Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  ICHIGO’s second phase, in the form of a southward drive from Hankow toward the chain of the Fourteenth Air Force bases in east China, opened in June with every sign of duplicating the earlier success. The Chinese General Staff had drawn up no plans for defense of the airfields and the centers adjoining them. When Changsha, capital of the rice-bowl region, fell on June 18, resentment of the Government’s laxity, rising out of the ravages of Honan, spread to the south. The domestic prospect, quite aside from the military, was dismaying: loss of food stocks, disruption of trade, influx of refugees into the unoccupied zone, a reduced area of Free China, causing increase of conscription and taxes. Summarized by an American report, it meant lowered morale, weakening of the Central Government, proportionate strengthening of the provincial cliques, continued inflation and economic crisis. In short, how long could the Central Government survive? The author of the report, John Service, thought it could survive for a while but its weaknesses would grow and its collapse in the long run would be only a matter of time.

  Service was another China-born member of the Embassy’s staff, “the ablest group of young diplomats,” according to Eric Sevareid, “I had ever seen in a single American mission abroad. They were the best informed foreigners in China.” Along with two other second secretaries, Raymond Ludden and John Emmerson, Service had recently been recruited, much to the Ambassador’s annoyance, as political adviser by Stilwell’s headquarters in Chungking.

  The emergency brought on by the Japanese drive in the south precipitated the bitterest phase of the Chennault-Stilwell dispute and the long train of rancor and abuse by Chennault and his associates that was to follow after the war. The issue of the effectiveness of Chennault’s air arm occupied a far larger place in everyone’s mind at the time than it retains in historical perspective, and was a determining factor in attitudes and decisions.

  By persistent and damaging attacks on Japanese supply lines the Fourteenth Air Force succeeded in hampering but not halting the offensive. As it became apparent that the fliers alone could not stop the march toward the air bases, Chennault hammered at Stilwell for more planes, supplies and fuel and even for arms for the defending forces on the ground. He claimed his means were “hopelessly inadequate” and insisted he must have 10,000 tons. Stilwell regarded this as a campaign “to duck the consequences of having sold the wrong bill of goods.” Having assured the Generalissimo that the Fourteenth Air Force, if supported effectively, could hold the Japanese and now finding that it could not be done, Chennault was “trying to prepare an out for himself by claiming that with a little more, which we won’t give him, he can still do it.” The extra tonnage would have to come from the B-29 allotments and Stilwell believed it would be wasted because of weakness on the ground. Air cover over nothing, as he had said at TRIDENT, was valueless.

  This dispute was the reason for his being summoned from Burma by the Generalissimo on June 4. Under Chiang’s extreme pressure Stilwell agreed to divert 1,500 tons from the B-29s to make up Chennault’s 10,000 if the War Department consented. Marshall refused. He had come to the conclusion that the huge effort to supply Chennault’s air offensive had not been worth the cost and he was bitter at the delay caused to success in Europe for lack of air transport absorbed by the Hump. “It has been bleeding us white in transport airplanes,” Stimson complained. On June 6, the day before Marshall’s reply to Stilwell, Rome fell and the Allies landed in Normandy. Marshall believed that more rapid progress could have been made in Italy and France if the transport planes then in the China theater had been available for air support.

  Furthermore military thinking now heavily favored long-range strategic bombing of enemy industry. In his telegram turning down a diversion of the long-range bombers’ supplies to Chennault, Marshall stated that nothing must interfere with the launching of the B-29 assault on Japan. This, he claimed, would be of greater service to China in the long run than the transfer of its stocks to Chennault. He also pointed out, for Chiang Kai-shek’s benefit, that experience in Europe proved the limitations of “a purely air resistance” to a ground offensive.

  Like an emperor’s thumbs-down signal in the gladiatorial arena, Marshall’s reply marked the definite rejection by the Joint Chiefs of Chennault’s claim. The flaw in the rejection was that Chennault and his protagonists never understood what had happened to them with the result that their enduring rage was directed against Stilwell. He, of course, was left in no doubt. “Instructions understood,” he replied to Marshall, “and exactly what I had hoped for.” Stilwell’s seeming indifference to the fate of east China was based on his belief that the Japanese would eventually outrun their supply lines and come to a natural stop; meantime it was too late to save the first airfields in their path. His plan, after he had succeeded in reopening the Burma Road, was to bring the Y divisions and the NCAC back into southwest China and together with the Z divisions and an American Army corps, for which he was still hoping, collect a force of 250,000 with which to clear a path to the coast and seize a port.

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  To keep the condition of China smothered under benevolent fictions in the American press was no longer possible. Articles critical of the regime were appearing and even the Luce publications had to make the best of a bad situation by admitting China’s ills and deficiencies and blaming them on the blockade which the United States had failed in its duty to break. Life on May 1 published a report of excoriating frankness by Theodore White who described the Kuomintang as a “corrupt political clique that combines some of the worst features of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition” and declared that “progressive deterioration” within the Nationalist Party left the future outcome of civil war with the Communists uncertain. The slightly askew conclusion (possibly drawn by the editorial hand of the home office) was that it was the “obligation” of America to assist this antidemocratic and losing regime “with force at the present moment on a scale far greater than we have done for the past two years.”

