Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The question must be asked whether Stilwell himself, after all he had experienced, believed the position would offer any possibility of exercising real command. Part of the answer lies in the officer’s code in which he was schooled which does not allow a mission to be considered impossible until a total effort has been made to accomplish it. Like everyone else, he considered China’s situation so alarming as to leave Chiang Kai-shek little choice. He had given up hope of consolidation of divisions and reform of the army but his continuing hope was to obtain some sort of tacit consent for the position of overall commander with power to coordinate all units, which had never existed in China. He thought it would be worth establishing as at least better than the existing situation. He knew that his orders in such a post would be blocked or undercut or passively resisted but he believed that if he could cut the channels of command from Chungking to the field he might be able to function effectively. “We will only have real command in the field,” Pai Ch’ung-hsi once said to him, “when all the telephone lines to Chungking are cut.”

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  In Hengyang the army of Hsueh Yueh, aided by the strenuous efforts of the Fourteenth Air Force, held off the Japanese through July but no help was sent or diversionary attack mounted by the Central Government. Stilwell, who was still in Burma, authorized one shipment of arms to Hsueh Yueh’s forces, which was protested by Central Government representatives in Kweilin as likely to fall into the hands of “bandits.” Thereafter, despite the insistent demands of Chennault and the pleas of his own deputy, General Hearn, in Chungking, Stilwell refused to send more. He maintained, in reply to Hearn, that the decision was up to the Generalissimo who for two years had insisted that everything go to Chennault. If Chennault, who had received 12,000 tons in June, now realized that he could not stop the Japanese, he should so inform the Generalissimo “who can make any proposition he sees fit.”

  Governed by doubts of Hsueh Yueh’s loyalty, Chiang made no proposition. In his turn Hsueh Yueh would make no request of the Central Government because, according to the American staff in Kweilin, “he states it will be refused.” He was now reported to be associated with Chang Fa-kwei, Li Chi-shen and others in the plan for an autonomous government if cut off from Chungking. Hengyang fell on August 8. The sad eternal trek of refugees, with bundles and babies and cooking pots and old people in wheelbarrows and swarms clinging to the last train, moved westward once more. The Japanese, suffering from Fourteenth Air Force attacks on their communications, halted for a month to bring up supplies and then moved on against the next air base in the chain, only 100 miles from Kweilin.

  In desperation Chennault now offered to turn over 1,000 tons of his allotment to arms and ammunition for Hsueh Yueh, but not through the medium of the Central Government. He knew as well as anyone that the defender of the east China air bases was not being supported by the Generalissimo. “I would not be interested in turning this over to the Minister of War,” he acknowledged realistically to Hearn, “because the chances are great that it would never reach Hsueh Yueh.” This notable admission left something of a hole in his thesis that Stilwell was responsible for the disaster in east China through his failure to supply arms. But a bold polemicist is a disregarder of holes. Chennault, assisted by the excited voice of Alsop, continued to pursue his theme which, when the time came, provided the Generalissimo with his official excuse.

  Stilwell gave them every help. For a year his efforts to equip the Y-force and prepare an effective 30 divisions on the ground had been sacrificed, at Chiang’s insistence implemented by Roosevelt, to Chennault’s priority. He was not now, when Chennault’s claims were proved vain, going to allot arms in order to cover up the Chennault-Chiang error; he wanted the error to be made plain. He did not believe in any case, though Hsueh Yueh was a genuine fighter, that help to him now would be effective. If Hsueh had not been able to hold Changsha, there was no reason to suppose he would do better at Hengyang, especially under the overall direction of Chiang Kai-shek. Stilwell had no trust whatever in Chiang’s generalship which he considered politically motivated and militarily contemptible and he was determined that American arms should be used for fighting the Japanese only where there was some American control. He rejected Chennault’s proposal to turn over 1,000 tons to Hsueh Yueh. Until a proposition came from the Generalissimo, he told Hearn harshly, “let them stew.”

