The widespread mythology about China meant that more than facts and logic went into the making of American wartime policy toward China. The surcharged sentimental attachment to the Chinese raised the importance of China in strategic planning all out of proportion to its real military and immediate political worth. The significance of China was further inflated by a geopolitical assumption of Roosevelt’s that China would become a great power after the war and therefore during hostilities it should be treated as one, and Chiang as co-equal with Churchill, and Stalin.
This caused Washington civil and military officials, notwithstanding reports to the contrary from their representatives in Chungking, to think wishfully that Chiang and his National Government might want to prosecute the war with all vigor. Washington was also anxious to keep China in the war, not fully recognizing that while Chiang was loath to expend strength against the common enemy, he would not withdraw from the war. Assuming an American victory, there was much for him to gain from remaining nominally an ally: all kinds of assistance and, after the war, territorial acquisitions.
Thanks to Pinky and the General, I received in February 1942 State Department orders assigning me as Consul at Kunming, designating me as Second Secretary of Embassy at Chungking, and detailing me to “the China Military Mission headed by Major General Joseph W. Stilwell.” This was followed by the standard formula: “This assignment is not made at your request nor for your convenience.”
The orders specified that my detail to Stilwell was for “liaison between the Mission and American and foreign civil officials.” Three days later, on February 13, as an afterthought the Department admonished me to conduct my liaison duties “at the direction and under the supervision of General Stilwell.” The Department also desired that, as practicable and appropriate, I keep the Ambassador and, through him, the Department informed of “the activities of the military mission.”
My superiors in the Far Eastern Division did not favor my detail to the General, feeling that it was irregular and bordering on the frivolous. I should stick to the Foreign Service. Currie, who was administering lend-lease to China, welcomed the arrangement. I assumed he thought I could be a useful point of contact with Stilwell’s headquarters.
Currie and Owen Lattimore, recently returned from serving as a personal adviser to the Generalissimo, emphasized to me the logistic importance of India in view of the impending Japanese capture of Rangoon. Lattimore referred with approval to what he said was the opinion of Chiang and Chennault, then heading a small pursuit aircraft contingent manned by American mercenaries and called the American Volunteer Group. That opinion was that the United States should direct its then limited strength against the Japanese flank from China. They asked that I assure Chennault that he was appreciated, but that he must play ball with General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. Otherwise he would get no equipment. Arnold was extremely influential, Chennault should be advised, and had to be humored.
About a fortnight after Stilwell’s departure for China-Burma-India, I left Washington, on February 25. Also bound for Stilwell’s theater were six officers and a sergeant. We flew by one of Pan American’s original clippers, a flying boat, to Belém at the mouth of the Amazon—moist, mossed, suffocating, hyper-tropical—then Natal, and across the Atlantic to somnolent Fisherman’s Lake in Liberia. The remainder of the trip was by two-engine C-47 transport planes to Kano and then Maidugiri, both in Nigeria, across the scrubby wilderness of Chad to Khartoum dominated by the Nile, up to Cairo, swarming with handsome British staff officers whom the troops called the gabardine swine, over to Tel Aviv, down to the Shatt-al-Arab, carrying the mingled waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, out above the azure-emerald Persian Gulf to Sharjah’s desert airstrip manned by an RAF ground crew of a forlorn half dozen and a gazelle, along the desolate, jagged coasts of Iran and Baluchistan to Karachi, and finally trans-subcontinentally to teeming, beholy-cowed Calcutta.
The flight from New York to Calcutta, stopping at night and encountering delays, took thirteen days. Because of bottlenecks in air transport to Burma, I remained in the effete luxury of Calcutta’s Indo-Anglo-American society for some ten days waiting for my turn to join Stilwell. During this time I encountered C. J. Pao, the shrewd and engaging Chinese Consul General whom I had met in Peking and who, in my adversity twenty years later at the foot of the Andes, proved to be a staunch friend.
Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek had given Stilwell, now a Lieutenant General, the benefit of a great deal of faint-hearted advice and orally told the American he was to command two Chinese armies (each of three understrength divisions) on their way to the front in Burma. The Japanese were north of Rangoon, which they had occupied on March 6. The mixed force of British, Burmese, Indian, and Gurkha units under General Sir Harold Alexander had been badly shaken by the swift ferocity of the Japanese onslaught. On what may be euphemistically called a line, east-west in lower Burma, the British Empire units occupied the western sector and the Chinese, with a toe-in-the-water disposition, moved tentatively into the eastern. Allied air support was from the British Royal Air Force (RAF), whose obsolescent aircraft were being rapidly destroyed, and from Chennault’s American Volunteer Group. The AVG, with new P-40 pursuit planes and aggressive tactics, outperformed the enemy, but nevertheless were being ground down by sheer superiority of Japanese numbers and AVG lack of aircraft, parts and personnel replacements.
Soon after assuming command of the Chinese expeditionary force in Burma, Stilwell discovered that his assumption was indeed no more than that. His orders were secretly referred back to the Generalissimo for final decision. Chiang also issued behind Stilwell’s back a babble of vacillating orders to his distracted officers in the field, even down to the regimental level.
The Generalissimo was morbidly defensive-minded, and in its most fatal manifestation: static defense, yielding the initiative to the enemy. Furthermore, in his obsessive hoarding of materiel and troops he only reluctantly committed his units to battle, and then piecemeal. For he believed that to concentrate force was to risk greater loss than committing it in minimal increments. Which was, up to a point, true. But it was not the way either battles or wars are won.
Stilwell’s headquarters were at Maymyo, the prettily landscaped summer capital to which the Government of Burma had retreated. Stilwell was not at his headquarters but at the front when I arrived on March 22. And Pinky was with him.
The next day the General and Dorn returned to headquarters, a big red brick rest house belonging to the American Baptists. Stilwell was tired, but still exuded his characteristic nervous energy. On March 24, the following day, I noted in my diary,
General Stilwell in his bare room off the bare upstairs porch said, “Sit down.” Each in a wicker chair, he said “There’s nothing I can tell you about how to run your job. You’re a free agent. All you have to do is keep things running smoothly between the civil authorities here and us.” So much for functioning, as the Department of State had enjoined me, “at the direction and under the supervision of General Stilwell.”
Civil authority in Burma was collapsing on all sides. The Burmese, including officials and lesser government employees, felt no loyalty to their British masters. And with the Japanese trampling all under foot, most Burmese, including those who were servants to the King-Emperor, were in panic looking to their own safety and for ways in which they might ingratiate themselves with the new conquerors. The more enterprising took to sabotage, ambush, arson, and otherwise acting as collaborators of the invaders. There was precious little civil authority left for me to deal with. Any authority that existed was military—and that only when immediately enforceable by a bullet in the head.
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