IF THERE WERE ever two men ill suited to work with each other, they were Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stilwell. It was not that they weren’t more alike than either would have admitted, even to himself. Physically, both were slight of build,† agile, and devoted to keeping their bodies in condition. Temperamentally, both were quick to anger and unable to forgive. And both men subscribed to noble but all-consuming codes of behavior that brooked no deviation and made few concessions to on-the-ground realities. In other words, here were two ideologues from incompatible ideologies expected to work together.
Stilwell came from an old Yankee family that had immigrated to the United States in 1638. He had entered the military on a fluke: as a high schooler, he had stolen some ice cream at a dance, and his father, deciding that the boy needed discipline, sent him to West Point. A summer in Guatemala had left him with deep compassion for the underclass and hatred for the officials who kept the peasants illiterate. The inability to read and write, Stilwell said, “suits very well the purpose of the Government which takes him from his farm at any time and puts him in the army for an indefinite period, not caring whether or not his family starves.” Stilwell’s background, as it turned out, was perfect preparation for China.
During World War I, Stilwell had served in France as an intelligence officer, for which he received the Distinguished Service Medal. Following a year spent studying Chinese, he had set out with his wife and family for China in the summer of 1920. After six months in Peking, the International Famine Relief Committee borrowed him from the army to work on a road building project in Shansi, the interior province that was home to the Kung family. In the course of directing some six thousand men, Stilwell met a number of local farmers, who worked on the road to earn extra money. He was shocked by the hardship of their lives, commenting that “the daily struggle even to reach his fields would appall a white man.” At the end of a four-year tour of duty in China, the Stilwells were sent back to the States, but he returned to Tientsin as battalion commander of the 15th Infantry in 1926, at the time that Chiang Kai-shek took over the KMT and headed north with his army to unify the nation. The American major admired the generalissimo’s “determination and energy” but said that his march was “more in the nature of a parade than a campaign.” He noted that the troops Chiang would have come up against had simply “oozed out of town” before the G-mo and his soldiers arrived.
Back in the United States in 1929, Stilwell was assigned to head the Tactical Section at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he earned his nickname, “Vinegar Joe.” Famously impatient with incompetence, he had been particularly acidic about the performance of his students one day and, when he returned to the barracks, found a caricature of himself rising from a vinegar bottle with three Xs on the label. It had been drawn by a young officer who had pinned it on the bulletin board, much to the amusement of everyone in the barracks—including Stilwell himself, who asked permission to keep it.
Six years later, in July 1935, Stilwell was sent back to China as military attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Peiping.* Now a colonel, he arrived the day after Chiang’s government was forced by the Japanese to withdraw its soldiers from the old capital, and there was a sense of growing frustration with Chiang’s inability or refusal to fight the Japanese. Ambassador Johnson, who complained that “the Government at Nanking has been reduced to a jelly,” still held to his conviction that there was no alternative to the generalissimo, who was the only person who could keep China unified.
The problem for any American working in China in those days was how to keep it going without direct interference. Every time the West made a loan or provided aid, the Japanese threatened to go to war. This was fine with the higher-ups in the Chinese Communist Party, who knew that if Chiang were forced to go to war against Japan, he would not be able to continue to fight them. But Chiang simply sat back and waited for help from America, although he had assured Ambassador Johnson that his policy was to “continue” actively fighting Japan—a leap over reality if there ever was one. Part of Stilwell’s new job as military attaché was to see just how much of this “armed resistance” there really was, and he made two trips to southern China to investigate. He was not impressed. “No evidence of planned defense against further Japanese encroachment,” he reported. “No troop increase or even thought of it. No drilling or maneuvering.” But Stilwell agreed with Johnson on the subject of Chiang: “Unfortunately for China, there is no other influential leader in sight… who can take his place and carry on with anything like the prestige he has gained.”
Stilwell liked Madame Chiang, whom he met in 1938 in Hankow. He thought she was “very charming, highly intelligent and sincere,” and, in spite of the fact that she “pushed out a lot of propaganda about the way the government is looking out for the common people,” he believed that “she is alright and doing a good job.” After their initial meeting, he sent her flowers.
Posted back to the United States in May 1939, Stilwell was promoted to brigadier general by his friend General George C. Marshall, who was about to assume the post of Roosevelt’s army chief of staff. But, as Tuchman points out, the U.S. Army itself currently ranked a pathetic number nineteen in the armed forces of the world, behind Portugal and just ahead of Bulgaria. In the belief that the United States was still protected by the oceans, Congress had repeatedly cut military appropriations, reducing the United States to what Marshall called “the status of a third rate power.”
Ranked first in merit of the U.S. Army’s nine corps commanders, Stilwell was named commanding general of U.S. Army Forces in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater in the last week of January 1942. The title made him chief of staff to the supreme commander of the Chinese theater, i.e., Chiang Kai-shek, and supervisor of Lend-Lease in the area. In assuming his new role, he was doubtless unaware of two letters sent out by T.V. at the time. The first, addressed to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, noted that the American officer chosen as commanding general of the U.S. Army Forces in China “need not be an expert on the Far East”; in other words, the less the American knew about China, the better he would get along with the G-mo. The second went directly to the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson: “I take it for granted that both as Chief of the Generalissimo’s Joint Staff and as American Commander, the American officer selected for the post will be subject to the command of the Generalissimo.”
