Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Chinese hoarding of resources for some yet greater emergency was another hindrance to fighting. To the Chinese, chronically short as they were of everything, it was a cultural imperative. From Chungking the Generalissimo personally doled out the movement of the Fifth Army’s nine tanks one by one so that what usefulness they might have had as a group was destroyed. At Toungoo Alexander asked General Tu what had happened to his field guns which he had seen the day before, expertly dug in, well-sited and carefully camouflaged. Tu said he had withdrawn them to safety.

  “Then you mean that they will take no part in the battle?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But then what use are they?”

  “General, the Fifth Army is our best army because it is the only one which has any field guns, and I cannot afford to risk those guns. If I lose them the Fifth Army will no longer be our best.”

  —

  The turning of the Allied east flank by the Japanese drive on Lashio ended any hope of prolonging the campaign. With unbelievable speed the Japanese, using motorized transport, had already bypassed Taunggyi and were well north of it on the road to Lashio. Every effort to concentrate the Sixth Army failed. Summoned to send 150 trucks, the Chinese Service of Supply at Lashio delivered 22. On the central front the Fifth Army was being heavily attacked, and further west the Japanese were advancing toward the Chindwin in a drive to come up between the Allies and India. Envelopment threatened on both sides.

  Stilwell and Alexander held a conference with Lo and Tu at Kyaukse, 25 miles south of Mandalay, on the night of April 25. Stilwell in his World War I campaign hat and government-issue khakis which, in a kind of inverse snobbery he wore without insignia or decorations, looked “terribly tired” to Seagrave who caught a glimpse of him. Lo looked “plump and unhappy” and Tu “uncertain and sulky.” It was agreed that a general retreat was the only course, and once this had been acknowledged the campaign now became a race to withdraw before being trapped. In the east the fragmented Sixth Army plus the 200th Division at Taunggyi and two new Chinese divisions, which were just then entering via the Burma Road, could retreat toward the Chinese border. The main problem for Alexander and Stilwell was to get the Burma Corps and the 38th, 22nd and 96th Chinese Divisions out through Mandalay and over to the west bank of the Irrawaddy from where the British could retreat to India and the Chinese northward via Myitkyina. The only place where tanks and large numbers of troops could cross the river was the Ava rail and highway bridge at Mandalay. When all were across, the bridge was to be destroyed. The British had prepared it for demolition as long ago as February.

  As he watched Alexander dictate the general order for retreat, Stilwell recalled a Chinese saying about “eating bitterness.” The only shred of consolation was that the orders did not call for surrender, as at Singapore and Java. Underlining defeat, six enemy bombers roared over the site of the conference. While officers scrambled for cover, a 500-pounder hit with a deafening blast within 100 yards. Through the raid Alexander, performing the commander’s role, stood stiff and defiant in the garden and Stilwell, not to be outdone, leaned against the porch railing with his amber cigaret holder cocked at its Rooseveltian angle.

  Headquarters was moved 50 miles north of Mandalay to Shwebo, where the Japanese planes pursued. Among the staffs a sense was rising not only of military disaster but of personal danger. Some self-reportedly were in “a state of funk,” others relapsed into passivity, not knowing what to do. The railroad was the worst problem. Stilwell was determined to get troop trains down to bring out the 22nd Division but Chinese organization was lax or nonfunctioning. Because none of his staff was technically authorized to issue orders to the Chinese he went back to Mandalay himself to try to stir up action. He returned over the bridge among the stream of retiring troops while below in the river others were crossing in ferry boats. On the road to Shwebo, clogged with trucks and caissons and the piled carts of refugees, the mass of retreat moved in dust and heat and the sour smell of fear. Once-proud Sikhs were dirty and disheveled in ragged turbans. Chinese soldiers marched with frightened eyes in a strange land where they could not shed uniforms and slip away into the countryside. Yellow-robed bodies of Buddhist monks lay on the ground, shot by the Chinese who believed them to be spies in disguise. Japanese Zeros flew over, strafing the road with machine-gun fire. Chinese generals in their cars, and British officers conscious of the “natives,” were concerned not to lose face, but everyone was conscious that all had lost face, in the eyes of Asia, the world, and “worst of all” as Dorn wrote, “in our own.”

