Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Obliged to comment at a press conference, Roosevelt was never more bland. It was all a conflict of personalities. Chiang Kai-shek and General Stilwell had “certain fallings-out—oh, quite a while ago—and it finally ended the other day.” No politics were involved, not even Chinese politics; no (in reply to question after question), not strategy, not policy, not Lend-Lease nor the Hump tonnage, nor Hurley-Nelson, nor Gauss’ resignation, nor the “so-called Communists” had anything to do with it. It was “just personalities.” A Times editorial punctured the personality issue with respect to both Stilwell and Gauss. “It is scarcely conceivable that more tactful representatives, if tact was what they lacked, could have overcome the disorganization and corruption which have hamstrung the Chinese war effort.”

  In the midst of the press furor Stilwell reached home shores at Palm Beach on Thursday November 2, five days before the election, and was smuggled into Washington the next day under security regulations as tight as if he had been Rudolf Hess just defected from the enemy. His wartime mission of little glory and no thanks was matched by his reception at home. There was no welcome appropriate to what Stimson called “the most difficult task assigned to any American in the entire war.” Stilwell was an embarrassment to his superiors; the visible symbol of their retreat. In their anxiety to keep attention away from him, the White House and War Department could think only to keep him out of sight. Presumably for fear of attracting the press, neither Marshall nor Stimson came to meet him; in fact Stimson, who knew the time of his arrival, left by plane for his weekend home from the same airport half an hour earlier. Stilwell was met by his wife and by Marshall’s aide, Colonel Frank McCarthy, who had instructions to get him off the airplane and out of the airport without being seen. He was escorted to guest quarters at Fort Meyer across the street from Marshall’s house where he was greeted by General Handy and General Surles, chief of Army public relations, who warned him not to talk.

  Marshall came to see him after nightfall. For the present he had nothing better to offer than command of the Army Ground Forces in charge of training at home, with promise of something indefinite in Europe or the Pacific later. “There is really no job for me,” Stilwell recognized. Now a four-star general, he asked to be given a division; Marshall laughed and told him to take a month off. It was clear to Stilwell they wanted him out of the way and muzzled until after the election.

  That was his homecoming. The fear of what he might say appears exaggerated. Stilwell was prepared to obey the order not to talk, the more so as he had no desire to be shelved when the war was reaching its climax. But he had a long history of lack of inhibition against giving offense, which may have influenced Marshall who had had to protect him from its results ever since Benning and was anxious to avoid an indiscretion. The M.P.s and protective custody and secrecy accompanied him across the country to California and he continued to be muzzled at home. Followed everywhere by the press ready with notebooks and microphones for anything he wanted to say, and bursting with the need to speak, he telegraphed General Surles to know when the ban would be lifted. The answer was the refuge of the bureaucrat: “The less you say the stronger your position becomes.” The excuse for muzzling was no longer valid, if it ever had been, but no one really wanted Stilwell to make it too plain, as he had once before, that what had taken place, this time to American effort, was “a hell of a beating.”

  Personally he could be consoled—though never for long—by the delight of being at home in Carmel, reunited with his beloved family, free to walk with his dog along the beach. The appreciation he had had to forgo poured in from the theater. “We all felt lost” when the news came, wrote General Pan Yu-kan, commander of the 50th Division, the first into Myitkyina. General Pick, the road-builder, wrote, “I never had a commander before I regretted losing as I do you.” The theater’s Provost Marshal, Colonel Harry Cooper, asked to be assigned to “go with you wherever you go.” In their messages the Chinese felt that what Stilwell had done had been done for China, while the Americans felt that what they had done had been done for one man: “It was doing a job for Uncle Joe.” CBI Roundup condensed the sense of loss in a sonnet entitled “Salute.” In troubled days ahead, it predicted,

  …a spry

  Small ghostly figure will be seen along

  The Ledo Road—his campaign hat awry—

  Roaring in his jeep down toward Mogaung,

  …and we shall say

  “You see? He never really went away.”

  The Chinese who had fought with Stilwell estimated his accomplishment differently than did Chiang Kai-shek. “Hundred Victories Wei,” commander of the Y-forces on the Salween, recalled that the Government had given him the taxes of four counties in appreciation of his victories in the anti-Communist campaigns and, as he said to Dorn, “For a man like General Stilwell, well, they will surely give him at least ten counties!” The best and final judgment came in a letter from General Tseng Hsi-kwei, colleague since the first Burma campaign, who wrote, “For at least three years you have made things possible out of impossibilities.”

  Stilwell had always believed that what he called the phony propaganda about China was his worst enemy and at peaks of frustration would ask himself, “What will happen when the American public learns the truth?” Nothing happened. Official policy continued to flow in the channel it had carved for itself. Hurley, of course, was named Ambassador to succeed Gauss, because he was there, because he wanted it, because he was agreeable to the chief of state, although career officers in China considered him 50 percent vapor and pleaded “anyone but Hurley.” Wedemeyer, equally polished and persona grata, filled the post of American Chief of Staff.