Before leaving for China, Stilwell asked to meet with the president so that he might carry a personal message from Roosevelt to Chiang Kai-shek. “Tell him we are in this thing for keeps,” Roosevelt said, “and we intend to keep at it until China gets back ALL her lost territory.”
Clarence Gauss, the ambassador to China, a thin-lipped, nearsighted worrywart, had warned Roosevelt and Congress that loans with no restrictions could be ill used by “the retrogressive, self-seeking and, I fear, fickle elements” at the top of the Kuomintang. But they had ignored him, passing China’s request for an unrestricted loan of $500 million by voice vote in the House of Representatives and unanimously in the Senate. In spite of those who had dealt with the G-mo on his home ground, he was still known in the United States as “a military technician of surpassing skill” and “the shrewdest politician in China.”
BY EARLY FEBRUARY 1942—a month before Stilwell arrived in Asia—it had become apparent that Rangoon would soon be lost to Japan. The British had sent two Indian brigades back to Burma from the Middle East to reinforce their own troops. According to Tuchman, these men had been trained for desert warfare against the Germans, “rather than for service in their own area where they might become contaminated by dangerous ideas of Asian nationalism.” The combined British and Indian troops, withdrawn to a position before the Sittang River, didn’t have a prayer of success; as Tuchman put it, “an inferior force with its back to a river is in a classic position from which not to fight.” On February 23, the Japanese clobbered the British-Indian brigades.
To counteract the now-probable fall of Rangoon and subsequent isolation of
Chungking, T.V. had recommended to President Roosevelt an air route between northeast India and Kunming in Yunnan (the province of China bordering Burma), neglecting to mention that between these two points lay the Himalaya Mountains, “probably the most hazardous flight route in the world.” Another possibility was a road from Ledo in northeast India across the mountains, forests, and rivers of northern Burma to connect with the Burma Road. Chiang Kai-shek said it could be built in five months, but, according to the U.S. Military Mission to China, it would take two and a half years. Both of these projects had been approved before Stilwell got to China.
It took Stilwell and his staff twelve days to fly from Miami to Chungking. Before they arrived, Singapore had fallen and 80,000 soldiers— English, Australians, and Indians—were in Japanese prison camps. Rangoon, which the British evacuated on March 7, was rapidly descending into a state of lawlessness. There was little support among the Burmese for the British, who had refused to offer Burma independence or even dominion status after the war, and, conversely, a great deal of admiration for the Japanese, who were showing the Westerners something about war. The Burmese premier explained it this way: “We Asiatics,” he said, “have had a bad time since Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape.”
This was the general feeling throughout the Far Eastern colonies. Chiang and May-ling had visited India just before Stilwell’s arrival. Encouraged by both Indian and British leaders, Chiang had been led to believe that he was in a position to convince the British to accede to some of the Indians’ demands and, at the same time, rally their support for the Allies at a moment when their regard for the British was at a particularly low ebb. According to Crozier, the personal, unstated purpose of the generalissimo’s trip was to establish himself as the great leader of Asia in the coming postwar world. Ambassador Gauss thought that the visit might prove useful but added that matters were really “too delicate for Chiang’s knowledge and temperament.” It was a secret trip, and for five days after their arrival, the Chiangs’ presence in the country was not even announced.
No sooner had they arrived, however, than they ran into a problem of official protocol. Chinese tradition required that Chiang go to Wardha near Bombay to visit Mahatma Gandhi, while Indian protocol demanded that Gandhi meet his visitor in New Delhi, where the Chiangs were staying in a villa on the grounds of the Viceroy’s Palace. The English ambassador to China, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, brought May-ling a letter from the viceroy (the marquess of Linlithgow), explaining that he would be subjected to “grave political embarassment” if the Chiangs traveled to Wardha to meet Gandhi. At the same time, Churchill cabled Chiang asking him not to go against the wishes of the viceroy; such a trip, he said, “might impede the desire we have for rallying all India to the war effort against Japan” and “might well have the unintended effect of emphasising communal differences at a moment when unity is imperative.” This was a legitimate concern for the British. If the Japanese were able to convince 390 million Indians that to fight for Britain would be, as White put it, “like a fish fighting for the frying pan,” Asia would soon fall to the Axis powers. If, on the other hand, Chiang could help convince the Indians that both they and the Chinese would be better off defeating Japan, his trip might be a boon to the British.
Once it was clear that the Chiangs were in the country and cooperating with the British, the viceroy gave them a celebratory dinner in his huge sandstone palace with its eighteen-foot windows, lovely terraces, and gardens. “It was white tie and tails and beyond doubt one of the biggest things that has been given in New Delhi in a long, long time,” said Thomas M. Wilson, an American diplomat.
