(each according to his own interpretation) wrath. Chennault’s pretension to omnipotence and his persistent scheming to usurp Stilwell’s position created and kept going a Chennault-Stilwell feud that involved the Chiangs and the White House. Gauss felt snubbed by both generals, who rarely consulted with him. And he was too unbending to take the initiative in trying to create a collaborative relationship with at least the theater commander. As for Stilwell, his disregard of the Ambassador was not because he disliked Gauss. Rather, Stilwell was not inclined to seek counsel from others—although he would welcome practical advice when proffered. In fact, Vinegar Joe Stilwell liked the Ambassador even though he looked upon Gauss as something of a sourpuss.
* * *
With every step that the Allies retreated in Burma, India’s importance to them grew. India was a fallback position, and in depth, thanks to its size. It was the base for a vital air bridge into China, a base in which to grow and manufacture war supplies, and to prepare for and then mount a counteroffensive.
India was an area about which Stilwell and his staff were far less informed than they were about China. Not only was Stilwell a China specialist, he had then on his staff more than half a dozen exceptionally able China and Japan specialists. But he had no expert on India, an area of study that had been neglected in the American Government and academe.
I could be most useful to the General, it seemed to me, if I investigated and surveyed for him the Indian political and economic scene. I put this idea to Stilwell. He accepted my suggestion and on April 5 I left Chungking for India.
On the same day the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang flew to Burma with Stilwell. Chiang assured his American commander that he would instruct his generals to obey Stilwell’s orders. Whatever the Generalissimo may have told his principal officers, it did not halt the continuing retreat nor instill in them obedience to the foreigner. The sudden and utter disintegration of a Chinese division at the eastern end of the “line” when a much smaller Japanese force out-maneuvered and struck it, meant that the allies were outflanked. The final debacle was not long in coming. By the end of April the Chinese and British Empire forces were in demoralized flight. The remnants of the Chinese armies straggled back into China, excepting two decimated divisions, which, like Alexander’s surviving troops, staggered out over jungle trails into India.
It had taken four Japanese divisions four months to rout the larger, motley allied forces of Burmese, Chinese, Indian and British units. The climax was galling for Stilwell. Cut off from vehicular and air transportation, he, Dorn, and about one hundred others slogged over jungled mountains to India. There he snorted to newsmen, “I claim we got a hell of a licking. We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.”
What caused the humiliating licking so far as China was concerned, Stilwell told the Generalissimo in early June, was the structure and the character of the Chinese Army. It was weak for more reasons than shortage of equipment. The three hundred Chinese divisions were understrength; if they were consolidated to full strength divisions and all available materiel redistributed, the number of units would reduced, but the overall effectiveness would be greatly increased. Furthermore, only a few of the general officers were competent. They should be retrained and the others gotten rid of, “otherwise the army will continue to go downhill, no matter how much materiel is supplied for it.” Also, the Generalissimo should designate one man whose “absolute control of the troops must not be infringed upon.” And awards and punishments should be promptly administered.
Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who often participated in the Generalissimo’s conferences with foreigners, told Stilwell that his critique was similar to that received by Chiang several years earlier from his German military advisers. So the comments made by the American General were not new to the Generalissimo.
At a subsequent Stilwell meeting on military reform Madame Chiang was again present and again elucidating and expanding upon her husband’s aloof pronouncement. In sum, she told Stilwell that his recommendations could not be put into effect and that it was necessary to be “realistic.” Five years earlier, Chennault, while serving the Chiangs as military aviation adviser, had pressed the Generalissimo to take drastic action against the incompetence and corruption in the Chinese Air Force. Madame Chiang told him that her husband said that “the Chinese are the only people he has to work with, and if we get rid of all those people who are at fault, who would be left?”
The fact of the matter was that had Chiang undertaken such a sweeping purge, “all those people who are at fault” would have liquidated him before he had gotten started. While he was despotically inclined, the Generalissimo did not have the dictatorial power to purge at will, as did Hitler and Stalin. Nor could he houseclean a manifestly corrupt and inefficient arm of the government as could a strong leader in a democracy. He was a captive of the sorry forces he manipulated.
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
