China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  “The Peanut says he won’t fight,” Stilwell told Marshall in 1943. He was speaking specifically of Chiang’s refusal to commit troops to the campaign that Stilwell wanted to wage to retake Burma after its loss in 1942, but that short, brutal sentence also reflected Stilwell’s more general contempt for Chiang. As early as 1937, while on a long inspection tour of China, Stilwell had lamented Chiang’s lack of preparation for the fight against Japan that everybody knew was looming, even as Chiang was assuring the Americans that he would vigorously resist the invaders. “He can have no intention of doing a thing,” Stilwell wrote in an army intelligence report, “or else he is utterly ignorant of what it means to get ready for a fight with a first class power.”

  There is more ammunition on both sides of this argument than Stilwell, Gauss, and others angry at the rosy portrayal of Chiang that had appeared elsewhere were likely to admit. From the beginning, it is true, Stilwell always had to beg Chiang to commit his troops and was infuriated when Chiang hesitated, procrastinated, promised to deliver, and then didn’t. “He can’t make up his mind,” Stilwell groaned during that first campaign in Burma, the one that ended with a rout of Chinese and British troops. Stilwell recognized that Chiang had sent some of his best and best-equipped troops, his Fifth and Sixth armies, but it had taken them a long time to move, and Stilwell believed that the delay had “fatally compromised any chance we might have had here in Burma.”

  But Chiang’s analysis of Burma wasn’t at all ridiculous. Having fought the Japanese since 1937, he thought he knew something about it. “Resisting the Japanese is not like suppressing colonial rebellions, not like colonial wars,” he told Sir Archibald Wavell, the commander of British troops in Burma. “We Chinese are the ones who know how to do it. For this kind of job, you British are incompetent.” And while this might seem pretentious in light of Chinese losses in the war and the historical fighting reputation of Britain, in this instance his view is confirmed by the official British history of the Burma campaign, which indicts British commanders in general for “complacency and haughty disregard for their enemy.” Both the British and the Americans underestimated the Japanese in this early stage of the conflict, thinking that they were no more threatening than one of those colonial rebellions that Chiang had spoken of and that the British, especially in places like India and Afghanistan, were expert at suppressing. Wavell’s “failure to recognize the degree of superiority of the Japanese forces led him into unjustified optimism,” a British military historian concluded.

  In Chiang’s view, Stilwell and other American officers were also guilty of underestimating the Japanese. After observing the battle of Shanghai in 1937, the attaché there, Captain Evans F. Carlson, declared that the Japanese army was “third rate,” and later, in 1938, he noted its “inferiority of striking power, poor coordination of transport, poor coordination of airforce and ground troops, inferiority of weapons, poor direction of artillery fire, and lack of imagination and initiative on the part of leaders.” By contrast with the supposedly rigid and uncreative Japanese, Stilwell, though lacking in combat experience, was famous in the army for his exploits in field exercises, in which he stressed speed, surprise, and spirit. Just before being sent to China, he had been rated number one of the forty-seven major generals in the United States Army. Burma was his first real experience in combat command, and his plan was characteristically audacious. The Japanese had landed three divisions in Burma in December 1941, and, contrary to what many opposing commanders thought of them, they were proficient in both jungle and off-the-road warfare. They moved quickly, outmaneuvered the road-bound British, and had excellent air-ground coordination. They also benefited from local anticolonialist sentiment, posing—convincingly to some Burmese nationalists—as the local liberators from European exploitation; they quickly won a series of engagements against the British, who, as the local colonial power, were primarily responsible for Burma’s defense. Stilwell’s readiness to blame Chiang for the 1942 loss of Burma seems, in light of all this, unreasonable.

  By the end of February 1942, the main British force, the 17th Indian Division, was backed up against the Sittang River, the final natural obstacle before the Burmese capital of Rangoon. There was only one bridge across the river, a five-hundred-meter-long span that had been planked over to handle vehicular traffic, and rearguard detachments of the 17th, dug in on the east bank of the river, fought to defend it so the main body of troops could get across. But in an extraordinary communications snafu, the bridge was blown up while two brigades were stranded on the wrong side of it. In the melee that ensued, more than half the division was lost and most of its heavy guns destroyed, even as the way to Rangoon was left open and the British were never again able to form a strong defensive line.

