Читать книгу China Hand - John Paton Davies Jr. - Страница 12

Almost a year before Pearl Harbor, Stilwell wrote to me on New Year’s Eve wishing me a happy 1941, and passed on a message from Pinky Dorn: “if you can get us sent to China you can come along.”

Well, things did not work out quite that way. Stilwell, a Major General in command of the Seventh Division at Fort Ord, California, when he wrote to me, and seven months later Commander of the III Corps, was called to Washington a fortnight after the Japanese attack. Pinky accompanied him as aide de camp. At the War Department Stilwell learned that he was to lead what was then planned as the first American offensive, a landing somewhere in French West Africa, code-named GYMNAST.

I was unaware of this when the General, Pinky, and I dined together shortly after Christmas. They intimated that they would be going overseas, but not to China. After dinner I asked Dorn if, even though they were not sent to China, I could come along.

Pinky said that he thought this could be arranged. I had suggested that my role might be something like a diplomatic attaché to the General, a mirror role to that of a military attaché to an Ambassador.

Early in January the American high command began to doubt the timing and feasibility of GYMNAST and frantically conceived alternatives to it. Meanwhile Roosevelt and Stimson, now Secretary of War, felt a pressing need to exhibit American military support of China. In impotent disarray from Hawaii to the Philippines to the Java Sea, the United States was not in a position to dispatch either troops or significant quantities of materiel to China. The best that could be done was to present Chiang Kai-shek with a high-ranking American military officer as adviser, representative of the American high command, and an earnest of large support to come.

General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, with whom Stilwell had served in China in 1926, asked Stilwell on January 1, 1942 to recommend someone for the China assignment. Although Stilwell himself was an obvious possible choice, he was then immersed in evaluating GYMNAST and, in any event, was rated as one of the best combat commanders in the Army. Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum was Stilwell’s recommendation because, as he observed in his diary, Drum was pompous and of high rank. As for himself in the China role, “No thank you.” The Chinese “remember me as a small-fry colonel . . . Drum by all means.” Stilwell’s predilection of course, was for a fighting rather than a representational and administrative command.

Drum regarded the China assignment as vague and not worthy of a general of his pretensions. And he made a poor impression on Stimson and Marshall. They turned to Stilwell. Would he take the China mission? “I’ll go where I’m sent,” Stilwell characteristically replied.

Stilwell viewed the plum proffered him not without misgivings. From his considerable experience in China he had few illusions about the quality of the Chinese military leadership. And the current reports from China of an American military mission headed by the urbane and discerning Brigadier General John Magruder supported what he knew—that the Chinese Army lacked aggressive fighting spirit and that the materiel demanded by the Chinese National Government was not for fighting the Japanese but for ensuring Chiang’s domestic ascendancy against internal rivals after the defeat of Japan.

At the same time, China had an insidious lure for Stilwell, as it did for many China hands. And Stimson, who had been emotionally involved as Secretary of State in trying to defend China in the early 1930s against Japan in Manchuria, envisioned the command offered to Stilwell as charged with keeping China in the war and securing it as a base, initially for limited operations and eventually for a counteroffensive, possibly by Chinese forces. By mid-January the concept of the China assignment had expanded to embrace a nebulous position as chief of the Generalissimo’s nonexistent allied staff. In addition to controlling the distribution of lend-lease supplies, Stilwell was told he would train Chinese troops and even command them.

How many, where and under what circumstances was undefined—until the Japanese surged out of Thailand into Burma, intent on cutting China’s only remaining line of surface communications with the West, stretching from the port of Rangoon half the length of Burma to the Yunnan border. Thereupon the Chinese indicated that an American lieutenant general, but not Magruder (who knew them so well), would be granted “executive control” of Chinese forces dispatched to Burma. Whether the Generalissimo would permit an American to command Chinese troops was, Stilwell thought, a test of Chiang’s willingness to allow him to function effectively.

