The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  8

  The dawning of 1943 saw Stilwell in the doldrums. Very bitter about Roosevelt’s doctrinaire support for Chiang and the KMT, no matter how much damning evidence was produced, he said that even Russia under Stalin compared favourably with the nationalist regime in China, which he characterised as ‘A gang of thugs with the one idea of perpetuating themselves and their machine. Money, influence and position the only considerations of the leaders. Intrigue, double-crossing, lying reports.’1 Even the consolation prize of the Distinguished Service Cross, which Marshall had engineered for him, and which was celebrated by the generalissimo with a congratulatory dinner on 26 January, did nothing to dispel the gloom. ‘The whole thing is bunk,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘pumped up out of a very minor incident and entirely undeserved. It is embarrassing but luckily time moves on, such things are forgotten.’2 To console himself, he clung to the idea that Madame Chiang’s mission in the USA had been a flop – a mistaken idea that he seems to have extrapolated from some negative personal remarks by Marshall. Sadly for him, the reality was that Madame’s American trip, which would go on until May, was a great triumph. By clever public relations and spin, abetted by FDR, she managed to create the greatest sensation of any conquering celebrity since Lindbergh in 1927. She cleverly projected a smiling, bubbly public persona quite at odds with her irascible, arrogant, prima-donna-ish behaviour in private, which eventually alienated even Roosevelt.3 FDR too was in public a very different creature from the irritated and exasperated private figure. Even though Chiang had just run up the white flag in Burma, the US president continued to churn out cant and humbug about the glorious and risky defiance of the generalissimo. He remained inflexible on the four cardinal points of his China programme: that US policy in the Far East had to hinge on a close China–USA rapport; that the Kuomintang alone could unify China; that China must retrieve all the territory lost to Japan; and that the Soviet Union should play no part in the destinies of post-war China. No one in the State Department thought the KMT a viable option for the future, but nothing could shake Roosevelt’s idée fixe.4 The journalist Theodore White’s famous description of the terrible famine in Honan in 1942–43 was censored by the authorities in Washington to make sure neither Chiang nor the Kuomintang were held to blame. Historians have always considered US blindness over nationalist China well-nigh incredible – the triumph of received opinion and the a priori over truth and reason. US press censorship on this issue was as complete as anything in the Axis countries. ‘Probably never before had the people of one country viewed the government of another under misapprehension so complete.’5

  The year would be one of conferences – summits in which both Stilwell and Wingate would play a significant part. British reluctance to fight a war in Burma, especially with Chinese help, was highlighted at the Casablanca conference when both General Marshall and the head of the US navy, Admiral Ernest King, announced that ANAKIM, laid aside by Wavell, was a vital part of the grand strategy in the war against Japan. Marshall indulged in some crude but very effective arm-twisting by telling his British counterparts bluntly that unless they signed up to ANAKIM, the Americans might pull out of planning for the invasion of Europe. The British tried to counter that providing the numbers of boats required for the amphibious side of ANAKIM would cut down on what was available for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe, but King checkmated the objection by offering to provide all the necessary landing craft from the US Pacific fleet. ANAKIM was then scheduled for 15 November 1943, with a final decision to be taken no later than 15 July.6 Because Chiang was sulking about not being invited to Casablanca, it was decided to send a top-level delegation to Chungking, headed by General ‘Hap’ Arnold. FDR was secretly beginning to agree with Churchill that the reconquest of Burma was like ‘munching a porcupine quill by quill’7 and increasingly felt it should be abandoned in favour of the cross-Channel invasion of Europe, thus bringing the inter-Allied arguments full circle. FDR’s secret, machiavellian motive in sending General Arnold to China was in hopes that Arnold would approve the Chennault airpower strategy and so appease the disaffected Chiang. But if he hoped the Arnold mission would follow the pattern of the Currie and Wilkie visits, he was soon severely disappointed. Arnold found both Chiang and Chennault every bit as quixotic and chimerical as Stilwell did, and was particularly disgusted with Chiang’s oily slipperiness.8 Chiang asked him for an independent command for Chennault, 500 combat planes by November and a pledge to fly 10,000 tons a month over the Hump. Stilwell, who attended the talks with Arnold, tried to pin Chiang down to support of ANAKIM, at which point the generalissimo, losing face in the presence of Arnold, lost his temper. When Stilwell asked if Chiang would still take part in the reconquest of Burma even if Allied naval support was limited, Chiang snapped: ‘Didn’t I say I would?’ Later he complained that Stilwell had embarrassed him publicly. Stilwell noted in his diary: ‘He can go to hell. I have him on that point.’9

