Stilwell Joseph Warren - Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

Barbara W. Tuchman

Text copyright 1970, 1971 by Barbara W. Tuchman
Introduction copyright 1985 by John K. Fairbank

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First printed by The Macmillan Company, New York, New York.

Maps drawn by Brigadier General Frank Dorn, U.S.A. (Ret.)

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim.

Stilwell and the American experience in China, 191145 / Barbara W. Tuchman.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9847-1
1. Stilwell, Joseph Warren, 18831946. 2. United StatesForeign relationsChina.

3. ChinaForeign relationsUnited States. 4. World War, 1939-1945China. I. Title.

E745.S68 T8 2001
951.042092dc21

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

by John K. Fairbank

Barbara Tuchmans Stilwell is a classic for a number of very different reasons, each one quite adequate to make it endure. First of all, it is high drama. It gives us a close-up biography of a quirky but genuine hero, one of Americas greatest field commanders. When the U.S. Army staged war games in Louisiana in 1940 to find talented commanders, Joe Stilwell was so lightning quick, imaginative and unorthodox, already a master of the blitzkrieg, that he was rated the best of the Armys nine corps commanders and selected to command the invasion of North Africa. He might have become the Bradley or the Patton of the European theater. But instead, because of his China experience, he had to be sent to handle the crisis there.

But the American war effort in China was largely wastedeven allowing for the fact that warfare is itself the most highly organized form of human wastefulness. The adventure against odds of General Stilwell, who achieved miracles by sheer devotion to his task, is highlighted by the crumbling environment of Free China under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, to whom Stilwell was nominally chief of staff. What a contrast!the hard-bitten American idealist, determined to train Chinese troops and beat the Japs, and the crafty military politician, equally determined to stay in power by not mounting any further Chinese war effort. The Stilwell-Chiang stalemate encapsulated the frustration of Americas war aims in China.

Stilwell, however, is more than a fast-paced narrative of colorful events shadowed by tragedy. Back of the war story looms the long-term American effort to help China be more like usa quixotic endeavor with nine lives that now flourishes again. The reader will find this volume ends very appropriately (as of 1971): In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come. But nearly fifteen years later another cycle of contact, tourism, exchanges, investment and diplomacy is well under way. High time for the American public to look back, Chinese-style, at the tracks of the cart that went this way before. Especially when we find that in helping our allies the Nationalists we set ourselves against the Communist Chinese revolution, and worst of all, for us, the revolution succeeded.

In short, after setting out, as we said, to help China, we let our national interest in the power politics of the cold war line us up against the Chinese people. Was it really in our national interest to do so? Especially when it was the prelude to our wars in Korea and Vietnam? Barbara Tuchmans Stilwell leaves us with a residue of questions very pertinent today.

But the real attraction of this book is that it is a first-rate historical narrative by a self-assured master of the art. Early on, Barbara Wertheim Tuchman moved naturally into the American aristocracy of the intellect. Her grandfathers had been liberal leaders among New Yorks men of affairs. One was Henry Morgenthau, Sr., whose son, her uncle, became Roosevelts Secretary of the Treasury. While still a student at Radcliffe she accompanied her grandfather to the World Economic Conference at London. High policy and public personalities were part of her inheritance.

At Radcliffe she concentrated in the combined and rather special field of history and literature. Graduation in 1933 ushered her into a world soon obliged to mobilize against fascism and militarism. Gifted with a self-propelled, lucid and unafraid mind, she became a researcher in the Institute of Pacific Relations, during 1934 in New York, in 1935 in Tokyo. The IPR was a pioneer think tank and conference organization originally put together in the 1920s by ex-YMCA secretaries at Honolulu. It consisted of a dozen national institutes in all the major Pacific rim countries including the European colonial powers. Alone in the Pacific area, it inaugurated the kind of contemporary research and periodic international discussion that is now pursued by centers and associations every day of the week. From militaristic Tokyo, Barbara Wertheim visited pre-Communist China in 1935.

Back in New York she joined the staff of The Nation, of which her father had once been publisher, and then went to Madrid to report the grim civil war in Spain during 1937-38. Returning to New York as American correspondent for the New Statesman of London, she married Dr. Lester Tuchman in 1940 and soon had three daughters. From 1943 to 1945 she worked on the Far East news desk of the Office of War Information in New York.

Such an early career might have prepared a well-to-do and busy mother to grace the New York establishment at meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and little more. Barbara Tuchman, however, was just beginning to hit her stride. In 1956, continuing an earlier interest, she published Bible and Sword: Britain and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour, an historical account down to 1918. Thereafter she avoided topics that engaged her personal feelings and found her own style as a writer of histories that reached the public.

A critic who called these books popular history would be saying as much about himself as about the books. They are, to be sure, non-academic in the sense that they are not mainly devoted to discussion of historical problems, so many of which have been derived from the infiltration of history by the social sciences. This invasion of history in the universities by seekers after the uniformities of science puts a premium on generalizations, patterns of events and comparative schema. It may well have contributed to the recent decline of student interest in history. At any rate, Barbara Tuchman has been a vocal, incisive and widely persuasive advocate of history as a readable story. To her, questions of social mobility, legitimization, investment ratios and the work ethic are of secondary interest to how people felt and acted, what they did and said. She reaffirms the uniqueness of all happenings, persons and places.

Of course the struggle in history between the claims of the particular and of the general has gone on for ages. We cannot hope to crack this hoary philosophical chestnut here in a few words, however well chosen. We dont have to, for Barbara Tuchmans history stands on its own feet and needs no theoretical support. It simply fascinates readers by bringing them as close to past reality as they are ever likely to get.