“The Generalissimo and I returned yesterday from the Burma front,” May-ling cabled Lauchlin Currie on April 12. “The situation there is unspeakably dangerous with complete disorganization of both front and rear, collapse of civil administration, breakdown of communications, and population panicky.… British seem hopeless and helpless, while Burmese people are antagonistic and the country side is honeycombed with Fifth Columnists.… Generalissimo told [Field Marshal Harold] Alexander if such conditions obtained in China, heads would have been chopped off.” The next day in another cable clearly written by his wife, Chiang sent the same information to President Roosevelt, detailing the “complete absence of fighting spirit… among the civilian defense personnel, the public servants and the masses alike,” along with the “intolerable stench from the corpses… and from the carcasses of animals which had not been removed.” As usual, the disasters had been brought about not by the Chinese but by the failures of their allies.
The Chiangs were not entirely wrong. Stilwell radioed Marshall that he believed the British had long since written off Burma, that they had plenty of troops they “could have… marched in long ago had they meant business.” But he thought that they preferred to sacrifice Burma rather than owe anything to the Chinese or promise Burmese nationalists a change in status after the war. As Tuchman put it, “They intended to regain it at the peace table in any event and wanted it free of any commitments as to future form of government.”
Five days later, the Japanese broke through the Allied front. The Chinese soldiers were not where they were supposed to be and could not get there, since the trucks that should have been available were being used to transport goods to China. When the head of the British forces asked the Chinese general what had happened to the field guns he had seen the previous day, the general said he had moved them to safety.
“Then you mean that they will take no part in the battle?”
“Exactly.”
“But then what use are they?”
“General, the Fifth Army is our best army because it is the only one which has any field guns, and I cannot afford to risk those guns. If I lose them the Fifth Army will no longer be our best.”
With the Japanese threatening to envelop the Allies on all sides, there was nothing to do but try to get the Allied troops out of Burma before they were trapped. On May 1, Stilwell woke up to find that his Chinese chief of staff had commandeered a locomotive with seventeen cars and run his train into another, blocking the railway for two days. “Unfortunately,” Stilwell said, “he was not killed.” The order for the British to evacuate came through the next day. While their commander left by car, his soldiers set off on a sixday march. They beat the Japanese but were forced to abandon tanks and guns on the way. Of those who left, only 12,000 got back to India, while 13,500 were killed or left by the wayside.
On May 6, May-ling cabled Currie that the “responsibility for the Burma debacle rests on the British.… It is claimed that the British destroyed 300,000 gallons of gasoline… although previously they had informed the Chinese that they regretted their inability to supply any more gasoline.… The outcome of the Burma campaign has resulted in an intensification of anti- British sentiment in Chungking.” Although she assured Currie that “Chiang Kai-shek thinks very highly of Stilwell” and that this “regard is shared by other Chinese officers,” the defeat of the Allied forces resulted in a major split between the generalissimo, who worshiped appearances, and Stilwell, who took devilish pleasure in ignoring them.
When the pilots of the DC C-47 sent by General Hap Arnold to evacuate the American commander informed Stilwell that they had come to get him, he refused to go with them, even after being told that enemy troops had been sighted a mere twenty miles away. Stilwell’s “sole idea,” according to Tuchman, “was to go out with the Chinese troops. This was his duty as commander which, for him, allowed no deviation.” According to Dorn, Stilwell was “physically courageous.… He possessed the quality of mind* that enabled him to encounter danger with firmness and without fear. At times he was actually foolhardy.”
