Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Bitter with a sense of betrayal and broken promises, without will to fight and only mistrust and hatred of the theater commander in its place, they were a ruined unit with no thought but to get out of Myitkyina and out of Burma. The sick were being evacuated at the rate of 75–100 a day, the criterion being a fever of 102 for three consecutive days, but a shell of the unit was held in place. As an Allied commander Stilwell felt he could not withdraw the Americans while keeping the Chinese and Chindits in the fight. He was engaged in a fierce broil with Lentaigne throughout this period because the Chindit units, dwindled to exhausted remnants like GALAHAD, were insisting on withdrawal and in one case had given up a position Stilwell considered essential. While angrily refusing to let them withdraw, he could not treat the Americans differently. The last of GALAHAD, called to stem a Japanese counterattack, fell asleep under fire and Colonel McGee, their commander, fainted three times while directing the engagement. When Stilwell came to investigate, one enlisted man said regretfully afterwards, “I had him in my rifle sights. I coulda squeezed one off and no one woulda known it wasn’t a Jap that got the son of a bitch.”

  At one time or another Stilwell tried three different American commanders as successor to Merrill. For most of the time General Boatner was in charge. Food and supplies during June were down to a minimum because Japanese mortars, pounding the field, interrupted the flights of the transports. At times no more than a day’s rations were on hand. For a period of crisis early in the month it appeared that the Japanese might even recapture the airfield. Stilwell called in Generals Hu Su and Pan Yu-kan, commanders of the units from the 30th and 50th Divisions, and told them “under no circumstances would they retreat one step.” To lose Myitkyina now would have been unendurable. Reluctant to ask for more Chinese casualties, he ordered in two battalions of Engineers from the Road, following the Leavenworth principle that recognizes Combat Engineers as Infantry reserve in emergency. Though nominally Combat Engineers, the road-builders had not held a rifle since basic training and proved initially worthless. Two battalions of replacements for GALAHAD, just arrived in India from the United States and rushed to Myitkyina without training, were no better. “They are in many cases simply terrified of the Japs,” reported Boatner; they would not follow their officers, refused to attack and ran under fire.

  To Stilwell, out at the end of the line in CBI, U.S. troops had seemed to promise reliable action. “Terrible letter from Boatner,” he wrote, and added one of the most poignant lines of the diary: “US troops shaky. Hard to believe.” To maintain an American presence, and conscious that the Chinese had taken a far higher rate of direct combat casualties than the Americans, he now gave orders for return to the front of all GALAHAD convalescents fit for field duty. This was the last whiplash. To everyone in the 5307th his name by now, according to Ogburn, was “as a red flag to a bull” and to Ogburn himself Stilwell seemed “bloodless and utterly coldhearted, without a drop of human kindness.” Understandable from the GALAHAD point of view, it was a judgment, considering Stilwell’s real nature, that can only be reckoned as one more of the tragedies of CBI. Ravdin of the 20th General Hospital, though he disputed Stilwell’s order to return the GALAHAD evacuees to duty, nevertheless considered him a commander who “thought more of his men than any commanding general I have ever known.” In Yank, the soldiers’ newspaper, he appeared within four months of GALAHAD’s agony as “The GI’s Favorite” who had canceled the rule against pets for GIs in his theater (“It’s unnatural for a soldier not to have pets”) and banned the “officers only” signs from restaurants and cafes and forbidden officers to date enlisted WACS in order to give GIs a chance. His record was too plain to make him out a Patton.

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  In China the situation looked ominous under the impact of a new and menacing Japanese offensive. The Generalissimo, still thoroughly persuaded of Chennault’s thesis that the air force could fight his war and defend the air bases, summoned Stilwell “immediately to Chungking on June 3 to demand more planes, supplies and fuel for the Fourteenth Air Force. Required to face the danger that was soon to become enveloping, Stilwell hurried to the capital for two days, June 4–5, and returned as soon as he could to Burma’s portion of “worry, worry, worry.” General Arms, hurriedly summoned from Kunming, organized basic training behind the lines for the Engineers and GALAHAD replacements. Worked in three shifts of eight hours each to train, fight and sleep, they were pulled together and hardened. The grip on Myitkyina was holding but “The wear and tear on the nerves continues. Are we attempting too much? Can they hold us? Is there a surprise ready? Counterattack? Will our people stick it out? Casualties too heavy? I can tell I’ve nearly had enough of this….”

