Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Stilwell and other foreigners living in China could not be so objective. The Nationalists, having crossed the Yangtze, were now continuing their northward march and foreign residents of north China visualized a repetition of the Nanking “massacre” taking place in Tsinan, Tientsin and Peking. By temperament an anticipator of trouble, Stilwell wrote of speculating on the loyalty of his servants, of plans for flight at a moment’s notice to the Concessions at Tientsin, of “a sick feeling of apprehension…for risking wife and children in such a country at such a time.”

  Confidence in the northern armies was minimal. Wu was not cooperating with Chang Tso-lin who had been named northern Generalissimo, and the associated warlords were regularly falling out with or withholding support from each other. The 15th Infantry and other foreign garrisons held anxious conferences on how to ensure protection of their nationals in Peking and recommended a doubling of the strength of each. In order to hold the railroad open, a total force of 25,000 would be better still, General Castner informed the War Department. He suggested that the next Army transport, due in May, should bring in troops from Manila and take home American women and children from north China. The Japanese moved a brigade down from Dairen to Tsingtao in Shantung and General Butler, deciding that the situation in the north was now more critical than at Shanghai, brought a full brigade of 4,000 Marines to Tientsin.

  Equipped with 20 airplanes and a number of light tanks, which none of the other foreign contingents could boast, the Marines were the wonder of Tientsin much to the annoyance of the 15th Infantry. As they briskly and efficiently went about unloading field artillery, mortars, howitzers, machine guns, sandbags for barricades, trucks, tanks, planes and piles of supplies, the infantrymen stood watching with studied carelessness and inner rage. Butler warned that he would tolerate no clashes with the Chinese people and that “if a Marine so much as laid a hand on a rickshaw coolie he would be court-martialed.” Nevertheless he spared no effort in his preparations to relieve Peking at a moment’s notice. His trucks with machine guns, ammunition and ten days’ rations were kept fueled and ready to move. Highway bridges were reinforced to carry the tanks. An airfield was built near the mouth of the Pei Ho and Butler flew back and forth between Tientsin and Taku to keep watch. When winter came he kept fires going day and night to ensure that motor fuel would be usable. With these arrangements, a battalion could start in trucks for Peking within 14 minutes of receiving the alarm and planes within five minutes. The plan arranged with the Legations in case of an antiforeign outbreak was to seize the park of the Temple of Heaven as an assembly point for the foreign residents from where they could be evacuated by truck and plane to the coast.

  In May anxiety heightened as the advancing Nationalists approached Hsuchow, the crucial junction of the main north-south and east-west railways just below the border of Shantung. Dating back to legendary times, the battle for Hsuchow was customarily considered the climax of every change of dynasty. According to an old Chinese saying, “Hsuchow is the place which the generals must capture to control the sky.” It was now held by the forces of the ogre of Shantung, Chang Tsung-chang, the man who was “dangerous even to look at” but who in the war had not made a firm stand yet. If Hsuchow fell, Shantung would be invaded, and if Shantung were overrun, the southerners would be at the gates of Tientsin. Should foreign women and children be evacuated now? What plans should be made? How far would the southern effort go? If, as Stilwell wrote later, “the push had run its course, it would be unseemly to call our nationals in and run for the sea. But if not, and the invasion reaches us even in the northern treaty ports, then what? Who would be responsible for a repetition of Nanking?”

  The American Legation needed to obtain at first hand a reliable estimate of the real strength of the southern forces, not to mention the northern. Reports from newspapermen, consular agents and missionaries were so unreliable that it was impossible to judge the situation. Though the mission would be dangerous, given the rising mood of antiforeign fanaticism, an American military man must go in person. The choice fell not on the Military Attaché, Major John Magruder, or any of his staff, but on Major Stilwell of the 15th Infantry. Besides a knowledge of China and Chinese, a record of previous adventurous journeys and a recognized toughness of spirit, Stilwell possessed a further essential qualification—willingness to go, though he would be leaving behind four children and a wife shortly expecting a fifth.

