In great things, wrote Erasmus, it is enough to have
tried. Stilwell’s mission was America’s supreme try in China. He made the
maximum effort because his temperament permitted no less; he never slackened
and he never gave up. Yet the mission failed in its ultimate purpose because
the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese. Combat efficiency and
the offensive spirit, like the Christianity and democracy offered by
missionaries and foreign advisors, were not indigenous demands of the society
and culture to which they were brought.
Even the Yellow River Road that Stilwell built in 1921 had disappeared twelve
years later. China was problem for which
there was no American solution. The American effort to sustain the status quo
could not supply an outworn government with strength and stability or popular
support. It could not hold up a husk or long delay the cyclical passing of the
mandate of heaven. In the end China went her own way as if America had never come.
. .
. . .
. . .
. . . . . . .
. . .
. .
On leave from West Point in 1907 Stilwell’s wanderings by foot and mule in Guatemala were
full of discoveries. He found the country flea-bitten and unappetizing, fell
ill with dysentery and fever and after a few weeks longed to go home. Yet he
was constantly observing, filling his notebooks with facts and comments,
finding himself stirred by the same
aspects of oppression that were to become familiar in China. They evoked a
sympathy with the common man and anger with his rulers that he would not have
felt at home. The Guatemalteco, he noted, would not work more than he had to
because everything he made was stolen by Government officials who were often
‘thieves or even worse.’ Stilwell formed a very ‘unfavorable opinion’ of the
officials, landowners and professional classes. Keeping the peasant illiterate
and uneducated, he wrote, ‘suits very well the purpose of the Government which
takes him from his farm at any time and puts him in the Army for an indefinite
period, not caring whether or not his family starves. Yet . . .he says nothing,
enduring it all in silence.’ These were sentiments that were to repeat themselves
in China. As a close friend said, ‘Stilwell was liberal and sympathetic by
instinct. But he was conservative in thought and politics.’
. . . . . . .
On 9 February 1942 Stilwell went to the White
House for his first interview with his Commander-in Chief. It lasted 20 minutes
and produced no such rapport as the quiet fireside talk with Secretary of War
Stimson. Considering the pre-judgments Stillwell brought with him and
Roosevelt’s habit of bright monologues, it was not likely too. At home Stilwell
was a conventional Republican who shared the sentiments and adopted the tone of
Roosevelt-haters, in which he was influenced by his brother John, an extremist
of the species .If he used a cigarette holder ‘cocked upwards at a Rooseveltian
angle,’ as an observer noted, the similarity was certainly accidental. Yet in
their hopes for China there was a ground on which they could have met, if
either had given the other chance. The President might have learned more about
the real China and Stilwell might have learned something about the President’s
real aims.
Roosevelt’s verbal monopolizing of conversation was so inveterate that his
regular associates had to devise special methods to make themselves heard, such
as speaking to him at meal times when he had his mouth full or timing him for
exactly five minutes and then cutting in ruthlessly. On the telephone Secretary
Stimson had been known to hang up on him. He was good-humored, intuitive, experimental,
calculating, changeable, devious, compromising and given to leaps of thought
without discernible coherence. He usually had several lines out and his motives
were often mixed. The coherence that guided him, in a phrase used by his
daughter, was his ’sense of the future’. As a British observer said: ‘He blazed
with faith in the future of democracy.’ His dominant characteristic was
confidence-over-confidence as some thought- perhaps the result of his own conquest of paralysis which may have left
him with a sense there was no problem that could not be solved.
He often sounded more frivolous than he was and could obscure his thought by
chatter as Stilwell obscured his with silence. Behind the chatter about his
ancestors in the China trade he had somehow arrived at the most important thing
necessary for the chief of a Western state to know about China: that, as he
wrote to a friend in a letter of 1935, ‘There are forces there which neither
you nor I understand, but at least I know that they are almost incomprehensible
to us Westerners. Do not let so-called facts or figures lead you to believe
that any Western civilization’s actions can ever affect the people of China
deeply.”
Stilwell found him “cordial and pleasant- and frothy. Unimpressive. Acted as if
I were a voter calling on a Congressman. Rambled on about his idea of the war –
‘a 29,000 mile front is my
conception,’ etc., etc., Just a lot of wind.’”