  Stilwell, in command of Chinese troops at least nominally, believed that the Japanese could be stopped with a swift counterattack, which he planned at Toungoo, a walled town on the main rail line between Rangoon to the south and Mandalay in the north. He sent there the 200th Division, a component of the Chinese Fifth Army, which engaged the Japanese in fierce house-to-house fighting inside the town itself. When Stilwell wanted to send the 22nd Division to Toungoo to help, its commander obstinately refused to go, and the 200th had to cut its way out. The 22nd never got into the fight.

  Infuriated with this disobedience, Stilwell flew to Chungking, where, as he put it in his diary, he “threw the raw meat on the floor” and asked to be relieved. “I have to tell CKS with a straight face that his subordinates are not carrying out his orders, when in all probability they are doing just what he tells them,” Stilwell complained to his diary. But Chiang had moved his troops to Burma and told Stilwell that he was putting them under the American general’s command even though he found Stilwell’s plan, which was to retake Rangoon, a risky one, given Japan’s control of the entire Bay of Bengal, its superiority in the air, its strength in tanks and artillery, and the demonstrated undependability of the British. Chiang favored a more cautious plan. “Going on the offensive should not be a guiding principle so far as Burma is concerned,” he said, thereby articulating his major philosophical difference with Stilwell, for whom going on the offensive was the only way to save Burma. Instead, Chiang favored what he called “defense in depth,” placing troops at intervals along the route of the enemy’s advance and to making it pay a price, or, as this was also put, to trade territory for time, which is what Chiang had done after the initial devastating months of the Sino-Japanese War.

  In 1942 in Burma, Chiang favored falling back on Mandalay, north of Rangoon, and holding an east–west line across the country that would enable a supply route to be built from British-held Assam, India, into China. This was the plan the British favored at the beginning of the second Burma campaign in 1944. But even in 1942, despite his doubts, Chiang yielded to Stilwell, who was aware of the magnitude of that gesture. “It is expecting a great deal to have [the Chinese] turn over a couple of armies in a vital area to a goddamn foreigner that they don’t know and in whom they can’t have much confidence,” he said.

  But whether because of Chiang’s caution or Stilwell’s overoptimism, the 1942 defense of Burma was a disaster. Stilwell decided to try to lure the Japanese into a trap at a place called Pyinmana with both British and Chinese troops, and the Chinese Fifth Army duly got into position there. But the British, fearing encirclement, pulled back, and the Chinese 200th Division resisted Stilwell’s orders to rush into the breach. Meanwhile, the Japanese attacked in force from the east, destroying a whole division of the Chinese Sixth Army. On April 29, the Japanese seized Lashio, the terminus of the rail line from Rangoon and the beginning of the truck route to China, which had been built by the two hundred thousand Chinese laborers sent into Burma by Chiang four years earlier.

  Chiang now wanted the Chinese forces to concentrate on Mytkyina further to the north. Stilwell agreed, and was determined to join them, but he never made it, choosing to go overland instead of on an airplane sent by Chennault to
take him there. With that decision, Stilwell was separated from the troops he was supposedly commanding, and he was forced to lead his staff, a group of Burmese nuns, and a few civilians out of Burma to Assam on foot.

  Stilwell’s walkout quickly became the stuff of legend, the doughty commander pushing his party of about one hundred soldiers and civilians to safety, some of the injured carried on pack mules and stretchers, getting through without a single loss and then promising, MacArthur-like, to return to Burma another day. Two books were quickly written by Americans who accompanied him, the journalist Jack Belden and Stilwell’s loyal chief of staff, General Dorn; these books helped to establish the Stilwell legend and, indirectly, to lend credence to the idea that it had been Chiang’s behind-the-scenes interference that had led to the Burmese defeat. At one point in the saga, before Stilwell’s separation from his Chinese troops, a Chinese general secretly commandeered a train in order to escape and then caused a two-day tie-up on the rail line when his train collided with another, leading Stilwell to lament that the general hadn’t been killed in the crash.

