The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  The collective denial of the Roosevelt administration about the reality of Chiang’s regime received a bad jolt in May when the well-known journalist Theodore White blew the lid off the Kuomintang in an article in Life. Describing the KMT as ‘a corrupt political clique that combines some of the worst features of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition’, he argued that it was madness to give the regime a ‘prolonged kiss of death’ by continuing to prop it up.23 This was an open endorsement of what Stilwell had been saying for years. Perhaps encouraged by the new mood in the USA, from the beginning of September onwards Stilwell’s diaries became full of sombre reflections on the nature of the Kuomintang and its leader. Why were the Allies fighting the Nazis in Europe, with their one-party system, use of terror and the Gestapo, yet backing to the hilt the selfsame fascist system in China? Why had Roosevelt never demanded a quid pro quo from Chiang for the Lend-Lease supplies that flooded into his country? The choice between the Kuomintang and the Communists was a classic ‘no-brainer’, the contrast between corruption, neglect, chaos, heavy taxation, hoarding, the black market and trading with the enemy on the one side, and the reduction of taxes, rent and interest and an increase in production and the standard of living on the other. The Communists practised what they preached; the KMT utterances were mere meaningless words. Above all, there was the personality of the generalissimo. ‘I have never heard Chiang Kai-shek say a single thing that indicated gratitude to the President or to our country for the help we were extending to him. Invariably, when anything was promised he would want more. Invariably he would complain about the small amount of material that was being furnished. Always complaints about the vast amount going to Britain and the trickle to China … The cure for China’s trouble is the elimination of Chiang Kai-shek.’24 Even Stilwell’s promotion to de facto field marshal was problematical, for the Chinese army – or at least those portions that had not been trained at Ramgarh – was seriously deficient. On paper it contained 324 divisions plus another 60-odd specialist brigades and 89 so-called guerrilla units, which should have made it by far the most formidable army in the world. Unfortunately the paper strength masked the reality. Chinese divisions, supposed to be 10,000 men, rarely had more than 5,000, casualties were never replaced, all the officers were place men and political appointees, the troops were unpaid, unfed, sick and undernourished, training was non-existent and equipment antiquated or unserviceable, and there was no artillery, transport or medical corps worth the name. This was to say nothing of the fact that Chiang habitually kept at least 20 divisions as reserves, facing north to deal with the Communist menace, and refused to release them to any other theatre. Above all, Chinese culture itself worked against military prowess. Taoism taught one to go with the flow, accept fate and never take risks, for if you did nothing, you couldn’t be blamed for whatever happened.25

  In the privacy of his journal Stilwell took what comfort he could from Brit-bashing. Even when the Limeys tried to be accommodating, they managed only to be patronising. Mountbatten had told him that, as an American, he did not have to join in singing ‘God Save the King’ but he should at least stand up when the National Anthem was played. Stilwell took a sour view of this advice: ‘I don’t mind standing up. All I object to is 1) standing on my knees and 2) having my feet kicked out from under me when I do stand up.’26 Always obsessed with the view that the British did not pull their military weight and that the war in Asia was simply a device whereby American blood and treasure rescued the moribund British Empire, he oddly took up the discredited Wingate–Churchill line that the Indian army was a bloated bureaucracy of bullet-dodging loafers. Auchinleck had already refuted this, demonstrating that 400,000 was the maximum fighting strength of his army, not the one million confidently bruited by Wingate. Churchill in fact, with his lifelong contempt for the Indian army, tied himself into knots on this issue, both accepting the Wingate figure and then telling Auchinleck that he should slim down his army by about a million men.27 Most of the anti-Limey effusions were standard diatribe. ‘I see that the Limeys are going to rush to our rescue in the Pacific. Like hell. They are going to continue this fight with their mouths. Four or five old battleships will appear and about ten RAF planes will go to Australia but in twenty years the schoolbooks will be talking about “shoulder to shoulder” and “the Empire struck with all its might against the common enemy” and all that crap. The idea of course is to horn in at Hong Kong again, and our Booby [FDR] is sucked in.’28 The main enemy, of course, was always Mountbatten, who by this time was a positive bête noire for Stilwell. He was highly amused when a March of Time documentary entitled ‘Background Tokyo’ implied that the Americans were doing all the fighting in Burma and portrayed the Supreme Commander in a poor light as a mere playboy, with carefully edited footage showing him apparently being sycophantic to Madame Chiang.29 He was not so happy when the boot was on the other foot, and wrote in outrage to his wife: ‘Did you see Churchill’s speech about Louis’s great campaign in Burma? They apparently feel it necessary to pump a little prestige into him. Today’s news is that Eden announced that the “beloved” commander of the SEAC was in London. He didn’t tell me he was going so I suppose there is more skulduggery afoot.’30 This was a curious mirror-image version of Mountbatten’s paranoia. When Stilwell went to Chungking in September, Mountbatten imagined that he was stealing off to the Quebec conference; when Mountbatten went to Cairo, Stilwell imagined that he had gone to London. In fairness to Mountbatten, he was more meticulous about keeping his deputy informed than Stilwell was with him.31