The exchange between Washington and Chungking regarding the appointment of an American commander in China passed through T. V. Soong, Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s Americanized, clever, brazen, and ambitious brother. He was Chinese Foreign Minister and resident in Washington, where he acted as the Generalissimo’s alter ego, interpreting and editing communications between the American Government and Chiang.

Through one or more of his many highly placed sources of information in Washington, Soong learned that Stilwell was the probable choice for China. So he made inquiries about the General and was satisfied with what he had learned. Subsequently, the Generalissimo declared that Stilwell would be “most welcome.”

With “executive control” promised Stilwell and a welcome to him from Chiang and Soong, Marshall asked Stilwell on January 23, “Will you go?” Again, “I’ll go where I’m sent.” But with feelings far from undiluted elation—“the blow fell,” he wrote that night in his diary.

The War Department orders to Stilwell, dated February 2, designated him as Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander of the Chinese Theater (Chiang Kai-shek) and Commanding General of the American forces (initially headquarters staff, liaison officers and technicians) in China-Burma-India. Soong confirmed that Stilwell was to act as Chief of Staff for the Generalissimo, to supervise and control all American defense aid for China and, under the Generalissimo, to command such Chinese forces as were assigned to him. To emphasize the purpose of military assistance, Marshall directed Stilwell “to increase the effectiveness of United States assistance to the Chinese Government for the prosecution of the war and to assist in improving the combat efficiency of the Chinese army.”

And so a general who had been appraised as one of the best fighting commanders in the American army was dispatched on a ceremonial, negotiatory, administrative mission in which he was also to command Chinese troops at the pleasure of the Generalissimo, whom Stilwell regarded as disastrously incompetent in military matters. Why, when given the opportunity to decline, did Stilwell accept the assignment? He did because as a thoroughgoing professional soldier he took the wish of his commanding officer, George Marshall (who was one of the few men he really respected), as tantamount to an order. Then too, Stilwell believed what became something of an American military creed: that, properly fed, trained, equipped and led, the Chinese soldier would be the equal of any. This just might be the chance for him to prove this belief.

Nevertheless he already longed for the reassuring presence of American combat troops under his command. To Marshall he described the Southwest Pacific as a defensive theater, whereas China was the area from which to launch the offensive against Japan—employing at least one American army corps. This was to be a reoccurring plea throughout Stilwell’s China assignment; not granted until the last year of his ordeal, and then with but one regiment.

The American high command, however, looked upon China as of relatively slight military significance. The American grand strategy assigned priority to the defeat of the German-Italian Axis over the defeat of Japan. In the secondary effort against Japan, four possible avenues of attack existed. One was the northern Pacific and the Aleutians. Weather and terrain severely limited the practicability of this route. A second was westward from the Central Pacific, a flank assault, which proved to be the main road to victory. A third, starting from Australia, was northward island hopping in arduous frontal assaults against the maximum extension of enemy strength, but enabling MacArthur to fulfill his promise to return to the Philippines.

And finally, China. Effectively blockaded from its allies for most of the war, it was a logistical monstrosity, with a line of communications stretching from the United States across the Atlantic, around Africa, through the Indian Ocean, and then either across or around the Indian subcontinent, up the Brahmaputra valley to the foothills of the Himalayas and thence, by airlift, across Burma and the high ranges to the east and so into the southwest mountain-girt corner of China. China was indeed, as often said during the war, “at the end of the line.” In retrospective military logic, commitment of American men and materiel to the China-Burma-India Theater was a diversion from theaters where they could be more effectively used against the enemy.

Who was this Chiang Kai-shek to whom Stilwell was assigned? He was a slight, sleek, alternately impassive and overwrought, obstinate and vacillating, fifty-six-year-old native of the lower Yangtze valley. As a student at military academy in Japan he joined Sun Yat-sen’s republican movement plotting the overthrow of imperial rule over China. Chiang had a minor part in the ensuing 1911 revolution, following which he cultivated Shanghai financial contacts, became a broker and established connections with the powerful and sometimes benevolent Shanghai underworld.

