China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (8 page)

Even two years later, Stilwell’s victorious return to Burma, though publicly celebrated by Chiang, did not erase his doubts about his chief of staff’s judgment. Chiang was generally angry at the Allies for giving priority to the war
in Europe over the war in Asia, and he was angry that Stilwell’s obsession with retaking Burma gave priority to a secondary theater of the war at a time when the offensive the
Japanese mounted in 1944 was seizing whole provinces of China proper—which, in turn, was provoking American criticism that he was refusing to resist. “
We have taken Mytkyina but we have lost almost all of East China,” Chiang dryly observed to
Patrick J. Hurley, FDR’s special representative, in October 1944, explaining why he had had no choice but to demand Stilwell’s
recall. The Burma campaigns consolidated Stilwell’s reputation at home, but for Chiang they served to intensify his conviction that, as he once confided to his diary, Stilwell “lacked the virtue and vision of a commander.”

It was into this parlous
situation that late in 1944 Roosevelt sent Hurley to straighten things out. Hurley, a staunch Republican, was by nature an optimistic man, and he had a great deal of charm, often involving some recourse to his western cowboy heritage. When he first arrived in China, the sitting ambassador, Clarence E. Gauss, expressed the suspicion that Roosevelt wanted Hurley to take over the ambassadorial function. Hurley replied by telling the story of a barbershop out west. While a customer was sitting in the chair having his hair cut, bullets suddenly began whizzing over his head. Naturally alarmed, he made to get up, whereupon the barber said, “
Lean back, brother—nobody’s shooting at you.”

Hurley had succeeded in everything else he had done in his life, as a self-made oil millionaire, as a lawyer to the Choctaw Nation, and as secretary of war under Herbert Hoover. As a soldier in World War I he had earned a medal at the Argonne. When World War II in the Pacific broke out, he ran supplies to the American troops bottled up on Bataan, at least once committing a technical act of piracy by flying the Japanese flag on one of his ships. He had that very American faith that all disagreements can be overcome with a little good sense and tough talk, but in this he was naïve, and he was pigheaded as well, entirely disinclined to take on board views and information different from his own.

Hurley met Chiang for the first time on September 8, the day after his arrival in Chungking, and the two men hit it off. At least
Chiang found Hurley “different” from “American officials in the past,” by which he must have meant less amenable figures like Stilwell and Gauss. In any event, Chiang agreed to the main American demand, which was that Stilwell be given command over all Chinese armies, including the Communists, in the unlikely event that they accepted Chiang as China’s undisputed leader. But things started to sour quickly. Hurley’s entry onto the scene came simultaneously with the big Japanese offensive of 1944—it was called Ichigo, meaning “first”—and the Burma campaign. At a meeting on September 15 with Stilwell and Hurley present, Chiang worried about a Japanese counterattack that was taking place on the Salween front, and he asked that the X-Force at Mytkyina in Burma be moved east immediately to relieve the pressure. Stilwell, who was notorious among his soldiers in Burma for pushing them beyond ordinary human endurance,
rejected the request on the grounds that his men needed to rest. In other words, an American subordinate was telling the president of China that he could not use Chinese troops in the defense of his own country.

After the meeting, Stilwell wrote to Marshall calling Chiang a “
crazy little bastard” and reporting that he was sabotaging the entire Burma campaign. Stilwell sent a note to
T. V. Soong complaining that he had “
been delayed, ignored, double-crossed, and kicked around for years” in China and demanding that he be given “nothing less than full power” over all Chinese armies. It was this demand that led, a few weeks later, to Chiang’s demand that Stilwell be withdrawn.

In the end, it was a now famous confrontation at Chiang’s official residence at the hilltop outside
Chungking known as Yellow Mountain that led to the irreparable break between the two men. Roosevelt, who was with Marshall at an Allied conference in Quebec, drafted a note to Chiang with orders that Stilwell deliver it personally. The note was insulting in the extreme. It demanded that Chiang reinforce the Y-Force army in Yunnan “immediately” and place Stilwell “in unrestricted command of all your forces,” threatening that if he failed to comply, “you must yourself be prepared to accept the consequences and assume the personal responsibility.”

Stilwell, after receiving the note, took a jeep to Yellow Mountain, where Chiang and several of his top officials and military commanders were meeting with Hurley discussing precisely the terms by which Stilwell would take command of the Chinese armies. Chiang, informed that Stilwell was present, suggested that he be invited in for tea, but Stilwell asked to see Hurley privately first. On the balcony of Chiang’s residence, he showed Hurley the note from Roosevelt, and Hurley, seeing the offense it contained, asked Stilwell not to deliver it.

