Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  On August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. On August 7 the Russians entered the war. On August 9 a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. “Revolutionary all right. Human civilization approaching suicide rapidly. I will now acknowledge that the Japs may quit. Russia plus the bomb should do the trick.” An unanticipated result of the bomb was to provide Japan with a face-saving reason for quick surrender and that development now followed more precipitately than foreseen. After an intense struggle over the status of the Emperor, ending in American agreement to his retention, Japan surrendered on August 14.

  “SO IT IS OVER,” Stilwell recorded as he had once before in 1918. Although it meant that the opportunity to command American troops in battle was gone for good, he shared the immense relief of everyone. No sensible man looked forward to the invasion of Japan. His first thought was for his youngest son just turned eighteen. “I am so thankful we don’t have to throw Ben into the pot,” he wrote to Win, “that I don’t care what they do with the God damn emperor….Hooray, Hooray. We have survived. No blanks in our list. Lucky people.”

  His own immediate future looked disappointing. As a result of the “Doug-Nimitz hate,” the Tenth Army was being torn apart like the baby offered for Solomon’s judgment. Except for corps used separately, it appeared to be out of the occupation forces. From MacArthur Stilwell learned of an added complication: Chiang Kai-shek had questioned Washington about a rumor that General Stilwell would be in command of U.S. troops to land on the China coast; Truman had replied that General Stilwell would not land on the China coast. MacArthur professed to believe that a query to Washington asking whether Korea was included in the China coast would undoubtedly be answered “yes.” He did not want to risk delay in the movement of his occupation forces. He promised to put the Tenth Army in Japan later if it could be arranged. Stilwell was bitter. “So they cut my throat once more”—in deference to Chiang Kai-shek.

  News from the mainland was brought by visiting correspondents. “China in a mess. Danger of U.S. getting embroiled. Reds linking up with Russians.” The problem of ensuring the surrender of more than a million Japanese in China proper and almost as many in Manchuria was enormous. Confronted with the overwhelming task, unexpected so soon, of reoccupying the major cities from Canton to Peking, not to mention Manchuria which had been under Japanese rule for 15 years and Formosa for 50, the Central Government had neither plan, organization nor resources equal to the need. Transportation, always China’s greatest handicap, was in shreds with 90 percent of railroads out of operation, rolling stock and river shipping destroyed, and roads as inadequate as ever. For ultimate control of the country, the return of Government forces to the key cities of north China and Manchuria before the Communists could gain them was the most urgent concern. American air and sea transport of the troops to Shanghai, Peking, Tientsin, Tsingtao and other places was made available. In the north, clash with Communist units heading for the same ports and cities was inevitable. American aid to one side and not the other in the race made involvement in the civil conflict more than likely, and the added hostility of the non-aided side certain. Stilwell could see only one solution. “We ought to get out—now,” he wrote firmly on August 19.

  He was to have the satisfaction, he learned, of taking the formal surrender of the enemy, if not on the grounds of his own battle in Burma at least in the Ryukyus, and of attending the full ceremonial surrender of Japan scheduled for September 2 in Tokyo Bay. With other officers he arrived in the defeated country two days in advance of the ceremony and took a harsh pleasure in touring the gutted and burned-out districts of Yokohama and staring at the once arrogant “buck-toothed bastards,” now living in shanties of scrap lumber and tin and scratching in the dirt to plant onions. The helpless rage he had shared in the 1930s at the brutalities inflicted on China and the humiliation of foreigners was revenged. “We gloated over the destruction and came in feeling fine.”

  Seen through Stilwell’s eyes the ceremony on board the Missouri had not quite the quality wanted for schoolbooks. Boarding the battleship as the ranking American Army officer in the group, he led the way to the quarter deck where the group took their places and waited. Eleven Japanese representatives, headed by Foreign Minister Shigemitsu for the civilians and General Umezu for the military, climbed on deck and took their places too; “hard cruel hateful faces under excruciating humiliation as we stared at them.” Lined up at attention, they stood silently, looking straight ahead. “No one spoke. We just looked at them…for well over ten minutes. It must have seemed ten years to them.” MacArthur, the designated representative of all the Allies, emerged from the Admiral’s cabin, took his place and made his speech with hands and legs trembling noticeably: “Krueger says it is not nervousness but palsy but it looked like hell.” Shigemitsu and Umezu then signed the surrender, followed by MacArthur, while Generals Wainwright and Percival who had surrendered at Bataan and Singapore respectively, and had been in Japanese prison camps ever since, stood beside him. Stilwell’s comments about Percival, beginning with “the weakest sister I have ever seen, even in the British army,” and elaborating, were unnecessarily nasty. When venting certain prejudices the vinegar flowed in excess.

  Led by Nimitz for the United States, the Allied representatives then signed individually. Except for the American Admiral and the Chinese, they appeared to Stilwell a “scratchy-looking crowd”: the Englishman “a fat red dumpling,” the Australian “a tub of guts,” the Canadian “an elderly masher of the gigolo type,” the Frenchman “rather trim” but with a pair of “dirty-looking apaches” as aides, the Dutchman fat and bald, the New Zealanders amateur-looking. “What a crew of caricatures in the eyes of the Japs. The human race was poorly represented.”

