Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

In Brereton’s plane with the Persian rug he flew to Delhi and fame on May 24. Followed from the airport to the Imperial Hotel (whose telegraphic address, he noted, was “Comfort”) by a crowd of newspapermen, he agreed to hold a press conference. After an hour’s questions and answers about the campaign in which he stressed Japanese air superiority as the most damaging factor, he concluded with one of the historic statements of the war: “I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.” The impact of the words was clean and hard. Stilwell’s honesty cut through the pap and plush prose of Army public relations, as the San Francisco Chronicle recalled at a later time, like “a sharp salt wind.” The New York Times in a lead editorial stated that Churchill and Roosevelt, for all their magnificent rhetoric, “each of them could learn something from General Stilwell,” and lesser officialdom could heed him “both as to diction and as to policy.” His statement became synonymous with his name, quoted thereafter every time he made news. He had chosen to do a simple thing: tell the public the truth.