  On arriving in Hsuchow he was to present his credentials in person to the famed and terrible Chang Tsung-chang. A former wharf coolie in his youth, nearly seven feet tall, Chang bore the nickname “Three Things Not Known”—how much money he had, how many soldiers and how many concubines. Of the latter he was said to maintain a stable of 42, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, 21 White Russians and one bedraggled American, whom he hauled along to his wars in two private railroad cars. He was also known as Lao pa-shih liu or “Old Eighty-six” because the height of a pile of that number of silver dollars reputedly represented the length of the most valued portion of his anatomy in action. He supported a luxurious yamen thronged with officers, and dined lavishly with brandy and champagne from a Belgian cut-glass dinner service of 40 covers which he boasted cost $50,000. A magnificent carved and lacquered teakwood coffin accompanied him on board a flatcar of his private train. It was his boast that he would return from battle inside it if he failed to conquer, but he returned from Shanghai sitting on the coffin, smoking and slightly tipsy. Under his reign Shantung was plagued by famine in 1927, brought on not by flood or drought but by the Tuchun’s rapacity.

  Stilwell caught the evening train for Hsuchow on May 26. With him went Chao, his Chinese servant without whom, as he wrote afterwards, he might not have returned. “Why should Chao poke his nose into danger and risk his life in loyalty to a lao mao tze [Old Hairy One, a common designation for a foreigner] when all his own countrymen were screaming ‘Kill them’?” Stilwell could suppply no answer but he acknowledged his respect for “a game and loyal man” who when the situation became nasty could easily and safely have run out, but did not.

  As the train rattled across the border into Shantung, Stilwell saw telltale signs of trouble. Carts with safe-conduct flags waited for hire at the railroad stations, an indication that local security was nonexistent. The carts were in fact a racket run by bandits who took squeeze from the cart-owners. Villagers with worried faces were mending their mud walls. There was “an ominous quiet when there should have been a hubbub about small things.” As the train progressed, soldiers of the northern army began to be seen, “unconcerned, apathetic…in a jungle of units…no evidence of any organization of positions.” Rolling stock in railroad yards was in “terrible condition…one or two wrecks in every round house.”

  After dark of the next day they reached Hsuchow and found it crowded with soldiers of all arms and ranks. Drunken pings and scowling White Russians of the warlord’s cavalry reeled in the streets. The travelers met surly replies and no room at the inns. Chao suggested the local YMCA and they slept at the home of its secretary, Mr. T’ang. Hsuchow, as they discovered the next morning, was a “wreck,” washed over time and again by the wave of war. The homeless, evicted by famine or soldiers, were camping where they could, food supplies were giving out, dead bodies were lying in the streets where they had fallen. “We stepped over them with the other passers-by and went our way.” Stilwell saw 15 blind women leading each other around; otherwise no other women but a few old crones were visible in the streets, all being hidden away behind closed doors in fear of the soldiers. The refugees, possessing nothing but the rags they stood in and a few clay pots for cooking, “did not beg; they simply sat and looked out with hopeless eyes at an incomprehensible world.” They were fed a meager ration of pressed cake, the residue after oil is pressed from beans, which in Manchuria, Stilwell noted, was broken up for fertilizer or fed to pigs. Once hard-working and industrious farmers, the refugees had seen “their carts and animals seized for armies, their sons drafted,
their grain eaten up by locust hordes of soldiers, their homes pulled to pieces for firewood, their women mistreated, their children perhaps scattered—this is the saddest side of Chinese wars.” Face to face with the old and limitless misery of China, Stilwell wrote with truth and understanding in contrast to the rather banal ideas he expressed on social problems in America.

  After trying in vain to see Chang Tsung-chang, he prowled around the city. “Russky cavalry,” the feared and prized adjunct of a northern warlord’s army, galloped through the streets. They wore dark green, almost black, uniforms with yellow leather boots reaching to their thighs, and carried an armory of weapons: pennant-tipped lances in their stirrup sockets, long-barreled Mauser pistols in wooden holsters and the da-bao or Chinese beheading sword, like an oversize machete, strapped over the shoulder in a canvas scabbard. Merciless and fierce, men without a country, they were “the toughest eggs I ever laid eyes on.” Besides the cavalry troop of about 100, a Russian Infantry Brigade under General Netchaeff of about 3,000 men with four armored trains served with the Tuchun’s forces.

