On September 13, Stilwell received a visit from two representatives of Mao Tse-tung, who told him that Communist troops would fight under him but not under “a Chinese commander designated by CKS.” Although Stilwell said he would go to Yenan to discuss it, the mere fact that he might consider using Communist soldiers to help fight the Japanese (along with the fact that the Chinese Communists clearly admired Stilwell’s military judgment more than his own) drove Chiang crazy. The G-mo had probably heard that Chou En-lai had told John Service of the U.S. Embassy, half in jest, that he himself would have led the Communist troops in a campaign to retake Burma and “I would obey General Stilwell’s orders.”
In the meantime, the situation in Burma had changed. After bitter battles, the Y Force was now on its way over 11,000-foot mountains and the Salween River gorges toward the city of Lungling, currently occupied by the Japanese. An Allied occupation of Lungling was necessary to open the Burma Road, but the Y Force ran into trouble on the outskirts of the city. It desperately needed reinforcements to continue its advance, and Hurley told Chiang that he must send in more men. But the G-mo refused, saying that he wanted to bring back the soldiers who were already there to defend the front in east China. Chiang was afraid that if the Chinese lost the battle at Lungling, the Japanese would move on to Kunming and then to Chungking, and he was ready to sacrifice Stilwell’s campaign, which was about to open up the Burma Road, to his fears. The situation was urgent, and the Japanese, numbering somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 men, had decided to fight to the death. Chiang was finally convinced to give the orders that allowed the Y Force to proceed.
But Stilwell had wired Marshall concerning Chiang’s threat to withdraw the Y Force and use it elsewhere. His telegram arrived in the middle of the second Quebec Conference, a summit between Roosevelt and Churchill held in September 1944, at which they laid out the strategy for defeating Japan. Marshall gave Roosevelt, Churchill, and the other members of the conference the essence of Stilwell’s message: that is, Chiang’s refusal to take part in breaking the blockade of China or his threat to do so. Marshall also seems to have brought along a draft of a reply, which became a six-hundred-word telegram written by his staff and signed by Roosevelt. The message, according to Tuchman, “adopted the tone of a headmaster to a sullen and incorrigible schoolboy.” It explained that “the only thing you [Chiang] can do to prevent the Jap from achieving his objectives in China is to reinforce your Salween armies immediately and press their offensive, while at once placing General Stilwell in unrestricted command of all your forces. It appears plainly evident to all of us here that all your and our efforts to save China are to be lost by further delays.” If Chiang failed to do this, he “must… be prepared to accept the consequences and assume the personal responsibility.”
Instructed to deliver the wire in person, Stilwell arrived at the Chiang home during a dinner meeting that included Hurley, General Ho, and T.V. He showed Hurley the message before giving it to Chiang, and Hurley told him to soften the phrasing—exactly what May-ling, who was away, had always done when translating for her husband. Hurley even offered to deliver the crux of the message himself. Stilwell refused. It was, White says, “the harshest document… delivered to Chiang in three years of alliance.” Chiang’s knees apparently shook when it was read to him, and afterward, according to White, his “wrath was incandescent.”* Referring to the letter as “the greatest humiliation I have been subjected to in my life,” Chiang told Hurley that the “Chinese were tired of the insults which Stilwell has seen fit to heap upon them” and that the American general must be removed from China. Hurley, Chiang, and T.V. wrote a letter to Roosevelt recommending that Stilwell be recalled. Hurley showed it to Stilwell, who said it was like “cutting my throat with a dull knife.” When it looked as if Roosevelt might not follow his advice, Hurley sent two more messages reiterating his position. “Thus,” as historian Michael Schaller put it, “a man completely ignorant of actual conditions in China took it upon himself to insure that the United States would sustain Chiang against all challenges.”
