An excellent book! Long and very interesting. As you get into it, you suffer along with the amazing Joe Stillwell. Dealing with the completely dysfunctional Chinese Nationalist was more trying than fighting in the jungles of Burma.

This provides great insight to understand China, its history, and our history with them.

Learning about the communists and the nationalists in China in that era, I have to wonder if I had been a young man then, if I would have been prosecuted by McCarthy for being a communist sympathizer. ( )

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1/30/23

Stilwell in China

The deconstructionists do have a point; every historian is influenced by the times they live in, as well as the times they are writing about. Stilwell and the American Experience in China is copyright 1970. Barbara Tuchman’s book seemed to confirm the mood of the times; historical inevitability dictated that the East would be Red, and eventually everywhere else would be Red too, and we might as well get used to the idea and try to make accommodations with the winning side.


As it happens, it didn’t turn out that way. In fact, Stilwell doesn’t really have that much to say about the Chinese communists. I suspect some of the laudatory reviews from the contemporary Left came from people who just used the index to see what Tuchman had to say about Chiang Kai-Shek, Chou En-Lai, and Mao Tse-Tung (that was the way they were spelled then) and based their comments accordingly. In fact Tuchman is pretty circumspect, at worst viewing the Reds through glasses that have only the slightest rose tint. Conventional wisdom on the Left is that the communists instituted agrarian reform, set up schools and hospitals for the peasants, banished landlords, fought the Japanese, and generally ushered in the Golden Age in the parts of China they controlled; in fact, all they really did was the same thing the Kuomintang did – take foreign military aid and stash it away waiting for the dramatic showdown with the real enemy. (Tuchman doesn’t come out and say so bluntly, but does mention that Soviet advisers to the Chinese communists were just as frustrated as the American advisers to the KMT over their inability to get their clients to fight the Japanese rather than each other).


On the surface, Joseph Stilwell must have seemed the ideal choice for command in the CBI – old China hand, fluent in Mandarin, imbued with sympathy for ordinary Chinese. In fact, he wasn’t; what little tact he had quickly evaporated in the jungles. He followed orders, went where he was told, and did his level best at doing what he was supposed to do, but one of the spit-and-polish generals he disdained might have been a better choice. One of Tuchman’s themes is that it couldn’t have come out differently no matter who was in command – the CBI was the WWII equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits and anyone sent there was doomed to be engulfed – but it might have been better to send someone less militarily talented.


That, of course, raises another question – just how militarily talented was Stilwell? His WWI experience was mostly staff work – again he was doomed to the rear by language fluency. He’d performed well in maneuvers during the buildup to WWII, and received praise from George Marshall. His big combat accomplishments, though, were the retreat from Burma in 1942 and the recapture Myitkyina in 1944. Both of these get mixed reviews. During the retreat, he led his staff and various hangers-on out through some of the most unpleasant country in the world without losing anybody, even though he could have flown out much earlier. Stunt or heroic leadership? Hard to say; critics argued that no matter how dramatic it is, a theater commander is not supposed to be out of contact on a cross-country march; the flip side is a demonstration of a commander’s willingness to share burdens with the troops – Stilwell was 59 at the time, and lost 25 pounds from an already spare frame. I’m inclined to side with Stilwell; he never intended an overland march but kept trying to get to an airfield or railhead until there were no other choices. It’s interesting – and amusing – to speculate on what Douglas MacArthur would have done in similar circumstances.


The battle for Myitkyina is a little more troubling, and Tuchman is less laudatory. Stilwell pounded his only American troops, the 5307th Composite Unit (aka Merrill’s Marauders) into the ground. The Marauders did smash up a Japanese division pretty thoroughly, and they did take Myitkyina airstrip (they pretty much had to, because that was the only way to get resupplied) but at a horrendous cost. Even here Tuchman apologizes for Stilwell; his tight-fisted policy on decorations is explained by saying that he felt that American troops should be motivated by military honor, not by reward (every surviving Marauder did eventually get a Bronze Star, unique for an American unit), and Tuchman goes so far as to disrespect the Marauders a little, suggesting that they were recruited from disgruntled soldiers whose commanders were anxious to get rid of them and that’s why they complained about Stilwell so much. This time I’m a little less sympathetic; I think Tuchman does analyze Stilwell’s overall problem correctly. No matter how much evidence he received to the contrary, he always thought there was some magic formula to make Chiang Kai-Shek fight the Japanese and kept searching for it; maybe if he diddled with Lend-Lease, maybe if he threatened, maybe if he cajoled, maybe if he gave Chennault the supply priority he demanded, maybe if he opened the Ledo Road. Maybe if he took Myitkyina. If, of course, the capture of Myitkyina had convinced CKS to cooperate fully – or even slightly – the Marauder’s sacrifice might have been worth it – but Stilwell should have known by now it wouldn’t.


Eventually it all became anticlimactic. Stilwell was relieved on Chiang’s insistence. After some bouncing around he eventually received command of 10th Army, scheduled to go into Kyushu – other events intervened. He then more or less just faded away after that – and without making any speeches about it or getting any parades, either – dying of metastatic stomach cancer in 1946, still on active duty. His last decoration, and as far as Tuchman knows the only one he personally requested, was the Combat Infantry Badge, one of only three officers who ever received it while a general.


Stilwell’s star dimmed a little after the war; he was one of many blamed for having “lost” China, apparently because of his hostility to Chiang rather than any displayed fondness for Mao. While the McCarthy Era has been oversold as the American equivalent of the rise of the Third Reich, it is well to remember that there were people just as crazy as any Birthers or Truthers; General Claire Chennault testified before Congress in 1952 that Stilwell had planned to seize control of the 10th Army while on the way to invade Japan, divert it south to the China coast, distribute arms and equipment to waiting communists, and march on Shanghai. Nobody seems to have told Chennault he had no sense of decency, either.


Tuchman is definitely warm to her subject, despite the fact that their political views were probably opposite. She plays with “what if” a little, but only by suggestion (and, in fact, all the possibilities were explored, at least cursorily, during the war). What if the US had let the Japanese have a free hand in China in 1937? What if the US had just abandoned China during the war? What if the US had shifted support to the Communists rather than the KMT? I can see problems and possibilities with all these courses; it’s disappointing that Tuchman doesn’t speculate more.


All of Tuchman’s books are well worth reading. Stilwell does get bogged down in the middle when there’s a lot of politics and not much action; of course, that’s sort of the story of the CBI theater. There are maps; unfortunately my edition is a mass-market paperback and they’re hard to read; I’m sure they would have been better in a larger format and on coated paper. The reform of official Chinese romanization means that none of the personal or geographic names used by Tuchman are still spelled that way; this is a handicap, since there are necessarily a lot of them. The index is excellent, and the bibliography is extensive; there are endnotes, but they are not numbered in the text. There are more recent works on the CBI but nothing that I’ve read fundamentally changes anything Tuchman says; thus this is still an excellent history. ( )