The new republic was soon fragmented by warlordism. Chiang maintained his ties with Sun, joining in at least one of that erratic leader’s military campaigns to capture a base for his Kuomintang (national people’s party). This paid off for Chiang. When Sun made a deal with the Soviet Union for assistance, he sent Chiang on a visit to Moscow in 1923 as his military representative. Having established a base at Canton, Sun appointed Chiang head of a new military academy there, complete with Soviet military advisers, headed by the ascendant General Vasily Blyukher.

With Sun’s death in 1925, Chiang slickly disposed of his competitors, took over as Sun’s successor, and showed that he knew how to handle foreign advisers. He called a Soviet bluff to terminate aid, put his Soviet military tutors briefly under house arrest, and forced the recall of several for attempted reforms of his army and one for allegedly making fun of him. Against the advice of his Soviet mentors, he launched in 1926 a northward drive to subdue warlords and unify China.

Chiang undertook the campaign in collaboration with the puny new Chinese Communist Party, which the Soviet representatives had persuaded Sun to accept in a united front with the Kuomintang. Although Chiang had continued with the united front, when the successful offensive approached his own turf, particularly Shanghai, he turned on his Communist collaborators and caused the killing of all that his men could lay hands on. Using the right wing of the Kuomintang, he established at Nanking a conservative government claiming to be the national administration, even though it controlled—and that imperfectly—only the southeastern portion of the country.

In search of respectability Chiang courted Shanghai’s most powerful banking and commercial community. And late in 1927 he disembarrassed himself of his old-fashioned marital entanglements (two wives) and embraced Christianity so as to quality for marriage to Soong Mei-ling. In marrying Miss Soong, Chiang acquired a pretty, temperamental wife of inclinations with rich historical precedents—the empress or imperial favorite who usurps the throne. He also acquired a spirited assortment of in-laws.

The Soongs were a wealthy Christian family. The father, Charlie, was brought up in the United States and his progeny were educated there. He was a friend of Sun Yat-sen’s and his second daughter, Soong Ching-ling, became Sun’s second wife. She was the gentle, idealistic member of the family and disapproved of her brother-in-law’s dictatorial nature. The oldest daughter, Ai-ling, shrewd and self-controlled, married H. H. Kung, who claimed lineal descent from Confucius and was from time to time Chiang’s Finance Minister. The dominant son, T. V. Soong, a Harvard product, aggressively rose to become Foreign Minister and, like his sister, Madame Chiang, acted during World War II as a broker between the Generalissimo and the Americans.

Chiang failed in his attempt to unify China. Warlords continued to control large portions of western China and all of Manchuria, until the Japanese took over that northeastern region in 1931. Rather than going to war against Japan over Manchuria, Chiang attempted to eradicate his former allies, the Communists. They had established themselves in a small rural area in Central China where they held out against repeated government offensives. The Generalissimo’s fifth campaign in 1934 finally forced them into a circuitous 6,000-mile retreat, known as the Long March, to Northwest China. His persistent harrying of the Communists resulted in a bizarre incident in 1936 wherein he was kidnapped by regional forces, released through Communist intercession, and agreed with the Communists to form again a united front, this time directed against Japan.

The Generalissimo’s successful 1934 campaign had been planned by his German advisers, headed by General Hans von Seeckt. General Alexander von Falkenhausen succeeded von Seeckt and was training Chinese troops when Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China in 1937. He was largely responsible for planning the only important victory of the Chinese, Taierchuang, and was infuriated when they held back and would not press on to achieve a major success.

Early in the war the Soviet Union began military aid to Chiang—but not to the Communists—and made available to the Generalissimo Soviet military advisers. Among them were Generals G. K. Zhukov and V. I. Chuikov, both of whom, on the basis of their subsequent performances in the war against Germany, could be considered as competent to give advice to

Chiang. But the Generalissimo did not make use of them and so they returned to the Soviet Union.

