Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The 2,000 tons spared for “all other purposes” meant in effect only 500 tons a month for the Y-force after the “other purposes” were filled. “They made it practically impossible for me to prepare the Y-force,” Stilwell summed up, “and then ordered it used in an offensive…”, in north Burma. Yet he did not ask to be relieved after TRIDENT or at any other time. In spite of every denial of the means, and every argument running against him, he never really gave up the belief that somehow he could bring off the comeback through Burma. His theater had the lowest priority of any and though, as Robert Sherwood wrote, every commander except Eisenhower and Nimitz felt himself the most neglected, abused and cheated of them all, “none had as much right to feel this way as did Stilwell.” He had to work against defeatism in the India command and passive resistance in China; his own Commander-in-Chief as well as the Commander to whom he was accredited wanted him recalled; his requests for American troops and for authority to exact a quid pro quo had been denied and his means of supply now diverted to the air force. His customary description of his mission in Chungking was “shovelling the manure pile.” Yet, whether from duty or a desire for vindication or both, he left no indication that he ever considered not returning.

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  As the “MacArthur of China” he was much interviewed by the press and consulted by officialdom while in Washington. He had conferences with Secretary Hull and Hornbeck and Currie and Colonel Donovan of OSS and two “very satisfactory” sessions with Senators La Follette, Connally, Douglas and others on the Hill. He tried to use the opportunity as far as he could to get the truth to Americans about the problems of China. Davies arranged for Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post, to give a dinner for him with six or eight leading correspondents; 20 or more other guests came in after the dinner to listen. Articulate when facing an audience who wanted to hear, Stilwell spoke bluntly and frankly of the situation he faced and asked Davies to speak afterwards on its political aspects. From about this time on, cracks began to appear in the idealized press treatment of China. Afterwards Stilwell sent Davies back to the United States several times to orient the press on developments.

  One person who was interested to hear more from him while in Washington was Churchill, who invited him for a talk at the British Embassy, “to get acquainted,” as he said. One of the points that had been brought out at TRIDENT was Wavell’s defeatism and the lethargy of the India command, which Secretary Stimson had frankly told Churchill needed attention. Before Stilwell had his encounter with the Prime Minister, Stimson coached him “so as to get some punch into his remarks and not be afraid of him.” At the interview Stilwell felt he was being listened to sympathetically with the result that he talked well and, being thoroughly knowledgeable, impressed his listener. To his surprise Churchill thoroughly agreed with him on the lack of energy in India and had in fact already made up his mind to replace Wavell and his senior commanders. He formed the beginnings of “great respect and liking for General Stilwell.”

  In China panic had seized the Government as the Japanese drive progressed during April and May, and the Generalissimo in one of his celebrated tantrums reportedly threw teapots at the bearers of bad tidings. From his staff in China Stilwell learned “there was hell to pay at Ichang” and he ordered Hearn to “prepare for the worst” and Bissell to send 40 pursuit planes from India to the Fourteenth Air Force to aid in the defense and to prepare to send a squadron of medium bombers. Throughout this time Chinese communiqués reported heavy and continuous fighting, with the Japanese several times said to be “collapsing under Chinese counterthrusts” and suffering “heavy losses,” “encirclement” and “annihilation.” Eventually in June the Japanese withdrew without pursuit from what appeared to have been a training and foraging offensive to collect rice and river shipping. The result was announced by the Chinese, and willingly reported by American correspondents, as a major Chinese victory.

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  Stilwell returned to China via London and Cairo, stopping en route to call on fellow-commanders in North Africa, as he told reporters, to “check on their tactics.” After the Hump, “crossing the Atlantic is nothing. You don’t know you’re doing it.” In London he engaged on a round of high-level visits (arranged on instructions from Marshall to enhance his prestige) culminating in a state luncheon in his honor with a speech by Mr. Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister, and a response by himself. Although he wrote that this was “making much of the country boy,” he was perhaps not entirely indifferent to the occupations of the past month. His diary for the two days in London included the cryptic note, “High time I retired the other me.”