  On April 29 the trap narrowed: on the east the Japanese took Lashio, cutting the Burma Road, and on the west they took Monywa on the Chindwin, only 60 miles below Shwebo, endangering the path of the British retreat to India. It was now urgent for the British to reach the crossing of the Chindwin at Kalewa before the Japanese. Last-minute efforts to stock the lines of retreat with food and water had to be cut short. The blowing up of the Ava bridge was set for midnight on April 30. Stilwell had intended to move his headquarters to Myitkyina in order to stay in contact with the Chinese as long as possible, but the fall of Lashio, opening the Japanese way to Myitkyina over the hills, made this impossible. He decided to send the bulk of his staff out to India by plane while he would go to Loiwing on the Lashio front taking General Lo with him. He radioed for a plane to take him out on May 1. His staff, sweltering in the heat and eating boiled rice because canned goods were being saved for an unpredictable future, were growling restlessly. Angry at the repeated Chinese failure to fulfill agreements and carry out orders, they agreed that “The Boss should tell the Chinese to go to hell and get out while the getting was good.” Heat, defeat and fear, disgust with allies and a general sense of desertion were not bringing out the best in them.

  A message came through on April 29 reporting Chiang Kai-shek’s approval in principle of the training program in India. Stilwell’s mind was now fixed on this like a mariner’s on the North Star. “God, if we can only get those 100,000 Chinese to India, we’ll have something.” He at once wired Marshall for assurance of support and matériel, otherwise the plan would have to depend on British support “which would be fatal.” While everyone around him wanted only to see the last of Burma, he sat under a tattered punkah telling Darrell Berrigan of the United Press about his strategy for return and for reopening the door to China—the springboard, he said, from which the Allies could strike Japan. Marshall passed his telegram on to the President who, now that the loss of Burma loomed, was once again afflicted by fear that China would withdraw from the war. “Ways will be found,” Roosevelt announced on April 28, “to deliver airplanes and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.” As if to reassure himself as much as Chiang, Roosevelt repeated his theme that in the future “an unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity not only in Eastern Asia but in the whole world.”

  On May 1 Stilwell woke to discover that General Lo Cho-ying, the chief executive officer, had decamped for Myitkyina and its airfield. He had commandeered a locomotive with 17 cars at gunpoint and after proceeding 25 miles had run his unscheduled train into collision with another, blocking the railroad for two days. “Unfortunately he was not killed.” His defection soured even Sibert, hitherto a holdout among the disaffected. “Christ, Joe, let’s go home,” he pleaded. Loiwing was closed down, but Stilwell still felt obliged to do what he could to ensure that the Chinese escape routes were stocked with rice. The staff argued that his place was at Headquarters in Delhi. “No,” he said, “and I will tell you why.” With one defeat after another, including American defeat in the Philippines, Western prestige had never been so low. It was his job to take care of the Chinese whom he commanded, at least on paper. “If I run out now that will be one more defeat, one more surrender. I could not command the Chinese again.”

  He sat down to draw up his list of who among the staff was to go to Delhi and who to stay with him. Alexander came in “ve
ry worried.” It was their last meeting in Burma. The final order for the British retreat was issued the following day and Alexander departed by car on the 107-mile trek to the Chindwin, a six days’ march for those on foot. They crossed the Chindwin ahead of the Japanese but with forced abandonment of tanks, guns and many vehicles. Arrangements for transport and food had been made on the other side. Twelve thousand of the Burma Corps straggled into India between May 12 and 20, leaving behind 13,500 casualties in killed, wounded and missing during their four months’ campaign. “Of course we shall take Burma back; it’s part of the British Empire,” Alexander said in farewell on terminating his command on May 20. Shortly afterwards he returned to London and went on to command GYMNAST and win renown in Tunisia. He did not return to Burma.

  Alexander and Lo were gone; Stilwell was left. Companions in a ginrummy game, scattering during an air raid, returned to find him still at the table “resignedly playing solitaire.” By now the Japanese had taken and passed beyond Mandalay and the sound of their artillery could be heard. “It’s a great May Day,” Stilwell said to Belden. “Down with everything. Down with everybody.”