  While Stilwell amused himself with these lucubrations, the great crisis with Chiang approached. Stilwell had told Marshall it was essential that FDR read the riot act. Marshall drafted a very stiff memo arguing that in the light of the Japanese I-CHIGO campaign, Stilwell had been right after all and Chiang and Chennault wrong. By now disillusioned with Chiang, Roosevelt signed it. His memorandum of 4 July 1944 has been described as ‘in effect a scorecard totting up Chennault’s failures and Stilwell’s triumphs’.32 After reminding the generalissimo that the future of Asia was at stake, he proceeded to an encomium of the Chief of Staff in China:

  While fully aware of your feelings regarding General Stilwell, nevertheless … I know of no other man who has the ability, the force and the determination to offset the disaster which now threatens China and our over-all plans for the conquest of Japan. I am promoting Stilwell to the rank of full general and I recommend for your most urgent consideration that you recall him from Burma and place him directly under you in command of all Chinese and American forces and that you charge him with full responsibility and authority for the coordination and direction of the operations required to stem the tide of the enemy’s advances.

  FDR signed off with a contemptuous dismissal of the Chiang–Chennault thesis of victory through airpower: ‘Please have in mind that it has clearly been demonstrated in Italy, in France, and in the Pacific that airpower alone cannot stop a determined enemy.’33 To make sure there would be no suppression, doctoring, bowdlerisation or spinning of this stark document, Marshall bypassed Soong and had the senior US permanent officer in Chungking, Major General Benjamin Ferris, deliver it in person, together with a translation by John Service, Stilwell’s political adviser. As has been well said, this thunderbolt called Chiang ‘the Peanut’ by implication.34 It certainly put the generalissimo on the spot for, as Barbara Tuchman has sagely remarked: ‘It can be said that regardless of Stilwell’s faults and offenses, even if he had the tongue of angels, the temperament of a saint and the professional charm of a Japanese geisha, the generalissimo would still have had no more intention of giving him command of his armed forces than of giving it to Mao Tse-tung.’35

  The Roosevelt memorandum constituted not so much a loss of face as a direct slap in the face. Chiang’s worst enemy had been promoted four-star general, one of only five in the entire US army (the others being Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower and ‘Hap’ Arnold). Fuming impotently – he knew
that any overt expression of anger might mean the severance of Lend-Lease – Chiang searched the arsenal of Chinese cunning for a riposte, and came up with a brilliant solution. His initial reaction was typical: stall, stall, stall.36 First, he claimed that ‘political limitations’ in the Chinese army would make it impossible for the moment to appoint a supreme commander with plenipotentiary powers. What that meant in fact was that, with Stilwell as a real commander, he, Chiang, would be unable to manipulate his generals. Then he played his ace. He asked FDR for a ‘mediator’ who would resolve the differences between him and Stilwell – in effect asking for a superior officer to be appointed above Stilwell.37 Amazingly, Roosevelt took the bait, and a sanguine Chiang moved in for the kill, intending to use the envoy to dilute the new system into meaninglessness. With Mountbatten requesting that Stilwell be transferred from SEAC to China, Wallace advocating his total recall and Chiang unwilling to grant him supreme military power in China, FDR fatally took his foot off the gas pedal and looked around for some sort of intermediate solution. Instead of reading the riot act to Chiang, he sent an emollient reply. The stupidity of this response should have been obvious, for it was only when the President had sent an ‘or else’ message and threatened to cut off Lend-Lease unless the generalissimo sent Y-force across the Salween that Chiang finally buckled. A disappointed Marshall was reduced to cabling Stilwell to ask feebly what parts of his command he might be prepared to give up. Yet by suggesting Sultan as the commander of US and Chinese forces in Burma with Wedemeyer as deputy commander, SEAC, at the very time Chiang was refusing Stilwell supreme command in China, Marshall was in effect proposing that Vinegar Joe be reduced to a cipher. That was not his personal intention but simply the logic of FDR’s appeasement of the anti-Stilwell faction.38

