Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The difficulty of inculcating aggressive spirit in the Chinese superior officers persisted. The Artillery, trained by General Sliney and led by able and energetic Chinese officers, was vigorous and reliable, but all the efforts at Ramgarh could not eliminate characters like one Major Ch’en, a battalion commander of the 38th Division, who, during the month before Stilwell came to the Hukawng, failed to occupy his given post, remained four weeks without doing any offensive patrolling, failed to issue supplies to a special patrol unit and could provide no record of what had been done with 31,000 rations and 28 tons of ammunition dropped to him during this period.

  Friction over supply was constant. On the one hand Chinese requisitions were usually double what a unit needed or could use; on the other hand units were sometimes left close to starvation when pilots in bad weather were less than aggressive about flying in airdrops. Stilwell remedied this situation by requiring air crews to exchange places with men on the ground and live in the mud on Spam and hot water for a few days. “After the air boys learned what it was like down there,” recalled Paul Jones, “they flew in every day, flew when you thought no one could, when clouds were on the tree tops.”

  All the while messages from Chungking or Delhi, buzzing with “Z-Z-Z-Z” for urgent, poured into Stilwell’s command post, “screaming for me to come to both places and decide on this or that.” His deputy in Delhi, General Sultan, the ranking major general in the Army whom Marshall had sent to help Stilwell in 1943, was dependable and excellent—“Dan Sultan is the best thing that ever happened to the theater” in his chief’s opinion—but it is the nature of miltary channels that everything, however petty, is passed on to the top, with exasperating effect if the occupant of the top is not by temperament an administrator. The problem is not unknown in civil government. Roosevelt, complained Secretary Stimson, was “the poorest administrator I have ever worked under.” One issue that Stilwell could not avoid, involving as it did the military’s most absorbing concern, was his place in the chain of command. He made a quick overnight jump to Delhi on December 31 to settle it.

  As operational chief of NCAC he held a temporary corps command within the SEAC structure of which, under another hat, he was Deputy Supreme Allied Commander. The situation was like that of the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe who tangled with himself as suitor to his own ward and wondered whether he could give his consent to his own marriage, or marry without his own consent, and in that case could he cite himself for contempt of his own court? But no glimmer of inherent absurdity lightened the problem at SEAC headquarters. The Supremo, as Mountbatten was called, wanted Stilwell to serve along with Slim, who commanded the Fourteenth Army comprising the two British corps, under General Sir George Giffard, commander of the ground forces of SEAC. Stilwell despised Giffard whom he called the Ho Ying-chin of Burma and who was reputed among Americans to have been given his job because “he was the kind of man who would ensure that there would be no fighting.” Believing that Giffard would contrive to hold back his progress, Stilwell refused utterly to come under his control. Putting on his hat as Deputy SAC he said he was superior to Giffard, and in another guise as Commanding General of American forces in CBI he said he did not have Presidential authority to put himself under Giffard. The adroit way he shifted from one to another of his various offices (in the theater’s table of organization he occupied no less than five boxes at various levels) was, according to Slim, “a lesson in the mobile offensive-defensive.” The more Mountbatten reasoned with him the more stubbornly he resisted, exhibiting, Slim thought, “a surly obstinacy that showed him at his worst.”

  Matters were at a deadlock until suddenly he astonished everybody by announcing, “I am prepared to come under General Slim’s operational control until I get to Kamaing,” that is, to the midpoint of the Mogaung valley, about halfway to Myitkyina. Having confidence in Slim’s fighting intentions, Stilwell knew that under this arrangement he would not be hampered. Slim’s junior rank was immaterial: “I would fight under a corporal as long as he would let me fight,” he said.

