“Isn’t Manchuria a spectacle?” Stilwell wrote. Then followed the comment about Marshall, and then the sentence, “It makes me itch to throw down my shovel and get over there and shoulder a rifle with Chu Teh.”*1 The itch represented for Stilwell, as for so many others, an inclination toward the Chinese Communists that was simply the obverse of disgust with the Kuomintang. His casual remark tossed off in a private letter was seized upon by extremists of both left and right and made the foundation of a marvelous ideological structure purporting to demonstrate his allegiance to Yenan.