After sending part of his staff on the planes, Stilwell started to walk out of Burma with about a hundred people, including American soldiers, two doctors,* Burmese nurses, Chinese guards, an ambulance unit of British Quakers, cooks, porters, British officers and civilians, an American missionary, and American journalist Jack Belden, plus an odd collection of miscellaneous vehicles. Stilwell chose a little-traveled and difficult route in order to avoid the multitudes of other refugees, mostly Indians and Chinese, running away. It was a shortage of food that, Tuchman said, “made fellow refugees as great a danger as the enemy.” The road they were on soon gave out, and all their vehicles except jeeps had to be left behind, including their radio truck and radio. Before abandoning the radio, Stilwell sent out his last message to the U.S. War Department. It was typical of him not to admit the desperateness of their plight: “We are armed have food and map and are now on foot.… No occasion for worry.… Believe this is probably our last message for a while. Cheerio.” He then had the radio axed and all the codes and copies burned.
What Stilwell did not do was inform the generalissimo of his plans. Chiang had specified that in case of defeat, the Chinese soldiers should be withdrawn to northern Burma and from there to China. Stilwell had thus countermanded the G-mo’s orders by heading for India, ignoring the Chinese tradition that “when cornered, Chinese troops will not degrade themselves by seeking shelter in a foreign country.”
On the morning after they abandoned their vehicles, Stilwell addressed his odd company of travelers. He told them that they were embarking on a trip of some 140 miles that would take them across a river and through a mountain pass 7,000 feet high. They had to make fourteen miles per day (1) in order to get there before the summer monsoons and (2) so that their food would last. They would be allowed one five-minute rest every hour. Their food had to be pooled and all personal baggage discarded except for what each person could carry along with his weapons and ammunition. If anyone was unwilling to abide by his orders, he could leave now and be given a week’s food rations. No one left. “By the time we get out of here,” he told them, “many of you will hate my guts but I’ll tell you one thing: you’ll all get out.”
Blazing heat—just before the monsoon is the hottest time in Burma— malaria, dysentery, ants, insects, leeches, and bearers who disappeared—all these slowed the group and forced Stilwell to extend the rest period to ten minutes per hour. Two officers collapsed from sunstroke and had to be hoisted onto the backs of mules. The group’s box of medicines was stolen. While they were rafting down the Uyu River—Stilwell had sent messengers ahead to order the rafts—they heard an airplane, which they recognized as British. It opened its bomb doors and let out sacks of food and medicine, but before the travelers could beach their rafts, natives appeared from the jungle to help themselves to the first of the drops.
On May 14, as the group struggled to climb 3,000 feet up the mountains, they were met by a British district official, who brought a supply of pigs for dinner and word that more food, ponies, whiskey, cigarettes, a doctor, and porters were on the road in back of him. When Stilwell asked the man how he had figured out which of the four possible routes they were on, he said that he had called Delhi to “find out what kind of man you were. Delhi said you were very intelligent. This is the only trail it makes common sense to take so I figured you would be on it.” After five more days of hard climbing, they started down the mountains, racing against the monsoon. On May 20, they reached Imphal, the capital of India’s easternmost state of Manipur—“the only group,” Tuchman tells us, “military or civilian, to reach India without loss of life.”
Stilwell’s subsequent report to the War Department was so damning visà-vis the British and Chinese that all copies of it were destroyed. The British, he contended, had never planned to hold Burma and had deliberately let it go in order to weaken China. He also lashed out at the Chinese for their “stupid gutles
s command” and the “interference by CKS.” But the Chinese blamed Stilwell for getting out of Burma on foot. “No doubt it was a titanic march,” commented Corcoran from the safety of Washington. “But in Chinese eyes it was craven and undignified. He might have lost the battle, and they could almost forgive him that, but to disregard the safe exit by plane— which was a high commander’s prerogative—was incomprehensibly undignified.”* Foreign correspondent Eric Severeid had a more generous reaction. Stilwell, he said, had “an exalted concept of true soldiering and an impossible ideal of what a true soldier should be.”
