Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  —

  In Peiping where streamers from Japanese balloons floated overhead announcing the capture of Chinese cities along with the legend, “The Japanese Army Preserves the Peace of East Asia,” Stilwell faced the professional necessity of getting on with north China’s new masters. To have to ask their permission to visit the front was almost too much for his temperament. “Arrangements generally seemed to go wrong when he was with them,” sighed his friend Goette. To improve the situation Stilwell asked for a Japanese-speaking assistant and was lent one of the language officers from Tokyo, Captain Maxwell Taylor, a Leavenworth graduate then thirty-six who 20 years later was to be United States Chief of Staff. Warned that he would find his new chief an unusual officer, able but irritable and hard to get along with, Taylor was surprised to find Colonel Stilwell waiting to meet him on his arrival at the railroad station. Appreciating the courtesy and confounding predictions, he discovered a man he liked. He saw Stilwell as a man of emotion and action rather than reflection, a doer who when he saw something wrong wanted to correct it right away. He thought Stilwell used bad judgment when in a bad temper, but had the soldier’s virtues of bravery and determination.

  Taylor could act as a buffer and make arrangements if not control results. Conducted by a Japanese colonel on a tour of Kalgan after its capture, Stilwell confessed to having been thrown out of General Suzuki’s office for asking embarrassing questions. He steeled himself to the necessity of professional relations, but after a call on General Takashita, Win recorded, Joe was “quite ready to retire today and go to Carmel.” Peiping under the control of the “arrogant little bastards” was hard to bear. They buzzed the American Embassy in planes at 150 feet “to show us what they think of us.” They forced students to march in parades “celebrating” the fall of Paoting so that the Japanese could take pictures of the enthusiastic support of the population. “They are more insufferable than ever and I have to deal with them and smile.” Duty required that he persist even to the point, persuaded by Taylor, of giving a lunch for five Japanese officers. Two accepted the invitation but failed to appear, one neither replied nor came and of the remaining two Stilwell’s only comment was, “The hell with them!”

  Humiliation, imposed by Washington’s anxiety to avoid trouble, was shared by others. Colonel Alexander McAndrews of the 15th Infantry, citing his instructions from the War Department—“Nothing should be done to involve us in a quarrel”—told Stilwell apologetically that he felt required to call off G-2 observation of Japanese troop movements because of a Japanese vice-consul’s veiled threat.

  Since the Chinese preferred their war to be observed through the medium of official communiqués, Stilwell could not get to the front with them or with the Japanese and his repeated “blasts” to Washington to exert pressure brought no results. He had to make do with a Japanese-conducted tour of Paoting where his hosts, according to their own statement, had killed 25,800 Chinese in the course of taking the city. Stilwell could find no damage to the walls or other evidence to indicate that the Chinese had put up a strong, or any, defense. Annoyed at being kept from the active front 50 miles away, he considered himself “practically in arrest the whole time and told them I realized it.” Not surprisingly he was informed three days later, when another tour was arranged for the foreign attachés, that he was not to be included, “so I guess I am washed up for this war. I am spotted as a friend of the Chinese and a moral leper.” He felt let down, too, and unreasonably nagged by MID, “the pack of fools in Washington” with whom his relations were to grow steadily worse in the coming months. Taken altogether, he wrote to his two oldest daughters then in America, “I have released enough bile since July 8 to float a battleship.”

  At the end of August he noted, in sad epitome of China’s fate, “a nice crop of radishes” on the grave of thirty Chinese soldiers killed in a last skirmish four weeks before. Every day groups of foreign families departed while amahs stood weeping, husbands wiped tears from their eyes and the band helpfully played “Auld Lang Syne.” The State Department, nervous lest some accident to its nationals involve America in the conflict, was encouraging departures. So many left, including Ambassador Johnson’s wife and children, that Win found herself the ranking American lady in Peiping. On September 7 a Presidential order required all American civilians to leave and at the same time State and Navy ordered out their families but the War Department “hasn’t put its finger on us.” Stilwell’s family, later rejoined by the two daughters from America, remained in China until the end of his tour.