To Chiang the assignment of Stilwell was not a totally new kind of experience. For some eighteen years, off and on, he had dealt with foreigners intent on telling him how to be a soldier. He had not suffered as a consequence any apparent decline of confidence in his own superior judgment in military matters. At times he accepted—and always adapted— advice; more often he did not act on it. There was no convincing reason to believe that Chiang would be more responsive to Stilwell than he had been to Blyukher or von Falkenhausen.

* * *

The approach of the American public to China, especially during the three years after Pearl Harbor, was largely subjective. It was a product of one hundred years of missionary compulsions and involvement, spiritual and emotional, of a sense of guilt that the United States had not gone to the rescue of China under attack from Japan and had sold war materiel to Japan, and of propaganda portraying the Chinese as heroically fighting on our behalf and wanting only American arms and know-how to drive the enemy into the sea. Central figures in this vision of China were Chiang and Mei-ling—he the unflinching Christian commander of four hundred million tillers of Pearl Buck’s good earth, and she, a Wellesley girl, fragile as a peach blossom sheathed in brocade, faithful helpmeet to the devout Generalissimo (Time’s 1937 Man and Wife of the Year), and an eloquent pleader of China’s cause (moving assembled members of Congress to penitence, high resolve, and other manly emotions).

The widespread mythology about China meant that more than facts and logic went into the making of American wartime policy toward China. The surcharged sentimental attachment to the Chinese raised the importance of China in strategic planning all out of proportion to its real military and immediate political worth. The significance of China was further inflated by a geopolitical assumption of Roosevelt’s that China would become a great power after the war and therefore during hostilities it should be treated as one, and Chiang as co-equal with Churchill, and Stalin.

This caused Washington civil and military officials, notwithstanding reports to the contrary from their representatives in Chungking, to think wishfully that Chiang and his National Government might want to prosecute the war with all vigor. Washington was also anxious to keep China in the war, not fully recognizing that while Chiang was loath to expend strength against the common enemy, he would not withdraw from the war. Assuming an American victory, there was much for him to gain from remaining nominally an ally: all kinds of assistance and, after the war, territorial acquisitions.

Thanks to Pinky and the General, I received in February 1942 State Department orders assigning me as Consul at Kunming, designating me as Second Secretary of Embassy at Chungking, and detailing me to “the China Military Mission headed by Major General Joseph W. Stilwell.” This was followed by the standard formula: “This assignment is not made at your request nor for your convenience.”

The orders specified that my detail to Stilwell was for “liaison between the Mission and American and foreign civil officials.” Three days later, on February 13, as an afterthought the Department admonished me to conduct my liaison duties “at the direction and under the supervision of General Stilwell.” The Department also desired that, as practicable and appropriate, I keep the Ambassador and, through him, the Department informed of “the activities of the military mission.”

My superiors in the Far Eastern Division did not favor my detail to the General, feeling that it was irregular and bordering on the frivolous. I should stick to the Foreign Service. Currie, who was administering lend-lease to China, welcomed the arrangement. I assumed he thought I could be a useful point of contact with Stilwell’s headquarters.

Currie and Owen Lattimore, recently returned from serving as a personal adviser to the Generalissimo, emphasized to me the logistic importance of India in view of the impending Japanese capture of Rangoon. Lattimore referred with approval to what he said was the opinion of Chiang and Chennault, then heading a small pursuit aircraft contingent manned by American mercenaries and called the American Volunteer Group. That opinion was that the United States should direct its then limited strength against the Japanese flank from China. They asked that I assure Chennault that he was appreciated, but that he must play ball with General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. Otherwise he would get no equipment. Arnold was extremely influential, Chennault should be advised, and had to be humored.

