Puzzle Without Solution

By Gerald Clarke

STILWELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA, 1911-45 by Barbara W. Tuchman. 621 pages. Macmillan. $10.

For as long as anyone can remember, China has puzzled Americans. U.S. feelings have been a mixture of fascination, affection--and disastrous delusion. During World War II the result was complete military failure in China as well as a legacy of bitterness between China and the U.S. So argues Barbara Tuchman. The value of her engrossing popular history is that it provides a kind of psychological purgative.

The American fantasy--that the U.S. could be China's protector--began about the turn of the century. On the one hand there was John Hay's "Open Door" policy, which in fact meant that the U.S. demanded equal trading rights with the European powers. On the other, there was the zeal, mostly idealistic, of religious missionaries, whose work had the support of millions back home. By the end of World War I, the sense of mission and patronage was so strong that public and press angrily denounced Woodrow Wilson when he acquiesced to Japan's taking over Germany's privileges in China's Shantung province. In a foreshadowing of the bitterness of the late '40s and early '50s, Republicans used Wilson's "betrayal" of China as a major theme in the campaign of 1920.

Particular Hubris. Enter Barbara Tuchman's Joseph Stilwell, 36, a slight, bespectacled, but athletic captain from New York's Westchester County, whose aptitude for language made him the first U.S. Army officer sent to Peking for training in Chinese. He was to spend 13 of the next 24 years there.

The years before the U.S. entered World War II were enough to exhaust any Westerner's patience. The Nationalist Chinese victory of 1928 over the provincial warlords was never total. Its reformist possibilities were gradually destroyed by corruption and ineptitude and by the bitter power struggle with the emerging Communist Party, which challenged the existence of Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Many in Chiang's Kuomintang Party were attempting to push China toward modernization and industrialization, the path taken by Japan the century before. Many others seemed content to take what they could from a peasantry long accustomed to abuse. Chiang's tragedy, according to Tuchman, was that he was incapable of making a decisive break with the past.

Japanese aggression, which began with the occupation of Manchuria in 1931, met with little opposition. Usually the Chinese were woefully lacking in modern arms, but time and time again they simply abandoned their defenses. With a centuries-long Chinese perspective of history, the Nationalists looked on the Japanese as merely a temporary threat. Eventually, Chiang reasoned, Japanese forces would bog down in China's vastness, or Japan would provoke a war with the West, which would .fight China's battle for her. In the meantime, he felt, the central government must hoard its resources for the long-term internal struggle against the Communists. The concept was so profoundly alien to Westerners at the time that few Americans, observing the steady Japanese advance, could grasp it at all. Stilwell understood it. But by World War II it became his particular hubris to believe he and his country could mobilize China's manpower against Japan when her own leaders would not. The resulting struggle forms the most dramatic portion of the book.

Quill by Quill. Stilwell returned to the U.S. in 1939 to help train the growing American Army. But by early 1942 he was back in China. His mission: to provide American arms and training-- for the flagging Chinese. The Japanese already controlled the coast and were fast overrunning Burma, the only overland supply route from India. Given command of two Chinese armies to secure the defense of Burma, he quickly discovered that real control remained in Chungking, Chiang's mountain capital. His orders were often ignored. When a British general asked his Chinese counterpart what had happened to the field guns he had seen dug in for defense the day before, he was given an answer worthy of the Queen of Hearts. "The Fifth Army is our best army," the Chinese explained, "because it is the only one which has any field guns, and I cannot afford to risk those guns."

Naturally, Burma fell to the Japanese. Only the U.S. seemed interested in winning it back. Speaking for Britain, Winston Churchill observed that marching back through the Burmese jungles would be like "munching a porcupine quill by quill." The Chinese were not eager to recapture a former British colony and seemed oblivious to Burma's strategic importance. Stilwell came to hold Chiang, whom he privately called "the Peanut," in total contempt--a feeling he managed to hide not at all. Chiang, a remote figure protected by a smothering entourage and ultrasensitive to any slight, reciprocated. He and Madame Chiang campaigned for Stilwell's recall.

The story of the next 21 years was chiefly one of frustration. President Roosevelt, who maintained against much evidence that China was a great power, intervened again and again and seriously undercut his field commander. Intrigued by the fashionable "victory through airpower" arguments of General Claire Chennault, the U.S. diverted badly needed supplies from the ground Army to Chennault's Air Force, which launched air attacks from Chinese bases. The Japanese took the airfields--as well as eight provinces and a population of 100 million. By the time Stilwell's Chinese troops were belatedly put on the offensive and had opened a supply line through Northern Burma in August 1944, the U.S. was advancing across the Pacific and China's war effort seemed less important. Still, in one of history's extraordinary exchanges, Roosevelt, finally disenchanted, demanded that Stilwell be put in absolute charge of all Chinese land forces. It was a bluff--for Roosevelt was secretly fearful that China would drop out of the war entirely--and Chiang called it. Stilwell was brought home.

Mrs. Tuchman's personal sympathies are all with Stilwell, and her bias shows through. She is too good a historian, though, not to admit his faults, among them a total lack of diplomacy, which won him the nickname "Vinegar Joe." In a job that required the most delicate tact, Stilwell managed to be Yankee-abrasive, not merely to Chiang, but to the British and many Americans as well.

Still, as Mrs. Tuchman shows, the real problem was not one of personalities but a historic and cultural gap between East and West so profound that it swallowed generals and Presidents alike. Roosevelt, and most other Americans, thought of China as a great wounded giant that could be brought back to health. Stilwell knew that China was a nation in chaos but thought nonetheless that it could be forced to fight. Both were wrong. Stilwell's "mission failed in its ultimate purpose," Mrs. Tuchman writes, "because the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese . . . China was a problem for which there was no American solution, [and] in the end . . . went her own way as if the Americans had never come."

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