Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

“You will hear a lot of talk,” General Stilwell wrote for the graduating class of West Point in 1945, “about how this or that generation messed things up and got us into war. What nonsense. All living generations are responsible for what we do and all dead ones as well.”

He was in fact as fragile as steel wire.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

The humanities were confined to one course in history and one in English language, literature and composition combined. Otherwise the cadet took French and Spanish, math, chemistry, law and “natural philosophy” (which meant a smattering of the physical sciences), plus his military subjects. In addition to drill regulations, these were ordnance and gunnery, surveying, fortifications, tactics and two years of drawing which included topography and plotting of surveys, shades and shadows, linear perspective, theory of color and laying of tints, field reconnaissance contouring, history of cartography, engineering and ordnance drawing, freehand landscape and enough more to equip a Leonardo.

“There shall be no discussion of politics” was a bylaw of the West Point Association of Graduates. Army personnel, according to the Military Services Journal, were “scarcely conscious” of their right to vote and rarely exercised it.

To organize a General Staff in the European sense with plans drawn for mobilization and campaigns “takes thirty years,” a French general told Pershing. “It never took America thirty years to do anything,” Pershing snapped.

“clean clothes, no wind, short hours, agony over quickly, back for lunch.”

Glowing from a sense of being liked and appreciated, Stilwell replied in slangy and fluent French, thanking them for all he had learned and promising that among all the emmerdement awaiting him at Chaumont he would look back to his good friends of the XVIIth “with all the pleasure in the world.”

Springless covered Peking carts bumped over the cobblestones, camels from the northwest moved with the haughty dignity of the desert, Buddhist priests in saffron robes stood among the red columns of the Lama Temple, dust storms blowing off the plains periodically tortured the capital and its residents. Outside the walls the plain stretched away to the Summer Palace and the Western Hills where the Monastery of the Azure Cloud and other temples were sheltered by ancient pines. From the Hill of the Jade Fountain springs flowed down to fill the lakes and moats of the Forbidden City.

even in decline the people of Sian devised pleasures. They tied bamboo whistles of varying pitch to the tail feathers of pigeons so that when circling in hundreds overhead the birds made the sound of a flying pipe organ.

On July 9, 1923, he sailed with his family for home, four months after his fortieth birthday. “Here it is,” he wrote on that day, “middle-aged man now.”

The press as a whole (inevitably excepting the Chicago Tribune) refused to respond to the Red scare. “Chiang’s army is as red as Washington’s at Valley Forge,” stated the New York World, which, considering the presence of the Communists, was an understatement. Led by predisposition in China’s favor, American public opinion for the first time in history was moved to minimize rather than inflate the Red menace.

Stilwell was always writing things down. In addition to diary, letters, essays and sketches, he wrote what he called “Random Notes” or “Odds and Ends” on sheets or scraps of paper dealing with thoughts, dreams, stray ideas, jokes, anecdotes, remarks, quotations or anything that was passing through his constantly ticking mind. A characteristic scrap, verbatim and in entirety, reads, Henri Fabre’s insect study History of the eel History of the bowler hat What to do with Waterloo Tall men and tall houses least furnished in upper stories—Bacon Well’s “outline of the arts” “Fix Bayonets”

Through the remaining months of 1931 Stimson acted in the hope that “mobilization of public opinion against Japan” backed by threat of economic sanctions could strengthen the parliamentary parties and lead to the conclusive curbing of the military. Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century it was always this beckoning figure of the liberal thin man inside the Japanese body politic and the hope of his reemergence that lured American policy.

Villagers said the Japanese had offered to let the troops surrender if they gave up their arms, and when they emerged from the village, mowed them down with machine guns and grenades.

At the end of November 1937 Carlson took off for Yenan in Shensi to find out how real were the legends of the Communists’ guerilla warfare against the Japanese. As evidence he sent the President captured Japanese documents, a diary and a fur-lined uniform. Later when he came inevitably to write a book his point of view appeared in the title he gave to his chapter on Yenan, “China’s Fountainhead of Liberalism.” His views, expressed more floridly in the book than to the President, typified one kind of American approach to China. He had undertaken the journey, he told the Governor of Shensi, “From the heart…in the name of liberty.” In his own country people regarded liberty and equality as “inalienable rights” and he had observed “this same love of liberty and equality” in China, “the same spirit which had animated our own ancestors at Lexington, Trenton and Valley Forge.” This was China filtered through the rhetoric of the American dream, not necessarily the most appropriate framework for policy in Asia.

