During a second meeting with Wallace, Chiang “launched forth into a lengthy complaint against the Chinese Communists,” who, he said, had managed to sway American public opinion by claiming that they were not really revolutionaries but agrarian democrats. Members of the CCP were not independent, the generalissimo told Wallace, but were under the orders of the Third International. Chiang’s “case against the Communists,” according to Wallace, “… was full of bitter feeling and poor logic. I like the Gimo, but fear his lack of vision will doom him.… I was very sad after the second conversation. I told both Madame and T.V. so. They passed it on.”
Chiang also complained to Wallace about Stilwell. Wallace was apparently struck by Chiang’s recital of his problems with the American general, suggesting that Roosevelt send a replacement to China, perhaps Albert Wedemeyer, a man who could combine political and military authority. Stilwell, he said, had lost Chiang’s confidence. It must be noted, however, that Stilwell was fighting in Burma during Wallace’s sojourn in China, and the vice president did not go to Burma to speak directly with him. Moreover, his negative attitude toward the American general was “given every nourishment” by Chennault, who hosted Wallace in Kunming and assigned Alsop as his “air aide.” Like others who had preceded him into the unreality of Chungking, Wallace was fooled into believing that “with the right man to do the job it should be possible to induce the Generalissimo to reform his regime.”
During the Wallace mission, Lattimore met privately with Madame Chiang. She told him that she was planning to go abroad because of illness and wanted Wallace “to comment on her ill-health to the Generalissimo”—a request that made Lattimore wonder whether Chiang was refusing to let her go. “She even pulled down her stockings to show that she was really sick. That part, at least, was convincing, for she did have some sort of skin disease.” The G-mo’s wife had been complaining for some time about “painful maladies”—her ever-returning skin ailment and something she referred to as “nervous eye strain,” which, she said, had made it necessary to dilate her pupils during the Cairo Conference. During their conversation, May-ling kept hinting at the question of a check for $1,000, which David Kung had delivered to Lattimore as a gift from her husband after Lattimore left China in 1942. Lattimore had refused the money, and the G-mo’s wife said she had never received the letter he wrote explaining why he had done so. During their conversation, he explained to her why such a gift would not be considered proper in the United States.
The American government did not give up trying to get the KMT and the CCP to cooperate. In the middle of June, Ambassador Gauss was sent to talk to Chiang and to explain that the generalissimo should try to come to some agreement with the Chinese Communists whereby their soldiers could join the fight against the Japanese. Not only was the United States anxious for help—the CCP apparently trained dedicated soldiers—but it wanted to avoid the chaos of a civil war at the end of World War II. The Americans had convinced themselves that the CCP was not out to dominate China but only to find a political modus vivendi with Chiang. This theory was underlined by the fact that Stalin had assured Ambassador Averell Harriman that the “Chinese Communists are not real Communists, but ersatz or ‘margarine’ Communists.* Nevertheless,” Stalin added, “they are real patriots and they want to fight Japan.” But Chiang continued to refuse to comply with American requests to cooperate with them.
In July, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff sent President Roosevelt a memorandum detailing the situation in China, which, they said, was “deteriorating at an alarming rate.” Not only were the Chinese ground forces “impotent,” but “Chennault’s air alone can do little more than slightly delay the Japanese advance.” In this situation, “the military power and resources remaining to China must be entrusted to one individual.… That man is General Stilwell.” They recommended promoting Stilwell to full general—a matter of face for the Chinese—and convincing Chiang to place him in command of China’s armed forces. Two days later, Roosevelt sent the generalissimo a message saying that “drastic measures must be taken immediately,” among them naming Stilwell to head the Chinese forces. Although the president said he was “fully aware of your feelings regarding General Stilwell.… I know of no other man who has the ability, the force, and the determination to offset the disaster which now threatens China… the future of all Asia is at stake.”
WHILE WALLACE, LATTIMORE, and Gauss were dealing with Chiang, Stilwell had returned to the task of opening a land route to China through northern Burma. The plan was two-pronged: he himself would lead the X Force on a drive to the city of Myitkyina in northern Burma. Once he accomplished this, the Y Force, based in Yunnan, would move west to link up with the X Force, thus clearing a road into China and ending the blockade. All this had to be accomplished before the monsoon.
