The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  Stilwell kept pressing to get Chiang to commit to a campaign to reconquer Burma. This became his abiding ambition in Chungking. On 19 July he submitted a three-point plan, which envisaged a land offensive by 20–30 Chinese divisions and the opening of Rangoon to shipping, by which means the generalissimo could receive an extra 30,000 tons of supplies. Stilwell called this the X-Y plan, for he had in mind a two-pronged invasion, with X-force invading from India and Y-force operating from Kunming in Yunnan.27 The third element was a British landing at Rangoon in concert with the Chinese, once they had reasserted naval control in the Bay of Bengal and retaken the Andaman islands. Curiously, and quite independently of Stilwell, the British chiefs of staff were at that very moment considering the recapture of Rangoon in an operation to be codenamed ANAKIM. But this project was largely chimerical, for it was scheduled for November, whereas Wavell had warned the War Cabinet that he would not have built up the necessary forces, and especially airpower, by that time. Besides, the chiefs of staff made ANAKIM contingent on developments in other theatres, especially the Middle East, gave it a very low priority and then added the near-impossible proviso that all depended on Japan’s being drawn into a war with the Soviet Union.28 Chiang’s immediate response was to stall; he hoped that the Lauchlin Currie mission might lead to Stilwell’s recall. He refused to reply to Stilwell’s memos or requests for interview. In his diary Stilwell fumed at the stupidity of an uneducated and friendless man and said that Madame would make a more effective leader if she was generalissimo. He concluded: ‘This is the most dreary type of maneuvring I’ve ever done, trying to guide and influence a stubborn, ignorant, prejudiced, conceited despot who never hears the truth except from me and finds it hard to believe.’29 Lauchlin Currie duly arrived, his talks with Chiang went well, and the generalissimo was thereby encouraged to another piece of machiavellianism. On 1 August Chiang finally replied to Stilwell and accepted his ideas for an offensive, subject to two conditions. One was full and effective British cooperation, and the other was the support of a proper air force. What Currie had revealed to him had made it clear that the British would not be attempting to retake Burma in the near future and Stilwell’s ideas did not have top priority in Washington. This meant Chiang could accept the idea of an offensive, knowing it would never come to pass.30

  Chiang was initially buoyed by the visit of Lauchlin Currie, a Canadian-born economist who had risen fast during the New Deal to become one of FDR’s ‘Young Turks’. He would later become semi-famous through being suspected of being a Soviet spy, and had to spend the last 40 years of his life in exile in Colombia. He had been to China the year before on a dual mission, trying to expedite the Flying Tigers and attempting (futilely) to reconcile Chiang and the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung.31 An arrogant ‘know-all’ on China, Currie was easily duped by Chiang, who pressed either for Stilwell’s recall or the separation of Lend-Lease adminstration from his powers. Chiang was very pleased with the way he had gulled Currie, but when the envoy returned to Washington, the generalissimo’s hopes and plans unravelled. Influenced by Currie’s report, which ascribed most of the problems in Sino-American relations to the personality clash between Chiang and Stilwell, FDR toyed with the idea of replacing Stilwell immediately. But Marshall and Stimson would have none of it and told the President forthrightly that Stilwell was unquestionably the right man for the job. Marshall, who knew the true picture from his signals to Stilwell, summoned Chiang’s ambassador and told him brusquely that all his master’s machinations were in vain, for even if Stilwell himself was replaced, US policy on Lend-Lease would remain the same. He followed up with a memorandum to this effect.32 The slippery T.V. Soong doctored this, expurgating everything negative, and sent it on to Chungking. It took another two years for FDR to realise that Soong applied this treatment to all his correspondence with Chiang. Yet Marshall suspected the ambassador was not to be trusted and sent on the original to Gauss in Chungking for transmission to the generalissimo. When Chiang saw Marshall’s original, he was outraged and insulted, having suffered the most massive loss of face. Stilwell recorded on 1 August: ‘Snafu with Peanut. He’s having a hell of a time with his face.’33 The trio of Marshall, Stilwell and Gauss never had any illusions about the Kuomintang and its illustrious leader, which was why in later years they became marked men in the eyes of the McCarthyite ‘China lobby’.34

