Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Understandably Soong thought an airline would be more effective. “Miraculously enough,” as he wrote to Roosevelt on January 31 in a letter that defies comment, one lay “conveniently at hand.” It covered only 700 miles of “flying over comparatively level stretches” between Sadiya at the top of Assam in northeast India to Kunming in China. He did not mention that between these two points rose the Himalayas, providing probably the most hazardous flight route in the world. He estimated that 100 DC-3 transports could fly 12,000 tons a month into China. The port of entry for supplies would be Calcutta, from where a railroad led north to Assam. Harriman endorsed the proposal in a covering letter which took the precaution to mention the mountains. Within nine days of the request and with quick “can do” confidence in any problem of mere logistics, the President gave Chiang Kai-shek “definite assurance…that the supply route to China via India can be maintained by air.” Airfields, planes, ground crews, fuel and servicing for an air freight route over the top of the world would have to be called into existence and the task was included under Stilwell’s mission before he left. He believed in its necessity. “Events are forcing all concerned to see the vital importance of Burma. We must get the airline going at once and also build the back-country road.”

  The “back-country road” from India to China that was to be inseparably connected with Stilwell—named as his monument and denounced as his folly—was a proposal initiated by the Chinese on January 1, 1942, two weeks before he was considered for the China mission and three weeks before he was appointed to it. Anticipating even then the loss of lower Burma, even before the Japanese had crossed the border, the Chinese formally requested Lend-Lease material to construct a road from Ledo in Assam across the mountains, forests and rivers of north Burma to tie in with the Burma Road on the Chinese side at Lungling. Over a route unknown by wheeled vehicles, it was an engineering project even more extravagantly difficult than the air route. The Generalissimo suggested that it could be built in five months; AMMISCA officers, after a month’s survey of the problems, estimated that it would take two and a half years. The War Plans Division recommended it as an “urgent military necessity.” As such it was approved, before Stilwell ever reached China or Burma, by everyone concerned with forwarding aid to China: by the War Department and the President, by T. V. Soong and China Defense Supplies, by Lauchlin Currie for Lend-Lease, and naturally by the Generalissimo, who on a visit to India in February personally undertook to obtain the approval of the Government of India.

  When Stilwell returned to Carmel to spend four days with his family before departure he did not express any disappointment he may have felt about giving up the combat command. He seemed glad of the opportunity to fight the Japanese and help the nation he knew in a situation he understood. The mission had now been shaped to his own desire: to enable the Chinese soldier to fight effectively. Besides a staff of 35 officers and five enlisted men who would accompany him by air, the War Department was sending by ship 400 technicians and instructors to aid in training the Chinese in the use of American equipment and tactics.

  Stilwell’s staff was a combination of the “China gang” and officers from the IIIrd Corps. Colonel Dorn continued as aide and as chief assistant with experience of China. Colonel Frank Roberts, the former language officer whose fate on the Panay had caused so much anxiety, now head of the China section of MID, rejoined Stilwell as G-2. Two other former language officers, Colonel Willard Wyman and Colonel Haydon Boatner, who had also served with the 15th Infantry, were recruited, as well as a younger aide, Captain Dick Young, a Hawaiian-born Chinese. Maxwell Taylor, eager to put his knowledge of Japanese to use, was as anxious to go as Stilwell was to have him, but found his name removed from the list by Marshall who wanted him for Europe. As political officer Stilwell borrowed John Paton Davies whom he had known in 1938 on the Embassy staff in Hankow. Born in Szechwan of missionary parents, Davies was knowledgeable, keen and Chinese-speaking, with a talent for informative reports. Chiang Kai-shek was not getting a mission of amiable ignorance. The rest of the staff were drawn mainly from the IIIrd Corps at Ford Ord headed by Brigadier Generals Franklin Sibert as chief Infantry officer and “Long Tom” Hearn, a slow tall southerner, steady but not inspired, as Chief of Staff.