  Before the day was over, an American transport plane came in, flown by Colonels Caleb Haynes and Robert Scott, Commander and Executive Officer of the new Assam–Burma–China Ferry Command, which had begun operations ten days previously. The transports were unarmed Douglas C-47s (DC-3s) which the pilots, who hated the job and the route, called “gooney birds” for a species said to fly backward to see where they came from. Haynes and Scott had received a message from General Hap Arnold instructing them to “proceed immediately vicinity Shwebo effect evacuation Stilwell and staff most urgent.”

  Ushered into the tea planter’s house where Stilwell had his headquarters, they found the General in his ancient hat, writing at a desk. Scott, a heroic type who was later to join Chennault’s pursuit group and claim a notable score of Japanese kills, announced with fitting drama if not tact, “General Arnold sent us to rescue you, Sir.” Gaunt and haggard from the strain of the last days, Stilwell looked through his rimless glasses at the “fly boys” and declined the privilege. The aviators gaped. They told him they had sighted enemy units within 20 miles of Shwebo on the way in. Stilwell was not to be shaken. From the beginning of the collapse his sole idea was to go out with the Chinese troops. This was his duty as commander which, for him, allowed no deviation. He welcomed the plane to take out the staff but he himself intended to reach Myitkyina, by train or truck or jeep or whatever means possible, where he expected to make contact with the Chinese.

  He offered no reason for his decision, a kind of negation that was part of his temperament, like not wearing insignia. As a three-star general he felt no obligation to explain himself to a couple of Air Force colonels, but more than that, he had no wish to talk of what he felt deeply to brash and uncomprehending strangers. To the aviators this refusal to be rescued by the air arm, this absurd preference for the ground, expressed by an old man in a battered World War I hat sitting behind a desk within 20 miles of the enemy, was virtually an insult. Richly elaborated by Scott, it was to become evidence for the future contention of the Chennault cult that “Walking Joe” did not understand air power.

  Stilwell sent out his headquarters group on the plane with orders to Roberts “to find me a place to train the Chinese. You know what I want.” With the remainder of his staff he moved 60 miles north to Wuntho, hoping to get past the block on the railroad. Every American was now thinking of his own chances of escape and survival. Their vehicles, overheating and breaking down, struggled over the rutted cart track through dry, desolate, burning hot country, past overloaded Chinese Army trucks with men clinging to them like swarmed bees. At Wuntho Paul Jones, the transportation officer, who had been devoted to Stilwell ever since training under him with the Reserves at San Diego in 1934, went out on the tracks to try personally with a crowbar to move stalled cars. Stilwell went to “talk supply” to a Fifth Army commander who had no plan and was not interested. Three garbled radio messages from Chiang Kai-shek were no help. Lo was found but he asked if Stilwell would return to see him at 8 P.M. At the appointed time Stilwell found the house dark and everybody gone. He realized he could keep trying too long. “It is now apparent that we can no longer be of much use.” He decided the time had come to go—by train to Myitkyina, if possible; if not, west across country to India. “Chinese control very weak. Believe collapse near,” he radioed Marshall and gave his plans.

  He had with him now a collection of tatterdemalion vehicles and a party of about 100 consisting of 18 American officers and six enlisted men, Seagrave’s unit of two doctors and 19 Burmese nurses, an escort of 16 Chinese guards, a British Quaker ambulance unit of seven members, nine Indian, Malayan and Burmese cooks and porters, several stray British officers and civilian refugees, an American missionary, Breedom Case, president of the Agricultural College at Pyinmana who spoke the dialects of the hill tribes, Jack Belden, who had refused to leave when all other correspondents were ordered out by the British, and assorted stragglers. Among the American officers were Merrill, Sibert, Sliney, McCabe, Wyman, Ferris, Williams the medical officer, Dorn and Young the two aides, Paul Jones and another reserve officer, Fred Eldridge, formerly a police reporter who had served as public relations officer at Ford Ord and accompanied the unit in the same capacity.

