Chiang Kai-shek demands Stilwell's recall

On 15 September 1943 the Foreign Minister of the Republic of China, Song Ziwen, known in the West as T. V. Soong, presented President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Washington with a memorandum on a “complete reorganisation” of the China theatre. On the face of it this was a technical proposal: China was to join the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Allied munitions assignment board, and the supreme commander and chief of staff of the China theatre were to be Chinese, with American deputies. In practice it meant the removal of General Joseph Stilwell, who since the spring of 1942 had been chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, commander of American forces in China, Burma and India, and controller of Lend-Lease supplies for China.

Popular chronologies record under this date that Chiang Kai-shek demanded Stilwell’s recall because the American had proposed an alliance with the Communists. The picture needs refining. September 1943 did indeed open the most serious crisis around Stilwell up to that point, and one of its causes was his recent proposal to use Communist troops against the Japanese as well. But in mid-September the campaign was being waged by Soong in Washington; the Generalissimo’s own formal demand came only in mid-October and was withdrawn on 17 October. Stilwell was actually recalled a year later, in October 1944.

Two years of friction

Stilwell arrived in China in March 1942 with orders issued in February that made him at once Chiang Kai-shek’s subordinate and Washington’s representative. This dual role caused tension from the start. After the defeat in Burma and the walk out to India, Stilwell concluded that the Chinese army needed thoroughgoing reform: fewer but better trained and equipped divisions, commanders appointed for competence rather than loyalty, and a land offensive to open the route from India to China. To this end he trained Chinese divisions at Ramgarh in India (later known as X Force) and pressed for a second group to be prepared in Yunnan (Y Force).

Chiang Kai-shek saw things differently. The army was the foundation of his power vis-à-vis the provincial generals and the Communists, and American plans to rebuild it upset that balance. He found far more congenial the ideas of General Claire Chennault, former commander of the Flying Tigers, who promised to defeat the Japanese in China with air power. In March 1943 Chennault’s units were turned into the Fourteenth Air Force, and at the Trident Conference in May Roosevelt gave the air arm priority in the allocation of cargo flown over the Himalayas – “the Hump”. Stilwell, who warned that the Japanese would respond to the air raids with a ground offensive against the airfields and that the untrained Chinese army would be unable to defend them, lost the argument. The President, moreover, regarded him as too abrasive towards an ally whom America wished to treat as a great power.

September 1943: Chennault, Sun Liren and the “north-western” proposal

By the summer of 1943 the promises made at Trident had not been kept. Tonnage over the Hump was growing, but more slowly than planned (just under 5,700 tons in August, around 6,700 tons in September), and the aircraft and stores promised to Chennault were arriving late. The Japanese responded to the first strikes of the Fourteenth Air Force with massed raids on its bases. On 5 September Chennault painted a grim picture of his position to Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins: he did not accuse Stilwell, but he listed how many fighters and bombers he lacked. On 10 September an equally pessimistic report reached Soong from India from General Sun Liren, commander of the American-trained Chinese 38th Division, who complained of shortages of men, of malaria and of the refusal to give him a tank battalion.

Between these two reports, on 6 September, Stilwell submitted to Chiang Kai-shek a plan for a diversion in north-western China. His aim was to forestall the Japanese offensive which, in his view, Chennault’s raids were bound to provoke. The troops of Generals Fu Zuoyi and Deng Baoshan were to strike at the Beijing–Suiyuan railway, forces from the Xi’an area were to cross the Yellow River and threaten Zhengzhou, and the Communist 18th Army Group (formerly the Eighth Route Army) was to advance into the Wutai Mountains and attack the Beijing–Hankou railway. Stilwell proposed that all these forces should receive supplies, the Communists included. According to the American official history (Charles Romanus and Riley Sunderland), this was Stilwell’s first proposal that the Generalissimo should order Nationalist and Communist divisions to attack simultaneously and give the Communists something from his stocks. Stilwell justified it on purely military grounds and added that the plan would “show the degree of reliability of the forces in the north-west” – that is, test whether the Chinese Communist Party would obey a government order.

To Chiang Kai-shek the idea was unacceptable. Since the New Fourth Army incident of January 1941 the united front with the Communists had existed largely on paper, and General Hu Zongnan’s best divisions, which Stilwell wanted to throw against the Japanese, were enforcing the blockade of the Communist base around Yan’an. To arm Mao Zedong’s army with American supplies would, for the Generalissimo, have meant strengthening a rival in a future civil war. Stilwell himself predicted in his diary that the proposal would be treated “with the contempt it deserves”, and at the end of September he noted that it had got him into trouble and that he should have known “the Reds won’t take orders”.