  Stilwell judged it was time for a cooling-off period and on 1 February departed for India. While he was en route, Chiang wrote to FDR (7 February) agreeing to ANAKIM but adding riders that would easily enable him to back out later. A full-scale planning meeting convened in Delhi on 9 February – a kind of tripartite conference, with T.V. Soong and Ho Ying-chin representing China, Wavell and Field Marshal John Dill representing Britain, and Arnold, Stilwell, Bissell and Somervell defending the American corner. Stilwell enjoyed particular rapport with Arnold and Dill, who had a positive genius for getting on with Americans. Both told him that negotiations with the Chinese had given them some idea of what Stilwell was up against in Chungking. Arnold told him: ‘You ought to get a laurel wreath … You have one son of a bitch of a job … If at any time you think I can help, just yell.’10 Stilwell would need all the help he could get, for FDR, irritated that Arnold had not reported as he wanted, dispatched yet another fact-finding mission to Chungking, this time sending the journalist Joe Alsop, who was close to Harry Hopkins. Needless to say, the ‘facts’ Alsop brought back were merely a specious confirmation of FDR’s a priori belief in the Chennault doctrine of airpower and yet another recommendation that Stilwell be removed. But the Chennault doctrine gave Roosevelt the fig-leaf justification he needed to abandon ANAKIM (an even more problematical enterprise after the British defeat in the Arakan). He could now switch resources to Europe while pretending to be doing something for Chiang. Accordingly, on 8 March he signed an order for an independent air force under Chennault’s command and no longer subject to Bissell’s orders; the snag for Chennault was that he would still have to obey Stilwell. FDR also told Chiang he would have his 500 combat planes and 10,000 tons of supplies a month, once again without any quid pro quo.11 In a masterpiece of ignorant nonsense, Roosevelt told Marshall that Chiang was entitled to more respect, since he had come up the hard way. The most fatuous of his fantasies about China and the Kuomintang was his assertion that Chiang had created in a very short time what it had taken the USA two centuries to achieve.12 Either FDR was conceding what anti-American critics habitually say – that the USA was a snakepit of corruption comparable to an Oriental despotism – and this is an impossible reading of his remark –; or he was evincing the most grotesque and lamentable ignorance of a truly fascistic society.

  Stilwell continued in near-despair over his President’s myopia. He pointed out that although Chiang had the ‘negative’ power to countermand positive orders to the army by his chief of staff, elsewhere he was a paper tiger, unable to control the endemic corruption of the KMT, knowing that any order he issued to control graft and racketeering would be ignored. Stilwell himself could make no headway as FDR readily imbibed the most barefaced lies from the Kuomintang propaganda machine about ‘victories’; to feed his wrath, Stilwell made a list both of the phoney military ‘successes’ claimed by Chiang and of his broken promises. As he wrote to Marshall: ‘If the Chinese army is so full of fight and so well led, what am I here for?’13 Marshall and his colleagues in the War Department were furiou
sly angry about FDR’s continued attempts to sideline Stilwell and the absurd promotion of Chennault to major general. In pointed memos to the President, Marshall underlined the fatuity of Chennault’s ideas. If US airpower really did make a significant impact on the Japanese, they would retaliate by overrunnning the Chinese airfields, and since Chiang was habitually and pathologically unwilling to release his divisions to fight, who would stop them?14 Stilwell evinced his contempt for Chungking and all its works by staying in India during February–March, overseeing the training sessions at Ramgarh and the agonisingly slow building of the Ledo road, and conferring with his British counterparts in Delhi. This left the field clear for Chiang and Chennault to intrigue for Chennault to be called back to Washington by FDR, hoping that he could then cut Stilwell out of the loop and be assigned responsibility for Lend-Lease. When Roosevelt seemed happy to accommodate the request, Marshall once more intervened. He insisted that if Chennault was to be recalled for talks, then Stilwell must be also.15 The two men left China on 21 April and were in Washington on the 29th. Stilwell planned to counterattack at his meeting with the President, not just repeating Marshall’s arguments about the limitations of airpower but extending the discussion to a general strategic overview of the entire South-East Asia and South-West Pacific area; he also hoped to persuade FDR to use American troops in Burma.

  Unfortunately, when Stilwell was invited to speak at a meeting at the White House on 20 April, he turned in a mumbling, lacklustre, low-key performance. In an aside to Marshall, Roosevelt commented that Stilwell was obviously ill and should be replaced. Marshall knew his man better. Unlike the MacArthurs, Pattons, Chennaults and others – the type with whom FDR mainly dealt – Stilwell was temperamentally incapable of boasting and bragging. He made the mistake so many talented but modest men make, of thinking that merit will speak for itself without the megaphone of self-publicity. Alas, it almost never does. Unable to be vainglorious, openly ambitious or in any way to talk himself up – significantly his Who’s Who entry was a mere six lines as against 15 for Eisenhower, 33 for Patton and 55 for MacArthur – Stilwell managed to come across as a journeyman mediocrity.16 Additionally, he and FDR never got on well at that mysterious visceral level that determines the chemistry between individuals, and Stilwell found it hard to conceal his contempt for the President’s backing of Chiang and Chennault. On 2 May, FDR told Marshall that he was going to overrule the objections of the War Department and give Chiang what he wanted without any caveats or preconditions. He completely accepted Chennault’s boast that with 500 planes and 10,000 tons of Lend-Lease materiel a month he could sink one million tons of Japanese shipping by the year’s end. So bowled over was Roosevelt by this that he told Chennault he could correspond with him directly, without going through Stilwell, Marshall and the usual channels. Stilwell saw in his own discomfiture the malign hand of Madame Chiang, who, he said, had ‘put it over FDR like a tent … [Chiang was] a one man joke. The KMT is his tool. Madame is his front. The silly US propaganda is his lever. We are his suckers.’17

