Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-1945, by Barbara W. Tuchman
This is the other book for which the late historian Barbara Tuchman won a Pulitzer Prize, the first being ‘The Guns of August’, her seminal account of how World War I started. An English friend credits the latter with persuading him that the war narrative he’d learned in school (England stalwart and wise; everyone else cowardly and incompetent) “might not be entirely accurate.” Tuchman punctures the myths of all combatant nations. Her Great War was a conspiracy of scoundrels, desperados and fools.
‘Stilwell’ was published in 1971, nine years after ‘The Guns of August’, when the American public’s confusion and disgust over the Vietnam War fed demand for a book that answered questions such as, Why did we mess up so badly in Asia? How could we possibly have lost control of these primitive nations that had hardly a pot to piss in and inspired them to rise up against us? We never intended to be their new colonial overlords. We just didn’t want them to go red. How else might we have been able to achieve that?
Tuchman’s copious research and taut prose style were like a beacon to readers swept up in the bewildering, tumultuous coverage of Vietnam, helping them recover their bearings. History may not offer much in the way of reassurance, but at least it gives you the space to think and consider the missed chances and untaken paths.
Today, ‘Stilwell’ helps with a somewhat different question. By delving into the formative years of the US-China relationship — unquestionably the most consequential geopolitical faultline in the world today — Tuchman illuminates the conflicts, betrayals and grievances embedded in that relationship and helps us think about whether they’re manageable or point us inexorably towards the next world war.
Oh and her book also happens to be a fantastic adventure story that maps the ebb and flow of America’s engagement with the world over the first half of the 20th century.
Tuchman’s macro historical view on China is fascinating. To the extent that anything unites China’s panoply of cultures, she contends, it is the centuries of subjugation and abuse by foreign invaders. The Chinese have, in short, mastered the art of survival. To each successive wave of occupying forces, they have said, Sure, you can plunder our resources and enslave our people, but you’ll never be comfortable here. You will never feel secure in knowing what tomorrow brings. There are far too many of us, and even when you’re starving us, marching our youth off to labor camps and doing other terrible stuff, we will find ways to subtly disobey and undercut you and eventually we will wear you out. Because we’ve been here forever and we will be here forever.
It reminds me of the “rope-a-dope” strategy Muhammad Ali made famous in his 1974 fight against George Foreman — assume a defensive posture and let your opponent punch themselves into oblivion. I’m not sure how much stock to put in this tidy generalization but I like it.
Let’s get to our hero.
Joseph Stilwell was born in 1883 in Yonkers, New York, a then-prosperous town just north of the Bronx. His father had a law degree from Columbia, as well as a medical degree, but after a bunch of false starts in business, he settled into a career as a utility executive. Young Joe had a comfortable childhood. Bright and athletic, he was just enough of a troublemaker that his father decided he needed more discipline than Yale could provide. He mentioned to Joe that he was thinking of “a nice place up the Hudson where you can play tennis.”
That nice place was called West Point.
For a white, educated, well-to-do American at the dawn of the 20th century, a career in business looked a lot more promising than one in the military. “America,” Tuchman notes, “did not on the whole admire its Army … The public attitude was such that Congress felt required in 1911 to provide a $500 fine for any public place of entertainment that discriminated against men in uniform.”
What nobody could know then was that military men of Stilwell’s gneration had not one but two world wars ahead of them, with enough time before the first one to gain seniority and not risk getting their heads blown off overrunning German trenches. West Point, in Stilwell’s time there, was filled with future American icons, including Douglas MacArthur, who was one class above.
Right out of school, however, the options for Stilwell were not great. When there’s no war on, what’s an ambitious young military man meant to do? The cream of the class at West Point chose engineering — building evidently being the next best thing to killing. Stilwell, who only made the top third, picked infantry but developed an affinity for languages and world travel. At the end of 1911, he visited China for the first time, a land of mesmerizing contrasts; luxurious cosmopolitan living in Peking and Shanghai, hinterlands carved up among murderous warlords and everywhere in between a grinding, eternal poverty untouched by modern technology. Disease and famine were common; half the population didn’t make it to the age of 30. There were navigable waterways and a rudimentary rail system, but virtually no roads to speak of. The primary means of moving goods in a country of 400 million was the wheelbarrow.
