The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  Mountbatten had a variety of tasks to perform as supremo. One was to protect and cherish Churchill’s great favourite Wingate, so one of his first stops was the hospital where the Chindit leader lay ill; accompanying him on this visit were Giffard and Wedemeyer. Mountbatten was puzzled by Wingate’s behaviour: ‘he refused to report sick in his mad desire to see me personally on my arrival, as he wished to get certain things cleared up. Now he is out of action for some weeks at a most unfortunate moment.’55 Churchill had high hopes of the Mountbatten–Wingate ticket as both men were his hand-picked protégés, both in their early forties, both impatient, reckless dynamos of energy who tended to act first and think later. In reality the two were totally different types. Nothing more clearly illustrates the gulf between them than their attitudes to illness. Wingate took a Shavian approach to doctors and was reluctant to admit that anyone could ever really be ill; he was prepared to make an exception in his own case, but maladies in others were always construed as instances of malingering or hypochondria. With Mountbatten the case was the exact opposite. He really was a hypochondriac, or as his biographer puts it, ‘he treated his health with the utmost seriousness and summoned a doctor for causes that to others sometimes seemed trivial’.56 Yet in the first two weeks of October Wingate was not his prime source of worry; Stilwell was. Although Stilwell had flown down to Delhi for Mountbatten’s arrival on 7 October and stayed for a week, the contacts between the two men had been superficial, and he was not au fait with the latest developments there. So, the day after the hospital visit, Mountbatten travelled down to Assam and then took a plane for Chungking, crossing the Hump at night to avoid the intense Japanese fighter sweep. It is somehow typical of his tactlessness that the first person he went to visit on his arrival in Chungking was Chennault, Stilwell’s bete noire.57 Perhaps he was seeking clues to the psychology of monomania, for Chennault was in many ways the American equivalent of Wingate. Where Wingate had a tunnel vision whereby LRP operations alone could win the war, Chennault had a similar obsession about unaided airpower. Some observers have remarked that the true soul partner for Wingate would have been the founder of the Flying Tigers.

  Mountbatten cannot have relished the impending meeting with Stilwell, for the American general was in a particularly sour mood now that Marshall had communicated to him all the decisions and implications of the Quebec conference. Marshall related that he had had to fight hard to keep the Ledo road project going, and did so mainly by pointing out that it took a ton of petrol to deliver a ton of cargo to China over the Hump. When someone suggested an oil pipeline, Marshall deftly used this as a point in favour of the road, pointing out that the Japanese were not at present concerned about the Ledo highway but certainly would be if an attempt was made, however impracticable, to run an oil pipeline along it.58 Further bad news was that Roosevelt remained blind to the faults of Chiang. Despite all contrary evidence, he was certain that Chiang would maintain his position after the war, and was committed to China as the fourth of the Big Four post-war powers. In the short run China still loomed large militarily, as it was the only place from which the USAAF could bomb Japan – for the advance to the Gilbert and Marshall islands and the use of B-29s with a 1,500-mile range was still some way in the future. Ominously, FDR continued to discount the obvious evidence that the Kuomintang was a fascist regime and to insist that the only real problem in China was the personality clash between Stilwell and the generalissimo. But worst of all the news Marshall had to impart was that the 3,000 US troops finally earmarked for service in the CBI theatre under the codename GALAHAD would be under Wingate’s command. This information produced a state of near-apoplexy in Stilwell, who had fought so hard and so long to get American ground troops into Burma. ‘After a long struggle we get a handful of US troops and by God they tell us that they are going to operate under WINGATE! We don’t know how to handle them but that exhibitionist does! He has done nothing but make an abortive jaunt to Katha, cutting some railroad that our people had already cut, get caught east of the Irrawaddy and come out with a loss of 40%. Now he’s an expert. That is enough to discourage Christ.’ Marshall mournfully replied to Stilwell’s strictures: ‘We must all eat some crow if we are to fight the war together.’59

