Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  He felt the outlook for China was black and in June was glad to get away on a trip to Suiyuan and Mongolia with his friend Colonel Sabatier, the French Military Attaché. He expected to go to Wu Tai Shan and walk from there to the railroad, a distance of about 150 miles, he wrote to Win.

  His reputation as an expert was growing. Colonel Lynch, on returning to Washington from the 15th Infantry, reported that Stilwell “knows China and the Far East better, in my opinion, than any other officer in the service.” His explorations through the country “have given him a background that no one else possesses.”

  * * *

  *1 Known as the Flying Palace, this was a twin-engine monoplane, silver outside, lined with red plush inside, equipped with two full-length sofas, an ornate writing desk, upholstered chairs, radio and icebox. Though he employed an American pilot, Royal Leonard, Chang often piloted the plane himself, with his long robe tucked up around his knees and his purple Moslem bell-boy cap awry on his head. On inspection flights over his domain, he communicated with his troops by dropping messages to which they replied by spreading out cloth panels on the ground, or failing these, by throwing themselves on the ground in the proper arrangements.

  *2 He lives in Taiwan and is seen from time to time on Sundays in the same church attended by the Generalissimo.

  8

  Military Attaché: Sino-Japanese War, 1937–39

  ON A LANTERN-LIT CHINESE BARGE poled by boatmen over the dark Pei Hai Lake in the Imperial City, a party from the American Embassy enjoyed a serene excursion under a full moon on the evening of July 7, 1937. In the group were Colonel and Mrs. Stilwell and their daughter Nance, Ambassador and Mrs. Johnson, Colonel John Marston, commander of the Marine Embassy Guard, and his wife, and Stilwell’s friend John Goette. The Ambassador had brought his guitar and played his favorite song, “Down That Weary Road,” as the boatmen paced rhythmically up and down the side of the deck. Light from the boat’s lanterns glimmered in the water, and lit by the moon the softly gleaming white marble tower of the Dagoba rose out of the darkness like the vision of a Buddhist Grail. The party felt themselves surrounded by the spirit of ancient Peking until reality glided by in another boat carrying a group of Japanese officers.

  Colonel Marston mentioned that as senior officer of the foreign detachments he had been notified by the Japanese that their troops would be leaving the city that evening for night maneuvers at the railroad bridge at Lukouchiao, twelve miles to the west on the Peking-Hankow line. The Japanese had been holding maneuvers in the area for two weeks, causing worried speculation in the local press. The railway was the only remaining access to Peiping not under Japanese control and Lukouchiao was a key junction where a shuttle connected with the railway to Tientsin. Alongside the railroad bridge, a stone bridge 800 years old with parapets adorned by marble lions spanned the river on 30 graceful arches. One of China’s most beautiful monuments, admired by the first Westerner who crossed it in the thirteenth century, it was known in his honor as the Marco Polo Bridge.

  At 8 o’clock on the morning after the boat ride Stilwell’s office learned there had been a skirmish at the bridge. The Japanese, claiming to have been fired on by troops of Sung Che-yuan’s 29th Army garrisoned at nearby Wanping,*1 were now besieging Wanping with mortar and artillery fire to enforce surrender of the officers they charged were guilty. On Stilwell’s orders the Assistant Attaché, Major Barrett, drove out with Goette to investigate. The scene was quiet with only an occasional rifle shot disturbing the calm of a beautiful summer morning, but they found cause for disquiet in the body of a dead Japanese soldier guarded by a platoon. Realizing that this would be made the pretext for extreme Japanese demands, they knew they stood in the presence of an Incident. It proved to be the start of the war.

  The Chinese garrison commander had refused the Japanese terms and for the moment was holding a parley. By the time Barrett returned to the office, Stilwell was already receiving reports of Kwantung Army units moving in strength through the Great Wall. Despite the show of negotiations at Wanping, he and Barrett agreed that the Japanese were opening their definitive move to take over north China. The atmosphere in Peiping was tense; no one knew if there was real purpose behind the skirmish or what Chiang Kai-shek would do. Stilwell drove out to Wanping on the third day to try to make contact with the Chinese garrison but as he crossed the last 500 yards both sides opened heavy fire. The driver turned the car around without stopping and “we got out on two wheels.”

