Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (43 page)

While Marshall had decided to concentrate forces on Europe, he recognized that it was still important to show the Americans were fighting in Asia; after all, the provocation had come from Japan, not Germany. Yet he did not want to assign US ground troops to China. The solution seemed to be to persuade Chiang to allow an American chief of staff for the Chinese armies, which would show that the Americans stood side by side with the Chinese, but did not require the assignment of significant troop numbers. Stilwell was Marshall’s choice to take the role.

Stilwell had taught at West Point, where his cutting remarks had led to him being nicknamed “Vinegar Joe,” a moniker in which he took great pride. Between the wars he undertook several tours of duty in China, becoming proficient in Chinese and including a period as US military attaché from 1935 to 1939, during which he had witnessed the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. His reports show one constant theme: puzzlement and anger that the Chinese military preferred to retreat rather than to hold territory. When asked on one occasion when the Chinese might choose to fight back, he replied, “Not until they lose their inherent distaste for offensive combat.”
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The Chinese military officers, he believed, simply did not have the skills needed for modern warfare. The ordinary fighting man, on the other hand, had the fortitude to conquer—as long as he was led by a commander who knew how to use him. Stilwell had no previous direct experience of generalship, but he had a powerful friend in George C. Marshall. Stilwell believed that as long as he was given genuine “COMMAND” (as he put in his diary) over Chinese forces, then he could use them effectively against Japan.
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Yet on February 6, 1942, Marshall sent a message to General John Magruder, the head of the American military mission in Chongqing, that made Stilwell’s role clear: “American forces in China and Burma will operate under Stilwell’s direction . . . but General Stilwell himself will always be under the command of the Generalissimo.”
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The gap between the official understanding of Stilwell’s role and Stilwell’s sense of his own position would soon come to assume crucial importance.

The official entry of the United States into the Second World War had turned Chongqing into a very different city after December 1941. Although American troops were not sent to fight in China, an influx of American bureaucrats and military personnel was now a constant part of everyday existence. Sometimes the influence could lead to odd results; one report claimed that a local student had been reprimanded for starting to speak her native Chinese in an American accent. “Young lady,” scolded her teacher after she tried out her new voice in class, “remember I am your professor, not your boyfriend.”
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Other aspects of the American presence were visible as well as audible. Graham Peck spent the war years in China working for the US Office of War Information. His job was to spread positive propaganda about the war effort and China’s new American allies. In his compelling memoir of his assignment to Chongqing, Peck described the arrival of a heartening new presence in the war-weary city. With a “thick powerful roar, smooth as the tearing of heavy silk,” he recalled, there appeared “American P-40 fighter planes with the grinning sharks’ faces of the ‘Flying Tigers’ painted on their snouts.” For half an hour the P-40s performed to their audience, dipping up and down in the air, “like a school of happy flying fish,” and in response they heard “the noise of half a million people shouting together to the sky,” the population of Chongqing overjoyed at the presence of their new, technologically superior allies.
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Having been in Chongqing since 1937, General Claire Chennault was delighted that the US and China were now officially allies. The Flying Tigers (AVG) that he commanded were augmented with a hundred P-40 aircraft that had been promised before Pearl Harbor, and were delivered in late 1941, mostly before that attack.
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(In 1942 the AVG would be officially redesignated as part of the 14th US Air Force, and would become the only Americans to see active combat service in China itself.) Yet the arrival of Stilwell spelled trouble for the American flier. Chennault was convinced that airpower held the key to a swift victory over the Japanese within China. Stilwell, in contrast, believed in the power of well-trained ground troops. The stage was set for a confrontation that would make the complex relationship between the US and China still more tense.

Chiang Kai-shek’s great hope was that the US might supply American ground combat troops to fight in China. However, this was never seriously considered by the Allied commanders. The official US Army historians stated clearly that:

there were no U.S. ground combat units, for the U.S. effort in China had always been intended by the War Department to help the Chinese defend themselves, to which end the War Department and the Joint Chiefs had been willing to give advice plus technical and air support. Moreover, since every American flown into China meant that .62 of a ton of supplies had to be flown to China every month for his support, Stilwell had kept the number of U.S. ground force and service personnel in China to a minimum, hence there were few indeed in that category.
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Stilwell’s chance to put Chinese troops into action would come very soon indeed. One of the first decisions made by the Allied commanders was to repel Japanese advances not in China but in Burma. Even before Pearl Harbor, the British and the Chinese had concerns that Burma, which lay between China and Britain’s Indian Empire, was vulnerable to Japanese attack, and that the fall of Burma could allow the Japanese to take northeast India, Calcutta, and make the whole of eastern India vulnerable. The Burma Road had been supplying some 20,000 tons a month of supplies, to which the only alternative was to fly much smaller amounts across the Hump from India to China. However, the Japanese threat to Burma was not considered a major one, and only around 12,000 troops were stationed there.
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Then, in February 1942, the Japanese launched their assault on Burma. They had not previously considered the British colony a priority target, but the events of the previous month had inspired them. After Pearl Harbor, in quick succession they had conquered Hong Kong and the Philippines. It suddenly seemed that the mighty British Army was not such a formidable foe, and Burma now looked a more attractive target. It offered the twin temptations of cutting off the Nationalists from supply via the Burma Road, and making the eastern flank of British India vulnerable. On February 9 the Japanese 15th Army moved to take the capital, Rangoon, and then drive north toward Toungoo and Mandalay.