  Stilwell too saw Wingate as another Chennault, forever diverting resources from important objectives to pursue his own private fantasies. But whereas Wingate was still riding high, Stilwell had hopes that the Chennault bubble was about to burst, for the lavish promises the hyperbolic airman had made to FDR had come to nothing. ‘He has been screaming for help,’ Stilwell wrote triumphantly. ‘The Japs are going to run us out of China! It is to laugh [sic]. Six months ago he was going to run them out.’60 He therefore was less than pleased at Marshall’s suggestion that the deficiencies of both Chennault’s and Wingate’s thinking could be remedied if the two mavericks cooperated. Marshall’s concern was not Wingate’s reputation but anxiety about casualties. Washington would scarcely tolerate GALAHAD losses at the level Wingate had sustained on Operation LONGCLOTH, and the way to avoid this, he thought, was to use Chennault’s fliers as a shield. But all Chennault’s hyperbolic requests for hundreds of aircraft had to go through Stilwell, who either spiked them or truncated and doctored them before sending them on to Marshall.61 Sooner or later, though, Chennault was bound to prevail, simply because of FDR’s purblind and complaisant attitude to anything that concerned China and the generalissimo. Stilwell’s slender hope, encouraged by Marshall, was that eventually the weight of expert military and public opinion would force Roosevelt to change tack. At the military level Marshall confided the absurdity to Stilwell that although the USA had broken the Japanese codes and knew from this that the Japanese in turn had broken the Chinese codes, none of this could be passed on to the sieve-like Kuomintang for fear of compromising Allied sources. Meanwhile, bit by bit and agonisingly slowly, the American public were finding out the truth about FDR’s absurd propaganda on Chiang’s China. By late 1943 it was public knowledge that simply keeping China nominally in the war on a supine basis was using up 95,000 US servicemen. Indeed, some sections of informed American opinion were ahead even of Stilwell. The view was becoming more pronounced in some circles that China was a busted flush and that Japan could be beaten only in the Pacific, or on land by the Russians.62 Such views tended to leave Stilwell trailing, for he still believed in China and still envisaged an eventual pincer strategy in collaboration with MacArthur. But it was difficult for him to make common cause with FDR’s critics, for incredibly, he believed in notions like truth and merit. He could have lobbied his friend Marshall much more assiduously to promote his own views, as MacArthur and Chennault did on a virtually daily basis, but he refrained on the grounds that ‘he’s running a war all over the world’.63

  Such was Stilwell’s state of mind when, as newly appointed Deputy Supreme Commander, South-East Asia, he met his boss in Chungking. As for Mountbatten, it would be surprising if he did not go into the meeting with some preconceptions, for with the exception of Auchinleck, all the people he had spoken to so far had characterised Stilwell as a fire-eating, Limey-hating wild man. Pownall described him as ‘offensive, ignorant and obstinate’.64 When Alanbrooke met him in Washington in May 1943 he described him thus:

  Stilwell was a strange character known as Vinegar Joe, a name that suited him admirably. One of Marshall’s selections, and he had a high opinion of him. Except for the fact that he was a stouthearted fighter, suitable to lead a brigade of Chinese scallywags, I could see no qualities in him. He was a Chinese linguist, but had little military knowledge and no strategic ability of any kind. His worst failing, however, was his deep rooted hatred of anybody or anything British! It was practically impossible to establish friendly relationships with either him or the troops under his command. He did a vast amount of harm by vitiating the relations between American and British both in India and Burma.65

  As it happened, the basic disharmony between Stilwell and Mountbatten was masked by yet ano
ther crisis in Chungking, when Chiang again tried to oust his turbulent chief of staff. Stilwell returned from his long leave in India to find himself in the middle of a firestorm that he could not have anticipated, since the causes were external and essentially nothing to do with him. In short, Chiang was in a state of fury because of loss of face at the hands of the Americans and a power struggle within the KMT. Washington had long been pressing hard for some kind of truce or treaty between Chiang and the Chinese Communists so that the full military resources of China could be directed against the Japanese. Chiang had always refused such a popular front unless Mao and the Communists explicitly submitted to his authority – an impossible demand, as he must have known. In September FDR finally put the generalissimo on the spot, stating that without the desired united front between KMT and Communists, he would have to insist that Chiang renounce the use of force against the Reds. Fuming, but facing the loss of Lend-Lease if he did not come to heel, Chiang agreed (13 September). But from that moment he was looking around for a scapegoat for his fury, and Stilwell was the obvious candidate.66