  Marked by the naval Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines which opened on the day Stilwell left Chungking, the direction of the war approached China, but American military interest receded except for the trapped effort to shore up Chungking and simply keep China in the war. In mid-November the twin Japanese drives, inward from the coast and southward through Kwangsi, effected a junction at Liuchow, which fell within a few days of Kweilin. Soon afterwards the enemy advance came to an end on the frozen mountain roads of Kweichow, stopped by winter and over-extension. Since April eight provinces, half a million soldiers, a population of 100,000,000 and the last access of the coast had been lost. The credit of the Kuomintang with its people was irreparably damaged. Chiang Kai-shek still stood, confident of American support, “too weak to rule,” as a fellow countryman said, “too strong to be overthrown.” Four years later S. I. Hsuing, a laudatory biographer of the Generalissimo, obliquely suggested that many great men would be considered greater if they had had the sense to die earlier, for example Napoleon before Waterloo, Wilson before Versailles and “Chiang Kai-shek before the recall of General Stilwell.”

  * * *

  *1 Thanking Carlson for enclosing a letter from Chou En-lai about the Military Observers Mission, Roosevelt wrote on November 15, 1944, “I am hoping and praying for a real working out of the situation with the so-called Communists.”

  *2 Nelson was treated to luscious flattery. Chiang Kai-shek asked him to return to China to take charge of the reconstruction of the country’s economy. His acceptance would be a “historic event” that would give China the greatest hope. “If you do not come then it would appear that China is hopeless….I regard you as a Chinese citizen and wish to entrust to you the entire responsibility for China’s economic reconstruction….I will unconditionally invest in you all China’s economic powers.”

  *3 Central Executive Committee.

  *4 Stilwell’s third position as Deputy Commander of SEAC was filled by General Wheeler.

  *5 The Blue and White was first proposed for Stilwell by the Chinese Government in March 1944. Stilwell told the War Department that in order to keep his complete freedom of action he did not want to accept a decoration from either the Chinese or British and if there was no other way to do this “peacefully,” he would take refuge in the War Department rule prohibiting those
involved in the allocation of Lend-Lease from accepting foreign orders. This reason was offered by the War Department on his behalf for his final refusal of the Blue and White.

  20

  “We Ought to Get Out—Now” 1945–46

  BY A BOLT OF LUCK into whose path Stilwell alertly stepped, he was to finish the war in the field as he hoped. In the first months after his return, however, his fate seemed to be a desk. Appointed commander of the Army Ground Forces in the United States on January 23, he had charge of training, but the job had no charm for him while combat mounted overseas. “I will stand it as long as I can and then explode,” he wrote Win. Marshall could tell him nothing definite about a possible command in the Pacific and Stilwell thought the President’s failure to receive him at all was ominous.

  Headquarters of the AGF was in Washington but most of Stilwell’s time was spent going from one army camp to another to inspect training and administer the problems of returned soldiers. Unlike the usual general on inspection, he ignored the barracks and, as at Ramgarh, went at once to watch training exercises and firing practice. In between tours he found himself a celebrity attested by the ultimate mark—a police escort that took him all the way from Albany to Washington when a plane was grounded. There were speeches and meetings and testimonials, a special warmth of applause that singled him out at public dinners, an invitation to give the graduating address at West Point, a meeting with Vice-President Truman who “wants to talk,” a statement by Judge Vinson, the future Chief Justice, that the “American people think of me as an institution. My God.”

  A bittersweet honor came when the Ledo Road, pushed through to China in final actuality, was named for him. The Y-forces and the Burma forces had made their junction early in January. Following closely behind, the Road was cut through to join the old Burma Road at Bhamo and officially opened for through traffic on January 25. “I have a convoy formed,” signaled the builder, General Pick, to General Sultan who had succeeded to Stilwell’s command in Burma. “I would like your permission to take it through to China.” As the first trucks drove into Kunming after 24 rough days on the way from Assam, thousands of ecstatic people waved colored banners inscribed with the Chinese characters for “Welcome First Convoy Over Stilwell Road.” Stilwell’s picture was carried in the celebrations along with those of Chiang Kai-shek and Roosevelt. “We,” proclaimed the Generalissimo, “have broken the siege of China. Let me name this road after General Joseph Stilwell in memory of his distinctive contribution and of the signal part which the Allied and Chinese forces under his direction played in the Burma campaign and in the building of the road.” “I wonder who put him up to that?” the title character mused.

  U.S. Headquarters for the India-Burma theater confirmed the name in an official order. Stilwell’s own statement for the occasion, broadcast over the Army Hour radio program, paid tribute to all the men—infantry, engineers, medics, air crews, truck crews and laborers— “who fought for it and built it,” and was as silent about his own role as if he had not been there. Better than all the formalities a private message from Sultan acknowledged that what had opened the road to China was “your indomitable will.”