About a fortnight after Stilwell’s departure for China-Burma-India, I left Washington, on February 25. Also bound for Stilwell’s theater were six officers and a sergeant. We flew by one of Pan American’s original clippers, a flying boat, to Belém at the mouth of the Amazon—moist, mossed, suffocating, hyper-tropical—then Natal, and across the Atlantic to somnolent Fisherman’s Lake in Liberia. The remainder of the trip was by two-engine C-47 transport planes to Kano and then Maidugiri, both in Nigeria, across the scrubby wilderness of Chad to Khartoum dominated by the Nile, up to Cairo, swarming with handsome British staff officers whom the troops called the gabardine swine, over to Tel Aviv, down to the Shatt-al-Arab, carrying the mingled waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, out above the azure-emerald Persian Gulf to Sharjah’s desert airstrip manned by an RAF ground crew of a forlorn half dozen and a gazelle, along the desolate, jagged coasts of Iran and Baluchistan to Karachi, and finally trans-subcontinentally to teeming, beholy-cowed Calcutta.

The flight from New York to Calcutta, stopping at night and encountering delays, took thirteen days. Because of bottlenecks in air transport to Burma, I remained in the effete luxury of Calcutta’s Indo-Anglo-American society for some ten days waiting for my turn to join Stilwell. During this time I encountered C. J. Pao, the shrewd and engaging Chinese Consul General whom I had met in Peking and who, in my adversity twenty years later at the foot of the Andes, proved to be a staunch friend.

Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek had given Stilwell, now a Lieutenant General, the benefit of a great deal of faint-hearted advice and orally told the American he was to command two Chinese armies (each of three understrength divisions) on their way to the front in Burma. The Japanese were north of Rangoon, which they had occupied on March 6. The mixed force of British, Burmese, Indian, and Gurkha units under General Sir Harold Alexander had been badly shaken by the swift ferocity of the Japanese onslaught. On what may be euphemistically called a line, east-west in lower Burma, the British Empire units occupied the western sector and the Chinese, with a toe-in-the-water disposition, moved tentatively into the eastern. Allied air support was from the British Royal Air Force (RAF), whose obsolescent aircraft were being rapidly destroyed, and from Chennault’s American Volunteer Group. The AVG, with new P-40 pursuit planes and aggressive tactics, outperformed the enemy, but nevertheless were being ground down by sheer superiority of Japanese numbers and AVG lack of aircraft, parts and personnel replacements.

Soon after assuming command of the Chinese expeditionary force in Burma, Stilwell discovered that his assumption was indeed no more than that. His orders were secretly referred back to the Generalissimo for final decision. Chiang also issued behind Stilwell’s back a babble of vacillating orders to his distracted officers in the field, even down to the regimental level.

The Generalissimo was morbidly defensive-minded, and in its most fatal manifestation: static defense, yielding the initiative to the enemy. Furthermore, in his obsessive hoarding of materiel and troops he only reluctantly committed his units to battle, and then piecemeal. For he believed that to concentrate force was to risk greater loss than committing it in minimal increments. Which was, up to a point, true. But it was not the way either battles or wars are won.

Stilwell’s headquarters were at Maymyo, the prettily landscaped summer capital to which the Government of Burma had retreated. Stilwell was not at his headquarters but at the front when I arrived on March 22. And Pinky was with him.

The next day the General and Dorn returned to headquarters, a big red brick rest house belonging to the American Baptists. Stilwell was tired, but still exuded his characteristic nervous energy. On March 24, the following day, I noted in my diary,

General Stilwell in his bare room off the bare upstairs porch said, “Sit down.” Each in a wicker chair, he said “There’s nothing I can tell you about how to run your job. You’re a free agent. All you have to do is keep things running smoothly between the civil authorities here and us.” So much for functioning, as the Department of State had enjoined me, “at the direction and under the supervision of General Stilwell.”

Civil authority in Burma was collapsing on all sides. The Burmese, including officials and lesser government employees, felt no loyalty to their British masters. And with the Japanese trampling all under foot, most Burmese, including those who were servants to the King-Emperor, were in panic looking to their own safety and for ways in which they might ingratiate themselves with the new conquerors. The more enterprising took to sabotage, ambush, arson, and otherwise acting as collaborators of the invaders. There was precious little civil authority left for me to deal with. Any authority that existed was military—and that only when immediately enforceable by a bullet in the head.

