Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45
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Stilwell snorted when he learned the terms of Marshall’s mission from General Byroade who was to accompany Marshall as his chief assistant. Held by the Pearl Harbor hearings until the last minute before departure, Marshall sent Byroade, a veteran of CBI, to ask Stilwell’s advice. Stilwell asked what were Marshall’s instructions and concluded that the mission would not succeed. Once Chiang Kai-shek sensed the situation he would merely become more intransigent. “Don’t you realize the Chinese respect only power?” he said to Byroade several times in the course of the conversation. Later as he watched the troubles develop, he summed up the Marshall mission in one of his sharp, apt phrases: “But what did they expect? George Marshall can’t walk on water.”
The comment was written in a letter of April 6, 1946, which by virtue of another remark it contained was to become notorious. “Isn’t Manchuria a spectacle?” Stilwell wrote. Then followed the comment about Marshall, and then the sentence, “It makes me itch to throw down my shovel and get over there and shoulder a rifle with Chu Teh.”*1 The itch represented for Stilwell, as for so many others, an inclination toward the Chinese Communists that was simply the obverse of disgust with the Kuomintang. His casual remark tossed off in a private letter was seized upon by extremists of both left and right and made the foundation of a marvelous ideological structure purporting to demonstrate his allegiance to Yenan. Promoted by Alsop, the structure was to reach a peak of creative imagination in testimony given by General Chennault to a Congressional investigating committee in 1952. He said that in July 1945 Stilwell proposed to take the Tenth Army (scheduled for the invasion of Japan) to “the coast north of Shanghai, north of the Shensi River [sic],” where he would arm 200,000 or 300,000 Communists and lead them south to capture Shanghai. In short, in the most immense and fearsome operation of the war, he credited Stilwell with planning all on his own to lead half the invasion fleet to another destination, presumably leaving the attack on Japan to be carried out by the Eighth Army alone. Only the unlimited accusations of the McCarthy era combining with the relentless animus of Alsop and Chennault could have produced this remarkable fiction.
While in command at San Francisco Stilwell kept his connection with the Weapons Board and in this capacity was sent as an observer of the two tests of atomic bomb effects at Bikini in the Marshall Islands in July 1946. On his return after a month’s absence Win noticed a physical change in him: he appeared shrunk and unwell and complained of lack of energy. During the remainder of the summer he suffered from chills, occasional dizziness and bouts of exhaustion, several times falling asleep in a chair. Medical tests discovered “something suspicion in my liver.” The next day, as if in defiance, he walked miles—for the last time. On September 28 he entered Letterman General Hospital and on October 3 underwent an abdominal operation which disclosed cancer of the stomach with metasteses to the liver in a more advanced stage than suspected. It had obviously been in his system for a long time. He had had no pain, which mystified the doctors.
It was known that although he had the DSC, DSM and Legion of Merit, his one wish was for the Combat Infantryman Badge, a simple pin with a wreathed rifle generally reserved for the enlisted foot soldier who proved himself under fire. Award of the badge to General Stilwell was announced on October 11 by Under Secretary of War Patterson who brought it in person to San Francisco. It was not, however, pinned on in a bedside ceremony lest Stilwell realize that he was dying. He slept during most of the last two days, woke briefly to ask the nurse, “Say, isn’t this Saturday?” (it was), and died in his sleep shortly after noon on October 12, 1946.
According to his wish no public funeral was held; his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Pacific. In the flow of comment and tribute, editorials referred again and again to his “I claim we took a hell of a beating” as evidence of “tough-mindedness” and a refusal to pretend. Emphasis was on the “Vinegar Joe” who had captured the public imagination as had only a handful of military men, according to the Atlanta Constitution, in the life of the nation. “They’ll have a hell of a time replacing him,” was General Merrill’s succinct summary.
There was little assessment of his role in China where the confusion and flux of the hour allowed no perspective. The nearest was Colonel Carlson’s characteristic superlative, “No more devoted friend of the Chinese people has ever appeared on the pages of history.” Chiang Kai-shek marked the passing of his great detractor by a very small Christian service in a private home in Nanking with no prior publicity or announcement and only the American Ambassador, John Leighton Stuart, and a few invited Americans, but no Chinese, in attendance. To those present it seemed a sad, mean ceremony for the man who had commanded the American war effort in China, but its very inadequacy suggested that Stilwell’s ideas for the army had gathered too strong a following for the Generalissimo’s comfort.
