Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

  The first counteroffer to Chiang Kai-shek before the Kung mission was proposed had suggested an American expenditure of $25 million a month on terms to be negotiated jointly by Ambassador Gauss and General Stilwell. By the time this lethal fate was arranged for him, Stilwell was no longer in Chungking nor planning soon to return. He left for the front in Burma on December 20, the day after Chiang confirmed his command of the Ramgarh force, now called the New First Army, in writing. With the none-too-confident question in his diary, “CAN WE PUT IT OVER?”, he escaped to the “heavenly surcease” of action in Burma.

  * * *

  *1 Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister of Britain.

  *2 Stilwell’s terse summary of the Tehran Conference was: “Churchill wanted to poop around the periphery and take Rhodes but Stalin said No and that was that….OVERLORD is on. Joe will hop the Japs as soon as Hitler folds.”

  17

  The Road Back December 1943–July 1944

  A HEADQUARTERS GENERAL and theater commander is not supposed to operate at the front at divisional much less regimental or battalion level. Stilwell headed back into Burma on this unorthodox course, not simply from a surfeit of the higher echelons nor a pure desire for combat, but from a practical recognition that only his personal leadership could bring the Chinese to the offensive and give the campaign any chance of succeeding.

  Disregarding criticism of his absence from Headquarters and gibes about “the best three-star company commander in the U.S. Army” or the “platoon war in Burma,” he remained in the jungle, except for one or two quick flights to Delhi and Chungking, for seven months, from the end of December to July. His principle was the same as Pershing’s, when as a General and Governor of a province in the Philippines in 1913 he took the place of a captain killed in action and led the company himself in assault on a Moro fort for which he was proposed for the Congressional Medal of Honor. He rejected the honor, in a letter to the War Department, for the simplest of reasons: “I went to that part of the line because my presence there was necessary.”

  The important thing in Stilwell’s mind when he started was to open the land route to China for the sake of eventual meeting with U.S. forces on the China coast, and in so doing to prove his old contention that the Chinese soldier, properly armed, trained and led, was the equal of any in the world. He had the Generalissimo’s assurance that Chinese divisions of the NCAC were “his” army to command free of interference, and while profoundly skeptical by now of all Chinese promises, he assumed the purpose of the expedition was not one that Chiang would want to thwart. He had no authority to bring in the Y-force ahead of him or the British behind him to fulfill their planned part in the campaign; this would have to be left to prevailing pressures from higher up. In any event he saw no point in wrestling any longer with endless evasions in Chungking and Delhi; the only course was to force the issue by opening military action forthwith. His goal was Myitkyina*1 before the monsoon.

  According to the plan code-named CAPITAL approved by the Combined Chiefs, north Burma was to be pinched off by the Y-force crossing the Salween to engage the enemy on the east, and by the British IVth Corps advancing to the Chindwin to engage the Japanese divisions on the west, thus preventing their interfering with Stilwell’s advance. Meanwhile his army like an apple-corer would be penetrating upper Burma as vanguard for the Road.

  His plan of campaign was succinct: “We have to go in through a rat hole and dig the hole as we go.” The rat hole was a series of three valleys: the Hukawng, terminating in a ridge called the Jambu Bum; next the Mogaung valley leading to the main north-south railroad; and on the other side of the railroad the broad Irrawaddy valley, Burma’s central corridor. Myitkyina, the northernmost major Japanese garrison and air base, lay on the railroad and river 40 miles below Mogaung; from here a road descended southward to connect with the old Burma Road into China. The slot assigned to the NCAC, thick with jungle growth and threaded by overgrown trails which allowed progress of sometimes as little as a mile an hour, and edged by mountain ranges carved in directionless ridges by the run offs from heavy rains, was as forbidding fighting country as any in the world.

  The enemy facing the NCAC was the renowned 18th Division, veteran of the first Burma campaign and the conquest of Singapore, considered one of the ablest and best-trained divisions in the Japanese Army. Its commander, General Shinichi Tanaka, a plump comfortable-looking officer in a topee, was a soldier of outstanding capacity who maneuvered his resources superbly and knew how to make the best of what he had. Altogether the Japanese had five divisions in Burma at this time, reinforced to eight within the next two months, plus four Thai divisions, service troops and some collaborationist Indian and Burmese units that were not much use to them.

