• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

3. The Fall of Stilwell

IN THE LATE summer of 1944, the Japanese Ichigo offensive precipitated a crisis in the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and the American government. As the Nationalist armies fell back, ceding great tracts of territory, leading figures in the U.S. leadership at last perceived that China was incapable of fulfilling Washington’s ambitions. It could not become a major force in the struggle against Japan. Stilwell signalled to Marshall, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff: “I am now convinced that he [Chiang] regards the South China catastrophe as of little moment, believing that the Japs will not bother him further in that area, and that he imagines he can get behind the Salween [river] and there wait in safety for the U.S. to finish the war.” This was an entirely accurate perception, but one of little service to the relationship between China’s leader and America’s senior military representative in his country.

Personal antagonism between Stilwell and Chiang, festering for many months, attained a climax. Few Americans knew more about China than “Vinegar Joe.” After serving in France in 1918, where he rose to the rank of colonel, he spent most of the inter-war years in the East, and learned the Chinese language. A protégé of Marshall, who admired his brains and energy, Stilwell was appointed in February 1942 to head the U.S. Military Mission to Chiang, and to direct lend-lease. He also accepted the role of chief of staff to the generalissimo. From the outset, it seemed bizarre to appoint to a post requiring acute diplomatic sensitivity an officer famously intense, passionate, intolerant, suspicious, secretive. Stilwell praised subordinates as “good haters,” and cherished his feuds as much as his friendships. During the 1942 retreat from Burma he took personal command of two Chinese divisions, sharing with them a gruelling 140-mile march to sanctuary in India. Sceptics said that such adventures showed Stilwell’s unfitness for high command: he had no business indulging a personal predilection for leading from the front, putting himself with the men in the line, when his proper role was at the generalissimo’s side, galvanising China’s war effort.

Roosevelt delivered homilies about the importance of treating Chiang with respect, writing to Marshall: “All of us must remember417 that the Generalissimo came up the hard way to become the undisputed leader of four hundred million people…and to create in a very short time throughout China what it took us a couple of centuries to attain…He is the chief executive as well as the commander-in-chief, and one cannot speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.”

This, of course, was nonsense. Roosevelt’s remarks reflected naïveté about the mandate of Chiang, as well as about the character of Stilwell. The general was incapable of the sort of discretion the president urged. Famously outspoken, he flaunted his contempt for the incompetence of Chiang—“the peanut”—and for the British, whose military performance impressed him as little as their governance of India. Roosevelt urged U.S. commanders to display greater respect for the ruler of China, but American policy reflected a colonialist vision. It was absurd to suppose that an American general could impose on Chinese armies standards which their own officers could not; that Nationalist soldiers could be incited by a few thousand Americans to achieve objectives which Chiang and his followers refused to promote. American adviser Maj. E. J. Wilkie complained that even Stilwell-trained Chinese troops were hopelessly casual in their use of firearms: “I saw a machine gunner418 firing his weapon with one hand while eating with his other.”

Stilwell’s most notable military achievement was to direct the advance of Chinese troops on Myitkyina, the northern Burmese town whose liberation was critical to opening the Burma Road. Aided by a small