Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  As presented at the conference of January 31, AXIOM proposed to keep the British forces out of Burma, conserving them until the next dry season, that is, the winter of 1944–45, for the assault on Sumatra and Malaya. By that time it was expected that landing craft would be released from Europe, and the next stage would be advance to the China coast. SEAC claimed that Myitkyina could not be taken in time to bring up the Road before the monsoon, nor could the Road be reopened from there to Kunming before 1946, too late to support a Pacific offensive to the China coast. The goal of Myitkyina, it was argued, should be abandoned and Stilwell should content himself with reaching the Mogaung valley from where he could offer security to the air transport route, while the resources gathered for his campaign and for building the Road could be devoted to expanding the capacity of the Hump.

  Presented in full panoply of maps and planning papers, all this meant to Stilwell was “fancy charts, false figures, and dirty intentions.” He expressed as much to the conference. He said that if the British divisions and the Y-force helped as originally planned, China could be reached more quickly by land than by sea. Why wait six months to do what could be done at once? The difficulties of the Burma campaign were known whereas those of Malaya and Sumatra were still to be learned. He did not believe the Allies could bank on the defeat of Germany in 1944 and long-term operations were better recommended on the basis of resources in hand than on those yet to be acquired. The way to defeat the Japanese in CBI was to build a strong army and drive to the sea. Wedemeyer rose to explain that this depended on installing and maintaining lines of communication to the interior of China and “our technical experts tell us that we cannot do that for at least two years.”*3 Stilwell’s reply to Wedemeyer, according to reports, was vintage vinegar. His answer to all alleged impossibles was a sarcastic reminder that Clive had conquered India with 123 men. Since the SEAC staff alone numbered ten times as many, this staff was received, not surprisingly, in dead silence.

  The decision was up to Washington and London. Boatner and Davies left at once for the United States, five days ahead of the Wedemeyer mission, much to the wrath of Mountbatten who considered that Stilwell’s move in sending his own delegates was disloyal to him as Supreme Commander. On arrival the two delegates found their persuasions were hardly needed; AXIOM did not have a chance in Washington. Roosevelt did not like the plan at all as being both peripheral and neocolonial, and it made no appeal to the Joint Chiefs. Pacific strategy was now aimed at seizing the Luzon (Philippines)-Formosa-Canton triangle and progress had been made by a landing on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands (by the Stilwell-trained 7th Division) on January 31, the same day as the conference in Delhi. It was the American intent that the assault on Japan should be an American war. The Navy especially wanted to keep the British out of it, partly because interests were divergent but mainly because the Navy with its new carriers did not want to be hampered by the older and slower British warships. Stilwell’s campaign was strongly favored by the Joint Chiefs because the elimination of Myitkyina was considered essential to the VLR bombing program which in turn was needed to assist operations in the Luzon-Formosa-Canton triangle. Boatner found his way cleared to go straight to the President.

  “Tell me about Burma, young man,” said Roosevelt, all charm and welcome. Having provided himself with a magnificent topographical map in full color ranging from the dark red of the Himalayas to the pale green of the Irrawaddy plains, Boatner spread it out on the floor beside the President’s chair and was soon down on his hands and knees pointing out places as he talked. Two or three times Pa Watson, Roosevelt’s military aide, came in to shepherd him away in an effort to keep the Presidential schedule, but Roosevelt waved him off saying, “I am having the time of my life.” His enthusiasm nerved Boatner to urge him to “put pressure on Mr. Churchill so he will put pressure on the British in India to help and not hinder General Stilwell.”

  “All right,” Roosevelt agreed, “let’s you and I send him a radio.” Stunned but willing, Boatner found himself dictating while the President took down his suggestions in pencil on a pad. As Boatner was about to leave, the President said, “Young man, give me your ideas about the future of French Indo-China,” and without pausing proceeded to give his own. As often happened, these varied from listener to listener. “I have told Chiang,” he said this time, “to be ready to take it over at the end of the war. The French have forfeited their right to it by neglect.”