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  On July 30, in what was to prove a final departure, he left Burma for Kandy. While the question of his appointment to command in China hung fire, he was to take command of SEAC during the absence of the Supremo in London. No one had expected Stilwell to accept the official invitation to assume his place as Deputy SAC (“Sad Sac” as of course he called it), and the announcement that he actually intended to do so aroused in Kandy the emotions of Rome awaiting Alaric the Hun. Stilwell knew that one of Mountbatten’s objectives in London was to replace him as Deputy but this did not worry him unduly. “At one time or another all the Best People have attempted to get the can attached, but have somehow slipped up on it—up to now anyway.” His purpose in going among the “Kandy Kids” was no more sinister than the need for a rest which he would not get in Chungking. Knowing from Japanese prisoners that the defense of Myitkyina was nearing its end, with the remnant of defenders living on half a bowl of rice a day, he could go in good conscience.

  Met at the airfield by the Supremo’s black Cadillac with Allied flags flying, he said, “Get me a jeep.” With his leg hanging over the side in what seemed to some a petty and unnecessary show of disdain, he drove up the mountain road to Kandy preceded by the Cadillac with the luggage. He joined Mountbatten at his residence, the King’s Pavilion, for a farewell lunch, remarking afterwards, “I’ve got to quit eating with Louis. I actually like those rum cocktails.” Two days later at 3:45 on the afternoon of August 3 Myitkyina fell after a siege of 78 days. “Over at last,” Stilwell wrote next morning. “Thank God. Not a worry in the world this a.m. For five minutes anyway.”

  Of all the comments on the event the most interesting was that of Brooke in London: “It is clear, now that Stilwell has led us down to Myitkyina, we shall have to go on fighting in Burma.”

  After north Burma Stilwell found Ceylon a paradise. Kandy was 2,000 feet up and beyond it at 7,000 feet was the summer hill station of Newara Eliya in clean and bracing air that reminded him of Yellowstone, with waterfalls everywhere, deep and distant views, cypress trees, a lake and Easter lilies growing wild. Avoiding the King’s Pavilion—a miniature white palace set among lily ponds, hibiscus trees, an orchid garden with parading white peacocks, and a nine-hole golf course—Stilwell made his residence in an American officers’ bungalow. Apart from the physical comforts, he did not find his new command congenial. The SEAC staff numbered 3,000 including a band of 30 musicians and motorcycle outriders for the Cadillac. The Officers’ Club provided comfortable leather chairs, a good library with the English newspapers, and ubiquitous barefooted servants. Staff officers looked “sleek, smart and prosperous” to an English former civilian, but he too found “something wrong with Headquarters at Kandy…I always felt half asleep.”

  Every afternoon a full-dress meeting was held of heads of departments and sections with a situation report on every theater of the war. Until Imphal and Myitkyina tumbled the British into Burma, the theme had been global strategy which meant fighting somewhere else next year. Now the meetings concerned the enlarged campaign in Burma, directed southward toward Mandalay. With the prospect of ever-lengthening lines of supply, Mountbatten did not think he could advance beyond Mandalay and so proposed an amphibious assault on Rangoon (BUCCANEER revived) which should then extend northward to join the other forces in the center. To obtain the necessary landing craft and other means was the main purpose of his journey to London. Churchill was now willing to abandon all thought of Sumatra and turn his ever-fresh enthusiasm back to Rangoon as a preliminary to attack on Singapore, “the supreme British objective.”

  Stilwell took no interes
t in staff planning. Logistics were for others to take care of. When a campaign or operation was in question he would dash off a rapid tactical plan without charts or appendices on the theory “that we all know where we want to go anyway.” At Kandy he made no effort to conceal his boredom and impatience with the endless conferences over which he was supposed to preside. They appeared in his diary as “terrible” or “dumb” or “sad” or “crappier than usual” or “zero.” “I never felt at ease in such make-believe acts.” He took an impish pleasure, however, in the concept of himself as military governor of a British colony (Burma) and enjoyed contemplating all kinds of orders he might issue—“freeing the Kachins, etc.”