  Reports reaching his office indicated 10,000 Japanese troops were crossing the Wall into Hopei; troop trains were passing through Shanhai-kuan at half-hour intervals. To report on the situation as it developed he organized an intelligence network of the five senior language officers who served under his command as assistant attachés and whom he stationed in various cities. Four of the group had already served with the 15th Infantry and two, Captain Frank Roberts and Captain Frank Dorn, were in later years to serve under Stilwell again in the Far East. His son Joe Jr., then in Tientsin with the 15th Infantry, was also enlisted as an informant, as were journalists, consuls, Standard Oil men and whoever was in a position to extract evidence from the fog of rumor. The larger outlines of what was happening could only be estimated by putting together the hard details: the number of Japanese planes in the air over Tientsin, the frequency of rail and truck movements of Japanese men and matériel, the location of Chinese units and—most elusive—any evidence of Chinese troop concentration or other clues to the Government’s intentions.

  Stilwell adopted the unorthodox practice for a military attaché of keeping a file of his radios to G-2 on the table in his office for journalists to consult. His object, he told Barrett, was to make available as much accurate information as possible “so that the world would get a true picture of Japanese aggression as it developed south of the Wall.” Identifying with China he felt deeply the crisis that gripped her.

  The silence from Nanking was not promising. Chiang Kai-shek was not even in the capital as far as anyone knew. The Japanese had issued an ultimatum that was to expire on July 18. Chiang Kai-shek spoke at last, from Kuling, a mountain summer resort where foreigners and upper-class Chinese, carried up by sedan chair, escaped the sickening summer heat of the Yangtze valley. Without voicing a call to action or precluding a settlement, Chiang declared that no further positions in north China could be surrendered and that a settlement with Japan must not invade sovereign rights or territorial integrity. It was a statement that China’s limit of endurance had been reached and that she was accepting the necessity of armed resistance. When Chiang’s words were broadcast in Peiping, bugles sounded and gongs clanged as excited people filled the streets.

  A few days of enthusiasm was all they were to have for the Government had made no plan or preparations for the event of national resistance and the Japanese took over control of Peiping within the week. Stilwell’s temper mounted at their charges of Chinese provocation, claims of “self-defense,” acts of brutality and at his own country’s lack of response. When Secretary Hull held a press conference without taking a position Stilwell commented, “Mr. Hull again says we are against fighting. That ought to stop it quickly.”

  Alone, without his family who had gone to the coast to see the two older daughters off to America and remained at the seashore at Chinwangtao until mid-August, his mood was low. “The atmosphere is sad and gloomy,” he wrote to Win, “and there is a pall over everything. Jesus, to think that the blow has actually fallen already is enough to make you sick physically….This may be the end of this chapter or only a lull before a bad storm—no way of telling yet. In any case, North China is gone.”

  Sporadic fighting continued outside Peiping although General Sung Che-yuan’s intentions were uncertain and there were rumors that he had “gone over.” On July 29 Japanese planes bombed Tientsin concentrating on Nankai University. For four hours their squadrons, taking off in relays from an airfield three miles outside the city, “systematically and unhurriedly” rained
incendiary bombs on the university buildings which, as Japanese Headquarters informed the press, had to be wiped out because they harbored “anti-Japanese elements,” namely the students. They were the most potent agitators of nationalist sentiment. The bombing was designed to destroy the students’ base of operations so that they could not mobilize demonstrations or print propaganda leaflets. Throughout their campaign in China, as formerly in Korea, the Japanese intentionally attacked places of education as the source of national consciousness.

  On the road to the Temple of Heaven, the Japanese ambushed a Chinese unit, leaving 500 to 600 bodies on the ground, mostly unarmed and many blown to pieces, minus heads, arms and legs. Going out with Barrett to investigate Stilwell saw 30 truckloads of soldiers killed to the last man with parts of bodies plastered against the sides of the trucks and drivers dead at the wheels. Villagers said the Japanese had offered to let the troops surrender if they gave up their arms, and when they emerged from the village, mowed them down with machine guns and grenades. Dead horses were bloated in the hot July sun and dead men lay in the ditches, “one with his eyes wide open and flies walking on them.”

