Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  With a few of his staff Stilwell set up personal headquarters with the Fifth Army at Pyawbwe. His days were spent in rough dirty drives back and forth to Maymyo and Pyinmana, often through air raids, and in endless sessions over a map spread out on the table, arguing the advantages of the offensive with Tu and the commander of the 22nd, General Liao Yao-hsiang. Once as four enemy fighters flew over in a low pass to strafe the bungalow, Major Merrill while firing at them with a Bren gun heard the General shout from the bathroom, “The bastards have caught me with my pants down but I’ll be down to help you by the time they get back.”

  At Prome the British forces were assembled as 1st Burma Corps under a new corps commander, Lieutenant General William J. Slim, who had been transferred from the Middle East in the same infusion from the top that brought Alexander. He was a man of fighting temperament who had enlisted as a private in World War I. When Merrill who conducted Stilwell’s liaison with the British went to see him to ask if he would join in the counterattack, Slim asked, “What is Stilwell’s objective?”

  “Rangoon,” Merrill replied with a straight face.

  “Tell Stilwell he can count me in,” said Slim.

  Later in the course of shared misfortunes when he came to know Stilwell in person, he found him sometimes “obstinate as a whole team of mules,” sometimes deliberately rude, but possessed of a major military virtue: he was “constantly on lookout for an aggressive counterstroke.” Slim too believed there was a chance for just that at Toungoo but he had little to work with. Burmese soldiers, worried about their families, were deserting and there were no replacements, air cover was gone, the Indian Division’s field guns and heavy equipment had been lost at the Sittang, troops were dispirited, faith in their officers was minimal, positions were abandoned without battle. The countryside was growing sinister. An aide to Wavell who came on an inspection tour felt “anarchy and menace in the air.” Dacoits and Thakins, partisans of the nationalist leader Aung San, stalked the area. Burmese peasants like “malignant nursemaids in their skirts and white caps” carried long sharp knives, actually ordinary agricultural tools but they had a wicked look. British soldiers who drove jeeps with the windshields down were sometimes found decapitated by wires stretched across the roads at neck height.

  On March 26 Stilwell learned of a riot among British soldiers at Yenangyuang, 120 miles north of Prome, site of the oil fields which supplied all motor fuel and oil for the campaign. Then worse news. “British destroying the oil fields. GOOD GOD. What are we fighting for?” It was hard to tell. No one really cared about Burma. It was the end of the line. The main effort of London and Washington was directed elsewhere. With no reinforcements or help coming in, there was a sense of isolation in CBI. Dr. Seagrave, setting up his medical station at Pyinmana behind the Fifth Army, felt it. The only way to believe the task was important, he thought, was to believe that “everything we are trying to do here is being done for America and, perhaps, for the whole world.”

  Still the 22nd was not in action. Stilwell battled with the railroad whose Indian personnel, afraid of the hostile Burmans, were departing. “Told Martin to hold a gun on the crews and get the trains through….Last train of the 22nd passed Pyawbwe at 7:00. Looks a bit better.” Then General Tu had “one of his depressed fits—everything was against attack. Mai yu pan fa. [It’s impossible.] Christ, he’s terrible when he’s like that.” Now all depended on the arrival of the 22nd. At 3 A.M. two trains were still at Pyinmana; at 9 o’clock all five trains had cleared (“Some bastard stopped the move for three hours. Who was it?”). Conflicting reports came in next morning; then suddenly all three regiments were in position, guns and tanks ready for the jumpoff at 4 P.M.

  “Later. It was too good.” Chinese hesitancy and excuses returned. “ ‘How can we attack? They have 105s and we only have 75s,’ ” or “ ‘They have 49 tanks,’ ” or “ ‘The 96th can’t get here on time’ ” (having failed to move it by truck) or there would be Burmese sabotage or a break on the railway line; “ ‘Maybe tomorrow; must think it over.’ ” At this point word came that the British were withdrawing from Prome, uncovering the Chinese flank. “Well this will raise hell. What to do? Tu is too much for me.” Stilwell determined on a showdown. He knew Chiang Kai-shek was communicating directly with Tu and Lin Wei, ordering the movements of units down to the regimental level from 2,000 miles away. He returned to Maymyo to catch Lin Wei who had disappeared from Pyawbwe when he felt the attack by the 22nd was going to be forced. At Maymyo he found to his amazement that Chiang Kai-shek now accepted Alexander, who had been up to Chungking to see him in the meantime, as overall commander of the campaign. This remarkable reversal was never explained; however, since it achieved unity of command Stilwell wasted no time worrying about it.

