Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

  His family was his citadel where he felt secure against what appeared to be a hostile world, where he loved and felt loved and could shed his defenses. It was a place of jokes and laughter, companionship, mutual entertainment and unbuttoned ease. He never felt really comfortable when away from his family and yet within its bosom for too long, which might be anything more than a few months, he invariably became restless and anxious to get away. In marriage he and his wife Win were joined into a genuine couple. Married to a dominant personality, she took on many of his attitudes and tended to reflect and reinforce rather than soften his hostilities.

  His notebooks filled up with evidence of his constant and primary concern for his five children: their heights and weights with annual and sometimes monthly gains, their allowances and accounts, schools and travels, their first words and bright sayings with age and circumstance noted for each remark. “You’re old, we’re new” was one of Joe Jr.’s at age five. When away from home he always remembered their birthdays in his diary. Even during the chaos of Hsuchow June 1 did not pass without the note, “Nance’s birthday.” When schools were not satisfactory or when once in China his youngest son and daughter, scolded by their teachers, came home in tears, he swore no one should treat his children like that, took them out of school for a year and taught them at home. Handwriting exercises written out in a large and beautiful script for his eldest daughter Nance to copy reveal something of the “genius” Marshall saw in him as a teacher; how he could charm a pupil with humor and irreverence:

  Begin with short words like Cat.

  Pretty soon you can write hippopotamus

  Hip up on top of the whole lot of us….

  Sit close to the table and sit erect.

  Throw your food up in the air;

  And bite it as it comes down.

  All your friends will be pleased.

  They will think they are at the circus….

  Stab a potato with a knife, and then—

  Swallow it whole. Save the knife.

  He could sit for hours with the youngest, Ben, drawing fantastic animals and by a system of cutouts transform a shark into an airplane or a three-headed dragon into a series of marvelous mutations. The family nickname of Ol’ Pappy was acquired at Benning when the children were performing an imitation of the local Georgia “crackers” and “reckoned as how ol’ pappy would go out and catch hisself a rattlesnake and skin it alive.” Delighted with the image, they took to calling their father by the new designation and it stuck.

  Stilwell was always writing things down. In addition to diary, letters, essays and sketches, he wrote what he called “Random Notes” or “Odds and Ends” on sheets or scraps of paper dealing with thoughts, dreams, stray ideas, jokes, anecdotes, remarks, quotations or anything that was passing through his constantly ticking mind. A characteristic scrap, verbatim and in entirety, reads,

  Henri Fabre’s insect study

  History of the eel

  History of the bowler hat

  What to do with Waterloo

  Tall men and tall houses least furnished in upper stories—Bacon

  Well’s “outline of the arts”

  “Fix Bayonets”

  Another scrap records his mental struggle with a fundamental problem of democracy, still unsolved. Headed “= and ≠ Suffrage,” it reads,

  For— Everyman one vote. But some more than—

  Ignorant should be
  Intelligent should be able to offset numerical advantage of masses

  Vs— Difficult to find standard of awarding extra votes

  Property? (Often an accident. Foreign to dem. spirit). (Rep. in upper houses)

  Education. (Not nec. true. Uned. more insight at times).

  Another note headed “Recall, Initiative and Referendum” suggests that he was examining, besides insects, eels and the arts, the constitutional process. He copied passages from Shakespeare including inevitably and predictably Hotspur’s outburst, “For he made me mad…to talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman, of guns and drums and wounds….”

  Intelligent without being profound, Stilwell was a quick thinker usually ahead of the other person in any conversation which he would continually punctuate with a staccato and impatient “Yeh yeh….Yeh, yeh.” Apart from intermittent bouts of questioning, the general tenor of his social and political ideas was conventional. Though he had reacted against his father’s religious piety, he retained the family Republicanism and joined naturally in the exhilarating exercise of Roosevelt-hating. Despite its nonpartisan traditions, the Army when it “mumbles in its beard,” as a fellow-officer put it, shared the ordinary political passions and Stilwell was no exception; indeed, being Stilwell, his sentiments were harsh.

  Among other written records were his dreams, reported clearly and fluently, often with perfect candor and confidence in letters to the person who figured in them. To Win before their marriage he wrote of a dream of intimacy which though delicate and tender was still startling to write to a fiancée in 1910 when reticence was the usual rule. To his father he reported a dream in which after a scuffle with his brother he was being chased by his father with intention, as he thought, “to beat me to a pulp….When you caught up…instead of beating me you pulled out a coin and handed it to me. I stood looking at it stupidly and finally asked what it was. You said ‘A coin of this realm’ in a sad way. Well, I was so broken up about that ‘coin of this realm’ that I woke up and couldn’t get to sleep for some time.” The dreams frequently were of struggle and physical effort, of “Climbing a big mountain to get to some country. Only way in. Mountain side kept crumbling and getting steeper and steeper.” Or of watching with his mother a boy struggling on top of Croton Dam with a stone cannon and being propelled nearer and nearer the edge until he fell over. “ ‘Don’t look’ I said. Went down slowly climbing to stone. Struck and never moved. Red stain under him. ‘Killed him instantly,’ I said.” Others were of climbing down from an airship on ladders or of underwater struggle or of a melee of beasts in China in which “the whole struggling lot came crashing down a rocky slope in a grinding mess of broken legs and necks and crushed carcasses. Phew. I woke up scared stiff.”