In the battlefield from December 1943 until June 1944, emerging only twice for quick forays to Delhi and Chungking, Stilwell had taken 30,000 raw troops, removed all possibility of retreat, abandoned his own supply lines except airdrops, and led them 200 miles through the swampy jungle and over 6,000-foot-high mountains. His personal presence at the front impressed the Chinese officers, although it did not make them a great deal more aggressive. To urge the Chinese pilots to fly in their airdrops of food and supplies despite less-than-perfect weather, Stilwell made them change places with the men on the battlefield. “After the air boys learned what it was like down there,” said one transportation officer, “they flew in every day, flew when you thought no one could, when clouds were on the tree tops.” Before the advent of Stilwell, Chinese soldiers had always said they were not afraid of death but were terrified of being left on the field (which they always had been) to die of their wounds. To encourage the ordinary conscripts, Stilwell insisted that the wounded be carried to field hospitals* and, if necessary, to a larger hospital at Ledo in India, where he had harassed the powers into building an airfield. In the middle of March, he himself flew to Ledo to visit the wounded.
But even as Stilwell struggled to clear a path for a supply line into China, Chiang was refusing to send the Y Force, equipped by the Americans, to help him. Using the generalissimo’s refusal as his excuse, Mountbatten tried to take the British out of the assault force as well. He proposed that Stilwell stop trying to fight through northern Burma, substituting a new plan to go by sea and to include Hong Kong within the SEAC territories. Stilwell referred to Mountbatten as “a limey mountebank… sometimes as dumb as that thick-headed cousin of his, the King,” but Tuchman offered an explanation for Lord Louis’s position: “The British intended to reach Hong Kong by sea before the Chinese were able to reach it by land.” Not surprisingly, Churchill backed Mountbatten. Chennault and his buddies also continued to oppose the Burma campaign. Alsop wrote Hopkins that Stilwell was “arrogantly courting disaster,” forcing his way through a “trackless, foodless, mountainous waste,” trying, in Alsop’s words, to “breath life into the Burma campaign’s corpse.… In my opinion he has no more chance of doing so than of flying over the moon.”
“It takes a long time to even locate the Japs,” Stilwell wrote his wife in January, “and a lot more to dig them out. We are in tiger and elephant country, although I haven’t seen any yet. Some of the men have and I’ve seen droppings and tracks. When an elephant leaves his card in the trail, it takes a pole vaulter to climb over it. I expect to see Tarzan any day now. The jungle is full of his long swinging vines.” In spite of the wild terrain and the snakes that got into his tent, Stilwell remained pleased with his soldiers. “Good work by Chinese: aggressive attack, good fire control, quick action. They are full of beans and tickled to death at beating the Japs.” As was Stilwell, whose faith in the Chinese soldiers had finally begun to pay off.
Britain would probably have succeeded in pulling out of the Burma campaign, had the Japanese not launched a surprise attack on the Imphal Plain in India, destroying the road to the city of Imphal and leaving it isolated except by air. The situation for the British was criti
cal. If they were forced to pull back, the province of Assam in northern India would be separated from Calcutta, and the air bases for the Hump, located in Assam, would be cut off. Many years later, Tuchman pointed out the irony of the situation. “By provoking the Japanese offensive,” she said, “Stilwell’s march had succeeded, if not in the way he planned.… The battle was to be decisive though not of Britain’s choice, and Mountbatten… would emerge after the war as Earl Mountbatten of Burma.”
At the moment of crisis, however, Mountbatten emerged not with a new title but from the hospital. A man who, according to a member of his own PR staff, “took an intense interest in everything to do with publicity, especially his own,” the head of SEAC had gone into the jungle to mend fences with Stilwell and get a jump on him in the public relations war, which the American seemed to be winning. Mountbatten arrived, escorted by sixteen fighters. “We had four fighters working on the battle,” noted Stilwell acidly, offering the additional comment that Lord Louis “didn’t like the smell of the corpses” he encountered on the battlefield. But while conferring with Stilwell, Mountbatten had managed to get a bamboo splinter in his eye and had had to be hospitalized. When he came out of the hospital, he was asked the inevitable question by Stilwell’s deputy in Delhi: “How was it possible that three Japanese divisions could come through the mountains in sufficient strength to endanger Imphal when the British staff had been claiming for two years that to send an expedition in the opposite direction through the same country was impossible?” Beyond embarrassment, there was a need for reinforcements, and Mountbatten, who had thus far scorned Chinese troops, turned to Churchill and Roosevelt to ask Chiang personally for the Y Force. Chiang remained obdurate.
