by Frank McLynn
With Wavell in command, failure was inevitable; he had nothing to offer at any meeting except protestations that the thing was impossible, hopeless, impractical. Churchill even spoke of it as silly. The Limeys all wanted to wait another year. After the Akyab fiasco, the four Japanese divisions in Burma have been scared to death. The inevitable conclusion was that Churchill has Roosevelt in his pocket. That they are looking for an easy way, a short cut for England, and that no attention must be diverted from the Continent at any cost. The Limeys are not interested in the war in the Pacific, and with the President hypnotised they are sitting pretty. Roosevelt wouldn’t let me speak my piece. I interrupted twice but Churchill kept pulling away from the subject and it was impossible.’25
Yet Stilwell gained a minor victory. Churchill had been looking for a new viceroy and finally decided that the ideal solution was to kick Wavell upstairs by promoting him to viceroy and replace him as commander in India with Sir Claude Auchinleck. Stilwell was pleased: ‘If they give the Auk a free hand and real authority, things will look up.’26
Stilwell returned to China via London, North Africa and Cairo. In London he went on a celebrity tour arranged by Marshall to heighten his profile, including a state luncheon where he was honoured by a toast from the Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee. But once back in China he was profoundly depressed. ‘Better an hour in Carmel than a cycle of Cathay,’ he wrote. ‘Back to find Chiang same as ever – a grasping, bigoted, ungrateful little rattlesnake.’27 His diary entries for late June are a long, agonised shriek of splenetic abuse:
Any Jap threat will put the Peanut in an uproar, and if they are wise they will repeat their attempt, for this if for no other reason. And if they seriously want to gain the game, they can attack Kunming or Chungking, or both, with five divisions on either line and finish the matter. If we sting them badly enough in the air, they are almost sure to try it … The Peanut’s promise of picked men for India is so much wind; last year 68% of the men sent were rejected for trachoma or skin disease … This is going beyond all bounds. 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, setting up his goddam SOS, training his lousy troops, backing his dastardly chief of staff, and general staff, and he the Jovian dictator, who starves his troops and is the world’s worst ignoramus, picks flaws in our preparations and hems and haws about the Navy, God save us.’28
Stilwell’s frustration was understandable. By early July Chiang had still made no reply to FDR about any of the currently pressing issues: Operation SAUCY; the date for the beginning of the Burma campaign; whether he consented to General George Stratemeyer as air commander of all CBI units. The generalissimo replied to all exhortations about collaboration with the Chinese Communists by saying that they must first give cast-iron guarantees that they would obey him at all times. Stilwell continued to be baffled about why the USA was supporting a fascist regime in China while fighting another one in Europe. ‘To reform such a system, it must be torn to pieces,’ he remarked. He wanted FDR to make him field commander in China, with the proviso that if his orders were not carried out, Lend-Lease would stop immediately. Obviously this was what Roosevelt should have done but equally obviously, given his myopia over China, this was the one thing he would never do.29
As an inducement to Chiang to declare his hand, FDR decided to award him the Legion of Merit, as well as gongs for his right-hand men such as Stilwell’s bête noire Ho Ying-chin, the man most responsible for the corruption and disarray in the Chinese army. Stilwell was supposed to pin the medals on both men – a prospect that was distasteful to both sides: ‘It will make me want to throw up,’ Stilwell admitted. For his part Chiang, alerted by his spies that such an award from the US President was in the offing, manoeuvred so that he did not have to accept it from Stilwell and suggested informally that it be sent to him by messenger – a proposal Stilwell regarded as a mortal insult to himself and the American people. Both sides had to endure the unendurable. At a ceremony on 7 July, the two men went through the charade with gritted teeth. Stilwell recorded: ‘Peanut was half an hour late … Everyone anywhere near him turned to stone … When I grabbed his coat and pinned it on him, he jumped as if he was afraid I was going to stab him.’30 Even more distasteful was the award to Ho Ying-chin. And at first Roosevelt’s gesture seemed to have been in vain. Stilwell had another pointless conference with Ho, which he thought marked a new low, especially when he learned Ho had been trying to subvert the Ramgarh innovations as they showed up his own incompetence and venality. Word had got back to troops in China that their colleagues in India were actually being paid individually at a public roll call to avoid the ‘lump sum’ scam, and the men were beginning to query why the system could not be applied back home. While it was the money aspect that most concerned Ho, it was becoming clear that Chiang disliked the Ramgarh experiment as the end of the road might be elite troops under a rival commander.