  There were those who doubted that this would solve the problem; who wondered, like Graham Peck, an officer of OWI in China, whether the blank check of American aid, by encouraging the Kuomintang to be dependent rather than self-strengthening, might not represent “a prolonged kiss of death.”

  For a hundred years the Chinese had struggled to unburden themselves of misgovernment only to have each effort of reform or revolution turn itself back into oppression and corruption, as if the magic prince were bewitched in reverse to turn back into a toad. China’s misgovernment was not so much a case of absolute as of ineffective rule. If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more. For 30 years Ambassador Gauss had watched the process and wearily in June 1944 recognized the limits of American instrumentality to affect it. “I confess,” he wrote the State Department, “there is nothing I can suggest that we might do.”

  Counsels of incapacity are not welcome to the American spirit. One thing that it was believed America could do would be to push, persuade or force China into directing her whole available military strength against Japan and, to that end, into closing the rift with the Communists that paralyzed her war efforts. Ambassador Gauss was instructed on June 15 to make this clear to Chiang Kai-shek. He was to urge Chiang to reach an agreement with the Communists that would permit the quarantine to be ended so that troops of both sides might be released to fight the Japanese. In reply to recent Chinese requests for more aid and for continuation of Lend-Lease after the war, he was to inform Chiang that because of commitments in Europe the United States could not increase military aid to China for the present. That was as far as he could go.

  Chiang was dependent but not compliant. He and his associates did not believe that the United States would ever take the risk of withdrawing support from him. Yet in May the State Department in a policy advice circulated to its own officers stated that the United States was “not committed to support the Nationalist Government in any
and all circumstances.” This astonishing burst of independence could have been useful had Gauss been empowered to convey it to Chiang Kai-shek, but there is no evidence that he was. The persuasions and connections of the Soongs, the influence of church bodies and United China Relief, the ramifications of China Defense Supplies—nucleus of what was to become the China Lobby—and the underlying inertia of government all operated to maintain the tie. Occasionally, as in the State Department’s May policy advice, the United States thrashed about in the Chinese cobweb, but the threads held.

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  In the summer of 1944 growing impatience with the paralysis of Chungking turned American military interest toward the war potential of the Communists. They were reported to be aggressively engaged in guerilla warfare against the enemy in the provinces of Shantung, Hopei, Shanshi and north Kiangsu, although direct evidence was lacking because no foreigner accredited to Chungking was allowed to visit the area north of the quarantine line. They were established in north China in a region crucial for the final defeat of Japan which contained the largest concentration of Japanese troops and Japanese industry on the mainland apart from Manchuria. It was also the area that would be contiguous to Russian operations if and when Russia joined the war in the Far East.

  Since 1937 the remnant that survive the Long March to reach Yenan had become the government of a region the size of Japan. In these seven years the area under Communist control was estimated to have increased from 35,000 to 155,000 square miles, the population from 1,500,000 to 54,000,000, and the armed forces from 100,000 to 475,000. Communist enclaves were held behind Japanese lines in parts of north Kiangsu and Hupeh and also in the south around Canton and on the island of Hainan. The spread had been achieved by infiltration behind Japanese advances which often left large areas behind without adequate garrison. Moving in with effective political and military organization, offering tax reduction and elimination of rent to landlords who had joined the puppet regime, the Communists gained the support of the populace. Given protection from extortion and the press gang, the peasants felt for the first time they were getting something in return for their taxes. As the Communist base expanded, their position relative to the Central Government was strengthened and their confidence grew, and when Kuomintang weakness was revealed by the debacle in Honan, it grew apace.

  American interest was concerned as much with averting the disintegration of China in a civil war as with gaining Communist military cooperation against Japan. Civil war, besides destroying any hope of the stable China that was needed to keep the future peace, might lead to American-Soviet conflict. For political as well as military reasons it appeared essential to bring the contenders into some form of coalition. Both Communists and Kuomintang gave lip service to the idea of coalition government and had opened negotiations in 1943 for a political settlement, probably less from conviction than because neither side wished to appear to be pursuing civil war as a policy. American hope of coalition was based on the prevailing belief that the Communist aim was not to dominate China but to arrive at a political settlement with Chungking permitting a national effort against Japan. It was assumed, as Stalin personally assured Ambassador Harriman, that the Chinese Communists were not really Communists at all but a “margarine” imitation of the real thing, or alternatively, a “radish” variety—red outside and white inside.

  An additional motive from the American point of view was that the Communists as the more dynamic force might actually win a civil war. It was not part of the American war aim to have a hostile ideology, radish or not, govern China after the war and it seemed advisable to achieve a coalition government before the Soviet Union moved onto the scene. That event was an even greater worry to Chiang Kai-shek. He was reported to be strengthening the quarantine line by troops withdrawn from Honan and to be preparing to attack the Communists while the Allies were still occupied in Europe, and before either the Soviets could move in the Far East or the Americans land in China.