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  *1 Time published the report on March 22, 1943, in a version cut to 750 words with all mention of officials’ failures, corruption, profiteering, continued tax collecting and rising hatred of the regime omitted.

  *2 The Legion of Merit, created by George Washington, had been reestablished in 1942. The degree of Chief Commander, specified for heads of state and high-ranking military, was intended as the highest decoration the United States could give to foreigners.

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  Stilwell Must Go June–October 1943

  THE EFFORT TO SUPPLY CHINA, and the air and ground forces in China, presented the greatest logistic challenge of the war, probably of any war. If natural obstacles of terrain and climate were extreme, human obstacles raised by the mutual antagonisms and soured morale of reluctant cobelligerents were no less so, and the monsoon of the summer months thickened the misery. To raise the Hump’s deliveries to 10,000 tons a month under these conditions, as directed by TRIDENT, was a struggle.

  “The C-46 is full of bugs,” Stilwell noted worriedly on one of his inspection tours. “Carburetor ices up. We have lost six over the Hump and the boys’ morale is lower and lower.” Crews were rebellious and often bailed out as soon as an engine missed once, or refused to fly if there was a cloud in the sky. Convinced that the “slopeys” were not fighting and that black markets awaited the cargo destined for the ground forces, the fliers did not want to risk their lives to fill private godowns, although they would take any risk to fly supplies to the Fourteenth Air Force. Defense against Japanese fighters was poor because the Japanese concealed their airfields from aerial photography and even from Kachin scouts by hiding their planes in holes in the ground covered with sod. The OSS unit rescued 125 ATC crew members in 1943 but this represented less than a third of all who went down, the rest to death or capture. Nevertheless, with reinforcements, a new ATC commander and new energizing after TRIDENT, and gradual ironing out of the C-46 faults, morale and flying conditions improved, and tonnages rose from 3,000 in May to 5,500 in July to 8,000 in September, and, after the rains ended, to an unbelievable 13,000 in November.

  But the results were gained at the expense of the Road because many bulldozers, trucks, graders and shovels as well as men were diverted to build up the Assam airfields. The effort to bring supplies to the road-head, for those who were left, bogged down in mud during the monsoon. Vehicles could not get through; elephants and Naga porters could not deliver the necessary amounts of food, fuel and equipment; earth slides destroyed a day’s work in an hour; bulldozers were lost over banks when the ground gave way; everything—men, machines, tents and terrain—was sodden with rain; food was inadequate and malaria chronic. Burma was even ready with a new and unprepared-for disease, scrub typhus, which produced skin lesions, high fever, internal hemorrhage, confusion, delirium and all too frequently death.

  While the ATC expanded, the Road progressed only three miles from May to August. It came to be identified in the theater with Stilwell because of his insistence on the recovery of north Burma, and it was generally regarded as Stilwell’s folly. The British were forever saying it was an impossibility because there never had been a lateral road across the mountains of Burma; nature arranged that communications ran north and south in line with the river valleys. This was true though not necessarily conclusive. Few thought the Road could ever del
iver enough to make it worth the expenditure in resources, men and misery. Only Stilwell, according to General Slim, believed it was “both possible and worth the resources it would demand,” whereas he himself would have used the resources required for the Road to launch a full-scale offensive to retake all Burma from Rangoon up, thus supplying China with far more than the Road could carry. That much was obvious, and what Stilwell heartily wanted far more than Slim. The only difficulty was that Slim’s chiefs, as he well knew, unrelentingly refused from first to last to launch any such full-scale offensive. Stilwell did not choose the Ledo Road as preferable but as a poor alternative, necessary first of all to supply the campaign in north Burma and ultimately operations in China. He could say with Hannibal, “I will find a way or make one.”

  By August the difficulties made it apparent that Road and Hump together would not suffice both to carry themselves and deliver enough fuel for expanded air operations from China. Facing the stark fact that it required a ton of gasoline to deliver a ton of cargo to China, the planners at the Quebec Conference in August decided that the situation required a pipeline. Another wild leap of engineering, stretching 1,800 miles from Calcutta to Kunming, laid across mountains and canyons, through streams and river beds, carried by wooden trestles and suspension bridges built without steel, it was to be the longest pipeline through the worst territory in the world and was naturally christened Pipe Dream by its builders. Like the Road, it would have to follow in the track of the offensive, and neither pipeline nor road could reach China unless the campaign succeeded.

