Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

  When Tilly Hoffman, secretary of the Military Attaché’s office in Peiping, went home on leave she heard a long series of complaints from MID involving actions and decisions of Stilwell’s which he had not bothered to explain. Although the staff considered Stilwell one of the best observers and reporters they had in MID, in fact as regards military operations the “perfect observer,” they complained of his independence of action. When Tilly asked why someone had not taken pen in hand to write to the Colonel directly, the answer was that there were “strict orders against any officer communicating with anyone except through official channels.” That situation continued to the end of Stilwell’s tour.

  Hankow was now cut off from Peiping by land and could only be reached from the north by ship via Shanghai to Hong Kong and from there by plane. When Stilwell arrived on August 26 the Government had withdrawn and a sense of siege was descending. Remembering the great revolutionary days of Hankow in 1925–26, the Communists wanted to conduct a “people’s defense” of the city after the example of Madrid which was still holding out after two years of siege. They urged the Government to organize an army of 150,000 workers, students and townspeople, to be led by an elite corps of youths with “the highest revolutionary consciousness.” This project had small appeal for Chiang Kai-shek who had no desire to see workers’ cadres established under Communist control and did not believe in any case that the Wuhan cities could be held against Japanese assault. Since two supposedly impregnable Chinese positions on the way up the Yangtze had been, in one case, abandoned without battle, and in the other, taken by ruse from the rear, he had some reason for his belief. But essentially the reason for the military ineffectiveness of China’s defense was the deep cultural preference, fully shared by the Commander-in-Chief himself, in favor of outlasting over fighting.

  Stilwell started out for the front in a group with the British and French Attachés and the news photographer Robert Capa who had covered Spain for a year and was “quite a guy.” Staying on after the Englishman “got mad and bowed out” and the Frenchman fell ill of dysentery and returned, Stilwell can be seen in the pages of his diary: “Moved by night, hard going and guard went astray. Pack transport, coolies, exhausted men curled up to die….Jap plane at 200 feet machine gunning the road. After a few wounded, I suppose. Wild Eagles!…Welcome from Chung. Go forward, sure. The nearer the front the warmer the welcome. Had a talk and chow. They got me bedding….Bread and cheese for breakfast, by Capa. Mouldy but o.k. Sat around till 9 then off to the front. Hot as the hinges of hell and hard going. Climbed a high hill and got view along Yangtze to Juichang. Just a sea of rocky hills and scrub brush. Could be held indefinitely….A lot of assorted artillery coming out north of the lake. Why? Kwan and Chang say it can’t be used but back of their present positions it could.”

  Back in Hankow there were “barricades and wire everywhere.” Colonel Rousselle, the French Attaché, was dead of dysentery. It was the seventh anniversary of Mukden and in Europe the powers trembled through the Munich crisis. “My god what a world. If another war starts in Europe where will we all end up?…Carmel suddenly seems far off.” Japanese bombers blasted the city daily, unopposed. The Chinese Air Force on which Chiang Kai-shek had pinned his hopes never became effective and had few planes or pilots left to defend Hankow. Shortage of fuel was made shorter by the pervading Chinese philosophy of hoarding equipment for a future crisis. “The Chinese can’t bear to use their stuff,” Stilwell wrote after seeing a battery of 75s which had been through the battles of Shanghai and Hsuchow without being fired. “If they put it in, they might lose it and then where would they be after the war, without any matériel?”

  Air force personnel was a greater difficulty. Lacking the Americans’ affinity for the combustion engine, Chinese mechanics treated their machines with little care or respect; lacking expert maintenance, their planes became rapidly useless. Pilots and navigators, drawn from the educated class, represented a group which on the whole was not martial in spirit and had no desire to die in unequal combat with the well-trained, well-equipped Japanese. Those who did become pilots were valiant but reckless and flashy, and ill prepared by the Italian officers whom Chiang Kai-shek accepted from Mussolini early in the 1930s to train his air force. When Italy withdrew her officers out of deference to growing friendship for Japan, the Italians took with them all the aerial maps they had prepared for their clients, leaving the Chinese, who had left the work to others, helpless.

  To take charge of building his air force Chiang Kai-shek in 1937 engaged a remarkable American fighter pilot, Captain Claire Chennault, who had retired from the American Air Corps because of deafness and disagreement. By 1938 Chennault, promoted to colonel in the Chinese Air Force, had begun a major program of airfield construction and organized an effective warning net by radio but he had less success with pilots and was soon to recruit a volunteer force of American mercenaries to defend China’s skies. For the present as the Japanese raided Hankow unopposed, the sirens wailed and the streets drummed with the sound of thousands of running feet seeking the safety of the foreign Concession area.

  While columns of ragged and bloody wounded straggled in, evacuation of civilians began. In the last weeks 40,000 moved out in boats and junks or overland in trucks and handcarts to Changsha, capital of Hunan. Trainloads of half-starved, tattered war orphans gathered up from the battle zones by a women’s committee organized by Mme. Chiang were fed and washed and marched in clean blue overalls to riverboats for evacuation. The dismantling of factories and equipment for the long haul to the interior, organized by the industrial cooperatives, was under way. The wounded looking for some designated hospital already dismantled sat or lay on the pavement, worn out, unable to go farther.