  In addition to his loss of face with the Americans, Chiang became embroiled in a power struggle with the Soong family. T.V. Soong, ambassador to the USA, had accomplished what he considered a miracle by energising his close contacts with Harry Hopkins and getting FDR, in principle, to recall Stilwell. Under direct orders from the President, Marshall actually prepared a cable dismissing his old friend. He told Stilwell that the poor relations with Chiang gave him no choice and he had wanted to recall him two months earlier but Admiral King had objected strongly. He said he was particularly sorry to be ending his mission now, since everybody would think Mountbatten was behind it; he even asked Stilwell’s advice on his successor.67 Marshall tried to smooth over the awkward transition by suggesting that Stilwell was tired and needed to go on extended leave; he even fixed him up with a luxury two-week holiday at the palace of an Indian maharajah. Stilwell defeated that ploy by saying that he had just taken two weeks’ leave and in any case needed to ‘sit on the eggs for a while longer’.68 Meanwhile Soong noticed that he had been cut out of the loop in Washington, but misread the reasons; actually it was because the Americans did not want the enemy to know that they had broken their codes and were on to them. Soong was loose-mouthed, as were some members of the State Department, and if he remained in the inner circles, it was possible that a bibulous bureaucrat at some reception might blurt out the truth. Construing his ostracism as machiavellianism emanating from the generalissimo, Soong mobilised his powerful extended family in an attempted coup in Chungking. When Chiang decided not to press for Stilwell’s withdrawal, Soong in a rage declared that the generalissimo was a capricious despot who had changed his mind ‘like the chief of an African tribe’.69 Primed by Soong, Madame Chiang and her sisters, supporting their brother, thought that Stilwell would make a reliable ally and accordingly made honeyed overtures to him.70 Stilwell, unaware of the deeper currents, thought this was a disguised olive branch from the generalissimo. Soong wanted to replace Chiang as head of the Kuomintang and saw himself as a kind of Meiji emperor, whereas Chiang always struck a more reactionary pose, taking his inspiration from Confucius and the Boxers. There followed a month of bitter infighting, with Stilwell baffled as former enemies (like Soong) appeared as friends and vice versa. When Chiang finally decided to ask for Stilwell’s recall, the Soong sisters moved by reflex action to his defence. Madame had many secret meetings with Stilwell, which he reported as follows: ‘May let out that she has a hell of a life with the Peanut … no one else will tell him the truth so she is constantly at him with the disagreeable news.’71 The details of the Soong plot are still far from clear, and it is particularly uncertain whether they coordinated their efforts with an army revolt. The sinister Tai Li uncovered a plot by a cabal of young generals to seize the generalissimo when he arrived at Chungking airport; the generals were all executed. A more serious show of defiance, about which Chiang could do little, came from a junta of southern generals led by the Cantonese Li Qi-shen; these officers made a kind of unilateral declaration of independence and set themselves up as virtually autonomous warlords.72 A further complication was that the Kuomintang veteran He Ying-quin allied himself with the Soong sisters in autumn 1943, trying to weaken the generalissimo and himself aiming for supreme power.73 All the plots came to nothing and Soong, lucky not to be liquidated, was placed under house arrest. Stilwell was unaware of all these deeper currents and never trusted Soong or Madame, suspecting that their amity might simply be a devious ploy. His interpretation was that Soong was encouraging the generalissimo to get rid of him (Stilwell) so that he would fall foul of Washington and further weaken his position, but that Madame was secretly loyal to her husband rather than her brother and was playing her own machiavellian game. Meanwhile pro-Chiang aides were briefing Stilwell that he was alienating ‘the Chinese people’ (!) by his friendship with the Soongs. Actually the falling out between Chiang and the Soongs may have saved Stilwell from dismissal, for the generalissimo had graver matters on his mind than a recalcitrant chief of staff. The attempt by the Soongs to use Stilwell as a patsy seemed anyway doomed when he, in typically mulish fashion, declared that he had no intention of staying where he was not wanted.74

