by Frank McLynn
Stilwell began his mission with an enthusiasm that was soon dampened. He had bright ideas for an ambitious campaign to retake Rangoon, together with a ‘failsafe’ fallback plan for a retreat to high ground east of Mandalay where he could threaten the flank of any Japanese army and thus prevent a breakthrough into northern Burma. He believed he had sold the idea to Chiang by coupling it with a follow-up plan for an offensive in China once he had thrown the enemy out of Burma. But Chiang was cautious and said he wanted to know whether the Japanese were increasing their forces before he ordered an all-out offensive; in any event, he added, the best divisions in 5th and 6th Army would not be ordered south ‘in case the British ran away’. Refusal to commit his best troops or to allow any concentration in depth effectively stifled Stilwell’s more ambitious plans at birth. Stilwell wrote mournfully in his diary: ‘What a directive! What a mess! How they hate the Limeys! What a sucker I am … Maybe the Japs will go at us and solve it for us.’50 He was not exaggerating the Anglophobia, for Chiang actually cabled FDR to request that Stilwell be made supreme commander of all Allied forces in Burma. Sensing his chief of staff’s deep disappointment about the veto on his plan to retake Mandalay, the generalissimo sugared the pill on 11 March by telling him he could take three armies south: the 5th, 6th and 66th.51 Stilwell, however, remained sceptical that his orders would be obeyed, for he had heard of Chiang’s devious methods. Each divisional general was always informed that whatever orders he received from a superior, he was always to seek confirmation from the generalissimo himself, for Chiang thought this the best way to make ineffective any plotting by ambitious generals.52 Such was the genesis of the move south by the Chinese 5th Army to Toungoo on the Sittang, on the same latitude as the 17th Indian Division at Prome. On paper, the Allied strategy of holding the Prome–Sittang line 150 miles north of Rangoon made sense, but it ignored geography. It required operations to be conducted on a horizontal grid, but all communications in Burma were longitudinal, depending on the great rivers that ran north–south.
Stilwell set up his Burma headquarters at Maymyo, ‘the Burmese Simla’, where the British were already ensconced. He suffered initially from a severe shortage of staff officers, and contrasted his own ‘cando’ attitude with the (alleged) laziness of the British, who had 70,000 men on their ration list but only 12,000 at the front.53 Stilwell’s always rampant Anglophobia was kindled anew when he contemplated the ‘all chiefs and no Indians’ hierarchy of the British army, for so he construed it when he calculated that there was one full general, one lieutenant general, five major generals, 18 brigadiers and 250 staff officers for 15,000 men. The fact that many of the senior officers conformed to the blimpish stereotype Stilwell so detested did not help matters. He evinced particular animus towards the civilian governor Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, whom he predictably referred to in his journal as ‘Doormat Smith’. He tried to rile the governor by stating uncompromisingly that he would open fire on any Burmese who gave him trouble, but Dorman-Smith spoiled his fun by agreeing without demur.54 Stilwell found the British full of contempt for the Chinese, both as soldiers and because of their race. The ‘Limeys’ were also highly amused when both Stilwell and General Tu Li-ming presented credentials as commander of the Chinese armies. Dorman-Smith got revenge of a kind when Tu told him in confidence that Chiang had given Stilwell a mere paper command, but the real power was his. It would not be the last time that Stilwell would be bedevilled by such blatant duplicity. As has been well said: ‘the problem [of who was in charge] caused his command in Burma to take on the complexities of a Pirandello play’.55 According to the traditions of the Chinese army, a supreme commander had to possess a certificate signed by the head of state (in this case Chiang), complete with a six-inch-square seal with archaic Chinese characters and stamped in vermilion ink. The only man in Burma who had such a document was a general named Lo Chin-ying, whose speciality was stealing trains from the British.56
On 13 March General Alexander arrived, and his meeting with Stilwell was, predictably, a non-meeting of minds. The American’s diary entry says it all: ‘Very cautious. Long sharp nose. Brusque and standoffish. Amazed to find an American commanding Chinese. “Extwawdinery!” Looked me over as if I had just crawled out from under a rock.’ Distinctly unimpressed, Stilwell was positively infuriated when he was woken at midnight that same day with a message that Alexander and his no. 2, General Edwin Morris, wanted to see him at ten o’clock sharp next morning. ‘Can you beat it? I wonder what those babies would have said if I had sent Dorn on a similar errand to them? It’s just a superior race complex, for which they will pay dearly.’57 Stilwell’s bark was always worse than his bite, so the conference next morning passed without acrimony. By the 15th, Alexander was becoming cordial, and confided to Stilwell that he had only 4,000 really good fighting men. He massaged his bubbling paranoia effectively. ‘Alex says he now perfectly understands and we will cooperate with each other.’58 The Alexander–Stilwell entente was further cemented when the American made it clear he would put Anglo-American objectives ahead of any loyalty to Chiang. Further shuttle diplomacy, including a two-day conference with the generalissimo, a meeting with Chennault at Kunming and a terrifying flight over the Hump in a snowstorm to Lashio, found Stilwell more disillusioned than ever. Chiang insisted that his 5th and 6th Armies could not be allowed to be defeated (Stilwell wondered how he was supposed to guarantee that) and that they should concentrate on the defence of Mandalay (which, however, he thought was a walled city) instead of 130 miles south at Pyinmana, as Stilwell wanted. Stilwell reflected that Chiang was a ‘stubborn bugger’, but the more he saw of Chinese ways, the more he found it a source of wonderment that his own status was accepted, since it was the first time since General ‘Chinese’ Gordon in the 1860s that a foreigner had commanded regular troops in China.59 Since duplicity was a way of life, Stilwell found nothing untoward about disregarding Chiang’s wishes and detaching the 22nd and 96th Divisions for an attack at Pyinmana. This gesture delighted Alexander, who was favourably impressed: he became ‘a new man, all smiles and jokes about how I’d gotten his Chinese troops away from him’.60
Tired of Chiang’s stalling and procrastination, Stilwell virtually stole away from Chungking and based himself at Toungoo, where he hoped to make a stand. In the week of 24–31 March he made a desperate attempt to reinforce his troops, both to prevent a threatened encirclement and to hold the flank of the British at Prome. But the situation at Toungoo was perilous, for he had few radios, other communications were poor and his medical facilities were non-existent at the very time that malaria and blackwater fever were rampaging through his army. A particular headache was Japanese airpower, as the enemy was virtually unchallenged in the skies since the RAF withdrew to India. If he could mobilise his few American pilots to fly night and day, Stilwell could perhaps put 45 planes in the air, but the Japanese could send 260 planes against them without difficulty.61 Worst of all was the lack of cooperation from Chiang. Rail delays – deliberately engineered by the generalissimo, Stilwell thought – made it impossible for reinforcements to arrive at the front. When Stilwell asked Chungking for trucks, he was sent 50 out of 700 available, since the rest were being used to move materiel to private stashes deep inside China, ready for the future war with the Communists. Chiang, tired of face-to-face confrontations with his turbulent chief of staff, devised ever more Byzantine ways of holding him at arm’s length. He forced Stilwell to communicate with him indirectly through two liaison officers who were primed to be obstructive. Meanwhile Madame Chiang bombarded Stilwell with air mail, sometimes three letters a day, possibly as a deliberate campaign of obfuscation, for the missives contained self-contradictory messages and sometimes countermanded orders Stilwell had already given. Stilwell was so appalled by all this that he signalled Stimson in Washington that Chiang’s delaying tactics had destroyed any chance the Allies had in Burma.62 The last straw was when he learned on 27 March that the British intended to withdraw from Prome, exposing h
is own flank.63 Almost the only consolation he had in those dark days at Toungoo was the companionship of Frank Merrill, a soulmate both as a linguist and as a fighting officer. Tall, heavyset, short-sighted, ‘with glasses perched on a sunburned peeling nose’, 41-year-old Merrill was shrewd, genial and, above all, courageous. Enlisting in the army at eighteen, he took the West Point exams six times before the academy agreed to overlook his astigmatism and admit him. A Japanese-language specialist who was acting as liaison with the British, Merrill was the exact opposite of an armchair officer. When the Japanese strafed Maymyo, he jumped into a trench and opened fire on the Zeroes with a Bren gun.64
It was through Merrill that Stilwell first made contact with Slim – a contact that would produce a notable entente. When Slim arrived at Prome to command 1st Burma Corps, Merrill went to see him. Slim asked what Stilwell’s objective was, to which Merrill replied: ‘Rangoon.’ ‘Tell Stilwell he can count me in,’ said Slim.65 This promising beginning was followed by a meeting between the two commanders that was highly successful. Slim was certainly not the stereotypical British officer, and Stilwell appreciated his qualities, not least the fact that he had come up the hard way if not quite the whole way. Slim recorded his impressions of Stilwell at length:
