Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  That evening the first piece of good luck appeared in the shape of a Chinese pack train of 20 tiny mules and two raffish and ruffianly drivers who were on their way unloaded from the “northern mountains” to India, probably, Stilwell suspected, to smuggle opium back into China. They were hired and arrangements were also made with the local head man at a nearby village for 60 carriers (the local people were “good eggs”).

  Standing on a truck at daylight to address the company, Stilwell explained the plan of march and laid down his rules. All food was to be pooled and all personal belongings discarded except for what each person could carry in addition to weapon and ammunition. A journey of some 140 miles lay ahead with a river and mountain range to cross. The pass lay at 7,000 feet. They must make 14 miles a day; any slowing of progress would require more food than they had and would risk being caught by the rains. He warned that the party could only survive through discipline. Anyone who did not wish to accept his orders could leave now with a week’s rations and make his own way. He looked around; no one moved. “By the time we get out of here,” he finished, “many of you will hate my guts but I’ll tell you one thing: you’ll all get out.”

  At the head of the column he set the pace at the regulation Army rate of 105 steps a minute. The ghost of General Castner walked with him but Stilwell himself was the only veteran of those long-ago forced marches of the 15th Infantry. From the first day many among the Americans lagged and fell out, suffering from heat exhaustion. May in Burma, just before the monsoon, was the hottest time of year. Stilwell raged at the softness and the “damn poor show of physique.” He allowed a five-minute rest every hour but otherwise would not slow or stop. Coming to a river he plunged in without a break in his stride, “obstinately scrutinizing his watch and counting out 105 steps to the minute” while he slogged steadily through the water with the long column stretching out behind in a single file. As malaria and dysentery attacked the marchers, weakness spread and slowed the pace. Stilwell had to increase the rest to ten minutes, conscious that every extra hour lengthened the odds. Two officers collapsed from sunstroke and had to be loaded onto the overburdened pack mules. Colonel Williams’ box of medicines was stolen at one encampment, “a terrible loss.” Ants, thorns, broken packs, vanishing bearers, a rogue elephant, insects, leeches, leg sores, blisters, infections and the blazing sun plagued the march and shredded what was left of goodwill and fellowship. One officer was discovered to have added a bedroll containing a mattress and all his clothing to the porters’ loads. Without mentioning the individual by name, Stilwell excoriated him among the whole company for taking up the space that might have carried one of the sick. His voice shook with rage and his eyes filled with tears. “Jesus, even his campaign hat looks madder than hell,” whispered one awed listener.

  Merrill fainted in the river from a sunstroke complicated by a weak heart and had to be pulled over on an air mattress and afterwards carried by bearers. He was unconscious for two hours. Others faltered and dropped. Williams pleaded for halts for the sick. “This column can’t stop,” Stilwell answered. “Dammit, Williams, you and I can stand it. We’re both older than any of them. Why can’t they take it?” He kept them moving by tongue-lashing and implacable example. In constant anxiety about the food supply for over 100 people, he ordered half-rations and appointed Dorn mess officer to prevent cheating. He himself insisted on standing last in the chow line. He required the men to take turns standing guard every night and forming vanguards by day to guard against Japanese ambush.

  The Uyu was reached in the three days he had allowed. Rafts, ordered by messengers sent ahead, were ready. The mule train escorted by an American officer and a group of the Chinese guards went ahead by land. Seagrave’s nurses, “always willing,” made roofs of leaves to shield the rafts against the sun and a hospital shelter of grass matting for Merrill and other invalids. As the convoy moved out to pole downstream toward the Chindwin an unspoken fear of their destination was in many minds. “Could this be an appointment in Samarra?” asked Paul Jones. Progress was “too damn slow” and Stilwell kept them poling and pushing all night. Ominous rain showers fell the next day. A bomber flew over, passed up-river, circled and came back. Everyone cowered; then, as they saw the red and blue markings of the RAF, broke into cheers and frantic waving. Circling in three low sweeps, the plane opened its bomb bays to drop food sacks on the beach. Half-naked dark mountain people rushed from the jungle to seize the first drops before the raft contingent, howling with wrath, could reach the banks and collect the rest. The drop included a sack of medical supplies enabling Colonel Williams to start quinine doses. This sudden recognition from outside of their plight raised hopes that rescue would be waiting at Homalin. On his raft Stilwell discoursed to Belden of his plan for reconquest: if the United States provided planes and supplies—, if the British could reorganize—, if the Chinese would cooperate—. “We’ve got to get out first,” said Belden. Again they poled through the night. The rafts were hitting snags and breaking up and Stilwell was “dead beat all night.”