It is interesting to contemplate what might have happened if May-ling had been in Chungking at the time. During the war, “in accordance with usual Army procedure,” messages from the president to Chiang Kai-shek were routinely delivered to May-ling, who gave them to her husband and translated them for him. But while Madame was away, messages were rerouted to Stilwell. Had she been at dinner, she would have been handed the letter to translate and would have softened it considerably. Had she even been in Chungking, friends who spoke of her “immense influence” over the generalissimo believed that she would have been able to calm him down. But Hurley was blindly supportive of Chiang, and T.V. had been trying to get rid of Stilwell for years.
H. H. Kung, who was in the United States, suddenly entered the picture. He saw Harry Hopkins at a dinner party and asked what Roosevelt was planning to do about Stilwell. Whatever Hopkins said, Kung, ever anxious to please and never too bright, understood him to say that if the generalissimo insisted, Roosevelt would remove Stilwell. Kung could not wait to cable the good news to Chungking. On receipt of the cable, the G-mo met with the top leaders of the KMT and told them that Stilwell “must go,” that if the United States insisted on keeping him in China, he would refuse U.S. aid and retreat into the mountains with his loyal soldiers. T.V. confirmed that “on this point [the] Generalissimo will not and cannot yield.” By the time Hopkins wired back that he had been misquoted,† Chiang had committed himself. Roosevelt tried to effect a compromise, but the generalissimo, who would have lost face with the party leaders, refused to consider it.
The day after Chiang’s meeting, Stilwell wired Marshall that “the situation now has reached a deadlock and the real reason is not that the generalissimo objects to me but rather that he desires to avoid any further voluntary military effort.… It is possible that if a way could be indicated… by which he could recover from the results of his premature announcement to the central executive committee… the problem can still be solved.” To accomplish this, Stilwell recommended setting up a joint Sino-American Military Committee, which would make policy and “give the generalissimo a boost in prestige” by allowing him “to win his point with regard to me personally to the extent that I would not be anything but a field commander executing orders.… As field commander I could ensure that orders were obeyed and that the plans and policies, which would be largely created by the… committee, were actually executed and that the maximum military effort was made.” Stilwell finished his wire by stating, “If I considered that my removal would be the solution I would be the first to suggest it.”
Two weeks later, Stilwell and Chiang were informed that the American general would be relieved of his command, that he should leave immediately for the United States, and that there would be no other American commander in chief for the Chinese army. In addition, Chiang was advised that the CBI theater no longer existed but had been split into a China theater and an India-Burma theater. American troops in China would be under the command of General Albert C. Wedemeyer. Forty-eight years old, tall and tactful, Wedemeyer was known as a superb strategist. “THE AX FALLS.” Stilwell wrote. “… Hurley feels very badly. Told me he had lost me the command. Sees his mistakes now—too late.”
Secretary of War Stimson thought Stilwell’s removal was unwarranted and unfair. “Stilwell has been the one successful element of the three forces that have been supposed to operate in Burma,” he said. “… This campaign in all the difficulties of the monsoon has been a triumphant vindication of Stilwell’s courage and sagacity. He has been pecked at from both sides, carped at by the British from India, and hamstrung at every moment by Chiang Kai-shek.” Nevertheless, the recall went through.
The head cheerleader on the other side was Joseph Alsop, whose attacks on Stilwell came thick and fast, mostly after the general’s death in 1946. Alsop, who referred to Vinegar Joe as “the pro-Chinese-Communist Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell,” claimed in an article in T
he Saturday Evening Post that “Stilwell’s dismissal interrupted a program that would have brought the Chinese communists to power.” According to Alsop, Stilwell “warmly admired the communists” and had “intrigued” with the “incompetent and reactionary Minister of War, General Ho.” As to Chiang, who, Alsop admitted, preferred “pliant bad lots to independent-minded good men,” he was, in Alsop’s words, “one of the great men of our time,” and “those who deny his greatness are fools or worse.”