  It was in the midst of these concerns that Mountbatten raised the affair of Noel Coward, which if not quite on the global strategy level was evidently a matter of serious portent. Coward was making a tour of the Burma front and the Supremo with the kindest intent wanted to share his entertainments with the U.S. forces. A request for transportation for the actor and his troupe to the Ledo front had been refused by Stilwell, either from simple prejudice or perhaps on the theory that Coward’s talents would not be appreciated by Chinese and American GIs, but in any case with wounding effect on Mountbatten. “I consider this a slam in the face,” he complained to General Wheeler and expressed his resentment in a letter to Stilwell. Wheeler suggested an expression of regret from Stilwell and messages thickened between Kandy and Shaduzup. In the end Coward made his way to Ledo where the reception of his first performance was reportedly “completely flat”; the audience for the second at the 20th General Hospital was “directed to show expressions of approval.” “If any more piano players start this way,” Stilwell radioed to Sultan, “you know what to do with the piano.”

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  In final unbelievable reality the Y-force had jumped off on May 11 and was inching its way over 10,000-foot mountains and the gorges of the Salween toward Japanese-occupied Lungling on the old Burma Road. The route lay along a spur of the Himalayan range, the highest battleground in the world. The campaign was a mixture of extraordinary human exertion and the manifold debilities and overcaution of the Chinese Army. All the energy and endlessly compliant endurance of the men and the vigor and boldness of many of the officers were vitiated by the inertia and unwillingness that seeped down from the top. All the reluctance, delays and passivity could be crystallized in the unending problem of replacements. Ninety-five thousand had been promised by the spring of 1944; up to May 23,000 had been furnished and then replacements stopped. When the Chinese Expeditionary Force, as the Y-force was now called, went into action it was 115,000 under its table-of-organization strength and was to suffer an attrition rate during the campaign of over 5,000 a month.

  “They’ve done well at last,” Dorn wrote to Stilwell when after the long postponement the CEF, accompanied by American liaison officers and medical teams, crossed the rushing Salween on bamboo rafts and rubber boats. The river was 60 feet deep at the two crossings and full of whirlpools. In a thousand years of occupation, Hsiao I-shu said, the Chinese had never been able to cross the river with troops at these two places. Gaining surprise, the Force was out of the gorge and had climbed the cold cloud-covered mountains before the Japanese knew of their advent. “There was even enthusiasm,” Dorn wrote. Wei Li-huang, the Commanding General, “pounded the table and Hsiao yelled at the commanders…and is doing his damndest.” But even Wei and Hsiao “cannot inject what it takes into some of these birds.” He reported 32,000 men across the river on the first day, moving thousands of pack horses, pack cows, mules and transport coolies up the fearful incline in pouring rain. “I have never seen such a cheerful bunch of men.” Wherever he passed, “the whole mob started yelling Ting-hao, Hello, Okay, and other Americanized expressions which have become passwords in the CEF.” Troops who could be cheerful under such conditions and march and keep marching over the damned mountains, “can do anything if only given the breaks in leadership and e
quipment.”

  Once more, however, results were dispiriting. The Chinese took Lungling on June 10 and a week later were driven out by a determined Japanese counterattack more successful than that at Myitkyina. Forces were reassembled for another attempt. Possession of Lungling was essential to open the passage from Burma to China and permit Stilwell’s troops to come through once Myitkyina was taken. Although the CEF outnumbered the enemy by about ten to one it was two months before Lungling was reentered.

  Chiang Kai-shek had been sufficiently impressed by the coup at Myitkyina to loosen the reins in Burma. Sun Li-jen suddenly bounded forward and led his troops through a month of hard aggressive fighting to the capture of Kamaing on June 16. “Took a nap,” Stilwell recorded for the first time. “I needed it….We are just making the grade, every-time and by an eyelash.” Ten days later, with Stilwell viciously prodding the worn remnant of the 77th Chindit Brigade into simultaneous advance from the south, Mogaung was taken, causing a renewed outburst of the public-relations war over rival claims for credit.