  At Benning, even among familiars and equals where there was no group like the diplomats or the British to make him feel uncomfortable or to resent, he could still become difficult and hostile. Marshall acknowledged afterwards that he was three times asked by the Commandant, General Campbell King, to relieve Stilwell. One cause of the animosity he aroused in some officers was the extreme strictness of his standards which would not allow him to give a “Superior” on an Efficiency Report unless he considered it thoroughly deserved. The result was that few officers under his supervision could go on to the War College, whereas in the more routine Weapons Section “Superiors” were freely given, easing the advancement of the recipients’ careers. This puritanism of Stilwell’s about promotions and awards continued to leave patches of resentment behind him in his future service as commanding officer and theater commander. It was not surprising that Marshall’s rating for Stilwell’s tact went down a point in the second year at Benning. A faint note of long-suffering was detectable behind his further comments: “High principles. Too hard-working. Nervous temperament….” Yet Marshall held on to his thorny colleague whom he also recorded as “Ahead of his period in tactics and technique.”

  Stilwell drew on his Chinese experience for examples to illustrate his teaching and also to awaken awareness in the officers of a country with which, as he underlined, “we may all have something to do someday.” In a lecture to the School in 1929 under the title “Psychology of the Oriental” he fixed on a fundamental difficulty between West and East, so obvious that it is usually ignored, when he said that the reason Westerners apply the cliché “inscrutable” to the Chinese is that they find them “different from us.” Why are they different? Because having been “cut off” as Stilwell put it, from our civilization for so many centuries, they have developed u
nder different conditions a civilization of their own. “How then can a Chinese be expected to react like a Westerner?…Answer, he can’t.” This was a principle more important than it sounds. He also made the point that owing to a society so old and fixed in its patterns, the Chinese have “a conservative complex…whose inertia is simply enormous.” Discussing the Oriental concept of “face,” he said enough to show that his future mishandling of Chiang Kai-shek was not from ignorance: “Dignity, then, is their most prized possession and he who strips them of it makes bitter enemies….In dealing with Chinese don’t take their face from them unless you want to humiliate them and unless you do not care if you make enemies.”

  In talking of China to colleagues he stressed the country’s tremendous needs, especially in every form of communication from roads to radios. His interest, as a friend said, “was in what China could develop into.” He believed that the current effort in civil reform would permit “the thorn of extrality to be removed from her side” and he persuaded himself intermittently that the new Government might really succeed in modernizing China and mobilizing her potential. “With the right direction,” he would say, “four hundred million people with their working and manufacturing ability will dominate and we’d better be with ’em.”

  —

  While at Benning his notes show that he read—though disappointingly without comment—the historic document that marked the beginning of China’s new travail. This was the Report of the Lytton Commission of the League of Nations on the Manchurian crisis, the event whose train of consequences was to engulf the world.

  On September 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army, using the arranged pretext of a bomb explosion on the tracks of the South Manchurian Railway, seized Mukden in “self-defense,” and spread out swiftly to the military occupation of Manchuria. The move was a larger successor to the murder of Chang Tso-lin in 1928, and this time accomplished its purpose. It was precipitated by Chiang Kai-shek’s efforts in 1929, in collaboration with the patriotic Young Marshal, Chang Hseuh-liang, to reimpose Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria. Directed first at Russian control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, China’s challenge had provoked instant retaliation by Soviet troops ending in the defeat and humiliation of the Chinese—and alarm to the Japanese. The revival of both Chinese and Russian pretensions determined the Japanese military, who were the expansionist force in the nation, to consolidate Japan’s “special position” in Manchuria. Operating on the principle of direct access to the Emperor which allowed them to act independently of civilian control, the military acting through the Kwantung Army engineered the Mukden Incident, raising issues of tremendous import at home, in China and, in view of the Washington Treaties and the Covenant of the League of Nations, in the West.

  When the attack came Chiang Kai-shek’s military energies were absorbed in the third of his extermination campaigns against the Communists. Moreover, the country was suffering from a disastrous flood of the Yangtze which left thousands of square miles inundated, two million dead and countless destitute. No attempt to organize military resistance in Manchuria was made. On the contrary, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Chang Hsueh-liang who had 400,000 men under arms both south and north of the Great Wall “resolutely” to follow a policy of “non-resistance.” Though his troops were numerically superior, he knew they were no match for the Japanese in training or armament and he preferred a strategic retreat to a military showdown with Japan. His guiding principle was to let nothing deter him from his main purpose of eliminating internal rivals.

  Chiang had made up his mind that “pacification” must come before everything; before social and political reform or resistance to the invader. If there was one thing that could qualify Chiang for greatness, it was the fixity with which he gripped and held a conviction, once formed. Against the Japanese he could use China’s eternal advantage, her infinite room to retreat, while concentrating on his aim of uniting the country under Kuomintang rule. When this was accomplished China could cope with the Japanese; meantime Manchuria, presumably, would satisfy them.