  On 23 July, encouraged by FDR’s conciliatory response, Chiang named four further conditions for accepting the American terms. He demanded that Stilwell be barred from commanding the Red Army in the field unless the Communists acknowledged him (Chiang) as the ruler of the Chinese state; that Stilwell command only those armies currently in the field against the Japanese and not those that were held in reserve; that Lend-Lease be entirely in the hands of the Chinese government; and that there should be a detailed protocol to define the limits of Stilwell’s powers vis-à-vis the generalissimo. It should have been obvious to everyone in Washington that Chiang was not negotiating seriously, but, incredibly, they allowed matters to drift. Vinegar Joe himself remained pessimistic that anything would change. As one of the Chinese generals sympathetic to him remarked: ‘We will only have real command in the field when all telephone lines to Chungking are cut’ or, as Stilwell himself put it a little later: ‘The cure for China’s trouble is the elimination of Chiang Kai-shek.’39 When Chiang asked him for an increase in Lend-Lease supply, he pounced, determined that the generalissimo and Chennault should not get away with the lies of the past, which FDR had endorsed; he wanted them out in the open. Blithely he replied that since Chiang had in the past asked that all US aid should go to Chennault and not Burma, the generalissimo should address his request to Chennault, who had just received a consignment of 12,000 tons. Stilwell had hoped that Chennault would be recalled in disgrace after I-CHIGO had revealed all his tenets about airpower as nonsense, but FDR had given too many hostages to fortune by his earlier praise of the Flying Tigers. In retaliation for the snub over Chennault and Lend-Lease, Chiang tried to open a second front in Washington through his foreign minister T.V. Soong. Their target was once again Harry Hopkins, the President’s ‘grey eminence’, who was known to be unsympathetic to Stilwell and to consider that relations with China would improve only when he was recalled.40 Chiang’s brother-in-law, H.H. K’ung, based in Washington, was the main conduit for these intrigues.

  On 9 August, nudged by Hopkins, FDR offered Chiang General Patrick Hurley as an intermediary and Chiang accepted with alacrity. Marshall, determined to keep one step ahead of Hopkins, was opposed to the very idea of an intermediary as an obvious cuttlefish tactic by Chiang, but hearing that Hopkins was going to offer one of his own ‘creatures’ to the President, he got in first by recommending Hurley, thought to be friendly to Stilwell. Patrick Hurley was a controversial and, by all accounts, highly dislikeable character. A man of the far right, he had been born in poverty in Oklahoma next to a Choctaw reservation, made a fortune as an attorney and been Secretary of War during the Hoover administration of 1928–32. Roosevelt used him as a ‘fixer’, and he had organised the American end of the Tehran conference in 1943 entirely to FDR’s satisfaction. Variously described as handsome, talkative, irascible, suave, worldly, vain, arrogant, ‘simple minded and Reaganesque before his time’ (and memorably by Theodore White as an ‘ignoramus’), Hurley was said once to have killed a fractious mule with a hammer. Later he revealed himself as a notable pro-Chiang figure, but in 1944 he was best known as a vituperative critic of the British Empire and European colonialism.41 Donald Nelson, his fellow intermediary, was a chemical engineer who had just resigned as chairman of the War Production Board. Doubtless groaning inwardly that yet another mission was to come out to have the wool pulled over its eyes by Chiang, Stilwell replied meekly to Marshall’s news that Hurley was visiting China yet again. Marshall stressed that no firm decision had yet been taken on the CBI theatre or Chiang’s demand for a political commissar and insisted that Hurley was a mere stopgap. In his reply, Stilwell even managed a joke with reference to his own nickname: ‘I would welcome the help of your candidate. It takes oil as well as vinegar to make good French dressing.’42