  The telegram to Churchill, after polishing by the Joint Chiefs, stated all the compelling arguments for the taking of Myitkyina in the current season, cited Stilwell’s confidence that he could take it if the British did their part, and “urgently” hoped “that you will back to the maximum a vigorous and immediate campaign in Upper Burma.” Churchill was not prepared to be persuaded. The Joint Chiefs in their turn formally rejected AXIOM when presented by Wedemeyer.

  Another impasse would have ensued, leaving Stilwell out on his limb, but for the intervention of the enemy. As at Pearl Harbor the Japanese resolved their opponents’ difficulty. On March 7 they launched their long-planned attack on the Imphal plain, forcing the British to fight on, and eventually over, the border. Thus were the British to come back to Burma. By provoking the Japanese offensive, Stilwell’s march had succeeded, if not in the way he planned, in engaging his ally. The battle was to be decisive though not of Britain’s choice, and Mountbatten, in the final irony, would emerge after the war as Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

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  While these events were in the making, Stilwell was straining to trap a large part of the 18th Division at Mainkwan, the main Japanese base in the center of the Hukawng valley. He planned an enveloping hook by the 65th Regiment from the Taro plain on the right, and a wide-end run over obscure trails by the American commando force on the left to come out at Walawbum below Mainkwan where they would place themselves across the single main road to block the Japanese retreat. Through the center of the Hukawng five Chinese regiments and the tank corps would advance in parallel drives toward Mainkwan. The Road and pipeline were progressing steadily close behind. General Lewis Pick, designer of the Missouri Dam, the dynamic commander and patronym of the Road, locally called Pick’s Pike, came in to see Stilwell on February 5. He promised to have gravel as far as Taihpa, the new headquarters, by the 20th and an airfield for transports in three days. Three days later the field was laid, “a dandy, 4600’ and smooth, built in 14 hours under fire.”

  “Just a matter now of weather,” Stilwell wrote on February 1. “God give us a few dry days and we can go.” Rain poured down heavily on two of the next four days and began again the following week. So far there had been twelve days of rain in January and there were to be 18 in February, ten in March and ten in April although this was the “dry” season. In this of all years an abnormal 175 inches of rain fell in north Burma.

  A planned maneuver by the 66th failed when the regiment was discovered to be “way off course” and could not be located. Liaison officers were bewildered, patrols threshed about in vain for two days (“I sat around and went crazy”). Dragging Liao, the divisional commander, with him on the third day, Stilwell set out in person with his aide and bodyguard and one or two American and Chinese officers to find the missing battalions. Marching by compass in uncertain proximity to the enemy, over ridges and through elephant grass ten feet tall which made visibility near zero and ambush a possibility, they found the lost 66th by evening. Stilwell listened to an unacceptable explanation by the commanding officer, ordered him relieved, instructed his successor how to reach the objective and went to bed in a dugout. The hike back next day, “tough as hell,” exhausted him. On one steep grade he turned around and said to Colonel McCabe, “If I had a pack I’d fall down on the trail.” It was the first time, McCabe reported, he ever heard the Boss admit he was in trouble. The party had to be helped off with their packs when they staggered into 22nd Division’s headquarters. If the 66th had been in place, it was to have closed off a retreat of the Ja
panese who, in the event, escaped.

  At this time, on February 19, the American commando force entered the Hukawng under Merrill, now a brigadier general. Officially designated the 5307th Provisional Regiment, which one soldier disgustedly said “sounds like a street address in Los Angeles,” the unit on arrival in the Hukawng was more handsomely named Merrill’s Marauders by the correspondents attached to NCAC. As the first and only American ground combat force in the theater (and America’s answer to the Chindits whose exploits at Churchill’s insistence the British were heavily publicizing), the Marauders attracted a greater share of attention from the press and from history than a similar-sized unit merited anywhere else. As a result their ultimate tragedy loomed large, reaching the point of a Congressional hearing.