  At Tungchow, site of the Hopei-Chahar puppet government, the local constabulary, believing rumors of Chinese “victories” around Peiping, mutinied, massacred Japanese and puppet officials and attempted to hold the garrison. The attempt was smashed when Japanese reinforcements wiped them out and laid the city in ruins.

  Within four days all Chinese troops were withdrawn from the Peiping-Tientsin area leaving the Japanese in control. The lack of a concerted policy or plan of defense and the vain sacrifice of the men at Lukouchiao and Tungchow enraged Stilwell. The Chinese had missed so many good opportunities that “you can’t help getting thoroughly disgusted with them.” They could not have defeated the Japanese, he wrote, but they could have inflicted heavy losses if action had been coordinated and the order to attack ever given.

  Though late, the Central Government was pulling together the forces for defense. Imprisoned leaders of the National Salvation League were released and the ban on resistance songs and slogans lifted. Now they were sung openly in the streets and broadcast officially on the radio. From the south Pai Ch’ung-hsi flew to Nanking to pledge the services of the Kwangsi-Kwangtung group after eight years of opposition. To consolidate the alliance he was appointed Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff. Provincial warlords of Yunnan and Szechwan rallied to the Government. By the end of August all military forces including the Communists—reorganized as the 8th Route Army—were incorporated in and supposedly responsible to the central command.

  A first small but heartening victory which aroused Stilwell’s interest was won at Pinghsingkwan in the mountains of north Shansi by a division of the 8th Route Army commanded by Lin Piao. Using mobile guerilla tactics from village bases with the support of a friendly population, the division attacked the Japanese at a pass in the Great Wall and wiped out a brigade, capturing its headquarters and provisions. Though only a temporary check, it suggested that the Communists had developed methods worth investigating, and several months later Stilwell spent half a day analyzing the battle of Pinghsingkwan with Agnes Smedley, a free-lance correspondent who had spent months with the Communists in the north.

  On September 24 the Japanese took Paoting, Sung Che-yuan’s headquarters on the Peking-Hankow Railway. The fever of savagery bred by their own campaigns burst out in a week’s rampage of murder, rape and pillage by 30,000 soldiers. A self-defeating ferocity accompanied them like a hyena of conquest, growing more ravenous by what it fed on. The Japanese knew that a hostile China must ultimately defeat their aim to become leader of Asia. Throughout their years on the mainland nothing so maddened them as the constant reappearance of “anti-Japanese” sentiment. Annually they insisted on the necessity of forcing China to be “sincerely” cooperative. Intending to attach China, they found themselves forced to conquer, arousing increasing hatred with each advance and employing increasing brutality in response. At Paoting in addition to physical terrorism they burned all the schoolbooks in week-long bonfires as well as the library and laboratory equipment of the Hopei Medical College. A decade’s records of crop statistics at the Agriculture Institute, the basis of its program for improved farming methods, were also deliberately destroyed.

  In mid-August the still undeclared war entered the Yangtze valley, but not by Japanese design. When the campaign opened at Marco Polo Bridge, the Japanese had intended to finish off the separation of north China in a campaign of perhaps 90 days. They believed the Nanking Government would helplessly acquiesce as before, or, through extension of Japan’s control over cities, industries and communications, could be forced to give up and cooperate as a puppet regime. Chiang Kai-shek deliberately precipitated battle in Shanghai, supposedly to harden nationwide resistance by drawing the Japanese down to the heart of China, more likely in pursuit of the strategy he never gave up—to engage foreign intervention. From first to last Chiang Kai-shek had one purpose: to destroy the Communists and wait for foreign help to defeat the Japanese. He believed battle at Shanghai, the international city with its large foreign investments, would lead to mediation and possibly even intervention by Britain and the United States and other powers.