  On September 7 he himself presided at the Ryukyu surrender at which the Japanese were represented by two generals and an admiral. The painful ten-minute wait standing at attention as the focus of all eyes was repeated before Stilwell made his appearance. GIs yelled, “That’s right, Joe, make ’em wait. Keep ’em waiting, Joe.” The band struck up the General’s march, Stilwell took his place at the table, signed the document, issued instructions through an American Nisei sergeant for the three Japanese to sign and, as a massed group of 100 Navy fighters and 60 B-29s flew past, closed the proceedings. “Just cold hard business.” His war was over.

  Afterwards on learning that the Tenth Army was not to take part in the occupation but to return to the United States on October 15, he made one more attempt to reenter China. While on a second visit to examine Japan, he radioed Marshall on September 26 for permission to go to Peking to see old friends. After a week’s wait while the Generalissimo’s reaction was being queried by Stratemeyer, the answer was no. Evidently fearing Stilwell’s influence or intentions, Chiang Kai-shek replied that owing to the presence of both Communist and Japanese troops in Peking the situation was “confusing” and pending the entry of Nationalist troops (which six weeks after the surrender had still not arrived) a visit by General Stilwell might be exploited by the Communists. He promised that a formal invitation to visit China would be extended to Stilwell “as soon as the situation of the country becomes normal.” Unfortunately the trend of the situation was not toward normality. Stilwell took it as a compliment that “my presence is not desired on the continent of Asia….Maybe CKS thinks I would start a revolution….I would like to do just that.” It was done without him. He was not to see China again.

  When Stilwell returned home on October 18, 1945, he had a year minus a week left to live. He could normally expect to retire in March 1947 on reaching sixty-four. With the Tenth Army dissolved, he was temporarily assigned to duty in Washington as President of the War Equipment Board, eliciting the comment, “I am eminently suited to something else and would just as lief sit on a tack.” Closer to the mark the Army Times nominated him to be soldiers’ representative at the peace table as the man who “has seen more front line combat than any other top-ranking officer in this war.” The world was spared a
peace conference and Stilwell’s Washington duty fortunately lasted only a few weeks. In January he was happily and fittingly reassigned as Commander of the Sixth Army in charge of the Western Defense Command with headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco within a few hours of Carmel.

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  Before he left Washington the American entanglement in China erupted in another furor equal to his own recall. On November 25 Hurley resigned his Ambassadorship with the sensational public charge that “a considerable section of our State Department is endeavoring to support Communism generally as well as specifically in China.”

  After V-J Day American support for China through the maintenance of Wedemeyer’s command and the continuance of Lend-Lease had been prolonged for six months until the Japanese could be repatriated and the threatening specter of civil war somehow suppressed. Nursed by every American agency of persuasion and mediation, the negotiations between Chungking and Yenan were kept alive while their forces were already meeting and firing in sporadic conflicts. Mao Tse-tung and his chief lieutenants, Chou En-lai and Chu Teh, repeatedly protested the lifting of Chiang’s armies to the north by American air transport and warships, as well as the landing of Marines to hold cities in advance of the Nationalists’ arrival and the continuing supply of arms to Chungking. The rationale for this assistance was the ominous presence of large bodies of armed Japanese. To the Communists, straining to extend their hold in north China and gain Manchuria, it appeared as intervention. It fed their hostility and eroded American influence as mediator since America appeared committed to one side in the mediation.

  Risks of American involvement in the civil strife were underfoot at every turn, and explosive incidents often only narrowly avoided. Approaching Chefoo, a strategic port across the bay from Dairen, an American convoy was warned by the Communists not to land because the 8th Route Army already held the port and the region. The American admiral and Marine general in command of the convoy, on ascertaining that this was in fact the case and that conditions were orderly with no Japanese troops or prisoners of war in the area, sensibly reported that there was “no military reason for landing U.S. troops at this time” and withdrew. Coolness and common sense could not be expected always to prevail. Meanwhile the Generalissimo’s demands for assistance mounted, including the equipping of 90 divisions through Lend-Lease as rather airily promised by Roosevelt at Cairo. Chiang’s organization and resources were proving all too obviously inadequate to establish control. Loyalty at the cost of competence left him with a General Staff and a body of officials at a loss to cope with the enormous problems they faced. They were soon absorbed in the endless opportunities for deals and graft which accompanied the takeover of cities from the former puppet regime. In the north, where the Government lacked any popular support, the situation was especially unpromising. As early as August 15 Colonel Yeaton, new chief of the Military Observers Mission in Yenan, warned that despite Communist numerical inferiority, “over a long period of time as an occupying force the Kuomintang cannot hold out even with U.S. help.”

  In the painful light of this prospect the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC, known to Washington as “Swink”) was directed to work out a policy. The best it could offer was a general directive of October 22 stating that America’s aim was to see China a friendly, unified, independent nation “with a stable government resting, in so far as practicable, on the freely expressed support of the Chinese people.” Under this canopy, acts and decisions in China continued to tie the United States to a government which met none of the criteria.

