Stilwell And The American Experience In China 1911-45, by Barbara W. Tuchman

Admittedly, this book ends somewhat abruptly, but that is because its subject’s life ended somewhat abruptly.  One moment we are reading about Stilwell’s experience at the end of World War II and his efforts, after he was relieved from his position in China, to participate in the winning of World War II, and then he has metastatic cancer and dies.  Admittedly, I did not know a great deal about “Sour Joe” Stilwell before reading this book, and though my own political worldview is very distinct from that of the author (and not that distinct from the subject, it must be admitted) but this book certainly made me pretty sympathetic to his struggles both in the slow promotion of the peacetime army where his gung-ho attitude and longing for action helped make him a dangerous opponent in war games and in his struggle to get Chaing Kai-Shek to do something, anything, useful in the Chinese front of World War II.  This book is not flattering to CKS at all, and is a pretty fierce look at a China that was unable to defend itself against the Japanese and uninterested in acting, where corruption was rife and where the Americans were simply looked at as the source of creature comforts for corrupt elites.

This book is a bit more than 500 pages and it is divided into twenty chapters with an amusing appendix that includes haphazard conversations with Stilwell during 1921.  An introduction, forward, and prologue set this book up as a classic in writing about the American relationship with China as well as the crisis of World War II and the way that last-gasp Japanese offenses threatened China’s remote wartime capital.  The first part of the book looks at the foundations of Stilwell as an officer, his early visit to China during the revolution, his time in the Great War in both France and China, his service in the peacetime interwar army and his work as an attaché.  After that the second part of the book looks at his preparation for World War II and willingness to go where he is sent and then his declining relationship with Chinese leadership as well as rivalries with the British (who he despised, and the feeling was often mutual given his anti-imperialist and anti-limey tendencies) as well as other officers like the corrupt Chennault.  Stilwell’s experience trying to urge Chinese troops to invade, including the rebuilding of the Burma Road that made supplies far more plentiful, led him to consider American suport of CKS to be pointless and wasteful, and he died an honored soldier but one who was unsuccessful at prodding China in a way that would have made it possible to stop Communism.

According to this book at least, the American experience with China in the first half of the 20th century can be considered one of cultural misunderstanding and a great deal of frustration.  Although Tuchman tries to put a pretty face on both Chinese Communists as being more effective than the Nationalists, and although Tuchman is at least mildly critical of FDR, the author makes the failure of Stilwell’s efforts in China out to be something like a Greek tragedy of epic misunderstanding and character flaws that make it impossible for there to be a happy ending.  Admittedly, Stilwell was a fighting general who was quite adept when it came to the tactical and strategic aspects of warfare, and he showed these gifts to great success in Northern Burma as well as in the war games before World War II.  Yet he had some clear liabilities as a general when it came to areas of logistics and diplomacy, and it was these aspects that ultimately proved to be his undoing, although it can be argued that even had Stilwell been an easier person to get along with, that would not have resolved the essential disconnect between American and British and Chinese war aims and interests.  It is just that the disagreement would have been conducted in a more polite manner than it was.