The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  6

  The tireless Stilwell barely broke stride after his gruelling trek through the jungle. He departed from Delhi for Chungking at the end of May 1942 but arrived only on 3 June, after an enforced five-day stopover at Kunming because of bad weather. In the next seven months he would make the 2,200-mile journey between Chungking and Delhi no fewer than seven times. First there was a 450-mile flight from Chungking to Kunming; then 650 miles over the Hump to Sadiya in Assam; finally another 1,100 miles from Assam to Delhi. It must be emphasised that he had to fly over the Hump section of the Himalayas at 17,000–20,000 feet to get clear of the 15,000-foot peaks, through turbulence so bad it could tear a plane apart. The old, slow transport planes he flew on were not designed for such conditions, which meant that passengers had to carry their own oxygen, and there were no navigational aids or any defence against prowling Japanese fighters. If he was very lucky, Stilwell could get a ride in a B-25 bomber, which cruised at 250 m.p.h. – much faster than the transports.1 He went to see Chiang while depressed and ill, suffering from jaundice, and underweight after the ordeal in the jungle. He told his wife he was ‘like the guy in the medical book with his skin off, showing the next layer of what have you’. But the old martial spirit was never quenched. In the same letter written to his wife from Delhi, he expressed his bitterness about the Japanese: ‘I have hopes that some day we can step on these bastards and end the war, and if I am lucky enough I can go back and have a few days at a place called Carmel, where there are a few people I know who will welcome a vulgar old man, even though he has proved a flop and has been kicked around by the Japs.’ But his more immediate target was the generalissimo: ‘Tomorrow or next day I’ll be going back to report to G-mo and I sure have an earful for him. He’s going to hear stuff he never heard before and it’s going to be interesting to see how he takes it.’2

  The mood in Chungking was sombre and barely polite. Chiang blamed the British for the debacle in Burma but could not break with them openly for fear of alienating the USA and thus losing the crucial Lend-Lease materiel. He lobbied behind the scenes to get the Americans to recall Stilwell but as yet by means of winks and nods.3 To Chiang, the defeat of his armies had proved the truth of his credo that one should never attack; in the words of the old Chinese proverb: ‘One hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the best of the best; the best of the best is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’ Chiang’s mood was one of sullen non-cooperation. As he saw it, with the loss of the Burma road and with the Doolittle raids having precipitated a renewed offensive by the Japanese in China, his country was effectively blockaded. Meanwhile China was not treated as an equal by the Anglo-Saxon nations, who were obsessed with their ‘Europe first’ policy, and China had to endure routine humiliations like being refused membership of the US Munitions Control Board. Chiang’s basic attitude therefore was that the Western powers should now do the rest of the fighting in South-East Asia; after all, ancient wisdom dictated that the great leader should encourage one set of ‘foreign devils’ to fight another.4 At their conference with Stilwell on 3 June, Chiang and his wife tried to lay on the machiavellianism with a trowel, claiming that China was on the brink of collapse and thus hoping to suck even more aid and Lend-Lease out of the United States. Such was the barefacedness of the Chiangs that they even invented a ‘peace party’ within the Kuomintang, which aimed to sign a separate peace with Tokyo and by whom Chiang claimed to be threatened. For Chiang, Stilwell had a simple role: he was his chief of staff and should therefore get from the United States whatever Chiang wanted. Naturally, Stilwell did not see it at all that way: Lend-Lease was a quid pro quo for hard fighting, not a personal perquisite of the generalissimo. The conference was therefore the predictable dialogue of the deaf. Stilwell made good on his promise to tell his boss the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and revealed some of the more singular scandals in the brief campaign in Burma. He actually recommended to Chiang that some of his generals be shot, the officer corps purged and the army streamlined to 60 really effective and well-trained divisions. The Chiangs feigned astonishment at these revelations. Historians are divided on whether this was simple two-faced deceit or whether Chiang genuinely was ignorant of the worst excesses of his generals because his ‘face’ had to be saved.5