  Hiking into Homalin from the river they met a shock of disappointment: no one waiting for them, no food, no messages. The failure strained Stilwell’s leadership thin; murmurs of anger and criticism grew audible and some members began to scheme for private survival. Preparing for the crossing of the Chindwin and a possible meeting with the enemy next day, Stilwell ordered an arms inspection. At the Chindwin no Japanese were met and the party crossed safely in dugouts and freight boats.

  Shan and Kachin bearers were now exchanged for dark unkempt Nagas and Tangkhuls with a crest of hair down the middle of their shaved heads like Iroquois, and pierced ears holding cartridges or cigarets or flowers. They were good-humored and friendly, drank rice beer and could carry 50-pound loads on wooden back-packs. As the party dragged itself up a climb of 3,000 feet on May 14 the rains came down heavily, almost cause for despair. But that day they were met by the help which had failed at Homalin in the person of a British district official named Sharpe with a supply of live pigs for a roast dinner and the announcement that ponies, food, a doctor, whiskey, cigarets, and 400 porters were just behind him. “Quite a relief,” Stilwell recorded mildly. Sharpe was to guide the party into Imphal. The message to expect him had been enclosed in the lost RAF food sacks. Asked by Stilwell how he had known on which of four routes through the mountains to find the party, Sharpe replied, “I called Delhi to find out what kind of man you were. Delhi said you were very intelligent. This is the only trail it makes common sense to take so I figured you would be on it.” He assured Stilwell that the other trails were being stocked and he brought sad word too of the surrender of Corregidor.

  Five more days of continued climbing followed, with the pace pushed to 15 and 16 miles a day and on the downhill side to 17 and more in a race against the monsoon. Preliminary rains had already begun, making the trails so slippery that men fell repeatedly, stumbling and cursing, and often had to climb sideways, edging their feet into the hill. Seagrave, suffering from leg infections, was so worn at the end of a day that he could do nothing “but roll up in my blanket and pray for a sudden and easy death.” But the party now had food and the invalids could ride except for one who was too ill with malaria to sit a pony and had to be carried in a sedan chair by shifts of bearers. The “cream puffs” and “sissies” were doing better and the unfaltering nurses sang Christian hymns and American popular songs. “What a picture…Chinese soldiers, Burmese girls, Americans and Limeys, all in the brook washing and shaving and soaking feet.” A local head man in a brilliant red blanket presented Stilwell with a goat and welcoming Nagas offered rice wine and chickens.

  Imphal was reached on May 20. Through careful planning and relentless leadership Stilwell had brought his party out without a single person missing—the only group, military or civilian, to reach India without loss of life. Many of those who walked out under his command did hate his guts but all 114 knew they owed him their lives. He came out, reported a correspondent,
“looking like the wrath of God and cursing like a fallen angel.” He had lost 20 pounds. His already spare frame was worn down to a minimum, his hands trembled, his skin was yellowish with jaundice, his eyes sunk in their sockets. Dorn had lost 32 pounds, Colonel Holcombe, one of those invalided most of the way, was “emaciated, resembles Gandhi.” The Chinese troops had not been heard from.