On 12 July the clouds lifted momentarily and FDR’s manipulation appeared to have borne fruit when Chiang committed himself in writing to go along with the strategy of the combined chiefs. Stilwell wrote triumphantly: ‘After a year of constant struggle we have finally nailed him down. He is committed in writing to the attack on Burma. What corruption, intrigue, obstruction, delay, double-crossing, hate, jealousy and skulduggery 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.’31 He then sat down to write a memorandum predicting that the Kuomintang would not be able to stay in power once the war ended. The essential problem was Chiang himself, an uneducated villain living in a dream world, a man to whom the truth was alien and if anyone told it to him he would fly into a rage. ‘He is afraid of the crowd and what people will say, so he tries to stop them talking. This is very foolish. It is like trying to stop the sound of a rattlesnake’s rattle while leaving the poison in his fangs … The Peanut, fifty years ago, would have been an acceptable leader, but his lack of education handicaps him under modern conditions … Obstinate, pigheaded, ignorant, intolerant, arbitrary, unreasonable, illogical, ungrateful, grasping.’32
Yet even as the pressure about Chiang eased once he signed up to the Allies’ strategy, Stilwell found other irritating problems annoying him. There were three main ones. In the first place, his own countrymen seemed to be ‘going native’ and becoming sucked into the vortex of corruption and inhumanity in the CBI theatre. Stilwell raged in private: ‘Officers pimping. Hauling whores in our planes. Sent for Chennault. He knew … more dope on the gas-stealing ring.’33 Apart from the fiddles and scams practised by his own officers, he found their attitude to Indians disconcerting. Initially sympathetic to the subcontinent’s people as ‘victims’ of British imperialism, the Americans soon came to agree with their British cousins that the Indians were ‘wogs’ and even more despicable than the Chinese. With such attitudes, how could the USA take the moral high ground about colonialism? Second, morale among pilots flying the Hump seemed to be plummeting. One obvious factor was the danger. Nearly 400 US crewmen went down over the Hump in 1943, of whom only 125 were rescued. Another was that the ‘flyboys’ were cynical about the whole operation. Why, they asked, should they risk life and limb so that shady KMT entrepreneurs could sell supplies on the black market? The official line that they were flying vital materiel to China was believed by almost nobody.34 Stilwell looked into this, and found that the fliers’ complaints were warranted. Relations between American servicemen and the Chinese they dealt with on the ground were at rock bottom. Even worse, the ‘skinny’ that the Hump operation was all a giant scam led to increasing corruption and a thriving black market among the Americans themselves. One plane, which in fact had flown just four hours, was logged as having been refuelled eight times for a total of 700 gallons of gasoline.35
If that kind of corruption was unacceptable, it was
more difficult to brush aside the core complaint that the chore of flying the Hump was simply too exhausting. Hundreds of planes made a 600-mile crossing of the Himalayas daily, and sometimes pilots clocked up three times that mileage. Mainly the aircraft were C-46 and C-47 cargo planes, but with an increasing presence of converted B-24 Liberator bombers. Takeoff was often in heavy weather with no radar, no air traffic control and inadequate radios. After fighting through zero visibility, the pilots would often get above the cloud canopy into clear air and find another plane flying straight at them; mid-air collisions were frequent.36 Faced with such conditions, US pilots became more hardline, refusing to fly if there was a cloud in the sky and baling out immediately an engine missed once. Stilwell had to steer a difficult course between insisting on proper discipline and accepting that the pilots had legitimate grievances. Part of their grumbling concerned objective reality, for there was nothing anyone could do about the fog, ice, storms and severe turbulence over the Himalayas. But much of the grousing was well warranted. It was clear that the fliers were overworked, and Stilwell tried to compensate for this by high salaries and lavish allowances.37 He was furious when he discovered that Chiang’s regime, lacking the paper to print their own currency, were having it printed in other countries and then flown in via the Hump. He decided to allay the pilots’ anger by scapegoating his own side, since there was nothing he could do about Chiang and the KMT. At Chabua he staged a piece of rabble-rousing theatre. After joining the mess line with his GIs and finding the food inedible, he incited a riot in the mess hall, then summoned the commander to see the resulting destruction. ‘There’s your mess,’ he told him.38
