Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Madame took up the same themes with the President as with Hopkins, and in the course of her discussion of Stilwell and Chennault ascribed Stilwell’s bad relations with the Generalissimo to the watermelon incident. Stilwell’s reply to the Generalissimo on receipt of this order was, according to her, “bitterly and openly contemptuous” and this, she said, played a part in all their relations thereafter.

  She invited the President to come back to China with her as she did each of the top men in the Administration whom she set about “vamping,” to use Roosevelt’s word. Admiral Leahy, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was invited up to her suite in the White House, though he was afterwards “never quite certain of the purpose of this interview.” Secretary Stimson found her “a most attractive and beguiling little lady” who “commented on the beauty of my hands” but he warned McCloy, his Assistant Secretary whom she also invited to visit her, “to watch out sharply for what she said.” She importuned all of them for more planes for the Air Transport Command with such insistence that Roosevelt ordered the immediate delivery of Curtiss Wright’s new C-46s before their performance was tested. When they were put into use, the structural flaws brought out by the rough flight over the Hump proved lethal for many fliers, further embittering the already sour morale of the ATC.

  Roosevelt respected Mme. Chiang as a real power in the Chinese Government but did not trust her and grew less beguiled the longer she stayed. Her tact did not match her charm. When he held a press conference for her at the White House attended by 172 reporters she yielded to him a question on how the United States could get supplies into China. When the President answered we would get them there as fast as the Lord would let us, she pointedly suggested that “the Lord helps those who help themselves.” Roosevelt’s face was seen to redden but whether from embarrassment or anger is moot.

  Late in February the chief usher at the White House telephoned Morgenthau’s personal secretary on behalf of Madame to ask that the Treasury instruct the Collector of Customs to release a shipment of a special brand of English cigarets which had just arrived for her in New York. When it was discovered that the cigarets were still on board ship, the calls on behalf of Madame persisted all day until the Treasury in desperation instructed an agent to “get them off the boat and fly them down here.” Like the watermelons, the English cigarets were a petty matter with large implications. Madame’s behavior did not suggest a leader who was guiding her country toward a democratic future. “The President…is just crazy to get her out of the country,” Morgenthau told his staff. Roosevelt’s reason was not so much personal irritation as a growing concern that Madame’s private manners might gain unfavorable publicity to spoil her public image—and with it his policy.

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  Besides his fixed intent that China should be one of the four major powers in the postwar structure, Roosevelt’s main objectives were to keep China in the war for the present and aligned with the United States in the future. He believed that no other country was so likely to be the source of postwar trouble. His four principles for the underpinning of China’s future stability, according to Sumner Welles, the person best qualified to know, were: first, that China should come to an agreement with Russia to prevent Russia from interfering after the war; second, that China should get back all her territories taken by Japan and other powers, including Hong Kong; third, that the Nationalist Government should be supported as the only regime capable of unifying China; and finally, that American foreign policy in the Far East should be predicated on a close working relation between China and the United States.

  Roosevelt had already taken a notable step toward implementing China’s equality among nations by negotiating repeal of the unequal treaties and all remaining extraterritorial rights, privileges and concessions of the United States, and by prevailing upon Britain to do likewise, short of Hong Kong. The American action, announced on China’s Independence Day, October 10 of 1942, was formalized along with the British in separate treaties signed January 11, 1943, ending the century of intrusions on China’s sovereignty since the First Opium War. Chiang Kai-shek hailed the event as marking a “new epoch in Chinese history” and placing an independent China “on equal footing with Great Britain and the United States.”