  Underlying all the physical disabilities of CBI was the lack of an agreed upon goal to fight for and to generate enthusiasm. The average American in China, without his usual beer and PX supplies for which ATC space could not be spared, disgusted by the surrounding squalor and filth which afflicted him with diarrhea, worms and every variety of intestinal disease, alienated by the callous cruelties of Chinese life, and with little understanding of the long deprivation and hunger for goods that led Chinese theft and graft to flourish, did not, as the romanticists like to believe, learn through contact that all men are brothers. On the contrary, he came to regard all Chinese as corrupt, inefficient, unreliable, triple-damned, steal-you-blind, hopeless, slopey sons-of-bitches. In and around the supply bases the hostility on the whole was returned. The average Chinese found the Americans stupidly profligate, coarse, contemptuous, often brutal and easily corruptible. The “better class of people” in China, according to Embassy reports, were “surprised and shocked” by the rowdiness of American troops on leave and the “boorish” manners and “unkempt and disreputable” appearance of Fourteenth Air Force personnel.

  Lend-Lease provided limitless opportunity for mutual antipathies. No item, from medicine to half-ton trucks, was not for sale on the black markets of Kunming. Even the Fourteenth Air Force reported that “the Chinese are caching gasoline and charging it to our planes.” One plane was listed as having been refueled eight times in one day for a total of 700 gallons when it had actually flown a total of four hours, an arrangement that could hardly have been accomplished without American connivance. In the atmosphere of CBI Americans were not slow to share the graft. Smuggling of gold, sulfa drugs, foreign currency, cigarets, gems and PX supplies was carried on by American Air Force, Army, Red Cross and civilian personnel for an estimated take of over $4,000,000 by the end of 1944. Investigators of the Army CID had 300 cases under charge at one time, of which the most notable was the “Bordello Affair” of the Fourteenth Air Force. Besides its primary purpose involving girls imported from Kweilin, the glamour city of south China, and from India over the Hump, the place was also used as a smuggling center and this, on being reported, required Stilwell to take official action. “Officers pimping. Hauling whores in our planes. Sent for Chennault. He knew…. More dope on gas-stealing ring.” The affair generated investigation by the theater Inspector General, and because of the involvement of Chennault, which proved deeper than just knowing, created further ill feeling. Chennault’s various financial operations in China were one cause of General Arnold’s disfavor.

  India, the Rear Echelon, was exasperating both for its British imperialists and supine “wogs,” as Americans called the Indians. Americans tended to associate the British in India with George III, and the Indian uprising of 1942 with Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, but their initial sympathy with the Indians soon faded into impatience and contempt. There were so many of them, so apparently habituated to servility. They lacked the vitality and laughter and inner self-assurance of the Chinese. Americans quickly assimilated the British attitude toward the natives without ceasing to castigate imperialism. Not without reason the initials CBI were said to represent Confused Bastards in India. Its members wore on their sleeves the shield-shaped CBI patch with the star of India and sun of China surmounting the stripes of the United States. This was intended to distinguish Americans from British and to show that they were in Asia as Allies to defeat the Japanese, not to restore the British Empire. But the three parts of the emblem could not make a whole. With the kudos and promotions going elsewhere, ridden by discontent, scandals, frustrations and complex animosities, CBI was an unhappy theater, at odds within itself.

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  Deprived of leverage, Stilwell had now to obtain Chiang Kai-shek’s consent to participate in a Burma campaign that did not include Rangoon. As consolation or perhaps bribe, it was going to be his happy duty to confer Roosevelt’s proposed award of the Legion of Merit on Chiang and also on Ho Ying-chin, the man he believed more than anyone responsible for the debility of the Chinese Army and for whose removal he never ceased agitating. “It will make me want to throw up,” he wrote to Win. (By way of compensation the medal was also going to his friend Shang Chen, to Dr. Robert K. S. Lim of the Red Cross and to the generally admired Yü Ta-wei, chief of Ordnance.)