The defeat in Burma meant that much of the Chinese army’s small supply of heavy weaponry was lost and all possible routes to bring in more men and weapons were now in the hands of the Japanese. But in typical fashion, Chinese reports on the retreat from Burma talked about Japanese columns being “completely wiped out” or “annihilated.” The Chinese, they said, were “closing in on Mandalay from east and west with the object of recapture”— a bit of fantasy upped by the AP correspondent in Chungking to a “smashing defeat” of the enemy. The UP correspondent was no more accurate, reporting that the Japanese were “fleeing in disorder.” American editors then translated this information into headlines like INVADING JAP FORCE CRUSHED BY STILWELL! and STILWELL’S CHINA TROOPS TRAP JAPS, INVASION ARMY IN FULL RETREAT, ENEMY CUT OFF.
Greeted by a crowd of journalists when he got to his hotel in Delhi, Stilwell agreed to hold a press conference and answer questions about the campaign. “I claim we got a hell of a beating,” he told the reporters. “We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell.”
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Chiang thought of himself as a soldier, but his true genius lay in politics; he had no equal in the ancient art of hog-trading.… If his soldiers starved, that was the price of keeping the loyalty of dubious generals, who profited from their death. If he sent into battle soldiers who were doomed before they heard gunfire, that was one way of reducing the forces of a commander who might have challenged him.
—THEODORE WHITE AND ANNALEE JACOBY
BY THE time Stilwell got out of Burma, he and Chiang Kai-shek had settled even more firmly into their chosen acerbities. “Suspicious, secretive, and intolerant” was the way a Stilwell aide described the American general at this point in his life. “Stilwell’s devotion to… what he considered to be his duty was intense, as was his hatred of his enemies.… Disagreement with those he did not respect as men brought out his negative qualities.”
“Obstinate, pig-headed, ignorant, intolerant, arbitrary, unreasonable, illogical, ungrateful, grasping” make up just one list of adjectives that Stilwell applied to Chiang in “The Black Book.” “He [Chiang] wants to be a moral potentate, a religious leader, a philosopher. But he has no education!… No one tells him the truth—no one.… He will not listen to anything unpleasant, so nobody tells him anything but pleasant things.… He flies into a rage if anyone argues against him.” “Peanut” was Stilwell’s favorite nickname for Chiang. He was also known to refer to the generalissimo as “a lily-livered Chink” and a “slant-eyed snake.” According to one author, “The fact that the descriptions were not wholly inaccurate did not lessen the nature of his offense.”
But Stilwell failed to take into account one of the basic tenets of Chiang’s Confucianism. According to John Leighton Stuart, the United States’ last ambassador to Chiang’s government on the mainland, “Among a people to whom good manners are a part of morality, the tact and courtesy with which advice is given are of primary importance. Mencius commends the starving beggar who refused a crust of bread insultingly offered.” Moreover, on a practical level, Stilwell’s reforms would have undermined Chiang’s position. “They would cut out the heart of Chiang’s power structure,” historian Michael Schaller explained. “No longer would he alone be able to control the contentious KMT factions through selecting commanders and distributing aid to those personally loyal.… [He] would become extraneous and expendable. Understandably, the Generalissimo did everything possible to prevent this.”
In spite of the fact that he must have been aware of Stilwell’s contempt for him, Chiang continued to assume a surface cordiality toward the American general, while at the same time making every effort to bypass him on the issue of Lend-Lease. Chiang warned Washington that the only thing that would prevent a “total collapse of Chinese resistance” was a major influx of armaments, which China was unable to get through regular channels, i.e., Stilwell. May-ling wrote to advise Lauchlin Currie, currently head of the Lend-Lease Administration, that for the “first time” since the war began, her husband was showing signs of pessimism. This bit of information was followed by a letter from Chiang to Roosevelt—drafted by T.V. in Washington— asking him to send Harry Hopkins to China because the situation was “crucial.” The next word out of Asia was that defeatism was rampant within the walls of Chungking, that reactionaries were “making headway with antiwar propaganda,” and that there were plenty of Chinese ready to make peace with Japan. All of this added up to a carefully orchestrated campaign geared to convince the United States that the generalissimo could not hold the line against Japan unless he received a great deal more military hardware.