  All of Roosevelt’s principles and the success of his China policy depended on the assumption that the Kuomintang was a viable government, which was already questionable. No well-informed observer by 1943 believed the Kuomintang could escape a major civil challenge after the war and few were sure of the outcome. Nevertheless, for the sake of the great-power concept, the Kuomintang had to be treated with full respect, which meant that policy was conducted through the veils of a conscious illusion. The information available to Washington was not at fault. Foreign service reports were knowledgeable and sound. The consensus of most American officials and correspondents working in China was that the Kuomintang was incompetent, corrupt, oppressive, unrepresentative, riddled by internal weakness and unlikely to last. George Atcheson, a diplomat of 20 years’ experience in China, on arriving as Chargé d’Affaires in Chungking in May 1943, reported that the situation was “seriously deteriorating in practically all aspects” and economic deterioration was “leading toward something that may eventually spell ruin.” Chinese leaders were “helpless” and escaped realities by concerning themselves with postwar problems. His report did not sink into oblivion in Department files; it went to Admiral Leahy’s office in the White House. Pearl Buck made the same point in a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, written to pierce the clouds of glory surrounding the visit of Mme. Chiang. Describing the Government of Chiang and the Soongs as a clique with no claim to be representative, she wrote, “It is a peculiar and interesting situation. It cannot of course last. I fear an outbreak from the people immediately after the war, or at least as soon as the people can recuperate sufficiently to make it.” Currie, another with direct access to the President, received the uncensored text of Theodore White’s outraged eyewitness account for Time of the terrible Honan famine of 1942–43. He reported the “stupidity and inefficiency” of the relief effort, the continued collection of taxes from starving peasants by local officials, the “bland equanimity” of Chungking because officially all taxes had been remitted, and finally the conviction of the writer that the loyalty of the peasants of Honan had been “hollowed to nothingness by the extortions of their governments.”*1

  Between policy-makers in the capital and realities in the field lies an eternal gap whitened by the bones of failed and futile efforts. Washington’s China policy of 1943 was not made in terms of current information but in terms of the accumulated notions of a lifetime by which minds had already been formed. It was conditioned, not by Atcheson’s report or Pearl Buck’s letter, but by the Congressional Resolution of 1912 welcoming China into the company of the democracies and firmly congratulating her people on “successfully asserting…the powers, duties and responsibilities of self-government,” and by all the ensuing ideas and images of the 30 years that followed. Information coming from the field had to battle against this accumulated weight, besides succeeding in its other struggle to gain the eye and penetrate the mind of the chief of state. When informed advice succeeded in reaching him, it could still be ignored if it discommoded a wishful policy already determined. This was the most formidable barrier of all. To halt the momentum of an accepted idea, to reexamine assumptions, is a disturbing process and requires more courage than governments can generally summon. The State Department in the case of China drew no inference from the reports of its own envoys that a fresh look was called for. The President preferred not to look at the weaknesses of the regime to which he was committed because he was intent on China as the fourth corner of a stable world order. If there was no alternative to Chiang Kai-shek capable of holding China united, then Chiang had to be supported regardless of weakness.

  The need of a “regenerative idea” to strengthen or invigorate the Chinese Government occurred to others beside Stilwell. F
aced with the passivity and deterioration of China and the loss of war potential which this meant to the Allies, such men were consumed with a desire to find some way to improve matters. Foreign loans could no longer help, reported Atcheson, but if the Central Government could retake Ichang and the hinterland leading to southern Hupeh and Hunan, the flow of cotton and produce would bring a reduction of 50 percent in the cost of food and clothing, as he had been told by the Minister of Economic Affairs, Wong Wen Hao, one of the finest and most respected of China’s public officials. Atcheson wondered if the Allies could help the Chinese to undertake a “determined offensive action to attack and recapture…points such as Hankow, Ichang and others.” He was moved by “the necessity of doing something.” The necessity of “doing something” was the cry of Chinese like Wong Wen Hao as well as Americans, but like the effort of the reformers in the last years of the Manchus, it beat against a government too feeble and too fearful of change to act.

  The American public all this time heard and accepted on faith only the version of China transmitted through such reports as Willkie’s. Correspondents were hampered because they had to have War Department credentials, for which they had to sign an agreement to submit everything they wrote to censorship; violation risked loss of the credentials. Owing partly to censorship but more to voluntary reticence, the press up to 1943 published nothing realistic about the brave and favorite ally. Probably never before had the people of one country viewed the government of another under misapprehension so complete.

