by David Rooney
In the years before Pearl Harbor Stilwell again warned America of the dangers of Japanese aggression, which he realised was masked by the better publicised advance of fascist forces in Europe. He witnessed the rape of Nanking and other Japanese atrocities and, reinforcing his outspoken reputation, fulminated against the blinkered attitude in the American embassy and ‘the interfering bastards in Washington’. At the same time he began to formulate the view that only America was strong enough to enable China to resist Japanese aggression, and the way that might happen would be for senior commands in the Chinese armies to be held by Americans.
After Pearl Harbor, Stilwell could easily have taken his place along with Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley in the North African and European theatre, but once again fate seemed to direct him to China. After frequent and tedious meetings in Washington, he left for the Far East on 14 February 1942. Some issues, which were to become permanent, appeared almost at once. He found the British apathetic and snooty; he found that Chennault, who was to become his bête noire, already had the ear of Madame; and at his first conference in Maymyo General Alexander’s attitude made him feel as if he had crawled from under a stone. Another and more significant feature emerged at this time – Stilwell’s suggestion that thirty Chinese divisions should be trained and equipped by America.
He was very quickly caught up in the retreat from Burma, but even before that he had submitted to Chiang a plan for 100,000 Chinese troops to be trained and equipped in India. With his previous knowledge of Chiang and China he insisted, as he had with Marshall in Washington, that the one essential was American control of Lend–Lease, with all the bluff and counter-bluff that entailed. Later he discovered another permanent feature – that as early as June 1942 Chiang had tried to get rid of him.
From 1942, through weary years of frustration, Stilwell kept up the struggle to cajole or force Chiang into taking action so that the massive American contribution of money, men and machines could be mobilised into an effective force against the Japanese. From the thirty divisions he had originally suggested the number increased to sixty; and by the time Chiang attended the Cairo Conference in November 1943 it had risen to ninety, and later to more than one hundred.
This crucial issue was soon to be linked to the problem of arming the Chinese Communist forces. Stilwell saw these merely as a group that was more likely to fight the Japanese effectively, and he obtained their agreement to fight under his command. This soon became enmeshed in a graver matter of world significance, which illustrates the catastrophe of the rejection of Stilwell’s plan and of his early death. Had Chiang agreed to the plan to equip and place 100 divisions under Stilwell’s command, the American administration was already committed to providing the finance and all the supplies. Thus, when the war suddenly ended, he would have commanded a force that would almost certainly have been too strong for the military power of Mao Tse-Tung in the civil war that followed so soon after the Japanese defeat. Ironically, the defeat of the Communists was Chiang’s ultimate hope, and Stilwell’s plan was the best way of achieving it, but, as Stilwell put it, the dumb bastard couldn’t see it.
The double tragedy of Stilwell’s dismissal and early death meant that his realistic summing-up of Chiang’s corrupt Kuomintang regime, which was only then being recognised as accurate, was silenced just as the China lobby and missionary groups began to play on America’s anti-Communist fears. Disastrous results followed.
After Chiang was defeated in the civil war in 1949, he and half a million Kuomintang troops reached Formosa (now Taiwan). There his corrupt and dictatorial regime continued to receive American support, notably from the US navy. From the Korean War onwards, American warships patrolled the Formosa Strait and protected the islands of Quemoy and Matsu close to the Chinese mainland. Another legacy of the rejection of Stilwell’s concepts and the consequent failure of the American people to realise the enormity of Chiang’s corruption manifested itself in 1955, when the Communist government shelled Quemoy and Matsu. The hawkish US Admiral Radford attempted to pressurise President Eisenhower into launching a nuclear attack on Communist China. Fortunately Radford failed, but, to the amazement of the world, the United States continued to insist that Chiang’s regime in Formosa should hold China’s permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. This remained a running sore between America and her allies. The depth of American paranoia about communism during this period is illustrated by some preposterous books published in the 1950s and 1960s. These claimed among other things that Marshall was responsible for sending the ‘communist’ General Stilwell to China; that Marshall allowed Karl Marx to win the war; that Marshall single-handedly gave China to the Communists; and that in the Marshall Plan, Marshall was the tool of Stalin. An example of the genre is How the Far East Was Lost, by Dr A. Kubek.*
Had Stilwell, driven by his intense patriotism, succeeded in his mammoth task he could have changed the course of history in postwar China. Contemplating his failure in this enterprise, he offered his own modest and unsentimental final comment:
The personal experience of an individual fades into insignificance in the enormous scope and ramifications of war, specially if there is grievance connected with it. And when the general result is success, who cares about the squawks of the disgruntled? If a man can say he did not let his country down, and he can live with himself, there is nothing more he can reasonably ask for.
* Published by Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1963.
Select Bibliography
This short bibliography suggests books that should be available in libraries and is intended for those who might be interested in reading further about Stilwell’s career and the war in Burma.
Allen, Louis, Burma: The Longest War, 1941–1945, Dent, London, 1984
Bidwell, Shelford, The Chindit War, Hodder, London, 1979
Bond, Brian (ed.), Chief of Staff: The Diaries of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall, Leo Cooper, London, 1972
Brookes, Stephen, Through the Jungle of Death, John Wiley, New York, 2000
Calvert, Michael, Fighting Mad, Bantam, London, 1964
——— Prisoners of Hope, Cape, London, 1952
Cane, Peter, Chinese Chindits, privately published, 1948
Carfrae, Charles, Chindit Column, William Kimber, London, 1985
Connell, John, Wavell, Collins, London, 1964
Fergusson, Bernard, Beyond the Chindwin, Collins, London, 1945
——— The Wild Green Earth, Collins, London, 1946
Fraser, George MacDonald, Quartered Safe out Here, Harvill, 1992
Gilbert, Martin, History of the Twentieth Century, HarperCollins, London, 2001
Keegan, John, The Face of Battle, Cape, London, 1976
Kirby, S. Woodburn, The War against Japan, HMSO, 1958
Kubek, A., How the Far East Was Lost, Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1963
Lewin, R., Slim, Leo Cooper, London, 1972
Lyman, Robert, Slim: Master of War, Constable, London, 2004
Mao Tse-Tung, Basic Tactics, Pall Mall, London, 1967
Masters, John, The Road past Mandalay, Michael Joseph, London, 1961
O’Brien, Terence, Out of the Blue, Collins, London, 1984
Ogburn, Charlton, The Marauders, Harper, New York, 1959
Prefer, Nathan, Vinegar Joe’s War, Presidio, California, 2000
Romamis, C., and R. Sunderland, Stilwell’s Command Problems, Center of Military History, Washington, 1956
——— Stilwell’s Mission to China, Center of Military History, Washington, 1953
Rooney, David, Burma Victory, Arms & Armour Press, London, 1992
——— Guerilla: Insurgents, Patriots and Terrorists from Sun Tzu to Bin Laden, Brassey’s, London, 2004
——— Mad Mike, Leo Cooper, London, 1997
——— Wingate and the Chindits: Redressing the Balance, Arms & Armour Press, London, 1994
Seaman, Harry, The Battle at Sangshak, Leo Cooper, London, 1989
Slim, Field Marshal Viscount, Defe
at into Victory, Cassell, London, 1956
Tamayama, Kazuo, and John Nunneley, Tales by Japanese Soldiers of the Burma Campaign 1942–1945, Cassell, London, 2000
Tuchman, Barbara, Sand against the Wind, Macmillan, New York, 1970
White, Theodore (ed.), The Stilwell Papers, MacDonald, London, 1949
Ziegler, Philip, Mountbatten, Collins, London, 1985