Before leaving China, Stilwell wrote a “very decent” letter to Chennault and another to the head of the CCP army in Yenan, saying that he was sorry not to have been able to fight the Japanese with “you and the excellent troops you have developed.” He visited Ching-ling, who cried and told him she wished she could go to the United States and tell Roosevelt the truth. He later wrote that she was “the most sympatica of the three women [sisters], and probably the deepest.” Stilwell also went to see Ambassador Gauss, who resigned his post shortly thereafter, and then called on the generalissimo, who offered him the highest Chinese decoration, the Special Cordon of the Blue Sky and White Sun. Stilwell refused to accept it.
On October 20, 1944, Joseph Stilwell left China secretly. Along with General Hurley, who had recommended his removal to Roosevelt, and General Ho, the only other person at the airport to say good-bye was T. V. Soong, who had been trying for two and a half years to get him recalled. His trip to the United States was kept under wraps. His victories had made him a hero at home, and the Democrats worried that his dismissal might prompt Republican charges of improper action. He arrived in Washington only days before the presidential election. His arrival, like his departure from China, was kept secret, and he was hustled out of the nation’s capital so as not to embarrass Roosevelt, who won his fourth term as president shortly thereafter.
Nevertheless, there was wide speculation about him in the press. An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune called the president’s explanation that Stilwell’s recall was merely a personality clash “nonsense” and declared both countries at fault. The Chinese were responsible for corruption in the military and the failure to come to terms with the CCP, but the Roosevelt administration had also made mistakes, mainly in its choice of representatives. Stilwell was, in the words of the Tribune, “a superb commander” but “the right man in the wrong job,” while Gauss, who was “disliked by Chinese officials, to whom ‘courtesy and suavity’ were so important,” was another. “The most adroit general and the most skillful ambassador would have had no easy time in such a situation,” the editorial concluded, but “General Stilwell and Ambassador Gauss, able as they were, did not have the required qualities.”
During that same month, Chiang Kai-shek found himself rid of another enemy when word came of the death of Wang Ching-wei. Suffering from his old complaint of diabetes along with the wounds he had suffered in Chiang’s attempts on his life, Wang, who had served for four years as head of the puppet government in Nanking, was taken to a hospital in Japan, where he died in November of 1944. His remains were put in a tomb in Nanking, which was later destroyed by the Nationalists, presumably under Chiang’s orders.
THE REASON THAT Madame Chiang was not in Chungking to translate the unfortunate wire that led to Stilwell’s dismissal was that she was in the United States, to which she had retreated in the middle of the summer of 1944. Complaining of nervous exhaustion and skin disease, she was also trying to put an end to a private drama that had been raging in the Chiang household since before her return from the United States the year before. Toward the end of that earlier trip, rumors had begun circulating that her husband was living with another woman, and on her arrival in Chungking, she was met by a story that during her absence her husband had been having an affair with a Miss Chen, variously identified as the G-mo’s second wife who had returned to China, a young nurse, or a girl from the province of Chekiang. Whoever she was, the affair was obviously payback for May-ling’s romance with Wendell Willkie. Madame did not stay in her own home for long but moved in with the Kungs, then apparently went to Hong Kong. Rumors of impending divorce began to make the rounds.
John Fairbank interviewed May-ling two months after her return. Her mission to the United States, he said, had been “lushly reported” in Chungking. He was not as bowled over by her as his fellow Americans:
Chungking, Sept. 16, 1943
My small hour with the great lady: I have just come back from an hour’s talk [with Madame Chiang], with a number of mixed impressions.… The sum is that she is trying so hard to be a great lady. Conversation too cosmic to be real. An actress, with a lot of admirable qualities, great charm, quick intuition, intelligence, but underneath, emotions that are unhappy… bitterness about something.… Usually the beautiful but sad expression and the well-modulated tones with pauses for effect, upper lip pulled down in a strained way; but occasionally a real laugh, with a round relaxed face and higher-pitched voice, which seemed natural and at ease and made all the rest seem forced and tragic.… She was tired and her head shook a bit as old men’s do. I get the impression that she was unhappy about many things.