  This was the maelstrom Mountbatten now entered. His first call was on Soong, who told him that Chiang was absolutely determined on Stilwell’s ousting, that Stilwell no longer had his confidence nor that of any other Chinese and that he was in effect persona non grata.75 Mountbatten then proceeded to talk to Stilwell and found him in cynical and jaundiced mood. Whereas at the first meeting in Delhi on 7 October Mountbatten had been at his most charming, prompting the curmudgeonly Stilwell to record: ‘Louis is a good egg … full of enthusiasm and also of disgust with the inertia and conservatism … energetic and willing to do anything to make it go … a nice informal guy … He and the Auk are not hitting it off any too well’76, now he was suspicious and guarded, thinking the British too were working for his dismissal: ‘Mountbatten called me and we had a long talk. He is burned up. Feels the doublecross himself, because he’ll have to work with a brand-new man. Wants me to stay over and break him in.’77 Despite the suspicions, the British were very keen to have Stilwell stay on. Mountbatten had been accused of trying to steal MacArthur’s thunder and, if he now got rid of Stilwell, it would seem that his critics were right: Mountbatten was trying to do down all the top American generals. He was therefore keen to have Stilwell stay on and showed talent and skill in talking Chiang round. ‘If you want your job back, I’ll get it for you,’ he told Stilwell, who was sceptical and said there was nothing anyone could do: ‘You should not be shaking hands with me; it will be bad for you.’78 Next Mountbatten bearded Chiang in his lair, sending General Brehon Somervell as his emissary, and stressed the absolute necessity for Stilwell to continue. He could not use any units of the Chinese army without Stilwell, he averred, knowing that this would be a terrible loss of face for the generalissimo.79 Not only were the entire Anglo-American plans for future campaigns in the CBI theatre predicated on Stilwell’s presence but, he confided, as to a close friend, FDR could not continue to function without General Marshall at his side, and Marshall had explictly stated that if Stilwell was removed from China, he himself would resign. The issue of a possible suspension of Lend-Lease to China was left hanging in the air. Finally it was the generalissimo who ate crow. He sent for Stilwell and said that he was concerned that the American did not fully understand the duties of a chief of staff but that if he desisted from his ‘superiority complex’ they could continue to work well together. Primed by the Soong sisters, Stilwell made the necessary token gestures.80 How much influence Mountbatten’s intervention had, or whether Chiang had had second thoughts when he realised the extent of the Soongs’ manoeuvrings, is uncertain. But Mountbatten was happy to take the credit. As he wrote to Churchill: ‘I am glad that he is not being sacked immediately on my arrival, as I am quite certain that the American fo
rces out here would have felt that I had been the cause.’81 In his own diary he had an amusing anecdote about the case, involving General Brehon Somervell. ‘About midnight he [Somervell] came into my room and said: “This is the gosh-darndest country I have ever had any dealings with. Would you believe it? After the generalissimo had told me categorically that Stilwell was out, he sent for Stilwell this evening, kissed him on both cheeks and said he loved him more than ever and said he was right in again.”’82

  Stilwell was temporarily jubilant and said that Chiang’s climb-down was ‘a terrific loss of face for the Peanut’. Probably most of all Stilwell had been lucky: deeply embroiled in the power struggle with the Soongs, Chiang could not at the same time get bogged down in a potentially disastrous showdown with the Americans. The real loser was T.V. Soong, who, failing to topple Chiang, was in disgrace for a year.83 Meanwhile, glad that he had cut the Gordian knot on the Stilwell affair, Mountbatten tried to impose himself on the Chinese sector of the war with some manipulative conferences with Chiang. From the first moment of his arrival in Chungking, Mountbatten had been engaged in a subtle game of ‘face’ or oneupmanship with the generalissimo. His plane had arrived five hours late and he was full of apologies at having kept the reception committee of Chinese generals waiting. But his Chinese expert, Lieutenant Colonel Dobson, told him this was excellent, as he had ‘outfaced’ the generals.84 Dobson was less pleased when the Supremo, evincing Western courtesy, allowed himself to be ushered in to dinner ahead of another general, and cautioned his boss to take a tougher, ruder, more Chinese line. But there were swings and roundabouts in this game of face, as Mountbatten soon discovered. Finding the reading light in his bedroom inadequate because his hosts had enclosed it with a porcelain bowl, he asked to have the bowl removed, but Dobson pointed out that this would be construed as a grave criticism of the Chinese for not having provided an efficient light and they would accordingly lose face.85 The training in the subtle nuances of Mandarin society paid off when Mountbatten had his first face-to-face interview with Chiang on 18 October. Chiang kept him waiting for 15 minutes, so in retaliation Mountbatten spent an unconscionable time rifling through his attaché case, ‘trying to find’ the credential prepared by George VI. Very impressed by Madame, as Westerners tended to be (‘she has a beautiful figure and the most lovely legs and feet imaginable’), he found that flattery got him everywhere in China. Keeping a straight face, he told Chiang that he was hoping to learn from his wisdom and experience. ‘I made a few more complimentary remarks of this type which, had they been made to me, would have made me squirm, but they went down like a dish of hot green tea with the generalissimo.’86