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 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 the American war effort in China, to which many men posted to the theatre succumbed, in this alien Oriental world where leopards and tigers were known to kill U.S. soldiers, who in turn hunted them with carbines. At the Hump airlift’s forward HQ in Kweilin, “the most lovable and abandoned town in the Orient,” some of the most skilled prostitutes in Asia had set up shop after fleeing from Hong Kong. Here, “silken clad girls420 with ivory bodies and complete devotion to their art” practiced it to the satisfaction of visiting Americans, but doubtful advantage to the war effort. Edgar Snow, no friend to either the Nationalists or the U.S., was nonetheless right to suggest that “the one abiding sentiment421 that almost all American enlisted personnel and most of the officers shared was contempt and dislike for China.” It was a rich irony of both national policy and personal behaviour that Americans perceived themselves as anti-colonialists, yet conducted themselves in wartime China at least as autocratically as the British in South-East Asia.
In October 1944, Stilwell became the most prominent casualty of American frustration and failure. Emily Hahn describes the general as “incapable—surely to an abnormal degree?422—of appreciating that there are more points of view than one’s own, and that the world is appreciably larger than America.” Stilwell refused to acknowledge that, whatever the limitations of Chiang’s regime, he must work through its agency. Rationally, of course, his view was correct. If the Nationalist army was to play a useful role in the war, it must purge itself and reform, in the manner of the Chinese divisions airlifted to India beyond reach of Chiang’s dead hand. Had the generalissimo reformed his forces as Stilwell urged, the destiny of the Nationalist regime might have been different. However, to imagine that Chiang Kai-shek could forsake absolutism and corruption was akin to inviting Stalin to rule without terror, Hitler without persecuting Jews. Stilwell’s demands represented an assault on the very nature of the Chongqing regime. It was futile to yearn for Nationalist China to be what it was not, to suppose that an American could override Chinese leaders, however base.
In the autumn of 1944, Roosevelt made one of his most bizarre, indeed grotesque, appointments. He dispatched as his personal emissary to China one Patrick Hurley, a rags-to-riches Oklahoman ex-cowboy who had risen to political prominence as President Hoover’s secretary of war. Hurley was a buffoon, loud-mouthed and verging on senility. An ardent Republican, he was also a prominent figure in the “China Lobby,” precious little though he knew of China. He came, he saw, he addressed Chiang as “Mr. Shek.” Finally, he reported to Roosevelt: “Today you are confronted by a choice between Chiang Kai-Shek and Stilwell. There is no other issue between you and Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang Kai-Shek has agreed to every request, every suggestion, made by you except the Stilwell appointment [to command China’s armed forces].”
On 13 October, Hurley recommended Stilwell’s sacking. Roosevelt, who had earlier favoured replacing the general as director of lend-lease and chief of staff while retaining him as battlefield commander in Burma, acceded. Stilwell wrote to his wife of his delight in “hanging up my shovel423and bidding farewell to as merry a nest of gangsters as you’ll meet in a long day’s march.” He said to John Paton Davies: “What the hell. You live only once and you have to live as you believe.” He quit immediately, without waiting even to brief his appointed successor, Lt.-Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who had been serving as deputy chief of staff to SEAC commander Lord Louis Mountbatten. Wedemeyer arrived in Chongqing on 31 October, with a much more restricted mandate than his predecessor. He was to manage U.S. air operations out of China, “advise and assist the generalissimo,” but remain aloof from politics.
Chiang rejoiced. He perceived the removal of Stilwell as a triumph for his own authority. Yet after just ten days, Wedemeyer signalled Marshall in Washington: “The disorganization and muddled planning of the Chinese is beyond comprehension.” After a month in his new role, the U.S. general reported on the condition of Chiang and his armies in terms which matched or transcended Stilwell’s histrionic dispatches:
Generalissimo promised would fight hard to hold [Guilin-Liuzhou] area for at least 2 months, as it was it fell without a fight. The troops that melted away so quickly…were by Chinese standards well equipped and fed…I have now concluded that G and his adherents realize seriousness of the situation but they are impotent and confounded. They are not organized, equipped and trained for modern war. Psychologically they are not prepared to cope with the situation because of political intrigue, false pride and mistrust of leaders’ honesty and motives…Frankly I think that the Chinese officials surrounding the G are actually afraid to report accurately conditions…their stupidity and inefficiency are revealed, and further the G might order them to take positive action and they are incompetent to issue directives, make plans and fail completely in obtaining execution by field commanders…efficiency of Chinese combat units…is very low.