  On August 7 his promotion to full general became official, with the fourth star pinned on him by Merrill. “I never signed a commission which has given me greater satisfaction,” Stimson wrote. Congratulations from a regiment of the NCAC said there was nothing comparable to “your consummate achievement in this theater which was taken for granted impossible,” except in the Iliad.

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  In July when developments in China looked “very black,” Stilwell wrote that if the crisis “were just sufficient to get rid of Peanut without entirely wrecking the ship, it would be worth it.” For a brief moment after the fall of Hengyang there appeared to be a chance. On August 9 Li Chi-shen sent an emissary to Arthur Ringwalt, the American Consul in Kweilin, to say he intended to set up an independent government in Kwangtung and Fukien accompanied by a public demand for the resignation of Chiang Kai-shek. Claiming to dispose of a force of six to eight divisions, he wished to open negotiations toward cooperation with a U.S. landing on the China coast. Ringwalt believed the message should be given serious consideration for if Li’s group were to gain the support of the Communist and democratic parties, and the Central Government were to collapse in consequence, “the result may not be an unmitigated evil to China and to the cause of the allied nations.”

  “Hooray for crime!” Stilwell commented on being notified of this development, but long acquaintance with the luckless southern secessionist efforts warned against raising his hopes or leaping in to offer encouragement. He sent Timberman to Kweilin to investigate under instructions that gave no room for adventure: “Our policy is to lay off the internal affairs of China….Listen to any proposition that may be made but do not make any commitments nor even express any opinion. Just say you will forward any messages proposed.” Equally cautious, Gauss believed the Li Chi-shen inquiry was a feeler to find out whether the United States would support such a movement. He advised Ringwalt to stay aloof.

  The question in all minds was how extensive was Li’s support and whether the local Communists were likely to join him. Though it represented “genuine bitter opposition,” according to Consul Langdon in Kunming, the effort lacked cohesion, leadership and sufficient military power and he did not think it would have “any noticeable effect on the Generalissimo’s willingness to reform his Government.” The non-Communist opposition of provincial warlords and democratic groups was unlikely, he thought, to succeed and even if it did it would be in a “Kerensky” position and soon overthrown by the Communists. Timberman came to much the same conclusion. He found the Communists were not involved, nor was Pai Ch’ung-hsi who remained loyal to the Central Government and had already moved his family out of Kweilin to the west “with several freight-car loads of personal effects.” He judged Li Chi-shen’s movement “too small for us to do more than continue our present policy of receptive observation.” Gauss in his report concurred in this estimate. The flare in the south offered the United States no option.

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  At this time the reports of the first foreigners to visit the Communist region since the war were made known. They were enthusiastic. The journalists were disposed to be friendly because they were so thoroughly disgusted with the frustration of their profession in Chungking: the autocratic censorship, the endless promises and evasions, and the most exasperating Chinese habit of all—the bland declaration as fact of what both the declarer and listener know to be nonsense. Released from the miasma of Kuomintang China, they were in a mood to find a new world and they did. They were struck first by the physical appearance of the people, “better fed, huskier and more energetic than in other parts of China,” and by their transformation of the once barren land of north Shensi into an area of intensive cultivation and stockbreeding. By this reclamation process the Communist soldiery made themselves self-supporting, with no need to live off the peasantry. As the strongest single factor in their favor in local eyes, this was a point stressed by all the correspondents.

  Industrial achievement through the organization of handicrafts and workshops was no less impressive. With its home-made products and independent subsistence, Yenan appeared as a “magnificent symbol of the tenacity and determination” of its people. The correspondents all bought new coats and suits tailored for them from locally woven tweeds, discovering afterwards that their tailor was a member of the Supreme People’s Council. Members of the Military Observers Mission which reached Yenan on July 23 had their pictures taken in the heavy, substantial made-to-order uniforms of the 8th Route Army whose soldiers, according to the Times, were “among the best-clothed and best-fed the writer has seen anywhere in China.” Hard evidence of guerilla warfare was found in the presence of several hundred Japanese prisoners. No one had ever seen the prisoners claimed by the Kuomintang except for a token group which was always the same, like the captured helmets. It seemed obvious to the visitors that the Communist armies, like the Yugoslav partisans, would be “valuable allies” in the war whose proper use would speed up victory. Any Allied commander, declared Stein in the Monitor, “would be proud to command those tough, well-fed, hardened troops.”