  As Stilwell saw it, the Chinese units were never where he ordered them to be, and “Peanut” remained for Stilwell’s entire time in the China-Burma-India theater an object of special contempt. Try as he might, Stilwell seemed unable to convince Chiang that what China’s armies needed was training, reorganization, and the elimination of all those bungling and corrupt officers whose commission had been granted because of political patronage rather than demonstrated competence.

  In mid-April 1942, after the failures at Toungoo and Pyinmana and with the outcome of the Burma campaign still in the balance, Stilwell came across a letter from Chiang, sent from Chungking two thousand miles away from the fighting, ordering that a watermelon be distributed to every fourth Chinese soldier. “When Burma was crashing about his ears—due in large part, as he believed, to the Gimo’s other interferences—the watermelon order clinched his contempt for Chiang Kai-shek,” Barbara Tuchman wrote in her biography of Stilwell, “and since this ultimately became known, it in turn angered the Generalissimo.”

  But from Chiang’s point of view, Stilwell’s plan, pursued in willful disregard of the overwhelming strength of the Japanese, had been foolhardy to begin with and vainglorious in the end. When Stilwell took off for India on foot in April 1942, sending orders to the Chinese to make their way out of Burma as best they could, Chiang was “stunned,” feeling that Stilwell “has abandoned my 100,000 soldiers in foreign jungles and headed off to India. Only then does he send me this telegram.” While for years Stilwell complained that it was difficult for him to see Chiang, surrounded as the Chinese leader was by an imperial wall of seclusion, Chiang was angry that for days and even weeks at a time he would receive no communication from his supposed chief of staff—until, in the instance of the famous walk out of Burma, he informed Chiang that, having declined Chennault’s offer of an airplane, he had become separated from his troops and was making his way out alone.

  Largely ignored by Stilwell’s supporters, like Belden and Dorn, but of intense concern to Chiang, was the terrible toll taken by Japan’s armies on Chinese divisions in the 1942 Burmese debacle, the ones that had been so underestimated by the American command. The retreat from Burma involved many stories of survival and escape, but, aside from Stilwell’s, they were untold, or at least Americans never heard them. In all, the Chinese lost twenty-five thousand of their best troops. Some divisions lost a third of their men along with their meager supplies of trucks and artillery. In the tangle of recriminations that followed, the question does arise whether the 1942 disaster could have been avoided had Chiang’s recommendation of “defense in depth” been followed, rather than Stilwell’s more ambitious but adventurist effort to drive the Japanese out of Burma altogether. Certainly, if that strategy had been followed, as Taylor has written, “the battle at Pyinmana would have been avoided and they would have had a fair chance of success.” Moreover, even if the plan had failed, “the retreat would have been orderly and China itself … would have been much stronger over the nearly four years of war to come.”

  Even two years later, Stilwell’s victorious return to Burma, though publicly celebrated by Chiang, did not erase his doubts about his chief of staff’s judgment. Chiang was generally angry at the Allies for giving priority to the war in Europe over the war in Asia, and he was angry that Stilwell’s obsession with retaking Burma gave priority to a secondary theater of the war at a time when the offensive the Japanese mounted in 1944 was seizing whole provinces of China proper—which, in turn, was provoking American criticism that he was refusing to resist. “We have taken Mytkyina but we have lost almost all of East China,” Chiang dryly observed to Patrick J. Hurley, FDR’s special representative, in October 1944, explaining why he had had no choice but to demand Stilwell’s recall. The Burma campaigns consolidated Stilwell’s reputation at home, but for Chiang they served to intensify his conviction that, as he once confided to his diary, Stilwell “lacked the virtue and vision of a commander.”

  It was into this parlous situation that late in 1944 Roosevelt sent Hurley to straighten things out. Hurley, a staunch Republican, was by nature an optimistic man, and he had a great deal of charm, often involving some recourse to his western cowboy heritage. When he first arrived in China, the sitting ambassador, Clarence E. Gauss, expressed the suspicion that Roosevelt wanted Hurley to take over the ambassadorial function. Hurley replied by telling the story of a barbershop out west. While a customer was sitting in the chair having his hair cut, bullets suddenly began whizzing over his head. Naturally alarmed, he made to get up, whereupon the barber said, “Lean back, brother—nobody’s shooting at you.”