  Slim believed Stilwell to be “two people,” one when talked to alone and another in front of an audience when he adopted the “Vinegar Joe” attitude. “He had courage to an extent few people have and a determination which, as he usually concentrated it along narrow lines, had a dynamic force….He was undoubtedly the most colorful character in South-East Asia—and I liked him.” That Stilwell put on an act in front of a certain kind of audience was true. With friends he could be unaffected and easy, and at home he loved to joke, but with people of whom he was suspicious for one reason or another, whether from a sense of difference or inferiority or impatience or contempt, he could undoubtedly be rude or caustic or sometimes coarse and deliberately boorish, as his way of thumbing his nose. During the second campaign in Burma this attitude became more pronounced with regard to the Rear Echelon when, after sleeping in his clothes and coming under fire and suffering the companionship of fly-eggs in his blanket and scorpions in his dugout, he came out to the overstuffed conferences of Delhi. He tended to feel for the desk generals and colonels the sentiments of Hotspur in his favorite passage from Shakespeare who, when “dry with rage and extreme toil” after battle, raged against the popinjay from headquarters.

  In Marshall’s opinion Stilwell was “his own worst enemy” who poisoned his relations with the British and Chinese by making no effort to conceal his contempt for their “do-nothing” attitudes. While he had ample cause for impatience, his personality faults, Marshall thought, thwarted Mountbatten’s effort to get along with him. Stilwell certainly lacked the iron control over his feelings that characterized Marshall but the underlying source of the poison was his belief that both British and Chinese had been cowardly in the first Burma campaign and had devoted their energies to nonperformance in Burma ever since. He never had any trouble getting along with either British or Chinese who in his opinion were doers and fighters. This was the reason why he often wished he could command the Communists who seemed to be both, and why he admired the Russians for their stunning resistance at Leningrad and fight at Stalingrad. He sent congratulations to the Red Army on the occasion of its twenty-sixth birthday and received a message from Stalin in reply.

  “You will find, if you get below the surface,” Marshall wrote to Mountbatten on learning of Stilwell’s consent to serve under Slim, “that he wants merely to get things done without delays….He will provide tremendous energy, courage and unlimited ingenuity and imagination to any aggressive proposals and operations. His mind is far more alert than almost any of our generals and his training and understanding are on an unusually high level. Impatience with conservatism and slow motion is his weakness—but a damned good one in this emergency.”

  —

  After hurried conference with his staff chiefs, including Colonel Merrill whom he wanted to command the GALAHAD force, Stilwell was back at Shingbwiyang within 24 hours. One gain from the trip was victory in his obstinate struggle to have GALAHAD reassigned to his control, as a result of the canceling of the larger plans for Burma. Wingate’s angry comment on being informed was, “You can tell General Stilwell he can take his Americans and—.” But military action requires even the most ill-disposed allies to coordinate plans, and Wingate came to Shingbwiyang to confer on January 3. The meeting was recorded by one of his officers, Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, who attended rather nervously, knowing that the two principals “could both display atrocious manners and were not prepared to be thwarted by anybody.”

  Wingate at forty, handsome, bearded, strong-bodied, with heavy brows over piercing blue eyes and the look, manner and passion of a prophet, was a notable contrast to Stilwell at sixty, wiry and gaunt, with a quizzical eye behind his steel-rimmed spectacles and the shrewd, skeptical, speculative look of a down-east Yankee farmer. Fergusson thought both had the characteristics of prophets, “vision, intolerance, energy, ruthless courage,” but this was romanticizing Stilwell. Though he possessed the last three qualities in emin
ent degree, he was no prophet but a practical man whose motivating principle was “get on with it.” What was rare was the matchless driving spirit he put behind a mission and the degree of devotion he was willing to invest until it was accomplished. Wingate was both doer and fighter and the fact that he disliked and was thoroughly disliked by the average British officer of the Indian Army was no lack of recommendation to Stilwell. The meeting passed off amicably. Wingate agreed to send in the Americans soon and to deploy his own LRP force around Indaw to draw off enemy attention from the NCAC.

