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1 Stilwell Revisited
Out of the crooked timber of humanity
Nothing entirely straight was ever made.
(Isaiah Berlin)
When I prepared for this study, I had been determined to avoid writing old forms of military history focusing on operations, generals, and statesmen, inspired as I was by European military historians writing about the importance of warfare in the creation of identity, its impact on state making, and the formation of national memories. I had least expected to want to write extensively about Stilwell and the Nationalist military during the War of Resistance. To a graduate student at a time when the USA repeatedly backed nasty governments, when the Nationalists imposed a harsh martial law in Taiwan, and when Communist rule still retained the vestiges of promise, Tuchmanâs Sand against the Wind, The Stilwell Papers, and Theodore White and Annalee Jacobyâs Thunder out of China were convincing and confirmed that the Nationalists had deserved their fate.
As I read around what I then still thought of as the Pacific War, initially with the restricted aim of providing a short synopsis, it became clear that the Stilwell story could not stand up. I concluded that a new presentation of Stilwellâs activities, placed in the context of Allied strategy, was unavoidable. Only when a more complex understanding of the war, US and British strategies, the Nationalistsâ approach to it, and Stilwellâs actions was established would the ground exist for the proper exploration of the topics that first drove me to undertake this study. This chapter, and much of the rest of the book, is the result.
To challenge Stilwellâs views about Nationalist military incompetence, their refusal to gather up Chinaâs resources to fight Japan, and their blinkered failure to make use of the opportunities provided by the USA, it will be necessary to analyse the Burma War and the position of China in Allied strategy in detail. What I shall suggest is, first, that to understand Stilwellâs role in China his actions have to be placed in the context of US strategy in the Second World War, generally, and in the Pacific War, specifically. Neither Roosevelt nor the USAâs Chief-of-Staff, George Marshall, shared Stilwellâs conviction that Japan had to be defeated in China and that therefore it was necessary to build a supply line through north Burma to equip National Army divisions with advanced munitions and to retrain them. The key aims of Roosevelt and Marshall were to avoid fighting in China and make use of Chinese forces to prevent the fall of India and later on to support the US Pacific Offensive. The British too sought to make use of Chinaâs forces, but in their case in support of their Empire.
Most US military planners, including George Marshall, were convinced that an offensive against Germany launched from Britain should have priority. While they did come to back a programme to build heavy bomber bases in China to support the operations of the US Pacific Fleet, for Roosevelt and Marshall the problem after Pearl Harbor was that US public opinion demanded action against Japan. Stilwell was useful because of his status as a war hero to suggest that the USA was doing all it could against Japan on the Asian mainland, first after Pearl Harbor when the USA simply did not have the strength to do anything at all in East Asia and later to avoid the dispersal of US resources over too many theatres.
My second suggestion will be that neither descriptions of Stilwell as a great war hero representing the USA at its best nor depictions of him responsible for much that went wrong can stand. In Stilwell there was something of Kurtz in Joseph Conradâs Heart of darkness or the film Apocalypse Now. He was deeply dismissive of the Chinese and especially Chiang Kaishek. He believed that they could not save themselves, and was convinced that only he, knowing modern warfare, could do so. Stilwell certainly made serious tactical mistakes and his failures in organisation, administration, and intelligence have been acknowledged even by his staunchest supporters. Few, and certainly not Marshall, agreed with his strategic proposals for the defeat of Japan. At the same time, the actions for which he has been most criticised, including the withholding of supplies to the Nationalists and the US 14th Airforce in China that sought to support them in the spring of 1944 when Japanâs Operation Ichigo penetrated deep into south China, were carried out on the orders of Marshall. It is furthermore difficult to see that any of the operations in which Stilwell was involved profoundly affected the course of the war.
Stilwell became an important figure in the Pacific War less because of his military exploits, his strategic views, or his attempts to build up the Nationalist army than for political reasons. In the same way that he was useful to Marshall, who did not always support him wholeheartedly, he was similarly useful at times to Chiang Kaishek, who assigned command over Chinese divisions in Burma to Stilwell in order to keep him out of British hands, to attract US aid, and draw the USA into the fighting on the Asian mainland. Like Chiang, the British also found Stilwell difficult to deal with, but they used him, during the first Burma campaign in the hope of establishing some influence over Chinese forces in Burma and later because they feared that insisting on Stilwellâs recall would lead to a backlash in the US press.
