Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  These were now crashing through in one astounding victory after another. Guam and Wake fell on December 23. On Christmas day, after a hundred years as a British stronghold, Hong Kong surrendered. In the Philippines, belying first reports, the Japanese had made good their landing and with 200,000 troops ashore were driving the American-Filipino force into the bottleneck of the Bataan peninsula. On January 2 they captured Manila. Parachute troops had invaded the Netherlands Indies, Thailand was occupied and Indochina was opened up by the acquiescent Vichy regime, bringing the Japanese forward to the eastern frontier of Burma. They had also landed on the Malay peninsula at its waist, seized the British airfield there and were advancing southward toward Singapore through the jungle. On land and sea their dive bombers and torpedo planes had air superiority. Under the “hideous efficiency” of the Japanese war machine, as Churchill called it, white prestige in Asia was crumbling in ruins.

  In China the news of Pearl Harbor had been greeted as the herald of salvation. “Kuomintang officials went about congratulating each other as if a great victory had been won,” wrote Han Suyin. Crowds rejoiced in the streets of Chungking. In cities of the interior celebrants were under the impression that Tokyo was in flames; news of a great far-off air strike came through as a report that 500 American planes had bombed Tokyo, but the error was irrelevant. What was cause for celebration was that China had allies at last. The United States had entered the fight against Japan and could be counted on to finish it off. China had no further duty but to hold out and emerge on the winning side. “Pearl Harbor day in America,” commented one American watching the rejoicing in Chungking, “was Armistice Day out here.”

  As soon as he heard the news Chiang Kai-shek took steps to play a great power’s role in the grand alliance and to confirm China’s presence in global strategy. On the day of the attack he summoned a conference of British and American representatives in Chungking at which he proposed that all the enemies of the Axis in Asia—America, Britain, China, the Netherlands and Russia (which he then expected to enter the war against Japan)—should join in a military pact for mutual assistance and should establish a war council in Chungking under United States leadership to coordinate their war effort. While he left it to the United States to offer a “comprehensive plan” of strategy, Chiang already had a clear idea of what the strategy should be. He proposed that the Allies including Russia should make their main effort in Asia and defeat Japan in 1942 by air power operating from the South Pacific, Alaska, the Maritime Province of Siberia and the China coast. After air attack had isolated Japanese forces on the Asiatic mainland by severing their supply lines, the Chinese armies would destroy them.

  Chiang did not forget to add that the proposed war council in Chungking should “control priorities and supplies.” This concerned him as much if not more than strategy because he instantly and correctly perceived that the British would seek to preempt the Lend-Lease arms that were piling up in Burma on consignment to China. He wanted American leadership of the war council to keep the British from taking his goods.

  His strategy, aside from being visionary in regard to available air power, did not fit in with the Europe-first strategy to which the United States and Britain were already committed. Chiang was not invited to the ARCADIA Conference although China was included as one of the four major signatories of the joint declaration by the United Nations issued on New Year’s Day, 1942. (A list in Roosevelt’s handwriting initially placed China second after the United States, followed by the U.S.S.R. and the United Kingdom; he afterwards revised it to place the U.K. second and China fourth, followed by the rest of the 26 nations in alphabetical order.) Chiang was, however, as a matter of protocol, asked to send a preliminary plan of campaign after meeting with Sir Archibald Wavell who had been named Supreme Commander of the ABDA nations’ front in the Far East. This meeting in Chungking on December 23, China’s first with the long-awaited Western Allies, was almost as calamitous as Pearl Harbor. It brought to the surface, and augmented, the hostility between two of the three major Allies.