  Both the foreign press and the American Government had been pressing for months for permission to visit the Communist zone. A promise given to the press in November 1943 was pursued through half a year of evasions until a selected group of three correspondents, representing a pool of English, American and other publications,*1 was finally allowed to go in May. Washington’s effort to send a Military Observers Mission continued to meet polite assent without fulfillment.

  The mission and the opening of a consulate in Yenan were first suggested by Davies in a report to Stilwell of June 1943 which argued the military importance of the area and its relation to future Soviet entry and pointed out that the only official American observer to have visited the Communist region was Captain Carlson in 1938. Davies and General Timberman of the General Staff, another veteran of the 15th Infantry now attached to CBI Headquarters in Chungking, persuaded Marshall of the need for the mission, and a second report by Davies in January 1944 reached Hopkins in the White House. In February Roosevelt formally requested Chiang Kai-shek to permit military observers to go “immediately” to Shansi and Shensi, tactfully omitting to specify the region as Communist. Chiang gracefully agreed to “facilitate” the mission which, he added, could of course visit only those areas under the Central Government’s control.

  On the basis of his consent CBI Headquarters organized the project while ignoring for the time being the restriction that made nonsense of it. To ensure observers who would not be at the mercy of their hosts, Stilwell looked for candidates who had knowledge of the language and acquaintance with China. As chief of mission he named Colonel Barrett, said to be the only American who could tell jokes convincingly in Chinese to Chinese, with John Service as his political assistant.

  Stilwell’s own interest in the matter was a natural craving for a junction with what he believed to be vigorous, motivated troops. He remembered the Communists in terms of their startling if limited defeat of the Japanese at the pass of Pinghsingkwan in 1937, and like everyone else he had an impression of successful and energetic guerilla warfare ever since. He had been favorably impressed in 1938 by Yeh Chien-ying, the Communist Chief of Staff, and his associates, and he had not forgotten the word passed to him from Chou En-lai after the defeat in Burma: “I would serve under General Stilwell and I would obey.” It took on an exaggerated significance in his mind as he struggled against the frustrations of the Kuomintang military system. At one time he thought of using Communists to make up the desperately needed replacements for the Y-force on the basis of 20 to a company of 100. The idea was dropped after Dorn discussed it with Hsiao I-shu, the Y-force Chief of Staff, who said that on a 20 percent basis the newcomers would have the whole company Communist within two weeks. Stilwell knew by now that as long as Chiang Kai-shek remained, reform of the army and combat efficiency would never be achieved, and that knowledge made the idea of contact with the far-off unseen fighters of the Communist zone more compelling. For the present what was needed was firsthand information.

  Under the name DIXIE for the rebel side, and for the song “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?,” the Military Observers Mission was ready to go in March but the Generalissimo continued to stall. The President renewed his request in April, without success, and at that point the matter passed into the hands of yet another special envoy, Vice-President Henry Wallace.

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  The purpose of the Wallace mission, if any, was to persuade Chiang to negotiate with the Communists. It is a feature of government that the more important the problem, the further it tends to be removed from handling by anyone well acquainted with the subject. The President, deeply concerned about China, casting about for solutions, anxious to do something without knowing what, fell back on the device of a personal envoy. To a man like Roosevelt it always seemed that if only he could go in person, he could arrange matters; the next best thing was a surrogate for himself, and who more natural than the Vice-President?

  Actually the selection of Wallace had more to do with domestic politics than with China. Pre
paring for a fourth term, Roosevelt knew the delegates to the Democratic Convention in July would balk at renominating Wallace who had made many enemies. The President was anxious to avoid a fight that would divide the Party. Remembering Woodrow Wilson’s experience he wanted to cement his support in Congress in order to create the United Nations which he saw as the main task ahead. He was considering dumping Wallace in favor of some more generally acceptable running mate, and it was a natural instinct under the circumstances to want him out of sight. Hence the mission to China. When CBI Headquarters was notified of his coming, they asked that he be empowered to “insist” to Chiang Kai-shek that the Military Mission be allowed to visit Communist areas. This, as it turned out, proved to be the one accomplishment of Wallace’s eight days in China. Otherwise the main result was one more recommendation for Stilwell’s removal.

  In the course of four long conversations with Wallace on June 21–24 Chiang Kai-shek rejected the prevalent notion that the Communists were “agrarian democrats” and said they definitely wanted to seize power in China and were in fact “more communistic than the Russian communists.” When it came to permission for the Military Mission to visit Yenan, he at first refused and then surprisingly reversed himself the next day, perhaps in the hope of a reciprocal favor from Roosevelt. Chiang had long wished to divest himself of both Stilwell and Gauss, the two unillusioned men who controlled his channels to the United States, but after his many failures in the case of Stilwell he did not this time ask directly for his relief but rather for a personal emissary from the President who could give him access to the White House without having to go through the State or War Departments. With T. V. Soong, now back in favor, as interpreter, he gave a moving account of Stilwell’s failure to respond to the needs of the Fourteenth Air Force and of his “lack of confidence in General Stilwell’s judgment.” Although Wallace did not find himself in sympathy with the Generalissimo, he felt this was one area in which he might be of use. “I was deeply moved by the cry of a man in distress,” as he put it later.