To underscore her husband’s campaign, May-ling wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine in which she divided the relationship between East and West into three stages: first, the historical exploitation of China, a policy that had left the Chinese scornful of the “power-worshipping” West; second, the invasion of China by Japan, during which the West had acted like “spectators at a college football game cheering from the safety of the stand while taking no personal risk in the game themselves”; and third, the early years of World War II, during which the West had “felt the shattering impact of Japan’s might,” to which it had bowed, while, according to Madame Chiang, there had been “no instance of Chinese troops surrendering to the enemy” in the past five years!
This was followed by a longer piece in The Atlantic Monthly outlining a plan for China, geared to appeal to Americans and calling for specific reforms: “no exploitation of any section of society by any other section or even by the state itself”; giving private capital “its rightful place” in order to further the initiative of the individual; and “progressive taxation,” including an income tax. Claiming that “China is the Columbus of democracy,” May-ling harked back to 2400 B.C. when “Chinese emperors succeeded each other by their subjects’ wish instead of hereditary right. Over a thousand years before Confucius, an articulate political platform proclaimed, “The people’s views are heaven’s voice.” Moreover, in the fourth century before Christ, Mencius “enunciated the theory that the people rank first, the state second, the ruler last.” As if this were not democracy enough for anyone, Madame Chiang declared that she was “opposed to any system which permanently gives absolute power to a single party”—adding, however, the crippling qualification that “freedom of thought and action should be given to minorities as long as the activities of such groups are not incompatible with the interests and security of the state.”
Along with articles, the generalissimo’s wife cabled multiple requests for planes and armaments to Lauchlin Currie, and it says something unattractive about Currie that he used this opportunity to boost his personal prestige with the Chiangs. In answer to one of May-ling’s wires, he wrote to say that he had immediately taken it to the president and that it was “a pity that Stilwell was out of touch with the War Department for so long while he was getting out of Burma. The Chief of Staff very naturally and very properly is inclined to place most reliance upon the word and recommendations of his man on the spot. What TV and I can do is to bring support for those recommendations, but it is more difficult to secure action in the absence of such recommendations.”
So the G-mo’s wife called a meeting of the military brass—Stilwell, Chennault, Brigadier General Clayton L. Bissell of the U.S. Army Air Corps, and three Chinese generals—“to rough out a plan for the 500 airplane pro
gram.” She asked Stilwell and Chennault to list their requirements, requested information on replacement parts, and insisted that an airfield currently under construction near Kunming be finished in two months’ time. She asked Stilwell to write a recommendation based on their discussion and requested a copy of his proposal. If Currie couldn’t get her what she wanted without Stilwell, she would supply a written request from the general himself.
But planes were not Stilwell’s priority. As stubborn in his own way as Chiang was in his, he had become even more determined to reform the Chinese army and to recover his damaged pride by reconquering Burma. His plan was to train two Chinese armies, one in India and the other in the province of Yunnan, for the assault. The first group would be known as the X Force, the second as the Y. These forces would attack the Japanese from east and west while the British sent ships to southern Burma. In this way, the X and Y Forces would open the Burma Road while the Brits kept the enemy busy in the South.
To follow through on his plan, Stilwell needed Chiang’s cooperation but for some inexplicable reason decided that he must first tell him everything that was wrong with his army. He sent the generalissimo a memo. “I told him the whole truth,” Stilwell wrote his wife, “and it was like kicking an old lady in the stomach. However, as far as I can find out, no one else dares… so it’s up to me all the more.” Stilwell outlined a program for the reform of the Chinese army, which included disbanding and merging divisions in order “to bring all units up to full strength” and a “rigid purge of inefficient high commanders.” Stilwell left his memo with May-ling, who looked at it before giving it to her husband. “Why, that’s what the German advisers told him!” she said.
The Last Empress Page 51