  Although the reports were heavily censored in Chungking and in some cases killed in toto, the tone of enthusiasm could not be squeezed out. The correspondents humanized the Communist leaders for their readers, telling how Mao had worked his way through school; how Kao Kang, chief of the Party’s Northwest Bureau, was the son of a poor peasant beaten to death by the bailiffs of a Shensi militarist because he had failed to pay the tax on his donkey; how Wang Chen, a “dashing brilliant” brigade commander, had once been a fireman on the Peking-Hankow Railway. They told of doctors, students, university teachers and former YMCA secretaries all working “at a high pitch for their country with the conviction that the ways adopted here are right.” In the fall when a second group of journalists came, they reported plentiful harvests and fruit in abundance, pears and grapes, pumpkins and tomatoes, buckwheat, millet, cotton and tobacco. Brooks Atkinson happily described local theatricals and unrationed gasoline for the ten trucks of Yenan and the Times obliged him with a friendly headline, “YENAN, A CHINESE WONDERLAND CITY.” The journalists reported what they saw and heard and the saddest thing about it, in the long, cruel light of history, was that it was all true.

  Reporting for the DIXIE Mission, Service was no less impressed. He found morale high and the people serious with a sense of mission and a purposeful program under competent leadership. Coolies read newspapers, recruits marched without escort, there were no gendarmes, no bureaucracy, none of the “clap-trap of Chungking” and none of its defeatism. There was a certain smugness and self-righteous consciousness of a cause but no feeling of restraint or suppression. There was self-confidence, self-respect, an emphasis on relations with the common people and such impetus to the program, tied so closely to the people, “that it will not easily be killed.”

  The DIXIE Mission, which consisted of nine members representing the Air Corps, Medical Corps, Signal Corps and Infantry and was followed a month later by a second contingent, was sent to observe with a purpose: to evaluate the Communist potential for military collaboration against the Japanese. They were also instructed to assess “the most effective means of assisting the Communists to increase the value of their war effort.” This meant American aid and an American relationship, which was exactly what Chiang Kai-
shek feared and the reason he had done his best to obstruct the mission.

  Mao Tse-tung was also thinking of American aid. He made it plain that he looked forward to American landings in China. If the Americans failed to land, it would be unfortunate for China, he said. “The Kuomintang will continue as the Government—without being able to be the Government.”

  In the talks of Barrett and Service with Mao, Chou En-lai, Lin Piao, Yeh Chien-ying and Chu Teh, the Communists’ theme was that the Kuomintang was in the “dying throes” of incapacity while the Communists had established a viable government and could propose useful cooperation with the Americans under an “Allied” command rather than under a “bankrupt” Kuomintang command. They made no reference to fighting under Stilwell’s command nor asked that any such proposal be conveyed to him; indeed it was Colonel Barrett’s impression that “they never seemed much interested in General Stilwell.”

  They talked in terms of coalition not revolution. Their stated aim at this time was a return to the united front with representation on a national council, release of the blockade and freedom to maintain their own regime in their own areas while engaged in a common if not a joint effort against Japan. This concept did not include allegiance to the Central Government nor acceptance of its authority as stipulated by Chiang Kai-shek.

  The Chinese Communists of 1944 did not appear alarming, but on the contrary, like most challengers who have yet to succeed, rather attractive. In their rough and rumpled clothes, their earnest talk, their hard work and simple life, their energy, vitality and sincerity, they were a refreshing contrast to the world of the Kuomintang. That was their chief charm. In the absence of war effort by the Central Government especially after ICHIGO, it began to be taken for granted by Americans that the United States would have to cooperate with the Communists. As soldiers they looked useful. They were “better men physically,” as General Dorn later testified, “better fed, better clothed…with better morale than the Nationalist troops.” Their leaders on the whole appeared more able, less corrupt, fundamentally stronger men than those of the Kuomintang.