  Stilwell’s disgust was more than just personal. He felt there was something fundamentally wrong about America’s having maneuvered herself “into the position of having to support this rotten regime”; one that so curiously mirrored what she was fighting against in Germany—in both cases, as he saw it, “a one-party government, supported by a Gestapo [Tai Li’s organization] and headed by an unbalanced man with little education.” He tried at times to recapture understanding. He wrote down at length a talk with his friend and adviser Chiang Monlin, the leading academic figure in China, who reminded him that while Europe had been working through the process of political education for centuries, China had had only 50 years and was working on an imported civilization, not a domestic one. Though the Generalissimo, he said, was handicapped by lack of education, “even now there is no one better in sight.” It was not surprising, as Stilwell knew from his experience of the 1920s and 30s, that the Kuomintang governed the country so badly because the concept of civic as distinct from family responsibility had not developed in China and the mandarinate which had performed civic functions had been destroyed.

  But Stilwell’s own frustrations were uppermost. Roosevelt’s decision in favor of Chennault had obviously reduced his influence and confirmed the Generalissimo in his resolve neither to fight nor reform. “I have been ignored, slighted, blocked, delayed, double-crossed, lied to and about….” He had lost tolerance.

  After three weeks of waiting for a reply from Chiang, he discovered that Ho, although War Minister and Chief of Staff, knew nothing about the TRIDENT proposal; he had not been told. To Stilwell’s rage he was trying to divert arms from the Y-force for use in Hupeh. Delays and postponements in assignment of divisions for the Y-force, all of which had been promised for March 1 at the latest, continued. Ch’en Ch’eng was refusing to return to the command until they were in position. One of the missing divisions, promised “positively” for May 20, still had not arrived by June; in July a token of 1,200 men appeared. Fillers for Ramgarh presented the same problem. Of 4,500 promised for March, not one had appeared by July. Of 200 men promised for the heavy artillery, all but 65 were rejec
ted by Chinese doctors and 30 more by American doctors; 35 reached Ramgarh. Later, under pressure of the actual campaign, boys of twelve to fourteen were sent as replacements. After a meeting with Ho taken up with a dispute about trucks, Stilwell’s endless persistence nearly gave out. “I struck a new low after this conference. It seems absolutely impossible to do anything.”

  He ascribed Ho’s developing resistance to Ramgarh to the loss of face its methods reflected on Ho’s own management of the Chinese Army. He overlooked the fact that in direct pay of the troops and in raised expectations of food and medical care, Ramgarh was in effect subversive. With regard to the Y-force Stilwell felt the Chinese were resisting every attempt to help them get ready to fight. “That’s the crux of it—they just don’t want to get ready to fight.” This was indeed the crux. It was not the Chinese way to seek solutions through decisive battle. The one occasion when they had sought battle, at Shanghai in 1937, had not been for a military purpose but for its effect on national and foreign opinion. The promises made to Stilwell about the Y-force were made to obtain matériel, not with intention to carry them out. In Chinese practice a promise was a method of getting on with people, not the equivalent of intended performance. Stilwell knew this well enough yet he continually counted on the promises made to him—and wrote down angry lists of nonfulfillment—because he could not escape his inborn assumption that a promise represented intention.

  There were Chinese who wanted a reformed army. Many of the officers at the Kunming schools were hard-working and eager for instruction. Pai Ch’ung-hsi, appointed Director of Training, was enthusiastic when he became the first Chinese officer from the capital to inspect the schools; neither the Generalissimo nor anyone from the War Ministry had come. Pai visited each course, asked for the field manuals, made speeches to the officers about American methods and was ready to start the school for the second 30 divisions at Kweilin, the capital of Kwangsi province. His enthusiasm was not disinterested, for the program would mean an accrual of strength to the Kwangsi faction of which he was one of the leaders. It was just such a development that Chiang Kai-shek feared. To Stilwell, ever ready to seize on encouragement, Pai’s support appeared as a “major victory” and Pai “perhaps the best man in China.”