Stilwell and the American Experience
Praise for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 Winner 1972 Pulitzer Prize
Foreword
THE THEME of this book is the relation of America to China, in a larger sense to Asia. The vehicle of the theme is the career of General Stilwell. Why Stilwell? Because he combined a career focused on China with background and character that were quintessentially American; because his connection with China spanned the period that shaped the present from the dramatic opening moment of 1911, year of the Revolution, to 1944, decisive year in the decline of the Nationalist Government; because his service in the intervening years was a prism of the times—as language officer from 1920 to 1923 in the time of the warlords, as officer of the 15th Infantry in Tientsin from 1926 to 1929 at the time of the rise to power of Chiang Kai-shek, as Military Attaché from 1935 to 1939 at the time of Japanese invasion, lastly as theater commander in World War II; because in the final and critical years of this period he was the most important figure in the Sino-American relationship. Impatient, acid, impolitic, “Vinegar Joe” was not the ideal man for the role. But in knowledge of the language and country, friendship for the people, belief and persistence in his task, combined with official position and power, he personified the strongest endeavor and, as it was to prove, the tragic limits, of his country’s experience in Asia.
I am conscious of the hazards of venturing into the realm of America’s China policy, a subject that, following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek by the Communists and the waste of an immense American effort, aroused one of the angriest and most damaging campaigns of vilification in recent public life. Nevertheless, since China is the ultimate reason for our involvement in Southeast Asia, the subject is worth the venture even though the ground is hot. It is only fair to add that this book, which ends in 1946, is concerned with origins that reach back beyond yesterday. “You will hear a lot of talk,” General Stilwell wrote for the graduating class of West Point in 1945, “about how this or that generation messed things up and got us into war. What nonsense. All living generations are responsible for what we do and all dead ones as well.”
I should like to add a word of explanation about General Stilwell’s diaries, which were naturally a major source for his biographer. I became thereby a trespasser since the diaries were intended for no eyes but his own. “This little book,” he explicitly warned on the flyleaf of the pocket diary for 1906, “contains None of Your Damned Business!” Believing in the right of privacy, I do not share the view that posterity has some sort of “right” to know the private life of a public figure if he wishes otherwise but in Stilwell’s case the needs of history had already prevailed over privacy. After the war it became important and necessary to let Stilwell’s voice speak for itself about the events of his controversial command. With the consent of his family his wartime diaries and letters for the period 1942–44 only were edited by the former correspondent in China, Theodore White, and published under the title The Stilwell Papers in 1948. The originals together with other wartime documents were also made available to Charles Romanus and Riley Sunderland, authors of the official Army history of the China–Burma–India theater, and were subsequently donated for public use to the Hoover Library in Stanford, California. This decision having been taken, it was logical to give a biographer access to the rest of the Stilwell archive covering his career prior to Pearl Harbor. Mrs. Stilwell made available to me the diaries, letters, documents, scrapbooks, family albums and other material in her possession, hitherto unpublished. These are described further in the Bibliography.
The Stilwell Papers was a sensation and a best seller and has been a source of invaluable fact and enlivening quotation for historians ever since. Yet in this case a man’s own diaries, paradoxically, do not represent the real, or at any rate, the entire, man. Taken alone they give a one-sided view because Stilwell consciously used his diary to vent his “bile,” as he put it, of which he had a large natural endowment augmented by a peculiarly frustrating situation. Not content with diary entries, he rewrote and expanded his notes afterwards in larger notebooks or on loose sheets of paper, all of which he kept. Sometimes the process itself was recorded: “Wrote and wrote. Terrible.” Or, “I am just scribbling to keep from biting the radiator.” All this turmoil, which in other men would have been ephemeral, has become historical record. The acid, which in life was balanced by other qualities, has survived in undue proportion.
Finally, I am aware that this book by the nature of its subject does injustice to China and the Chinese people. Because it concentrates, especially in the second half, on a low point in China’s history and on the military function which has never been of high repute in China, the negative aspects predominate. The likableness, the artistic vision and philosophic mind, the strength of character, intelligence, good humor and capacity for work which have put the Chinese in the forefront of the world’s civilized peoples, have not come through in proper proportion. The author can only acknowledge this with regret.
Documentation will be found at the back of the book, with the relevant page number and phrase as the indicator.