  It became obvious that Chiang intended to do nothing about his rebellious or recalcitrant officers, and Stilwell’s frustration became evident. After the main meeting, Madame Chiang took Stilwell aside and tried to brief him on what she called the nuances of Chinese culture but which Stilwell regarded as a string of fatuous and disingenuous excuses. The generalissimo, she said, was ignorant of the true state of affairs in the army because Chinese ‘good news’ culture overwhelmingly accentuated the positive. To keep up the pretence that no one in China was ever discontented, and also to save the leader’s face, the truth was kept from him; Stilwell’s words had therefore come like a douche of cold water. This was doubtless the source of Stilwell’s self-congratulatory gloss on the meeting as confided to his diary: ‘I told him the whole truth, and it was like kicking an old lady in the stomach. However, as far as I can find out, no one else dares to tell him the truth, so it’s up to me all the more.’6 When Stilwell pressed the point about army reform, Madame replied inconsequentially: ‘Why, that’s what his German advisers told him.’7 She added mysteriously that Chiang was under pressure from ‘certain influences’ (this was doubtless a riff on the fictional ‘peace party’), that he was not the free agent he appeared to be and not even master in his own house. There was a scintilla of truth in this. Many of Chiang’s generals were de facto provincial governors. Chiang had in effect ‘solved’ the endemic Chinese problem of warlordism by transmogrifying his own generals into warlords, and they would rebel if pushed too hard. But Madame insinuated that the problems between Stilwell and her husband were not insoluble. Chiang was reluctant to use his army against the Japanese, but might change his mind if the trickle of Lend-Lease materiel became a flood. Here Madame was being both clever and obtuse. She was clever in that she emphasised her husband’s pragmatism. As has been well said: ‘Chiang’s resistance to Stilwell’s proposals was never fixed or solid but changeable and vacillating in proportion to what he thought Stilwell could obtain for him from America.’8 But she was obtuse in that she failed to realise that even if Stilwell was prepared to indulge Chiang at all points (he was not), as the more pliable Chennault was, he was not a free agent himself. The needs of the Russian front and the contingency planning for a cross-Channel invasion, to say nothing of the war in the Pacific, meant that Chiang’s war theatre had a very low priority. Nonetheless, Stilwell always incurred blame and vituperation from the Chinese when a cornucopia of material did not flood their way.

  By this stage of his mission Stilwell was already frustrated, deeply angry and profoundly contemptuous of ‘the Peanut’ and his corrupt clique in Chungking. As he clearly saw, the Kuomintang’s grip on power was shaky, with hyperinflation, sky-high rents and taxes plus incipient famine compounding the malaise of a string of military defeats. Worst of all was the all-pervasive corruption, the graft, profiteering, landlordism, peculation and defalcation, with a pro-Western business elite practically flaunting their extravagant wealth and conspicuous consumption in the faces of starving peasants. As Stilwell saw it, the KMT leaders dealt with all this by burying their heads in the sand. He commented on Chiang that he was ‘the most astute politician of the twentieth century … he must be or he wouldn’t be alive’.9 The only people Stilwell really got on well with in Chungking were those who shared his own low opinion of Chiang, men like General Shang-chen, in charge of military liaison with China’s allies and one of the few fluent English speakers in the higher echelons. On the other hand, he detested the head of Chiang’s press and public relations, Hollington Tong, ‘oily and false, mouthing delight at my arrival’. The chief of police, Tai-li, was another of Stilwell’s pet hates. Then there was Chiang’s Chinese chief of staff General Ho Ying-chi
n, conversations with whom were described as ‘double talk and tea’.10 The other Americans in Chungking largely shared Stilwell’s distaste for Chiang, with attitudes ranging from cynical indifference to positive loathing, but the US ambassador Clarence Gauss was a major ally. Gauss considered that China was a very minor asset to the USA but a major liability, and in his reports was implictly critical of FDR’s obsession with the country. In private he and Stilwell expressed their opinions more forcefully. They could not understand the mental block, a mixture of a priori fixed ideas and psychological denial of reality, whereby Roosevelt construed Chiang’s corrupt regime as vital to the Allied war effort.11