  Although China’s leaders exasperated him, Stilwell understood that “their moral standards are totally different from ours, therefore their moral strength is not sapped by what to us would be gross national cowardice….Where we would fight to the last man over an invasion of our territory, they are concerned with the continuance of the race, and to keep Chinese coming into the world they will accept temporarily any form of government they have to. Under it the main stream flows on.” Even so, Stilwell would become exasperated and allow himself tirades about China’s “oily politicians…treacherous quitters, selfish, conscienceless, unprincipled crooks.” Asked by G-2 after the fall of Paoting when the Chinese would stand and fight, he radioed in reply, “Not until they lose their inherent distaste for offensive combat.”

  He considered Chinese military weakness to be the result of reliance on winning by outlasting. And the Chinese tradition which puts the local interest ahead of the interest of the whole could be seen operating in one of the gravest of military faults—mentioned in reports from the Shanghai front—the failure of flank units to come to the aid of another unit under attack. The low quality of the professional officer corps on the whole was equally serious. “The educated Chinese is astounded to be told that the Chinese officer is no good,” Stilwell wrote. They readily understood his explanations of the value of initiative, selection of point of attack, concentration of means, and then their question became, “Can we produce officers in five years? So I tell them two generations might do it.”

  Yet he had confidence in Chinese soldiers as fighting material and believed that if properly led they could become the equal of any army in the world. Hardy and uncomplaining, accustomed to long hours, scanty food, hard work, sickness and wounds and no pleasures, yet able to “make a joke of the merest trifle and remain cheerful under the most discouraging circumstances,” the Chinese soldier with officers in whom he had confidence “will go anywhere.” Regarding Japanese culture as artificial and imitative, Stilwell had more confidence in China, especially in the north Chinese. He discussed his theories with Captain Taylor while out on field excursions to identify Japanese troop units. Walking through villages he would pick a piece of fruit, wipe it with a handkerchief and eat it, to the horror of his companion who felt obliged to do likewise. Once, resting beneath the statue of a Buddha after a long day without finding any clues, they looked up to find that three Japanese soldiers had scratched their names and units on the statue’s behind.

  They watched endlessly for troop trains. Sitting on a hilltop one day they saw in the distance a slowly moving elongated object with legs like a centipede’s. It proved to be a train of freight cars being pushed on each side by a company of Chinese soldiers. Contemplating its snail-paced progress in silence for a while, Stilwell said, “That’s the spirit that will conquer Japan in the end.” But he was inclined to be caustic when the Generalissimo gave an interview calling on the signatories of the Nine-Power Treaty to come to the aid of China. “CKS screams, ‘We are fighting the battle of the world. Intervene for Christ’s sake!’ ” was Stilwell’s version.

  —

  For those who saw Western democracy threatened by the rise of Fascism, intervention to halt the aggressors was the central problem of the time. The Isaiah of this view was ex-Secretary Stimson who spoke out against “amoral drift” and tried to persuade the President of the need for more outspoken guidance of public opinion.

  President Roosevelt, though st
arting out as a supporter of Stimson’s Far Eastern policy, had since then acquiesced in, without actively initiating, the American withdrawal from involvement in China. His chief concern with the Far East, after naval limitations came to an end in 1936, was concentrated on building up the Navy. In March of 1936 at the London Naval Conference, convened to discuss renewal of the Washington Treaty, the United States and Great Britain refused to accord parity to Japan, upon which Japan bolted the Conference, and the Treaty, already moribund, expired for good. Given Japan’s fanatic mood, Ambassador Grew urged, and Roosevelt and Hull accepted, the necessity of building a navy “so strong that no other country will think seriously of attacking us.” But accomplishment was far off and appropriations for a major building program were not voted until 1938. In the meantime the primary object of American policy in the months after Marco Polo Bridge was to keep out of conflict with Japan.

