by Robert Lyman
1.President has no idea of Chiang’s character, intentions, authority or ability.
2.British and Chinese ready to shift burden on to US.
3.Chiang’s air plans will stop formation of effective ground forces.
4.Air activity could cause Japanese to overrun whole of Yunnan.
5.Chiang would make fantastic strategic decisions.
6.Chiang will seek control of US troops.
7.Chiang will get rid of me and have a “yes” man.
8.Chinese will grab supplies for post war purposes.
In many of these accusations and prophecies Stilwell was to be proved right. His logic remained compelling to the War Department in Washington, but he failed completely to ensure that his views had the political impact they needed to survive. He was preeminently a fighting soldier, unable to deal with the complex nuances of the political environment in which he was forced to operate. The Australian journalist Ronald McKie described him as “small and sinewy. A cannibal would have rejected him. His face was slashed with age lines, his brown eyes were humorous even behind thick steel spectacles, and his cropped hair, grey at the temples, stood to attention on top and gave him a startled ‘little-boy’ look. . . . He had been born in 1883 and looked old and frail, far too old to be commanding a couple of Chinese divisions and some Americans, particularly in the middle of the monsoon. He was, however, about as frail as a steel girder and, to many people, as unbending.” Watching him closely in Chungking, General Adrian Carton de Wiart put his finger on the problem, describing Stilwell as having “strong and definite ideas of what he wanted, but no facility in putting them forward.”
Chennault, by contrast, fought to gain direct access to Roosevelt, bypassing Marshall altogether, and in these overtures he was assisted in Washington by T. V. Soong. Stilwell’s wholly admirable though ineffectual approach was to state what he believed, and state it loudly so that all could hear, but his failure was to believe that this was all that was necessary for him to do. The Chinese, seeing their strategies potentially undermined by this American Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, applied every devious political pressure they could to undermine Stilwell’s views, and in the end—in a clear win for the Mr. Facing-Both-Ways and his neighbors in Chungking’s decadent Vanity Fair, Stilwell lost the argument. Roosevelt had admonished him a year earlier for speaking sternly to Chiang Kai-shek (and he was to do so again at Cairo in November 1943 when Stilwell called Chiang Kai-shek “Peanut” in the president’s hearing), and the sharpness of his tongue, whatever the prescience of his observations, served to whittle away what political capital he retained in Chungking, New Delhi, London, and Washington.
Under the ill-informed pressure of the aerial strategists, the Trident Conference in May 1943 endorsed increasing the quantity of air resources to China, and agreement was reached in principle later in the year for a strategic bombing offensive to be launched from new bases in eastern China against Japan once the war in Italy and Europe had been successfully concluded. This outcome encouraged renewed opposition in Chungking to land-based operations in Burma and continued the difficulties that Stilwell faced in preparing Chinese troops for war. As supplies to Chennault burgeoned, the road building from Ledo almost stopped, the training of the Yoke Force became halfhearted, and plans for the attack on Burma received renewed criticism from Chungking.
Chiang Kai-shek repeated his demand that any Chinese commitment of ground forces be accompanied by overwhelming Allied amphibious and aerial attacks on Burma. Stilwell was furious that Chiang Kai-shek had the nerve to demand more resources from the Allies while offering little in return. In circumstances like these Stilwell was at his most eloquent: “This insect, this stink in the nostrils, superciliously inquires what we will do, who are breaking our backs to help him, supplying everything—troops, equipment, planes, medical, signal, motor services . . . training his lousy troops, bucking his bastardly Chief of Staff, and he the Jovian Dictator who starves his troops and who is the world’s greatest ignoramus, picks flaws in our preparations, and hems and haws about the Navy, God save us.” When, finally, Chiang Kai-shek appended his signature on July 12, 1943, to the plan for an offensive down the Hukawng Valley, Stilwell exclaimed with relief as much as fury at the pain he had had to go through to win even this concession: “What corruption, intrigue, obstruction, delay, double crossing, hate, jealousy and skullduggery we have had to wade through. What a cesspool. . . . What bigotry and ignorance and black ingratitude. Holy Christ, I was just about at the end of my rope.”