“Joe,” Hurley said, “
you have won this ball game, and if you want command of the forces in China all you’ve got to do is accept what the Generalissimo has already agreed to.” Stilwell insisted on personally handing Chiang the president’s note, which he had to know would be an enormous loss of face for the Gimo. Chiang read the Chinese translation in silence. After a few minutes, he inverted his teacup, signaling that the meeting was at an end, and said, “
I now understand.”

According to the American eyewitness to the event,
Joseph
Alsop, Chiang burst into “
compulsive and stormy sobbing” as soon as Stilwell and Hurley left the room. Later, Chiang confided to his diary that he had suffered “
the most severe humiliation I have ever had in my life.” Stilwell, though, was triumphant. He had always urged FDR to be tougher with Chiang, in particular to use the threat of withholding aid to get concessions from the Chinese. “
Rejoice with me,” he wrote to his wife. “We have prevailed … his head is in the dust.”

That same night, Chiang summoned Hurley back to the residence and told him that Stilwell would have to leave China. The two met again the next day, with Chiang telling Hurley that Roosevelt’s message marked a low point in Chinese-American relations. He was especially wounded by the innuendo in Roosevelt’s note, which had been encouraged by Stilwell and others, that he had not mounted a fight against Japan. He told Hurley that 30 percent of China’s troops had been fighting since 1936, some of them since the Northern Expedition of the 1920s, and these soldiers would not accept the “
patronizing attitude” of Stilwell.

Meanwhile, in the days after the meeting at Yellow Mountain, Stilwell was making plans to take over China’s armies. He ordered that two hundred tons of supplies be sent to the new commander of the defense of Guilin, the immediate target of the Ichigo offensive, supplies that he had up to then withheld—that is, he had withheld matériel from Chiang’s army even as he was complaining that it wasn’t fighting. He also drafted a proposal by which the United States would arm five divisions of Communist troops. Finally, he promised Hurley that he would change his behavior toward the Generalissimo.

But it was too late. On September 24, five days after Stilwell handed him Roosevelt’s message,
Chiang reiterated to Hurley his demand that Stilwell had to go. Stilwell, he said, in a pretty fair assessment, “
is a professional, works hard, is resolute, and good at his own military doctrine, which is to attack,” but “he has no strategic thinking … [or] basic political skills … [and] he is very arrogant.” The next day he gave Hurley a formal letter asking for Stilwell’s recall, while to his diary he confided his pain at what he saw as a betrayal by the man he probably worshipped most in the world, Roosevelt. “
My heart is broken,” he wrote. “It is difficult to go on.” But he also expressed determination. China, he said, could “once again hold out absolutely alone … if necessary … in four provinces.”

Hurley later said that the night Chiang’s demand for Stilwell’s recall arrived, he was unable to sleep, and in the wee hours he summoned an aide and dictated a message to Roosevelt recommending that the president accept Chiang’s demand. “
Stilwell’s every act is a move toward the complete subjugation of Chiang Kai-shek,” he wrote. “You have a choice between Stilwell and Chiang and you have to choose Chiang,” he told the president. “There is no other Chinese known to me who possesses as many of the elements of leadership as Chiang Kai-shek.… [He] has agreed to every request, every suggestion made by you except the Stilwell appointment.”

The divisions sowed by Stilwell’s removal were to be deep and long-lasting. Stilwell himself, whom public opinion was accustomed to seeing as honest, straight-talking, and no-nonsense, got in the first blow. After his dismissal but before he left Chungking,
Stilwell invited the correspondent of
Time
, Theodore White, and the one from
The New York Times,
Brooks Atkinson, to his office, and, in a remarkable breach of military discipline, gave them not only his version of what had happened but also access to the secret cable traffic involving the Chiang affair.
White’s account was essentially spiked at
Time,
whose editor in chief, Luce, would not allow Chiang to be seen as corrupt and incompetent, which is how White presented him.

