by Frank McLynn
However, in later comments Slim was less generous, and he was particularly irked by the publication of the Stilwell Papers, which his wife rushed through after his death.
It was a pity that the book was published as it was. Such papers, written in the heat and exasperation of the moment, in spite of their salty humour, did not do him justice. He was much more than the bad-tempered, prejudiced, often not very well-informed and quarrelsome man they showed him to be. He was all that, but in addition he was a first-class battle leader up to, I should say, Corps level and an excellent tactician, but a poor administrator. At higher levels he had neither the temperament not the strategic background or judgement to be effective. Even in the tactical field he hampered himself by, I believe, deliberately employing only mediocre American subordinate commanders and a good deal of nepotism on his staff. His dislike, openly expressed and shown, of all ‘limeys’, which at times did not make for cooperation, was, I always found, if not taken too seriously more amusing than dangerous. I used to tease him about it and he took it very well. Yet his distrust of the British was deeply rooted, and on what grounds I could not discover.’94
Some comments are in order. The charge of nepotism was, sadly, true. Stilwell used his mediocre son, Colonel Joseph Stilwell, as his head of intelligence (G2), and it was the son who badly underestimated the Japanese potential at Myitkyina. He also employed two of his sons-in-law as liaison officers with the Chinese.95 As for employing only mediocrities, even Slim’s biographer is moved to protest at this point. Not only did Slim forget that he had already described Frank Merrill as a brilliant officer, but most of the high talents in the US military were employed in the Pacific and thus unavailable. As Lewin rightly comments: ‘Stilwell had to make bricks out of what was sometimes straw.’96 On Stilwell’s alleged strategic incapacity, Slim again goes too far. It is true that he was bored by logistics and administration and that his theories of using Chinese armies to win the war in China were in their own way as far-fetched as Chennault’s notion of victory through airpower alone. But he was no fool, and could scarcely have become a four-star general (the US equivalent of a field marshal) if he was. Moreover, Marshall, who saw through the egotistic antics of Patton and MacArthur, rated Stilwell as the best of the best; Marshall, too, to put it mildly, was no fool, and in the opinion of some good judges was the great strategic planner of the Second World War. No man had more faults than Stilwell: he was ruthless, overcynical, drove men too hard, was tactless, abrasive and foolish. Later traduced by the China lobby, absurdly, as an agent in delivering China to the Communists, he was in fact a great patriot, who ardently desired to defeat the enemy, told the unvarnished truth exactly as he saw it and was a man of real integrity. He was also an historical figure of some importance, for until the drama of the Nixon–Mao meeting in 1972, he represented America’s ‘supreme try’ in China.97
One final and very important point is salient in any overall consideration of Stilwell. Although stabbed in the back by FDR, he never made public the dark side of that enigmatic character, which might have done irretrievable harm to the President’s reputation. On his return from the Cairo conference in late 1943, Stilwell confided to Colonel Frank Dorn, his chief of staff, an extraordinary conversation he had had with FDR in Egypt. As Stilwell expressed it: ‘The Big Boy’s fed up with Chiang and his tantrums, and said so. In fact he told me in that Olympian manner of his: “If you can’t get along with Chiang and can’t replace him, get rid of him once and for all. You know what I mean. Put in someone you can manage.”’ Stilwell confessed he was shocked by the order. Although Chiang was a ‘pain in the neck’ and Stilwell agreed with Dorn that everyone who knew him, including Madame and his generals, must at one time or other have wished him dead, assassination was not in the American tradition (‘the United States doesn’t go in for this sort of thing’) and was against his own code of ethics.98 It should be remembered that this was before the crazier antics of Wild Bill Donovan and the OSS were known about and long before the truly dark era of the CIA. Nevertheless, having been given an order by his commander-in-chief, Stilwell duly passed it on to Dorn. He instructed him to prepare contingency plans for a ‘hit’ on the generalissimo, all naturally on a ‘deniable’ basis, with the proviso that any attempt to liquidate Chiang had to be 100 per cent sure to succeed before he, Stilwell, would give it the nod. He signed off by telling Dorn that he doubted whether anything would ever come of it or that FDR would ever give him the green light, and so it proved. The conscientious Dorn and his officers worked through a number of scenarios – shootings, bombings, poisonings, a palace revolution – and eventually hit on a wild scheme to fly Chiang to inspect his troops at Ramgarh and crash the plane en route. The American pilots would be given sealed orders to be opened over the Hump and provided with reliable parachutes; those donned by the generalissimo and his entourage would be faulty.99 Amazingly, this was not the only assassination plan Stilwell had been ordered to cooperate with. Colonel Carl Feifler, the senior OSS officer in the CBI theatre, was told by Stilwell that orders had come from on high to prepare a contingency plan to liquidate the generalissimo using Botulinus toxin. Stilwell told Feifler he disapproved of the idea but that the orders had come from ‘the man above’.100 Truly it was the case that in Kuomintang China actuality was reversed, the real became the surreal, and the dream world of Chungking bade fair at any moment to turn into nightmare.
Stilwell was an authentic American hero sent on a mission impossible. Both he and his supporter Marshall – and Stimson also, who was shocked and disillusioned by his dismissal – had to deal not only with the egomania and mindlessness of Chiang but the wilful and disingenuous stubbornness of FDR. Roosevelt treated Stilwell worse than any other theatre commander.101 None of his other generals had to put up with a constant stream of interrupting meddlers (Lauchlin Currie, Wendell Wilkie, Henry Wallace, Donald Nelson and Patrick Hurley, twice) ‘whose chief qualifications were ignorance of China or, in some cases, Roosevelt’s desire to get them out of the country’. As has been well said, ‘An Eisenhower or a MacArthur would have blown his stack; Stilwell patiently put up with it.’102 Marshall too, without whom Roosevelt would have been at sea in the Second World War, was severely taxed by Roosevelt’s duplicity, dishonesty and insensitivity. On the issue of China particularly, the President often overruled Marshall with almost studied rudeness, as when he turned down Marshall’s relatively trivial request not to appoint Wedemeyer as Stilwell’s replacement.103 A particular irritant was the way FDR would not reply to a minute from Marshall, file it or otherwise place it on the record, but simply send it back if he did not like the contents.104 Then there was the way Roosevelt would arbitrarily change or doctor a carefully composed Marshall statement. In pique at Chiang’s attitude towards Stilwell, FDR appointed Wedemeyer purely as the generalissimo’s chief of staff and announced grandly that there would be no overall American commander in China. This fit of irritation simply played into Chiang’s hands, for he had accepted the principle of a US commander only under duress in the first place. So far from punishing him, the White House restored the status quo ante with a mere US chief of staff – exactly the outcome Chiang wanted. To the woefully inept presidential performance over Stilwell can be added the hate-laden campaign of the generalissimo over three years – a hatred driven purely by the base factor that Stilwell would not allow him a free hand to channel US Lend-Lease into his own coffers. Naturally none of this weighs with the purblind China revisionists who want to rehabilitate Chiang as a statesman.105 On the relationship with Chiang, the last word should go to Stilwell, expounding his credo: ‘The trouble was largely one of posture. I tried to stand on my feet instead of my knees. I did not think the knee position was a suitable one for Americans … If a man can say that he did not let his country down, if he can live with himself, there is nothing more he can reasonably ask for.’106 And when the corrupt Kuomintang finally succumbed to Mao and the Communists in 1949, had Stilwell still been alive he would have bee
n justified in saying: ‘I told you so.’
17
The tension observable on Slim’s face at the investiture ceremony at Imphal on 14 December was not the result only of Kimura’s disappointing decision not to fight at Shwebo. Already facing massive logistical problems, Slim was in effect stabbed in the back by Chiang and Wedemeyer. Shortly after Stilwell’s departure, Kweilin fell to the Japanese, exposing once again the deficiencies of Y-force and the generalissimo’s home-based troops vis-à-vis the Ramgarh-trained and Stilwell-nurtured X-force.1 A few days later the city of Liuchow, 100 miles south of Kweilin, also capitulated, underlining the poverty of Chennault’s thinking; contrary to all his assurances – and exactly as Stilwell had predicted – the Japanese were now overrunning his airfields. Chiang, predictably, panicked and turned to Wedemeyer for a solution. Wedemeyer was in a trap of his own devising; he was getting what he thought he wanted but quickly found he did not like it at all. Planning to use ‘honey rather than vinegar’ in his dealings with the generalissimo – and with this in mind he had filed away all the correspondence between Vinegar Joe and the ‘Peanut’ so that prying eyes could never find it2 – he soon discovered that Chiang was an impossible ingrate who expected his US chief of staff to have a magic wand that would spirit away all problems. Marshall took great satisfaction in, in effect, replying ‘I told you so’ to Wedemeyer’s querulous reports to Washington about the Kuomintang.3 Desperate for some expedient that would shut the generalissimo up, at least temporarily, Wedemeyer peremptorily ordered 75 Dakotas, vital to the supply of Slim’s 14th Army, back to China to assist on the home front. What made this particularly treacherous was that Wedemeyer knew, from his long association with Mountbatten, just how vital airpower was for success in Burma. The Supreme Commander learned with a shock that the man he had called his ‘beloved Al Wedemeyer’ had gone native and was now a fully paid-up member of the KMT tendency.4 The first Slim knew of this development was at dawn on 10 December, when he was woken at his HQ by the roar of aircraft engines. The supplies for 14th Army, already in the planes, had simply been taken off and dumped on the airstrip before the Dakotas took off.5
The departure of the 75 planes caused an immediate administrative crisis in a 14th Army HQ already stretched to the limit by logistical problems. As Slim pointed out, 14th Amy by this time had a ration strength of 750,000 in a force scattered over an area as large as Poland, and this was before it commenced offensive operations. Before troops can fight, they have to be fed, clothed, housed, equipped, paid, doctored, policed and transported by other personnel, all of whom in turn have to be fed, paid, housed, etc.6 As for CAPITAL, and even more, the refinements Slim made in EXTENDED CAPITAL, airpower was crucial, and his staff had calculated, before the Wedemeyer debacle, that the aircraft available to them would just suffice, provided there was no significant enemy interception or any sustained patches of bad weather. Road and rail transport, they hoped, would become available to them once they had conquered areas the enemy currently controlled, but meanwhile inadequate roads would have to do. The railhead at Dimapur was linked to Tamu via Imphal through a 206-mile all-weather road, and then by another recently constructed all-weather highway from Tamu to Kalewa (a further 112 miles). If they could capture Shwebo and Mandalay, they would have further all-weather roads that could be reached by transport across the Chindwin’s Bailey bridge, but short of that, all other supplies would have to be by river.7 An explosion in boat-building on the Chindwin, especially rafts and barges, was the result – most existing craft had been destroyed by the retreating Japanese. Yet fundamentally 14th Army had to reach the Irrawaddy, 600 miles from a railhead, cross the mighty river itself and then gamble on getting all the way to Rangoon before the monsoon broke in May. This was the context in which Wedemeyer withdrew the Dakotas. It sounded like the definition of mission impossible. Slim dealt with the immediate crisis by cutting down on the planes that would be available for Christison’s invasion of the Arakan (later, by intense lobbying, Mountbatten managed to get two thirds of the departed aircraft back), but for anyone but a superlative commander, the position on paper at the beginning of December would have seemed dire. All reports indicated that Kimura was waiting on the other side of the Irrawaddy with eight divisions, ready for the mother of all battles, what he had already called ‘the battle of the Irrawaddy shore’. Even with five divisions, a British assault across the river seemed suicidal.8
Slim went into conference with his corps commanders Stopford and Messervy on 18–19 December and explained to them his new conception of EXTENDED CAPITAL. Where the original CAPITAL had aimed merely at the defeat of the enemy in central Burma, the new plan envisaged total defeat in the country and the occupation of Rangoon by early May. He made it plain to his two commanders that the plan would not be discussed with or even referred to Leese, who was likely for one reason or other to ruin it if put in the picture.9 Seeking for somewhere other than Shwebo where he could engage Kimura on terms of comparative advantage, Slim hit on the idea of making a secret dash for Meiktila, 70 miles south of Mandalay, the supply town for the Japanese 33 and 15 Army and the ‘beating heart’ of their entire war effort in Burma. Since the railway and main road north from Rangoon ran through Meiktila, the position was a key, nodal one, and without it Kimura could not hold Mandalay. Moreover, if Slim could get one of his corps down to Meiktila in secret while the other crossed the Irrawaddy where Kimura expected the British to cross, the Japanese would be effectively encircled.10 Since Meiktila contained supply bases, ammunition dumps, airfields, depots and hospitals, the Japanese armies in the north were like the extended fingers of a hand, with Meiktila its wrist. In Slim’s words: ‘Crush that wrist, no blood would flow through the fingers, the whole hand would be paralysed, and the Japanese armies on the arc from the Salween to the Irrawaddy would begin to wither.’11 Slim intended to use 4 Corps for the secret march and 33 Corps for the Irrawaddy assault Kimura expected. It was hammer and anvil once again, with 33 Corps the hammer from the north and 4 Corps, at Meiktila, the anvil. EXTENDED CAPITAL was thus a war-winning stratagem of extreme genius, if Slim could pull it off. But how to move an entire corps, with tanks and heavy armour, through jungle without alerting the enemy? It was obvious that the most massive programme of deception, disinformation and obfuscation would have to be attempted. In the first place, 33 Corps would have to perform heroically in the north, keeping up constant pressure so that Kimura would never smell a rat. Then he would have to be convinced that he was being attacked on the Mandalay/Irrawaddy front by both corps.12
Messervy’s 4 Corps would be advancing south through the Gangaw valley and along the Myittha river – following the route Slim had taken in the opposite direction during the 1942 retreat – aiming to cross the Irrawaddy at Pakkoku and then launch itself on Meiktila. In accordance with his master plan, on 26 December Slim temporarily assigned 19 Division and 268 Tank Brigade from 4 Corps to 33 Corps, so that any Japanese agents would be able to report that the two British corps were indeed working together and massing on the other side of the river near Mandalay.13 While the real 4 Corps would maintain radio silence on its long trek, a dummy headquarters for a bogus 4 Corps would be set up at Tamu, complete with radio and signals. There would be deliberate ‘indiscreet’ talk by officers that pro-Japanese informants could pick up on, and an increase in radio traffic in the Shwebo area. Fake airdrops to fake agents would increase the confusion.14 Elaborate deception exercises were given grandiose titles such as STENCIL and CLOAK. Lieutenant Colonel J.H. (‘Elephant Bill’) Williams was instructed to go 40 miles up the Yeu river with a huge party of elephants, to suggest that a large force (possibly another detachment from 4 Corps) was about to cross the Chindwin there.15 Another advantage the deceivers had was that any force aiming at Meiktila would be expected to proceed on the Kalewa-Yeo-Shwebo approach. RAF planes would have to patrol the area around Pakkoku constantly to make sure that no Japanese aircraft got close enough to the area to report the secret advance of 4 Corps. T
he big obstacle that lay in 4 Corps’ path was the town of Gangaw. It was well defended, but if Slim committed too many men to capture it, the Japanese might be alerted to the clandestine march of Messervy’s corps, and it would be disastrous if any of Messervy’s men were questioned and interrogated in the fighting. To ‘take out’ this obstacle, therefore, Slim relied on a massive aerial bombardment by RAF 221 Corps, followed by an attack by the Lushai Brigade. The Japanese were familiar with this unit and knew that it was Slim’s version of the Chindits; if they were reported in the Gangaw valley, it would be clear that Slim was playing at being Wingate and the attacks read as those by loose cannon. It was inconceivable that the Lushai Brigade would be deployed in the same area as regular troops, as this seemed to make no sense at all; the obvious inference the Japanese were to draw was that Slim was feinting down the Myittha river in a vain attempt to disguise the intended attack on Mandalay. Using them in the Gangaw valley thus constituted a deception within a deception. As a final twist, Slim had Messervy send 28 African Brigade ahead of his corps. If they observed these troops, the Japanese were sure to take them for 11 East African Division, recently active in the Kabaw valley.16