  He sought out Lin Wei, kept at him until he agreed to write orders for attack, then hurried back to Pyawbwe to go over plans with Tu. General Liao, commander of the 22nd, “a colorless bird,” who talked a lot at high speed without saying anything, wanted to wait for the 96th. “They are dogging it…they’ll drag it out and do nothing unless I can somehow kick them into it….Okay I’ll try to be patient a bit longer. HOT as hell. All of us dried out and exhausted. I am mentally about shot.” He had phoned Maymyo to ask for a supporting British attack and received a promise in the affirmative. “Good old Slim. Maybe he’s all right after all.” But once more Tu found reasons not to move. While he procrastinated, the enemy encircled Toungoo on three sides, coming up between it and Prome, menacing the inner flanks of both Chinese and British. Slim’s Armored Brigade, which had actually advanced and gained ground, had to return to save itself from being cut off from behind. The 22nd fired its guns in a gesture of attack but stood still. By 9:30 on the morning of March 30 Stilwell knew there would be no offensive. They “have dogged it again. The pusillanimous bastards.”

  The 200th, after its stolid twelve-day stand with losses of 1,000 killed, was left to cut its way out and fall back behind the 22nd to the Pyinmana area 60 miles to the north. The Burma Corps was already retreating, supposedly to hold at Allanmyo on a level with Pyinmana, but the men did not stop, nor pause on the way for demolition of bridges to delay the Japanese, until they had gone 80 miles to the Magwe area in front of the oil fields. By this time even British soldiers were deserting, heading for Mandalay with the vague hope of exit through China. Recriminations flared between the Chinese and British, each blaming the other for exposing their respective flanks. The Chinese accused the British of leaving the 200th to starve, to which the British retorted that General Tai had placed his liaison officers so far to the rear that they were cut off by the Japanese encirclement. General Alexander, having achieved command of all the Allied forces, was later in his official report to call the Chinese “parasites” because “they expected me to feed them.”

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  Stilwell had now trapped himself in the position of conducting a fight with troops who refused to obey his orders. “I can’t shoot them; I can’t relieve them; and just talking to them does no good.” He had pushed Chiang Kai-shek into action more or less against his will, although in China’s interest; Chiang was now pulling back on the reins. Stilwell considered the choices open to him: to “let it ride and do nothing,” to “resign flatly,” or to “ooze out and demand our own force.” He left for Chungking to have it out with the Generalissimo. Realizing that his mission was on the way to becoming “a messed up affair,” he told Dorn to keep a record of everything.

  The problem of exacting obedience from unit commanders was not his alone. Retreat without orders and failure to take or hold a given position were habitual and inherent in the traditional Chinese idea of war as a kind of chess game of cunning and maneuver rather than a physical clash. For a commander to lose his life or his army was not gallant but stupid. Disinclination to risk troops in actual battle was so common in China that it led to the formulation in the sixteenth century of nien tso fa, a military rule of collective responsibility providing the deat
h penalty for officers all the way through the chain of command when any unit retreated without orders. Chiang Kai-shek applied the rule in the first campaigns of the Whampoa graduates to assure responsibility both vertically within a unit and horizontally between adjoining army groups.