These were my first contacts with Stilwell, who had arrived in Burma a few days before me. He already had something of a reputation for shortness of temper and for distrust of most of the world. I must admit he surprised me a little when, at our first meeting, he said, ‘Well, general, I must tell you that my motto in all things is buyer beware,’ but he never, as far as I was concerned, lived up to that old horse-trader’s motto. He was over sixty [not quite] but he was tough, mentally and physically; he could be as obstinate as a whole team of mules; he could be, and frequently was, downright rude to people whom, often for no good reason, he did not like. But when he said he would do a thing, he did it. True, you had to get him to say that he would – quite clearly and definitely – and that was not always easy – but once he had, you knew he would keep his word. He had a habit, which I found very disarming, of arguing most tenaciously against some proposal and then suddenly looking at you over the top of his glasses with the shadow of a grin, and saying, ‘Now tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.’ He was two people, one when he had an audience, and a quite different person, when talking to you alone. I think it amused him to keep up in public the ‘Vinegar Joe, Tough Guy’ attitude, especially in front of his staff. Americans, whether they liked him or not – and he had more enemies among Americans than among British – were all scared of him. He had courage to an extent few people have, and determination, which, as he usually concentrated it along narrow lines, had a dynamic force. He was not a great soldier in the highest sense, but he was a real leader in the field; no one else I know could have made his Chinese do what they did. He was, undoubtedly, the most colourful character in South East Asia – and I liked him.66
The understanding between Slim and Stilwell led to what, it was hoped, would be the first outstanding feat of Anglo-Chinese collaboration. Slim agreed to stand and fight at Taungdwingyi if the Chinese under General Tu would back him up. Stilwell was delighted: ‘Limeys will attack in force with all tanks. Good old Slim. Maybe he’s all right after all.’67 But the plan misfired badly. The Chinese failed to arrive – reliable reports said they had simply run away – and Slim’s armoured brigade had to pull back quickly to avoid being encircled. Trying to make some sense of his embarrassment, Stilwell learned that the root of the problem was that Chiang had issued secret orders forbidding Tu to advance with the British. Stilwell was therefore in the impossible position of a commander whose troops refuse to obey him, and meanwhile he could neither shoot them, replace them nor even talk to them, as that was a waste of breath.68 It was quite clear that every time he tried to take offensive action and Chiang agreed, the generalissimo would simply go behind Stilwell’s back and sabotage everything. Chiang’s defenders make three points, none of them very cogent. One is that in Chinese culture confrontation is to be avoided, so that if pushed into a corner a leader will agree to anything to save ‘face’ and then undo the agreement clandestinely. A second is that Chinese martial culture believes that war is a game of chess where you try to avoid decisive encounters. A third is that a leader does not have sufficient respect for his generals and military advisers because, unlike the scholar, bureaucrat or mandarin, the warrior has no secure place in Chinese culture.69 The refutation of all these points, whatever their internal validity, is that unless he was terminally stupid, Chiang could not have imagined that he could carry these tenets into international relations and dealings with the West. To stand firm on such a set of credos could be justified in a leader who sought nothing at all from the West, but Chiang’s greed for American money and materiel knew no bounds. Stilwell, therefore, was perfectly justified in his rage against the generalissimo. He considered three options: doing nothing, resigning, or once again confronting Chiang. It was obvious that for a person of Stilwell’s temperament, only the third option was really viable. He stormed up to Chungking for a showdown.
Arriving on 1 April without notice, he ranted to Chiang about the insubordination of Chinese commanders, especially the general in charge of 22nd Division, and announced that he intended to resign forthwith as chief of staff in order to concentrate on a special training programme for 30 divisions in India. To use Stilwell’s own words: ‘At 12 o’clock went down and threw raw meat on the floor … I have to tell Chiang Kai-shek with a straight face that his subordinates are not carrying out his orders, when in all probability they are doing just what he tells them.’ But he acknowledged that Madame Chiang was helpful and noted that she usually influenced her husband along the right lines. She was ‘a clever, brainy woman. Sees the Western viewpoint … Direct, forceful, energetic, loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history.’70 Since Chiang was about to fly to Maymyo to meet Alexander and Slim, the last thing he wanted was a sensational development with Stilwell. Madame suggested that Chiang go to Lashio to make it clear to the Chinese generals that Stilwell really was in charge. Once again Stilwell allowed hope to triumph over experience.71 In the event it was he himself who flew to Lashio while Chiang went directly to Maymyo for his conference with Alexander. The generalissimo assured his allies that Stilwell had his full confidence and was vested with plenipotentiary powers. To ‘prove’ this he offered to send Stilwell the famous seal that had such talismanic effect with Chinese commanders, stating that his chief of staff was Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma. Needless to say, when the seal arrived, it said nothing about plenipotentiary prerogatives but referred to Stilwell simply as chief of staff. Moreover, contrary to the agreement with Alexander at Maymyo, he did not send Stilwell a letter of authority, allowing him to punish recalcitrant Chinese generals. Madame meanwhile sent Stilwell the usual deluge of letters, trying to flatter and cajole him into accepting the unsatisfactory state of affairs; Stilwell concluded that she evidently thought all Westerners idiots.72