  To condition the men they had been marched in from Ledo, a distance of 130 miles over the Naga range, against the advice of a Burma veteran who warned it was better to conserve strength. Merrill, described by a colleague as a “born leader” who never exposed his troops to more risk than he was willing to take himself, had his reasons. GALAHAD was not the physically superior force of tough and adventurous volunteers that had been intended. To obtain men with jungle experience the three battalions of a thousand men each were raised from units in the Southwest Pacific and Caribbean. One group from New Caledonia included many already subject to malaria. Another group was raised from the 33rd Infantry in Trinidad, a division considered the dumping ground for all the misfits and low IQs in the Army, whose contribution to GALAHAD were volunteers only in the sense, as stated by one of their officers, that “the men would do almost anything to get out of Trinidad.” The call for volunteers for a hazardous mission of three months’ duration with promise of real contact with the enemy attracted many brave and aggressive men including veterans of action in the Pacific, as well as many rough characters and chronic malcontents. According to one medical report, “We expected picked troops. Instead we found many chronically ill men…also numerous psychiatric problems.” During the three months of training in India they had proved raw and ill disciplined, despising the accommodations and rations provided by the British, but gradually developing pride of unit and daredevil spirit and loyalty to their first commanding officer, Colonel Charles Hunter, who remained to serve under Merrill. On the way to Ledo by train some of the men were discovered by a horrified officer to be shooting out the windows at the “wogs” and their cows in the fields.

  Meeting his first American combat troops after two years of war, Stilwell spoke to them, as one recalled, “simply and quietly,” saying there had been two very encouraging developments: the appearance of aggressive spirit among the Chinese, and their own arrival which he and everyone had been waiting for—a hard-hitting American unit which would “get things done.”

  In his basha afterwards the staff gathered around Merrill to discuss the terms of a written directive. “Aw, to hell with this,” Stilwell broke in suddenly. “Come on outside, Frank, and let’s get this thing settled.” They squatted on their heels under a tree examining a map. Pointing to Walawbum, about ten miles below Mainkwan, Stilwell said, “I want you to hit there on March 3.” Like Pershing who, when he took over the French directives for reducing the St. Mihiel salient, reduced them from two volumes to fourteen pages, Stilwell believed in stating the objective and the major lines of approach without tying down each mile of progress to a rigid schedule. Once when asked for a directive by Sun Li-jen, he replied, “Very simple. Keep going.” As one of the master tacticians of the Army, he knew exactly, from studying and memorizing the terrain and geography, where and how to proceed. “When he told you what to do in Burma,” General Arms said, “you had confidence that was the right thing to do. That is what a soldier wants to know.”

  Rain and snafus harassed the advance toward Mainkwan. Fighter planes flew ahead to hit roads and bridges and block Japanese movements, but air support in the jungle was none too effective because the pilots could not see their targets. News from the Arakan reported that a British division had been surprised by a strong Japanese attack, its headquarters overrun and its positions besieged and surrounded. This assault was a Japanese diversion to draw attention away from their preparations for the Imphal front. Though they had three divisions in the Arakan to the Japanese one, the British hastily airlifted a division from Imphal as reinforcements. Planes from the ATC had to be diverted as troop carriers, evoking angry comments by Stilwell although it had been agreed that Mountbatten could call upon the ATC to move troops in an emergency.

  Worst was the rain; rain that made life in the jungle even less bearable than normal and kept the supply planes from coming in to reach the units ahead of the Road. Until the Road was surfaced by gravel, rain made a quagmire of the trace; even jeeps became stuck and trucks could bring only enough supplies forward to keep the road-builders alive. Combat troops needed the air, not only to eat but to evacuate the wounded. When it rained at night Stilwell lay awake, listening and cursing; “every drop hurt me.” Peering at the leaden sky one morning outside his basha he said to Paul Jones, “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” and there were tears in his eyes. Then came the sound of motors and the planes slid in.