  Nationalist forces lifted into the northern provinces by American agency naturally met and clashed with Communist units. On November 11 the Military Attaché in Chungking reported, “The fighting is becoming more bitter and larger numbers of men are becoming involved.” That it would be possible to disarm and evacuate all the Japanese without becoming involved in the civil war seemed less and less likely. The decision was pressing whether to deactivate Wedemeyer’s command and close Lend-Lease as scheduled at the end of the year. Was the United States to terminate aid to the Generalissimo and let the situation seek its own level—which meant civil war and defeat of the American purpose—or persist in the effort to help a failing government extend its rule to areas where it was strongly challenged?

  The decision to continue that effort was determined by the new world alignment. No sooner was Fascism defeated than Communism loomed as the new enemy. The presence of Soviet armies in Manchuria and the prospect of their making common cause with the Chinese Communists was now America’s worry despite a formal accord reached by the Russians with Chiang Kai-shek. The dilemma in China sharpened. The most earnest and anxious consultation of State-War-Navy and the President could recommend no other course than to continue to invest in the Generalissimo while bringing pressure on both sides to make concessions toward a representative government.

  The situation had become too much for Hurley. Under the new Administration he again believed himself the victim of a conspiracy in which Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes and Under Secretary Acheson were listening to his critics and preparing to replace him by a “deserving Democrat.” Returning to Washington in November, he repeated earlier threats to resign but was persuaded by Truman and Byrnes to go back to China and try again. The next day in a sudden reversal, without informing the President or Secretary, Hurley made his dramatic announcement directly to the press.

  His accusation captured the spirit of the time. Since the dissolution of wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, innate fear and hate of Communism reasserted itself in America. On that dark yeast, grudge, ambition and vindictiveness could feed, and demagogues grow fat. Hurley opened the journey toward the tawdry reign of terror soon to be imposed with such astonishing ease by Senator Joe McCarthy. The time of hysterics had arrived. America’s China policy was its central issue, the agents and partisans of Chiang Kai-shek, collectively known as the China Lobby, its promoters. A first step had already been taken in June 1945 with a raid on the offices of the pro-Communist magazine Amerasia and the resulting arrest along with five others of John Service. Copies of his reports from Yenan were found in the Amerasia files. When sent back to Washington by Stilwell the previous autumn, Service had indiscreetly lent the drafts of his reports to the magazine’s editor as part of the effort to inform the press. A grand jury found no grounds for indictment in his case and he was reassigned on Stilwell’s recommendation to MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo. But the hounding of the China foreign service officers through multiplying loyalty investigations and subversion hunts had barely begun. The attacks and savagery that were soon to rage over America’s China policy wrecked careers, blasted reputations and by the eventual dismissal of Davies, Service and others cowed the future exercise of independent judgment in the foreign service.

  For the present China confronted the American Government with a foreign crisis and domestic hazards both of alarming potential. Truman acted rapidly. In the hope of canceling the effect of Hurley’s explosion he asked General Marshall, a figure above politics who commanded national respect, to take up the mission to bring truce and united government to China. Marshall had just retired as Chief of Staff a week previously and was looking forward with his wife to his first relief from the unbroken burden of six years. His sense of duty, in the same tradition as Stilwell’s, allowed only one answer when called on by the Commander-in-Chief: he accepted. After his intimate connection with Stilwell’s experience in China, he might have hesitated but he felt urgently the need to try to save the purpose for which America had fought in the Far East. As a principal architect of victory he may have felt an extra interest in protecting it.

  To compel the parties to an agreement he was instructed to use the movement of troops to north China as his lever. In confirming his instructions Marshall himself determined their crucial point. It was his understanding, he said to Truman and Byrnes, that if the Communists refused to make reasonable concessions, he would move Nationalist tro
ops to north China. On the other hand if the Generalissimo refused to make concessions and this led to a breakdown in the effects for unity, the United States could not abandon him because “there would follow the tragic consequences of a divided China and of a probable Russian resumption of power in Manchuria…resulting in the defeat or loss of the major purpose of our war in the Pacific.” Under these circumstances he understood that he was to “go ahead and assist the Generalissimo in the movement of troops to North China” at least until the evacuation of Japanese was completed. Truman and Byrnes concurred.

  It was essentially a decision for counter-revolution. The same choice was made in former colonial territories where, contrary to the late President’s intent, American forces were actively helping to restore French rule in Indochina against a strong movement for independence. In charters and declarations American aims were democratic but in practice the executants opted for the old regime. In China the decision was not merely futile; it aligned America in popular eyes with the oppressor and landlord and tax collector, it disheartened the liberal forces and violently antagonized the future rulers. While many suspected that the effort was misguided, American policy could not readjust. It preferred the status quo even when the status quo was a sinking ship. There seemed to be no feasible alternative. To abandon the legal government for the Communists was not within American capacity and would have meant political suicide at home. The only other possibility was Stilwell’s advice to “get out—now” and this was ahead of its time by a year and a half.