Wedemeyer was fearful that the Japanese planned to take Kunming, terminus of the Hump air route, and strove to concentrate Chinese forces to defend it. To the dismay of Mountbatten and Slim, he withdrew from Burma the American-trained Chinese divisions, the best troops in the Nationalist order of battle, and airlifted them to the Yunnan front. Yet they arrived there as the crisis passed. The Japanese halted. They had achieved their aim—to open a land link to their own forces in Indochina, at a time when the sea passage was threatened by American blockade. In the Allied camp, it was recognised that the closure of Ichigo was the result of a policy decision by Tokyo, owing nothing to the Chinese Nationalist army’s powers of resistance. After almost three years of herculean effort by the United States, the employment of a quarter of a million Americans on the Asian mainland, Washington was obliged to confront the fact that the Japanese could do as they chose in China; that the country was as much a shambles as it had been in 1942, save that thanks to American largesse the regime’s leader and principal supporters, together with a few U.S. officers, were incomparably richer. None of this constituted a case for retaining Stilwell in his former role. Hurley was thus far correct, that it was absurd for the most senior American soldier in China to be entirely alienated from the man endorsed by the U.S. as its national leader. Washington belatedly realised what Chiang had always understood—that America was stuck with him; that no threats of withdrawing support unless conditions were met had any substance, because the U.S. administration had no other Chinese card in its deck.
For the rest of the war, Wedemeyer suffered familiar frustrations about the shortcomings of America’s huge, hopeless ally. If Stilwell’s successor managed to avert a showdown with Chiang, he saw nothing to diminish his contempt for Asians. Stilwell recorded an earlier conversation with Wedemeyer. “Al stated that424 he thought the British and we should permit the Germans and the Russians to beat each other into pulp…that Britain and the United States were the guardians and legatees of the only civilisation worth preserving.”
Through the winter of 1944, Allied diplomats and soldiers speculated freely that Chiang’s regime might collapse, that by default Tokyo might find all China at its mercy. “In about six months the Japanese have advanced…a distance of roughly 500 miles over comparatively poor l[ines] of c[ommunication] against a considerable concentration of Chinese troops, supported by the American/Chinese air force operating from well-prepared forward bases,” reported Mountbatten’s intelligence chief in a gloomy appreciation on 2 December 1944. “Economically they have secured adequate rice to maintain their forces but, of greater consequence, they have denied to the Chinese the resources of these areas…It appears probable that one of the main aims of Japanese mil strategy is to prolong the war in the hope that war-weariness, assisted possibly by disagreement between the Allies after the defeat of GERMANY, may enable her to secure a negotiated peace.”
Wedemeyer persisted with ambitious plans to rebuild the Nationalist armies. He had sufficient tact and discretion to sustain a relationship with Chiang, at the cost of quarrelling bitterly with the British. As the Chinese predicament worsened, acrimony increased between U.S. officers committed to Chiang and Mountbatten’s people, wearied to despair by what they regarded as a grand American futility. Americans believed that British strategy was driven chiefly, if not exclusively, by a preoccupation with resurrecting their own empire. On 9 December 1944, Mountbatten’s chief political adviser, Esler Dening, reported to the Foreign Office in London: “General Wedemeyer told me with conviction425 that there would not be a British Empire after the war…At present the question was whether to prop up a tottering China with props which may not hold, or to hit the Japanese hard where we have the forces to do it. [This] seems already resolved in favour of the former. If props hold, America will get the credit and if they do not, we shall get the blame.”