  Stilwell was anxious for the advent of the Americans to invigorate the Chinese who were starting to stall again in the Hukawng. “Sun not moving,” he noted on January 2. “Preposterous demands for air support, ammo and artillery.” The Chinese soldiers were doing well; “it’s only the higher-ups who are weak….If I could just have a couple of U.S. divisions!” He worried constantly about replacements, and his hikes to the forward command and observation posts were growing more tiring. On one occasion he trudged 18 miles up and back, on another it took three and a half hours to cover three miles, “tripping and cursing at every step,” on another his party came under the concentrated shell fire with which the Japanese often raked the trails in the hope of catching a mule train or a file of troops, and a shell burst within ten yards of him. He was proud of a regiment that made a good crossing of the river, “no fuss, good discipline, no grenade fishing…high class work.” Colonel Fu, their commander, “asserts this is the first time in his experience he has seen a real envelopment like this—na ko shao chien [something rarely seen].” But Sun’s unaccountable hesitation “will now cost lives.”

  All of January was consumed in effort to clear the enemy from the Taro plain, a valley lying parallel to and south of the Hukawng, so that no Japanese would be left in the rear of the main advance. A suspicious pattern of reluctance was becoming evident. The battalion of the laggard Major Ch’en, assigned to the Taro mission, had not moved from the edge of the plain, and Sun, his divisional commander, was “slow and sulky.” Stilwell argued and pleaded with him on the importance of the action and the consequences of failure and warned against giving the Japanese time. A few days later he found that another battalion of the 38th had not taken up its position and “raised hell” with the regimental commander, “told him by god to get it back and find out who had disobeyed orders.” When this happened a third time Stilwell suspected that Sun must be receiving messages from the Generalissimo to slow down for fear of losses, in fatal repetition of the first Burma campaign. He warned Sun explicitly with no tactful circumlocutions that if his orders as Commanding General were not carried out he would resign and report the circumstances to Washington with a recommendation of “very radical measures”—meaning cessation of U.S. aid.

  The 22nd was doing better. Li Hung, a battalion commander, was pleased, “says I bring him luck….Fu of the 65th will go anywhere if he has rations.” But five days later the 65th was stalled in a “sad fizzle” and Fu relieved of command. Every order for combat involved a struggle. Finally the 65th moved. The tank battalion of 60 light tanks under Colonel Rothwell Brown, the only Chinese unit under direct American command, did “a fine job under terrible conditions.” On January 28 the 65th cleared a pocket accounting for 250 Japanese dead; two days later, “65th got to TARO!”, clearing the way for the main advance.

  —

  Far from joining the action, Mountbatten was backing out. On January 8 SEAC produced a revised plan of campaign called AXIOM proposing a halt to the Road and to Stilwell’s effort to reopen north Burma, which was declared to be impossible before the rains in view of Chiang Kai-shek’s refusal to commit the Y-force. Instead Mountbatten proposed a return to the sea strategy via Malaya and Sumatra and the significant inclusion of Hong Kong within SEAC boundaries. “Louis welshes on entire program,” was Stilwell’s summary. He sent a radio to Marshall urging efforts to prod the Generalissimo into Burma so that the British would have no excuse, and despatched one of his staff, Colonel John Cleveland, to Chungking on the same errand. Cleveland returned with bad news: the Generalissimo still insisted on British landings and commitment to a major campaign in lower Burma before he would move. “We are out on a limb,” Stilwell recorded.

  Chiang’s withholding of the Y-force coupled with his extreme monetary demands reinforced the impression in Washington that he was asking in effect to be paid to fight in Burma. Since the campaign was designed to lift the siege of China and since the Y-force had been American-equipped for that purpose, the obvious course in view of Chiang’s unwillingness to assist in his own rescue would have been to call off the effort. This, however, the United States was not prepared to do because of the need for China in American strategy and the persistent fear of a Chinese collapse. Allowing a note of anger to creep into his tone, Roosevelt all but reached the demand to fish-or-we-shall-cut-bait that Stilwell longed for. “If the Y forces cannot be employed,” Roosevelt telegraphed Chiang on January 14, “it would appear that we should avoid for the present the movement of critical materials to them…and curtail the continuing build-up of stock piles in India.” Convinced of his indispensability, Chiang was not frightened and the Y-force did not move.