  The Allies outnumbered them in available if not active forces: Stilwell commanded three divisions of 12,000 each—the 22nd and 38th, which had been reconstituted at Ramgarh, and the 30th Division, extracted from Ho Ying-chin bit by bit and flown to India over the past months, of which one regiment was now in reserve at Ledo and one was still in training at Ramgarh (“We will never get the third”). Altogether the NCAC numbered at the start between 30,000 and 35,000 men.

  The British had six divisions (five Indian and one West African) organized in two corps, IVth and XVth, plus the three brigades of Wingate’s Raiders, called the Chindits, plus a variety of other regiments and auxiliary units. Their main base was at Imphal about 200 miles south of Ledo in the province of Manipur on the Burma border. Divisions of the Indian Army were generally composed of two-thirds Indians and Gurkhas and one-third British, organized by regiments or battalions that were racially homogeneous. All senior and some junior officers were British while the NCOs were Indian. In January soon after Stilwell entered Burma the XVth Corps was launched into action in the Arakan against one Japanese division in an effort to push southward down the coast toward the port and airfields of Akyab. Divorced from BUCCANEER and from a campaign for lower Burma, this was an objective of no compelling necessity except to give SEAC a sure success—which proved elusive.

  North Burma, 1944

  Ledo Road and Burma Road

  Route of the walkout in 1942: by road ======; by foot trail -------

  On the other side of Burma in Yunnan were the eleven still-immobile divisions of the Y-force.

  Besides being superior in numbers and equipment if not in unity or purpose, the Allies now had command of the air, not only in combat strength but in ability to supply, reinforce, evacuate and provide mobility to the ground troops. This was the enabling factor of the campaign. The NCAC, with units spread out on separate paths in advance of the Road, “had to have the air to eat,” as one of its officers put it. Airlift also made possible action behind enemy lines and the transfer of troops at critical moments. The new uses of air power and methods of delivery developed in north Burma were later to be used in France and the Battle of the Bulge.

  Stilwell’s tactics employed the same hook the Japanese had used in 1942 combined with the wide end-run envelopment which he had made his specialty in the maneuvers of 1940–41. His design was to engage the enemy frontally while launching the real attack through the jungle from the flank, and at the same time despatching an enveloping arm through the hills aimed at a point behind the enemy with the object of establishing a roadblock to cut off his retreat. The 18th Division was thus to be netted and annihilated in sections as NCAC advanced. Owing to a variety of malign and unexpected obstacles, practice frequently failed to live up to the design, the more so as the Chinese, inheritors of Sun Tzu’s dictum, “To a surrounded enemy you must leave a way of escape,” were averse to closing the net. They preferred a U-shaped ambush with a well-advertised escape route to avoid a savage fight to the death by trapped Japanese. Repeatedly the enemy succeeded in withdrawing from an engagement which Stilwell had planned to be conclusive, and though yielding ground, remained to fight again farther down. As a result, pressures of time built up in the race against the monsoon that w
ere to demand desperate expedients.

  Not all the training and new equipment of Ramgarh could dispel the Chinese sense of military inferiority to the Japanese; they did not believe they could defeat them—a factor which for a commander put a drag on impetus. To prove they could, Stilwell took care to give them numerical superiority in every contest; if a Japanese company was to be destroyed, he assigned a Chinese regiment to the task. He bullied, flattered and shamed, cajoled, bribed, goaded and pushed, rewarded with decorations, unit citations, press photos and every device of public relations, and kept the offensive going by the unrelieved pressure of his physical presence. Many times, in General Slim’s opinion, this “was the only thing that would impart real drive to his troops.”