  Two men who were decisively to affect the mission were encountered on the last day before Stilwell left. The first, at long distance, was Chennault, the brilliant fighter and agitator of the theater. In the course of negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek over reabsorption of the AVG into the American Army, Marshall had promised him that Chennault would be the ranking air commander in China. But with the development of a strategic air plan for the CBI theater, the structure of command required that Chennault’s pursuit group be included in the projected air force for China-based operations. Soong had agreed to the change but, as was his way with problems that promised trouble, failed to inform Chiang Kai-shek. Chennault was now raising loud objections on grounds of the broken promise although his real objection was to serving under the officer designated to be his superior, Colonel Clayton L. Bissell, with whom he had an old feud. Everyone entered the quarrel: Stimson was “quite concerned,” Stilwell was sent for, Currie intervened on Chennault’s behalf and the Air Force chief, General Hap Arnold, who shared the conventional officer’s dislike of Chennault as a black sheep, “hit the ceiling.” Though originally nicknamed Happy and known for an expression of amused benignity, General Arnold could throw a temper and on occasion a full inkwell. As overall commander of Americans in the theater, Stilwell insisted that Bissell rank Chennault, and Arnold so ordered. As regards discipline, Stilwell’s opinion of Chennault “dropped a lot” as a result of the episode.

  The second encounter was with Roosevelt. On a farewell visit to the Secretary of War Stilwell asked, for the sake of enhancing his prestige with the G–mo, if he could carry a personal message from the President. Stimson arranged a meeting, explaining the purpose, and at noon on February 9 Stilwell went to the White House for his first interview with his Commander-in-Chief. It lasted 20 minutes and produced no such rapport as the quiet fireside talk with Stimson. Considering the prejudgments that Stilwell brought with him and Roosevelt’s habit of bright monologues, it was not likely to. At home Stilwell was a conventional Republican who shared the sentiments and adopted the tone of the Roosevelt-haters, in which he was influenced by his brother John, an extremist of the species. If he used a cigaret holder “cocked upward at a Rooseveltian angle,” as an observer noticed, the similarity was certainly accidental. Yet in their hopes for China there was ground on which they could have met, if either had given the other a chance. The President might have learned more about the real China and Stilwell might have learned something of the President’s real aims.

  Roosevelt’s verbal monopolizing of conversation was so inveterate that his regular associates had to devise special methods to make themselves heard, such as speaking to him at mealtimes when he had his mouth full or timing him for exactly five minutes and then cutting in ruthlessly. On the telephone Secretary Stimson had been known to hang up on him. He was good-humored, intuitive, experimental, calculating, changeable, devious, compromising and given to leaps of thought without discernible coherence. He usually had several lines out and his motives were often mixed. The coherence that guided him, in a phrase used by his daughter, was “his sense of the future.” As a British observer said, “He blazed with faith in the future of democracy.” His dominant characteristic was confidence—over-confidence as some thought—perhaps the result of his own conquest of paralysis which may have left him with a sense that there was no problem that could not be solved.

  He often sounded more frivolous than he was and could obscure his thought by chatter as Stilwell obscured his by silence. Behind the chatter about his ancestors in the China trade he had somehow arrived at the most important thing necessary for the chief of a Western state to know about China: that, as he wrote to a friend in a letter of 1935, “There are forces there which neither
you nor I understand, but at least I know that they are almost incomprehensible to us Westerners. Do not let so-called facts or figures lead you to believe that any Western civilization’s action can ever affect the people of China very deeply.”

  Stilwell found him “cordial and pleasant—and frothy. Unimpressive. Acted as if I were a voter calling on a Congressman. Rambled on about his idea of the war—‘a 29,000 mile front is my conception,’ etc., etc. Just a lot of wind.” Among the et ceteras the President said he expected the war to be over in 1943, that “one year from now” would see the turn, that 2,000 planes would go to Australia, that Chiang was not to suppose that Hitler was the one enemy, that all enemies were equal and all the allies in the same boat, and he did not want Mme. Chiang to come on a visit. “After I had enough, I broke in and asked him if he had a message for CKS. He very obviously had not and talked for five minutes hunting around for something world shaking to say. Finally he had it—‘Tell him we are in this thing for keeps, and we intend to keep at it until China gets back ALL her lost territory.”

