Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Fillers repeatedly promised by the War Ministry, according to a definite schedule negotiated with Stilwell, never appeared, or straggled in prodded by bayonets in such sorry shape that it required a special program of five or six weeks with three meals a day, and mainly sleep and short walks the first week, to make them fit for duty. On the way to the depots recruits were not fed; they lived on what they could snatch from the villages at gun point, adding to the anger and misery of the country people. Surplus drafts were always ordered on the basis of expected loss. “Ho expects one third of replacements to die or desert en route,” Stilwell wrote. “And he calmly accepts the situation.” The rate of loss by death or desertion of all Chinese conscripts in 1943 was 44 percent, or 750,000 out of a total of 1,670,000—a “terrible indictment of China’s leaders.”