  Hurley had succeeded in everything else he had done in his life, as a self-made oil millionaire, as a lawyer to the Choctaw Nation, and as secretary of war under Herbert Hoover. As a soldier in World War I he had earned a medal at the Argonne. When World War II in the Pacific broke out, he ran supplies to the American troops bottled up on Bataan, at least once committing a technical act of piracy by flying the Japanese flag on one of his ships. He had that very American faith that all disagreements can be overcome with a little good sense and tough talk, but in this he was naïve, and he was pigheaded as well, entirely disinclined to take on board views and information different from his own.

  Hurley met Chiang for the first time on September 8, the day after his arrival in Chungking, and the two men hit it off. At least Chiang found Hurley “different” from “American officials in the past,” by which he must have meant less amenable figures like Stilwell and Gauss. In any event, Chiang agreed to the main American demand, which was that Stilwell be given command over all Chinese armies, including the Communists, in the unlikely event that they accepted Chiang as China’s undisputed leader. But things started to sour quickly. Hurley’s entry onto the scene came simultaneously with the big Japanese offensive of 1944—it was called Ichigo, meaning “first”—and the Burma campaign. At a meeting on September 15 with Stilwell and Hurley present, Chiang worried about a Japanese counterattack that was taking place on the Salween front, and he asked that the X-Force at Mytkyina in Burma be moved east immediately to relieve the pressure. Stilwell, who was notorious among his soldiers in Burma for pushing them beyond ordinary human endurance, rejected the request on the grounds that his men needed to rest. In other words, an American subordinate was telling the president of China that he could not use Chinese troops in the defense of his own country.

  After the meeting, Stilwell wrote to Marshall calling Chiang a “crazy little bastard” and reporting that he was sabotaging the entire Burma campaign. Stilwell sent a note to T. V. Soong complaining that he had “been delayed, ignored, double-crossed, and kicked around for years” in China and demanding that he be given “nothing less than full power” over all Chinese armies. It was this demand that led, a few weeks later, to Chiang’s demand that Stilwell be withdrawn.

  In the end, it was a now famous confrontation at Chi
ang’s official residence at the hilltop outside Chungking known as Yellow Mountain that led to the irreparable break between the two men. Roosevelt, who was with Marshall at an Allied conference in Quebec, drafted a note to Chiang with orders that Stilwell deliver it personally. The note was insulting in the extreme. It demanded that Chiang reinforce the Y-Force army in Yunnan “immediately” and place Stilwell “in unrestricted command of all your forces,” threatening that if he failed to comply, “you must yourself be prepared to accept the consequences and assume the personal responsibility.”

  Stilwell, after receiving the note, took a jeep to Yellow Mountain, where Chiang and several of his top officials and military commanders were meeting with Hurley discussing precisely the terms by which Stilwell would take command of the Chinese armies. Chiang, informed that Stilwell was present, suggested that he be invited in for tea, but Stilwell asked to see Hurley privately first. On the balcony of Chiang’s residence, he showed Hurley the note from Roosevelt, and Hurley, seeing the offense it contained, asked Stilwell not to deliver it.

  “Joe,” Hurley said, “you have won this ball game, and if you want command of the forces in China all you’ve got to do is accept what the Generalissimo has already agreed to.” Stilwell insisted on personally handing Chiang the president’s note, which he had to know would be an enormous loss of face for the Gimo. Chiang read the Chinese translation in silence. After a few minutes, he inverted his teacup, signaling that the meeting was at an end, and said, “I now understand.”

  According to the American eyewitness to the event, Joseph Alsop, Chiang burst into “compulsive and stormy sobbing” as soon as Stilwell and Hurley left the room. Later, Chiang confided to his diary that he had suffered “the most severe humiliation I have ever had in my life.” Stilwell, though, was triumphant. He had always urged FDR to be tougher with Chiang, in particular to use the threat of withholding aid to get concessions from the Chinese. “Rejoice with me,” he wrote to his wife. “We have prevailed … his head is in the dust.”