In establishing relations with the Government of Burma, I called first on the Governor’s military aide, who seemed to be not at all put out that at 4:40 p.m. I had roused him from a siesta. At tea and cakes with him and his pet gibbon, Miss Gibb, I took up with him my first piece of business— the misuse of jeeps by Chinese soldiers for private enterprise. Ah yes, the police in Mandalay had complained to the offending Chinese military on this score, only to have abuse heaped upon them. So the problem was a military one, not a civilian one.

The Governor, Sir Reginald Hugh Dorman-Smith, hospitably received me a few days later with pink gins and wide-ranging discourse. We concluded that Americans and Britons should be on guard against rumors designed to create rifts between us. The Governor made mild fun of the confused command structure in Burma, a matter on which his principal secretary, a Mr. Binns, had the day before spoken out more plainly to me. Binns had observed that General Stilwell had introduced himself as commander of the Chinese Fifth and Sixth Armies, the Chinese expeditionary force in Burma. Then General Tu, the commander of the Fifth Army, represented himself in much the same way. General Alexander, the senior British commander in Burma, of course regarded himself as in command of all the allied forces in this British colony. And finally, Binns pointed out, by the constitution of Burma only the Governor is in charge of the defense of Burma, no one else. What Binns did not know was that the Generalissimo was also in the act, regularly undercutting the authority he had conferred upon Stilwell.

By the end of March Stilwell was so wroth over the Generalissimo’s bad faith and deceptions that he flew to Chungking to seek a showdown with Chiang. He took me with him, for there was nothing constructive that I could do with the Government of Burma in a condition of rigor mortis. In any event, it was time that I reported to the Ambassador from whose embassy in Chungking I was detailed to Stilwell. En route to Chungking, Stilwell picked up Chennault at Kunming, to which place Chennault had withdrawn his badly battered AVG leaving the enemy in uncontested control of the Burmese skies.

When Stilwell was having it out with the Generalissimo, I was paying my respects to the Ambassador, my tepid admirer from days at the Department and Peking, Clarence E. Gauss. Although I respected his utter rectitude, his Puritan sense of duty, and his inquiring, precise mind, I sensed that the depressing, ingrown atmosphere of Chungking, rancid with spite and intrigue, had soured Gauss. I thought that he needed a change. The Ambassador, for his part, did not think much of my detail to the General. With a wry smile he said that I belonged behind a desk, at work in his embassy, not gallivanting around China-Burma-India.

To Chennault I passed on Currie’s advice about playing ball with General Arnold. Chennault said that his volunteers, among whom discontent and indiscipline had become rife, would willingly accept induction into the Army Air Corps provided they were first returned home to see their families, as promised in their contracts. Although he did not explicitly say so, it was evident from his presentation that he agreed with his fliers that it would be unfair to induct them—and himself—forthwith. Chennault, after all, had no desire to be subordinate to Stilwell, an old foot soldier. The airman enjoyed having, as a favorite of the Chiangs, direct access to the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang. They found most congenial his doctrine that Japan could be defeated by air power with minimal ground effort. And there was little doubt in Chennault’s mind that he was the one uniquely qualified to accomplish this feat. As he said to me, the Army Air Corps would need one thousand men to do what he could do with one hundred and fifty.

Gauss, Stilwell, and Chennault were the three dominant American personalities in China from early 1942 until late in 1944. They were, all three, strong-willed, each highly competent in his own profession, dedicated to and tireless in what he was doing, quick to take offense, and given to righteous (each according to his own interpretation) wrath. Chennault’s pretension to omnipotence and his persistent scheming to usurp Stilwell’s position created and kept going a Chennault-Stilwell feud that involved the Chiangs and the White House. Gauss felt snubbed by both generals, who rarely consulted with him. And he was too unbending to take the initiative in trying to create a collaborative relationship with at least the theater commander. As for Stilwell, his disregard of the Ambassador was not because he disliked Gauss. Rather, Stilwell was not inclined to seek counsel from others—although he would welcome practical advice when proffered. In fact, Vinegar Joe Stilwell liked the Ambassador even though he looked upon Gauss as something of a sourpuss.