  For intelligence he relied on the Kachin guerillas organized by Detachment 101 of the OSS. A friendly, smiling, brave people, violently anti-Japanese and quick to learn the handling of radios, they located the enemy, guided the NCAC, blew up trains and bridges, and wiped out isolated Japanese patrols. For no less necessary information about his own troops Stilwell relied on American liaison officers who were attached, nominally as “advisers,” to each Chinese regiment and in some cases to battalions. They carried their own radios and reported to him daily in code on action and progress, often in contrast to the version he received from the Chinese commanding officer. Although enjoined from command, and under strict orders in any conflict of judgment to respect the Chinese decision, they could exercise influence through the power to relay—or veto—supply requisitions. Here at least Stilwell could exercise the quid pro quo. The adviser system produced Sino-American quarrels as well as enduring friendships, and on the whole proved not as effective as had been hoped in maintaining the battle order or instilling the offensive spirit.

  —

  On December 21 when Stilwell arrived in the Hukawng valley, the NCAC offensive, which was supposed to have taken off from the line of the river Tarung, was already a month behind schedule. Japanese units, probing for positions for an offensive which they too were planning, held Yubang Ga, key to the river crossing and the point where the Ledo Road was supposed to cross the river. Three battalions of General Sun Li-jen’s 38th Division, coming under fire from this unexpected presence, had dug in and were now separately surrounded by the enemy, supplied by inadequate airdrops and unable to advance or retreat. Attempts to relieve them had failed. Generals Sun and Boatner were at angry odds over questions of supply and demands for artillery. On his way home from Cairo, the Generalissimo, with his instinct for hoarding, had cautioned against deploying more than one regiment on the Tarung, “because we had only six regiments and if two were used and cut off by the enemy we would have only four regiments left.”

  Stilwell established headquarters for the first phase of the campaign at Shingbwiyang, which was reached by the Road a week after his arrival, enabling trucks and jeeps to bring up supplies. He worked out plans for a serious attack on Yubang Ga with Sun and the regimental commander, arranged for artillery barrage and flank attacks and made a speech to the troops saying this was an important attack that must succeed. “Wherever Stilwell went something happened,” noticed Seagrave who was serving with the forward troops. The attack opened on December 24. Stilwell went forward at 6:30, hiking two hours over trails to the command post and staying throughout the day to observe. The opening artillery barrage, fired at a range of 30 yards ahead of the attacking troops, was followed by an awful hesitation of five minutes, then the sound of the Chinese bugle and the infantry’s advance. To clear the Japanese out of jungle pockets and gain the river against land mines and concealed machine guns proved difficult. Wearing a steel helmet and unconcerned by the fire of a concealed machine-gun sniper probing for the range of the command post, Stilwell caused intense discomfort to Sun Li-jen and his officers who feared he might be hit and they be held responsible.

  The Chinese attack, though too cautious for Stilwell’s taste, did not let up. Sun “swears they are trying to do a good job for the lao hsien sheng [Old Man] and the troops are all bucked up to have me with them.” The Japanese resisted fiercely from foxholes and dugouts; when one lone machine-gunner was killed, another man rushed from the woods to man the isolated weapon. It took a week before Yubang Ga was secured and all pockets cleared out. By the end of December the 38th Division had suffered casualties of 315 killed and 429 wounded but it had overcome the enemy for the first time in Burma. As the first test of American training the outcome was critical: it proved to the Chinese that they could actually defeat Japanese. A company of the 22nd Division after its first victory staged a parade with the heads of Japanese stuck on bamboo poles, to the horror of the American liaison officer who demanded to resign from his assignment. From the quality of the fighting and the equipment and airdrops, the Japanese too recognized that they confronted a new enemy.

