70 years later, China still saluting Stilwell
CHONGQING, China — Early in his tenure as commander of the United States’ World War II mission in China, Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell expressed a grudging fondness for the damp, ramshackle capital deep in the country’s southwest that would be his base for the next several years.
“Chungking isn’t half bad when the sun shines,” the plain-spoken general wrote in his diary, using the spelling of the period. But his tolerance for the underserviced, refugee-laden town perched high above the Yangtze River did not last.
A year later, he composed a five-stanza poem that went, in part:
“The garbage is rich, as it rots in the ditch, And the honey-carts scatter pollution.”
By the time Stilwell was recalled to the United States in the fall of 1944, he grumbled that Washington was “as big a pile of manure as Chungking was.”
Still, that unflattering take on Chongqing, now a metropolis of 30 million, has not stopped a wellspring of local pride and scholarship about the U.S. military hero who was dispatched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help the Chinese battle the Japanese.
A museum dedicated to Stilwell opened there more than 20 years ago in the graystone, flat-roofed house set in a garden of palm trees where the general lived and worked. Scholars in Chongqing say that when William Perry, then the defense secretary, attended the opening of the museum in 1994, his plane was the first U.S. aircraft to touch down there since the victory of the Communists in 1949.
In a sign of the official respect for Stilwell, the Chongqing municipal government runs the museum.
One of the epic personality battles of the war played out there as two stubborn and hostile men, Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, vied for the affection of the U.S. president even as they were supposed to be allies. Stilwell openly referred to Chiang as “Peanut” and railed against his corruption, complaining that it left conscripts starving in the streets of Chongqing.
Dark wood furniture, a sepia-toned wall map of the region in the conference area and a spartan dining table where Stilwell entertained make it easy to envision what went on in the modest rooms. Other touches — a gray steel Remington typewriter, a glass-fronted bookcase behind the general’s desk and a wood-framed bed — are of the period but did not belong to the general, according to his grandson, John Easterbrook.
The photos on the walls re- flect the intrigue of a city that was not only an encampment for U.S. military and government advisers who dealt with Chiang but also home to a small cell of Communists led by Zhou Enlai, later the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, who stayed not far from Stilwell’s house.
It was, wrote Theodore H. White, Time magazine’s correspondent in China, “as if the ablest and most devoted executives of New York, Boston and Washington had been driven from home to set up resistance to an enemy from the hills of Appalachia.”
The most striking images in the Stilwell museum are grainy black-and-white shots of the grim-faced generals, Stilwell and Chiang, that capture their frosty relationship. They both stand ramrod straight, rail thin and staring ahead, with the fashionably dressed Madame Chiang Kai-shek sandwiched between them as a chic intermediary — although not always trustworthy, from the American’s point of view.
After rising to power, the Chinese Communist Party refused to acknowledge the help the United States had given China in defeating the Japanese, a reaction to U.S. support for Chiang during the civil war. But that attitude changed in the 1990s, and now the U.S. role has become part of the standard version of the war.
Stilwell’s low regard for Chiang, who lost to the Communists and fled to Taiwan in 1949, has contributed to his high standing in China.
In the Stilwell papers, now housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the general refers to the Communist program as: “Reduce taxes, rents, interest. Raise production, and standard of living.” The government of Chiang, he wrote, was riddled with “greed, corruption, favoritism, more taxes, a ruined currency, terrible waste of life, callous disregard of all the rights of man.”
“Stilwell was very unhappy with the Kuomintang soldiers and the situation in the war,” said Zhou Yong, the director in Chongqing of the Research Center for the Great Rear Area During the Anti-Japanese War, using the Chinese word for the Nationalists.
“But that was the reality of China at the time,” said Zhou, who has visited the United States and Taiwan to pursue his research on wartime Chongqing. Stilwell, he said, “had to find a new force to win the war, and the new force was the Communist Party.”
Stilwell, he noted, wanted the Communists under Mao Zedong to have a share equal to Chiang’s of the U.S. supply of fighting equipment, known as Lend Lease. The sharing never came to pass: Chiang outfoxed the American he never trusted and persuaded Roosevelt to send the general home.
Among scholars in China, the unforgiving attitude toward Chiang that prevailed in the early years of Communist rule has softened, and now credit is given to his troops for helping keep the Japanese at bay.
“There’s a transformation in China’s study of this part of history,” said Tan Gang, an associate professor at Southwest University in Chongqing. “It used to be that if scholars mentioned the Kuomintang, they would criticize it. Now we can see the Kuomintang more objectively.”
It was understandable, Tan said, that Chiang loathed Stilwell and worked to undermine him. “Stilwell often criticized Chiang Kai-shek publicly, and his words were very nasty,” Tan said. “It embarrassed Chiang Kai-shek — that’s why he didn’t like him.”
Although the American general was known as “Vinegar Joe,” and his language left an indelible image of a rough-talking boss, his diaries were mostly a means of letting off steam, Easterbrook said by telephone from his home near San Jose, Calif. The general would most want to be remembered as a stalwart supporter of the Chinese soldier, his grandson said.
Early in his stay there, Stilwell wrote, “The Chinese soldier best exemplifies the greatness of the Chinese people — their indomitable spirit, their uncomplaining loyalty, their honesty of purpose, their steadfast perseverance.”