  Sent ahead to reconnoiter, Jones reported the railroad hopelessly jammed. Stilwell determined to continue north, parallel to the railway, for one more day, then turn west and head overland, not toward the Tamu Pass but by a more northerly route in order to cross the Chindwin as far ahead of the Japanese as possible. The party would go by road as far as it lasted, then by trail to the Uyu, a tributary of the Chindwin, then by raft downstream to the confluence.*3 After crossing the Chindwin at Homalin they would continue over the mountains to Imphal in India. Stilwell had been warned that this route was little used and difficult and he chose it for that reason—to avoid the stream of refugees and the escaping Chinese. Shortage of food was the overriding fear which made fellow refugees as great a danger as the enemy. Three divisions of Chinese would be making for the escape routes west of the Irrawaddy in addition to the fleeing population. A million Indians had left or were trying to leave Burma, many of them already out or dead of privation along the way. Thousands were still pushing toward the mountains and the whitened bones of those who failed were to be found beside the trails at the time of the return. Two British brigadiers leading a party of twelve tried strenuously to persuade Stilwell to join them on the more direct route but he refused and was to learn weeks later that their party had been ambushed by Japanese and several of them killed.

  Burned-out motors, flat tires and reports of the enemy in the vicinity harassed progress on May 4–5. Stilwell agonized at every delay. The coming monsoon—once prayed for, now a menace—added to the need for haste. The mood of the group was growing mean. Seagrave overheard talk of “paying the nurses off and leaving them so they wouldn’t be a drag on the party.” On being informed, Stilwell “squelched it at once.” “Everyone is losing faith in himself,” Belden recorded. “The defeat is producing an enormous impression.” General Lo reappeared, having failed to make it to Myitkyina, and dejectedly joined a Chinese party of refugees. At Indaw a last grasp for a train proved futile. In the town all vestige of order was gone, soldiers were looting, civilians dying; a few dazed British officials helplessly witnessed the end of empire. Chinese soldiers in trucks beat off the clutching hands of their fellows with rifle butts. Stilwell said afterwards the chaos in Indaw was the worst sight he had ever seen in the Far East. He warned his group they might have to fight for it. “Keep moving. Don’t stop for anything.”

  At this point the turn away from the railway line into the unknown forest was made. Except for one radio sending-set, communications with the outside world were severed; isolation was closing in. Stilwell did not know where the enemy was and for one dreadful moment thought a column of soldiers coming d
own the road was Japanese. “God, I was never so scared in my life.” After continuing delays (“Christ, if I can only get them around the corner”) the party was assembled by evening. Seagrave led the nurses in singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” At the sound of their pure, thin voices everyone fell still; cursing and griping stopped. Stilwell, about to climb into a jeep, stood motionless. After a silence the convoy headed west in the darkness under huge trees. Elephants trumpeted in the woods. At a ford when trucks stuck in the mud a group of Chinese “went right through us like Red Grange.” Desperate to keep going, Stilwell ordered the stalled trucks abandoned. He made camp at 11 P.M., “I think still ahead of the deluge.”

  Assembling the group on the morning of May 6 he discovered a party of 15 newcomers, British commandos, unshaven, dirty, half-starved, led by an officer, Colonel Davidson-Huston. “Where’d you come from?” he snarled. “Got any rations?” They shook their heads. He glared, and agreed to let them stay. They included a useful addition, Major Barton, who had lived most of his life in the jungle areas and many years in Burma. The party now numbered 114. At the end of that day’s trek the road gave out and all vehicles, except jeeps for carrying supplies, had to be abandoned, including the radio truck and the radio set itself which weighed 200 pounds. Last messages were sent. The sergeant bent to his work, tapping, listening anxiously and tapping again. The message to Brereton in India advised him of the route and stated “we are running low on food with none in sight.” He was asked to send food and bearers and medicines to meet the party at Homalin and to alert the Indian Government that tens of thousands of refugees and Chinese troops were heading for India along the various trails as far north as the Hukawng valley and that it was urgent to stock the trails with rice and to send police and doctors “or thousands will die….Large numbers on way. All control gone. Catastrophe possible.” The Stilwell party should reach the Uyu in three days. “This is our last message.” To the War Department via Chungking Stilwell did not admit the worst since they could not help anyway. “We are armed have food and map and are now on foot 50 miles west of Indaw. No occasion for worry. Chinese troops coming to India this general route….Believe this is probably our last message for a while. Cheerio. Stilwell.” The radio was then smashed with an axe and codes and file copies burned.