  —

  Stilwell’s presence at the front and his living close to the men made a strong impression on Chinese officers. To avoid headquarters routine and the mass of papers, messages and envoys from the Rear Echelon that pursued him, he often moved out of Shingbwiyang and subsequent base headquarters to stay at a private combat headquarters of his own in a clearing in the woods. He lived with his aide Dick Young in a basha or bamboo hut or sometimes a tent, with an underground dugout for shelter, a packing case for a desk and only the luxury of two wicker chairs as a concession to rank. Here he slept on a cot or in a hammock stretched between two trees, shaved and washed from a helmet, stood in line for chow and ate C-rations from a mess kit. At base camp his meals were cooked for him by Sergeant Jules Raynaud, called Gus, former chef of the Stork Club, who complained that the Boss ate “like the birds”: for dinner usually only a couple of pieces of raisin bread which Gus baked for him, with butter and jam and a cup of coffee. Gus foraged for vegetables to take the curse off Spam and stood over the Boss till he ate them. The family, always Stilwell’s main anchor in life, was represented by his son Joe Jr. serving as G-2 for NCAC, and his sons-in-law Colonel Ernest Easterbrook and Major Ellis Cox, serving as liaison officers with the Chinese divisions.

  On the march when he saw Chinese soldiers smoking rolled-up leaves, Stilwell would take out his own cigarets and hand them out and he made an extra effort to have cigarets flown in. He paid “special attention to people at the bottom,” said a Chinese officer, and when the soldiers saw him they would crowd around “our Commander” and want to talk to him. The most important morale factor was his insistence on the wounded being carried back to the field hospitals and flown if necessary to the 20th General Hospital at Ledo. He brought relentless pressure until an airfield was built for the hospital and supported every demand of its chief, Colonel Isidor Ravdin, a surgeon from civilian life who on Stilwell’s recommendation was to become the first Medical Reserve officer promoted to brigadier general. When Ravdin complained that the hospital had no fans, urgently needed for the typhus wards, Stilwell radioed General Dan Sultan, his deputy in Delhi, “Dig up 150 ceiling fans, 160 standing fans and 11 air-conditioning units….You and I both know where a lot of it can be dug up.” The Imperial Hotel where the American staff of SEAC lodged was duly stripped of its fans for the hospital at Ledo. On Sunday morning Stilwell usually flew in to visit the patients who had been injured the previous week. His order that no Chinese soldiers were to be searched on leaving the hospital resulted in a steady disappearance of medicines, blankets, pajamas and equipment, but it was issued in that expectation for Stilwell also took care to order that Ravdin should not be held responsible for anything missing.

  The combined efforts of American medics, from stretcher teams and field hospitals to the 20th General, reduced the death rate from wounds, ordinarily a limitless figure in the Chinese Army, to 3.5 percent. Chinese soldiers were not afraid of being killed in battle, they used to say, but only of being left wounded on the battlefield to die, which was the usual fate in China for those who could not walk away from combat. The feeling that they were being looked out for in the NCAC g
ave the soldiers a newfound pride and confidence. In the knowledge, too, that planes would keep them supplied with ammunition, they were not afraid to shoot what they had as in the first Burma campaign.

  They were a young army, many as young as fifteen, and if not robust in body, yet as brothers of the Communists who had trudged the 6,000 miles of the Long March, they were the sturdiest walkers of any army in the world. They had in large measure the good soldier’s qualities of courage, stamina, willingness and an eye for the country, and their dominant characteristic, as Wingate observed, was cheerfulness. “Under conditions which would reduce Europeans to gloomy despair, smiles of pure joy break out constantly over the Chinese face.” Measured time was of no concern to them and no plan based on accurate timing had a hope of success. Nor could any plan succeed that ignored consideration of face. Familiar with the absence in the home army of any supply, transport or medical organization worth the name, they were accustomed to keeping themselves alive by scavenging and would take or steal any object of any kind that lay loose.

  At dawn Stilwell would set out regularly to hike three to five miles, often taking two or more hours, to the regimental command post, trailed by his aide, bodyguard and two or three of the hardier correspondents. On the way he studied and remembered the trails and terrain features and villages, and at night sketched his situation maps by candlelight, recording in marginal comments every move and engagement of the troops. At the command posts he would observe and advise without exercising direct command. His presence at the front became known to the Japanese who broadcast from Rangoon their intention to capture him alive, adding immeasurably to the uneasiness of whatever Chinese commanders he chose to visit. They feared execution if the Commanding General was shot or ambushed by a patrol and captured while in their vicinity. Taking advantage of this anxiety, in the case of a commander who delayed or stalled, Stilwell would hang around his command post and refuse to go away until the order to move was given.