Under these pressures Chiang wished neither to risk loyal troops in costly battle against the Japanese nor allow troops of doubtful loyalty to be trained, armed and equipped by the Americans lest some day they be turned against himself. He desperately wanted all the American help in arms, money and supplies that he could get, not for use against the common enemy whom he expected his allies would defeat in any event, but for the purpose which he, as its chief executive, considered most important for his country—survival of the Nationalist regime. This was the web in which he was caught and which fixed the terms of the long-existing struggle between himself and Stilwell.
Stilwell offered no surrogate. He had long maintained that an air force was no better than the ground troops that defended its airfields. The Japanese advance now gave his thesis alarming cogency. His object and assigned mission was to enable the Chinese ground forces to fight efficiently; to so train, arm and equip the Chinese soldier, and assure his pay, food and medical care, as to create an effective military arm. “If I can prove the Chinese soldier is as good as any Allied soldier,” he told a correspondent, “I’ll die happy.” He had proved it could be done by the performance of two Chinese armies under his command in Burma, but his training programs with American instructors and equipment for 60 divisions in China were a ceaseless battle against frustrations and delays, not all of them natural.
To Chiang every unit trained by the Americans was one that loosened his control. He could not reject the program since he was utterly dependent on American aid but he could stall and thwart and divert supplies. For more than two years two unyielding men, equally determined, mutually hostile, supposedly allies, wrestled over the fate of China. Three times Chiang asked or induced others to ask for Stilwell’s recall. Stilwell in his turn despised, as he tactlessly did not conceal, the Generalissimo.
Known with reason as Vinegar Joe, Stilwell was a man of high performance and utter integrity, too quickly disgusted with anything less in others. His particular animus was reserved for persons in high places. He could no more ingratiate himself with someone he did not respect than the dumb could speak. He would have liked to do the job proposed for him if he could have done it without the office. He was already Commanding General of U.S. forces in the CBI theater, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, Commanding General of the Chinese Army in India and its field commander in Burma, nominal Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek for the China theater, chief of the Chinese Training and Combat Command and Administrator of Lend-Lease to China—each of these with its appropriate staffs, pomp and paper work. Since he hated palaver and loathed pretensions, it was understandable that he preferred war in the jungles of Burma among leeches, mildew and outright enemies.
At the front, like General U. S. Grant, he shed insignia of rank and made himself comfortable out of uniform. In nonregulation sweater, GI boots and his old stiff-brimmed campaign hat from the First World War, he could be found within a few hundred yards of the firing line, standing beside a Chinese battalion commander, chewing gum, smoking from a cigaret holder and talking Chinese. He was sixty-one, a slight figure, lean and bony, five-foot-nine, with short-cropped gray-black hair, a hard, lined, decisive face and a deceptive appearance of physical fragility. He was in fact as fragile as steel wire. He had served in China at different periods through the days of the warlords, the rise of the Kuomintang and the Sino-Japanese War. As an officer his persistent concern for the welfare of the men, whether Americans or Chinese, was not journalists’ copy but lifelong, unfailing and on occasion explosive. To the American public he was the hero of the celebrated walk out of Burma in a time of defeat, to the GIs he was Uncle Joe, to the British, whom he insisted on disliking except for those he liked, he was “difficult,” to CBI Roundup, the theater journal, he was remarkable for singleness of purpose and a sense of humor which “only fails him in case of the monsoon and stuffed shirts.” His motto was Illegitimati non carborundum, personally translated as “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
To make his proposed appointment more palatable to Chiang Kai-shek, Stilwell was promoted to four-star general, equal to the rank then held only by Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur and Arnold.
A foreigner in command of China’s armed forces was not a proposition that could be made palatable to Chiang Kai-shek in any form. Nevertheless Roosevelt’s tone, harsh and almost insulting from one head of state and ally to another, suggested an ultimatum. The United States held the upper hand but all China’s history weighed in the scale against compliance. Chiang accepted “in principle,” proposed modifications, shifted ground, insisted on control of Lend-Lease, twisted and temporized. The Chinese from necessity had made manipulation of the strong by the weak into a fine art and Chiang played every stratagem and every maneuver. In response to his request for a special envoy to “adjust relations between me and General Stilwell,” Washington sent a former Secretary of War, General Patrick Hurley. Chiang enveloped him in seductions and evasions; Washington’s impatience and pressure increased. After two months the issue was still unresolved. On September 12 Hurley returned from an interview discouraged, reporting the Generalissimo to have been “very difficult” and the matter no nearer to settlement. Chiang’s parting remark, half Oriental pretense of humility, half genuine bitterness, was “General Stilwell has more power in China than I have.”
The facts were otherwise but that the statement could be made was a strange destiny for an American who five years earlier had left China, as he then supposed, at the end of his career and for the last time.