Third, Stilwellâs dramatic recall in October 1944 came at a critical time in the war. Allied offensives in Europe were suffering setbacks. Following the breakout from the Normandy beachheads, General Montgomeryâs attempts to seize the bridges over the Rhine in preparation for a âpencil-likeâ thrust to Berlin failed in mid-September. While German resistance was stiffening and supply problems intensified, in the Pacific events had not gone well. The Japanese had put up very fierce resistance in the Marianas until the middle of July. The Ugo offensive in Burma had been stopped, but the recovery of Burma would still take much time and hard fighting. In China, the Ichigo Offensive had broken Chinese resistance and it seemed possible that the Nationalists might yet be defeated. The beginning of Kamikaze attacks during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October frightened all, and made clear that an attack on Japan even after the destruction of its fleet would demand huge sacrifices.
These developments came in the run-up to the US elections of that year, in which the conduct of the war was a major issue. Opinion polls suggested that Rooseveltâs lead was uncomfortably small and declining. In that context, it became useful for Roosevelt to distance himself from the Nationalists to avoid being tainted by their collapse in a critical moment in the Second World War and in US politics.
Stilwellâs recall served these purposes. Roosevelt approved the publication of articles by sympathisers of Stilwell, which suggested that the USA had done its best in China and that it had sought to reform the National Army, but that the Nationalists had never been interested in fighting the Japanese and instead had become a nasty dictatorship that was corrupt, oppressed the Chinese people, and with which the USA should no longer be associated. This view became entrenched subsequently, as the introduction has made clear, when China figured largely in political rivalries in the USA, in which the fate of New Deal liberalism was as much an issue as US foreign policy.
Many of the conflicts between Chiang Kaishek, Stilwell, and the USA had their origin in the complexities inherent in Allied warfare. For example, when in 1944 Chiang refused to let a US equipped force in south China join the fighting in Burma, he did so not because he did not want to fight the Japanese. With the USA and Britain having decided to put all possible resources into the invasion of Europe and to retract the promise of the participation of sizeable amphibious forces in the reconquest of Burma to focus all effort on the invasion of Normandy, Chiangâs refusal is better seen as an attempt to avoid committing his best forces to a campaign in Burma to which his Allies appeared to attach little significance while his greater need was to confront Japan in China itself.
The correctness of Allied strategy has been debated at length, and will no doubt continue to be so. It may well be the case that Churchillâs peripheral strategy was appropriate before 1943 and that afterwards the USA was correct to insist on the early invasion of Europe as the speediest way to bring an end to the war. But that is not to say that Allied strategy especially in East and South-east Asia was well designed, that people always did their honest best, that all was done altruistically to help China, or that promises were not abandoned when that seemed expedient. We need not accept as truth a presentation of events to the public that flowed from political expediency, especially the suggestion that the Nationalists were not willing to fight the Japanese. No one has a monopoly on virtue; and no one on incompetence.
A Surprise Battlefield and a Surprise Appointment
Japanâs official history of the war has made clear that Japan did not intend to take its Southern Advance as far as north Burma. Throughout 1941, Japanese operational plans called for the navy and the 25th Army to seize Hong Kong and Singapore and occupy the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The aim of the Southern Advance, according to these plans, was to create a defensive perimeter in anticipation of Allied attacks, secure access to primary resources such as oil and rubber in Southeast Asia, and cut international supply lines to China so as to gradually strangle the Nationalists into submission. Japanâs access to oil had been severely curtailed by Rooseveltâs haphazard imposition of an oil embargo in July 1941. Until then the USA had provided Japan with 80 per cent of its oil supplies.1 The embargo followed Japanâs occupation of the southern provinces of French Indo-China.2 Yet, both Roosevelt and Churchill remained determined to avoid war with Japan while also seeking to keep the Soviet Union in the war. They hoped to prevent the Japanese from joining the Germans in their assault on the Soviet Union.3
In October 1941, the Japanese took the decision to add the 15th Army to the Southern Advance and to include in its plans the occupation of Thailand to protect the flank of the units of the 25th Army that were to take Singapore. Although subsequently Burma was mentioned in operational plans, what was meant, according to Japanâs official history, was not the whole of Burma, but Moulmein to the south of Rangoon, where the British had an important air base from which they might attack Japanese forces in Thailand. Shipping allocation lists confirm that no plan existed to attack Burma before Pearl Harbor.4 It was simply not believed that the Japanese navy had sufficient capacity to be able to support a large-scale attack on Burma in addition to its other assignments. Besides the attack on Pearl Harbor, these called for a two-pronged attack on South-east Asia, one from Taiwan to the Philippines and one from Hainan and French Indo-China to Malaya. After securing these areas, the two forces then were to converge on the Dutch East Indies. The operation, which was to succeed in 150 days and involved Japanâs entire navy and eleven infantry divisions, reflected perfectly Japanâs strategic ideology of a combined arms offensive aimed at a quick victory.