. .
. . .
. . .
Stilwell in Action.
On December 21 1943, when Stilwell arrived in the Huawng valley, the Northern Combat Area Command offensive into Burma, which was supposed to have taken off from the line of the river Tarung, was already a month behind schedule (see Maps). Japanese units, probing for positions for an offensive which they too were planning held Yubang Ga, key to the river crossing and the point where the Ledo Road was supposed to cross the river. Tree battalions of General Li-jen’s 38th division, coming under fire from this unsuspected presence, had dug in and were now separately surrounded by the enemy, supplied by inadequate airdrops and unable to advance or retreat. Attempts to relieve them had failed. Generals Sun and Boatner were at angry odds over question of supply and demands for artillery. On his way home from Cairo, the Generalissimo ( Chang Kai-Shek), with his instinct for hoarding [American Lend-Lease supplies in expectation of fighting the Communists after ‘the barbarians’ had defeated the Japanese], had cautioned against deploying more than one regiment on the Tarung, ‘because we had only six regiments and if two were used and cutoff by the enemy we would only have four regiments left.’
Stilwell established headquarters for the first
phase of the campaign [to open the land route through Burma to China] at
Shingbwijang, which was reached by the
Road a week after his arrival, enabling trucks and jeeps to bring up supplies.
He worked out plans for a serious attack on Yubang Ga with Sun and the
regimental commander arranged for artillery barrage and flank attacks and made
a speech to the troops saying this was an important attack that must succeed.
‘Wherever Stilwell went something happened,’ noticed Seagrave who was serving
with the forward troops. The attack opened on December 24. Stilwell went
forward at 6:30, hiking two hours over trails to the command post and staying throughout the day to observe. The
opening artillery barrage, fired at a range of 30 yards ahead of the attacking
troops, was followed by an awful hesitation of five minutes, then the sounds of
the Chinese bugle and the infantry’s advance. To clear the Japanese out of
jungle pockets and gain the river against land mines and concealed machine guns
proved difficult. Wearing a steel helmet and unconcerned by the fire of a
concealed machine-gun sniper probing for the range of the command post,
Stilwell caused intense discomfort to Sun Li-jen and his officers who feared he
might be hit and they be held responsible.
The Chinese attack, though too cautious for Stilwell’s taste, did not let up.
Sun ‘swears they are trying to do a good job for the lao hsien sheng [Old Man] and the troops are all bucked up to have
me with them.’ The Japanese resisted fiercely from foxholes and dugouts; when
one lone machine gunner was killed, another man rushed from the woods to man
the isolated weapon. It took a week before Yubang Ga was secured and all the pockets cleared out.
By the end of December the 38th Division had suffered casualties of
315 killed and 429 wounded but it had overcome the enemy for the fist time in
Burma. As the first test of American training the out come was critical: it
proved to the Chinese that they could actually defeat Japanese. A company of
the 22nd Division after its first victory staged a parade with the
heads of Japanese stuck on bamboo poles, to the horror of the American liaison
officer who demanded to resign from his assignment. From the quality of the
fighting and the equipment and airdrop, the Japanese too recognized that they confronted
a new enemy.
Stilwell’s presence at the front and his living close to the men made a strong
impression on Chinese officers. To avoid headquarters routine and the mass of
paper, messages and envoys from the Rear Echelon that pursued him, he often
moved out of Shingbwiyang and subsequent base headquarters to stay at a private
headquarters of his own in a clearing in the woods. He lived with his aide Dick
Young in a basha or bamboo hut or
sometimes a tent, with an underground dugout for shelter, a packing case for a desk
and only the luxury of two wicker chairs as a concession to rank. He slept on a
cot or in a hammock stretched between two trees, shaved and washed from a
helmet, stood in line for chow an ate C-rations from a mess kit. At base camp
his meals were cooked for him by Sergeant Jules Raynaud, called Gus, former chef
of the Stork Club, who complained that the Boss ate ‘like the birds’: for
dinner usually a couple of pieces of raisin bread which Gus baked for him, with
butter and jam and a cup of coffee. Gus foraged for vegetables to take the
curse off Spam and stood over the Boss till he ate them. The family, always
Stilwell’ main anchor in life, was represented by his son Joe Jr serving as G-2 for NCAC, and his sons-in-law Colonel Ernest
Easterbrook and Major Ellis Cox, serving as liaison officers with the Chinese
divisions.