  This remarkable aim became in fact American policy although it may not have been tossed off as casually as Stilwell thought. As in the case of unconditional surrender at Casablanca a year later, Roosevelt sometimes announced extraordinary decisions seemingly off the top of his head which reflected basic convictions if not prior consultation. Although it was never officially reported, he had enunciated to Stilwell a departure in policy which became a commitment when Stilwell duly conveyed it to Chiang Kai-shek. One country does not usually undertake to win back the lost territories of another, even of an ally, and in 1944 Roosevelt was to state, “I do not want the United States to have the post-war burden of reconstituting France, Italy and the Balkans.” Yet he somehow felt an obligation to China.

  In the public mind China was the favorite ally. When in his message to Congress on January 6 Roosevelt listed the Allies whom the United States had joined in war, his reference to the “brave people of China” drew the loudest and most spontaneous applause. “Those millions,” the President went on, “who for four and a half years have withstood bombs and starvation and have whipped the invaders time and again in spite of superior Japanese equipment and arms.” The enduring courage of the Chinese was associated with a mystique about “whipping” the Japanese which the military communiqués of Chungking did everything to elaborate. In one case after Pearl Harbor, the Chinese Government announced the despatch of two armies against the rear of the Japanese who were attacking Hong Kong. Although no such movement took place, a Chinese communiqué reported on December 15 that these forces had engaged the enemy and inflicted 15,000 casualties. In the same fairy-tale spirit in January Chiang Kai-shek informed the American Government of his intention to launch an offensive to drive the Japanese out of Indochina.

  The Chinese are “great believers in the world of make-believe,” General Magruder reported to the War Department at this time. They shut their eyes to unpleasant actualities, preferring “flattering but fictitious symbols which they regard as more real than cold facts.” He cited the communiqués as an example. Because correspondents from goodwill or laziness reported these fairy tales uncritically, the effect was to create a propaganda about Chinese “victories” that led to misconception.

  There were other fictions. As America’s ally China could not be admitted to be other than a democratic power. It was impossible to acknowledge that Chiang Kai-shek’s Government was what the historian Whitney Griswold, future president of Yale, named it in 1938, “a fascist dictatorship,” though a slovenly and ineffectual one. Correspondents, even when outside the country and free of censorship, refrained from reporting the worst of the Kuomintang, on the theory that to do so would be to help the Japanese and besides would ensure that the correspondents could not return. Out of friendship for China they exaggerated her military resistance. It became an established tradition that no journalist “wishing well to China,” as one of them wrote, could visit Chungking “without going into ecstasies over the beauty of Madame, the heroic determination of G–mo, the prowess of the Chinese armies and the general nobility of all hands.”

  When China in January requested an unrestricted loan of $500 million, Ambassador Gauss, who represented the informed if sour view, cautioned against an unrestricted loan that could be poorly used by “the retrogressive, self-seeking and, I fear, fickle elements” in Chinese ruling circles. The loan was declared necessary by Chungking to support the Government against darkly hinted forces of defeatism. “Nothing but blackmail,” Ambassador Litvinov of Russia said privately to Secretary Morgenthau, but the War and State Departments believed that the loan was necessary to encourage the regime and keep China in the war. It was a political and military, not a financial, venture. Morgenthau was exceedingly uncomfortable about fathering a loan without security or controls and proposed a scheme for monthly payments in a special currency directly to the Chinese troops, “so that while the boys fight they get their money, and if they don’t fight, no money.” This being firmly rejected by the client, Morgenthau continued to struggle to retain for the United States some form of control or supervision or at least right of consultation as to the use of the money. To every such suggestion the Generalissimo said no. He advised Washington that the loan should be regarded as an advance to an ally fighting against a common enemy, “thus requiring no security or other pre-arranged terms as to its use and as regards means of repayment.”

  This remarkable proposition was allowed to prevail because the real purpose of the loan was to please Chiang Kai-shek and keep him interested in the Allied cause. The motive was the persistent fear, as Morgenthau himself expressed it, that without significant aid, China might move closer to the Japanese and others of the “yellow races.” Required to defend the unsecured loan to committees of the House and Senate, he admitted that it was not a banking proposition and that there was a good chance the United States might not get its money back, and he did not deny the imputation of a questioner that the loan was an attempt to outbid the Japanese and prove to Chiang where his interest lay.

