carriers or from a secret base in Lower California that would murder his whole outfit. Scare stories of sabotage, radio spies, submarines and secret airfields proliferated and had to be investigated. Stilwell was urged to move under constant attendance by guards to prevent Japanese agents from killing him.

  Suddenly he was summoned out of the frenzy. A call from Fourth Army woke him at 6:30 on the morning of December 22 to say he was ordered to Washington at once “to work on a war plan for some expeditionary force which [the caller] implied I was to command.” He was told he would be away for some time. His staff buzzed with excitement. “They think it’s big stuff.” After a hasty winding up of affairs he went home for a farewell visit and a premature Christmas with his family. “Talked and talked. All composed mentally, thank God.” With Dorn he left next morning by plane and reached Washington on the afternoon of the following day, December 24, two days after Churchill and his chiefs of staff arrived for the series of staff talks known as the ARCADIA Conference.

  Going straight to the War Plans Division Stilwell was given stunning news of his new assignment: he had been chosen to command the first American offensive of the war in the form of Plan Black, a landing in French West Africa. His informant was the Division’s Deputy Chief, his former classmate at Leavenworth, Dwight Eisenhower, freshly wearing his first star. For once Stilwell was conscious that he should have felt something appropriate to the occasion but “it didn’t make me feel any different from before, somehow.” Marshall had selected him for this, the number-one combat assignment, because he had been impressed, as he afterwards said, by Stilwell’s training and handling of the 7th Division in maneuvers and considered him a masterly tactician, fertile, ingenious and confident; a student of military history, and excellent in training. His opinion was confirmed by a survey of general officers he had ordered made by Mark Clark. It placed Stilwell’s name first on a list of the Army’s nine corps commanders arranged in order of merit.

  At the War College Stilwell learned his objective was to be Dakar which had long figured in American planning as the jumping-off place of a German attack across the narrow South Atlantic on South America. The next day this proved far from definitive. “Nobody knows where I am going. This a.m. it was Dakar, this p.m. it is Casablanca.” The opening decision of the ARCADIA Conference had been to confirm the Europe-first strategy, and the plan to land at Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco was designed to secure a base from which to prevent enemy control of the Mediterranean and eventually seize the initiative in the European theater. The code name for the Casablanca operation was GYMNAST. Stilwell found there was “uncertainty about the whole show,” a condition which did not improve during the three weeks of the ARCADIA staff talks. Through eight major policy meetings at the White House and twelve meetings of the newly organized Combined (British and American) Chiefs of Staff the conferees struggled to work out agreed war aims, organization of command, a plan of action, and above all, the means of action. GYMNAST bobbed like a cork on a sea of pros and cons.

  When war had come to Moscow six months earlier, “No one knew what to do,” according to an observer inside the Kremlin, and now the same condition prevailed in Washington. Stilwell, joined by his staff chiefs from the IIIrd Corps, worked on a plan of operations with its objective changing hourly. Was it to be Casablanca or Dakar? Iceland or the Canary Islands? What strength? What prospects? What support? What arms? What anticipated enemy action? All was uncertain and arguable. Alternates and variants were seized and discarded. Stilwell was surrounded, as he wrote his wife, by “clerks rushing in and out of swinging doors, people with papers rushing after other people with papers, groups in corners whispering in huddles, everybody jumping up just as you start to talk, buzzers ringing, telephones ringing, rooms crowded, clerks banging away at typewriters. ‘Give me 10 copies of this AT ONCE.’ ‘Get that secret file out of the safe.’ ‘Where the hell is the Yellow Plan (Blue, Green Plan, Orange Plan, etc.)?’ Everybody furiously smoking cigarettes, everybody passing you on to someone else. Someone with a loud voice and a mean look and a big stick ought to appear and yell, ‘HALT! you crazy bastards. SILENCE! you imitation ants. Now half of you get the hell out of town before dark and the other half sit down and don’t move for one hour.’ Then they could burn up all the papers and start fresh.”

  While wrestling with GYMNAST Stilwell worried about the Far East and wondered when the Navy would ever get into action. He had learned by now the extent of the disaster at Pearl Harbor—eight or nearly half America’s capital ships sunk or put out of action, 177 planes destroyed and close to 4,000 casualties, more than half of them killed. There had been equal disaster at Clark Field in the P
hilippines, where several hours after news of the strike at Pearl Harbor, half of General MacArthur’s 35 heavy bombers and a third of his fighters were caught and destroyed on the ground. Western entry into the war against Japan—the consummation so long awaited by China—had brought debacle instead of encouragement.

  The Japanese had started the war with a Navy approximately equal to the combined American, British and Dutch naval forces in the Far East and Pacific. Japan still had ten battleships and ten carriers with approximately 500 first-line naval planes against a total in capital ships for the Allies of one undamaged and two slightly damaged American battleships and three American carriers. In destroyers, cruisers and submarines the belligerents were about equal. On land the Japanese had an Army of 51 divisions of which 21 were in China, 13 in Manchuria holding the front against Russia, leaving, aside from home defense, 11 active divisions and some 700 Army aircraft assigned to the operations in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.