On the march when he saw Chinese soldiers smoking rolled-up leaves, Stilwell
would take out his own cigarettes and hand them out and he made an extra effort
to have cigarettes flown in. He paid ‘special attention to the people at the
bottom,’ said a Chinese officer, and when the solders saw him they would crowd
around ‘our commander’ and want to talk to him. The most important morale
factor was his insistence on the wounded being carried back to field
hospitals ad flown if necessary to the
20th General Hospital in Ledo. He brought relentless pressure until
an airfield was built for the hospital and supported every demand of its chief,
Colonel Isidor Ravdin, a surgeon from civilian life who on Stilwell’s
recommendation was to become the first Medical Reserve officer promoted to
brigadier general. When Ravdin complained that the hospital had no fans,
urgently needed for the typhus wards, Stilwell radioed General Dan Sultan, his
deputy in Delhi. ’Dig up 150 ceiling fans, 160 standing fans and 11
air-conditioning units . . . You and I both know where a lot of it can be dug
up.’ The Imperial Hotel where the American staff of SEAC lodged was duly
stripped of its fans for the hospital at Ledo. On Sunday morning Stilwell
usually flew in to visit patients who has been injured the previous week. His
order that no Chines soldiers were to be be searched on leaving the hospital
resulted n the disappearance of medicine, blankets, pajamas and equipment, but
it was issued in the expectation for Stilwell; also took care to order that
Ravdin should not be held responsible for anything missing.
The combined efforts of American medics, from the stretcher teams and field
hospitals to the 20th General, reduced the death rate from wounds, ordinarily a
limitless figure in the Chinese army, to 3.5 percent. Chinese soldiers were not
afraid of being killed in battle, they used to say, but only being left wounded
on the battlefield to die, which was the usual fate in China for those who
could not walk away from combat. The feeling that they were being looked out
for in the NCAC gave the soldiers a new found pride and confidence. In the
knowledge, too, that planes would keep them supplied with ammunition, they were
not afraid to shoot what they had as in the first Burma campaign.
They were a young army, many as young as fifteen, and if not robust in body,
yet as brothers of the Communists who had trudged the 6,000 miles of the Long
March, they were the sturdiest walkers of any army in the world. They had in
large measure the good soldier’s qualities of courage, stamina, willingness and
an eye for the country, and their dominating characteristic, as Wingate
observed, was cheerfulness ‘Under conditions which would reduce Europeans to
gloomy despair. Smiles of pure joy break out constantly over the Chinese face.’
Measured time was of no concern to them and no plan based on accurate timing
had a hope of success. Nor could any plan succeed that ignored the consideration
of face. Familiar with the absence in the home army of any supply, transport or
medical organization worth the name, they were accustomed to keeping themselves
alive by scavenging and would take or steal any object of any kind that lay
loose.
At dawn Stilwell would set out regularly to
hike three to five miles, often taking
two or more hours, to the regimental command post, trailed by his aide,
bodyguard and two or three of the hardier correspondents. On the way he studied
and remembered the trails and terrain features and villages, and at night he
sketched his situation maps by candlelight, recording in marginal comments
every move and engagement of the troops. At the command posts he would observe
and advise without exercising direct command. His presence at the front became
known to the Japanese who broadcast from Rangoon their intention to capture him
alive, adding immeasurably to the
uneasiness of whatever Chinese commander he chose to visit. They feared
execution if the Commanding General was shot or ambushed by a patrol and
captured while in their vicinity. Taking advantage of this anxiety, in the case
of a commander who delayed or stalled, Stilwell would hang around his command
post and refuse to go away until the order to move was given.
The difficulty of inculcating aggressive spirit in the Chinese superior
officers persisted. The Artillery, trained by General Sliney and led by able
and energetic Chinese officers, was vigorous and reliable, but all the efforts
at Ramgarh could not eliminate characters like one Major Ch’en, a battalion
commander of the 38th division, who, during the month before Stilwell came to
the Hukawng, failed to occupy his given post, remained four weeks without doing
any offensive patrolling, failed to issue supplies to a special patrol unit and
could provide no record of what had been done with 31,000 rations and 28 tons
of ammunition dropped to him during this period.