  What disgusted them most was Chiang’s lust for money and the Kuomintang lies that were accepted uncritically. One of Chiang’s most notorious ‘big lies’ was his claim to have attacked the Japanese army besieging Hong Kong in December 1941 and killed 15,000 of them. Needless to say, no such engagement ever took place, but such was Washington’s ‘will to believe’ that no one questioned Chiang’s Walter Mitty propensities, and the propaganda about Chinese ‘victories’ was accepted as fact. FDR’s cant about ‘democracy’ was particularly repulsive when applied to a fascist dictatorship like the Kuomintang. He was able to get away with it because foreign journalists self-censored and concealed the truth about Chiang’s China so as not to give comfort to the Japanese. And so in the press Chiang was always presented as an heroic paladin, his wife as a peerless beauty and the Chinese as noble and courageous.12 In such a context it was not difficult for Chiang to pull off his most breathtaking and outrageous coup. In January 1942 he managed the blatant extortion of $500 million from the US government, claiming it was necessary for China’s survival. Although many in Washington warned that this ‘aid’, if granted, would simply disappear into the bank accounts of Chiang and his cronies, Roosevelt felt that Chiang could not be refused. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and others tried to attach conditions to the ‘loan’, but Chiang adamantly refused to accept them.13 With the abiding fear in Roosevelt’s circles that Chiang would throw in his lot with the Japanese, forming a bamboo curtain of yellow races against the whites, the President granted Chiang all he asked for. Morgenthau admitted to a Senate committee that the money was an explicit bid by the USA to outbid Tokyo for Chiang’s services. When Secretary of War Stimson testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee on 3 February 1942, the House voted unanimously for the ‘loan’; Stimson then repeated the trick with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The outcome was that a huge loan had been made without security, control, conditions or any means whatever of getting the money back.14 What infuriated Stilwell was that ‘the Peanut’ had blackmailed his (Stilwell’s) own country. Even though by now he knew that Chiang would never launch a major offensive against Burma, he had to look on while FDR bought into a pack of lies, all based on the dubious premise that Chiang would withdraw from the war. Not while there was Lend-Lease materiel to acquire, Stilwell reflected bitterly.

  Further contacts in the month of June left Stilwell convinced that Chiang wanted him merely as a pro-Chinese stooge, someone useful for blocking and sidestepping the hated British and as a conduit to Lend-Lease. He brooded that Chiang had double-crossed him in China, had never officially endorsed him as commander-in-chief of the Chinese army, consistently went behind his back or even, so far as he could, over his head in Washington, never answered his memos and refused to clean up the rampant corruption in the army. It was quite clear that he had confirmed Stilwell’s command of the 5th Army units who had been evacuated to India simply so that he would not have to meet Wavell or any other Britons. But he refused to budge on the issue of the generals Stilwell wanted court-martialled or executed: ‘Tu to remain,’ Stilwell wrote bitterly. ‘His face is to be saved, the hell with mine.’15 At a conference on 24 June, with Madame’s support, Stilwell got Chiang to agree to having significant units of the Chinese army trained in India. However, Chiang insisted as a quid pro quo that Stilwell procure an airlift of 5,000 tons of supplies a month over the Hump and 500 combat planes. This was a very steep request because, with bad weather and a shortage of planes, only 100 tons a month was currently being delivered.16 Chiang of course had no idea and no interest in how the materiel reached him, and seemed to have thought it could be conjured up by a magic wand. In fact the transport of the Lend-Lease materiel meant a journey of 12,000 miles by sea from the USA to the west-coast ports of India, then 1,500 miles by railway to Calcutta, and thence by the narrow-gauge Assam–Bengal track to the airfields of Assam for the flight across the Hump. Even when the supplies had reached Kunming, they still had to be taken several hundreds of miles further to the military bases. It was estimated that the USAAF burned a gallon of fuel for every gallon it delivered to China and had to deliver 18 tons of supplies to enable Chennault’s Flying Tigers to drop one ton of bombs on the enemy.17 Heedless of all this, Chiang was so pleased with the hard bargain he had driven with Stilwell that he went over the top, tweaking his requests a further notch by expanding them into his famous ‘Three Demands’: this time it was not just 5,000 tons of materiel and 5,00 combat planes but three US infantry divisions as well. This was pure pie in the sky.18