A political revolution was underway, as the old Manchu imperial dynasty was liquidated by young reformers, which “added a touch of excitement for Stilwell without seriously inconveniencing him,” writes Tuchman, “for like most momentous upheavals it was less noticeable to the eyewitness than it would be to history.”
This observation is classic Tuchman, demonstrating one of her golden rules of history: Whatever awful stuff may be happening in the news, the vast majority of people get on with their lives as best they can. Her theory is like a surgeon general’s warning for historians — don’t take the big stuff too seriously. Most people pay attention to their own lives and not much else. They are too busy, too oblivious or simply don’t care.
Young Stilwell fell in love with China practically at first sight, but given that it was under the firm grip of Great Britain, France and Japan, there wasn’t much for an American officer to do but take in the sights and sample the colonial lifestyle. He met some of China’s young political rebels, judging them “good hombres but most of them were pirates for fair.” Before long, the Great War was brewing, and he obviously didn’t want to miss that, although he almost did. While his contemporaries led troops into battle, he got stuck as “a damned waffle-tailed clerk in a bloody office … grinding out rot about things I know nothing about and surrounded with desks and typewriters and stuff.”
Among many other things, Stilwell was a committed diarist, profane and unsparing in his judgments of people, places and events. His voice jet-fuels Tuchman’s book. He kept these accounts for himself, she contends — noting that one of his early journals, from 1906, carries the warning, “This little book contains None of Your Damned Business.” He had to have known that would draw far more interest than it deflected.
Stilwell escaped his dreary desk job in time to contribute as an intelligence officer to critical battles on the Western front, but he wouldn’t find his true footing until after the war. While the US Army was swiftly dismantled by Washington in accordance with the prevailing national mood of ‘Let’s never do that again”, he requested a post “as far away from home as possible.”
This is one of the unresolved mysteries of the book. Why exactly did Stilwell want so badly to be on the other side of the world? At this point, he was married with young children, and the United States was as full of exciting opportunities as any time in its history. Maybe the 1920s didn’t look as promising at its outset as it does in retrospect? The Army had no openings in Japan, so Stilwell took China and had to enroll for a year at Berkeley to learn the language. He arrived in Peking with his family in August, 1920.
In Peking, writes Tuchman, “the old mandarin class mingled with venal adventurers, the new China throbbed with plans and hopes of reform, foreigners lived a charmed, hedonistic existence and the silent Altar of Heaven lay in eternal marble perfection open to the sky.” The upshot being that the Stilwell family, which eventually included five offspring, lived astonishingly well. A photograph in the book shows their extensive household staff, numbering fifteen strong. Maybe Stilwell knew what he was doing in the army after all!
To be fair, Stilwell spent much of his time out in the field, away from the comforts of home. Though he had no formal training, he served as Chief Engineer of a road-building program launched by the Red Cross in the aftermath of a devastating famine.
Largely unnoticed by expats living the good life in the major cities, bad vibes were gathering force throughout China. The outcome of the Great War had cemented China’s inferior status in the eyes of the world and that did not make the Chinese feel all that good about the world. To keep Japan from walking away from the League of Nations, the Allies rejected China’s bid for sovereignty and transferred Germany’s colonial concessions on Shantung — the prosperous part of the Chinese mainland that juts out into the Yellow Sea — to Japan. “Among the disappointments suffered at the Peace Conference,” writes Tuchman, “none was greater than China’s.”
There were all sorts of hidden motives and machinations at play, but the calculus was simple. Japan had a formidable navy, and thus the ability to cause trouble for Western powers, and China didn’t. So Japan had to be appeased. The message to the Chinese people couldn’t have been clearer — Sorry, your country is not your own. Maybe one day, but not now.
The United States, for what it was worth, was pro-China, in part because American missionaries were active there and it obviously helped their crusade to be seen as supportive. But the signals from the US to China were not uniformly positive. New immigration controls passed by Congress limited eligibility for citizenship to “free white persons,” an ineluctable insult to two-thirds of the world’s inhabitants. Americans’ respect for the Chinese people, in other words, was contingent on them staying in China (and converting to Christianity).