Friction over supply was constant. On the one hand Chinese requisitions were
usually double what a unit needed or could use; on the other hand units were
sometimes left close to starvation when pilots in bad weather were less than
aggressive about flying in airdrops. Stilwell remedied this situation by
requiring crews to exchange places with men on the ground and live in the mud
on Spam and hot water for a few days. ‘After the air boys learned what it was
like down there,’ recalled Pal Jones, ‘they flew every day, flew when you
thought no one could, when clouds were on the treetops.
All the while messages from Chungking or Delhi, buzzing with ‘Z-Z-Z-Z’ for
urgent, poured into Stilwell’s command post, ‘screaming for me to come to both
places at once and decide this or that.” His deputy in Delhi, General Sultan,,
the ranking major general in the Army whom Marshal had sent to help Stilwell in
1943, was dependable and excellent –‘Dan Sultan is the best thing that ever
happened to the theater’ in his chief’s opinion – but it is the nature of
military channels that everything, however petty, is passed on to the top, with
exasperating effect if the occupant at the top is not by temperament and
administrator. The problem is not unknown in civil government. Roosevelt,
complained Secretary Stimson, was ‘the poorest administrator I have ever worked
under.’ One issue Stilwell could not avoid, involving as it did the military’s
most absorbing concern, was in the chain of command. He made a quick overnight
jump to Delhi on December 31 to settle it . . .The adroit way he shifted from
one to the another of his various offices (in the theater’s table of
organization he occupied no less than five boxes at various levels) was,
according to Slim, ‘a lesson in the mobile offensive defensive.’[. . . .]
Slim believed Stilwell to be ‘two people,’ one when talked to alone and another
in front of an audience when he adopted the ‘Vinegar Joe’ attitude. ‘He had
courage to an extent few people have and a determination which, as he usually
concentrated it along narrow lines, had a dynamic force . . .He was undoubtedly
the most colorful character in South-East Asia – and I like him.’ That Stilwell
put on an act in front of a certain kind of audience was true. With friends he
could be unaffected and easy, and at home he loved to joke, but with people of whom
he was suspicious for one reason or another, whether from a sense of difference
or inferiority or impatience or contempt, he could undoubtedly be rude or
caustic or sometimes coarse and deliberately boorish, as his way of thumbing
his nose. During the second campaign in Burma this attitude became more pronounced
with regard to the Rear Echelon when, after sleeping in his clothes and coming
under fire and suffering the companionship of fly-eggs in his blanket and scorpions
in his dugout, he came out to the overstuffed conferences in Delhi. He tended
to feel for the desk generals and
colonels the sentiments of Hotspur in his favorite passage from Shakespeare
who, when ‘dry with rage and extreme toil’ after battle, raged against the popinjay
from headquarters.
In Marshall’s opinion Stilwell was ‘his own worst enemy’ who poisoned his
relations with the British and Chinese by making no effort to conceal his contempt
for their ‘do-nothing’ attitudes. While he had ample cause for impatience, his
personality faults, Marshall thought,
thwarted Mountbatten’s efforts to get along with him. Stilwell certainly lacked
the iron control over his feelings that characterized Marshall but the
underlying source of the poison was his belief that both British and Chinese
had been cowardly in the first Burma campaign and had devoted their energies to
nonperformance ever since. He never had any problem getting along with either
British or Chinese who in his opinion we doers and fighters. This is the reason
why he often wished he could command the Communists who seemed to be both, and
why he admired the Russians for their stunning resistance at Leningrad and
fight at Stalingrad. He sent congratulations to the Red Army on the occasion of
its twenty-sixth birthday and received a message from Stalin in reply.
“You will find, if you get below the surface,’
Marshall wrote to Mountbatten on learning of Stilwell’s consent to serve under
Slim, ‘that he wants merely to get things done without delays . . . He will
provide tremendous energy, courage and unlimited ingenuity and imagination to
any aggressive proposals and operations. His mind is far more alert than almost
any of our generals and his training and understanding are on an unusually high
level. Impatience with conservatism and slow motion is his weakness – but a
damned good one in this emergency.’