  Among the “last-ditchers” of Hankow was Mme. Chiang Kai-shek whom Stilwell visited in September and found “very charming, highly intelligent and sincere.” Though he recognized that she “pushed out a lot of propaganda about the way the government is looking out for the common people,” nevertheless “she is alright and doing a good job.” Mme. Chiang never made an effort to charm without succeeding and the American Military Attaché was worth her effort. He sent her flowers after the interview.

  Out again to the southern front in October he observed from a battalion commander’s command post a five-day fight for Teian in the path of the Japanese drive southward from the Yangtze against Nanchang, capital of Kiangsi. “Walked to Wang Lia-chi’s hq, 15 li. Bridges are all burning, road broken every 200 yards or so. Met Wang. Warm welcome. He has been catching hell—50% losses….No hmg [heavy machine guns]. Small cns [caissons?]. No guns. About 200 rounds apiece. 4 lmgs [light machine guns]. Bridge out. No car. No phone, etc. Slept in the straw.” Colonel Wang at first held a hill position but was forced back into the town. The fight continued within the walls. In the last hours Colonel Wang himself led a night attack through the narrow streets. As described by Stilwell afterwards, “The detachment runs into a Japanese machine-gun nest….The Chinese throw themselves prone on the right side of the street. The Japanese open fire but fail to come out into the open where they can rake the street and the shots carom off the opposite wall and hit no one. Quick action is needed here and the Chinese are equal to it. A squad slips around a building and coming in from the rear puts the machine-gun crew out of action with hand grenades….Everything by now is in an uproar and Colonel Wang in the darkness loses touch with them….” For the rest of the night and next day the fight continued with only a few yards separating the two sides until, as the Japanese advanced in force against the weakened garrison, the position became hopeless. A messenger from the division commander, the only one to get through of six who were sent, arrived at 6 P.M. with orders to withdraw. Under cover of darkness Colonel Wang with 65 men rejoined the rest of the battalion and left the field with less than 400 men of his original 1,500. They had been continuously in action for over five days with little sleep, food or water. Of his 1,100 casualties, 600 were dead.

  In acti
ons like these Stilwell was forming the judgments that he was to take with him to the Chinese theater four years later. He thought Colonel Wang was brave but his judgment was poor; he should have stayed out of the town which being in ruins furnished no cover and was absolutely dominated from the hills. In a G-2 report analyzing the war from what he had seen at first hand, he described the needless failures inherent in Chinese defensive tactics. In open country against Japanese planes, tanks and artillery, the Chinese, being deficient in these weapons, made only halfhearted defense and readily abandoned positions. In hilly country, however, where concealment was good, they held their ground better, and with only rifle, grenade and machine gun slowed down the Japanese advance. The enemy continued to push against the flanks, often thrusting out a salient that invited counterattack, but instead of seizing their chance, the Chinese “always react to protect their rear.” They hoarded their reserves, failing to exert full strength when it could succeed with the result that numbers were more equal than they should have been and Japanese initiative and superior equipment turned the scale. “The Chinese replacement system is cockeyed,” he added in private notes, and “this failure to use China’s greatest asset—manpower—is the most ghastly failure of all.”

  The report concluded on his favorite theme: “The Chinese soldier is excellent material, wasted and betrayed by stupid leadership.” There was a corollary: “Suppose the Chinese soldiers were well-fed, well-armed and equipped, well-cared for and well-led….?”

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  The Sino-Japanese War came to a climax in the five days of October 21–25 when the Japanese took not only Hankow but also Canton, China’s last access by sea to the outside world. The key city of the south fell like a ripe pear in autumn. Relying on British presence across the bay in Hong Kong, the Chinese had prepared no defense because they could not believe the Japanese would move in under the imperial shadow of the Peak or that Britain would let the event happen without retaliation. More alert, the Japanese took their cue from Munich. On October 12, two weeks after that day of “defeat without war,” as Churchill called it, Japanese troops landed at Bias Bay on the Kwangtung coast 30 miles from Hong Kong. Negligence, corruption and some treachery opened their path and Canton was captured without serious opposition.

  The British did not react because they could obtain no assurance of American support if action against Japan should involve them in war. The Chinese felt, according to Ambassador Johnson, “completely let down.” In a message to President Roosevelt following the landing at Bias Bay, Chiang Kai-shek urged him to give the British the necessary encouragement for “cooperative intervention” in the Far East. He was not shy about stating his thesis. The problem of Asia, he instructed the President, could only be solved by collective action for which “leadership must come from the United States.” That was the American dilemma. The United States was prepared neither to seize the leadership nor to acquiesce in Japanese control of China which must result from failure to seize it.

