Stilwell in China

On 2 February 1942 the War Department in Washington issued an order that, for almost three years, tied the course of American policy towards China to a single man. Major General Joseph Stilwell, a 58-year-old infantry officer who had spent well over a decade in China in all and spoke Chinese, was appointed chief of staff to the supreme commander of the China theatre, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and at the same time commander of American forces in China, Burma and India. That same day the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, signed his instructions: Stilwell was “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”. He would later open every private analysis of his mission with these words, in this or a slightly altered form.

Some accounts state that on 2 February Stilwell became Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff and “supreme commander of Allied forces in China”. The second half of that claim is inaccurate. The Allied supreme commander in the China theatre was Chiang himself, appointed to the post after the Arcadia Conference. Stilwell was to be his chief of staff, commander of all American forces in China, Burma and India (of which there were as yet almost none), administrator of American Lend-Lease supplies, and commander of whatever Chinese forces the Generalissimo chose to place under him. That last clause proved the source of most of the trouble that followed. Stilwell was chosen for the mission in the second half of January, his acceptance was settled on 23 January and the formal orders were issued on 2 February; he did not reach China until early March.

China in a coalition war

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, China, which had fought Japan alone since 1937, suddenly found itself the ally of two great powers. On 9 December 1941 it formally declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy. For Chiang Kai-shek it was a moment of great hope: China would henceforth sit at the table of the great allies rather than beg for help from outside. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt shared this vision, at least in words. His policy, as Marshall later put it, was to “treat China as a great power”. At the end of December Roosevelt offered Chiang the post of supreme commander of the China theatre, which also took in Thailand and Indochina, and advised him to set up an Allied staff of Chinese, British and American officers. Around 5 January 1942 Chiang accepted and asked the United States to send a senior officer to head that staff. The letter added the proviso that the officer need not know the Far East, since men who remembered the Chinese armies of the warlord era misunderstood the present National Army.

The reality of the alliance, however, did not match the declarations. China was cut off from the sea, and its only land route to the outside world was the Burma Road, which ran from the port of Rangoon by rail to Lashio and then on through the mountains to Kunming. Along it travelled the American aid promised to China under Lend-Lease in the spring of 1941 and overseen since the autumn by General John Magruder’s American military mission in Chongqing. From the airfields of Burma and Yunnan operated Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers, formally part of the Chinese air force. In December, when the Japanese began bombing Rangoon, the British held back in port some of the cargoes destined for China, and General Archibald Wavell, commanding in India, accepted only part of the Chinese troops Chiang had offered for the defence of Burma. The Generalissimo took both as an insult. Roosevelt was concerned enough to ask Winston Churchill to have Wavell do everything possible to placate the Chinese.

Two conceptions clashed in Washington. Secretary of War Henry Stimson envisaged a genuine theatre of war in China, with American bases and supply lines from which Japan might one day be struck. Marshall and his staff, with Dwight Eisenhower in the War Plans Division, wanted something more modest: a mission that would arm and train Chinese divisions, strengthen Chennault and keep China in the war without drawing resources away from the main theatre, the Atlantic and Europe, which the Arcadia Conference had made the priority.

Drum declines, Marshall chooses Stilwell

Stilwell was not the first candidate. Stimson proposed Lieutenant General Hugh Drum, commander of the First Army, the senior line general of the US Army and one of the few with combat experience from the First World War. Drum arrived in Washington on 2 January convinced that a command in Europe awaited him, and was surprised to hear of China. Over the following days he put forward ambitious plans of his own: a great operation from Burma through Thailand and Indochina towards Hanoi and Haiphong to open a route to the sea for China. When Marshall explained to him on 8 and 9 January that there would be no large American forces in China, Drum replied that, as one of the three senior generals with front-line experience, he would be wasted in a subordinate post. Marshall took this as a lack of enthusiasm and recommended dropping his candidacy. Drum tried to retract his words, but on 17 January Stimson closed the matter.

On 14 January Marshall proposed Stilwell. The two had known each other since the 1920s, when they served together in the 15th Infantry Regiment in Tianjin, and from Fort Benning, where Marshall, as assistant commandant of the Infantry School, had put Stilwell in charge of the tactics section. Stilwell was regarded as one of the best corps commanders in the army. In December 1941 he had come to Washington from California, where he commanded III Corps, as the designated commander of the planned invasion of French North Africa, then code-named Gymnast. He was also the only American general who knew the Chinese army from the inside: from 1935 to 1939 he had been military attaché in Beijing and had studied the battles of the Sino-Japanese War in minute detail, from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident to the fighting around Xuzhou. Marshall knew that Stilwell was no diplomat. He was famous for his sharp tongue, and not for nothing was he called “Vinegar Joe”.

Between 14 and 23 January Stimson, Marshall and Stilwell discussed the scope of the mission. Asked what he needed to succeed in China, “and especially in Burma”, Stilwell answered: executive authority – that is, command. The Chinese Foreign Minister T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), who was in Washington, agreed on behalf of his government on 21 January that an American general should exercise executive authority over British, Chinese and American forces, especially in Burma, and head Chiang’s Allied staff. On 23 January Marshall asked Stilwell outright: “Will you go?” Stilwell, who had not sought the mission and showed no joy about it in his notes, replied: “I’ll go where I’m sent.” Soon afterwards he learned that the British had appointed an officer senior to him in rank to Burma, so his hope of commanding all the forces in that country began to fade before he had even left.