. .
. . .
. . .
. .
In the summer of 1944 when the campaign in Northern
Burma was winding-down, developments in China looked ‘very black’. At this time
the reports of the first foreigners to visit the Communist region since the war
began were made known. They were enthusiastic. The journalists were disposed to
be friendly because they were so thoroughly disgusted with the frustration of
their profession in Chungking: the autocratic censorship, the endless promises
and evasions, and the most exasperating Chinese habit of all – the bland declaration
as fact of what both the declarer and listener know to be nonsense. Released
from the miasma of Kuomintang China, they were in a mood to find a new world
and they did. They were struck first by the physical appearance of the people,
‘better fed, huskier and more energetic than in other parts of China,’ and by
their transformation of the once barren land of south Shensi into an area of
intensive cultivation and stock-breeding. By this reclamation process the
Communist soldiery made themselves self-supporting, with no need to live off
the peasant. As the strongest single factor in their favor in local eyes, this
was a point stressed by all the correspondents.
Industrial achievement through the organization of handicrafts and workshops
was no less impressive. With its home-made products and independent
subsistence, Yenan appeared as a ‘magnificent symbol of the tenacity and
determination’ of its people. The correspondents all bought new coats and suits
tailored for them from locally woven tweeds, discovering afterwards that their
tailor was a member of the Supreme People’s Council. Members of the Military
Observers Mission which reached Yenan on July 23 had their pictures taken in
the heavy, substantial made-to-order uniforms of the 8th Route Army
whose soldiers, according to the Times,
were ‘among the best-clothed and best fed he writer has see anywhere in China.’
Hard evidence of guerilla warfare was found in the presence of several hundred
Japanese prisoners. No one had ever seen prisoners claimed by the Kuomintang
except for a token b group which was always the same, like the captured
helmets. It seemed obvious to the visitors that the Communist armies, like the
Yugoslav partisans, would be ‘valuable allies’ in the war whose proper use
would speed up victory. An Allied commander, declared Stein in the Monitor, ‘would be proud to command
those tough, well-fed, hardened troops.
Although the reports were heavily censored in Chungking and in some cases
killed in toto, the tone could not be squeezed out. The correspondents
humanized the Communist leaders for their readers, telling how Mao had worked
his way through school; how Kao Kang, the chief of the Party’s Northeast
Bureau, was the son of a poor peasant beaten to death by the bailiff of a
Shensi militarist because he had failed to pay a tax on his donkey; how Wang
Chen, a ‘dashing brilliant’ brigade commander had once been a fireman on the
Peking-Hankow Railway. They told of doctors, students, university teachers and
former YMCA secretaries all working ‘at a high pitch for their country with the
conviction that the ways adopted here are right.” In the fall when a second
group of journalists came, they reported plentiful harvests and fruit in
abundance, pears and grapes, pumpkins and tomatoes, buckwheat, millet, cotton
and tobacco. Brooks Atkinson happily described local theatricals and unrationed
gasoline for the ten trucks and the Times
obliged him with a friendly headline’ ‘Yenan,
A Chinese Wonderland City. The journalists reported what they saw and heard
and the saddest thing about it, in the long, cruel light of history, was that
it was all true.
Reporting for the DIXIE Mission, Service was no less impressed. He found high
morale and the people serious with a sense of mission and a purposeful program
with competent leadership. Coolies read newspapers, recruits marched without
escort, there were no gendarmes, no bureaucracy, none of the ‘clap-trap of
Chungking’ and none of its defeatism. There was a certain smugness and
self-righteous consciousness of a cause but no feeling of restraint or
suppression. There was self-confidence, self-respect, an emphasis on relations
with the common people and such impetus to the program, tied so closely to the
people, ‘that it will not be easy to kill.’
The DIXIE Mission, which consisted of nine members representing Air Corps.
Medical Corps, Signal Corps and Infantry was followed a month later by a second
contingent, was sent to observe with a purpose: to evaluate the Communist
potential for military collaboration against the Japanese. They were instructed
to assess ‘the most effective means of assisting the Communists to increase
the value of their war effort. This
meant American aid and an American relationship, which is exactly what Chang
Kai-Shek feared and the reason he had done his best to obstruct the mission.