It was against this backdrop that Stilwell went to work in Peking. As language officer, his duties amounted to gathering intelligence the old fashioned way — talking to people. He traveled alone to the interior of China, something very few non-Chinese ever did, discovering that people there “universally consider the U.S. the best friend of China. They nowhere evince the slightest interest in the politics of their own country and ask only to be left alone to make a living as best they can.”
Stilwell apparently admired this about his hosts and it fits nicely with Tuchman’s pet theory of history. But you have to wonder if these Chinese weren’t merely telling a talkative white stranger what he wanted to hear. Just minding our own business here and, by the way, we sure love you Americans.
When Stilwell went back to the United States to study war tactics — in the class he took at Fort Leavenworth’s notoriously demanding Command and General Staff School, Dwight Eisenhowser finished first — the political situation in China coalesced around a slippery figure named Chiang Kai-shek, a protege of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, a political maverick who had built a movement based on the Three Principles of Nationalism, Democracy and the People’s Livelihood. When Dr. Sun died of cancer in 1925, Chiang stepped into breach. His center-right party, the Kuomintang, declared itself the national government and Chiang was installed as military chief. Before long, he would seize control.
Chiang is a hard guy to put your finger on. Tuchman pitches him as a semi absurd character who leaned heavily on his charming, ever-scheming wife and did self-indulgent rich-guy stuff like pilot his own plane, the so-called Flying Palace, “with this long robe tucked up around his knees and his purple Moslem bell-boy cap awry on his head.” He was pro-Chinese sovereignty, anti-Communist and open to the highest bidder on pretty much everything else. His governing philosophy was to intervene as little as possible and let crises pass, which Tuchman posits as an ancient Chinese tradition. “His great talent was not military but political,” she writes, “exercised through a mastery of balance among factions and plots so that he came to be called the ‘Billiken’ after the weighted doll that cannot be knocked over.”
One thing Chiang absolutely was not was an advocate for democracy, a fact that was conveniently overlooked by his supporters in the American government. “Americans saw in the Chinese a people rightly struggling to be free and assumed that because they were struggling for sovereignty they were also struggling for democracy,” writes Tuchman. “This was a delusion of the West.”
Just how many suffered from this delusion? Tuchman fogs the lens here a bit. She writes as if millions of Americans in the 1920s went to bed at night rooting for democracy in China. Were these the same Americans who had told their government to never get involved in another foreign war or let any non-white people into the country? It’s hard to square such things. Have strong opinions about China ever run that deep in American life?
When Stilwell returned to China in 1935 as the military attaché, he and Chiang commenced a dance that would last through the end of World War II. Stilwell badly wanted Chiang to develop his military into a formidable fighting force, as an essential aspect of nation building. Chiang feared that if he did that, it might turn on him one day, though he also knew he couldn’t afford to simply ignore the hostility of Japan. Having been permitted by the Versailles treaty to control Shantung, the Japanese wanted more. A lot more. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria in the north. In 1932, they picked a fight with the Chinese army in and around Shanghai. The Western powers who had concessions there brokered a truce allowing Japan to keep an armed force in the city, but not the Chinese.
China had the backing of the Americans, British, Soviets and even the Nazis (before they switched to Japan), but all that support did them no good on the field of battle. Each encounter with Japan demonstrated that the Chinese could be bullied and humiliated on their own turf. Then it got worse. Claiming that the Chinese had killed a Japanese soldier in a skirmish outside Peking, the Japanese rolled deeper into China with 10,000 troops. Chiang’s government was forced to flee from Nanking, its capital, and when the Japanese got there, they “hacked, burned, bayoneted, raped and murdered” 42,000 civilians. In a coincident event — exceedingly minor by comparison, but of grave importance to the United States — the Japanese attacked an American warship, the U.S.S. Panay, and sinked it to the muddy bottom of the Yangtze River.
This could have been the basis for an American war with Japan — six years before Pearl Harbor — but America wasn’t ready for that, not even close. Japan offered an official apology, which was accepted.