  The NCAC stood at last astride the railroad at the entrance to the Irrawaddy valley. Crippled by 50 percent casualties, the Japanese 18th Division was reduced to a shattered 3,000 who, with some 2,000 more from other regiments, succeeded in withdrawing toward Mandalay. Except for the short gap between Mogaung and Myitkyina, north Burma as far as the Irrawaddy was now regained with the Ledo Road following on the heels of the advance. Closure of the remaining gap between the NCAC and the CEF was still to be achieved and depended on whether offensive impetus could be maintained.

  At Myitkyina attrition was slowly weakening the Japanese defense and the Allied grasp was gradually being extended. On the borders of India the Japanese gamble had failed—although the fight went on—when Kohima was relieved and communications restored between Imphal and the Dimapur Road at the end of April. General Mutaguchi’s troops were left at the end of jungle trails without supply arrangements and with the monsoon pouring down. They fought on while they died of starvation and disease. By the end of June the fanatic offensive had crumbled into rain-soaked and putrefying chaos. When retreat was finally ordered in mid-July Japanese casualties including ill and wounded had reached 85 to 90 percent and the dead numbered 65,000 out of the original 155,000. On these same trails the refugees of the exodus of 1942 had dropped and died, now to be covered by the rotting corpses of their conquerors. The senseless tides of war rolled and receded impersonally over the shadowed uplands of Burma.

  In China the thrust of the Japanese offensive was strong: Changsha which had three times withstood attack in the past fell without a fight on June 18; Hengyang, first in the chain of American air bases, was under siege. Washington was alarmed. A “message from George” with a proposal of unusual dimensions reached Stilwell on July 2. His new task was at hand.

  * * *

  *1 Pronounced Mit-chi-nah.

  *2 Very Long Range.

  *3 The first convoy over the completed Road was to enter China on January 28, 1945, exactly one year minus three days from the day Wedemeyer made his prediction.

  18

  “The Future of All Asia Is at Stake” June–September 1944

  DURING THE MONTHS when Stilwell was in Burma, China’s situation had degenerated alarmingly from the effects of civic and economic paralysis, renewed Japanese penetration, and rising disunity and discontent. Dissatisfaction with the regime had erupted in the previous December, when Chiang Kai-shek was in Cairo, in a conspiracy of younger officers to enforce the removal, not of Chiang himself, but of Ho Ying-chin, Tai Li, Dr. Kung, the Chen brothers and senior civil and military officials considered guilty of corruption and inefficiency. Uncovered by Tai Li’s agents before it could accomplish anything, the Young Generals’ Plot, as it became known, was said to have involved between 200 and 600 officers and to have resulted in the execution of 16 generals. Trapped in the narrow circle of the very few figures whom he trusted, of whom Kung and Ho were the two most important, Chiang took no measures to respond to the grievances expressed by the movement.

  From January to June reports from American foreign service officers in posts from Kunming and Kweilin to Sian and Lanchow were filled with mounting evidence of deterioration and dissidence. Their burden was that China was becoming progressively demoralized, official life infected by unprecedented corruption, the army ineffective and the Government engaged in a prolonged suicide in which the only hold on life was preparation for civil war against the Communists. Under the long strains of war and occupation, the paste of unity was cracking and the pattern of warlord separatism reappearing. The Kwangsi-Kwangtung faction had revived under the leadership of two early Kuomintang leaders of always uncertain allegiance, Yu Han-mou and Chang Fa-kwei, joined or possibly exceeded in discontent by a figure of great influence in the southern provinces, Marshal Li Chi-shen. Provincial factions of Szechwan and Yunnan were said to be drawing together with the Kwangsi-Kwangtung group toward a possible autonomous regime in the event of collapse at Chungking. Disaffection was openly expressed at the headquarters of Hsueh Yueh, Commander of the Ninth War Zone in the rice-bowl region of Hunan. Groups in Chengtu were agitating for reform of the Central Government along democratic lines. In Yunnan the Government was denounced, according to a consular report, as “a clique almost completely lacking in popular support.” In the north restlessness was reported among former warlords who had been insurgents before and could be again, among them the “Model Governor,” Yen Hsi-shan, for whom Stilwell had built his first road in 1921.