Mao Tse-tung was also thinking of American aid. He made it plain that he looked
forward to American landings in China. If Americans failed to land, it would be
unfortunate for China, he said. ’The Kuomintang will continue as the Government
–without being able to be the Government.’
In the talks of Barret and Service with Mao, Chou En-lai, Lin Piao, Yeh Chien-ying
and Chu Teh, the Communists’ theme was that the Kuomintang was in the ‘dying
throes’ of incapacity while the Communists had established a viable government
and could propose useful cooperation with the Americans under an ‘Allied’
command rather than under a ‘bankrupt’ Kuomintang command. They made no
reference to the fighting under Stilwell’s command nor askes that any such proposal
be conveyed to him: indeed it was Colonel Barrett’s impression that ‘they never
seemed much interested in General Stilwell.
They talked in terms of coalition not revolution. Their stated aim at this time
was a return to the united front with representation on a national council,
release of the blockade and freedom to maintain their own regime in their own areas
while engaged in a common if not a joint effort against Japan. This concept did
not include allegiance to the Central Government nor acceptance of its
authority as stipulated by Chang Kai-Shek.
The Chinese Communists of 1944 did not appear alarming, but on the contrary,
like most challengers who have yet to succeed, rather attractive. In their
rough and rumpled clothes, their earnest talk, their hard work and simple life,
their energy, vitality and sincerity, they were a refreshing contrast to the
world of the Kuomintang. That was their chief charm. In the absence of war effort
by the Central Government especially after ICHIGO (new Japanese offensive), it
began to be taken for granted by Americans that the United States would have to
cooperate with the Communists. As soldiers they looked useful. They were ‘better
men physically,’ as General Dorn later testified, ‘better fed, better clothed .
. .and with better morale than the Nationalist troops.’ Their leaders on the
whole appeared more able, less corrupt, fundamentally stronger men than those
of the Kuomintang.
. .
. . .
. .
To the Americans and many of the Chinese who had fought with him – if not the
Fourteenth Air Force which rejoiced at the news- the recall of General Stilwell
was a kind of closing, the visible signal that a great endeavor was over. The
effort had been made, and as some felt, wasted. If the man who had given it
impetus and direction was gone, pulled out without ceremony or recognition,
there seemed to many only futility in remaining. The feeling was summarized in
a letter from Dorn to Bergin written from the Salween front. He explained that
he could not leave because he felt it would be wrong to desert the Chinese and
Americans serving under him in the unfinished campaign but, he wrote, ‘The more
I think of it the more hopeless the future looks. Everything has always been ‘in
the future’ and now there isn’t any . . .I have always believed, even in the
usual mess, that we could accomplish things here. Now I do not . ..’
In Washington, with the presidential campaign in its final week, Stilwell’s
return was awaited with extreme nervousness. ‘I foresee an infinite amount of
trouble,’ Stimson wrote ‘Stilwell’s success has made him very popular with the
American people.’ The election campaign had been in Roosevelt’s opinion ‘the
dirtiest in history’ and it was likely enough that a popular hero’s recall would
provoke charges of skullduggery. Blowing with the advanced winds of the cold war,
the Republican candidate, Governor Dewey, was proclaiming in last-minute
orations that Communists has seized control
of the New Deal. While no real doubt was felt in the President’s circle that he
would defeat Dewey, the press predicted a close result and Roosevelt wanted as
strong a mandate as he could get.
The long-delayed ‘bursting of a great illusion . . .the long delayed washday for
China’s dirty linen’ began in a front-page story in the Times on October 31 along with the inevitable question: ‘why the
American public had no been informed ( for which up until then the Times itself was largely responsible!)
FDR answered the press in the ‘blandest
ways possible’ while top Brass did everything possible to keep the returned Stilwell
out of sight and away from the press. . . .
Stilwell had always believed that what he called the phony propaganda about
China was his worst enemy and at peaks of frustration asked himself, ‘what will
happen when the American public learns the truth’ Nothing happened. Official
policy continued to flow on the channel it had carved out for itself.’