  By this time Stilwell’s thinking on China had advanced well beyond his visceral dislike of Chiang, who now seemed like a particularly sickly icing on top of a rotten cake. He raged that Washington seemed to condone the most barefaced corruption and profiteering. A particular Kuomintang scam was the so-called ‘pegged rate’. When the United States imported from China it had to pay in Chinese currency, which was pegged at a ludicrously high artificial rate against the dollar. This allowed Chinese profiteers to pocket the difference between the pegged rate and the true market rate; there were times when the pegged rate was 20 times the value of the market rate.35 The entire rotten edifice of the KMT meant that Chiang would never countenance a disciplined army, as this might come under a new commander and challenge his rule, and sacking incompetent commanders meant removing most of those who owed him favours or were beholden to him. Above all else, Chiang was always more concerned about Mao and the Communists than about the Japanese. As Stilwell noted: ‘Chiang would prefer to see Germany win than to end up with a powerful Russia at his door, backing up the 18th Army Group [the Chinese Communists].’36 As for the Communists, Stilwell sometimes expressed the wish that he could have them at his side as combatants, for at least they were genuinely committed to fighting and killing the Japanese. In his clear-headed analysis of Nationalist China, Stilwell was at one with Clarence Gauss, who in his own quiet way hammered away in his diplomatic dispatches at the terminal sickness of the KMT and the inadequacy of Chiang. Neither man could ever understand how, in a war supposedly waged to rid the world of fascism, the United States could not just aid and abet an openly fascistic regime but almost treat it as most favoured nation.37 Stilwell deplored the stupid US propaganda about a ‘gallant ally’ when the alleged gallant ally was simply taking his country to the cleaners. He was disgusted with the way Americans had been ‘forced into a partnership with a gang of fascists under a one-party government similar in many respects to our German enemy … there is sympathy here for the Nazis. Same type of government, same outlook, same gangsterism (except that the Kuomintang is incompetent) … Chiang is not taking a single step forward or doing anything to improve the position of China.’38

  Disillusioned as he was, Stilwell was also in poor health, with bad eyesight (he was blind in one eye), jaundice and worms to contend with. There were continual Japanese air raids over Chungking. Additionally, he had just received news of his mother’s death in the USA. Finally there came a ray of light. It seemed that Wavell had been strong-armed into approving Stilwell’s training camp for Chinese troops in India. With Chiang having already given his approval (albeit for machiavellian motives), the way was now clear for Stilwell to return to India and escape the miasma of Chungking. Marshall told him that the British did not want to use the Chinese in the reconquest of China, fearing the possible effect on Indian and other Asian nationals, but that pressure from Washington had finally done the trick.39 Stilwell accordingly prepared to fly to India for a month. The Chiangs gave him a farewell dinner, at which the generalissimo was bland and affable. Having concluded that confrontation with Stilwell was pointless, he contented himself with vapid remarks about how Chinese psychology was different from that of the West and could never be understood by Westerners. Stilwell found greater consolation from the company of Madame and her two sisters, Madame Kung and Madame Sun Yatsen. Always ambivalent about Madame – Stilwell considered she was a ‘power-devil’ who wished she was a man – by now he had no great opinion of her intelligence, despite his earlier praise, and noted particularly how she accepted any old rumour as fact, without testing or verifying anything. Allied to this was a tenden
cy to shoot from the hip: to take decisions first and consider the reasons for them later. He liked her sisters better. ‘Madame Sun is the most simpatica of the three women, and probably the deepest. She is most responsive and likeable, quiet and poised, but misses nothing, would wear well.’40 Stilwell was a shrewd judge. Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) had always been sympathetic to the Communists and lived in Moscow in the 1930s. After a temporary reconciliation with Chiang and the KMT during the war with Japan (1937–45), she threw in her lot with Mao and became (after 1949) the great female figure of the Chinese people’s republic.41