  After a 60-mile trek through the jungle which took them eight days, GALAHAD came out to meet their airdrop and seize the road at Walawbum on schedule but were heavily counterattacked the next day. Joined by a regiment of the 38th Division, they fought a fierce five-day engagement, the first occasion in which Chinese and Americans fought side by side. As a result of various foul-ups and confusions and a too-cautious advance by one Chinese regiment, the main body of the Japanese got away, though 1,500 had died and the area was left to the Allies. Booty take at Walawbum included a number of Lend-Lease jeeps and trucks that the Japanese had captured at Rangoon. Stilwell recorded with grim satisfaction that an enemy broadcast described the fighting in the Hukawng, though not on a large scale, as “probably the fiercest in Asia.” His loathing of the Japanese was intense. When a frightened prisoner surrounded by interrogators attempted to shake hands with him, he snatched his hand away and snarled, “Not with you, you dirty bastard.”

  In the Arakan with the aid of the airlifted division the British had broken the Japanese offensive and retrieved the situation. General Slim, “jubilant” at the result, flew in to confer with Stilwell about the launching of Wingate’s airborne brigades into the area south of the NCAC advance. Their object was to disrupt Japanese communication so as to prevent attack on the NCAC flank and reinforcement of the garrison at Myitkyina. One brigade marched in from Ledo to Indaw covering 250 miles on foot; the other two, airborne by 250 troop carriers and gliders of the American Air Commando force under Colonel Philip Cochrane, were flown in to prepared landing strips during the period March 5–11. Despite crashes and accidents, 9,000 men and 1,300 mules were landed in 650 sorties in six days. “All our columns are inserted in the enemy’s guts,” declared Wingate in his Order of the Day, in the rhetoric that made correct British officers wince. “We will oppose him with resolve to reconquer our territory of Northern Burma. Let us…press forward with our sword in the enemy’s ribs….This is a moment to live in history.”

  Up to this time the Generalissimo, whatever his private messages to Sun Li-jen, had inflicted no advice upon Stilwell; now he suddenly came to life. Evidently suspicion of events in the Arakan, or angry that planes from the Hump had been diverted once again from supplying China to rescuing the British, he radioed Stilwell on March 6 that until the British advanced in the Arakan, “our army should stop at the present position so that we will not be attacked individually.” Like MID of old, he requested Stilwell to report his operational plans in advance. “O Jesus, now that starts,” Stilwell moaned, with no intention of complying.

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  However deep in the jungle, Stilwell could not escape politics. A radio from Marshall regretted that “discord and suspicion” had arisen between him and Mountbatten as a result of quarrels over Boatner’s mission to Washin
gton and diversion of the Hump transports, and ordered him to reestablish cordial relations. Stilwell felt himself the aggrieved party but the Supremo spared him the trouble of coming out by coming up himself to the Hukawng. Stilwell’s descent to a field command, however deplorable from a Headquarters point of view, had an attraction for the press which put Mountbatten at something of a disadvantage. One of the sources of their discord was his complaint that Stilwell made statements to the press which gave the impression that he was the only person in SEAC fighting a war. The public-relations war was in fact the most active front in Asia. The main purpose of Mountbatten’s visit, apart from attracting the spotlight, was to adjust the relative credit in communiqués and press coverage and “harmonize” Anglo-American public relations in his theater, a matter of extreme importance and sensitivity to the British Empire.

  No nation has ever produced a military history of such verbal nobility as the British. Retreat or advance, win or lose, blunder or bravery, murderous folly or unyielding resolution, all emerge alike clothed in dignity and touched with glory. Every engagement is gallant, every battle a decisive action. There is no shrinking from superlatives: every campaign produces a general or generalship hailed as the most brilliant of the war. Everyone is splendid: soldiers are staunch, commanders cool, the fighting magnificent. Whatever the fiasco, aplomb is unbroken. Mistakes, failures, stupidities or other causes of disaster mysteriously vanish. Disasters are recorded with care and pride and become transmuted into things of beauty. Official histories record every move in monumental and infinite detail but the details serve to obscure. Why Singapore fell or how the Sittang happened remains shrouded. Other nations attempt but never quite achieve the same self-esteem. It was not by might but by the power of her self-image that Britain in her century dominated the world. That this was irrecoverable (and that no successor would inherit it) was not yet clear in 1944.