  At the railroad yards Stilwell found 200 cars, 20 locomotives and three armored cars with Russian crews. While trying to identify troop units and estimate numbers he calculated that out of every 100 soldiers, 30 had rifles. In drill units half had guns and half had none. In one “scarecrow” company of 200 to 250 men, 20 percent were under four-foot-six, many under fourteen, all dirty, some barefoot, with a total of fifty rifles among them. “The wildest stretch of the imagination could not envision the rabble in action except running away.” An informant told him that the northerners would not fight; they were all afraid of the Red Spears. These were bands of resistance fighters drawn from the country people who, made desperate by marauding soldiers, had organized the Red Spear Society to prey upon whatever small groups of soldiers they could handle. They killed without mercy, inflicting wounds that left their victims alive for three or four hours before they died.

  Each day food grew more scarce. Chao scrounged and brought in some canned goods. Preparations for a general movement were increasingly evident. Stilwell kept watch at the two railroad stations and yards, counting guns and calibers, recording troop trains and trying to “dope out” from the chaos what Chang Tsung-chang was planning. From the pings he learned that some units had not been paid for five months, some not for a year. Their ration was mantou, rice and water. He picked up the news that Feng Yu-hsiang had taken Chengchow which dominated the western end of the transverse railway. This was both true and important.

  After a year’s absence in Moscow, Feng was once more in command of the Kuominchun (National People’s Army), the well-armed and disciplined force of over 200,000 which he had built up in Shensi and which figured in Comintern strategy as the northern arm of the revolutionary forces in China. To make junction with this force was the essential goal of the Kuomintang, but whether Feng would opt for the Communist-left coalition at Hankow or for Chiang Kai-shek was as yet uncertain. Trying to keep up with Feng’s permutations which were bewildering even for China, Stilwell reached the verdict, “He double crosses everybody—is strictly for himself.” But he also acknowledged that Feng was a “real fighter” who “never allows his troops to abuse the people” and that if China could find ten more commanders like him her troubles would be over. While Hankow and Chiang Kai-shek were both negotiating for his alliance, Feng as a result of various defaults by the northerners, captured Chengchow, causing the northern army in the area to retreat behind the Yellow River, which in turn uncovered Hsuchow. This development decided Chang Tsung-chang to retreat.

  Stilwell hurried to the telegraph office to send word to the Legation but he was too late. The office was closed and the operators had fled. Next day, his fourth in Hsuchow, there was no doubt any longer; the northerners were pulling out. He counted six trains leaving in half an hour. When they were gone, the southerners would flood in and a foreigner might likely as not be lynched. His object now was to get out with Chao as soon as possible. The Tuchun’s train was in the yards, but they were not allowed on, and when they attempted to push their way on board one of the crowded troop trains, they were thrown off. They tried offers of money in vain, the soldiers being themselves too anxious to leave to yield their places. As the Tuchun’s train pulled out, Stilwell could feel panic rising in the crowd of soldiers around him. “How soon would their officers get them out of this?…control would now be difficult…everyone is ugly.” The troops crammed on the remaining cars with “latecomers scurrying frantically to get aboard and perch anywhere—on the end-ladders or between the cars. Many will be shaken off….” As he watched, one man fell under the moving wheels and was left to die, “no doctor, no help of any kind, just a crowd of curious coolies jammed around him.”

  Now it was too late to leave with the northerners. What should he do? Walk? Could he reach Feng Yu-hsiang, some 50 miles off to the west? But the Red Spears were in between and “they will not discriminate in our favor.” To the east, more Red Spears, “and the Russians, I am afraid of the Russians.” The only alternative was to sit still and wait for the southerners “and that scares me as badly as the Russians do.” Mr. T’ang, the YMCA secretary, confessing himself a southern sympathizer, advised staying as safer than going.