  China feared and disliked Britain as the dominant imperial power, the original penetrator of her sovereignty and founder of the unequal treaties. The temporary closing of the Burma Road was still bitterly resented. Britain in turn had little respect for China’s Government or military capacity. A British Economic Mission under Sir Otto Niemeyer which had visited China a month before Pearl Harbor reported that the Government was incapable of coping with its manifold problems, that its measures were inept and haphazard and that a loan would not help because it could not be effectively utilized in the face of the real trouble, which was an acute shortage of goods. Chiang Kai-shek, Niemeyer told a State Department official, “did not have an intelligent grasp of the situation.” These conclusions were accepted philosophically by Britain which as an imperial state did not share the American interest in a strong China after the war. In the desperate hours of December with every bastion falling, Britain’s immediate concern was to hold Burma if possible as the last barrier before India, but if this were lost there was no other thought than that the imperial territories in Asia would be regained after ultimate victory.

  China was equally interested in the defense of Burma in order to keep open the flow of Lend-Lease supplies coming through Rangoon, not to mention to keep possession of the thousands of tons already piled up there. A primary concern of the conference in Chungking was a struggle for the Lend-Lease stockpiles and for control of Chennault’s newly arrived American Volunteer Group (AVG) based in Burma. China held title to both but the British in dire need considered they could make better use of them.

  General Wavell, the sturdy one-eyed soldier of formidable silences who made the confrontation explicit, was fated to exercise command against odds. Born in the same year as Stilwell, he had lost his eye at Ypres in the First World War. This time, after initial victory and then misfortune in the Middle East, he had been transferred to India as Commander-in-Chief in an exchange of places with General Auchinleck. Now, as a result of Marshall’s insistence at ARCADIA on unity of command in each theater, he had been assigned the dubious defense of 2,000 miles of front from Java to Burma. The British chiefs suspected an American trick to escape a command doomed to defeat and protested that it would “be fatal to have a British commander responsible for the disasters that are coming to the Americans as well as ourselves.” Churchill angrily rejected the imputation and allowed Wavell to assume the theater command in Southeast Asia where he was left to brace a set of soft and rotting posts under the impeccably planned blows of the Japanese.

  Struggles over areas of command continued throughout the war to absorb as much attention as plans for action. Ever since the invention of the General Staff in the nineteenth century the paper arrangements of warfare had assumed an importance happily unknown to Caesar, Genghis Khan or Napoleon. War was now regarded by staff professionals no longer as the province of Great Captains but as an exercise in “command problems.” Having learned the lesson of World War I, all the conductors of World War II were so intent on achieving unity of direction for each theater that what happened in the field seemed almost secondary.

  Wavell came to the meeting with Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking prepared to discuss if not to welcome the participation of Chinese troops in the defense of Burma. On the day after Pearl Harbor Chiang had asked the British Military Attaché, General Dennys, what Chinese troops would be needed. All too obviously putting little value on the offer, Dennys had suggested one regiment, possibly a division later. The Generalissimo replied that he was thinking in terms of two armies*1 with additional troops to as many as 80,000 on condition of a total plan of joint strategy. Dennys did not pursue the subject, with perhaps some excuse, since Chiang Kai-shek a few weeks earlier had evidently not thought these troops capable of defending Kunming.

  When Wavell reached Chungking Burma’s danger was more apparent. The suddenly revealed feebleness of British positions was in the nature of empire which had hitherto not n
eeded more than the show of power to rule. A gunboat here and there, the smart slap of rifles at drill on the Bund, a parade of scarlet uniforms, imposing bearded Sikhs as police, had sufficed to govern Asia without serious challenge. Pukkah complacency, now undercut by emergency in Europe, had nothing on hand to meet the calculated assault of Japan. Nevertheless the British had no desire to see Chinese troops enter Burma, to which China had vague traditional claims never renounced. Once over the border they might remain, besides causing trouble with the local population who had no love for the Chinese. Wavell was expecting a reinforcement of Indian troops and naturally preferred that “a country of the British Empire should be defended by Imperial troops rather than foreign.” Further he was advised that Burma could not feed or transport a large influx of Chinese. He therefore accepted only one Chinese division on condition that it be supplied from China.*2 His American partner, General George Brett, an Air Corps officer sent to China to survey possible bases for heavy bombers, concurred, having been appalled by what he had seen so far of Chinese military methods. Wavell’s rejection, as General Magruder reported in nervous understatement to Washington, was “somewhat displeasing” to the Generalissimo who was in fact infuriated. Another mark was made in the long track of insult left by the British east of Suez.