On April 3, Roosevelt radioed the generalissimo, “A shell of a division opposes you.… To take advantage of just such an opportunity we have during the past year been equipping and training your Yoke [Y] forces. If they are not to be used in the common cause our most strenuous and extensive efforts to fly in equipment and furnish instructional personnel have not been justified.” Underscoring presidential disgust, Marshall assured Stilwell that if the Y Force did not move, Lend-Lease to China would be at an end. Stilwell wrote his chief of staff in Chungking, “I agree fully with George [Marshall]. If the Gmo won’t fight, in spite of all his promises and all our efforts, I can see no reason for our wasting another ton. I recommend diversion… of all tonnage being delivered to any Chinese agency.” To save Chiang’s face, Stilwell’s man in Chungking told General Ho (rather than the G-mo directly) that if the Y Force did not move, the Hump tonnage for the current month would be diverted elsewhere. Within two days, Ho was instructed to order the Y Force to proceed. The decision to move the soldiers, Ho informed Marshall, “was made on initiative of Chinese without influence of outside pressure.”
Stilwell now advanced toward Myitkyina and, with the help of an American group called Merrill’s Marauders, seized the Myitkyina airstrip. Out of fear that he might fail, Stilwell had not told Mountbatten that he was continuing his march into Burma, and it was, Tuchman reported, “brutally embarrassing for the Supreme Allied Commander to wake up and discover a component of his* forces in Myitkyina when he had not known the expedition was on its way.” He was furious at Stilwell and thoroughly discomfited by an inquiry from Churchill, who wanted to know how “the Americans by a brilliant feat of arms have landed us in Myitkyina.” But the English, rarely at a loss for the right thing to do, came up with an Order of the Day, sent to Stilwell in Mountbatten’s name: “By the boldness of your leadership, backed by the courage and endurance of your American and Chinese troops, you have taken the enemy completely by surprise and achieved a most outstanding success by seizing the Myitkyina airfield.” It was an historic victory and, according to White, “the only offensive combat victory won by Chinese troops against the Japanese in eight years.”
Although everyone expected that control of the Myitkyina airport would lead easily and quickly to taking the city, the Japanese rushed in reinforcements—some 5,000 soldiers within two weeks—and Stilwell was forced to order in American convalescent soldiers to maintain an Allied presence in the area. In the middle of the crisis, Stilwell received a request from Mountbatten for transportation for Noel Coward and his troupe to the Ledo front. Out of either pique or the realization that Coward was not the right entertainer for Chinese and American troops, Stilwell refused. “I consider this a slam in the face,” Mountbatten wrote back. Coward got his transportation, but, not surprisingly, his first performance fell “completely flat.” At the second performance, given for the soldiers at the Ledo General Hospital, the audience was instructed “to show expressions of approval,” which they apparently did. “If any more piano players start this way,” Stilwell told his man in Delhi, “you know what to do with the piano.”
“Summoned” from the Burma battlefields to Chungking in early June, Stilwell was prevailed upon to get Chennault his 10,000 tons by taking 1,500 away from other forces, providing the War Department agreed. But Marshall balked, saying that Chennault’s air war had not justified the requisitions taken from other theaters of warfare. “It has been bleeding us white in transport airplanes” was his comment. “Instructions understood,” Stilwell replied, “and exactly what I had hoped for.”
