The military establishment, like the rest of the state structure, suffered from the fact that China was in transition from the traditional society, which had endured for millennia, to an undefined modern society. The Chinese Army was made up of congeries of soldiery. Some divisions, created by Chiang’s central government, were regarded as modern and were usually responsive to Chiang’s wishes. Many other units belonged to neo-warlords, and were regionally levied and maintained and therefore in a negotiatory relationship with the Generalissimo—he had to bargain for compliance. Finally, in 1942 relatively small Chinese Communist forces, although designated as a nominal part of the national army, were really in a state of suspended insurgency, blockaded by several hundred thousand of Chiang’s less unreliable troops, while both sides awaited the end of hostilities with Japan to resume their civil war.
The warlord mentality flourished in the commanders of provincial units, lingered in the national government office corps, but did not exist with the Communists. It assumed that a military formation was the private property of its commander, a capital holding from which he derived his income. The commander of a provincial division, for example, received revenue from the people whose area his division occupied. If he associated himself with the national government he also received subsidies for troop pay, rations and other expenses. The general with a keen business sense— and most of them had that—therefore padded his statement of troop strength and kept his expenses, the number of men he actually retained, at a lesser level.
For example, the commander of the Chinese Fifth Army in Burma informed the British, who supplied the Chinese rice, salt, and a supplementary cash payment for other food, that he had 45,000 men. Although the British believed that the correct figure was under 28,000, they nevertheless accepted and paid out on the basis of General Tu’s claim. After advancing 240,000 rupees, the British checked Tu’s divisions, the commanders of which declared that they had not received any of the payments. So the British discontinued the subsidies pending evidence that the troops received the money due them. Tu did not produce any such proof.
As his unit was his capital, the commander-entrepreneur was not keen to engage it in any enterprise that reduced its profitability or risked its loss. It was all very well to take the offensive in the good old days when warlordism was in flower and the chances of loot and expanded territory were good speculative risks. But in this war against an aggressive, implacable foreign enemy, caution was essential. Conserve materiel and manpower by falling back and do not jeopardize your own unit if the one next to you finds itself in trouble—retreat before he does, lest he leave you exposed and vulnerable.
The defensive, negative attitude of most Chinese generals was reinforced by Chiang Kai-shek’s strategy. From the beginning of the Japanese invasion in 1937 it had been based on the assumption that China could not defeat Japan, the hope that the United States or the Soviet Union would eventually become embroiled in war with Japan and thereby cause its withdrawal from China, and the conviction that he must husband his resources for the civil war against the Chinese Communists that would follow the end of the war against Japan. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor therefore came as a godsend to Chiang and his Kuomintang regime. His hope was well on the way to fulfillment. The Americans could now be depended upon to finish off the Japanese. And, as an ally, he could demand quantities of arms from Washington, which he would hoard against the coming showdown with the Communists.
Chiang’s strategy may not have been heroic, but it was realistic and practical. And it fitted not only the outlook of the generals and the Kuomintang but also the sentiment of Chinese people who were genuinely warweary. But to the outside world, Chiang’s propagandists represented China as militant and heroic.
Stilwell believed that by bargaining, engaging in a quid pro quo exchange of American military equipment for Chinese offensive action, he might be able to activate the Chiang regime. I was of the same opinion. The General’s control over lend-lease supplies entering China seemingly gave him a strong bargaining counter. But the White House—Roosevelt and his assistants Harry Hopkins and Lauchlin Currie—was early in the war sentimental about China and disinclined to place any conditions on aid to that country. Materiel assistance to China was in any event only a trickle in 1942 and 1943 because of limited production, the competing requests from our fighting allies, the British and the Russians, and after the loss of Burma, the tonnage limitations of what could be airlifted into China.
Unable at this stage to bargain, Stilwell offered inducements to action—he would train, organize, and, as American materiel became available, equip a modern army for the Generalissimo. He persuaded Chiang to let him begin with the Chinese troops which retreated from Burma into India. He also offered a program to bring up to strength, train, and equip 30 reorganized divisions. This was accepted and gotten under way. Whereupon Stilwell presented plans for another 30 divisions, followed late in 1943 by an offer for a third 30 divisions. With 90 such divisions Chiang should be able not only to expel the Japanese but also secure his domestic supremacy after the war.
CHAPTER VI
A MOMENT WITH MR. GANDHI
Writing from New Delhi to the young woman in Washington whom I would later marry, I reported in April 1942 that
Since leaving Chungking I have had trouble with my eyes—infection. So yesterday night after I arrived I went to a specialist recommended by the hotel, Dr. T. K. Uttam Singh, D.O.M.S. (London). First he wanted to sell me spectacles. Then he turned back both my eyelids and announced with profound spiritual detachment that I had trachoma. So I sat down in a rattan chair, tilted my head back and he painted my eyes with 2% silver nitrate caustic solution. That was about 4:40. At 5:30 my eyes ceased to feel as if hot cinders were in them, and I could see.
But in the interim we had a most profitable conversation. It started, of course, on the Cripps-Congress negotiations and ended with the identification of oneself with God through casting out, in the order of increasing difficulty, desire, hate, greed and the sense of personal identity—the ego. En route, we touched upon the cycle through which India has passed and is passing: six thousand years in which she was the most advanced and the dominant nation in the world, then the past two thousand in which she had slept through an evil epoch, and now coming up to a golden age in which India will lead the rest of the world.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to a plain, unimaginative, wicked, whiskey-drinking doctor to find out whether I really have trachoma. In any event, what if I do. We Americans have a health fetish. Disease is like war—it’s normal. It’s a nuisance and uncomfortable and requires a lot of fussing, but it’s good for your character, mellows you. That is, if you get over it.
I got over mine, which was no more than acute conjunctivitis.
India was to me a vast unknown when I had first passed through it a month earlier on my way to Burma and China. To be sure I was acquainted with Mowgli and Gunga Din and had even read E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. But beyond that I was ignorant of this manifold land.
Most Americans were uninterested in India, except as they imagined it—a freakish place inhabited by snake-charmers, practitioners of the rope trick, starving untouchables, bejeweled maharajahs, and widows flinging themselves in suttee on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Even in places where one might expect to encounter a fund of solid information there were some gaps. I remember Dean Rusk saying later that shortly after Pearl Harbor, as an earnest reserve officer at the War Department, he endeavored to learn about India. He asked for the military intelligence files on that country. He was handed a single folder in which reposed one old newspaper clipping and a National Geographic map of that part of the world on which someone had stamped SECRET.
The American high command, however slightly informed about India, came to regard that country as an important factor in the war against Japan. In the spring of 1942, with the defense of Burma collapsing and a powerful Japanese naval task force scudding into the Bay of Bengal, fears arose that the enemy might invade India and turn that base area for the supply of China and reconquest of