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  On the agenda of the Casablanca conference in January 1943 was the question of reviving the ANAKIM campaign for the overall reconquest of Burma including amphibious action to take Rangoon. With initiative now beginning to swing to the Allies, both American service chiefs, General Marshall and Admiral King, were strongly in favor of ANAKIM as the prerequisite for establishing effective bases in China for air operations against Japanese industry and Japanese sea-lanes. Reopening access to China also offered the possibility that Japanese forces could be put on the defensive on the main foothold of their empire, that is, if the Chinese armies could be equipped and energized to fight. This was much more desirable from the American point of view than using American manpower to fight the slow, difficult, piecemeal, costly struggle up through the humid island jungles of the Southwest Pacific. Japanese counterattack in the islands was fierce, and America, as Marshall said, “could not stand another Bataan.” By putting the Japanese on the defensive in China we could “reduce our hazards in the Pacific and thus undertake the campaigns against Germany.” Marshall was not averse to blackmail. Unless ANAKIM were undertaken, he said to the British at Casablanca, “a situation might arise in the Pacific at any time that would necessitate the U.S. regretfully withdrawing from the commitments in the European theater.”

  British reasons for dislike of the campaign had not changed. They too could use blackmail. The landing craft required to take Rangoon, they said, must necessarily reduce Britain’s share in the cross-Channel attack in Europe. This was disposed of by Admiral King, a man like an axe who made Marshall seem gentle, who offered to supply the landing craft for Rangoon from the Pacific. On that basis it was agreed that ANAKIM, which had to be completed in one combat season, that is, between November and May, would be planned for launching on a target date of November 15, 1943, and with a final decision to be made no later than July.

  To obtain Chiang Kai-shek’s agreement to participate, and to smooth over the fact of Chinese absence from Casablanca, so embarrassing to the concept of China as one of the big four, a high-level mission was sent to confer with him composed of General Arnold of the Air Force, General Brehon B. Somervell, chief of American SOS, and Sir John Dill, British representative of the Combined Chiefs.

  Behind the mission was the issue of air versus ground strategy. Under the influence of the Chiang-Chennault pressures, Roosevelt was already beginning to have doubts about ANAKIM and to favor air warfare as the quickest and cheapest way of damaging the enemy. He proposed sending Arnold to China as a proponent of air war who was eager to “get at the bombing of Japan as soon as possible.” Somervell, who represented the War Department doctrine that the Hump could never supply as much as the Road, was sent along by Marshall as a counterweight.

  The mission was a revelation to its members both of the realities and of the flights from reality in CBI. In Delhi it seemed to Arnold that Wavell’s plan of campaign was not a plan at all but “several pages of well written paragraphs, telling why the mission could not be accomplished.” On reaching China on February 4, he found Chennault not “realistic” about the logistics of his operations and Chiang Kai-shek even less so. Accompanied by Stilwell to a series of conferences at the Chiangs’ hilltop residence (named “Peanut’s Berchtesgaden” by his guide), Arnold found that the Generalissimo “would not listen to logic or reason.” Chiang was not mollified by the promise Arnold brought of 137 transports for the Hump, the number necessary to deliver 5,000 tons a month, nor by the promise of a group of B-24 bombers to come. Far from feeling it necessary to buy himself back into American favor as Stilwell had supposed, Chiang now had three new demands: an independent command for Chennault, 10,000 tons a month over the Hump and 500 combat planes for China by November.

  One reason behind the demands was need for the defense of Chungking by Chennault’s Air Task Force in default of the Chinese Air Force. Chinese air corps cadets trained in the United States “do not go on to actual battle experience,” reported Gauss, “and apparently have been lost to the war effort.” The Russian training effort at Lanchow had proved equally futile. The Russians discovered the aircraft they delivered were misused or cracked up by inexperienced personnel, and the other matériel seemed scarcely ever to find its way into combat against the Japanese. “It disappeared and no accounting was given,” they stated. Having failed in its training program, ruined most of its Lend-Lease aircraft and disdained operational control by a foreigner, the Chinese Air Force was in no shape to protect Chungking when the Japanese bombers should return with spring.