Worried by the trend the President determined on a speech emphasizing international cooperation. At Chicago on October 5 Roosevelt suggested a collective “quarantine” of the forces breeding “international anarchy” whom he likened to the carriers of a disease. The result was a historic boomerang. Declaring that the President was “pointing” the people down the road to war, six major pacifist organizations launched a joint campaign for 25 million signatures to “Keep America Out of War.” The A. F. of L. disapproved the speech, Representative Fish proposed the President’s impeachment and a poll of Congress showed two to one against joining the League of Nations in collective action in the Far East. “It’s a terrible thing,” the President said to a friend, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.”

The crucial question of the era was presenting itself again: when does resistance to wrong become a national interest?

With the rail routes from Peiping blocked by the battle front, the journey now took eight days, first by sea around the Shantung peninsula, then via the Lunghai line to Chengchow, then southbound to Hankow. Already “quite fed up with everything and everybody,” as Win wrote to her daughters, Stilwell boarded the train at Hsuchow in a swarm of refugees: “13 occupants in 8 seats, didn’t dare get up to go to the toilet. Cold…no food, no water.” After two days and two nights he drank the cold tea from a sleeping passenger’s teapot, for the first moisture in 44 hours.

For the next eight months Hankow (or, in its triple character, Wuhan) was the capital of unoccupied China. The Generalissimo had his headquarters across the river in Wuchang on the south bank. In Hankow itself the foreign missions crowded into the Western-style buildings of the Concessions facing the river where the U.S.S. Luzon, flagship of the Yangtze patrol, lay at anchor. The city was a chaos of thousands of people rushing around “like ants on a hot rock,” in Stilwell’s phase: officials, hangers-on, journalists, profiteers, refugees, welfare committees and all the hectic influx of war. Devotion and energy mixed with laxity and indifference.

Much of the photographic evidence that later reached newspapers abroad came from snapshots taken by the Japanese themselves which they gave for developing to ordinary camera shops in Shanghai, whence copies made their way to the correspondents.

The House immediately took up the Ludlow Resolution requiring a national referendum before a declaration of war could become effective. Previously its sponsor had been unable to collect the necessary number of signatures to bring the measure before a Committee of the Whole. Two days after the sinking of the Panay he had more than enough and the resolution was later defeated only after heavy pressure by the Administration and only by 21 votes.

Hankow, “the bunghole of creation.”

Since Stilwell had officially asked for permission to visit the front from the Foreign Minister, he could not “slide out” to the front unofficially, as Captain Dorn had discovered to be the best method.

Chou En-lai, second to Mao in the Communist hierarchy and its representative in Hankow, and with Yeh Chien-ying, the Communist Chief of Staff. He thought the Communists’ political demands for “liberation of military policy” and “mobilization of the masses” were “very vague—the usual slogans,” but personally, after visiting and dining with Chou En-lai and his entourage, he found them “uniformly frank, courteous, friendly and direct. In contrast to the fur-collared, spurred KMT new-style Napoleon—all pose and bumptiousness.” Handsome, cultivated and urbane, Chou En-lai was a favorite of foreigners. Yeh Chien-ying made the select category of “good egg, like most reds.” Talking to those intense and energetic men, pursuers of China’s old unsatisfied need of revolution and as yet uncorrupted by power, Stilwell realized the “wide chasm” between them and a man like General Liu. He felt sure that if China emerged from the war with Japan, “there will be trouble again internally.”

Making his way by train as far as Sian where he visited 8th Route Army headquarters, and from there to Lanchow by bus and truck, he hunted down clues, bribed employees of the Russian guest house for figures on arrivals, questioned sentries, police, bus drivers, innkeepers, servants, the Governor of Kansu and his secretaries, missionaries at Sian, a Tibetan interpreter, an automobile dealer, Chinese officers, student aviators and local Mongols. These