The Japanese were now preparing for the next phase of the campaign: the capture of Mandalay. To achieve this, they brought in two new divisions and two rank regiments and planned a three-column drive up the river valleys to smash the Allies between Lashio and the Chindwin before the monsoon came. First they softened up Mandalay in the devastating air raids that reduced the city to a charnel house (see p. 34). Even the cynical Chiang, visiting Mandalay after his conference with Alexander, was shaken by what he saw and wrote to Churchill: ‘I have seen nothing to compare with the deplorable unprepared state, confusion and degradation of the war area in Burma.’73 To try to hold on to Mandalay, the generalissimo sent the 38th Division under General Sun Li-jen, generally considered the best of the Chinese generals. With the Japanese beginning to break through on the Mandalay front, another top-level military conference was held at Maymyo on 15 April, with Alexander, Slim and Stilwell all present. Whatever Alex’s ori
ginal feelings about Stilwell, he was by now fully convinced of his value as a fighting general, and there was no more sardonic talk in the officers’ mess about ‘Stilwell’s great Chinese offensive’. ‘He calls me “Joe” now,’ Stilwell reported contentedly. When Alexander admitted that his troops seemed mesmerised by the enemy and genuinely afraid of the Japanese, Stilwell noted: ‘Did Aleck [sic] have the wind up! Disaster and gloom. No fight left in the British. Afraid of the Japs who dress as natives and live openly in the villages.’74 During the next few days Stilwell saw a good deal of Alexander, and his comments grew more and more patronising: ‘Alexander impressed me as sucking a lot of moral support about of [sic] being around us’ (17 April); ‘Alexander will do anything I tell him to. Had him radio Wavell for two reconnaissance planes’ (22 April).75 Such astringent remarks probably reflected a growing feeling among the American military that Alexander was under secret orders from Churchill to cut and run, giving up the fight for Burma. Ironically, Mrs Luce Booth, energetically promoting the legend of ‘Vinegar Joe’ and even interviewing Chiang to that end, reported that Alexander had said to her: ‘I do hope Joe doesn’t go. I would find it very difficult to command the Chinese without him.’76 Yet the military situation went from bad to worse. In mid-April the Japanese seized key points on the route to Lashio, cutting the Burma road and the escape route by which Stilwell planned to withdraw to China. To Stilwell’s consternation, Slim informed him that he had issued contingency orders for the destruction of the oilfields at Yenangyaung. ‘Good God, what are we fighting for?’ was Stilwell’s appalled response.77
The brutal battle for Yenangyaung on 17–20 April saw Stilwell and the Chinese at their best. The 38th Division under General Sun Li-jen took Twingon on 19 April after a hard slugging match, penetrated Yenangyaung on the 20th and fought off a vicious Japanese counterattack in which heavy losses were taken by both sides. Slim eventually took the decision to pull the Chinese out to avoid the likely bloodbath in house-to-house fighting among the smoking ruins. Stilwell remained keen for yet another counterattack on Yenangyaung, as Slim recorded: ‘I found him, as he always was, ready to support an offensive move and prepared to go a long way to help me.’78 Yet Stilwell’s capacity for offensive operations was limited by the need to keep substantial forces in the north to protect the Chinese 5th Army against flank attacks from Japanese forces on the Irrawaddy. Moreover, Alexander was not keen on a counteroffensive, further increasing Stilwell’s contempt for his ‘defeatism’. ‘Are the British going to run out on us? Yes’ was a diary entry for 20 April.79 In any case, all such ruminations appeared academic when the terrible news came in that the Japanese had severely routed the Chinese 6th Army in the hills behind the Mandalay–Rangoon railway and the Sittang. This was the defeat that enabled the Japanese to gain control of one of the world’s most valuable wolfram mines (see p. 35). Having cowed the 6th Army, the Japanese began hooking around them to the north, taking Hopong and Loilem in a rapid move. Any chance of reinforcing Slim and his own 5th Army was gone, and Stilwell had to concentrate on the developing crisis in the north. Using 200th Division from the 5th Army, he headed for Taunggyi, hoping to retake it, but the Chinese at first refused to obey his orders. He then secured their cooperation by outright bribery, offering not only a bonus for every man who fought but a collective reward of 50,000 rupees if the town could be taken by 5 p.m. that day. They achieved that goal and then, flushed with victory, drove the Japanese out of Loilem and Hopong as well. As Slim recalled: ‘It was a magnificent achievement, and only made possible by Stilwell’s personal leadership.’80 But it was too little, too late. It was the last hurrah of the Chinese, and both the 5th and 6th Army were exhausted and at the end of their resources.