It was in this context—confusion, recrimination, partisanship, and relentless propaganda—that Eric Sevareid’s trip to China was conceived. What was going on in China? Who was right? One day Sevareid was invited to meet a man whom he knew to be close to the president. Would Sevareid be happy to employ his talents as an investigative journalist by travelling to Kuomintang-run China and offering an unbiased view for the benefit of the White House? The American population, at the hands of a deeply partisan media, believed the propaganda that China was America’s staunch Churchillian ally in the region and that every American dollar spent on Chiang Kai-shek was money spent on Chinese bullets to be fired at their common enemy. The truth—that American lives were being sacrificed to line the pockets of graft-ridden Kuomintang generals and keep them in power—was too unpalatable to consider, and those responsible for signing the checks had a habit of keeping their heads in the sand on the issue. The American public had been fed a diet of half-truths about China for so long that only the fresh objectivity of someone like Sevareid could do anything to break the stranglehold that this mythologizing had on popular feelings about Chiang Kai-shek. Sevareid’s biographer, Raymond Schroth, observed:
The Roosevelt circle’s gamble in promoting a Sevareid mission was that a dose of Sevareid-delivered truth—even bad news—would either soften the greater shock of a later Chinese collapse or strengthen the president’s hand by making public opinion demand more of the generalissimo. It is easy to see why Sevareid accepted. The assignment got him back into the action; he revered Roosevelt: and he did believe that a hard dose of the truth is often the best medicine for an ailing democracy.
So it was that Sevareid kitted himself out in a war correspondent’s uniform and an expensive “war zone” ensemble that took him a good deal of effort to acquire in Washington and climbed aboard one of a succession of indifferent and deeply uncomfortable aircraft for the long journey across the South Atlantic to Africa, India, and China. Little did he know that one of the men who would accompany him on the flight into Kunming, Jack Davies—who saw clearly the true state of this latter-day Heart of Darkness—would himself, in a later decade, have his career destroyed under Senator Joseph McCarthy for suggesting that the Communists would win the long struggle for the creation of a new China and that the much-lauded Kuomintang was a busted flush.
6
THE PASSENGERS
Harry Neveu knew nothing about the eighteen men who had boarded his plane that morning: they were merely names on a manifest, part of the C-46’s payload. His job was to transport them through these dangerous skies to their destination. He would have been surprised had he paid the list any attention, for it boasted an eclectic cross-section of America. Eleven were noncommissioned officers and enlisted men of the USAAF, nine of whom worked for the ATC. They were traveling to their place of duty in Kunming, there to work at the China end of the Hump operation. They were Staff Sergeant Joseph “Jiggs” Giguere, Staff Sergeant Joseph Clay, Sergeant Francis Signer, Corporal Edward Helland, Corporal Basil Lemmon, Sergeant Glen Kittleson, Corporal Lloyd Sherrill, Corporal Stanley Waterbury, Private William Schrandt, Technical Sergeant Evan Wilder, and Second Lieutenant Roland Lee. Two were officers of the Kuomintang: Colonel Wang Pae Chae, of whom little is known, and Lieutenant Colonel Kwoh Li, who had marched out of Burma with Stilwell. A young but hard-bitten man, he was much admired by the Americans. Of the four remaining Americans, one was William (“Bill”) Stanton, a representative in Stilwe
ll’s CBI theater of the Board of Economic Warfare, which collected and analyzed enemies’ economic information. A banker in Hong Kong before the war, he was in his forties at the time of the crash. The final three were Eric Sevareid, Captain Duncan Lee, and Jack Davies.
Eric Sevareid was born in November 1912, an American of Norwegian ancestry. He grew up in the rural town of Velva, North Dakota, harboring a boyhood ambition to become a newspaperman. He was to succeed in this dream. Indeed, he was eventually to become one of the most prominent radio journalists of his age. His rise to prominence came with the start of the war in Europe in 1939 when he went to work for CBS (joining the likes of William Shirer, who was to write, among others, Berlin Diary and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) and began to report to listeners across America on events in France. Sevareid and his fellows became known as “Murrow’s boys” after the well-known reporter Edward Murrow. At a time before television, when immediacy in journalism came from the radio, with the newspapers several days behind, Sevareid and others brought the meaning of war to millions of Americans through the power of their voices and the currency and pertinence of their observations. They were also increasingly partisan in favor of ordinary Britons’ resistance to the threat of Nazi bullying and of Britain’s herculean struggle against the fascist jackboots striding contemptuously across Europe, trampling all in their path (to use the rhetoric of the day). For all his intellectual abhorrence of the concept of the British Empire (he had adopted radical politics and pacifism at the University of Minnesota in the early 1930s), Sevareid was, in 1940, to align himself completely with the citizens of London, who suffered the nightly bombardments.