  Even while Hurley and Nelson were en route to India, on 23 August, Washington replied to Chiang’s four further conditions and rejected them all, except to say that Lend-Lease would shortly be removed from Stilwell’s control and the generalissimo would be informed of the new arrangements in due course. Marshall cabled Stilwell that the intended reforms in his theatre were now clearer. He would in future no longer be in charge of Lend-Lease for China, and would cease to be Mountbatten’s deputy. The Burma-India part of the CBI theatre would be hived off, and Stilwell would be supreme commander in China. Stilwell knew well enough how little that meant and accepted his obvious demotion with good grace, remarking that nothing could be worse than the present situation.43 All the top analysts in the State Department could see clearly that Chiang was stalling, hoping to sit out the war, fearful of American landings in his country and wishing Japan to be defeated outside his borders so that he did not have to use his reserves. The problem was that Roosevelt could never quite overcome his ingrained ‘China complex’ and the conviction that Chiang was an important player.44 On 30 August Stilwell left Kandy for Delhi, where he met Hurley and Nelson. Hurley at first seemed all Stilwell could wish for. His extrovert, rambunctious manner, not to mention his cowboy boots, convinced Stilwell that he was a no-nonsense down-to-earth and non-ideological fellow spirit. Hurley told him that Mountbatten had repeatedly tried to ditch him only to be blocked by FDR, and that Marshall was four-square behind him and appreciated all his difficulties.45 He did not of course tell him that Vice President Wallace, in order to get Chiang’s agreement for US envoys to visit Mao in Yenan, had gone out on a limb and promised him Stilwell’s dismissal in return – the true reason Chiang agreed to the so-called Dixie Mission.46 But Stilwell might have heeded the warning signs when Hurley told him that he understood Chiang’s cautious approach and declared that the British were even greater double-crossers than the Chinese: ‘The Limey reverse Lend-Lease,’ said Hurley, ‘is a racket. They refuse cost figures and are purposely gumming up the accounts so the snarl can never be untangled.’47 Perhaps because he was so impressed by the anti-Limey rhetoric, Stilwell did not pick up the ominously pro-Chiang subtext.

  The three men flew to Chungking and talks began. On 7 September Chiang saw Stilwell alone at 9.30 in the morning and tried to ‘soft soap’ him ahead of the plenary meeting with Hurley and Nelson at 11 a.m. He talked to Stilwell emolliently, appearing to accept that his co
mmand of all Chinese armies on FDR’s terms was already a settled thing. Stilwell was naturally suspicious and wrote: ‘Well, here it is … Now what do I do?’48 The issue of Lend-Lease was touched on at the later conference, but Stilwell pointed out that the fall of Myitkyina had changed the picture entirely; US planes could fly to Chungking without the interception of Japanese fighters, and therefore he expected the supplies to exceed anything Chiang would need. There was much truth in this. Supplies to Chungking increased from 29,000 tons in August and 30,000 in September to 35,000 in October and 39,000 in November. Stilwell did not fail to make the point that this breakthrough had not come about because of Chennault’s much-vaunted airpower but because of the heroic efforts of Stilwell’s infantry.49 Vinegar Joe did not attend all the conferences as he found them tedious and disingenuous. On the occasions he was absent, Chiang habitually complained that Stilwell was more powerful in China than he was, and instead of dismissing this as claptrap, Hurley listened sympathetically. When Vinegar Joe did attend he was both bored and disgusted: ‘One and a half hours of crap and nonsense. Wants to withdraw from Lungling, the crazy little bastard. So either X attacks in one week or he pulls it out. Usual cockeyed reasons and idiotic tactical and strategic conceptions. He is impossible.’50 At the various meetings, Chiang kept insisting that Lend-Lease had to be turned over to him to run, and even Hurley, absurdly sympathetic to the generalissimo, had to remind him that he was talking about American property. Yet Hurley was beginning to worry Stilwell by his constant conciliation of Chiang: ‘Pat much impressed with the antics of the Peanut,’ he wrote. ‘What they ought to do is shoot the Generalissimo and [General] Ho and the rest of the gang.’51 Hurley seemed unconcerned when Chiang sucked him into a whirlpool of irrelevancies or discussed quixotic fantasies such as damming the Yangtze instead of dealing with the present urgent military crisis. When Soong came out with his unctuous bromides about the ‘dignity of a great nation’, Hurley listened sympathetically. Stilwell was revolted by the humbug: ‘We must not look while the customer puts his hand in our cash register, for fear we will offend his “dignity” … The picture of this little rattlesnake being backed by a great democracy, and showing his backside in everything he says and does, would convulse you if you could get rid of your gall bladder. What will the American people say when they finally learn the truth?’52