Knowing and talking to the China of General Liu, Stilwell was not prone to see the country as fighting democracy’s battle, the favorite theme of ideologists like Carlson. Of Carlson himself whom he came to know in Hankow his opinion was kindly. He was “a good scout, not overeducated…but a solid citizen and a soldier” and, though he wore all the wrong clothes at dinner, “a gentleman anyway.” Privately he called him “Captain Courageous” and was not impressed by Carlson’s glowing reports of the 8th Route Army’s military training methods which Stilwell told him he had seen in practice under Feng Yu-hsiang 15 years before.
Though it was the fashion to say “aren’t the 8th Route wonderful,” Stilwell was skeptical but professionally interested. Through Agnes Smedley he became acquainted with Chou En-lai, second to Mao in the Communist hierarchy and its representative in Hankow, and with Yeh Chien-ying, the Communist Chief of Staff. He thought the Communists’ political demands for “liberation of military policy” and “mobilization of the masses” were “very vague—the usual slogans,” but personally, after visiting and dining with Chou En-lai and his entourage, he found them “uniformly frank, courteous, friendly and direct. In contrast to the fur-collared, spurred KMT new-style Napoleon—all pose and bumptiousness.” Handsome, cultivated and urbane, Chou En-lai was a favorite of foreigners. Yeh Chien-ying made the select category of “good egg, like most reds.” Talking to those intense and energetic men, pursuers of China’s old unsatisfied need of revolution and as yet uncorrupted by power, Stilwell realized the “wide chasm” between them and a man like General Liu. He felt sure that if China emerged from the war with Japan, “there will be trouble again internally.”
Few could doubt it for a sense of decline in the Government and ruling society pervaded Hankow that winter. Stilwell expressed it when after the fall of Nanking he wrote of “the rotten shell of administration primarily responsible for the current debacle.” In the same vein Carlson was writing to the President at this time that he was “disgusted with the attitude of the intellectual class, even the middle class. The town is filled with men and women who take no apparent interest in the war. They have no feeling of responsibility for the future of their country.” When Carlson at a Chinese dinner party in Hankow offered a toast to “Old Hundred Names” as bearing the brunt of the war, it fell very flat according to Ambassador Johnson who was present. Johnson too felt that the general attitude was “Let us fight to the last drop of coolie blood” while “in the midst of it all the Soong family carries on its intrigues which sometimes disgust me completely.”
The fervor of the Kuomintang’s youth had passed to the Communists leaving Chungking with history’s most melancholy tale: that every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed. Madame Chiang Kai-shek in a rare moment left a brief acknowledgment. When a number of journalists returned from Yenan with enthusiastic reports, she invited them to tea, though disbelieving, to hear what they had to say in person. After listening to their glowing tales of the Communists’ integrity, idealism and sacrifice for a cause, she said it was impossible for her to believe them. Walking to the window she stared out across the river in silence for several minutes and then turned back to the room and spoke the saddest sentence of her life: “If what you tell me about them is true, then I can only say they have never known real power.”
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Just as Stilwell was about to leave for the Anhwei front to observe the 13th Army under General Tang En-po, he was balked by the War Department which ordered him to go to Lanchow instead to report on Russian aid reaching China. Furious at the cancellation of a tour which had taken a great deal of arranging and represented the first time in eight months of the war that a foreign officer had been able to get accredited to a unit in the field, Stilwell offered every kind of excuse almost to the point of insubordination to avoid going to Lanchow. He was ordered to comply. The War Department was acting, as it happened, at the desire of the President who had asked for a report on the nature and amount of arms reaching China through all avenues: Hong Kong, Indochina and Burma as well as overland from Russia. Stilwell was not told this and indeed the whole Lanchow affair, which brought his resentment to a peak, could have been mitigated, like the rest of his troubles with MID, by a simple personal communication. He went off “sick unto death of the interfering bastards in Washington,” and in a mood, as he wrote to Win, to retire, at once or next year, “whatever the family decides.” He passed his fifty-fifth birthday en route to Lanchow feeling that, in view of his relations with the War Department, his career henceforward held little promise.