  Secretary Stimson presented it as a means of mobilizing China’s military effort. Quoting what Stilwell had told him of the potential of the Chinese soldier, he testified for the loan before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on February 3 in a speech “as eloquent, as moving and as convincing” as one listener had ever heard. He told the members of China’s strategic position and of her “unique relations with us and her unique attitude and confidence towards our government,” of Japanese efforts to pull down Chiang Kai-shek “upon whose character and influence rested the Chinese defense,” of Chiang’s promise to make an American his Chief of Staff and of Stilwell’s belief that he could mobilize a fighting capacity. He said the loan was a chance “to play for the highest stakes for the Far East….If America refused to take this chance she would not deserve to win the war.” The Committee was so impressed that they did not put a single question and the loan was passed by the House the next day by a voice vote without debate. The Senate, equally favorable, voted unanimously for the loan on the same day that Stimson testified before its Foreign Relations Committee. Congress attached no strings. For the first time, commented the State Department in some awe, a substantial political loan had been made by the United States “without security, without interest, and without retention of control by the U.S. of the expenditure thereof.” It was testimony, Roosevelt informed Chiang Kai-shek, of the “wholehearted respect and admiration which the Government and the people of this country have for China.”

  Like others before and after it, the loan was promised on the necessity of sustaining Chiang Kai-shek in power, whatever his shortcomings, for the sake of maintaining a front in China against Japan. If he should fall, it was feared that collapse of resistance or the outbreak of civil strife would follow, and on that point virtually everyone, whether partisan or detractor, was agreed. Magruder put the case for Lend-Lease on that basis. China had no intention of undertaking any
offensive and “will never be a great military asset,” he wired on the same day that the Secretary of War was speaking so eloquently to Congress, “but her collapse and loss of her territory for our use would be a liability.”

  —

  Somewhere between the cold pragmatism of Magruder and the optimism of Roosevelt, without the romanticism of Carlson or the illusion of Stimson, Stilwell, who knew China, prepared to return.

  One of his last interviews was with Harry Hopkins whom he saw at the White House after seeing the President. The record illustrates Stilwell’s way of developing his commentary. In his pocket diary he wrote of Hopkins, “Queer gnome.” In his expanded notes this becomes “a strange gnomelike creature (stomach ulcers)….He had on an old red sweater and crossroads store shoes, and no garters and his hair hadn’t been cut for 8 weeks.” In a letter to Win the following day Hopkins appears as a “very pleasant old farmer.”

  Thrust into global problems and newly discovering China, Hopkins was eager to help, if not very precise. “You are going to command troops, I believe,” he said, adding that he would not be surprised if Chiang Kai-shek offered Stilwell command of the “whole Chinese Army.” He pronounced Chiang to rhyme with bang. He said FDR was “vitally interested” and ready to pull 100 passenger planes off the airlines if needed. He enthused his visitor by a proposal to use the huge Normandie as a transport for the theater. “Great stuff,” wrote Stilwell who was concerned that shipping was going to be the great problem. Hardly had he left the White House when news came, too pat not to seem an omen, that the Normandie, a victim of sabotage, was burning at her docks in New York. “Is that fate?” Stilwell wondered.

  He was heading into a collapsing situation. On the same day, February 9, the Japanese, after a pause at Moulmein to bring up a force of two divisions totaling 18,000 men, crossed the Salween. They were now about 100 miles from the Sittang River, the last natural obstacle before Rangoon. The British had a division of two brigades of Indian and Burmese troops in lower Burma, both of which had been badly mauled by the Japanese on the way to Moulmein. Together forming the 17th Division of about 7,000 men and reinforced by a newly arrived Indian brigade, they abandoned defense of the Salween and withdrew to a position in front of the Sittang. Drawn up behind the river they might have had a chance to fight a delaying action, but an inferior force with its back to a river is in a classic position from which not to fight.