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Stilwell died too soon to see his prescription to “get out” accepted. Marshall’s efforts proved fruitless. He could neither unite the contenders nor, when that failed, sufficiently reinvigorate the Central Government to enable it to take hold. In the year after V-J Day between 400,000 and 500,000 Nationalist troops were ferried by American agency to Shanghai, Nanking and key cities in Manchuria and north China; 50,000 American Marines were landed to hold ports, coal mines and railroad centers; $600,000,000 of Lend-Lease arms and ammunition and other matériel was supplied and economic assistance extended. No infusion was enough because none was used effectively. In the effort to compel Chiang Kai-shek to cease hostilities which he could not win, Marshall shut off the supply of arms to the Nationalists in July 1946, without effect. The Generalissimo, as Marshall said later in echo of a spry small ghost, “simply does not know what is going on.” Supported by a “dominant group of reactionaries” in the Kuomintang who frankly stated their belief that cooperation with the Communists was inconceivable and that only force could settle the issue, he remained recalcitrant, counting on American support whatever happened. The dominant group among the Communists was equally unwilling to try for a settlement. Though numerically inferior in armed forces, they counted on economic collapse accelerated by guerilla warfare to bring down the Government. In contrast to the Kuomintang, they were organized, Marshall noticed, from the grass roots up “with the strength that gives them in public support.”
On October 1, 1946, Marshall notified the Generalissimo who had launched an offensive toward Kalgan that he would discontinue mediation unless a basis for agreement with the Communists were found without delay. No concessions were proposed. In December Marshall warned Chiang in person that the Communists were too strong to be defeated militarily and that negotiations offered the only way to avert the collapse of China’s economy. Chiang was impervious to the advice. That month, after a year in China, Marshall notified Truman that his mission had failed. He was recalled early in January 1947 to become Secretary of State. Washington announced termination of the effort to mediate a settlement and withdrawal of American forces. Within a year and a half of victory in the Far East, the goal it had been meant to achieve had receded beyond reach, in mockery of the American effort.
As Secretary of State, Marshall remained convinced that the Kuomintang could not win the civil war without American military intervention. To this he was steadily and unalterably opposed, nor was there any public sentiment calling for it. Under the rising heat of political pressure, demands for every other kind of help were strident. Arms sales to the Nationalists were resumed, various missions were sent and $400,000,000 of economic assistance was extended by the China Aid Act of 1948. Denounced by the Communists as a useless prolonging of the civil war, this aid was used to generate a wave of anti-American feeling in the weary populace. Chiang’s forces under “the world’s worst leadership” (in the words of General Barr, chief of a new Army Advisory Group) lost crucial battles; entire divisions defected to the Communists; economic chaos increased popular detestation of the discredited Kuomintang. In October 1948 the Generalissimo declare
d that the salvation of Asia depended on China and he hoped “the American people and their statesmen will dedicate their lives to this task.” Madame came to Washington to ask for a new aid program of $3 billion over three years and a declaration of American determination to defeat Communism.
There was no support now that could have been effective. Born of the imperfect Revolution of 1911, crippled by the Japanese before it was fully established, and renegade to its origins, the Kuomintang had spent its mandate in one generation. In December 1948 the Communists took Hsuchow, “the place generals must capture to control the sky.” In April 1949 their forces swept across the Yangtze. In ensuing weeks the Generalissimo’s Government, followed by some two million adherents, decamped to Formosa where it successfully established itself with American support. The Middle Kingdom was left to the ungentle reign of a New Revolution.
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Would the fate of China have been different if Stilwell had been allowed to reform the army and create an effective combat force of 90 divisions? “I myself firmly believe,” wrote General William R. Peers, who as a colonel had served as chief of the OSS guerilla unit in Burma, “that had Stilwell’s plan for equipping, organizing and training the Chinese ground forces been carried through to completion, Japanese infantry would not have been able to overrun the air bases in south China in 1944…nor would the Chinese Communist ground troops have achieved their ends after the war with the Japanese was over.”
This assumption might have been true if Asia were clay in the hands of the West. But the “regenerative idea,” Stilwell’s or another’s, could not be imposed from outside. The Kuomintang military structure could not be reformed without reform of the system from which it sprang and, as Stilwell himself recognized, to reform such a system “it must be torn to pieces.”
In great things, wrote Erasmus, it is enough to have tried. Stilwell’s mission was America’s supreme try in China. He made the maximum effort because his temperament permitted no less; he never slackened and he never gave up. Yet the mission failed in its ultimate purpose because the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese. Combat efficiency and the offensive spirit, like the Christianity and democracy offered by missionaries and foreign advisers, were not indigenous demands of the society and culture to which they were brought. Even the Yellow River Road that Stilwell built in 1921 had disappeared twelve years later. China was a problem for which there was no American solution. The American effort to sustain the status quo could not supply an outworn government with strength and stability or popular support. It could not hold up a husk nor long delay the cyclical passing of the mandate of heaven. In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.