  When it came to the necessities required for building and maintaining airfields and supplying fuel, Arnold found that Chiang and Chennault “glossed over these things with a wave of their hands. They could not or would not be bothered with logistics.” To the Generalissimo all explanations of the practical difficulties were “excuses, excuses.” He wanted 5,000 tons a month right away; “There are ways and means of doing things and they must be done.” He resorted again to ultimatum: “Tell your President that unless I get these three things I cannot fight this war and he cannot count on me to have our Army participate in the campaign.”

  “I’ll be damned if I take any such message back to the President,” Arnold said to Stilwell afterwards. Ignoring the ultimatum, he returned to the talks and promised increased tonnage but nothing more, leaving it to the tactful Dill to “smoke out” the Generalissimo on whether he would or would not take the offensive in November. Chiang said he would, although without the 10,000 tons and 500 planes he could offer no assurance of success. Not content with this, Stilwell asked whether he would participate if naval support were limited. “He got mad as hell and said, ‘Didn’t I say I would?’ He sent word by T.V. that I had embarrassed him publicly. He can go to hell. I have him on that point.” Chiang repeated his promise along with his three new demands in a letter to Roosevelt of February 7, stating that “the Chinese army will be in readiness to perform its assigned task at the specified time without fail.” The November campaign was confirmed by all parties at a conference in Calcutta on February 9 attended by Ho Ying-chin and T. V. Soong for China, Dill and Wavell for Britain, and Arnold, Somervell, Bissell and Stilwell for the United States. “All were in agreement,” according to Wavell’s summary, and it only remained to press on “with the greatest possible energy” to prepare for the battle immediately after the monsoon.

  Stilwell was pleased that his visitors had had a look for themselves at the “machinery of C
hinese government” and at the personalities—meaning Chiang and Ho Ying-chin—with whom he had to deal. Arnold had said to him on leaving, “You ought to get a laurel wreath,” and wrote afterwards, “Dear Joe: You have one S.O.B. of a job….If at any time you think I can help, just yell.”

  The yells came instead from Chennault whose operations continued to be limited by the inexorable mathematics of tonnages over the Hump. The ATC was flying in about 3,000 tons a month at this time, of which Stilwell allotted the major share to train and equip the Y-force for the Burma campaign and the minor share to the Air Force. Chennault’s objections were loudly voiced, publicly by articles planted in the press to force the issue, and privately to Hopkins’ office in the White House by the agency of Alsop, a journalist with a tendency to cataclysmic opinions. A relative of the Roosevelts and well known around Washington as a political columnist, Alsop was a devotee of the airplane as the definitive weapon and had found his idol in Chennault whom he had joined as public relations aide in 1941. Captured a few months later in Hong Kong by the Japanese and repatriated to the United States, he had since arranged through Hopkins to have himself appointed Lend-Lease representative in Chungking and had departed for China in December 1942. Roosevelt had written to him at that time saying he wished he could go with him to see Chennault and suggesting as an alternative that Chennault come to Washington. The President tended to trust the reports of private envoys more than those of officials and Alsop qualified for that advantage. He was literate, excitable and persuasive with just enough superficial acquaintance with the situation to be opinionated and to appear knowledgeable. Hopkins, according to his biographer, was “unquestionably influenced” by Alsop’s flood of letters.

  His reports were alarming. Before even reaching China he melodramatically informed Hopkins on the basis of talks with returned fliers that the American Air Force situation in China was “a national tragedy…a national scandal…grossly dishonoring to President, Army and country.” He begged to be recalled within two months to report in person. On arriving in Chungking, he went to see Stilwell, becoming, after one interview, “Alslop” in the diary. He was back in Washington in less than two months with the solution for the war in CBI, presented to Hopkins in 21 passionate and plausible pages. The gist was that in adopting the Burma campaign we had embarked on “grandiose, dangerous and doubtfully fruitful” ground operations while neglecting the “brilliant and easy opportunity in the air.”