  As if all this pressure was not enough, Stilwell also had to deal with the gadfly antics of Chennault. In July 1942 the renamed Flying Tigers became the China Air Task Force. Chennault was promoted to brigadier general but was then placed under the command of General Clayton Bissell, who now commanded all US planes in the CBI sector. Since Bissell was Chennault’s bête noire and since Chennault had impressed the Chiangs by his absurd but reiterated argument that he could win the war with airpower alone, this new appointment infuriated Chiang, who started to intrigue to have Bissell removed. But Chiang was as impotent in the case of Bissell as with Stilwell, for just as Stilwell was General Marshall’s favourite, so was Bissell the hand-picked appointee of the father of the American air force, the hugely influential General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the only man ever to be a five-star general in both the US army and (after 1945) the newly formed US air force.19 Arnold cordially detested Chennault as a show-off and a charlatan. Chiang fumed about this fresh humiliation, for he had wanted Chennault as the air supremo, believing in the far-fetched theory that with 500 planes he could win the war. This total fantasy suited Chiang, for it meant he would not have to send his army into battle, reform his officer corps or upset his warlords/generals in any way. Meanwhile Chennault continued to drip poison into the ear of Madame, whose special favourite he was. On one occasion she wrote to him: ‘If we destroy fifteen Nippon planes every day, soon there will be no more left.’20 Meanwhile the USA, having to subvent China over such a long supply chain, often cut what it could offer Stilwell and Chiang, as new global emergencies arose. The particular crisis triggered by the fall of Tobruk to Rommel in June 1942 meant that US air resources were overwhelmingly switched to the Middle East. This evoked in Chiang a twofold reaction. On the one hand it increased his Anglophobia. He complained that the British were always the Americans’ senior partner, that every time they faced a crisis, China had to carry the can.21 He was also deeply resentful that he could not control the allotment of Lend-Lease within China as the British did within Britain. The reason was obvious. Washington knew that what it supplied to Britain would be used in the global struggle against fascism but that what was sent to Chiang would not. Chiang, presiding over a snakepit of corruption in Chungking, wanted equal treatment with an advanced Western democracy governed by the rule of law. But he was interested neither in the special relationship nor in political theory or logistics. For him the failure of his demanded monthly quota to arrive meant either that Stilwell was lazy and not exerting his influence or that he was deliberately sabotaging China. Chiang always operated in a cloud cuckoo land where Stilwell simply had to ask for something to be given it at once. While under pressure from such absurd demands, Stilwell was being harangued by the War Department for not being conciliatory enough. Reasonably, he concluded that
he was being made a whipping boy: ‘In a jam blame it on Stilwell.’22

  On 1 July, Stilwell attended yet another conference with the Chiangs; present also were the two top generals in the Chinese air force. Chiang now formally tabled his infamous ‘Three Demands’, this time with timetables attached. The three US divisions were supposed to arrive by September to open the Burma road, while the 500 planes and the 5,000 tons of supplies over the Hump were to start at the beginning of August. Stilwell found the demands outrageous but agreed to forward them to Washington. Writing bitterly in his diary that night about the sheer ingratitude of Chiang, he noted: ‘utterly impossible, but they’re so dumb, they think we’ll promise it’.23 He did, however, baulk at Madame’s further requirement, that he endorse the Three Demands. Patiently he explained that he could not support an ultimatum to his own government. Madame allowed him to leave and then phoned him in a furious rage. ‘She got hot on the phone and started to bawl me out, so I said I should like to see her … Obviously mad as hell. She had snapped the whip and the stooge had not come across.’24 Once again Stilwell controlled himself and explained patiently that he wore four hats, and three of them entailed absolute loyalty to Washington; being the generalissimo’s chief of staff was just one in his portfolio of activities. ‘If she doesn’t get the point,’ he wrote, ‘she’s dumber than I think she is.’25 Although both Stilwell and ambassador Gauss advised FDR that Chiang was bluffing when he spoke of ‘making other arrangements’ (i.e. peace with Japan) if the Three Demands were not met, Roosevelt once again proved surprisingly weak and flaky on this issue. He knew perfectly well he could not give Chiang what he wanted, but indulged his usual instincts as a politician by stalling. He sent a soothing letter to the generalissimo to say that things would be better in the future and promised to send out his personal representative to sort out ‘misunderstandings’. This was to have been his éminence grise Harry Hopkins, but in the end he dispatched Lauchlin Currie to China. As Stilwell sardonically commented: ‘Apparently now that stooge [Hopkins] won’t come across, Soong [Chiang’s ambassador in Washington] is sending someone that will.’26