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*1 The addressee is unknown. The letter in Stilwell’s handwriting came into the possession of Johannes Steel, a pro-Communist free-lance journalist. After Stilwell’s death he published it in photostat, with the name of the addressee torn out, in the first issue (January 1947) of his newsletter, Report on World Affairs. The letter was given notoriety by Joseph Alsop, who made much of Stilwell’s reference to Chu Teh in testimony before the Senate Internal Security hearings in 1951.
Photo Insert
Joseph W. Stilwell as a cadet at West Point.
Stilwell’s fiancée, Winifred A. Smith, in 1908.
Second Lieutenant Stilwell, right, in the Philippines, 1905.
First Lieutenant Stilwell, extreme right, and fellow instructors at West Point, 1914.
Major Stilwell, front row, center, with the French XVIIth Army Corps at Verdun, 1918.
From Stilwell’s album, 1920–23: A walled village in north China;
A north China river scene.
Stilwell at work on the Yellow River Road.
Marshal Chang Tso-lin and his son Chang Hsueh-liang with General William D. Connor of the 15th Infantry, 1926. (U.S. SIGNAL CORPS)
Feng’s troops at trade school (from Stilwell’s album).
The 15th Infantry entertained in the American compound by civilians of Tientsin, 1927. (U.S. SIGNAL CORPS)
At Fort Benning, 1932: Colonel George Marshall, center front, Lieutenant Colonel Stilwell on his right, Major Omar Bradley directly behind them.
Road-building: a page from Stilwell’s album, 1921–22.
The foreign attachés in Peking in July 1935, representing, left to right, Italy, Great Britain, Japan, France and the United States (Lieutenant Colonel Stilwell; to be promoted to full colonel August 1).
The Military Attaché investigates on foot, south China, 1936.
The Stilwells’ household servants in Peking, 1936.
Chinese troops on the Lunghai Railway, 1938. (U.S. INFORMATION AGENCY)
Entertaining Chinese friends at the Stilwells’ home in Peking during the Sino-Japanese War, 1938: above, Mme. Dan with Mrs. Stilwell. right, Wu lai-hsi, the well-known art critic.
Japanese troops occupying a Chinese town in Anhwei province, 1938. (U.S. INFORMATION AGENCY)
A Japanese column on the march in Kiangsi, 1938. (U.S. INFORMATION AGENCY)
Japanese soldiers on the South Manchurian Railway, photographed by the author in 1935.
General Marshall as wartime Chief of Staff. (U.S. OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION)
T. V. Soong and Secretary Henry Morgenthau sign the $500,000,000 loan agreement, January 1942. (U.S. OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION)
Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek with Stilwell at Maymyo, April 1942. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPHS)
The Walkout, 1942: Stilwell and Paul Jones discussing distribution of loads among the bearers, with Breedom Case of Agricultural College acting as interpreter. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPHS)
The last radio message.
Stilwell leading the column on the walkout followed by his aides, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Dorn and Lieutenant Richard Young. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Stilwell in the river carrying a sack from the RAF food drop. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
On rafts on the Uyu River. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPHS)
Stilwell, preceded by a guide, leading the column down the Uyu.
General Yu Fei-p’eng, Chief of Service of Supply, and General Ho Ying-chin, War Minister and Chief of Staff. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPHS)
Stilwell and General Claire Chennault; in the background, members of the AVG.
The Cairo Conference, 1943: Stilwell contemplates the Commander-in-Chief. In the back row, General Shang Chen, Lieutenant General Liu, General Somervell, Stilwell, General Arnold, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Admiral Mountbatten, Major General Carton de Wiart. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Stilwell discussing tactics with Generals Sun Li-jen, left, and Liao Yao-hsiang, March 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Troops of the 38th Division fording the river at Taihpa Ga, February 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Chinese officers receiving instruction in building rafts for personal equipment in the sniper course at the Infantry Training Center, Kweilin, June 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
An artillary pack train of the 22nd Division, Warazup, May 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Monsoon: reinforcements moving up the Ledo Road, 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Stilwell in the field:
C-rations on Christmas morning, 1943.
Relaxing at Taihpa Ga, February 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPHS)
Kuomintang generals: General Lo Cho-ying, center, Commandant of the Infantry Training center, Kweilin, with associates, June 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
A group of fillers en route to a hospital, Kweiyang, 1945. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Yenan, 1944:
Colonel Barrett with Chou En-lai, left, and Mao Tse-tung.
The American Military Mission in “Chung-shan” suits of native homespun made and presented to them by the Communists to show the success of their production drive. (PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF COLONEL DAVID BARRETT)
Evacuation of Kweilin, September 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
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Evacuation of Liuchow, November 1944. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
General Patrick Hurley and Donald Nelson arrive in Chungking, September 1944; Ho Ying-chin is at Nelson’s right. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH)
Stilwell meets the press after recall in the garden of his home at Carmel, November 1944.