Eight months later, in May of 1944, the U.S. Embassy’s John Service addressed the rumors directly:
Chungking is literally seething with stories of the domestic troubles of the Chiang household. Almost everyone has new details and versions to add to the now, generally accepted story that the Generalissimo has taken a mistress and as a result his relations with the Madame are—to say the least—strained. There is so much smoke, it would seem that there must be some fire. Normally such gossip about the private lives of government leaders would not be considered as within the scope of political reporting. This is hardly the case, however, in China where the person concerned is a dictator and where the relationship between him and his wife’s family is so all-important.… If the Madame… should openly break with her husband, the dynasty would be split and the effects both in China and abroad might be serious.… The stories generally agree that the Generalissimo (whose sexual life was not particularly monogamous)… took up with his present attachment while the Madame was in the United States.… The prevalence and belief of these stories, and the humorous elaborations which are passed around, are at least indications of the unpopularity of the Madame (it is generally regarded by Chinese as a joke at her expense) and the decline in respect for both her and the Generalissimo.… Typical of these anecdotal stories are: The Madame now refers to the Generalissimo only as “That Man.” The Madame complains that the Generalissimo now only puts his teeth in when he is going to see “that woman.” The Madame went into the Generalissimo’s bedroom one day, found a pair of high-heeled shoes under the bed, threw them out of the window and hit a guard on the head.… The Generalissimo at one time did not receive callers for four days because he had been bruised on the side of the head with a flower vase in a spat with the Madame.…
All these stories may be nothing more than malicious gossip. But a number of surface indications might be interpreted as indicating at least serious tension between the Generalissimo and the Madame. The Madame… has avoided social life and public appearances. She has been rarely seen with the Generalissimo, and when together, they have seemed to observers to be very cool. The Madame is not well: her complaint, a skin irritation, is regarded medically as being a result of nervous strain. She avoids photographers. And people who have seen her at close range have remarked… that she seems irritable.… If the situation as reported is true, it has undoubtedly been a great strain on the Madame— because of her pride as a woman, her puritanical Methodism… and her knowledge of the effect it will have on her prestige. Nonetheless, most observers believe that the stakes of power are so important to the Soong family that they… will do everything to prevent an open break and that she will swallow her pride and put up with the situation. Critics of the Generalissimo regard it all as evidence of the hollowness of his Christian and New Life moralizing, and another indication that he is after all not far from being an o
ld-fashioned “warlord.”
Everyone had a different story to tell. According to the London Daily Mail, the generalissimo and the Madame had split, and she was thinking of making her home in Florida. Another paper reported that Chiang Kai-shek’s first wife, Ching-kuo’s mother (who was dead and whom Chiang had never much liked anyway), had moved into his house. Even the Communists got into the act, predicting that Madame would soon sue the G-mo for divorce. When May-ling told Chiang that she had decided to join sister Ai-ling in a trip to Brazil “on the advice of [her] doctors,” he invited sixty people— members of his cabinet, major officials, a handful of journalists, and the odd missionary—to a seated tea party in the garden, in the middle of which he stood up and gave a highly emotional, forty-five-minute speech, claiming that, ugly rumors to the contrary, he had remained true to his wife and his Christianity: “On the departure of my wife for Brazil on account of her health, I decided to give this farewell party for her. You are all my friends and I think the time has come to speak very frankly about a subject. I feel it is most important to do this for the good of the country. Perhaps my Chinese friends here think that I should not speak so frankly. But it is necessary.”
“In leading my fellow countrymen,” he said, “I rely not on power or position, but on my character and integrity. As a member of the revolutionary party, I must abide by revolutionary discipline. As a Christian, I must obey the commandments. Had I violated the discipline and the commandments either in public or private moral conduct, I should have been a rebel against Christ, against our late father Sun Yat-sen, and against the millions of my countrymen who have given their lives to our cause. Any one of them should impeach or punish me in accordance with discipline and the commandments.”
The Last Empress Page 65