Stilwell was the first foreigner to visit the Russian air base at Lanchow and bring back evidence to show how far Russia was concerned to help China. Making his way by train as far as Sian where he visited 8th Route Army headquarters, and from there to Lanchow by bus and truck, he hunted down clues, bribed employees of the Russian guest house for figures on arrivals, questioned sentries, police, bus drivers, innkeepers, servants, the Governor of Kansu and his secretaries, missionaries at Sian, a Tibetan interpreter, an automobile dealer, Chinese officers, student aviators and local Mongols. These last, “sturdy, dirty, hard-bitten, weather-beaten, with faces like Sitting Bull,” he entertained to tea at an inn; afterwards when encountered on the street they were “all smiles and howdy.” Though his movements were watched and his conversations listened in on, he was able to inspect the flying field and ascertain that 300 Russian planes had been delivered, of which 30 were still at the base for training Chinese pilots. Russian aviation personnel, though physically impressive, with huge appetites, consuming four meals a day, were “a sour and surly lot…I never saw one of them smile.” He collected figures on the Russian truck convoys which brought in munitions and fuel, worked out estimates of the monthly deliveries on the basis of distance traveled and turnaround time, and was able to specify types of munitions “though unable to get box markings or broken boxes.” The total was little in comparison with what could be brought in by ship at Hong Kong and he concluded the route had been established primarily for aviation fuel and as an emergency inlet in case Canton fell.
By the time he returned to Hankow on April 15 China’s mood had undergone a dazzling change caused by her first real victory, at Taierchuang in Shantung on April 6–7. The whole country went “mad with joy.” The Japanese were not invincible after all; a new hope in resistance swept away pessimism. It was the first cause for rejoicing since the war began.
Taierchuang was a town on the path of the enemy’s advance to Hsuchow whose fall would have put the Japanese on the Lunghai line, opening their way to the interior. Under the command of the Kwangsi General Li Tsung-jen, its defense was turned to counterattack, according to a plan of the German advisers, with an army of reinforcements brought up to cut off the enemy in the rear. General Tang En-po’s army, which Stilwell would have been accompanying had he not been ordered to Lanchow, played this role. Thrilled by the phenomenon of reinforcements, the defenders rushed forward to join the attack with “battles cries that shook the skies.” They were able to slaughter the Japanese infantry who had been cut off from their supply of ammunition and fuel for their tanks and proved unable to withstand a determined attack without mechanized support. At the end of the 17-day battle the Japanese had suffered 16,000 casualties and the loss of 40 tanks, 70 armored cars and 100 motor vehicles besides guns and other arms in their first notable defeat since their creation of a modern army. The Chinese sustained equal casualties.
Like all China’s partisans Stilwell wanted deeply to find cause for optimism and was moved to write after Taierchuang when friends now said they thought China would win, “So do I.” At the same time he knew that militarily the Chinese had lost their advantage by failing to pursue. General Falkenhausen, the chief German military adviser, was “tearing his hair” at frustration of his plan. “I tell the Generalissimo to advance, to attack, to exploit his success. But nothing is done. Soon the Japanese will have 8 or 10 divisions befor
e Hsuchow. Then it will be too late.” Analyzing the battle with Stilwell and the German advisers, Pai Ch’ung-hsi was not interested in the lesson of attack. He reverted to the theory of winning by outlasting. “We can afford to lose four men if the Japanese lose one,” he said, adding that Chinese losses would be of “no significance” until they passed 50 million. The Chinese, Stilwell commented, “cannot get the idea of the offensive into their heads.”
Visiting the scene at Taierchuang, he talked with the commander Li Tsung-jen. In one of the few recorded views of Stilwell through Chinese eyes, Li described him as “outspoken” in manner with sympathy for China’s cause but with “great pessimism over the future of China’s resistance.” This pessimism Li ascribed to the “materialist civilization” in which the American Colonel had been educated. He urged Stilwell to recommend to his Government a large loan to China for the purpose of war supplies, arguing that help for China was the best insurance the United States could take out for herself.