The orders of 2 February

The scope of Stilwell’s duties was set out in an exchange of letters between T. V. Soong and Stimson. The Chinese understood them as follows: he was to supervise and control all matters of American military aid to China; under the Generalissimo, to command all American forces in China and such Chinese forces as might be assigned to him; to represent the United States on the Allied war council in China; to be Chiang’s chief of staff; and to improve, maintain and control the Chinese section of the Burma Road. A second chief of staff, responsible for the Chinese army proper, remained General He Yingqin. Stilwell noted with satisfaction that the clause on the control of military aid was meant to give that authority to him rather than to Magruder, the existing head of the mission. Relations with the British were defined in a paper of the Combined Chiefs of Staff: Stilwell’s Chinese troops, should they enter Burma, were to come under Wavell’s Allied ABDA command, while Stilwell himself was to be the principal liaison between Wavell and Chiang and could build bases and airfields in Burma and India.

The order of 2 February read, in substance, that by direction of the President he was detailed to the General Staff Corps and appointed chief of staff to the supreme commander of the China theatre, and that upon reporting to the supreme commander he would in addition be designated commanding general of United States Army forces in the Chinese theatre of operations, Burma and India. Stilwell was to assemble a staff in Washington without delay and be ready to fly to Chongqing. He was soon promoted to lieutenant general so that in dealings with the British and the Chinese he would not be outranked by his counterparts.

Stilwell assembled his staff on the model of a corps headquarters, partly from officers of III Corps and partly from the group earlier prepared for Drum, and called it the United States Task Force in China, since the word “mission” struck him as too modest. Before leaving he asked Marshall for arms for 30 Chinese divisions, for American supply units and air forces, for transport aircraft, and for an assurance that, should Rangoon fall, deliveries would not stop but be diverted to a port in India, preferably Calcutta. The War Department agreed to keep supplies flowing and to provide transport aircraft as soon as they became available, and promised some artillery, machine guns and rifles, but it did not approve the long-term aim: the rebuilding of the Chinese army and the preparation of a land base for a final offensive against Japan.

At the same time Washington tried to show the Chinese that it took them seriously. In early February Congress voted China a credit of half a billion dollars, and Chiang, then on a visit to India, announced the construction of a road from Assam to China through northern Burma to replace the threatened Burma Road. On 9 February the Generalissimo sent word through Magruder that General Stilwell’s arrival “is most welcome”.

The journey east

On 11 February Stilwell and his staff set out by air on the long journey to Asia. While he was on his way, the situation in Asia worsened by the day. The Japanese, who had taken Moulmein on 31 January, were crossing the Salween and pushing on Rangoon, and on 15 February Singapore surrendered. On 24 February Stilwell’s aircraft landed at Karachi, and the next day the general was in New Delhi, where he learned that India could send only one brigade to Burma. Meanwhile Washington had widened his powers: he was to take command of all American forces in India as soon as he arrived there, rather than only after reaching Chongqing.

From India Stilwell flew to Lashio, where in early March he met Chiang, and on 4 March at Kunming he talked with Chennault, who agreed to serve under his orders and to have the Flying Tigers inducted into the US Army Air Forces. “Great relief,” Stilwell wrote. That same day the headquarters of American Army Forces in China, Burma and India was established in Chongqing; in keeping with Marshall’s wishes, the word “theatre” did not appear in its name. On 6 March Stilwell held his first conference with the Generalissimo and his wife, Soong Mei-ling (Soong Mei-ling). Chiang spoke above all about the command in Burma and about relations with the British, whom he distrusted.

A clash of characters

Stilwell’s mission rested on a misunderstanding from the outset. Washington had sent to China a field commander and army reformer, convinced that the Chinese soldier, properly trained, fed and led, was a match for the Japanese, and that it was enough to remove the corrupt and passive generals. What Chiang needed above all were supplies, aircraft and political recognition, and he treated his best divisions as a pillar of his power that had to survive not only the war with Japan but also a future confrontation with Mao Zedong’s Communists. The Generalissimo had no intention of handing real command of his armies to a foreigner, and he issued orders to Chinese generals over Stilwell’s head. Stilwell, for his part, made no secret of his contempt. In his diary and dispatches he called Chiang “Peanut”.

In March and April 1942 Stilwell commanded, at least nominally, the Chinese Fifth and Sixth Armies in Burma. After the fall of Rangoon, the defeat at Toungoo and the severing of the Burma Road at Lashio at the end of April, in May he led his staff on foot through jungle and mountains to India. “I claim we got a hell of a beating,” he told journalists afterwards. From then on China could be supplied only by air over the Himalayas, and for two years Stilwell pressed for the recapture of northern Burma and the building of a road from Ledo, trained Chinese divisions in India and fought over supplies with Chennault, who was persuading Chiang that air power would win the war. The dispute came to a head in 1944: when the Japanese Operation Ichi-Go shattered the Chinese forces in central and southern China, Roosevelt demanded that Chiang give Stilwell command of all his armies. Chiang refused, and in October 1944 Stilwell was recalled.

Place in the war

The appointment of 2 February 1942 was the first concrete step by the United States towards what was later called the China–Burma–India theatre. That theatre never received what it needed: Europe and the Pacific had priority, and there were hardly any American ground troops on the Asian mainland. Even so, Stilwell’s presence changed the war in Asia. Chinese divisions trained in India, supported by the American unit known as Merrill’s Marauders, took Myitkyina in 1944, and the Ledo Road, which Chiang renamed the Stilwell Road in his honour, linked India with China in January 1945.

Above all, however, Stilwell’s mission became the symbol in the United States of disillusionment with Chiang Kai-shek’s China. Journalists and diplomats who were friends of Stilwell portrayed him as an honest soldier destroyed by a corrupt regime, and his diary, published after the war, fixed that image for decades. Some historians now regard this judgement as one-sided and point out that Chiang had his reasons when, after four years of fighting alone, he husbanded his bled-white army and refused to throw it into battle to recover a British colony. After the Communist victory in 1949, the argument over who was to blame for the alliance’s failure became part of the American debate over the “loss of China”.