The Nationalists too had made few serious preparations for a move into Burma. Since Japanâs occupation of north French Indo-China in August 1940, the Nationalists worried about a Japanese attack from there into Yunnan, the Chinese salient into South-east Asia bordering French Indo-China and Burma but also a backdoor into Sichuan where Chinaâs wartime capital, Chongqing, was located. Long the preserve of the shrewd Long Yun, the province was poor, lacked good supply lines, and depended on imports from French Indo-China, as Long suggested to Chiang and as he acknowledged, and therefore would find it difficult to support more forces.5 However, in August 1941, Chiang and Long Yun reached an agreement that two central divisions would enter the province. In October 1941, the 60th Army, consisting, in fact, of two divisions and three independent brigades, was ordered to take up positions near Kunming, the provincial capital, as well as Kaiyuan and Jianshui to protect Yunnanâs border. Fortifications along the Yunnan section of the Burma Road were also to be built to protect the road from attack by paratroopers.6 Long Yun was promised that the centre would not interfere in internal Yunnan affairs.7 After protests by Long Yun, Chiang informed him that initially only a few thousand soldiers would be sent. These would be increased when the necessary infra-structural facilities had been built up.8
Even though the British were concerned about a Japanese offensive in South-east Asia, their preparations did not focus on Burma either. The British had decided that Hong Kong could not be defended, but had strengthened Singapore with two capital ships, five cruisers, nine destroyers, six submarines, and 120,000 troops. Although Singapore was the cornerstone of the British Empire in South-east Asia and critical to the protection of the dominions of Australia and New Zealand, Churchill had prevailed in a debate with Sir John Dill, then the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, about strategy to defend the Empire. Dill had advised to concentrate not on the Middle East but on India and Singapore and argued that the Middle East had become something of an obsession for Churchill. Churchill, however, was convinced that the Middle East, with its critical oil reserves, was central to the survival of Britain, that it was unlikely that Japan would attack South-east Asia, and that if it did so, the USA, with its interests in the Philippines, would not be able to stay out of the war. He refused airforce and naval requests to reinforce Singapore.9 The security of Singapore depended on Britainâs ability to despatch the Mediterranean Fleet and the Royal Air Force (RAF) and that, by 1942, was impossible.
As to Burma, British and Chinese officials began discussions in late 1940 about co-ordinating their military actions in case of a Japanese attack somewhere in Southeast Asia and they did consider the defence of the Burma Road. These discussions took place between Air Chief Marshall Robert Brooke-Popham, the Commander-in-Chief Far East, headquartered in Singapore and a Chinese Military Delegation under General Shang Zhen. According to a Chinese report, Brooke-Popham suggested that the Nationalists would focus on the defence of the Burma Road in Yunnan while the British would do so in Burma itself. Brooke-Popham also promised the delivery of 100 aeroplanes and mentioned that Rangoon, then the terminus of the Burma Road, had been reinforced with anti-aircraft guns and that an RAF squadron had been stationed in Burma. In case the Japanese attacked Burma through Thailand, which under the ardently nationalistic Phibun Songkhram was pro-Japanese and strongly anti-Chinese, Brooke-Popham suggested that the Nationalists should attack French Indo-China from Yunnan so as to cut off Japanese lines of retreat.10 However, a Japanes...
