A Chip on his Shoulder
"A good commander," General Stilwell wrote in one of the more coherent entries in his personal diary, "must be impartial, accessible, human, humble, patient, forbearing." He himself was none of these things. To the almost impossibly complex and difficult task allotted to him in the Second World War he brought moral courage, energy, stubbornness and a sound working knowledge of the Chinese official mind. They were not enough. The main reason for this lay in the fact that he was an unusually conccitcd man. He was not in the least vain, he genuinely hated publicity, he was not a careerist or a climber ; but he vims a man whose small and petulant mind was incapable of admitting that he might conceivably, occasionally, be wrong. It is not impossible for a morose and intolerant individualist to make a good soldier, provided he has something—whether it be nous, imagination, breadth of vision or just good manners—which enables him to rise above his limitations, to suppress an instinctive
tendency to regard all his principal colleagues, subordinates or superiors as trash or even as traitors. Stilwell never did this. He strove relentlessly for victory, but it had to be victory on his own terms. His mind was as little generous as it was flexible. Outside the smaU circle of his personal staff he trusted nobody, and showed it. He was, I should imagine, about as unlike Eisenhower as it is possible to be.
His task was an extraordinarily difficult one. He was, on paper, Chief of Staff to the Generalissimo, but had in fact no executive power over any part of the cumbrous and ineffective Chinese war 'machine. He was concurrently Commanding General of the China- Burma-India theatre, an American command- which straggled across Asia from Karachi to Chungking. C.B.I. included the loth Air Force based on India and the 14th based on China and commanded by Chennault : a network of Service of Supply units and administra- tive staffs ; various army training establishments ; and—eventually- one brigade of American troops trained in jungle warfare. Stilwell knew nothing about the air and was bitterly jealous of his nominal subordinate Chennault, who was both better liked by the Chinese and also better placed to do what Stilwell himself longed to do— namely, to get on with the war by fighting the Japanese.
Stilwell's only chance of doing this was at the head of Chinese troops, and when in 1944 a Chinese force of two divisions, sup- ported by an American Long Range Penetration Brigade, advanced into Upper Burma as part of the Allied plan for the reconquest of that country, Stilwell accompanied them. He was not actually in command of them, but his editor is probably right in describing them as "tightly subordinate to Stilwell's personal urge." The Chinese—well fed, well equipped and regularly paid—did well, capturing Myitkina after a long siege and helping Chindits under Calvert (who are characteristically not mentioned by Stilwell) to make much quicker work of Mogaung. This tough but essentially subsidiary campaign proved the theory—which Stilwell was not alone in holding—that Chinese troops, given good training, good weapons, good administration and complete air superiority, could not only fight bravely but win battles ; but however deeply one sympathises with Stilwell's "personal urge" to supervise the process it is a little difficult to square his digression into tactics with his strategical responsibilities as Commanding General, C.B.I., and also (by this time) Deputy Supreme Commander, S.E.A.C. Though he seems to have had a more active dislike for Chiang Kai-shek (usually referred to as " Pea-nut " but sometimes by less printable terms) than for any of the other individuals whom he was supposed to be serving, commanding or collaborating with, his detestation for the British is particularly cordial and comprehensive. When he received the news—prematurely by two months, as it turned out—of his single operational success, the capture of Myitkina, his only comment—" WILL THIS BURN UP THE LIMEYS ! " —hardly re-echoes the tones in which the Great Captains have at one time or another exulted over their victor't s. He does not criticise the British commanders with whom he dealt ; he simply dismisses them as hopeless duds in whose difficulties or setbacks he takes a personal pleasure. Alone of a race of snobs, poltroons and quitters, the present C.I.G.S. earned a measure of his tolerance.
One must sympathise with Stilwell for the difficulties he so stub- bornly faced ; for the unreliability of the Chinese politicians who tricked him and let him down with all the less compunction because his personality never earned him much " face " in China ; for his shabby treatment by the War Department after his recall. And one must respect him for his singleness of purpose and his personal toughness. But the legend that this exceptionally disagreeable and narrow-minded soldier, most of whose service had been spent on the staff or as a Military Attache, was a commander of unrecognised genius, adored by his troops (he never for practical purposes had any troops), misunderstood by his superiors and denied by his allies the support and co-operation to which he had a right, is a travesty of the facts. He was a small, proud, bitter, brave, uncomprehending man who brought to an exceedingly difficult task a character and an outlook which made failure in it a certainty.
PETER FLEMING.
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