Sevareid had met Murrow in 1937, when both were print journalists for American news organizations in Europe, Murrow in London with CBS and Sevareid in Paris for the Paris Herald and United Press International (UPI). With war came a phone call from Murrow, and Sevareid joined a band of journalists Murrow had been pulling together to report on the coming conflict. As the Wehrmacht rolled into France in May 1940 Sevareid quickly became a critical part of CBS’s live broadcasts from the front. He reported the occupation of Paris and the capitulation of France some weeks later. It could be said that in those months he made his career. His reports were interesting, accurate, and full of the pathos engendered by war. Despite the battles within CBS in the United States about the requirements for objectivity in reporting at a time when America was still neutral, “Murrow’s boys” defined what it meant to be a radio journalist rather than merely a reader of news. By selecting, presenting, and interpreting the news, they effectively commented and analyzed at the same time. They found that they could not separate themselves from the war and increasingly observed its rights and wrongs from a personal and a moral perspective. For millions of ordinary Americans, these news reports brought the reality of war to life in kitchens and living rooms across the nation, and the full moral horror of the Nazi subjugation of Europe became known to a gradually comprehending and increasingly angry American audience. As the historians Cloud and Olson observed, this was a new sort of conversation between the reporter and the listener thousands of miles away back home: “What Murrow wanted was for the Boys to imagine themselves standing before a fireplace back home, explaining to the local editor or college professor or dentist or shopkeeper what was going on. But imagine, too, he said, that a maid and her truck-driver husband are listening at the door. Use language and images that are as informative and compelling to them as to the guests around the fireplace. Avoid high-flown rhetoric and frenetic delivery.”
Sevareid covered the war for CBS from the outset until he managed to escape on one of the last boats leaving Bordeaux in June 1940 for the relative safety of London. In the first few months of what British soldiers called the “Bore War,” he observed the deep-seated hostility of the French people to the idea of renewed hostility with Germany. They, and the French Armed Forces, remained superficially dutiful but not passionate about fighting yet another war against the Boche. In any case it was confidently and conveniently believed that the eighty-nine miles of Maginot Line would stop a German attack in its tracks. When the Phony Wara ended after eight months, the full horror of real war shocked Sevareid. Caught in a house at Cambrai, shaken by the repeated concussions of close-landing artillery shells, he wondered whether he was brave enough to face the dangers of battle close up, even though he was far from being a combatant. “And God!” he recalled. “The terrifying violence of bombs nearby, how they stunned the mind, ripped the nerves, and turned one’s limbs to water!” What he saw with his own eyes he felt deeply, and he struggled to compose himself when reporting the sight of a train packed with refugees that had been devastated by Luftwaffe machine guns. Unable formally to take sides, he was able nonetheless to make plain his moral indignation at the deliberate, wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians by a ruthless German war machine: “To a pilot, I suppose, a freight train is a freight train. It may carry women and children; it may carry troops. But even a pilot can tell what direction it’s moving, and troops are not moving south.” Sevareid, having managed to ensure the evacuation of his wife, Lois, and newborn twin sons on a ship to the United States, left a collapsing Paris only after the escape from the city of the country’s panic-stricken leaders. His last broadcast from Paris warned America that his next would not be under the control of the French government. Making his way by stages first to Tours and then to Bordeaux, Sevareid managed to travel by freighter to Liverpool and thence to London. He broadcast the imminent collapse of France from Bordeaux and was the first to announce the capitulation to the world.
The period between the declaration of war on September 3, 1939, and the German invasion of France in May 1940 was called the “Phony War” in Western Europe because, unlike other wars in recent human experience, in this one nothing seemed to happen.
