Tragedy in Chungking

On March 21, 1943, Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell, Commander of the China-Burma-India Theater, Chief of Staff to Chiang Kaishek, wrote to his wife in Carmel, Calif. In the letter he enclosed the following verse:

Aromatic Chungking, where I welcomed the spring,

In a mixture of beauty and stenches,

Of flowers and birds, with a sprinkling

of --,

And of bowlegged Szechuan wenches.

The contempt in those lines epitomizes the tragic failure of Vinegar Joe Stilwell, a brave soldier who broke his heart on a job a hundred times too big for him. The deeper tragedy was that Stilwell's colossal failure contributed to the war-born misunderstanding between the U.S. and China; a misunderstanding which has already brought a disaster to China and may have consequences for the U.S. as well.

Stilwell died a year and a half ago. Theodore H. White, a former TIME correspondent in Chungking, has assembled "Stilwell's Story" from the general's fascinatingly revealing diary, his letters to Mrs. Stilwell and random papers. The collection, edited and liberally annotated by White (who shares Stilwell's hatred of the Chinese government and his warm regard for the Chinese Communists), appeared this week in the current issue of the Ladies' Home Journal. As if in answer, Major General Claire L. Chennault, who commanded the Fourteenth Air Force at Kunming under Stilwell, is writing his very different version of the tragic story for the Scripps-Howard newspapers.

More is involved than the warming over of an old feud between generals. Much of the present U.S. governmental and popular attitude toward China has been distilled out of Stilwell's venom.

"I Let Them Rant." In Washington's confusion after Pearl Harbor, Stilwell almost got the assignment which would have developed into command of the North African expedition. If the acid of his insecure and suspicious personality had been poured over U.S.-British relations, calamity might have come more dramatically. Stilwell's contempt was not confined to the Chinese government. In his diary and letters he sneered at the British, at Washington, at Mountbatten and at Chennault, who had been in China four years before Stilwell got there.

Chennault says that Stilwell never once asked him to present an airman's picture of the China war. Chennault believes that Stilwell's initial defeat by the Japanese in Burma led to his obsession with the planning of a second Burma campaign which was to vindicate Stilwell's military reputation. Chennault traces many of Stilwell's mistakes in his relations with the Chinese to his preoccupation with the reopening of the Burma Road, which Chennault believes was a nearly valueless objective. Actually, the damage was done before the first Burma campaign.

For an American to operate effectively as Chiang Kai-shek's Chief of Staff would have been a delicate operation at best. Stilwell in his diary quotes George Marshall as telling him, "Get the various factions together and grab command and in general give 'em the works." Whether Marshall said that or not, that is the way Stilwell went about his task.

Three days after his first arrival in Chungking, this was Stilwell's attitude toward his superior, Chiang Kaishek: "[Dinner at Chiang's] turned out to be a session of amateur tactics by Chiang Kaishek, backed up by a stooge staff general. Chiang Kai-shek gave me a long lecture on the situation and picked on Mandalay as the danger point. 'If the British run away, the Japs will get to Mandalay and crucify us.' I showed him the solution, but [the] stooge jumped in and made a long harangue about how right Chiang Kai-shek was. I let them rant." On that first dinner Stilwell had a typical comment: "What a directive--what a mess!" Even more characteristically he exclaimed, "And what a sucker I am!"

Of Sudden Death. In his diary and letters Stilwell usually refers to Chiang Kai-shek as "Peanut" and Roosevelt as "Old Softie." The crisis in Stilwell's struggles with "Peanut" and "Old Softie" came in September 1944. In nis disgust with Chiang, he wrote to Mrs. Stilwell, "Why can't sudden death for once strike in the proper place?" Two days later he was jubilant. He finally got from Roosevelt what Editor White describes as "the sharpest-worded American demand for reform and action on the part of the Chinese government that the war had evoked."

Stilwell went in person to serve his ultimatum. "I handed this bundle of paprika to the Peanut and then sank back with a sigh. The harpoon hit the little -- right in the solar plexus, and went right through him. It was a clean hit, but beyond turning green and losing the power of speech, he did not bat an eye. He just said to me, 'I understand.' And sat in silence, jigging one foot. At least F.D.R.'s eyes have been opened and he has thrown a good hefty punch. I came home. Pretty sight crossing the river: lights all on in Chungking."

But Chiang Kai-shek didn't take it. He insisted that Stilwell be replaced. Stilwell writes, "It looks very much as if they had gotten me at last. The Peanut has gone off his rocker and Roosevelt has apparently let me down completely. If Old Softie gives in on this, as he apparently has, the Peanut will be out of control from now on. . . . God help the next man."

The next man was Lieut. General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who got along fine.

The Deck Hand. Like others, Stilwell fell for the "liberal" line that the Chinese Communists were really agrarian reformers. In his diary Stilwell calls them "the so-called Communists."*

Stilwell again & again refers to himself as a "deck hand." He liked to drop the more important and troublesome aspects of his mission and turn to the jobs he could do well: troop training and tactical command. He believed that the Chinese soldier could be made into a first-class fighting man, and he proved it with the units he trained at Ramgarh in India. Crawling through the mud of the North Burma offensive, Stilwell looked like the hero he was. Chennault says it all when he calls Stilwell "one of the best divisional commanders the United States ever produced." The accent is on "divisional."

Before he left Washington early in 1942, George Marshall (Stilwell remembered) said to him: "It's hard as hell to find anybody in our high command who's worth a damn. There are plenty of good young ones, but you have to reach too far down." Because George Marshall, when he picked Stilwell, did not reach down far enough, wartime comradeship-in-arms between the U.S. and China became, and remains to this day, a source of bitterness rather than friendship.

* This strand in the party line is now worn out. Recently the New York Daily Worker approvingly reported a speech by Israel Epstein: "She [Freda Utley] always waits for the liberal to start proclaiming that Chinese Communists are not Communists--they're Jeffersonian democrats, single-taxers, members of the A.D.A., or some such nonsense. Mr. Epstein, however, said that China's Communists were Communists. He defended them as Communists."

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