  Next it was on to Stilwell’s battered DC-3, with his regular pilot Captain Emmet Theissen, for another 2,200-mile journey to Delhi via the Hump and Assam. As more and more American fliers had to make the perilous run over the Himalayas, the Hump came to be known as ‘the Skyway to Hell’ and flying it as ‘Operation Vomit’ or ‘the Aluminium Trail’, from the number of crashed planes. The worst peril in the Hump was the banks of cumulonimbus clouds, which could reach a height of 25,000 feet. Mired in these, pilots spoke of being tossed about like an egg in a tin. It was difficult and often impossible to control the plane in these circumstances, so crashes into the mountainside were frequent.42 Even when Stilwell got safely through this and proceeded to Assam from Kunming, he still had to reckon on the fact that ditching meant almost certain death. There were no emergency airstrips, only paddy fields and jungle into which a stricken plane would disappear without trace. Stilwell and Theissen simply hoped for the best, flying in all weathers, fair and foul, without radio aids or military security. The travails of this particular trip were even greater, for even when he had completed the 2,000-plus miles to Delhi, Stilwell had to fly another 500 miles from Delhi to the training ground at Ramgarh in Bihar province or another 700 if he wished to visit the chief Lend-Lease supply port at Karachi. It was yet another ordeal that would have taxed a man half his age. Leaving on 7 August, he flew to Delhi, then on to Karachi on the 12th, back to Delhi and then on to Ramgarh on 16 August. India was then at the height of the ‘Quit India’ insurgency, but on top of this there was severe flooding in the whole of the north. Ramgarh itself was no picnic: Stilwell reported to his wife that tigers prowled the artillery range at night.43

  Stilwell had always felt that, man for man, the Chinese soldier was a superb fighting instrument. It was the useless officers, lack of morale, indiscipline and corruption that were the problem. In China, under Chiang’s watchful eye, there was nothing he could do about any of that, except to intrigue and give discreet backing to the more enlightened clique of officers, which included his protégé General Ch’en Ch’eng. Here in Ramgarh he was a free agent and he could introduce genuine and radical reforms. The first thing was to reform the organisation of the Chinese army, which was responsible for much of the blinkered mindset among its generals. Among Chiang’s many eccentricities was a quasi-Confucian obsession with triads. So, he had three million men organised into 300 divisions; each division had three regiments; there were three divisions to an army and three armies to a group army.44 When the Chinese had entered Burma, Chiang had ordered it divided into 12 distinct war zones, each with a virtually independent command, so that the Japanese could never eliminate more than a small part of his army. Three group armies were then assigned to each of the war zones. There was no uniformity of arms and materiel in the armies, as Chiang had ‘pets’ among his divisions, which he favoured hugely with special issues of food, arms and ammunition. Of the 300 divisions, 40 per cent were under strength, but since army pay was disbursed en bloc to the officers commanding the divisions, who naturally enough pocketed most of the payroll for themselves, the commanding officers continued to draw pay for the full strength – payroll padding with a vengeance. The upshot of this corrupt system was that officers got rich – some of them even sold their arms on the open market and traded overtly with the Japanese for their own enrichment – while their men died of malaria, dysentery and cholera. One general (Lan Yang) decreed that all two-wheeled carts must be equipped with rubber tyres, then sold off the ‘inadequate’ tyres he had previously confiscated; he then capped the exploit by taxing all carts with rubber tyres.45 The block payment system actually made it a matter of self-interest for generals to keep their divisions under strength, for otherwise their ‘profit margins’ would be cut. As for those who were recruited, these men were secured mainly by press gang, with those who could afford it buying their way out of the draft. Not surprisingly, the desertion rates were astronomical – some 44 per cent in 1943, or 750,000 out of 1,670,000 recruited. In the 8th Division of the 8th Army (thought to be one of the better units), 6,000 men out of 11,000 disappeared, either through death or desertion, in 1942.46