But Atkinson, under no such restriction, accompanied Stilwell on his plane back to Washington, D.C., and his account of the Chiang-Stilwell dispute represented a negative shift in the press coverage of Chiang and his regime. “
STILWELL BREAK STEMS FROM Chiang REFUSAL TO PRESS WAR FULLY” ran the page-one headline in the
Times,
which perfectly encapsulated Stilwell’s view of the problem. “PEACE WITH REDS BARRED: GENERALISSIMO REGARDS THEIR ARMIES FIGHTING JAPAN AS THREAT TO HIS RULE.” Stilwell’s dismissal by Chiang, Atkinson wrote, “represents the political triumph of a moribund anti-democratic regime that is more concerned with maintaining its political supremacy than in driving the Japanese out of China.” “Relieving General Stilwell and appointing a successor has the effect of making us acquiesce in an unenlightened cold-hearted autocratic political regime.”

Hurley said nothing publicly right away. But within a year or so, he was making comments that can only be described as deranged, accusing Stilwell, the State Department officers who agreed with the general about Chiang, and the American press as engaged in a conspiracy to destroy Chiang and see him replaced by a Communist government. He summed up his position this way: “
The record of General Stilwell in China is irrevocably coupled in history with the conspiracy to overthrow the Nationalist Government of China, and to set up in its place a Communist regime—and all of this movement was part of, and cannot be separated from, the Communist cell or apparatus that existed at that time in the Government in Washington.”

Wedemeyer
, Stilwell’s replacement, paid his first call on Chiang just five days after Stilwell’s departure, on November 2. He had flown to Chungking two days before, then driven out of the afflicted, rubble-strewn city and across the Yangzi River to Yellow Mountain. Chiang, who often appeared in a simple Chinese robe with no insignia, was dressed in his Prussian-style green-brown uniform bearing the emblem of a five-star general. Wedemeyer found him to be a “
small, graceful, fine-boned man with black, piercing eyes and an engaging smile.”

Chiang was eager to make a good impression on the man who would now be his chief of staff and who would also have control over the all-important
Lend-Lease supplies for China, the tons of aviation fuel, weapons, and ammunition that came from India every month. He received Wedemeyer in a spacious reception room adorned with beautiful Chinese paintings and etchings on the walls, rugs on the polished floor, teakwood tables, chairs with marble inlay, and vases with flowers. Servants in long blue robes glided in and out with tea and refreshments. There were so many curtains and screens drawn around the room that Wedemeyer, no innocent abroad, wondered “
how many people might be listening in and noting what we said.”

“Please, please,” said Chiang, the only English words he spoke, gesturing Wedemeyer to a divan and then sitting next to him on it. It was a gesture of equality. He would not have sat on the same couch with Stilwell. “
He seemed shy but keenly alert,” Wedemeyer noted, and he constantly and nervously fluttered a fan. Hurley, who had been appointed the American ambassador a few weeks earlier, was present, as was
T. V. Soong.

The meeting was an opportunity to exchange pleasantries and to repair the wounds of the Stilwell debacle, but not to get into detailed discussions. Wedemeyer told the Generalissimo he was sure “
we would have no difficulties in bringing about an efficient, carefully coordinated employment of American and Chinese forces against the
Japanese.”

Respectful as he was of Chiang’s feelings, Wedemeyer had no illusions about the condition of China’s armies. The Japanese were on the offensive, threatening the important cities of Guilin and Liuzhou, both sites of American air bases, yet Wedemeyer found the Chinese to be strangely “
apathetic and unintelligent.” A bit later, on December 4, in a cable to Marshall, he had changed his mind, but only somewhat. “
I have now concluded,” he wrote, “that the Generalissimo and his adherents realize seriousness of situation but they are impotent and confounded. They are not organized, equipped, and trained for modern war.” Among the problems was “disorganized and muddled planning” that was “beyond comprehension.” The Chinese soldier was not only not properly equipped, he was also not properly fed, and Wedemeyer soon realized that this inadequacy, which resulted in malnutrition and disease, “
underlay most of China’s military problems.”

This assessment seemed to correspond with Stilwell’s harshest judgments, but in fact Wedemeyer was not only more tactful than his predecessor, an attribute that enabled him to establish a cordial relationship with Chiang, but also more sympathetic, more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. While
American public opinion was souring on Chiang—or, at least, was now privy to the disillusionment illustrated by the
New York Times
coverage—and while
American diplomats and military officers in China were forming an anti-Chiang consensus, Wedemeyer became convinced of Hurley’s assessment that the Gimo was a great man and the only one who could lead China. Others felt that way as well, so that the United States government ended up in a kind of warts-and-all resignation about Chiang, an unenthusiastic acceptance of the fact that, as FDR once said about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastazio Somoza, he may be a bastard but he’s our bastard.