Soong’s memorandum

With these reports in hand, Soong presented his plan to Roosevelt on 15 September. The immediate pretext was the decision of the Quebec Conference to set up South East Asia Command under Vice Admiral Louis Mountbatten, with Stilwell as his deputy. Soong wrote that the new command made it necessary to review the American’s position: Stilwell was chief of staff of the China theatre, held independent command of the US air forces in China, India and Burma, directed the supply services, the airlift to China and the Ramgarh divisions, and had been given authority over the Chinese Lend-Lease programme by the War Department without China’s consent. Such a “straddling” of authority over so many fields was bound to cause friction that “may dangerously jeopardise future campaigns”. All troops operating in the theatre, regardless of nationality, were to come under the orders of a Chinese commander.

Roosevelt passed the memorandum to General George Marshall, who politely declined to change the command structure. One reason, which the Americans could not state openly, was security: since August 1943 they had known that the Japanese were breaking Chinese codes, and every admission of the Chinese to secret deliberations was a risk. Marshall informed Soong of this. At the same time the President showed sympathy for Chennault’s complaints: on 16 September, through Stilwell, he apologised to Soong Mei-ling, the Generalissimo’s wife, for the delays in supplies for the Fourteenth Air Force, and asked Marshall to “push vigorously” the agreed plans.

The attack on Stilwell also had a second front – in Chongqing. Rumours were repeated to the Generalissimo that the American wanted to push him aside, hand civil affairs to Soong and the army to General Chen Cheng – in effect, to himself. Paradoxically, at the same time Stilwell gained unexpected allies. Soong Mei-ling and her sister Soong Ai-ling, wife of the Finance Minister H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi), invited him to a talk in September and offered to work with him. Their motives remain unclear; historians point to the sisters’ rivalry with their brother, T. V. Soong. Soong Mei-ling explained to Stilwell how to present matters to her husband and warned him against mistakes such as the “north-western” proposal.

The October showdown

The crisis came to a head in October. Mountbatten flew to India, as did General Brehon Somervell, head of the American supply services, whom Roosevelt had sent to present the new command to Chiang Kai-shek. In New Delhi Soong told Somervell that the President had already agreed to recall Stilwell – Somervell had heard nothing of the kind in Washington. In Chongqing the Generalissimo, with Soong acting as interpreter, explicitly demanded the American’s immediate removal. Marshall, who valued Stilwell as a commander and trainer but knew he lacked the President’s backing, was already considering moving him and replacing him with Somervell.

It was Mountbatten who tipped the balance. When he arrived in Chongqing on 16 October and learned of the demand, he declared that he did not wish to use Chinese troops if they were deprived, just before operations began, of the commander who had been training them for two years. For Stilwell the demand came as a shock: the Generalissimo had recently been responding to his memoranda, and Soong Mei-ling was his ally. The next day both Soong sisters spoke up for Stilwell, as did even the chief of staff of the Chinese army, He Yingqin, with whom the American was at odds. On the evening of 17 October Soong Mei-ling summoned Stilwell to her husband’s residence and persuaded him to make peace. Stilwell assured Chiang Kai-shek that his only aim was the good of China, and the Generalissimo set two conditions: that the American should understand the difference between the duties of a commander-in-chief and those of a chief of staff, and that he should “avoid a superiority complex”. In his diary Stilwell dismissed this as “pure drivel”, but formally the two men were reconciled. According to Romanus and Sunderland, what the Generalissimo objected to above all was Stilwell’s dual status, answerable both to him and to Washington.

Place in the war

The crisis of September and October ended in victory for Stilwell, but only an apparent one. It left the American permanently disillusioned; from then on he devoted himself mainly to the campaign in northern Burma and the building of the Ledo Road, regarding his possibilities in China as exhausted. The fundamental disputes – over priority for Chennault’s air force, control of Lend-Lease and reform of the army – remained unresolved, and at the Cairo Conference in November 1943 Roosevelt was still courting Chiang Kai-shek as a partner among the Big Four.

Stilwell’s predictions came true in 1944, when the Japanese Operation Ichi-gō, launched in April, swept away the Chinese armies and overran the forward airfields of the Fourteenth Air Force. In the summer of 1944 the American Dixie Mission arrived in Yan’an, and Washington began to demand that Stilwell be given command of all Chinese forces, the Communists included. Only this pressure – above all Roosevelt’s sharply worded message of 19 September 1944, which Stilwell personally handed to the Generalissimo – led to the break: Chiang Kai-shek demanded his recall, and in October 1944 Roosevelt agreed. Stilwell’s successor in China was General Albert Wedemeyer. The theme of an “alliance with the Communists”, often linked with September 1943, was thus at that stage only in embryo; it acquired its full weight in 1944, and later in the American arguments over “who lost China”.