  He sent his best German-trained divisions from Nanking down to Chapei on the borders of Shanghai where, he may have considered, any fighting would be likely to produce an incident involving foreigners or foreign property. The Japanese had a marine garrison in the International Settlement and had filled the river with their warships whose menacing naval guns were intended not to fire but to overawe, while in the meantime the Kwantung Army fastened its hold upon the north. But the challenge of the Chinese advance on Shanghai provoked the bursting sense of mastery of the Japanese. They landed troops and extended their lines with intention to disperse the Chinese, and suddenly found themselves thrown back under ardent attack. From then on a battle of suspense and tragedy was fought out under the eyes of the foreign bystanders. In the first week the vigor of the Chinese assault drove the Japanese almost to the river’s edge. With the advantage of naval guns and command of the air, the Japanese were able to reinforce and counterattack and eventually to land forces to outflank the Chinese position. Under incessant bombing by the enemy’s Formosa-based planes and the shelling by warships in the Whangpoo, the Chinese held their lines for three desperate months in the most visible and publicized and important battle the world had seen since the smashing of the Hindenburg Line in 1918.

  The flames and gunsmoke that enveloped Shanghai drew world attention if not help. Commanded by Chang Fa-kwei, leader of the famed Ironsides Army of 1927, the Chinese demonstrated a will to fight both to their countrymen and to the world. At a terrible cost in casualties, greater than any since Verdun and the Somme, they were kept in position against the urgent advice of Pai Ch’ung-hsi and others long after that position was hopeless. Chiang Kai-shek had no other military plan at Shanghai than that of the death stand, but he was playing for world opinion. For prolonging the defense he was to be bitterly condemned and never forgiven by many Chinese. Tenacity was his governing characteristic and he may have believed that the agony of the defenders must finally move the foreign powers.

  Toward the end, under attack by Japanese divebombers and field guns fired at a range of 60 yards, the Chinese lines were collapsing from exhaustion, starvation and losses. The last few days of the defense added nothing and wrecked the army. By the time the order for withdrawal was given, Japanese reinforcements had landed down the coast to outflank the line of retreat. Under enemy fire “the tragedy of the retreat,” in the words of a Chinese commander, “was beyond description.” Sixty percent of the force was lost including 10 percent of the entire trained officer corps.

  The defense of Shanghai made the world China-conscious. One of the most memorable war pictures ever published humanized the war for Americans in the figure of a crying baby sitting on tracks in the middle of a blasted emptied street in the wake of an expl
osion. Journalists flocking to the drama and richly nourished twice daily at Chinese Government press conferences reported tales of heroism, blood and suffering. China was seen as fighting democracy’s battle and personified by the steadfast Generalissimo and his marvelously attractive, American-educated, unafraid wife. In their image Americans saw China strong in will and united in purpose. Once firmly fixed, this impression was unaffected by the military blunder of the withdrawal from Shanghai, or by the fiasco of the Air Force, which, after trying vainly for weeks to hit the Japanese battleships in the Whangpoo, by mistake loosed bombs that killed 2,000 of their own people and hit the U.S.S. Hoover.

  Beyond Shanghai, 200 miles up the river, was Nanking. Drawn in more deeply than they had planned, and sensing the growing danger of becoming overextended, the Japanese determined to end the adventure at the capital. Their statements on the necessity of “subduing completely China’s will to fight” took on a frenzied tone. The Nanking Government, having “embarked on an anti-Japanese campaign of the most vicious kind,” Premier Hirota told the Diet, must be “compelled to mend its ways” and to “act in unison for enduring peace in East Asia through sincere cooperation between Japan and China.” Air raids on Nanking, Canton and 20 cities of east China followed, “in order to conclude hostilities as soon as possible,” according to the Japanese announcement. Chiang Kai-shek, still unswerving, chose to defend Nanking in a decision that was militarily indefensible since equal time could have been bought, tremendous sacrifice spared and a firmer stand made behind Nanking than in it. Again his purpose was to engage world attention and possibly foreign involvement because of the presence in Nanking of the Embassies.