  Beneath the official surface the sounds of history were stirring the President and activating in him the ideas that were to shape American policy over the next eight years. Roosevelt was more concerned with the threat of Japan than with the integrity of China per se, although he loved to dwell on the Delano family’s connections with the China trade and tell stories of their dealings with Chinese merchants and dignitaries. His mother’s father, Warren Delano, had been a partner in the leading American trading firm, Russell & Company, founded in 1824, soon as affluent and influential as the East India Company with branches in all the Treaty Ports where its partners acted as American consuls. They sailed the fastest clippers, sometimes beat the British to London with the first tea of the season, built the first telegraph line in China, set up the first steamship line to run regularly up the Yangtze and dealt in opium as well as in tea and silks. Sara Delano, Roosevelt’s mother, lived for several periods during her girlhood at the family home, Rose Hill, in Hong Kong. Her two oldest sisters were born there and married partners of Russell & Company, and one of them, Mrs. W. H. Forbes, continued to make her home at Rose Hill for 35 years.

  At Hyde Park Roosevelt was brought up among Chinese furnishings, among them a large blue and white porcelain garden pot in the library which according to family tradition had been used at Rose Hill for bathing the children. A bronze Chinese bell used as a dinner gong had been acquired by Roosevelt’s grandfather from two coolies who were carrying it away from the sack at Soochow in 1863. Roosevelt’s stamp collection was founded on Chinese and Hong Kong issues given to him by his mother when he was ten. Defending his support of the Stimson Doctrine in 1933, Roosevelt told Raymond Moley that because his ancestors had traded with the Chinese he had always had the deepest sympathy with the Chinese people and did not see how anyone could expect him not to support China against Japan. This was ingenuous; Roosevelt was a Stimson supporter because he was of like mind, not because of his ancestors. After his election in 1932 he conferred with Stimson on Far Eastern policy and on taking office announced his intention to adhere to the policy of nonrecognition.

  Privately he told Stimson that he had been profoundly impressed by the seizure of Manchuria because of his recollection of a Japanese fellow-student at Harvard in 1902 who had told him of Japan’s schedule, drawn up in 1889, for a 100-year program of expansion in twelve steps. Beginning with a war in China and absorption of Korea, it was to proceed to war with Russia, annexation of Manchuria, then of Jehol, then a protectorate over north China from the Wall to the Yangtze, ultimately acquisition of Australia, New Zealand and the islands of the Pacific including Hawaii, and culmination in a protectorate over all the yellow races. In the stages already carried out the President saw ominous implications.

  In the years after Manchuria Roosevelt became “even more incensed” by Japan’s conduct, according to Sumner Welles, his closest adviser on foreign policy, and by 1937 was “far more preoccupied” with the threat of Japan than with the threat of Germany. He kept trying to think of ways to halt Japan’s advance. After the attack at Marco Polo Bridge he asked the Navy for some large-scale maps of the Pacific which he placed on a stand in his office, and discussed with Welles the possibility of placing an embargo on Japanese trade to be enforced by units of the American and British fleets. Deprived of access to raw materials, Japan would be forced to pull back and would not, he believed, be provoked to war because she was so heavily committed in China. But in the isolationist state of public opinion, the President realized, a measure involving risk of war would not be permitted by Congress.

  With his penchant for private informants Roosevelt was receiving news of China from one of the most romantic American observers ever to report from that country—Marine Captain Evans F. Carlson, the Assistant Naval Attaché. Later famous as leader of Carlson’s Raiders, a battalion he formed using methods and the motto Gung-ho (work together) learned from the Chinese Communists, Carlson was a sincere man of intense convictions and courageous enterprise. He was an American Candide who was able to believe that “mutual confidence obtained between the Generalissimo and the leaders of China’s Communist Party” because “both had the welfare of China at heart.” Interpreting everything he met in terms of the ideals he was brought up with, he saw both Chiang and the Communists “aiming for representative government.” He could not present a lily without gilding it. Mme. Chiang radiated not only the “consciousness of being an instrument of destiny” but also “the mature graciousness of an inward peace.”

