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By Root 870 0

force of Americans—the legendary Merrill’s Marauders, who endured hardships comparable with those of Wingate’s Chindits—Stilwell’s forces triumphed at Myitkyina in August 1944. Yet the British, whose forces contributed significantly to that operation, remained highly sceptical of the Chinese performance, and of Stilwell’s claims for it. Success at Myitkyina owed much more to Japanese weakness than to Allied genius. A shrewd judgement on Stilwell was offered by the British Bill Slim, who liked the American, and thought his post-war published diaries did him a disservice: “He was much more than419 the bad-tempered, prejudiced, often not very well-informed and quarrelsome old man they showed him to be. He was all that, but in addition he was a first-class battle leader up to, I should say, Corps level, and an excellent tactician, but a poor administrator. At higher levels he had neither the temperament nor the strategic background or judgement to be effective.”

Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek were divided on one irreconcilable issue. The bespectacled American sought to run a campaign to defeat the Japanese. The haughty, implacable Chinese warlord, by contrast, addressed the demands of his own nation’s politics. He needed to maintain the support of his generals, frustrate the rise of the Communists, husband his military strength for the moment when Nationalist armies must reoccupy Japanese-ruled China, and crush Mao Zedong. By the autumn of 1944, Stilwell’s patience with Chiang’s military inertia was exhausted. The generalissimo’s fury at Stilwell’s perceived presumption could no longer be contained. Chiang rejected out of hand a request from Roosevelt that Stilwell should be given direct command of the Nationalist armies. This was indeed fanciful. Americans were savagely critical of British conduct in India. Yet Americans in China, from Stilwell downwards, behaved with comparable insensitivity and matching condescension. GIs referred to Chinese as “the slopies,” Chiang as “Chancer Jack.” In Kunming, the northern terminus of the Hump air route, Chinese servants were so abused that it was found necessary to post notices: “U.S. personnel will not beat, kick or maltreat Chinese personnel.” Wen Shan, a supply driver on the Ledo road, said ruefully: “Americans considered a Chinese life to be worth a great deal less than an American one.” U.S. Captain Medill Sarkisian, in the same area, submitted a formal protest when told that his Chinese troops could not feed alongside Americans: “From any point of view, I believe that inferior treatment of Chinese soldiers is prejudicial to our best interests…when in their own country to treat them as unworthy to eat with our own men.”

Sgt. Wade Kent was one of thousands of American engineers labouring to complete the road and fuel pipeline from Ledo through northern Burma into China. An accountant’s son from Richmond, Virginia, Kent was appalled by India, “the most terrible place I had ever seen. I wasn’t born into the lap of luxury, but to see human beings in that condition was terrible.” In Burma, the first man his unit lost was washed away in a foaming river. They worked in the jungle, “hot, miserable, damp…those damn leeches, one pulled off one’s boots to find them full of blood,” in teams of three GIs with each crew of Burmans. One of Kent’s comrades was killed when he drove his bulldozer over an old Japanese mine, but mostly they worked in a huge silence broken only by jungle noise. When at last the path into China was opened, they welcomed the coolness of the mountains, but encountered new hazards. Chinese villagers punched holes in their fuel pipeline, then attempted to use the gas they stole for their lamps. “They sometimes set fire to whole villages—then blamed the Americans.” Fuel leaked into the paddies, killing precious rice. Trucks plunged into ravines. For almost two years, there was no R and R, precious little news of the outside world: “It was a strange assignment.”

Kent and his comrades achieved a technical triumph which proved a strategic cul-de-sac. A kind of madness had overtaken