  Whatever his resentment of the President’s treatment, Stilwell expressed nothing privately or publicly, even by so much as a significant smile or a lifted eyebrow. “The curtain was down right to the floor,” said a friend. Inwardly his mind was churning in an agony that poured itself out in notes and reflections on the circumstances of his command and the problem of China. The inescapable conclusion expressed at dinner at Secretary Stimson’s house and recorded by his host was that “nothing can be done in China until we get rid of Chiang Kai-shek.” Equally inescapable was the obverse: what was the alternative? Because there was no other realistic answer, but more than that, because they were vigorously working for a change, Stilwell was persuaded that the Communists, as the “agricultural liberals” of China might offer the United States a base to build on. In another conversation Senator Morse found him “equally critical” of the Communists as of Chiang. He said China was in for “a long pull of civil war, and there was nothing we could do about it.” We would just have to wait until China went through her turmoil. So long as Chiang was at the helm, Stilwell wrote in his notes, there would be no progress toward unity or even working coalition. By backing the reactionary Chungking Government, America was getting a black eye in China and associating herself with the old colonial system. “Unless we stand clear, we will be classed with France, England, Holland and Chungking.”

  His major outlet was editing and contributing to the massive official record of his command, History of the CBI Theater, which his staff was preparing. Including the combat report, the political aspects, sections on each branch of the service and a Master Narrative, the whole was to fill a trunk when completed and delivered to the War Department on March 7. Asked what it contained when he was seen helping to carry the trunk through the Pentagon’s corridors, he replied, “a letter for General Handy.” Its central thesis, summarized in the concluding chapter, was that in supporting China without exacting a commitment to action in return for Lend-Lease, the United States had conducted a “vacillating policy which drained public funds into a futile transfusion.” With regard to his own command in the field, Stilwell’s conclusion was that it had been vitiated by lack of the right to “order” his troops, with the result that he could not form strategy nor direct tactics. In criticism of his own country and profession he found that American military education had proved deficient. Lacking knowledge of the methods and characteristics of foreign countries, our men “knew how to deal only in the American way and when this failed to bring results they became confused and lost patience.” He believed the educational system would have to take account of this problem if the United States expected to hold a leading place among the international armies of tomorrow.

  Challenging American policy, the report closed with a condemnation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Government, a reproval of the United States’ commitment to its support and a prediction of its downfall. At the bidding of the General Staff the contents were reduced to a manageable volume of under 700 pages, but even then Stilwell was told that if he wanted to have it officially published he would have to cut out his unsparing criticism of Chiang and the British. He refused, effectively assuring the report’s suppression.

  Stilwell’s judgment might have been worth listening to. “There was no American in China at that time, or perhaps ever,” wrote A. T. Steele, correspondent in China for the Chicago Daily News and other papers from 1932 to 1950, “who was in a better position to observe the Generalissimo at his best and at his worst.”

  There were others too whose advice was not taken. In anguish at the conduct of policy, the political officers of the Embassy despatched in February an unprecedented joint telegram signed by Atcheson as Chargé d’Affaires in Hurley’s absence. They warned that the policy of continued support for Chiang Kai-shek was making him unwilling to compromise; meanwhile, as witnessed in person by one of their number in a three months’ tour of the northern areas, the Communists were increasing in strength and bringing closer the unavoidable dilemma when the United States would have to decide, following a landing in China, whether to accept or refuse cooperation with them. Plans had been drawn by Wedemeyer’s command to put U.S. parachute troops into Communist territory to “organize, lead and command,” as it was put with combined innocence and arrogance, Communist guerilla troops against the Japanese. No working arrangements could be made, however, until Chiang Kai-shek settled the terms under which the Communists should enter the Government. The Embassy officers argued that the only way to compel Chiang toward unity was to tell him, not ask him. They advised that the American decision to cooperate with the Communists should be made now, with or without the Generalissimo’s consent, and he should be so informed. Their telegram was forwarded by Under Secretary Grew with a favorable recommendation to the White House on March 2 in the same week that Stilwell’s report
was delivered to the Pentagon.

  It was no accident that the foreign service officers took this step when Hurley was in Washington, for their advice was in effect and intention a vote of no confidence in the Ambassador. Hurley was under instructions to support the recognized government, keep it from collapse and press for immediate unification of the Nationalist and Communist armed forces. He was to act as go-between to bring the two parties into some form of agreement. Starting with breezy overconfidence, he was soon, for all his native shrewdness, over his depth. Pleased by the flattering attentions showered on him by the Kuomintang, and lacking knowledge of the domestic background or appreciation of the depth of the problem, he listened to the persuasive voices of Chiang Kai-shek’s circle and accepted their repeated assurances that everything could be arranged. Yet despite meetings and truces, offers and counteroffers, he was making no real progress toward the coalition for which his Government was pressing. For Washington the urgency was growing. A China on the brink of civil war could not fill the vacuum that would be left by the defeat of Japan. In addition it was feared that if the split were not closed the Soviet Union might reach some agreement with the Communists for control of Manchuria.