  Stilwell did not intend to stay out on a limb. On learning that Mountbatten was sending Wedemeyer at the head of an Anglo-American mission of no less than 17 staff officers including three generals to London and Washington to persuade the Combined Chiefs to adopt AXIOM, he decided to send a delegation of his own to Washington to “checkmate the limies.” Boatner and Davies were selected to go. In the theater Mountbatten summoned a high-level strategy conference to consider his new plan but it had to wait for Stilwell until after Taro had been taken. He emerged on January 31 to go to Delhi for the conference which, however negative from his point of view, at least provided the occasion for his first bath in twenty-nine days. “He damn near went to sleep in the tub,” his son wrote home.

  The sea strategy of AXIOM, of which Wedemeyer had become the leading advocate on the SEAC staff, was a concerted effort by all the antagonists of Stilwell’s road strategy to pull away from a fight in the dangerous, difficult and altogether disagreeable conditions of Burma. The argument of all was that Stilwell was wasting Allied energy and resources on an effort that could not succeed in the current combat season, and if it ever did, could not deliver enough to China to be worth its cost. The British interest was best expressed by Churchill who, as always, was thinking ahead. He disliked intensely the prospect of a large-scale campaign in north Burma, than which it was impossible to choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese. To become “sidetracked and entangled” there, or even in lower Burma, “would deny us our rightful share in a Far East victory”—meaning that the imperial trail lay through Singapore to Hong Kong and he wanted these well in hand before coming to the peace table. Burma, though part of the Empire, led nowhere, except to China which was the wrong place from Britain’s point of view. The British intended to reach Hong Kong by sea before the Chinese were able to reach it by land. “I liked Mountbatten’s new plan,” Churchill finished sweetly.

  The ever-active cohorts of Chennault also opposed the NCAC campaign because they wanted its resources, although how they expected the pipeline, which they also wanted, to get through to China without the campaign is a military mystery. “I warn you solemnly,” intoned the untiring Alsop in his flow of letters to Hopkins, that Stilwell is “arrogantly courting disaster” by forcing a march through a “trackless, foodless, mountainous waste.” Voicing Chiang Kai-shek’s theme, of which Alsop considered himself the spokesman, he predicted Stilwell would be defeated, in which case the Japanese “will cut off China at last from the outside world and then the Chinese resistance will surely collapse and the Chinese base will be lost to us.” Stilwell “is playing soldiers at Ledo,” he wrote again in January. He hopes to “breathe life into the Burma campaign’s corpse….In my opinion he has no more chance of doing so than of flying over the moon.”

&
nbsp; It was also his opinion that the VLR*2 B-29 bomber program which threatened to take priority in resources away from Chennault was “dangerously theoretical” and the choice of Chengtu as its base was a mistaken concession “to General Stilwell’s off-repeated theory that the Japanese can capture the forward airbases in East China whenever they have a mind to.” The easiest way to improve the situation, he urged, would be to “confide the top command to General Wedemeyer who knows how to work with everyone,” besides being young and efficient.

  Enjoying, unlike Chennault, the favor of the War Department, Wedemeyer, aged forty-six, was the new candidate of Stilwell’s opponents. He was an ornament of the General Staff who had served with 15th Infantry at Tientsin in 1930–32. After graduating with honors from Leavenworth he took another General Staff course at the Kriegsakademie (the German War College) in 1936–38 under the Nazi regime, returning from the experience, according to an observer, “with a suggestion of the monocled aplomb which distinguishes the best of the German General Staff.” Tall and imposing, smooth, able and ambitious, he went on to an impressive career in the Planning Division of the War Department and was making an equal impression at SEAC. Not given, as he climbed, to reticence about his virtues, he subsequently vindicated his career in a book which bore his own name and an exclamation point in the title. “Thinks well of himself, that young man,” Stilwell had noted mildly once or twice, feeling as yet no need for a caustic nickname, although inspiration did not fail when the time came.