  For two days after the trains left, “the town waited, holding its breath for the next wave to break over it….One scourge gone, only to make room for another?” The northern rearguard came through, shooting, looting and yelling and doubling the turmoil at night. After them came “the pitiful remnants of a retiring Chinese army: the sick and wounded, dragging themselves along with only the prospect of death from the Red Spears ahead of them.” Shops shut, mules sold for $300 and food was not for sale at all. At night “hell let loose; an engine screeching the alarm, pings yelling and firing field-guns, rifles, pistols. Only a few bullets whizzed our way.” A plane came over and dropped a few bombs. The Russians who had stayed behind in their armor-plated train were the worst. They ran the train, equipped with machine guns and a naval gun mounted on the rear car, up and down the line, “terrorizing the people by shooting and then stealing everything moveable.” When the country people pulled up the track to block the train, the Russians “just about massacred the village” nearest the break. Keeping his daily watch at the railway yards, Stilwell saw another boy soldier run over by a train and laid on a mat to die. Rage and pity welled up in him at the callousness of China and vented itself savagely: “After a month or so you want to stick knitting needles in their balls.”

  On the morning of June 2 Mr. T’ang came in to report that the Kuomintang Army had arrived. They were behaving well, no beating, no looting, but Chao insisted that Stilwell stay out of sight. Everyone in the neighborhood knew there was a foreigner in Mr. T’ang’s house and Stilwell wondered when his presence would be reported to the soldiers. He imagined the squad that would come bursting in, yelling for the foreigner, and he tried to put his mind on something else. After four days of hiding with nothing to do but draw pictures, he felt desperate. “Must do something; hike south seems to be the only feasible plan.” After another day when he resorted to jumping over wooden horses for half an hour “to keep from going nutty,” he decided he “must get out of here somehow.” Mr. T’ang was growing cool and might be regretting having given shelter to a foreigner. On the sixth day of hiding, Chao at last agreed to take a chance. They walked out and made acquaintance with the southern pings, “a cheerful gang, mostly boys hardly 16, little runts with narrow shoulders, no weight….All the pings have been filled full of pro-American propaganda. They think America will actively help them.” The city was hung with Kuomintang flags and welcome signs, shops had reopened, women reappeared in the streets, carpenters were busy repairing damage, but the dead and dying still lay in the alleys, and starvation, filth and disease filled the makeshift shacks of the refugees. “The sights in this town are terrible.”

  The Kuomintang troops proving less murderous than he had expected, Stil
well made up his mind to leave via the south for Shanghai. The northerners had taken with them all the rolling stock they could collect but word came that a southbound train would be going through next day. Through a crush of frantic people waiting to get on, a wild scramble and a pall of garlic fumes, he and Chao fought their way on board. After three hours of suspense in the station waiting for the train to move and a journey of agonizing halts and delays, they came to a stop at 3 A.M. at P’eng Pu, still a long way from the Yangtze and possible foreign warships. Passengers were cleared out, it was obvious the train would go no farther and they were left standing on the platform in the dark.

  For the next 36 hours the sickening emotion of fear was to be Stilwell’s companion. Hungry and thirsty and stranded in a strange place, he and Chao did not know whether another southbound train would be coming through and did not dare ask questions for fear of drawing attention. They could not risk going to look for food or drink for fear of missing a train. They feared to wait until daylight brought new crowds and made Stilwell more visible but they had no other choice. At 6 A.M. some freight cars were pushed onto the southbound track. Among new crowds they struggled on board, while trying to remain inconspicuous, and found places on the floor of an old coal car. Feeling the other passengers’ eyes on him, Stilwell expected at any moment the sudden shout “Lao mao tze!” or the advent of a guard or official who would haul him off for examination. Baking in the heat, the car became “filthy with eggshells, snot, seeds, tea, water, spit, rinds and all the other trash that chinks can throw.” Mixed with “spitting, coughing, belching, nosepicking, sucking and grunting,” this was bad enough, but worse were the whispers and looks cast in his direction. Hunger and thirst increased but they dared not get off at any of the stops for fear of not getting back on.