  History is the unfolding of miscalculations, and Chiang had made several. Successful aggression is rarely self-terminated nor is the desire of a people to repel the invader so easily denied. Chiang, however, had little choice and his task inside the Wall was great enough. His first year of rule had been plagued by revolts of the leaders who had helped him to power and then resisted disbandment. At various times during 1929–30 the Kwangsi Generals Li Tsung-jen, Pai Ch’ung-hsi and Chang Fa-kwei and, in the north, Feng Yu-hsiang, had challenged the Government in armed conflict and had to be defeated or bought off. The outer provinces, Yunnan, Szechwan and Sinkiang, because they were outside the Government’s control, remained sources of possible opposition. Canton continued to be intermittent host to a kind of subgovernment maintained by the leaders of the still viable left wing, Wang Ching-wei, Eugene Chen and Sun Fo, the son of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Peiping reverted for a while to a secessionist regime under Wang, Feng and Yen Hsi-shan but, with the help of Chang Hsueh-liang, the Central Government reestablished control. These various struggles preoccupied the Kuomintang to the exclusion of social change, and as soon as they seemed settled or quiescent Chiang set himself to quell another set of domestic enemies, the Communists, who were dug into the countryside of Kiangsi. Three successive “Bandit Suppression” campaigns, as these operations were called, absorbed the Government’s military effort and brought it unpleasant defeats from the Communists’ guerilla tactics in the year before the Japanese struck.

  Three times in eighty years, in a country in desperate need of reform, the revolutionary surge had been frustrated. Chiang was concerned with piecing together political power, not with rooting it in a new social foundation. Land rent reduction could not be pursued by a Government that had reverted to the old alliance between officials and landowners. In Chekiang, where a program of rent reductions was genuinely attempted, its moving spirit and sponsor was assassinated and the program abandoned. Under the formula of “tutelage” the Government remained a one-party autocracy and became increasingly authoritarian and repressive, sowing the wind of rebellion. Deprived of the possibility of reform within the framework of government and hounded as outlaws, the Communist movement according to the American Vice-Consul in Hankow, Edmund Clubb, “has been forced…into a bitter rebellion which is sweeping the oppressed—liberal students and all—with a savage hatred of the existing regime in China.” All the while the regime clung to the Three Principles of Sun Yat-sen as a kind of incantation to substitute for practice. To fill the vacuum left since the collapse of the throne, Sun was made a cult. His portrait was omnipresent and his will containing the Three Principles was recited at weekly memorial services, at all public meetings, political assemblies and patriotic holidays and by schoolchildren every Monday morning. His body was removed from Peiping to a $6-million mausoleum built into the side of the Purple Mountain at Nanking.

  Modernization if not social revolution was pushed in the form of roads and airlines, electrification, new railroads, improvement of agriculture, codification of law, new schools with modern curricula and that basic requirement for all modern organization—a logical method of arranging the language to make a filing system possible. The absence of an alphabet in China was probably as disabling as the absence of roads. Varying from province to province some programs made progress, others did not. There was so much that China needed and the age allowed so little time.

  —

  After the seizure of Mukden the Japanese Army, regardless of divided councils at home, pushed ahead to attach Chinchow, Chang Hsueh-liang’s provincial capital just north of the Great Wall. They captured the city in January 1932, driving the Young Marshal out of Manchuria. The “independence” of the new state of “Manchukuo” was proclaimed in February and Henry Pu-yi, last relic of the Manchu dynasty, was installed as Regent in March. The Japanese Government, under the necessity of accommodating to the stranglehold of the Army and Navy ministers, was dragged forward
by faits accomplis and by the blackmail of violent nationalism. Because it was anxious not to give the League of Nations or the signatories of the Nine-Power Treaty a reason to declare that a state of war existed between Japan and China, Tokyo attempted to legalize each forward move on the mainland as “self-defense” and “self-determination” by the people of Manchuria. Behind the facade an intense struggle was shaking Tokyo. The Government resigned in December 1931. In naming a moderate, Ki Inukai, as the new Premier, the Emperor tried to brake the headlong course. Inukai was informed that the Emperor hoped he could curb the Army’s “meddling in domestic and foreign politics”—a dangerous assignment that was to prove the Premier’s death warrant. Unknown to the West, Inukai in his first month of office sent a secret envoy to Chiang Kai-shek to negotiate a settlement in Manchuria but control of Japanese policy was no longer really in civilian hands.

  The effort of the Western powers to deal with the situation over the 17 months from the Mukden Incident to the adoption of the Lytton Report was crucial for the twentieth century. It brewed the acid of appeasement that gutted the League, encouraged further aggression and opened the decade of descent to war. Statesmen are not seers and their actions are taken in contemporary context with no view over the hill. The working out of a crisis takes place in stages without history’s advantage of seeing the event whole and its aftermath too. It is doubtful if any stage of the Manchurian crisis could have happened otherwise, for in the course of the process there were no likely alternatives that could have been seized, no might-have-beens just barely missed. Some periods breed greatness, others feebleness. The Manchurian crisis was one of the causative events of history born, not of tragic “ifs,” but of the inherent limitations of men and states.