  Japan expected the capture of Hankow and Canton to seal victory at last. With a million men now on the mainland, and desperate to find some end to the war, she made one more effort to force China into a settlement. A New Order for East Asia based on an anti-Communist bloc of Japan, China and Manchukuo was announced and the Chinese Government invited to join on condition of repudiating its anti-Japanese past and “reforming its personnel.” Now that Japan had control of China’s ports, railroads and major cities and of north China, the Shantung peninsula, the Yangtze valley and the southern coast, the Japanese believed the Kuomintang would have to capitulate. To negotiate the settlement they had won over no less an emissary than Wang Ching-wei, Vice-President of the Kuomintang, who along with others had come to believe the Nationalist cause was lost. Partly motivated by old resentment of Chiang Kai-shek and ambition to succeed him even as a collaborationist, Wang was ready to accept the necessity of Japan as a new ruling dynasty.

  For Chiang no acceptable future was possible if he submitted. He remained, as always, impervious to the buffeting of events. Nothing ever changed him. He was welded to the belief that China would outlast Japan and that history must bring him foreign allies. Loosely organized and agrarian, China could sustain herself, even though isolated, in the far west—at what reduced level or cost in suffering did not matter. A slender egress by road into Burma, hacked out of the mountains by hand labor, had just been opened. Chiang would hold out in Chungking beyond the enemy’s reach until Japan ultimately clashed with Russia or the Western powers. He rejected all terms.

  On the failure of Wang’s mission in December 1938 the situation congealed. Japan reaffirmed inclusion of occupied China in the New Order and her resolve to “exterminate” the Kuomintang Government which “no longer exists except as a mere local regime.” Chiang Kai-shek publicly reaffirmed on December 26 the resolve to maintain China’s independence. Except for local punitive campaigns, military advance came to a stop; Japan had no appetite to go further. The war was left unfinished, the million men remained. In 1940 a puppet government under Wang Ching-wei was installed at Nanking but as long as independent China continued to exist and resist, the occupation troops could not be withdrawn.

  The New Order confronted the United States with violation of both the integrity of China and equal opportunity in China, the two basic principles of her China policy for 40 years. Once again the horrid case arose of circumstances which the country could not in conscience accept and was unwilling to use force to resist. Washington chose the middle course of protest. The New Order was declared to violate the Open Door and the Nine-Power Treaty. Japan expressed surprise that the United States had “failed to awaken to the new actualities in the Far East resulting from Japan’s successful military campaigns in China.” In response to renewed agitation in America for economic sanctions, the Japanese were reported by an experienced correspondent to “have begun to feel that the United States may prove the principal antagonist when the time comes for Japan to make a settlement with China.”

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  Stilwell did not stay to see the Japanese enter Hankow. He left to join Shang Chen’s headquarters at Changsha in Hunan, pivot of the new defense line. During the next two months when the situation was in flux he remained on the southern front, moving from place to place along with military units, hospital staffs, stranded officials, foreign colleagues and newsmen and all the displaced flotsam which follow a defeat.

  Another movement, a huge slow-motion upheaval, was relocating the working capacity of Free China to the west. A steady trudging toiling stream of people carried goods and equipment and themselves out of the area of the invader into the independent zone. Boats, trains, carts, pack animals and coolies, under repeated bombing, shared in the inland trek from Canton, Nanking, Hsuchow and other cities. Factory machinery, government records, university libraries, the contents of hospitals, arsenals and offices, were transported in boxes slung on shoulder poles or packed in sampans and pulled upstream by straining teams moving foot by foot over the rocks and roadless banks. In the age-old method of moving vessels up the rapids, the great-muscled coolies, hundreds to a load, bent double against the ropes, slowly hauled the burdens to the free land beyond the Yangtze gorges. A whole textile mill was packed into 380 junks of which a third sank in the rapids, were raised, repacked and started on their way again. Some factories were more than a year en route before renewing operation. Faculty and students of the universities, organized into marching sections with foraging squads, police units and pack animals, walked to new locations in the west and southwest. Stilwell watched some of the procession through Hankow and Changsha. “A single coolie would trot by with a length of pipe over his shoulder. A cart would creak along with a load of parts. A boiler would be pulled along on rollers. Some of the machines were pulled by manpower over wooden rollers for 500 miles. When they had gone far enough they dug caves in the rock cliffs along the Yangtze and duplicated the arsenal that six months before had been operating in Canton.” The migration,
no less extraordinary than the Communists’ Long March, was proof of what he had seen in the centipede pushing the freight train—the indomitable labor of China.

  Gradually, while keeping track of Chinese divisions, reviewing events with the commanders, struggling for transportation and trying to find out through the confusion and fog of rumor what was happening, Stilwell made his way southward through Hengyang to Kweilin in Kwangsi. Finding he would have to wait until February for the next vacancy by plane for Chungking, he managed to obtain a place in a car for the journey over the only motor road through Kweichow and over the mountains. Stopping for the night en route in a one-street town he invited himself to dinner at the local inn “with Hsu, Ti, Chu and T’ang…all good eggs,” and enjoyed as a roommate an interesting rat he called the Engineer because of its dexterity in solving problems.