Through all this, Stilwell grew increasingly agitated. Moving around the country, he wrote blistering reports back to Washington about Chiang’s cowardliness, some of which were so vitriolic they were ordered immediately destroyed. Chiang was afraid to put his armed forces into harm’s way, believing that if they were openly defeated, his hold on the country might fritter away. Better to revert to the ancient tradition: Retreat and play for time. To Stilwell, this was no way to run an army — or a country. Where could it possibly lead but fear and subservience?
The Communists in China were pulling themselves together at this point, but not considered much of a threat — or even really Communists. “Their leaders adopted the methods and slogans of communism,” wrote Stilwell, “but what they were really after was land ownership under reasonable conditions. It is not in the nature of Chinese to be communists.”
Does Stilwell sound dumb now for having written that, or was he kinda right?
As much as the U.S. government may have wanted sovereignty for China, its vital strategic interest was getting Chiang to curb Japanese expansionism, of which he was doing a dismal job. “The Chinese soldier is excellent material, wasted and betrayed by stupid leadership,” Stilwell reported back to Washington. Stilwell’s frustration with his own leaders was almost as great. He had seen enough from Japan to know that a confrontation with them was inevitable, but nobody in power was ready to contemplate that. The view from Washington was that domestic politics in Japan were on a knife edge between militarists and liberal civilians, and that the US must avoid doing anything to stir up the militarists and tip the balance their way.
It was an historically bad bet, but what choice did the United States have? Following World War I, it had forsaken all future involvement in world affairs and stripped its own military down to the studs. As late as 1939, the US had the world’s 19th largest army, with fewer men in uniform than Portugal. Many of the anti-aircraft guns that protected the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor were wood decoys.
On December 7, 1941, the day Japan did attack Pearl Harbor, Stilwell happened to be back home in Carmel, California — he and his wife had built a house there for when his foreign sojourns came to an end. Those early days and weeks after Pearl Harbor were chaotic. The fear was that California itself might be next, and Stilwell was thrown into organizing emergency deployment of troops. There were panicked reports of Japanese warships off the coast, an imminent aerial bombardment of Los Angeles, paratroopers, saboteurs, crazy stuff, none of which obviously panned out. Instead, the Japanese went about adding Hong Kong and Manila to their empire. In February, they captured Singapore, condemning 80,000 Commonwealth troops to brutal prison camps.
This was the cost of the US’s wait-and-see policy on Japan, and there was a great deal more to come.
Stilwell was summoned to Washington to meet with President Roosevelt, who was “cordial and pleasant — and frothy,” wrote Stilwell. “Unimpressive. Acted as if I were a voter calling on a Congressman. Rambled on about his idea of the war — ‘a 29,000 mile front is my conception,’ etc, etc. Just a lot of wind.”
Stilwell asked the President for a message to deliver personally to Chiang. “Tell him we are in this for keeps,” said Roosevelt, “and we intend to keep at it until China gets back ALL her lost territory.”
“One country does not usually undertake to win back the lost territory of another, even of an ally,” notes Tuchman, “and in 1944 Roosevelt was to state, ‘I do not want the United States to have the post-war burden of reconstituting France, Italy and the Balkans.’ Yet he somehow felt an obligation to China.”
When the United States entered the war, it was Roosevelt’s intention to prioritize Asia, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, out of deference to his buddy Churchill. Roosevelt saw the war as an opportunity to free Asia from the yoke of colonialism and to bring China into the company of the four great powers in a new post-war order, an idealistic scenario that Churchill did not condone whatsoever. What exactly was the point of winning a war, the British prime minister believed, if you lost your empire in the process? Wasn’t that supposed to be the fate of the losing side?
Stilwell was pushing 60 when he was reposted to China. This time, he had major powers, at least on paper. While Chiang was granted the puffed-up title of Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the China Theater, Stilwell was installed as his Chief of Staff, which supposedly included command over some portion of China’s army. Chiang didn’t like this last bit and resisted efforts to define Stilwell’s responsibilities. But to keep American aid flowing into his country, he had to maintain the appearance of cooperation.