Ironically the effect of Taierchuang confirmed Chiang Kai-shek in his overall policy of the defensive because the victory seemed to suggest that the Japanese had exhausted their impetus. Within weeks they returned to the attack, broke through the line and advanced upon Hsuchow which fell at the end of May. With another Japanese army coming down from the north to cross the Yellow River above Kaifeng, the whole region between the rivers, including Hankow itself, was in danger. In a desperate expedient Chiang Kai-shek called not on China’s armies but on China’s Sorrow—the Yellow River. He ordered General Shang Chen to blow up the dikes at Chengchow behind the Japanese vanguard. Repeatedly he telephoned in anxiety to learn if his orders had been carried out while Shang Chen delayed until his army could be moved out of the way. Then the dynamite was exploded. Jack Belden who was present reported how, for moments of agony to the watchers, the silt-filled waters flowed steadily on their old course, swirling and bubbling against the broken dikes, then suddenly with a “terrible roar” ripped through the breach and spread over the low ground on a rampage eastward to the sea. Eleven cities and 4,000 villages were flooded, the crops and farms of three provinces ruined, two million people rendered homeless, and in that vast and sodden wasteland another fund of animosity stored up against the Government. The Japanese were bogged down and perhaps three months’ time bought in the process.
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China’s battle was making an impression on America. Out of sympathy with her resistance or investment in her affairs, correspondents, missionaries and other observers concentrated on the admirable aspects and left unmentioned the flaws and failures. An idealized image came through. Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek as “Man and Wife of the Year” for 1937 gazed at Americans in sad nobility from the cover of Time, sober and steady, brave and true. Time’s publisher, Henry Luce, had been born in China of missionary parents, so this worshipful view of the Chiangs was no accident. The missionaries, and behind them the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the YMCA and China Famine Relief rallied to the cause of their wards with warmth, energy and all their considerable influence. As a result of a century of missionary effort Americans felt a responsibility for China which they did not feel for other countries. Whether or not the missionaries had made an impact on China, commented a European observer, “they certainly made an impact on the United States.” They rallied to the Chiangs in self-interested loyalty because the Chiangs’ Christianity at the helm of China provided such gratifying proof of the validity of the missionary effort. They overpraised Chiang Kai-shek and once committed to his perfection regarded any suggestion of blemish as inadmissible. “China has now the most enlightened, patriotic and able rulers in her history,” proclaimed the Missionary Review of the World.
The same journal presented the Communists too in acceptable terms as a group trying to bring about “social reform compatible with the aspirations of all progressive people.” This picture of “determined oneness of purpose” was necessary not only to the church groups heavily engaged in raising money for China relief but also to the envoys and propagandists of the Nationalist Government who were exerting pressure for American loans and intervention. To acknowledge the deep schism in Chinese society was not convenient. Therefore the Communists were not to be considered irreconcilables but respectable social reformers within the fold. Correspondents were asked by the Kuomintang not to refer to the Communists as Communists. “There are no Communists left in China,” Chiang Kai-shek told a German newspaperman in 1939. Everyone assisted in this illusion, including the Communists themselves because it fitted the party line of the united front. Although they did not deny their Marxist ideology, they talked in terms of the “new Democracy” as a stage on the way to their eventual goal.
The rise of international Fascism shaped America’s view of China and the fervent syllogism at its core: democracy was threatened by the aggressor nations; China was under attack by an aggressor nation; therefore China was a democracy and her battle was the battle of world democracy. To all men of goodwill convinced of the indivisibility of the world struggle, this appeared self-evident, and help for China therefore obviously in America’s self-interest. Strategically this was valid, if not ideologically. But strategy is more attractive when dressed in ideology and people on “our side” are considered to be democrats regardless of their political experience. Americans find it difficult to remember that Thomas Jefferson did not operate in Asia.