IN THE MIDDLE of September, on the day after the Japanese broke through the last effective defenses guarding the area around the airport in Kweilin, Stilwell and Chennault flew south to survey the situation. To keep the enemy from using their facilities, Stilwell ordered the Chinese commander to destroy all the American airstrips and installations except one. On the last night in Kweilin, 550 barracks and shacks were blown up. Harold Isaacs, the local Newsweek correspondent, described the scene for the readers of CBI Roundup:
A corporal, who comes from New Jersey, aimed along the thin beam of a lieutenant’s searchlight and fired at the bottom of a gasoline drum through the open door. In great, hungry, licking sheets, flames split the darkness, raced along the floor, up walls and through the roof. The destruction of the American air base at Kweilin had begun.… Roaring yellow blazes produced bizarre lighting effects against the high, craggy fantastically misshapen limestone masses which jut in the most improbable contours from the earth’s floor in Kwangsi, looking like a mad surface of Mars or the moon viewed through a powerful lens.… The 14 Air Force was pulling away from Kweilin which was waiting, stripped and unpeopled, for the will of the enemy.
A week later the Japanese reached a point just twenty-five miles from Kweilin and, after a reorganization period of five weeks, resumed the offensive, slicing easily through the leftovers of the Chinese army. By the middle of November, both Kweilin and Liuchow were in enemy hands, and the only active Allied soldiers remaining in the area were fifteen members of the OSS, sent in to destroy everything that might help the Japanese. Under the command of Major Frank Gleason, they went about systematically razing the countryside. With no money to pay for help, Gleason engaged Chinese coolies, whom he paid for their services by allowing them to loot the towns they passed through before the enemy got there.
When the OSS team got to the town of Tushan, Gleason heard that there was a lot of ammunition buried in the hills. He investigated and found three huge ammunition dumps, each with twenty to thirty warehouses about two hundred feet long. There were mortars, thousands of mortar shells, fifty new pieces of artillery, and vast supplies of ammunition—in all some 50,000 tons of supplies, hoarded by the Chinese military. Nearby, their troops, starved for arms, had been forced to abandon their positions. Gleason also found twenty tons of dynamite, which he used to blow up the dumps and their contents.
Having accomplished their mission of opening a route through China from Hankow to the Indo-Chinese border, the Japanese dug in for the winter. “Thus in December 1944,” White said, “the invasion of China by Japan reached its high-water mark and receded. For the government and its armies 1944 had been a year of unmitigated disaster. Almost half a million Chinese soldiers ha
d been lost, the entire coast was cut off from the Central Government, eight provinces and a population of more than 100,000,000 men had been ripped from the direct control of Chungking. The Kuomintang could explain its defeats in convincing terms of poverty and weakness.… But it could not explain why another Chinese army, that of the Communists, was moving from success to success in North China.”
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It would of course have been undiplomatic to go into the nature of the military effort Chiang Kai-shek had made since 1938. It was practically zero.
—GENERAL JOSEPH STILWELL
IN SEPTEMBER 1944, President Roosevelt sent another troubleshooter, Patrick J. Hurley, to China with instructions to “try to keep the Chinese Nationalists in the war, tying up Japanese who would otherwise be killing Americans.” Chiang liked Hurley, a rich Oklahoman who assured him that the U.S. government stood solidly behind him. Hurley also told Chiang that the aid China wanted would be forthcoming as soon as the generalissimo agreed to allow Stilwell to take over as commander-in-chief of the Chinese army and use Communist soldiers against Japan—solutions devoutly sought by Roosevelt and the brass in Washington. But, as Senator Judd put it, “There is no head of any government… that will make somebody else officially Commander-in-Chief of his own troops in his own country,” and although Chiang seemed to agree, he did not follow through.
What the G-mo wanted was the right to control Lend-Lease. Stilwell and Hurley met with T.V., recently restored to Chiang’s favor, and, according to Stilwell’s diary for the day, “T.V. says we must remember the ‘dignity’ of a great nation, which would be ‘affronted’ if I [i.e., Stilwell] controlled the distribution.” To which Hurley responded, “Remember, Dr. Soong, that is our property. We made it and we own it, and we can give it to whom we please.” Much to Stilwell’s delight, Hurley added that “there were 130 million Americans whose dignity also entered the case, as well as the ‘dignity’ of their children and their children’s children, who would have to pay the bill.”
The Last Empress Page 64