Another movement, a huge slow-motion upheaval, was relocating the working capacity of Free China to the west. A steady trudging toiling stream of people carried goods and equipment and themselves out of the area of the invader into the independent zone. Boats, trains, carts, pack animals and coolies, under repeated bombing, shared in the inland trek from Canton, Nanking, Hsuchow and other cities. Factory machinery, government records, university libraries, the contents of hospitals, arsenals and offices, were transported in boxes slung on shoulder poles or packed in sampans and pulled upstream by straining teams moving foot by foot over the rocks and roadless banks. In the age-old method of moving vessels up the rapids, the great-muscled coolies, hundreds to a load, bent double against the ropes, slowly hauled the burdens to the free land beyond the Yangtze gorges. A whole textile mill was packed into 380 junks of which a third sank in the rapids, were raised, repacked and started on their way again. Some factories were more than a year en route before renewing operation.

and enjoyed as a roommate an interesting rat he called the Engineer because of its dexterity in solving problems.

THE UNITED STATES ARMY that Stilwell returned to in September 1939 ranked, with Reserves, 19th among the world’s armed forces, after Portugal but ahead of Bulgaria.

Both President Roosevelt and former President Hoover made national radio speeches to calm what Roosevelt called the “calamity-howlers” and direct the fear toward useful ends. “There is no occasion for panic,” said Hoover; “there is need for speed.”

more apparent. The suddenly revealed feebleness of British positions was in the nature of empire which had hitherto not needed more than the show of power to rule. A gunboat here and there, the smart slap of rifles at drill on the Bund, a parade of scarlet uniforms, imposing bearded Sikhs as police, had sufficed to govern Asia without serious challenge.

Stilwell took the “same old tough climb” up 365 stone steps to the residence assigned

In this hour he found too a letter from Chiang Kai-shek ordering the issue of a watermelon to every four men. Nothing in the course of Stilwell’s theater command was to have a more baleful effect. Coming at the darkest time in Allied fortunes, when Burma was crashing about his ears—due in large part, as he believed, to the G–mo’s other interferences—the watermelon order clinched his contempt for Chiang Kai-shek, and since this ultimately became known, it in turn angered the Generalissimo. The mutual effect was far-reaching.

To the War Department via Chungking Stilwell did not admit the worst since they could not help anyway. “We are armed have food and map and are now on foot 50 miles west of Indaw. No occasion for worry. Chinese troops coming to India this general route….Believe this is probably our last message for a while. Cheerio. Stilwell.” The radio was then smashed with an axe and codes and file copies burned.

Standing on a truck at daylight to address the company, Stilwell explained the plan of march and laid down his rules. All food was to be pooled and all personal belongings discarded except for what each person could carry in addition to weapon and ammunition. A journey of some 140 miles lay ahead with a river and mountain range to cross. The pass lay at 7,000 feet. They must make 14 miles a day; any slowing of progress would require more food than they had and would risk being caught by the rains. He warned that the party could only survive through discipline. Anyone who did not wish to accept his orders could leave now with a week’s rations and make his own way. He looked around; no one moved. “By the time we get out of here,” he finished, “many of you will hate my guts but I’ll tell you one thing: you’ll all get out.” At the head of the column he set the pace at the regulation Army rate of 105 steps a minute. The ghost of General Castner walked with him but Stilwell himself was the only veteran of those long-ago forced marches of the 15th Infantry.

A bomber flew over, passed up-river, circled and came back. Everyone cowered; then, as they saw the red and blue markings of the RAF, broke into cheers and frantic waving. Circling in three low sweeps, the plane opened its bomb bays to drop food sacks on the beach. Half-naked dark mountain people rushed from the jungle to seize the first drops before the raft contingent, howling with wrath, could reach the banks and collect the rest. The drop included a sack of medical supplies enabling Colonel Williams to start quinine doses. This sudden recognition from outside of their plight raised hopes that rescue would be waiting at Homalin.

except for one who was too ill with malaria to sit a pony and had to be carried in a sedan chair by shifts of bearers. The “cream puffs” and “sissies” were doing better and the unfaltering nurses sang Christian hymns and American popular songs. “What a picture…Chinese soldiers, Burmese girls, Americans and Limeys, all in the brook washing and shaving and soaking feet.” A local head man in a brilliant red blanket presented Stilwell with a goat and welcoming Nagas offered rice wine and chickens.