  The practice of offering a monetary reward to unit commanders to hold a given position was another substitute for the missing sense of responsibility to the whole. But promise of neither death nor reward could create in military practice what was not developed in the culture, and Chinese officers on the whole did not regard themselves as responsible for the outcome of the battle. Traditionally the military profession was not highly regarded, the Chinese theory being that “good iron is not used to make nails nor good men to make soldiers.” Stilwell himself had noted in one of his jottings that the Chinese officer had “no association with a position of trust in the country” nor tradition of duty to the nation. The Chinese commander was not a member of an institutional army like the Western officer. This led to placing loyalty directly in the person of the leader instead of submitting to obedience in a chain of command, with the result that divisional generals and even regimental colonels would frequently take orders only from Chiang Kai-shek himself instead of from their immediate superior. General Hsueh Yueh, the Tiger of Hunan, at one time became so disgusted with the Generalissimo’s orders to his subordinates which resulted in the movement or withdrawal of units without his knowledge that he disobeyed orders himself and withdrew in order to “get beyond the reach of those telephone calls.”

  The atmosphere at Maymyo after the Prome-Toungoo withdrawals began to turn rancid. The Americans of Stilwell’s staff, who had not themselves been in battle and whose country’s military performance so far was less than brilliant, felt contempt for both Chinese and British, and as the campaign went on became convinced, according to one of them, that “the situation in Asia was past redemption except by the employment of exclusively American troops.” Stilwell’s “ooze out and demand our own force” already reflected this desire, never to be fulfilled in CBI. The British at Maymyo, in their turn, treated to sarcastic remarks by Americans and Chinese, openly jeered at “Stilwell’s great Chinese offensive.” With their empire sliding out from under them they were disposed to consider American carelessness in losing its Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor after repeated warnings as largely to blame. Even India might be lost in consequence.

  “Am I the April Fool?” Stilwell asked himself, writing down an appraisal of his situation on April 1 in Chungking. Chiang Kai-shek’s interference was the basic trouble. If he had not stopped the 22nd Division, it could have cut off the Japanese when they first went around Toungoo, but “he is hipped on holding Mandalay and can’t see that the way to hold is to lick the Japs at Toungoo.” Stilwell learned from Shang Chen that Chiang himself had ordered the retirement to the Pyinmana line.

  At his conference with the Generalissimo he “threw the raw meat on the floor. Pulled no punches and said I’d have to be relieved. Proposed an independent army under my command as an alternative. Told him I could not use the 10th Airforce behind such commanders….In plain words the army and divisional commanders failed to obey and I had insufficient authority to force them to obey.”

  This was in fact pulling a punch because, as Stilwell acknowledged in his diary, “I have to tell CKS with a straight face that his subordinates are not carrying out his orders, when in all probability they are doing just what he tells them. In justice to all of them, however, it is expecting a great deal to have them turn over a couple of armies to a goddam foreigner that they don’t know and in whom they can’t have much confidence.” Unlike many Americans, he appreciated the deep-rooted antiforeign feeling of the Chinese.

  Chiang and Madame appeared worried and anxious to rectify the situation and over the next few days promised to do everything to make Stilwell’s authority definitive. At Madame’s suggestion Chiang agreed to go in person to Lashio “to make it very plain to the boys that I am the boss.” He seemed sincere and convincing and appointed a new executive officer, Lo Cho-ying, who could more effectively handle General Tu than could Lin Wei. Lo was a forceful energetic Cantonese who had achieved his rise in the Bandit Suppression campaigns against the Communists in the 1930s, had fought at Shanghai and Changsha and impressed Stilwell as a “tough bird” who meant business. In addition, Madame understood the Western viewpoint and the mental reactions of a foreigner to indirect Chinese methods, and “promises to help in any way she can which is a whole lot.” Stilwell believed he had gained a major victory. “When you consider their history and experiences with foreigners, this is really a handsome gesture that Chiang Kai-shek is making.”

  Pursued by journalists in Chungking, he noted that already in the press “a flood of crap is released to justify which I would have to be in Rangoon within a week. What a sucker I’ll look like if the Japs run me out of Burma.” The American public at this time was reading such headlines as “CHINESE CAVALRY ROUTS JAP PANZERS IN BURMA!” The Fort Ord Panorama, founded by Stilwell, blazoned the announcement of his mission under the proud boast, “LOOK OUT HIROHITO!”