  Stilwell was invited to stay on for the forthcoming TRIDENT conference, which would be an Anglo-American overview of the entire global conflict, with special reference to strategy in the Mediterranean and the much-touted cross-Channel invasion. From the Burmese viewpoint the prime problem would be that Churchill’s only real interest in the East was Singapore, regaining which he viewed as vital for the prestige of the British Empire. He was broadly in favour of bypassing Burma, which he saw as being of advantage only to China, and on that subject none of the British could ever understand FDR’s obsession with China nor what was the point of replacing Japan with China as the dominant power in the Far East. Once again FDR’s view of the hemisphere can be seen as fatuous, since he regarded China only as a Pacific power, ignoring or unaware of her claim to Tibet, Mongolia and northern Burma, to say nothing of Hong Kong. Even if FDR’s tunnel vision of a ‘Pacific’ China were accepted, why would anyone like the idea of the country as the area’s hegemon or, as the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden put it, of China running up and down the Pacific?18 Faced with FDR’s pro-Chiang mania, the British adopted the machiavellian stance of supporting the Chiang/Chennault airpower idea, knowing it would fail anyway. Unaware of all these cross-currents, the honest Stilwell prepared his own memorandum for the conference. He felt he needed to get across that the President completely underrated the cunning and evil personality of the generalissimo. He wanted to stress the danger of the USA becoming a solitary Atlas bearing the burden of the world because the British were too clever for FDR. A forthright attack on the Chennault air strategy and its likely consequences would need to be reiterated. Most of all, he had to underline Chiang’s ambitions to get rid of his present chief of staff, replace him with a ‘yes man’ and acquire the Lend-Lease materiel for his own ends without let or hindrance. Specific recommendations included an end to the ludicrous exchange-rate scandal, the sending of US troops to the CBI theatre, and the need to nail down Chiang to specific commitments, with dates and figures and no supplementary clauses enabling him to wriggle out of his promises; most of all, back-door, stab-in-the-back secret diplomacy had to stop, and the endless stream of Curries, Wilkies, etc. extinguished.19

  Clear in his own mind about his objectives, Stilwell spent a pleasant five-day break in his native Carmel before returning to Washington for TRIDENT on 14 May. Again he found the British negative and unimpressive, but this time he identified his mirror image in the Americanophobe Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial Staff. Stilwell regarded it almost as a point of honour to lock horns with him, but by all accounts came off second best. Even Marshall was disappointed and told Stimson that ‘Stilwell shut up like a clam and made an unfavourable impression.’20 Sometime in the course of TRIDENT, Roosevelt asked Stilwell what he thought of Chiang, and Stilwell replied: ‘He’s a vacillating, tricky, undependable old scoundrel who never keeps his word.’ By contrast Chennault, when asked a similar question, replied: ‘Sir, I think the generalissimo is one of the two or three greatest military and political leaders in the world today. He has never broken a commitment or promise made to me.’21 With Chiang’s representatives (including his wife) still crying wolf – threatening that he would pull out of Burma and make a separate peace with the Japanese unless the British moved against Rangoon – it was decided to increase supplies flown over the Hump and shelve ANAKIM. Against this Stilwell argued the contrary case: that if the Allies waited another year before launching a land-based campaign, nationalist China really would collapse. It seemed, though, as if the Chennault ‘airpower alone’ thesis, absurd as it was, had won the day. But Marshall found a way to save the northern Burma campaign by telling FDR that the Hump route could not increase its deliveries unless Myitkyina and its air base was taken. When Roosevelt pledged to deliver 7,000 tons of goods a month over the Hump, with the first 5,000 earmarked for Chennault, a lesser man than Stilwell might have given up and handed in his resignation. Not only was he in an impossible situation with both FDR and Chiang against him, but the cuts in his materiel were more savage than those experienced by any other major US commander.22

  The atmosphere at the TRIDENT conference was certainly chaotic. Admiral King pounded the table violently in support of Marshall and Stilwell, disconcerting FDR. Marshall was icy towards the President and refused even to speak to Harry Hopkins because of his ‘treachery’ over Chennault. King and Marshall wanted the land route to China open but the British opted for the Hump. Alanbrooke’s patrician disdain was palpable, but then this was a man who claimed that human beings were a pretty bad lot and that only birds merited admiration. ‘Wavell was called upon followed by Somervell who contradicted him! Then Stilwell who disagreed with both and with himself as far as I could see! He is a small man with no conception of strategy. The whole problem seemed to hinge on the necessity of keeping Chiang Kaishek in the war. Chennault was then called upon followed by more Stilwell and more confusion.’23 The one bright spot in Wa
shington was that Stilwell conferred privately with Churchill and got on well with him. Churchill agreed with the American’s blunt criticism that the high command in India was listless, and it may even be that this was the final trigger for his decision to replace Wavell, with whom he had been unhappy for some time. Churchill spoke of the ‘great respect and liking he had for General Stilwell’.24 After this meeting Stilwell penned his own reflections: