by David Rooney
Against this rapidly changing background Stilwell saw Marshall, who encouraged him to go to the Pacific to familiarise himself with the situation. After the interview Stilwell, who had known MacArthur since they were contemporaries at West Point, felt that the Chiefs of Staff were afraid of MacArthur and uncertain how to control him. In May 1945 Stilwell flew to the Pacific theatre. MacArthur gave him a cordial welcome and suggested that he visit the commanders of the proposed Olympic and Coronet operations. He travelled widely and visited Okinawa, where he saw the almost total devastation. At the end of the trip he had a realistic discussion with MacArthur, when once again his status as a four-star general proved an obstacle. He declined MacArthur’s offer to be his chief of staff because he wanted an active command. He said he would be happy to command a division so that he could return to active duty with troops in the field. MacArthur countered this, saying that he would be delighted to have him as an army commander. With nothing definitively settled, Stilwell set out to return home. When he reached Guam in the Marianas he heard that the commander of the US Tenth Army, General Simon Bolivar Bruckner, had been killed on Okinawa. On the next leg of his journey to Honolulu he received an urgent cable from MacArthur to return to Guam and take over the Tenth Army. He went back to Guam and on 23 June took over command of the Tenth Army invasion force, planning close naval and air coordination. He was delighted to be once again involved in a positive and challenging task.
Meanwhile, proposals for peace had been considered at different levels. As early as May the governing council in Japan considered a plan for peace, hoping to use the Soviet Union as a buffer against the USA. Also in May, Stalin informed Washington that he could be ready to attack Japan in August. In June Japan made the first approach to Russia but received little response. The Japanese Supreme Council resolved to fight to the end, but two weeks later the Emperor Hirohito gave the order that Japan must seek peace. The crisis reached a peak in July 1945. At Potsdam, Truman – President since the death of Roosevelt in April – with Stalin and Churchill issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan. It stressed that the alternative was prompt and utter destruction. At this stage Truman and Churchill knew that the atom bomb was ready but they had not informed Stalin. On 28 July the Japanese prime minister Suzuki declared that the Potsdam Declaration must be rejected because it made no reference to the Emperor. This crucial statement led directly to the dropping of the first atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August and the second on Nagasaki on 9 August. This was also the day on which Russia declared war on Japan. Japan surrendered on 14 August.
Stilwell had a few brief weeks to take over command of the Tenth Army, but even then the venom of Chiang pursued him and it was understood that he would not be allowed to set foot on Chinese soil. When Japan surrendered Stilwell, like everyone else, was delighted at the end of the carnage and destruction, which relieved the Allies of the prospect of a ground campaign in Japan with the possibility of horrendous casualties. The casualties on Okinawa had been so appalling and the effect on the morale of the fighting units so severe that some commanders worried whether another hard-fought campaign might lead to a total breakdown of discipline.
Stilwell wrote in his diary, ‘SO IT IS OVER.’ He was particularly relieved that his youngest son, who was eighteen, would not have to face the prospect of a military campaign against the Japanese – a sentiment shared by the author, then a young infantry officer awaiting the final British offensive in the Far East.
After the announcement of the Japanese surrender, Stilwell quickly found himself buffeted about by the intense rivalry between General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz. The proposed operations of the Tenth Army were immediately changed, and Stilwell realised that part of the reason was Chiang’s last dig. ‘So they have cut my throat once more,’ he wrote.
In his deep and sincere concern for China and its long-suffering people he soon had to face grim news from all over the country. Japan had occupied Manchuria and Formosa for many years and now there were well over a million troops who had to be returned to Japan from those areas. Within China there was no overall organisation and almost no effective transport for such a mammoth task. At the same time both the Americans and the Kuomintang put a high priority on the need to occupy the territory from which the Japanese were withdrawing before the Communists did so. As America helped Chiang and the Kuomintang with transport to occupy areas in central China, so, in an ominous portent of the Cold War to come, the Soviet Union assisted the Communists. Stilwell, still America’s best-informed expert on Chinese affairs, realised better than most the decadence and corruption of Chiang’s regime and its contrast to the confident, forward-looking policies of Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists. He foresaw the real danger of America being dragged into a major confrontation on account of the wretched Chiang and his dismal regime, and he advised, ‘We ought to get out now.’
The formal surrender of Japan took place under MacArthur on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, and Stilwell attended as a senior representative of his country. He had a couple of days before the ceremony to inspect the colossal damage in and around Tokyo. He had witnessed the depredations of the Japanese across China from the rape of Nanking onwards, to say nothing of their brutality during the war in Burma. He made no excuse for gloating over the suffering of the people of Tokyo and ‘the arrogant little bastards’, as he had described them so many years before. Having revelled in the suffering of the Japanese, he viewed the surrender ceremony with misanthropic bitterness. He noted critically that at the ceremony MacArthur’s hands and leg were shaking with nervousness. He thought the Allied signatories were a disreputable looking bunch, and he reserved his fiercest criticism, and anti-Limey prejudice, for General Percival, the British general who had pathetically surrendered Singapore to the Japanese and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp. Stilwell’s final damning indictment was that ‘The human race was poorly represented’.
A few days later, as a tribute to the suffering and achievements of the Okinawa campaign, Stilwell presided over another surrender ceremony at Ryukyu. With the obvious approval of the troops he kept the Japanese waiting, standing at attention for ten minutes, before completing the ceremony with cold efficiency.
When he realised that the Tenth Army was not going to be a separate unit of the occupation forces, he contacted Marshall for permission to visit Peking. In replying to his request, Chiang said that there were both Japanese and Communist forces in the area around Peking and a visit by Stilwell could be exploited. When things were back to normal he hoped to issue a formal invitation. That never happened. Stilwell was amazed that Chiang thought he might start a revolution, and he noted, ‘I would like to do just that.’ Soon afterwards he left the Pacific theatre for the last time and returned to Carmel on 18 October 1945. After a brief and frustrating appointment in Washington he was put in charge of the defence of the San Francisco area, with a headquarters quite close to Carmel.
Within a few weeks of Stilwell’s return home another crisis erupted in China. Hurley, who had been a major player during the tense discussions over Stilwell’s recall, resigned because, he claimed, members of the State Department were actively supporting Communism in China. Hurley’s resignation highlighted the very strong anti-Communist feeling among the American people, and certainly among American military leaders. In an earlier incident another maverick American commander, ‘Blood and Guts’ General George Patton, a contemporary of Stilwell at West Point who now commanded the American troops who met the Russians on the Elbe in May 1945, publicly refused to drink a victory toast ‘with any goddam Russian son of a bitch’. When reprimanded, he claimed that America would have to fight the bolsheviks some time and they might as well start at once. In this he may have shown remarkable foresight, but at the time it was politically unacceptable and Patton was dismissed – for a second time.* He did, nonetheless, represent very widely and strongly held American views that soon became focused on the situation in C
hina.
Across China the dispute between Chiang and the Communists deepened, and Mao Tse-Tung protested strongly about American planes and ships moving Kuomintang troops to occupy territory in north China evacuated by the Japanese. As Chiang’s position steadily weakened, he renewed the demand for the ninety divisions which for long frustrating months Stilwell had sought only to be blocked by Chiang himself. What a different outcome might have been achieved if Chiang had earlier agreed to Stilwell arming, training and commanding the ninety divisions, a proposal that was put forward as early as the Cairo Conference. The American dilemma, which had been highlighted when Stilwell said ‘We ought to get out now’, became steadily more intractable. Chiang continued to howl for resources, and the Washington administration had to decide whether to pour more money and supplies into Chiang’s bottomless pit or to stop Lend–Lease supplies altogether, which would almost certainly mean that the Communists would defeat Chiang and the Kuomintang. Diplomats continued to avoid the harsh reality of this problem, and they fudged an answer, which was to go on sending some supplies to Chiang while attempting to achieve a compromise between the two factions. In America the impact of the China crisis, exacerbated by vicious Republican and Democratic allegations, quickly led to the anti-Communist paranoia that was to divide American society so bitterly. It destroyed the careers of able and honourable people at all levels of public service and led directly to the evil menace of McCarthy, the odious senator from Wisconsin, whom Truman called a pathological character assassin.
As the China crisis intensified, Truman, inexperienced in these dangerous waters, made a clever move. He asked Marshall, who had just retired as Chief of Staff, to undertake a desperate mission to achieve an acceptable compromise. As Marshall saw it his options were limited. If the Communists refused to compromise, America had the power and resources to move Kuomintang troops to northern China, but if Chiang was obdurate he could not be abandoned entirely because that would hand victory to the Communists and would defeat the very object of all the American efforts throughout the war. In a reversal of roles Marshall sent his second-in-command to ask advice from Stilwell. Stilwell was blunt, and forecast that the mission could not possibly succeed. As it increasingly became bogged down in the Chinese quagmire, Stilwell commented, ‘George Marshall can’t walk on water.’
In July 1946, as a senior American general, Stilwell was invited to witness the testing of the atom bomb at the Bikini atoll. This proved to be his last public engagement. His health began to fail rapidly and he stayed at home, following with interest Marshall’s efforts to solve the China problem. American forces transported nearly half a million Kuomintang troops to the key cities of Nanking and Shanghai, and American marines tried, as they had in the 1930s, to secure Chinese ports and transport facilities. Lend–Lease continued with 600 million dollars worth of supplies for Chiang. In July, seeing Chiang’s hopeless situation, Marshall stopped military supplies, though this appeared to have little effect on Chiang. He persevered with his hopeless task, and then in October 1946, because of Chiang’s intransigence, warned that attempts at mediation would cease. Back in California Stilwell was admitted to hospital in September, where stomach cancer and serious liver damage were discovered. Within days of Marshall’s final warning to Chiang, Stilwell died on 12 October 1946.
* Patton was first dismissed during the campaign in Sicily after he slapped a patient in a military hospital.
CHAPTER 16
Retrospect
Stilwell, one of a generation of West Point graduates from the early years of the century who were to achieve high military and political office during and after the Second World War, was driven throughout his career by a strong sense of patriotism. This tended to make him highly critical of other people’s efforts. Highly intelligent – witness his fluency in Spanish, then in French and finally in Chinese – he was also prickly, oversensitive and ready to take offence where none was intended. His intense dedication to his country and to the army accounts for some of his criticism of others. This feature of his character, so noticeable when he was a senior general, was certainly present in his early days. When he was awaiting repatriation from Germany in 1918 and President Wilson came to Versailles with his Fourteen Points, Stilwell called him ‘an addle-pated boob’.
In weighing up his image as the outspoken, critical, neurotic, tough-guy fighter, it must be remembered that his diary, often jotted down in the midst of battle or under the pressure of wretched defeat by the Japanese, was never intended for publication. Had he lived longer he would doubtless have produced his memoirs in a more balanced and polished form, though it is unlikely that he would have changed his strictures about Chiang Kai-Shek or the British.
His intense feelings about the British, so vividly portrayed in his diary and so highly publicised during the Burma campaign, went back to a time before the First World War. On an early posting to the Far East he visited Hong Kong, and while he admired the tough and competent British soldier, he evinced a deep antagonism to what he saw as the foppish upper-class English officer. This attitude was shared by a number of his contemporaries. Was it perhaps an attitude nurtured at West Point that went back to 1776, or perhaps to the war of 1812 when the British attacked Baltimore, Washington and Pensacola, among others? Initially Stilwell’s strong prejudice may have seemed the amusing eccentricity of a colourful character, but in a senior commander and influencing decisions that cost men’s lives it was deplorable. There is no doubt that his prejudice against Limeys was a major factor in what was his worst decision – his refusal to employ the British 36 Division to take the town of Myitkyina after Merrill’s Marauders had captured the airfield on 17 May 1944. 36 Division was trained in air movement and was ready for action, yet Stilwell refused to use it. Instead he combed American bases and hospitals for sick or wounded men and drafted in building workers who had never used a rifle. This decision cost the lives of hundreds, indeed thousands of men, and Stilwell has been rightly criticised for it by both American and British commentators.
While Stilwell’s prejudice against the Limeys is notorious, some explanation of the view from the other side may be seen in the British edition of The Stilwell Papers, published in 1949. The well-known British military historian General J. F. C. Fuller wrote a long introduction for this edition. He emphasised the deep cultural gulf between the British and Americans, arguing that whereas Europeans have overcome problems which date back to the Black Prince or even Troy, the Americans have never had to face serious problems, and hence their admiration for the tough-guy, big-shot, billionaire type of character. He then wrote this astonishing sentence: ‘We Europeans are grown up and, rightly or wrongly, we look upon all Asiatics, Africans and Americans as barbarians.’ Despite this outrageous statement, Fuller went on to say that Stilwell was ‘a first rate fighting soldier and one of the few really outstanding characters of the war’. He concluded with the sympathetic statement that few generals have been so disgracefully treated. The most intriguing aspect of Fuller’s contribution is why the publishers included it with its outrageous comments. Was it perhaps to give an example of the condescending arrogance of the British military establishment which fuelled Stilwell’s views of the Limeys?
From a purely military point of view Stilwell was an outstandingly able leader. As early as 1918 he was frustrated that his linguistic ability landed him in staff jobs when what he really wanted was to earn promotion by commanding a fighting unit. His ability was recognised during the doldrums of the 1920s by George Marshall, who brought him to the infantry school at Fort Benning to revolutionise training. Later, during the Burma campaign, he seems to have been happiest not among the top brass and the splendours of Delhi, Chungking or Ceylon, but with his tough Chinese soldiers on the jungle paths of the Huckawng valley. These were men who appreciated a senior general who shared their privations and their rations and saw that if they were wounded they were not left to die.
Stilwell’s intense patriotism, which drove him relentlessly,
accounts largely for his reputation as an unpleasant, acerbic and overcritical colleague. He was not popular with many fellow American commanders, and in the final part of the Burma campaign there was serious criticism that his staff were afraid of rousing his ire and would only tell him what he wanted to hear. This criticism was reinforced by the appointment to his staff of his son and son-in-law. It was also highlighted by the colourful and dramatic encounter with Mike Calvert, the intrepid Chindit leader who captured Mogaung, from whom Stilwell learned how seriously he had been misinformed by Boatner and his staff.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of this colourful character, any serious assessment must stand or fall on the great issue of China. It seemed from an early time that fate had destined him for a major role in that country. Many other officers were posted to China, but none used the opportunity as effectively or dramatically as Stilwell. On his first visit in 1911 he quickly left what he saw as the stultifying atmosphere of the military headquarters and immersed himself totally in the life and culture of the Chinese, helped by his flair for languages. After 1918, when all officers faced years of frustration and lack of promotion, he eagerly grasped the chance to return to China. Here again he escaped from the HQ atmosphere and undertook work on a road-building programme to support famine relief. There he lived almost like the coolies, and again involved himself totally with his Chinese workers. He also used the opportunity to travel around China and to visit Japan, where he epitomised the Japanese as ‘arrogant little bastards’, a view he never subsequently changed.
A few years later he undertook a remarkable and highly dangerous journey with a Chinese colleague which opened his eyes to the intense anti-Western and anti-Christian feelings of the Chinese. This may be an indication of one of the fundamental reasons for the ultimate failure of Stilwell’s mission and the failure of the great American dream for China – that they were alien impositions, and in the long run were never likely to control China’s indigenous development. Barbara Tuchman concluded her book Sand against the Wind by observing that ‘In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come’.