The third problem was the agonising slowness of the Ledo road construction. It took all of 1943 for the road to be cut from Ledo in Assam to Shingbwiyang in Burma – just 103 miles in all. This was hardly surprising, since 100,000 cubic feet of earth had to be removed along a track that ran as high as 4,500 feet over the Patka range through thick forests, up steep gradients and around hairpin bends; from the air the road looked like a gigantic snake. Moreover, the engineers had to work ‘by guess and by God’ when it came to soil analysis, river barriers and general topography; there could obviously be no prior studies in enemy-held territory. Even a workforce of 15,000 US troops (60 per cent of them black African-Americans) and 35,000 locals could make little progress against such obstacles. Churchill famously described the Ledo road as one that would be open only when there was no longer any need for it, and most observers shared his scepticism.39 Chennault, eager to make propaganda for airpower at every opportunity, argued that the road used up precious resources and would never provide the 65,000 tons of supplies over the Hump that his pilots could deliver. In fact, he was very far from fulfilling his boast, for tonnage over the Hump was only 3,000 in May, 5,500 in July, 8,000 in September and 13,000 in November (when the monsoon ended).40 And he neglected to mention that conveying such tonnage by air cut down on the resources available for the Ledo road. Nevertheless, most Allied analysts agreed with Chennault, and even Slim, always Stilwell’s doughtiest defender on the British side, argued that the reconquest of Burma by conventional military means would mean that China could be supplied far more liberally even than by a completed Ledo road. But he understood that pressing on with the road was one of the few means Stilwell had to force the recalcitrant Chiang to play a more active part in the war. His analysis of the Ledo road showed Slim at his most fair-minded and judicious:
I agreed with Stilwell that the road could be built. I believed that, properly equipped and efficiently led, Chinese troops could defeat Japanese if, as should be the case with his Ledo force, they had a considerable numerical superiority. On the engineering side I had no doubts. We had built roads over country as difficult, and with much less technical equipment than the Americans would have … Thus far Stilwell and I were in complete agreement, but I did not hold two articles of his faith. I doubted the overwhelming war-winning value of this road, and, in any case, I believed it was starting from the wrong place. The American amphibious strategy in the Pacific, of hopping from island to island would, I was sure, bring much quicker results than an overland advance across Asia with a Chinese army yet to be formed. In any case, if the road was to be really effective, its feeder railway should start from Rangoon, not Calcutta.41
It is a fair inference that Stilwell was glad to shake off the dust of China. He left for India on 14 July and remained there until September, even taking a holiday in Kashmir. While his fortunes dipped, Wingate’s soared astronomically. After reaching Imphal on 3 May, he went through an initially fallow period, annoyed that Fergusson had pre-empted him by writing a report on LONGCLOTH, and finding affairs in limbo, with Wavell still nominally commander-in-chief but actually phasing out pending his replacement by Auchinleck. Before he went, Wavell left behind a shirt of Nessus by setting up a second Long Range Penetration Group (111 Brigade) under the command of Brigadier William Lentaigne and composed mainly of Gurkhas. Wingate liked neither this rival in principle nor Lentaigne in person (Lentaigne vehemently detested Wingate), nor the idea of the despised Gurkhas looming so large in LRP.42 Yet there was worse to come. Auchinleck, the incoming commander-in-chief, did not believe that LRP groups were much more than glorified patrols – an attitude that put him on a collision course with Wingate. Staying at Maiden’s Hotel in Delhi for a fortnight, Wingate ran into a blizzard of criticism for the conduct of LONGCLOTH and in particular the level of casualties. The widespread perception that he was an irresponsible maniac was reinforced. Then came the famous press conference in the third week of May and the press furore about ‘Clive of Burma’. Even though Wingate’s prickly personality should not have made him a favourite with reporters, the media’s appetite for heroes and sensational copy overrode this. By the time he left for Calcutta at the end of the month, after three weeks in Delhi, he was a household name. But he was exhausted and went back to Imphal, where he checked into the military hospital under the care of the formidable matron Agnes MacGeary, who was a favourite of his and always treated him as ‘teacher’s pet’.43 While he rested and recovered under her regime, he wrote his own report on LONGCLOTH. This was indiscreet and highly critical of the military hierarchy. Irwin, also on his way out, was predictably furious and summoned Wingate to Delhi for a dressing-down. On 21 June Wingate flew in to the Indian capital and began by meeting Lentaigne. The two men were superficially cordial but too unlike in personality and temperament for real rapport. Then it was on to the meeting with Irwin, who told him that the entire 4 Corps regarded his report as a disgraceful act of disloyalty and that it would be suppressed. Irwin’s real problem was that by this time Wingate was a national hero. In any case Wingate had already outwitted him, getting a friend in high circles to smuggle out a copy, which was sent to Churchill and read enthusiastically.44