  On top of this a quarrel flared over use of Lend-Lease arms at Rangoon. Wharves were piled high, warehouses bulged with munitions, and hundreds of trucks stood inanimate in long rows. Meanwhile bombing of the docks was expected and stevedores were deserting. Chinese ability to move the stockpiles was limited and logic suggested that Allied strategic purpose was best served by immediate allocation of the matériel for the defense of Rangoon, which was as vital to China as to her allies. But it was not easy for Chinese supply officers in Burma headed by the Generalissimo’s cousin, General Yu Fei-p’eng, to hand over such a wealth of stores, with all their lucrative possibilities, to the British, whose ability to hold the city in any case did not inspire confidence. The Chinese appetite for matériel combined with their inability to utilize it exasperated the Westerners. With time pressing and nerves harried, the Governor-General hinted at confiscation; 150 trucks and a cargo of munitions were taken and other stockpiles impounded by American Lend-Lease officers until their destiny could be settled. When the dispute reached Chungking the Generalissimo, in a nicely studied retaliation for Wavell’s slight, offered to release 20 machine guns for the defense of Burma. He subsequently refused to see the British Ambassador and threatened to stop all cooperation between China and Britain.

  Waves from the episode hit the ARCADIA Conference with effect that emphasized the divergence between the American and British policies toward China. The British in the midst of their fight for survival did not really want to be bothered about China. America wore China like an albatross around her neck: Shantung, the unfulfilled Nine-Power guarantee, the impotent Stimson Doctrine, the scrap sold to Japan, the “special” American relationship, the return of the Boxer indemnities, the theory of a strong China after the war—all were part of the burden; a compound of guilt, guardianship and illusion. The American leaders at once reacted to Chiang’s possibly calculated bad temper with renewed anxiety that he might drop out of the coalition. Since China had every intention of coming through on the winning side and nothing to gain from Japan, the chronic American fear of the Chinese making a separate peace contained an element of unreality. But Chiang’s constant cries of impending collapse, and dread of all the Japanese divisions that this might release, kept the fear alive.

  Japanese triumphs lent force to the fear. As General Marshall pointed out in an anxious message to Wavell, Japan was mounting a tremendous propaganda drive to capitalize on the loss of Western prestige involved in the fall of Hong Kong and Manila in the hope of bringing about a collapse of Chinese resistance. He urged the necessity of building up China’s “faith and confidence in British-American joint purposes in the Far East.” Apart from defeating Japan, he might have been hard put to define what the joint purposes were.

  Chiefly because of diversion of interests the Allies had no agreed plan for resistance to Japan and had reached no decision at the earlier staff talks in Singapore on how to use available forces or what to defend first. The conference at Chungking agreed it was “a first essential” to secure Rangoon and Burma “which are vital for China’s continued resistance,” but almost at once the faith and confidence that Marshall mentioned as desirable had begun to erode. Allied reversals caused a “severe shock” to the Chinese, reported Gauss, and public references to the policy of defeating Hitler first caused “indignation.” Secretary Stimson was especially worried by the trend. He thought Wavell had been “rather peremptory and tactless and has acted in an old-fashioned British way towards China.” More than anyone Stimson felt the obligation of guardianship. He would have preferred a stronger effort in the Far East than allowed by the Europe-first strategy, because he believed it essential to prevent Japan from consolidating control and to keep China from collapsing from discouragement.