* * *

With every step that the Allies retreated in Burma, India’s importance to them grew. India was a fallback position, and in depth, thanks to its size. It was the base for a vital air bridge into China, a base in which to grow and manufacture war supplies, and to prepare for and then mount a counteroffensive.

India was an area about which Stilwell and his staff were far less informed than they were about China. Not only was Stilwell a China specialist, he had then on his staff more than half a dozen exceptionally able China and Japan specialists. But he had no expert on India, an area of study that had been neglected in the American Government and academe.

I could be most useful to the General, it seemed to me, if I investigated and surveyed for him the Indian political and economic scene. I put this idea to Stilwell. He accepted my suggestion and on April 5 I left Chungking for India.

On the same day the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang flew to Burma with Stilwell. Chiang assured his American commander that he would instruct his generals to obey Stilwell’s orders. Whatever the Generalissimo may have told his principal officers, it did not halt the continuing retreat nor instill in them obedience to the foreigner. The sudden and utter disintegration of a Chinese division at the eastern end of the “line” when a much smaller Japanese force out-maneuvered and struck it, meant that the allies were outflanked. The final debacle was not long in coming. By the end of April the Chinese and British Empire forces were in demoralized flight. The remnants of the Chinese armies straggled back into China, excepting two decimated divisions, which, like Alexander’s surviving troops, staggered out over jungle trails into India.

It had taken four Japanese divisions four months to rout the larger, motley allied forces of Burmese, Chinese, Indian and British units. The climax was galling for Stilwell. Cut off from vehicular and air transportation, he, Dorn, and about one hundred others slogged over jungled mountains to India. There he snorted to newsmen, “I claim we got a hell of a licking. 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.”

What caused the humiliating licking so far as China was concerned, Stilwell told the Generalissimo in early June, was the structure and the character of the Chinese Army. It was weak for more reasons than shortage of equipment. The three hundred Chinese divisions were understrength; if they were consolidated to full strength divisions and all available materiel redistributed, the number of units would reduced, but the overall effectiveness would be greatly increased. Furthermore, only a few of the general officers were competent. They should be retrained and the others gotten rid of, “otherwise the army will continue to go downhill, no matter how much materiel is supplied for it.” Also, the Generalissimo should designate one man whose “absolute control of the troops must not be infringed upon.” And awards and punishments should be promptly administered.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who often participated in the Generalissimo’s conferences with foreigners, told Stilwell that his critique was similar to that received by Chiang several years earlier from his German military advisers. So the comments made by the American General were not new to the Generalissimo.

At a subsequent Stilwell meeting on military reform Madame Chiang was again present and again elucidating and expanding upon her husband’s aloof pronouncement. In sum, she told Stilwell that his recommendations could not be put into effect and that it was necessary to be “realistic.” Five years earlier, Chennault, while serving the Chiangs as military aviation adviser, had pressed the Generalissimo to take drastic action against the incompetence and corruption in the Chinese Air Force. Madame Chiang told him that her husband said that “the Chinese are the only people he has to work with, and if we get rid of all those people who are at fault, who would be left?”

The fact of the matter was that had Chiang undertaken such a sweeping purge, “all those people who are at fault” would have liquidated him before he had gotten started. While he was despotically inclined, the Generalissimo did not have the dictatorial power to purge at will, as did Hitler and Stalin. Nor could he houseclean a manifestly corrupt and inefficient arm of the government as could a strong leader in a democracy. He was a captive of the sorry forces he manipulated.