  The dismal chorus of the American foreign service reports showed the economy to be stagnating owing to the Government’s effort to control inflation by a policy of forced purchase at prices barely one-third the cost of production. Seven out of every eight mines in Kwangsi had closed down as had 14 of the 18 iron foundries in Chungking. Little effort had been made to organize workable transportation, to carry out rationing, or to regulate tax collecting which through corruption and inefficiency now delivered no more than one third of its revenues to the Central Government. Conscription pressed as heavily as ever upon the peasant, trees and livestock were confiscated, and enforced grain quotas added to the limitless burden of legal and illegal taxes. Derelict soldiers, too starved or ill to keep up with their units and too far from home to find succor, could be seen along the roads hunched over their begging bowls in silent misery. Laborers impressed to build the airfields worked under armed guard, were seldom paid and ate only if their families lived near enough to bring them food. Many were soldiers from provincial armies scheduled for reduction and were fed so little that they usually died. On the sick body of the economy officials profiteered luxuriously through an unimaginable variety of grafts and rackets. After six months in Chengtu an American captain confessed, “I’d like to get a year’s leave of absence from the Army to organize a really efficient revolution in this country.”

  Foreign correspondents in their chronic feud with the censorship felt the same way. In April they addressed a joint protest to Chiang Kai-shek stating that although permitted to send stories that created an idealized portrait of China, they were prevented from writing anything that implied criticism of the Government or that disclosed “the full gravity of China’s economic situation” or that questioned in any way “the direction, condition or use of the Chinese armies,” and that it was impossible to function as responsible journalists unless the policy were liberalized. Chiang’s answer was merely that reports that were not detrimental to China’s resistance would be given every consideration.

  In Chungking discontent was surfacing through the crust of official suppression. Chang Lan, former Governor of Szechwan and President of the Federation of Democratic Parties, boldly published a pamphlet protesting the Government’s dictatorship. Mme. Sun Yat-sen, always a political foe of her family, was now outspoken in criticism, and even the approved newspapers were calling for democratic reforms. The same call was loud in Kunming where slogans of dissent appeared on the walls and students
paraded with placards and petitions. Through it all Chiang’s unresponsiveness appeared baffling and incredible. His failure at the 12th Plenary Session of the Central Executive Committee in May to take any reform measures was considered by many Chinese to mark the “turning point in the situation in China,” according to a report by Gauss on June 8. From here on, the Ambassador warned, the tide of political unrest could be expected to rise.

  Into this situation a new Japanese offensive, code-named ICHIGO, brought havoc. The war by now had turned against Japan. Her Western enemy was advancing implacably toward her across the Pacific. The hubris that had struck at Pearl Harbor and seized an empire from Mukden to Singapore was meeting its classic fate. Japan’s reach had exceeded her grasp, but though the edges crumbled, she was not going to let go in China. The overall aim of ICHIGO was to consolidate Japan’s position in the mainland by fusing a solid line of communications from Tientsin to Canton, and by eliminating the American air bases. Indirectly it may have represented one last effort to bring about a surrender of the Chinese Government.

  The first phase began in April in a drive down from the Yellow River against the gap in the Peking-Hankow Railway which the Japanese had so far not occupied. The 34 Chinese divisions in Honan, including some reputed to be among the Government’s best, showed little evidence, according to a Fourteenth Air Force intelligence report, “of either plan or capability to hamper Japanese movement.” They melted away before the enemy, leaving Honan in chaos with homes looted down to their last cooking pots by bands of wandering soldiers, and peasants turned bandit with captured arms as in the days of the Red Spears of 1927. In the wake of the collapse Communist units from neighboring Shansi filtered in. An Embassy observer in Sian reported that the inhabitants expected the Communists to be in control by the time the Japanese were expelled and “It would not seem strange if they turned out to be right.”