  Stilwell found a “nice message” from George Marshall waiting for him, expressing the commendation of “Secwar, President and entire War Department.” Conscious only of the defeat of all his purposes, he wrote the one-word comment, “Why?” Humiliation as a soldier required justification and his subsequent report to the War Department on the campaign (written by Dorn with Stilwell’s additions) was so blistering with regard to British and Chinese failures that all copies were ordered destroyed—with the incomplete success that such orders naturally attain. The implication of his report was that the British performance allowed only one interpretation: that they had never intended from the beginning to hold Burma and had deliberately scuttled it in order to weaken China. What is true in history is often less important than what people believe to be true.

  Elsewhere Stilwell summarized the causes of defeat as technical inferiority—in air force, tanks, artillery, machine guns, trench mortars, ammunition and transport—hostile population, Japanese initiative and “stupid gutless command, interference by CKS, Br. mess on RR, rotten communications, Br. defeatist attitude, vulnerable tactical situation.” The list gave too little credit to the enemy for whom the physical difficulties of campaigning in Burma were no less and the tactical difficulties greater. The essential difference was one of intent, as between the invader who had planned, prepared and moved under his own power, and the defenders who had neither planned nor prepared nor were determined in purpose.

  —

  While Stilwell was walking out, the Japanese invaded China along the Burma Road. After badly defeating the incoming 29th Division they took Wanting on May 8 and reached the deep gorge of the Salween just after the retreating Chinese destroyed the bridge. The Chinese armies in Yunnan, strongly supported by the AVG, fought in real alarm to stem the invasion. Here in the southern mountains, having run out of momentum and accomplished the main object of blockading China from the south, the Japanese came to a halt.

  Anxiety in Washington about the attitude of China, now isolated, was extreme. Marshall on May 9 despatched a stern instruction to AMMISCA in Stilwell’s absence, warning all officers on duty in China to maintain an “attitude of calm optimism with respect to Chinese future.” Plans and conversations must not “imply any thought of helplessness in situation.” Movements must be so regulated “that they cannot possibly be construed as an evacuation by Americans.”

  The fate of the Chinese units in Burma varied. Sun Li-jen brought the 38th Division out through great hardships but in good order by a route somewhat to the south of Stilwell’s, reaching India May 25–30. The 200th Division of the Fifth Army fought its way out, along with the remnants of the Sixth Army, to Yunnan. The 22nd and 96th Divisions of the Fifth Army struggled northward in veering directions and redoubled traces because of changing orders from Chiang Kai-shek. Caught by the monsoon in the high jungle of the northwest, they were kept alive on food drops by the RAF and American Air Force. Survivors of the 22nd reached India through Ledo in July and August, while those of the 96th after an epic of endurance eventually made their way over mountains to China via Fort Hertz.

  Chinese communiqués reported the last days of the Burma campaign in characteristic style, duly elaborated by American correspondents in Chungking and rewrite men at home. For May 10–11 the Chungking communiqué reported one Japanese column in Yunnan “completely wiped out,” another “also annihilated” and the invasion force “trapped” from behind by the Chinese in Burma who had “recaptured” Maymyo and were “closing in on Mandalay from east and west with the object of recapture.” The AP correspondent transmitted this as a “smashing defeat” of the Japanese invasion force, while his UP colleague even more vigorously described Japanese “reeling” back from China, “liquidated…fleeing in disorder.” Desk editors in America, on the patriotic assumption that all Chinese were under Stilwell’s command, presented these despatches to their readers under such headlines as “INVADING JAP FORCE CRUSHED BY STILWELL,” or on May 11, “STILWELL’S CHINA TROOPS TRAP JAPS, Invasion Army in Full Retreat. Enemy Cut Off as ‘Uncle Joe’ Slams China’s Back Door. Bulletin!!!” On that day Uncle Joe was on a raft on the Uyu.

  From the hill station at Imphal Stilwell and his party traveled by truck to the Assam railroad and by train past the endless rows of glossy tea shrubs to Dinjan and Tinsukia where the airfields of the Air Transport Command were located. Wavell and Alexander, Brereton and Bissell of the Tenth Air Force, and officers of his own staff in New Delhi came up to talk to him. In Brereton’s plane with the Persian rug he flew to Delhi and fame on May 24. Followed from the airport to the Imperial Hotel (whose telegraphic address, he noted, was “Comfort”) by a crowd of newspapermen, he agreed to hold a press conference. After an hour’s questions and answers about the campaign in which he stressed Japanese air superiority as the most damaging factor, he concluded with one of the historic statements of the war: “I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.”