Imphal was reached on May 20. Through careful planning and relentless leadership Stilwell had brought his party out without a single person missing—the only group, military or civilian, to reach India without loss of life. Many of those who walked out under his command did hate his guts but all 114 knew they owed him their lives. He came out, reported a correspondent, “looking like the wrath of God and cursing like a fallen angel.” He had lost 20 pounds. His already spare frame was worn down to a minimum, his hands trembled, his skin was yellowish with jaundice, his eyes sunk in their sockets. Dorn had lost 32 pounds, Colonel Holcombe, one of those invalided most of the way, was “emaciated, resembles Gandhi.”

Desk editors in America, on the patriotic assumption that all Chinese were under Stilwell’s command, presented these despatches to their readers under such headlines as “INVADING JAP FORCE CRUSHED BY STILWELL,” or on May 11, “STILWELL’S CHINA TROOPS TRAP JAPS, Invasion Army in Full Retreat. Enemy Cut Off as ‘Uncle Joe’ Slams China’s Back Door. Bulletin!!!” On that day Uncle Joe was on a raft on the Uyu.

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.

He had made the gesture to please the United States and to enhance China’s claim to Lend-Lease and in any event had not intended it to be real. Stilwell’s command was a case of yu ming wu shih, “having the name without the reality,” as distinguished from yu shih wu ming, “reality without the name.”

To Chiang Kai-shek and Madame the thesis was compelling. If 500 combat planes and 100 transports and “full authority” for Chennault could win the war, there was no need to reform the army and disturb the dangerously delicate balance of cliques and persons and war zone commanders which constituted Chiang’s teetering seat of power. Air power required no Chinese effort; besides, it looked so easy.

Life was not enjoyable during these months. When jaundice was succeeded by “gut ache,” finally diagnosed as worms in his system, he found himself taking eight different medicines in 36 hours and recording afterwards, to his astonishment, “feeling better!” He was saddened by news of the death of his mother in June and worried by trouble with his eyesight which had been poor for years, depending almost entirely on the use of one eye. The discomfort of air raids and the heat of Chungking were unpleasant and he thought longingly of Carmel and his family. He was reassured by a message from Marshall and Stimson promising that if efforts to secure more active cooperation from the Generalissimo proved unsuccessful, they would transfer him to another theater where he could be more useful.

American aid to China, whatever its military intent, was in effect going to a regime, not to a war effort.

As chief of a system without an exit, he was, as Stilwell wrote, “in a hell of a fix.”

“A little gnome-like man,” as Marshall later recalled, came into his office, curled one leg under him and said the President wanted Stilwell relieved. “He does, does he?” said Marshall. Currie replied yes, he did. “Is he sending you around to tell me?” asked Marshall. Currie agreed he was. “How long were you in China?” asked Marshall. “Three weeks, Sir,” replied Currie, and, facing the bleak silence of the Chief of Staff, departed.

Because of the language barrier and paucity of interpreters, training was largely by demonstration. The Chinese knack for imitation made it effective. “Thank God we don’t speak Chinese and don’t have enough interpreters,” said General Sliney. “We demonstrate and they copy. They are the greatest mimics in the world and are learning very, very fast.” Peasants from the fields who had never seen a machine mastered the use of the pack howitzer and machine gun in a week and learned with delight to operate field telephones and radios. Later, in combat, individuals were decorated, the first decorations Chinese enlisted men had ever received. “The limies are watching us with considerable interest,” Stilwell wrote to Win. “It’s something brand new to them to see colonels actually working.”

Chinese officers at Ramgarh were trained in tactics and combat techniques and the men in the handling of rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket-launchers, antitank guns and other equipment for specialized combat duties. After mastering the weapons they were given an eight-day course in jungle warfare. The six-week artillery course taught the handling of pack artillery and the use of howitzers and assault guns in jungle conditions. Line officers and noncoms were trained in field sanitation and medical care and colonels and generals of the Thirty Division program were flown to Ramgarh for a six-week staff and command course modeled on the wartime course at Leavenworth.

Resident correspondents were accustomed to such tours of “cold battlefields” where they were regularly shown stacks of Japanese guns, helmets and other equipment. To test the theory that the material was transferred from one place to another for their benefit, one newspaperman claimed he had scratched his initials on a helmet and saw it again a few months later on another tour.

The aviator’s view of China was expressed by Scott when he wrote that “Sian is to the north of Kunming,” which was information about as helpful as saying that Boston is to the north of Mexico City.