Wingate withdrew in a sulk to the balmy breezes of Simla, while in Delhi the controversy continued to rage. The opposition to and dislike of Wingate seemed to grow exponentially, with the officers of 13th King’s particularly bitter about the casualties their regiment had sustained. But in London Churchill and his close aide Leo Amery came to see Wingate as the last great hope of the British Empire. Always fighting his one-man campaign against the ‘defeatist’ military, and with Alanbrooke counselling a postponement of all major operations in Burma until the winter of 1944–45, Churchill viewed Wingate as the man of the hour, a hero whose ‘can do’ attitude would overhwelm the caution of his generals. Making policy on the wing as so often, he suddenly announced that he wanted Wingate to return to London for consultations, and on 25 July an official order of recall was issued.45 Wingate left Delhi on 30 July and flew to London in hops via Karachi, Basra, Kallia (on the Dead Sea) and Cairo, arriving in England on 4 August. There was a brief meeting with Alanbrooke, then on the evening of 4 August Churchill invited Wingate to dinner and decided on the spur of the moment to take him with him to the Quadrant Conference at Quebec. Improvising hurriedly, Wingate swept u
p his wife Lorna, took the train to Glasgow and sailed from Clydeside on the Queen Mary on 5 August.46 Alanbrooke was appalled at this further example of Churchill’s eccentricity: ‘To my astonishment I was informed that Winston was taking Wingate and his wife with him to Canada. It could only be as a museum piece to impress the Americans! There was no other reason to justify this move. It was sheer loss of time for Wingate and the work he had to do in England.’47 The passage was a reasonably calm and uneventful one, and Wingate was frequently summoned to attend the Prime Minister in his stateroom. After reading Wingate’s report, Churchill criticised his prose but said he liked the content. Wingate asked for six LRP brigades, arguing that the Japanese were very slow at counteroffensives, and Churchill, in one of his periods of euphoria, made favourable noises. In vain did Alanbrooke point out that accepting Wingate’s ideas meant that Britain would have to put all its Far Eastern eggs into the Burma basket. Some of Churchill’s entourage were more critical of Wingate’s social gaucherie, his inability to mix freely, engage in small talk or even dress properly. Wingate held himself aloof from social life on the liner and was judged standoffish and incapable of real friendship.48
On 9 August the Queen Mary reached Halifax and the Prime Minister’s party proceeded by train on the evening of the 10th to Quebec, where they were housed at the Chateau Frontenac Hotel. While Churchill left for Hyde Park to spend a few days with Roosevelt, Alanbrooke introduced Wingate to the Canadian chiefs of staff and told him that he would be expected to address the combined chiefs of staff when the Americans arrived in a few days.49 Wingate got down to work and produced one of his better memos, shorn of the usual Biblical quotations. He proposed an invasion of Burma with three LRP groups, each of eight columns – some 26,500 men in all – as a pre-emptive strike against a predicted Japanese offensive against the Arakan in 1944. The memo was dispatched immediately to Auchinleck in India. When the American service chiefs arrived on the 13th, they were enthusiastic about Wingate’s ideas, as they wanted swift action from the British in Burma and this new man (to them) looked likely to provide it. A cable from Auchinleck on the 14th put the first dent in the plan, since he reported disastrous floods in Bengal that seemed likely to delay any operations involving the Indian army. A further problem was that Churchill, always a devotee of the indirect and peripheral approach, had conceived a positive obsession about a campaign in northern Sumatra that Allenby suggested recalled his similar mania about Trondheim in 1940.50 For three days (14–17 August), Wingate was sidetracked into helping Dickie Mountbatten (another of Churchill’s personal favourites) plan Operation CULVERIN, the seizure of the Andaman islands, part of the Sumatra strategy. When he was not working, he again spent no time socialising but closeted himself in the Frontenac hotel with Lorna. Finally, on 17 August, he got his chance to pitch his ideas directly to the Americans. After a closed session with only chiefs of staff attending, Alanbrooke then opened up the meeting and introduced Wingate. Estimates of his performance that afternoon differ. Some say he addressed his superiors as if they were his column commanders, showing no sensitivity to rank or status. But Alanbrooke was pleased and described Wingate’s performance as ‘first class’. Finally, on 18 August, Churchill introduced Wingate to FDR and asked him to give a presentation of his ideas to the President. Again he seems to have performed well. Afterwards Churchill thanked him for his lucidity, to which Wingate replied, ‘Such is always my practice, sir.’51