And so a general who had been appraised as one of the best fighting commanders in the American army was dispatched on a ceremonial, negotiatory, administrative mission in which he was also to command Chinese troops at the pleasure of the Generalissimo, whom Stilwell regarded as disastrously incompetent in military matters. Why, when given the opportunity to decline, did Stilwell accept the assignment? He did because as a thoroughgoing professional soldier he took the wish of his commanding officer, George Marshall (who was one of the few men he really respected), as tantamount to an order. Then too, Stilwell believed what became something of an American military creed: that, properly fed, trained, equipped and led, the Chinese soldier would be the equal of any. This just might be the chance for him to prove this belief.
Nevertheless he already longed for the reassuring presence of American combat troops under his command. To Marshall he described the Southwest Pacific as a defensive theater, whereas China was the area from which to launch the offensive against Japan—employing at least one American army corps. This was to be a reoccurring plea throughout Stilwell’s China assignment; not granted until the last year of his ordeal, and then with but one regiment.
The American high command, however, looked upon China as of relatively slight military significance. The American grand strategy assigned priority to the defeat of the German-Italian Axis over the defeat of Japan. In the secondary effort against Japan, four possible avenues of attack existed. One was the northern Pacific and the Aleutians. Weather and terrain severely limited the practicability of this route. A second was westward from the Central Pacific, a flank assault, which proved to be the main road to victory. A third, starting from Australia, was northward island hopping in arduous frontal assaults against the maximum extension of enemy strength, but enabling MacArthur to fulfill his promise to return to the Philippines.
And finally, China. Effectively blockaded from its allies for most of the war, it was a logistical monstrosity, with a line of communications stretching from the United States across the Atlantic, around Africa, through the Indian Ocean, and then either across or around the Indian subcontinent, up the Brahmaputra valley to the foothills of the Himalayas and thence, by airlift, across Burma and the high ranges to the east and so into the southwest mountain-girt corner of China. China was indeed, as often said during the war, “at the end of the line.” In retrospective military logic, commitment of American men and materiel to the China-Burma-India Theater was a diversion from theaters where they could be more effectively used against the enemy.
Who was this Chiang Kai-shek to whom Stilwell was assigned? He was a slight, sleek, alternately impassive and overwrought, obstinate and vacillating, fifty-six-year-old native of the lower Yangtze valley. As a student at military academy in Japan he joined Sun Yat-sen’s republican movement plotting the overthrow of imperial rule over China. Chiang had a minor part in the ensuing 1911 revolution, following which he cultivated Shanghai financial contacts, became a broker and established connections with the powerful and sometimes benevolent Shanghai underworld.
The new republic was soon fragmented by warlordism. Chiang maintained his ties with Sun, joining in at least one of that erratic leader’s military campaigns to capture a base for his Kuomintang (national people’s party). This paid off for Chiang. When Sun made a deal with the Soviet Union for assistance, he sent Chiang on a visit to Moscow in 1923 as his military representative. Having established a base at Canton, Sun appointed Chiang head of a new military academy there, complete with Soviet military advisers, headed by the ascendant General Vasily Blyukher.
With Sun’s death in 1925, Chiang slickly disposed of his competitors, took over as Sun’s successor, and showed that he knew how to handle foreign advisers. He called a Soviet bluff to terminate aid, put his Soviet military tutors briefly under house arrest, and forced the recall of several for attempted reforms of his army and one for allegedly making fun of him. Against the advice of his Soviet mentors, he launched in 1926 a northward drive to subdue warlords and unify China.
Chiang undertook the campaign in collaboration with the puny new Chinese Communist Party, which the Soviet representatives had persuaded Sun to accept in a united front with the Kuomintang. Although Chiang had continued with the united front, when the successful offensive approached his own turf, particularly Shanghai, he turned on his Communist collaborators and caused the killing of all that his men could lay hands on. Using the right wing of the Kuomintang, he established at Nanking a conservative government claiming to be the national administration, even though it controlled—and that imperfectly—only the southeastern portion of the country.
In search of respectability Chiang courted Shanghai’s most powerful banking and commercial community. And late in 1927 he disembarrassed himself of his old-fashioned marital entanglements (two wives) and embraced Christianity so as to quality for marriage to Soong Mei-ling. In marrying Miss Soong, Chiang acquired a pretty, temperamental wife of inclinations with rich historical precedents—the empress or imperial favorite who usurps the throne. He also acquired a spirited assortment of in-laws.
The Soongs were a wealthy Christian family. The father, Charlie, was brought up in the United States and his progeny were educated there. He was a friend of Sun Yat-sen’s and his second daughter, Soong Ching-ling, became Sun’s second wife. She was the gentle, idealistic member of the family and disapproved of her brother-in-law’s dictatorial nature. The oldest daughter, Ai-ling, shrewd and self-controlled, married H. H. Kung, who claimed lineal descent from Confucius and was from time to time Chiang’s Finance Minister. The dominant son, T. V. Soong, a Harvard product, aggressively rose to become Foreign Minister and, like his sister, Madame Chiang, acted during World War II as a broker between the Generalissimo and the Americans.
Chiang failed in his attempt to unify China. Warlords continued to control large portions of western China and all of Manchuria, until the Japanese took over that northeastern region in 1931. Rather than going to war against Japan over Manchuria, Chiang attempted to eradicate his former allies, the Communists. They had established themselves in a small rural area in Central China where they held out against repeated government offensives. The Generalissimo’s fifth campaign in 1934 finally forced them into a circuitous 6,000-mile retreat, known as the Long March, to Northwest China. His persistent harrying of the Communists resulted in a bizarre incident in 1936 wherein he was kidnapped by regional forces, released through Communist intercession, and agreed with the Communists to form again a united front, this time directed against Japan.
The Generalissimo’s successful 1934 campaign had been planned by his German advisers, headed by General Hans von Seeckt. General Alexander von Falkenhausen succeeded von Seeckt and was training Chinese troops when Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China in 1937. He was largely responsible for planning the only important victory of the Chinese, Taierchuang, and was infuriated when they held back and would not press on to achieve a major success.
Early in the war the Soviet Union began military aid to Chiang—but not to the Communists—and made available to the Generalissimo Soviet military advisers. Among them were Generals G. K. Zhukov and V. I. Chuikov, both of whom, on the basis of their subsequent performances in the war against Germany, could be considered as competent to give advice to
Chiang. But the Generalissimo did not make use of them and so they returned to the Soviet Union.
To Chiang the assignment of Stilwell was not a totally new kind of experience. For some eighteen years, off and on, he had dealt with foreigners intent on telling him how to be a soldier. He had not suffered as a consequence any apparent decline of confidence in his own superior judgment in military matters. At times he accepted—and always adapted— advice; more often he did not act on it. There was no convincing reason to believe that Chiang would be more responsive to Stilwell than he had been to Blyukher or von Falkenhausen.
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The approach of the American public to China, especially during the three years after Pearl Harbor, was largely subjective. It