The only happy man in all this was the generalissimo. He deluded himself that he had gained all his objectives. Supplies flowed up the Burma Road in ever-increasing quantities. Yet Chiang would pay a heavy political price for his military failure. The U.S. no longer deluded itself that Japan’s forces in China could be defeated by the Chinese. Washington thus turned to the only other power capable of doing so—the Soviet Union. Through the winter of 1944–45, with increasing urgency Washington solicited Russian participation in the war against Japan. Chiang believed that he had played his cards with brilliant skill, by preserving American support for his regime on his own terms, without conceding any scintilla of domestic reform. Yet the consequence would be a great Russian army’s descent upon Manchuria, with the endorsement of the United States.
“Nineteen forty-four was the year in which Chiang Kai-shek’s policies completely collapsed, along with his defence of China,” says a modern Chinese historian, Professor Niu Jun of Beijing University. At a period when elsewhere in the world Allied arms were decisively ascendant, in China alone did the Japanese remain victorious. It is mistaken to dismiss the generalissimo as an absurd figure. He knew his own country better than did the Americans. He understood that no Chinese army could defeat the Japanese. His willingness to surrender territory, of which China possessed so much, rather than to confront the enemy on terms which suited Tokyo, was more realistic than the grandiose visions of Stilwell, Wedemeyer or Roosevelt. “Chiang did some big things426 for China,” says a historian of Manchuria, Wang Hongbin. “He ended the domination of the warlords, and he fought the Japanese. He was criticised for failing to oppose the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, but what else could he realistically do? He lacked the military means to resist. His strategy was simply to wait for a chance to engage the enemy on favourable terms. Is not that what the Americans and British also did in the Second World War? The Americans did not understand China. They wanted this country to do much more than it was capable of.”
Chiang’s regime was ultimately doomed by its corruption, and by the generalissimo’s inability to translate some shrewd conceptions into any sort of reality. He liked to proclaim sonorously: “I am the state.” But, by surrounding himself with thieves and sycophants, he denied his government the services of subordinates who might have rendered it sustainable. The generalissimo would ultimately discover that his achievement in forcing the Americans to indulge his regime on his own terms merely ensured its collapse. John Paton Davies wrote: “Stilwell’s big mistake, in which I sometimes went along with him, was to think that he could strike a bargain with the generalissimo…Had Chiang been able and willing to do what Stilwell asked, China might well have emerged from the war a great power…As Chiang could no more reform his power base than overcome his idiosyncrasies, the bargain was doomed—as was Chiang.” U.S. ambassador Clarence Gauss, who was replaced by Hurley shortly after Stilwell’s sacking, wrote perceptively in the autumn of 1944: “Time is on the side of427 the Chinese Communists…as time goes on, the Kuomintang’s influence and control in free China is deteriorating if not yet disintegrating; and…if the Soviet Union should come to make war upon the Japanese…defeat of the Japanese continental armies would probably leave the Communist forces and their regime in a strong political and military position.”
From the winter of 1944 onwards the war effort in China, which had never synchronised with events elsewhere, lapsed into a pattern wholly at odds with them. While in Europe and the Pacific the Allied march to victory gained momentum, in Chiang Kai-shek’s land the enemy retained power to advance at will. The occupation of swathes of new territory did nothing to mitigate the hopelessness of Japan’s wider circumstances. “Ichigo was a success in a narrow sense,” said Japanese staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki, “but it did not help our overall strategic position. We still had a million men in China who were denied to the Pacific campaign. Our success in overrunning the B-29 airfields in China simply meant that the Americans moved their bases to the Marianas.”
The Japanese advance made a mockery, however, of Washington’s claims that China was a serious partner in the Grand Alliance. The country was like some dowager stricken in years and heavy with rheumatism, unwillingly obliged to dance at a ball. The effort was painful, the achievement pitiful. The Japanese had no wish to extend their Asian perimeter until American assertiveness forced them to do so. The principal consequence of the huge Allied commitment was to intensify the miseries of China’s people. Li Fenggui, a Communist guerrilla from a peasant family in Shandong Province, was one of eighty-nine young men who left his village to fight. Afterwards, just four returned. The community’s experience was mirrored throughout China. The Chinese people paid a terrible price for participation in the Second World War, while contributing almost nothing to Allied victory.