  He returned to Burma on April 5 in company with the Generalissimo and Madame in whose honor the British, with exemplary protocol, broke out the Burma Rifles with bagpipes. Chiang assured Alexander at Maymyo that “General Stilwell has full powers to handle the Chinese troops” and on the following day assembled the Chinese commanders and told them in Stilwell’s presence that they must take his orders without question and that “I had full power to promote, relieve and punish any officer in the Chinese Expeditionary Force. (Jesus.) This is a new note in Chinese history.” Smiling pictures for the press were taken arm-in-arm with the Generalissimo and Madame, and confirmation of his authority was promised in the form of the kuan fang or seal showing the possessor’s official title in a large monogram of archaic characters. Its stamp in red ink was required to make a document effective; without it Stilwell’s orders were merely advices. When it arrived a week later the kuan fang proved to be significantly modified from what had been promised. The inscription read Tsung ts’an mou chang of the T’ung men chun (Chief of Staff of the Allied Armies) instead of Tsung ssu-ling of the Yuan mien chun (Commander-in-Chief of the Burma Expeditionary Force) and it was not accompanied by a letter of authority to reward and punish. Officers of the 38th Division stated after the war that regardless of the Generalissimo’s words at Maymyo, the ts’an mou of the seal indicated that Stilwell was “adviser” not commanding officer, and they so regarded him.

  Yet, to Stilwell it seemed that Chiang had come around to the view that in order to hold it was necessary to attack and that Lo Cho-ying and Tu Li-ming too were “all for it.” He felt encouraged, not without help from Madame who, on departing, left him a jar of marmalade and a letter rippling with charm-talk about the jar’s contents representing the bitter and the sweet of life and assuring him that “We are back of you….I am at the other end of the line….You have a man’s job ahead of you but you are a man—and shall I add—what a man!” Madame did not think it necessary to be subtle with Westerners.

  Mrs. Luce too was at Maymyo and interviewed Stilwell for an article that appeared in Life with his picture on the cover two months later. She asked if the talks had been a success. “Yep,” he said, according to her version, “Yep, yep, yep. The Gissimo handed it to everybody including his own generals straight. So did Alexander. So did I. And Madame translated it all straight too. Without pulling a punch. Yep. Everybody took it right out of the spoon.” He said the correspondent could report home that the situation was well in hand. When asked, “But will it last?” he replied, “Nope. It won’t last long. It can’t last long.” But it bought time and “time, time, time”—that was what he was fighting for. “Every hour that Burma holds saves America an hour in Australia and the Philippines.”

  Vinegar Joe was becoming a public personality. He made good copy, and the press made the most of it, developing a picturesque stereotype
, the crusty cracker-barrel soldiers’ soldier, tough, leathery, wiry, down-to-earth, wise-cracking, Chinese-speaking, a disciplinarian loved by the troops, with lack of swank and a warm smile, an American “Chinese Gordon,” an “Uncle Joe.”

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  Although the Japanese were methodically bombing every town and village ahead of their advance up the Irrawaddy toward Mandalay, the military situation on the ground had not changed visibly during Stilwell’s absence in Chungking. “We still have a chance.” Actually during this period the Japanese were bringing in two more divisions and two tank regiments of which the Allies, owing to poor reconnaissance, were unaware. The Japanese plan was a three-column drive up the three valleys to envelop and destroy the Allies between Lashio and the Chindwin before the monsoon came in mid-May. In conformity with his theory of attack in order to hold, Stilwell believed a counteroffensive could still be launched from the Pyinmana line sufficient to set the enemy back and permit the Allies to consolidate a position in central Burma. In order to hold Mandalay Chiang Kai-shek had sent in a new division, the 38th, commanded by the alert and vigorous General Sun Li-jen, a graduate like George Marshall of VMI, who was to prove himself an able tactician, cool and aggressive in battle, and to become the outstanding Chinese commander in the Burma campaign. Fluency in English assisted both his operations and his reputation. A major source of trouble with the other divisions was lack of enough able interpreters.