In response, Chiang offered up the Fifth and Sixth Armies to defend Toungoo, in central Burma, to provide relief for the British defense of Rangoon, but this gesture was rejected by Archibald Wavell, British commander in chief for India and supreme commander, Far East. Wavell’s justification was in part logistical, but also owed a great deal to imperial pride. He wrote to Churchill that it was “obviously better” that Burma should be defended by British troops rather than Chinese, although in this case Churchill disagreed with Wavell’s decision.
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Stilwell, still in Washington, wrote contemptuously that Wavell “didn’t want the dirty Chinese in Burma.”
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(Something similar had happened during the Great War, when the Chinese offer of combat troops to the Allies in Europe had been accepted by the French but was turned down by the British.)
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Yet in Southeast Asia the British position was becoming even more precarious. Singapore, the premier military harbor in the region, fell to the Japanese on February 15 in one of the greatest disasters for the British Empire during the whole of the Second World War.

The British, under General Harold Alexander, were unable to defend Rangoon, and withdrew. The Japanese captured the city on March 8 and immediately made plans to strike north, to Toungoo. Despite the mutual distrust between Alexander and Chiang, the British and Chinese were united in the conviction that the best strategy was now retreat. Alexander’s concern was to bring the Empire troops back for the defense of India while using Chinese troops as a buffer. Chiang advocated the defense of Mandalay, in central Burma, but demanded that the British provide more active assistance before Chinese troops were sent to protect the city. Both sides had given up southern Burma as lost.
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Not so Stilwell. He arrived in Chongqing via India in early March 1942, having been named Chiang’s chief of staff. After his first formal meeting with the generalissimo, Stilwell noted approvingly that “he seems willing to fight and is fed up with the British retreat and lethargy.”
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Chiang’s initial reaction to Stilwell’s appointment was also favorable. But he made it clear that he was commander in chief for the China Theater, and that he expected Stilwell to follow orders. Chiang was content to allow the Americans the gesture of appointing Stilwell to show the closeness between the US and China, but he had no intention of actually ceding command to a Westerner.

On March 9 and 10, Stilwell held meetings with Chiang on the strategy for Burma. Chiang advocated a cautious approach: Chinese troops should be sent into the north of Burma to defend the border with Yunnan province (ruled over by the ethnic Yi militarist Long Yun). Chiang believed that there was a chance of defending Mandalay, and wanted Stilwell to pressure the British into supporting a Chinese defense of the city. Stilwell instead spoke out in favor of an offensive strategy, arguing that a push against the Japanese from Toungoo would ensure a great victory. “Rangoon is the vital point,” he noted in his diary on March 9, 1942. “Without it, supply stops.” He added: “I have a hunch the Japs are weak.”
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As no US forces would take part in the campaign, Stilwell would be conducting it with Chinese troops, in particular the Fifth and Sixth Armies, among the best that China had left.

Like Chiang, Stilwell was convinced that China would be valuable as an active participant in the world war. He genuinely believed that Japan should be opposed on the Chinese mainland. Some of his more senior commanders did not agree. In a memorandum to the British and American combined chiefs of staff, Marshall was frank in his assessment of Stilwell’s appointment: “Because the Pacific is a secondary theater,” he noted, “we must depend on the Chinese to contain increasingly more Japanese divisions than at present.”
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By advocating an offensive strategy, therefore, Stilwell was going against Marshall’s advice.

Such risky tactics could have their uses: a decade later, the daring amphibious attack by General Douglas MacArthur at Inchon in Korea would help to turn that war against the insurgent Communist forces. But MacArthur was a great deal more experienced, and had far greater resources, than Stilwell in 1942. Chiang opposed Stilwell’s idea, pointing out that there was insufficient air cover or tank support for the Allies in Burma, and that if the Fifth and Sixth Armies were lost, then the defense of southwestern China would become even harder. He reiterated that Stilwell did retain command of the troops, but asked that he wait for Chiang to decide the right moment for an offensive after the Chinese forces had built up their strength near Mandalay.

At first, Stilwell maintained a degree of self-awareness about his position as an American commander of Chinese troops. “I am amazed the way the Chinese accept me,” he noted.
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He was less inclined to seek acceptance from the British, referred to as “Limeys” throughout his diaries, and mocked Major General Lancelot Dennys, the British military attaché in China, for wanting the Chinese to “rush in and save the British empire.”
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But his conviction that he could understand the Chinese and ignore the British awakened within him a recklessness that would not take long to show itself.

After their initial, brief warmth, Stilwell and Chiang clashed over and over again. Stilwell had started referring to Chiang in his diaries as “the Peanut,” and the nickname was clearly not meant to be affectionate. Chiang’s desire for a defensive strategy on the border with Burma led to a mocking response from Stilwell. “In a month,
if nothing
happens, maybe we can take the offensive. He wants to be sure it will be easy,” scoffed Stilwell in his diary. “Again told me Fifth and Sixth must not be defeated, so I told him to send someone else who could guarantee that, because I couldn’t.”
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Stilwell interpreted Chiang’s objections as excessive caution, or even cowardice. Yet it was hardly surprising that the leader of a country with its back against the wall might have doubts about a bold strategy—proposed by a foreign general with no command experience—which threatened to destroy two of his best remaining armies. However, Chiang did not wish to create a rift with his newly appointed chief of staff, so with misgivings he allowed Stilwell to implement his strategy.

On March 21 Stilwell returned to Burma. Toungoo was now under attack, and without fully discussing his plan with either the Chinese or the British, Stilwell ordered the Nationalist troops of the 55th and 22nd Divisions under his command to hurry south to launch a counteroffensive against the Japanese at Pyinmana and Pyawnbwe.
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In a letter home to his wife, Stilwell seemed to acknowledge that this was a risky move. “The Jap air raids on Magwe about cleaned out our meager support, and now we’ll be taking it on the nose for some time with no answer available.” He continued, “However, the Chinese have had a lot of that, and I believe, can take more of that without cracking.”
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