  Roosevelt was deeply disturbed by the Wavell incident. He was beset by the fear, if Chiang’s Government should give up resistance, of all Asia gravitating to Japan. Anything was dangerous that upset the Generalissimo’s morale, considered the most delicate of barometers in Washington. “If China goes under,” FDR said to his son Elliott, “how many divisions of Japanese troops do you think will be freed—to do what? Take Australia, take India—and it’s as ripe as a plum for the picking. Move straight on to the Middle East…a giant pincer movement by the Japanese and Nazis, meeting somewhere in the Near East, cutting the Russians off completely, slicing off Egypt, slashing all communication lines through the Mediterranean?” He told Churchill during the ARCADIA Conference that it was particularly important to restore the Generalissimo to a good frame of mind and asked that Wavell be ordered to go out of his way to placate him.

  To give Chiang formal status the Allies invited him to serve as Supreme Commander of Allied forces in a separate China theater. But as there was so far no plan to send Allied forces to China this amounted to notification that his sphere of operations was being limited to his own country. The form may have been pleasing but the reality was made plain by the fact that for security reasons the Chinese were not included in the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In compensation Roosevelt was all the more anxious to arrange some sort of inter-Allied military committee in Chungking.

  Roosevelt’s governing idea was that China should be one of the great powers after the war to fill the vacuum left by Japan. He was not unaware of shortcomings for he once acknowledged to his son that China “was still in the eighteenth century.” Nevertheless that great and ancient country with its 500 million enduring people, however frustrated by endless misgovernment, was a geopolitical fact. Roosevelt wanted it on America’s side in the future. When Churchill during the ARCADIA visit told him how much he thought American opinion overestimated the contribution which China could make to the war, the President “differed strongly.” What would happen, he asked, if China’s “enormous population developed in the same way as Japan had done in the last century and got hold of modern weapons?” Churchill replied that he was speaking of the present war “which was quite enough to go on for the time being.” The intransigence of the present expressed by Churchill and the shadow of the future by Roosevelt met in this exchange.

  If, as Roosevelt believed, China was to function as a great power, she must be treated like one. Chiang Kai-shek could not be spoken to like a “barbarian chieftain,” he said to Edgar Snow, author of Red Star Over China, in a conversation shortly after Pearl Harbor. Then, in a revealing question, he asked Snow whether the Chinese “like us? Do they think well of us over there?” He went on to talk about his family’s Chinese connections and how in 1933 he had wanted to renounce extrality, and although Hull had agreed, State Department advisers (whom Roosevelt disliked and distrusted as a species) had been opposed. Despite the source of the Delano family fortune, Roosevel
t disapproved of the foreign penetration of China. He was convinced, as he wrote in a letter of 1934, in one of the soundest policy statements ever formulated and never adopted, that it was better to hasten the crisis in China and “compel the Chinese people more and more to stand on their own feet” than to continue an unsound position for a generation to come.

  The evolution of the President’s thinking about China, apart from Grandfather Delano and the clipper trade, was something of a hidden process. “At the White House,” according to one of his close associates, Judge Rosenman, “the making of FDR’s China policy was almost as great a secret as the atom bomb.” When General Marshall was asked by Army historians after the war, “What was the President’s policy toward China? Did he ever explain it to you?” he could only say that it was “to treat China as a great power.” This was more than just a slogan to fill a vacuum. Though it was a policy of make-believe it grew out of genuine conviction. Roosevelt believed that the day of colonial empires was past and that the Western world for its own safety’s sake must give up treating the peoples of Asia as inferior. Treating China as an equal, as he told Under Secretary Welles, was the best means of preventing “a fundamental cleavage between the West and East in the years to come.”

  Here was the ground of cleavage with Churchill who, in his own words, had not taken office to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. The status quo ante was Britain’s war aim in the Far East but it was not Roosevelt’s. He believed the British Empire was finished and that the surge toward independence in Indochina, Malaya, and the Netherlands Indies would expel the white nations in the long run. His similar view of India, discussed during Churchill’s visit, caused the first serious rift between them. “I reacted so strongly and at such length,” Churchill wrote, “that he never raised it verbally again.”