  The impact of the words was clean and hard. Stilwell’s honesty cut through the pap and plush prose of Army public relations, as the San Francisco Chronicle recalled at a later time, like “a sharp salt wind.” The New York Times in a lead editorial stated that Churchill and Roosevelt, for all their magnificent rhetoric, “each of them could learn something from General Stilwell,” and lesser officialdom could heed him “both as to diction and as to policy.” His statement became synonymous with his name, quoted thereafter every time he made news. He had chosen to do a simple thing: tell the public the truth.

  * * *

  *1 The military habit of giving code names to people and projects partly accounts for the prevalence if not the nature of the nicknames Stilwell used.

  *2 The wording was that of the American Naval Attaché, Colonel James McHugh, who was on close personal terms with Chiang and Madame and often served as mouthpiece for their views.

  *3 For route of the walkout, see map on this page.

  12

  The Client June–October 1942

  THE LOSS OF BURMA, completing the blockade of China, raised the fear in American minds that China’s will to resist would not survive her isolation. She clearly required encouragement in the form of tangible support. The question was how to deliver it. With the Japanese in Myitkyina forcing the flight northward, the air transport route was aggravated in danger and difficulty. Priorities in any case were assigned to Europe. Strategy in Asia was still uncertain. All that could be envisaged so far was the necessity of keeping China in the war as a base for air operations against Japan’s sea-lanes and ultimate springboard for invasion. “Keeping China in the War,” the title of a War Department plan at this time, meant in effect sending her enough supplies to keep her operational, and that meant in effect the reconquest of Burma.

  Stilwell had a plan for the reconquest ready to commit to paper by the time he reached Delhi. Inevitably, after his experience in Burma, it called for American divisions. “My belief in decisive strategic importance of China is so strong,” he wired the War Department on May 25, “that I feel certain a serious mistake is being made in not sending American combat units into this theater.” Marshall could not be persuaded to divert any strength from full commitment to a Second Front in Europe. All he could offer was to return the Tenth Air Force to Stilwell’s command. The outlook for CBI was not encouraging and made Stilwell more than ever determined to carry out his project for training a Chinese task force in India.

  He had little support. The miasma of defeat and the sense of being in a low-priority theater had permeated many
of the Americans on duty in CBI. One after another of the staff in Delhi asked to be relieved, some pleading illness, some ambitious for a more promising assignment. “Christ, isn’t there one of them that puts the war first and himself second?” Stilwell himself was suffering from jaundice contracted from defective yellow fever serum, but though feeling “weak as a rag” and confined to bed off and on for the next several weeks, his idea of duty allowed him little sympathy for anyone who wanted relief. Stilwell could not understand a soldier who did not put duty to the mission first. He had “an exalted concept of true soldiering and an impossible ideal of what a true soldier should be,” wrote the journalist Eric Sevareid after serving in CBI.

  After conferring with Wavell who “mumbled” an assurance, “WILL go back for Burma,” Stilwell departed for Chungking, arriving on June 3 after a five-day stopover in Kunming because of bad weather. The journey between his two headquarters, which he was to make seven times in the next seven months, covered 1,100 miles from Delhi to the Assam airfields, 550 over the Hump to Kunming, and 450 from Kunming to Chungking, a total of 2,100. The Hump portion, over 15,000-foot mountains, was flown at twice normal altitudes, often through air currents so turbulent they could break up an airplane. Flying at 17,000–20,000 feet it was necessary to take oxygen. The old slow transports, not designed for such conditions, flew without aids to navigation or arms against Japanese pursuit. On this occasion Stilwell rode a B-25 bomber at 250 miles an hour, “not so comfortable but fast as hell. Beat the transport in.”