Certainly nothing on this scale has been done since the war.… There were eighty-five who sat down to the table. I was grabbed… and marched over to Madame Chiang Kai-shek.… [Her] first question was, “Mr. Wilson, what good do you think is going to come from this visit of ours?” She seemed very serious in putting the question. I told her… “I don’t even know what the purpose of the visit is or what you expect to achieve.” Weighing her words very carefully Madame Chiang started telling me… that in fact it had been hoped something would be achieved in the way of greater effort on the part of India in aid given to China.
In between the pomp and circumstance, the Chiangs looked at border fortifications, met with British officials, and saw Jawaharlal Nehru, whose Self-Rule Party believed that India must be guaranteed independence as payment for an out-and-out war effort. Nehru had visited the Chiangs three years earlier, and, according to Li, May-ling had started corresponding with him—“bubbly letters… [that] had the air of a schoolgirl crush.” He now joined the Chiangs after it was finally determined that they should meet Gandhi in Calcutta. The old mahatma was not easy for Chiang to convince. He said that the generalissimo’s treatment at the hands of the Allies argued against his demands to support them in the war effort. “They will never voluntarily treat us Indians as equals,” Gandhi told Chiang, “why, they do not even admit your country to their talks.” This argument hit home with Chiang, currently suffering because he had not been allowed to join the Munitions Control Board in Washington, the entity that doled out military supplies. He promptly sent T.V. a letter to be shown to Roosevelt, quoting Gandhi and adding “If we are thus treated during the stress of war, what becomes of our position at the peace conference?” Nevertheless, on the last day of their visit, May-ling broadcast a message from her husband to the Indian people, calling on them to support the Allied struggle against the Axis nations but adding the wish that the Indians would be given the right to run their own country.
According to the viceroy, the Chiangs’ visit was fairly successful, even though the generalissimo “quite failed to understand the complexity of Indian politics.” He called May-ling a “very clever and competent little lady… clearly invaluable to him. When they are on a big job, she starts with the family trousers firmly fixed on her limbs, but by the final stage of any venture the generalissimo is invariably discovered to have transferred the pants to his own person. The process is well worth watching.” Gandhi’s reaction, as expressed in a letter to one of his supporters, was just as cynical: “He [Chiang] came and went without creating any impression, but fun was had by all. I would not say that I learned anything, and there was nothing that we could teach him. All that he had to say was this: Be as it may, help the British. They are better than others and will now become still better.”
On their way home, May-ling wrote Nehru, “We shall leave nothing undone in assisting you to gain freedom and independence. Our hearts are drawn to you, and… the bond of affection between you and us has been strengthened by our visit.… When you are discouraged and weary… remember that you are not alone in your struggle, for at all times we are with you in spirit.” But May-ling did not stop with personal expressions of support; her public comments on India aroused Churchill’s ire, earning for her brother T.V. “a cool reception” when he visited London the following year.
“The time has passed when we can determine a man’s status or his nation by the color of his skin or the shape of his eyes,” May-ling said in a radio address to Wellesley alumnae shortly after her return to China. She also wrote two articles, indicating that her experience in India had raised her awareness of the attitude of the white man toward other races. In the first, published in The New York Times in April 1942, Madame Chiang rebuked the Western world for two hundred years of profiteering off China and “the superiority complex” that, she claimed, was “a cardinal point in the creed of the Western world in its dealing with all things Chinese.” In the second, which appeared in May 1942, in The Atlantic Monthly, the G-mo’s wife was more explicit, referring to “the exploitation of our country by the West in the past and the hard-dying illusion that the best way to win our hearts was to kick us in the ribs. Such asinine stupidities must never be repeated as much for your own sake as for ours.”
A necessarily anonymous letter to the editor was published in The Atlantic two months later, objecting to the choi
ce of May-ling as the voice of China: “Madame Chiang’s charges of foreign exploitation of China are largely camouflage to hide the exploitation of the country by the present regime.… Tell our friends in America to stop praising the present Chinese Government.” Along with detractors, however, there were always the Chiang supporters. In an article published in The Atlanta Constitution, Clare Boothe Luce claimed that Madame Chiang “is the nearest thing to a Joan of Arc… and a Florence Nightingale that this decade has produced.” And while they were still in Delhi, the generalissimo had received word that His Majesty’s government had made him an honorary knight of the Bath, Military Division, in honor of “outstanding achievement in the Allied cause.” A cable had also arrived from President Roosevelt, announcing a loan of $500,000.* “The gallant resistance of the Chinese armies against the ruthless invader of your country,” the president wired, “has called for the highest praise from the American and all other freedom-loving peoples.” Such blatant hyperbole prompted a gracious response, written by his wife for the generalissimo: “Your far-sightedness in this world’s greatest crisis is deservedly the envy of all real statesmen.”
ON HIS WAY to China, Stilwell stopped in India and flew on to Lashio, the junction of the railway and highway systems in Burma northeast of the capital of Mandalay. There, he ran into Chiang and May-ling. Lashio was the site of the Chinese General Staff, and the G-mo had come to give his orders for the campaign in Burma. In his entourage was Hollington Tong, the vice minister of information, who had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism. Although Holly Tong was said to be trusted by a number of foreign journalists—“one of the Generalissimo’s keenest instruments, as faithful as a dog and as clean as a dog’s tooth”—Stilwell couldn’t stand him, referring to him as “oily and false.”
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