During the long, hot, violent summer of 1940, Eric Sevareid was one of the voices of CBS—orchestrated by Edward Murrow—that nightly told Americans of the calm stoicism of ordinary Britons in London under repeated and terrifying aerial bombardment. His recordings became part of the established narrative of the Blitz, which stretched from September 7 to the end of October. In the midst of this period of relentless attack, CBS agreed to repatriate an exhausted Sevareid to the United States. Just before he left for home he broadcast his farewell to a London that he had come to believe personified resistance to the brutal ugliness of totalitarianism:
Paris died like a beautiful woman, in a coma, without struggle, without knowing or even asking why. One left Paris with a feeling almost of relief. London one leaves with regret. Of all the great cities of Europe, London alone behaves with pride and battered but stubborn dignity. . . .
London fights down her fears every night, takes her blows and gets up again every morning. You feel yourself an embattled member of this embattled corps. The attraction of courage is irresistible. Parting from London, you clearly see what she is and what she means. London may not be England, but she is Britain and she is the incubator of America and the West. Should she collapse, the explosion in history would never stop its echoing. Besieged, London is a city-state in the old Greek sense.
Someone wrote the other day, “When this is all over, in years to come, men will speak of this war and say, ‘I was a soldier,’ ‘I was a sailor.’ Or ‘I was a pilot.’ Others will say with equal pride, ‘I was a citizen of London.’”
Sevareid had arrived in London with many of the Anglophobic prejudices of the time. He left a convert to its bellicose spirit and stubborn refusal to give in to tyranny, something that he had not seen in France and that seemed to him to characterize more than anything else the British spirit of indomitable pluck. It was a lesson for his compatriots back home to learn: “During those bright days and livid nights of 1940, the spirit of the British called up from despair the spirit of other men. . . . It was this spirit and example which overbore the defeatists in the United States. . . . Americans thought they were saving Britain—and
they were. But the spirit and example of Britain also were saving America.”
At the time of the crash Duncan Lee had been a Soviet spy for over a year. A lawyer in the peacetime chambers of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS, he had followed his boss and mentor into this new organization, designed to lead the coordination of American intelligence operations abroad. No one thought to do an exhaustive background check on the bespectacled twenty-eight-year-old lawyer; he seemed to be just the right sort of person for this sort of secret work. That he had been educated at Yale and had been a Rhodes Scholar between 1935 and 1938, with a privileged education and impeccable American credentials—General Robert E. Lee was one of his ancestors—seemed perfect reasons to welcome Lee into the fold of the spy organization that would one day become the CIA. The massive expansion of the US military also meant that the checks on Lee’s associations, to test his loyalty, were perfunctory. Unfortunately, his credentials masked the fact that he had been a member of the Communist Party for three years and believed passionately that only communism could rescue the world from the poverty and social inequality that had been rampant in the wake of the Great Depression.
The threat of fascism, which Lee, like many others, naively believed to be the polar opposite of communism rather than its twin, only fueled his desire to help the Soviet Union—the only bastion of true equality in the world—in its life-and-death struggle against the forces of Nazi evil. There was no contradiction in his mind between fighting for America in its war against Nazi Germany and totalitarian Japan and his support for the social paradise established by the proletariat across the “old” Russian Empire. As his biographer Mark Bradley demonstrated, a combination of his mother’s intense Christian socialism and his immersion in the politically radicalized Oxford University of the mid-1930s made him easy pickings for Soviet intelligence. Bradley concluded that his experience of revolutionary ideas while a student in England “transformed him from a mild, mostly apolitical socialist into a future communist willing to spy against his own country.” His time at Oxford coincided with the rise of the fascist right in Europe, crystallized by the Spanish Civil War. Soviet support for the democratically elected Republican government in the face of a rebellion by Franco’s right made Stalin a hero to many thousands of people in the West who were disillusioned by the failure of capitalism during the Great Depression and of the Western democracies to stand up to fascism. As news seeped out about the purges and terror, they were conveniently excused by most Western communist-leaning intellectuals as necessary evils to restrain opposition within the Soviet Union to communist principles—collectivization, a planned economy, and public ownership of the means of production.