The immediate military drama was the defense of Burma and the vital supply route that ran between India and China. A “lightly equipped” Japanese force dressed in “sneakers and shorts and gym shirts” was making short work of the reluctant Indian and Burmese soldiers, under inept British command, who stood in their path. It was a shit show. In retreat, the colonial troops blew up a bridge with one of their own brigades still on the other side. Two Chinese armies were supposed to come to their aid, but Chiang was once again dragging his feet. Days after arriving in China, Stilwell hurried off to Burma to take command of the two Chinese armies, but it was too little, too late, and it hardly mattered anyway because they probably wouldn’t have obeyed his orders.
A couple of months later, when their final position was being overrun by the Japanese and the Chinese were in full retreat, a US transport plane arrived to extract Stilwell and his staff. Stilwell declined. Taking vehicles as far as they could, he led a retreating force on 140-mile trek across a river and through a major mountain range, battling extreme heat, drenching downpours, insects, leeches and unseen things that ate them from the inside. Stilwell was, remember, 60 years old. When he finally made it back to China, with all 114 of his charges alive, he held one of the most memorable press conferences of the war. “I claim we got a hell of a beating,” he said. “We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.”
It was still only 1942. The war, for the United States, was just getting going.
Stilwell and Chiang spent the next three years driving each other crazy. Chiang remained fearful of his own army and made an alliance with a renegade US Air Force general named Claire Chennault to focus on aerial warfare. They had the eager assistance of Joseph Alsop, who went on to become an influential Washington columnist, but was then practicing the dark arts of war propagandizing. Chiang treated Alsop to imperial perks like being portaged up and down the Yunnan mountains in a sedan chair.
Stilwell, meanwhile, became obsessively focused on training Chinese ground troops to retake Burma. His conviction was that wars could not be won in the air, but Chiang didn’t want to hear it. The stunning math was that “it required three Chinese to one Japanese division to hold a defense and five to one for attack.” Five to one. It’s hard to imagine how decisions could be made with such human carnage at stake.
At the end of 1942, Madame Chiang Kai-shek visited the United States, where she “aroused a greater outpouring of admiration and welcome than anyone since Lindbergh flew the Atlantic.” She stayed at the White House, addressed Congress and attracted crowds of 20,000 at Madison Square Garden and 30,000 at the Hollywood Bowl. Such crowds are a little hard to fathom —I guess Americans were bored? Madame had two major objectives. One, to make clear to American leaders how much she and her husband disliked Stilwell and two, to burnish China’s reputation with the American public.
American reporters fell hard for the glamorous Madame. “Owing partly to censorship but more to voluntary reticence, the press up to 1943 published nothing realistic about the brave and favorite ally,” writes Tuchman. “Probably never before had the people of one country viewed the government of another under misapprehension so complete.”
With Chennault and Alsop feeding the fire, the campaign to remove Stilwell gathered momentum and he was called to Washington to see Roosevelt. General George Marshall, a major ally of Stilwell, was in the meeting. Stilwell choked. “He sat humped over with his head down and ‘muttered something about China not fighting.’ Roosevelt seized on his attitude to wonder if he were ill and to ask Marshall if a sick man should not be relieved.” It took the full support of Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, to save Stilwell, but his credibility in Washington was irreparably damaged.
The story of China in World War II came to a strange and deflating conclusion. In November 1943, there were two major strategic conferences, first at Cairo, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang, then at Tehran, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. At issue was how and where to use their overwhelming advantage in resources against the Axis powers. At Cairo, Chiang had his moment of glory as China took the stage as an independent world power, no longer a mere servant of other states. But the good feelings didn’t last. Chiang subsequently failed to impress Roosevelt with China’s military seriousness, and at the next meeting in Tehran, Roosevelt opted for prioritizing the assault on Europe and let Stalin deal with Japan. Roosevelt had been the only one sticking up for China and now he had abandoned them, too. “At the beginning,” writes Tuchman, “Roosevelt was determined to make the occasion a Chinese success; at the end , he sacrificed Chiang Kai-shek to Stalin. He had found a new partner at the dance.”