Democracy became the theme of China’s partisans. The United Council for Civilian Relief in China, incorporating various committees under an imposing roster of prominent directors, unearthed the 25th anniversary of American recognition of the Chinese Republic in 1913 to celebrate as “Democracy Day” with a banquet and speeches broadcast over a national hookup. The same theme was hammered by all the committees that sprang up to aid China and to oppose the continuing sale of war materials to Japan. It was shared by the church groups (who united under the chairmanship of Harper Sibley, former president of the United States Chamber of Commerce), by lay groups like the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression and by left-wing groups of the united front like the American Friends of the Chinese People. It had ardent spokesmen as diverse as Dr. Walter Judd, a medical missionary from Shansi who returned to the United States to become Chiang Kai-shek’s most devout supporter, and Captain Carlson who returned home too to make his views public.
Silenced by navy censors when he gave interviews to reporters praising the fighting qualities of the 8th Route Army, he seized the pretext to resign his commission in 1938 and go home to persuade the public that China could win if America would stop selling war materials to Japan. The outcome of the Sino-Japanese struggle, he maintained, would determine “whether Eastern Asia will be ruled by a military autocracy, or whether the budding democracy of China will come into full bloom.” This was ideology rampant and unreal. Democracy was not budding either in the Kuomintang with its one-party Government and censorship and blue shirts and secret police, or in Yenan grounded in the dogma and dedicated to the goals of revolutionary socialism.
Although China’s friends made extraordinary efforts, American isolationism remained stronger than sympathy. Polls showed only 2 percent of the public pro-Japanese against 74 percent pro-Chinese but these sentiments did not include a desire for involvement. At government level a sense of urgency was growing. The President, anxious to keep China on her feet, was abetted on the one hand by Secretary Morgenthau who, with a desperate sense of the need to resist Fascist aggression, believed support for China crucial, and restrained on the other hand by Secretary Hull who maintained an unbudging resistance to any “unneutral” gesture, including economic aid, which might involve the United States in the Sino-Japanese conflict. His caution was such that he refused to accept T. V. Soong as economic emissary because he was too prominently anti-Japanese.
When the Treasury’s agent in China, J. Lossing Buck, came to see the Military Attach
é on August 30, 1938, to be briefed on the military situation, Stilwell put forward the argument of Li Tsung-jen that America should aid herself by enabling China to buy arms. As reported by Buck to Secretary Morgenthau, “Colonel Stilwell…feels that the policy of our government should be more positive in the present situation and that help to China in the way of financial loans and military equipment is much better defense for us than only the building of our own defense equipment. A very small proportion of the cost of such defense, if given to China, would be much more effective.”
Morgenthau agreed. With strong conviction in the larger cause but limited knowledge of China, he thought there was “a bare chance we may still keep a democratic form of government in the Pacific,” and strenuously urged the loan to China upon the President. In December 1938 a loan of $25 million was arranged through the Export-Import Bank.
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Despite their successes the Japanese could not end the war and in August 1938 took the decision to drive toward a new objective—Hankow. Stilwell returned there in August from Peiping where he had decided on his own authority to spend the summer with his family. This decision had more than ever incensed MID with whom he was already engaged in continuous quarrel over the assignments of his five assistants. Informed by Colonel McCabe that his return to Peiping in June represented “a serious error of judgment…when major military developments are in progress,” he was ordered in a tone more suitable for a cadet than a full colonel to go on no further travels without permission and to submit for approval “reasons, route, destination and estimate cost in each case.” He was told that the Department undertook to direct his and his assistants’ movements because the “coverage, quality and quantity of information received was not (repeat not) satisfactory.” Seven thousand miles from the scene McCabe asserted MID’s right to “assign you or any other officer in China to any mission it deems fit.” In further communications Stilwell was informed that his reports compared unfavorably with Carlson’s to the Navy, that the information conveyed did not justify the sums of G-2 confidential funds spent, and that he should explain the “exact nature and value” of the information obtained by these expenditures. McCabe was evidently trying to goad Stilwell into resigning from his post so that he could be replaced by some more intimate associate of the “attachés’ clique”; if so, he almost succeeded. Stilwell at one point made up his mind to ask for relief and drafted in fierce angry pen strokes a demand for an inspector “to determine the manner in which I have performed my duty under the conditions that have existed since June 1937.” China, however, held him back.