Prologue: The Crisis
IN JULY 1944, at the height of the Second World War, the United States Government officially requested Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to place an American, specifically Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell, in command of all China’s armed forces. The proposal was unprecedented: no American had ever before directly commanded the national forces of an ally. It was the more extreme because General Stilwell, already a figure of accomplishment, controversy and feuds in the China–Burma–India theater, was known to be persona non grata to the Generalissimo who had previously asked for his recall.
China’s case, however, was considered “desperate,” demanding “desperate remedies.” To keep China in the war, salvage something of her combat potential and prevent the consolidation of Japan’s hold on the mainland were objects essential to both American strategy and postwar policy. “The future of all Asia is at stake,” President Roosevelt said in his message to Chiang Kai-shek, “along with the tremendous effort which America has expended in that region.” He was fully aware, he added, “of your feelings regarding General Stilwell” but “I know of no other man who has the ability, the force and the determination to offset the disaster that now threatens China.”
A sweeping offensive by the Japanese into hitherto unoccupied China had precipitated the crisis. Launched in April with rapid successes, and advancing implacably against feeble and yielding Chinese defense, it threatened to choke off Free China and overrun the area where American air bases were located. At this stage of the war Japan was on the defensive against the westward American advance across the Pacific and her supply lines by sea were dangerously weakening under American air attack from the bases in south China. The purpose of the Japanese offensive was to wipe out the American airfields, assure a linked-up overland route from Manchuria to Southeast Asia and isolate Free China from contact with a possible American landing on the China coast.
Were these gains to be won, as the enemy’s rapid successes and lack of coordinated Chinese defense indicated they might well be, the war would be prolonged for no one knew how long. Japan could knit together her communications, eliminate a future base of American action and so strengthen her hold on the mainland that her Government might retreat there even if the home islands were lost.
Beyond that a darker prospect loomed. If China collapsed, the whole goal of American policy in the Far East could well be lost. That goal required, after victory, a Chinese nation strong and stable enough to take Japan’s place and keep the peace in the Far East. Far from strong after resistance to invasion that had lasted for seven years, longer than that of any other nation, China was battered and blockaded, its economy ruined by enemy occupation, its Government tired, corrupt and deteriorating. National war effort was paralyzed by fear of the internal challenge of the Communists whose annihilation Chiang Kai-shek had vainly pursued for ten years before a truce in 1937. If his Government should now fall, China would disintegrate in civil strife. Even if the Nationalist Government survived in an area reduced and fragmented by the new Japanese inroads, defeatism and decay from within would be accelerated. In the end, would the ravaged China that emerged from the war be capable of enforcing Japan’s surrender and maintaining her own integrity? If not, who then would be the foundation of stability in Asia?
These were the disturbing questions that shadowed American policy and that by negative outcome could nullify the tremendous effort of the war. The hope of a strong China as one of the four cornerstones of the postwar peace had formed Roosevelt’s policy from the beginning and dictated the effort to sustain China through the war. Military strategy ran parallel. It intended that China’s manpower, not America’s, should fight on the mainland; it needed China’s territory as a base of present air, and future ground, operations; above all, it depended on China’s continued resistance to hold down a million Japanese troops on the mainland. Otherwise they might be released against the Americans’ perilous progress from island to island across the Pacific. The collapse, surrender or collaboration of the Chungking Government, representing the last free nation of the Far East, might induce the other nations of Asia to come to terms with Japan, realizing Roosevelt’s greatest fear. These were the reasons that dictated the long-bedeviled campaign to supply, invigorate and mobilize China and reopen the back door through Burma which had been General Stilwell’s task since Pearl Harbor.
The Government in remote Chungking beyond the gorges of the Yangtze had no plan of defense to stem the Japanese advance. The Generalissimo whose genius was political rather than military had relied for defense on the air power of the American Fourteenth Air Force and the assurance of its confident commander, General Claire Chennault, that if adequately supplied by his countrymen he could contain, even defeat, the Japanese. This program perfectly suited the Generalissimo because it provided him with a surrogate to fight Japan while allowing him to hoard China’s limited military capacity for use against internal enemies. His best divisions were not in action against the Japanese but holding a frontier against the Communist area in the north. Dissidence in other quarters, too, chronically haunted him. Old antagonists among the southern regional commanders, growing restless under the many failings of Chungking, were promoting another of the separatist movements that had long been China’s bane.