Chiang bungled whatever slim chance he may have had of regaining Roosevelt’s good graces when he demanded an absurdly high exchange rate on US funds to build airfields in China for B-29s on their way to bomb Japan. If the financial negotiations were a disaster, however, China’s construction effort was magnificent. “In Szechwan,” writes Tuchman, “450,000 workmen were assembled from local hsien, or districts. Each hsien provided its quota of men, women and children with tools and food for 90 days’ work. They came on foot, bringing their materials in wheelbarrows. Nine fields, four of them with 9,000 foot runways, were constructed without trucks, steam shovels, or concrete. Topsoil, laboriously preserved for thousands of years for growing rice, was cleared off in wicker baskets carried on shoulder poles, and the subsoil flattened by men pulling huge rollers back and forth. A cobblestone base was laid from stones hauled from stream beds in an endless train of wheelbarrows. This was covered by layers of soil mixed with mud slurry alternating with layers of crushed rock made by women and girls sitting all day and hammering. The topsoil was then hauled back and rerolled. Foreman with pennants representing each village directed the work of their own townspeople, under orders of the engineers, of whom all but 14 Americans were Chinese. The first B-29 landed after 60 days; in 90 days, all the fields were completed.”
This passage, appearing towards the end of this mighty book, brought tears to my eyes. It is almost unbearable to contemplate such an extraordinary human effort carried out in the service of a bombing campaign that inflicted death and destruction on millions of people. Yet it also reveals something awe-inspiring about the Chinese capacity for work and their sense of duty that remains evident to this day..
Stilwell eventually got his way and led a Chinese force in retaking Burma. At his age and seniority (three-star general, he would later get his fourth), he could have easily chosen to orchestrate the attack from a place of total security and luxury. He could have had his shirts pressed daily, dined by candlelight on the finest delicacies and snoozed on silk sheets. Instead, he joined his men at the front, “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.” He rose early and hiked for up to 5 miles. The Japanese heard about this habit and talked about capturing him alive. At one point, an American unit was brought in, and American and Chinese soldiers fought side by side for the first and only time in history.
Back on the Chinese mainland, Japan turned up the heat, and their advances into the interior of the country created ever greater friction between Chiang and Stilwell. Chiang was inept and corrupt, but Stilwell let his anger get the best of him. Eventually he ran out of bridges to burn, and was recalled home, though his career was not over. Military men like Stilwell did not grow on trees. He was put in charge of the Tenth Army, which would’ve led the invasion of Japan if the atomic bombs hadn’t been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Tuchman pays Stilwell pays her subject the historian’s ultimate compliment when she credits him with possessing “that unusual talent — the capacity to understand a historical process as it was happening.” In the end, however, his obsession with retaking Burma cost him the respect of most other historians. It proved to be an irrelevant theater that had no impact on the outcome of the war.
But between Stilwell’s intense advocacy for the Chinese people and Roosevelt’s sympathetic disposition, there was clearly an opportunity for the US and China to emerge from World War II with a completely different relationship. But it was not to be. In trying to manage the Japanese surrender, Soviet designs on Manchuria and the rising Communist insurgency, the US facilitated Chiang’s movement of troops into north China, where he was not recognized as a legitimate ruler. “The decision was not merely futile,” writes Tuchman, “It aligned America in popular eyes with the oppressor and landlord and tax collector, it disheartened the liberal forces and violently antagonized the future rulers. While many suspected the effort was misguided, American policy could not readjust. It preferred the status quo even when the status quo was a sinking ship.”
Enter the commies. And why not? Nothing else was working. For the second world war in a row, China believed it had done what it was told by the West, only to get stiffed. “Stilwell’s mission,” concludes Tuchman, “was America’s supreme try in China … [But] China was a problem for which there was no American solution.”
In the years since Tuchman’s book was published, there have been two more significant “tries” by America — first, Henry Kissinger with detente and then Bill Clinton with his trade deals. Together, they formed what appeared to be a long-term trajectory toward greater US engagement with China and the inevitable liberalization of Chinese society that would result. The Internet would, of course, aid the cause of freedom. Attempts by an autocratic government to prevent the free flow of information, promised Clinton, would be “like trying to nail Jello to the wall.”
Clinton’s presumption, of course, has turned out to be comically off-base. With access to Western markets, China has built a manufacturing powerhouse, as well as the potent military that Stilwell badly wanted it to have, ensuring it never has to trust the United States again. It sure looks like the Chinese are still playing a very long game, but now they have the wherewithal to land devastating punches of their own.