  Stilwell wanted to train an entirely new army, where all this misery and corruption would be a thing of the past. He began with the problem of sickness. Since losses through disease and malnutrition ran at about 40 per cent annually in Chiang’s army, this meant a 7,000-strong division would need 3,000 new recruits to maintain its strength. He did not find them. Out of eight million troops recruited in the war years, one in every two could not be accounted for, having either deserted or died from non-battle reasons; an incredible 500,000 actually deserted to the Japanese.47 Epidemics of dysentery, smallpox, typhus and relapsing fever swept through the ranks, all exacerbated by virtually non-existent medical care, hygiene and sanitation. ‘The reason for digging latrines was not understood; fuel for boiling water was just another expense.’48 Such military hospitals as existed were understaffed and ill-equipped. Everyone seemed to think that since China had limitless manpower, a high wastage level could be tolerated, but the reality was that if Chiang kept his huge army and at the same time fed his people adequately, the manpower base was not large enough for both. Stilwell began tackling the problem of disease and desertion by a tripartite approach of drugs, good diet and regular pay. All the Chinese at Ramgarh were vaccinated against cholera, typhoid and smallpox and fed three good meals a day – which produced an average weight gain of 21 pounds in three months. They were also properly equipped and outfitted, so that the previously starving and ragged soldiers were transformed. Stilwell’s reforms produced their own black comedy moments, as when Chiang’s generals began sending men to be trained at Ramgarh stark naked or clad only in shorts (many died of cold in the planes en route). Chiang and his cynical henchmen reckoned that it was stupid to clothe soldiers if the USA was going to provide them with a new uniform anyway.49 Yet it would be wrong to insinuate the idea that Ramgarh was some kind of Shangri-La. Stilwell’s reforms engendered new and acute cross-cultural problems. All training was done by American officers and instructors, but they could not lord it over their trainees as over home-grown GIs, and many were resentful. The Chinese officer class was outraged by the financial reform, whereby each man was paid on the parade ground after stepping forward and being identified, as in the American army. This cut out all the officers’ chances for graft and corruption. On the other hand, Stilwell alienated many of his own officers by his order that Americans were not to lay hands on the Chinese, no matter how insubordinate, nor (contradictorily) to intervene if Chinese officers ordered draconian punishment for their own men. The worst clashes and tensions between Chinese and Americans came about because Stilwell was determined to avoid the British Empire pattern of white officers and native troops. This handed the initiative to the Chinese officers, who were in competition and often conflict with Stilwell’s US liaison officers (the equivalent of political commissars).50

  Some of the problems Stilwell encountered at Ramgarh were an inevitable consequence of the way the Kuomintang army was run. The 11 armies he hoped to mould into 30 crack divisions turned out to be short of 185,000 men (because of both desertion and payroll padding). They had only 50 per cent of the arms they were supposed to have, and half of those weapons were useless for lack of parts.51 Nevertheless, Stilwell worked tirelessly to ensure that he would have real, creditable divisions to his name
by 1943. Slim, based at Ranchi, just 40 miles away, often had occasion to observe the training of Stilwell’s New Model Army and commented as follows:

  Stilwell, indomitable as ever, planned to raise on this nucleus a strong, well-equipped Chinese force of several divisions that would re-enter Northern Burma and open a road to China. Only Stilwell believed that was both possible and worth the resources it would demand. The Chinese themselves were by no means enthusiastically cooperative; the Indian government, not without justification, felt considerable apprehension at the prospect of thousands of Chinese about the countryside … Stilwell was magnificent. He forced Chiang Kai-shek to provide the men; he persuaded India to accept a large Chinese force and the British to pay for it, accommodate, feed, and clothe it. … The two Chinese divisions were reconstituted. Good food, medical care, and regular pay achieved wonders. I have never seen men recover condition as quickly as those Chinese soldiers … I was very impressed by the rapid progress of the infantry who were converted to artillery, and who in an astonishingly short time were turned into serviceable pack batteries. No doubt they were apt pupils, but the major credit went to their teachers, under Colonel Sliney, one of the best artillery instructors any army has produced. Everywhere was Stilwell, urging, leading, driving.52

  Slim omitted to mention the very considerable tensions between some Americans, who regarded the Chinese as craven ‘slopeys’, and the Chinese, who saw the Westerners as arrogant barbarians. Imbued with the culture of defence and non-engagement, the Chinese regarded as realism what the Americans saw as cowardice. The lack of adequate Chinese-speakers was another problem at Ramgarh. American instructors liked to teach in a populist way, using movies and Disney cartoons, but now had to find other methods. The man so highly praised by Slim, Colonel G.W. Sliney, summed it up thus: ‘Thank God we don’t speak Chinese and we don’t have interpreters. We demonstrate and they copy. They are the greatest mimics in the world and are learning very fast.’53