  The son of a Congregationalist minister, Carlson had begun his military career as an enlisted man, and served with the Marines in China under General Smedley Butler in 1927–29, and again at Shanghai and Peiping in 1933–35 when he undertook the study of the language. Roosevelt met and formed a warm attachment to him beginning in 1935 when Carlson commanded the Marine guard at the President’s retreat at Warm Springs. He was included on friendly and intimate terms in the Warm Springs circle and on leaving for China in June 1937 was urged by the President to write to the White House. He arrived in mid-August at Shanghai where American interests during the battle were directed by a triumvirate of Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, commander of the Asiatic Fleet, Consul-General Clarence Gauss and Colonel F. B. Price of the Marines who met every morning in Gauss’ office. Reporting these dramatic and tragic days in weekly letters, Carlson wrote vividly of the Chinese soldiers whom he observed directly at the front. Never had he known a time “when all prominent Chinese were working together in a common cause,” even the “so-called Communists.” The President was so interested that during a month-long hiatus in the correspondence in October he made inquiries of Carlson’s whereabouts. “My Chief loves your letters,” Missy LeHand wrote, and “asks me to tell you please keep it up.”

  At the end of November 1937 Carlson took off for Yenan in Shensi to find out how real were the legends of the Communists’ guerilla warfare against the Japanese. As evidence he sent the President captured Japanese documents, a diary and a fur-lined uniform. Later when he came inevitably to write a book his point of view appeared in the title he gave to his chapter on Yenan, “China’s Fountainhead of Liberalism.” His views, expressed more floridly in the book than to the President, typified one kind of American approach to China. He had undertaken the journey, he told the Governor of Shensi, “From the heart…in the name of liberty.” In his own country people regarded liberty and equality as “inalienable rights” and he had observed “this same love of liberty and equality” in China, “the same spirit which had animated our own ancestors at Lexington, Trenton and Valley Forge.” This was China filtered through the rhetoric of the American dream, not necessarily the most appropriate framework for policy in Asia.

  Although he had invoked the Neutrality Act prohibiting trade with belligerents in regard to the civil war in Spain, Roosevelt chose not to apply it in the case of Japan and China because it would have worked to the advantage of the aggressor and disadvantage of the victim. Shipment of arms under the American flag to China or Japan was banned, but not the sale. In exercising the discretion allowed him by the Act, Roosevelt
had begun to move ahead of prevailing isolationist sentiment. Of 2,000 letters received by the White House and State Department in one week of September 1937, mostly instigated by peace societies, 95 percent demanded that the United States remain at peace, 80 percent were in favor of peace at all costs, 70 percent urged immediate application of the Neutrality Act and only 15 percent were opposed on the ground that it would benefit Japan to the detriment of China.

  Worried by the trend the President determined on a speech emphasizing international cooperation. At Chicago on October 5 Roosevelt suggested a collective “quarantine” of the forces breeding “international anarchy” whom he likened to the carriers of a disease. The result was a historic boomerang. Declaring that the President was “pointing” the people down the road to war, six major pacifist organizations launched a joint campaign for 25 million signatures to “Keep America Out of War.” The A. F. of L. disapproved the speech, Representative Fish proposed the President’s impeachment and a poll of Congress showed two to one against joining the League of Nations in collective action in the Far East. “It’s a terrible thing,” the President said to a friend, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.”

  The United States in consequence drew back from leadership of the Nine-Power Conference which convened in Brussels on October 6 in an effort to resolve the Sino-Japanese conflict. Since Japan rejected in advance any third-party mediation and since economic sanctions depended on common action and mutual guarantees by the Nine Powers in which the United States, among others, was unwilling to join, the Conference disbanded without result. To people who felt a desperate sense of the need to resist aggression, the time seemed under a pall. Stimson in a public letter urged a trade embargo of Japan. Despite the Neutrality Act, he wrote, the United States was not bound to “a passive and shameful acquiescence in the wrong that is now being done.” The crucial question of the era was presenting itself again: when does resistance to wrong become a national interest?