The military establishment, like the rest of the state structure, suffered from the fact that China was in transition from the traditional society, which had endured for millennia, to an undefined modern society. The Chinese Army was made up of congeries of soldiery. Some divisions, created by Chiang’s central government, were regarded as modern and were usually responsive to Chiang’s wishes. Many other units belonged to neo-warlords, and were regionally levied and maintained and therefore in a negotiatory relationship with the Generalissimo—he had to bargain for compliance. Finally, in 1942 relatively small Chinese Communist forces, although designated as a nominal part of the national army, were really in a state of suspended insurgency, blockaded by several hundred thousand of Chiang’s less unreliable troops, while both sides awaited the end of hostilities with Japan to resume their civil war.

The warlord mentality flourished in the commanders of provincial units, lingered in the national government office corps, but did not exist with the Communists. It assumed that a military formation was the private property of its commander, a capital holding from which he derived his income. The commander of a provincial division, for example, received revenue from the people whose area his division occupied. If he associated himself with the national government he also received subsidies for troop pay, rations and other expenses. The general with a keen business sense— and most of them had that—therefore padded his statement of troop strength and kept his expenses, the number of men he actually retained, at a lesser level.

For example, the commander of the Chinese Fifth Army in Burma informed the British, who supplied the Chinese rice, salt, and a supplementary cash payment for other food, that he had 45,000 men. Although the British believed that the correct figure was under 28,000, they nevertheless accepted and paid out on the basis of General Tu’s claim. After advancing 240,000 rupees, the British checked Tu’s divisions, the commanders of which declared that they had not received any of the payments. So the British discontinued the subsidies pending evidence that the troops received the money due them. Tu did not produce any such proof.

As his unit was his capital, the commander-entrepreneur was not keen to engage it in any enterprise that reduced its profitability or risked its loss. It was all very well to take the offensive in the good old days when warlordism was in flower and the chances of loot and expanded territory were good speculative risks. But in this war against an aggressive, implacable foreign enemy, caution was essential. Conserve materiel and manpower by falling back and do not jeopardize your own unit if the one next to you finds itself in trouble—retreat before he does, lest he leave you exposed and vulnerable.

The defensive, negative attitude of most Chinese generals was reinforced by Chiang Kai-shek’s strategy. From the beginning of the Japanese invasion in 1937 it had been based on the assumption that China could not defeat Japan, the hope that the United States or the Soviet Union would eventually become embroiled in war with Japan and thereby cause its withdrawal from China, and the conviction that he must husband his resources for the civil war against the Chinese Communists that would follow the end of the war against Japan. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor therefore came as a godsend to Chiang and his Kuomintang regime. His hope was well on the way to fulfillment. The Americans could now be depended upon to finish off the Japanese. And, as an ally, he could demand quantities of arms from Washington, which he would hoard against the coming showdown with the Communists.

Chiang’s strategy may not have been heroic, but it was realistic and practical. And it fitted not only the outlook of the generals and the Kuomintang but also the sentiment of Chinese people who were genuinely warweary. But to the outside world, Chiang’s propagandists represented China as militant and heroic.

Stilwell believed that by bargaining, engaging in a quid pro quo exchange of American military equipment for Chinese offensive action, he might be able to activate the Chiang regime. I was of the same opinion. The General’s control over lend-lease supplies entering China seemingly gave him a strong bargaining counter. But the White House—Roosevelt and his assistants Harry Hopkins and Lauchlin Currie—was early in the war sentimental about China and disinclined to place any conditions on aid to that country. Materiel assistance to China was in any event only a trickle in 1942 and 1943 because of limited production, the competing requests from our fighting allies, the British and the Russians, and after the loss of Burma, the tonnage limitations of what could be airlifted into China.

Unable at this stage to bargain, Stilwell offered inducements to action—he would train, organize, and, as American materiel became available, equip a modern army for the Generalissimo. He persuaded Chiang to let him begin with the Chinese troops which retreated from Burma into India. He also offered a program to bring up to strength, train, and equip 30 reorganized divisions. This was accepted and gotten under way. Whereupon Stilwell presented plans for another 30 divisions, followed late in 1943 by an offer for a third 30 divisions. With 90 such divisions Chiang should be able not only to expel the Japanese but also secure his domestic supremacy after the war.