China–Burma–India theatre

China–Burma–India theatre (CBI), a general geographic reference, designating the intersection of East Asia, South-East Asia, and South Asia insofar as they were linked together in the struggle against Japan. But CBI also referred loosely to the military commands of various nations which existed within this geographic region and for a time was the name of a specific American military command structure.

The command structures came initially from the ARCADIA conference held in Washington in December 1941. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed, inter alia, upon a joint command for South-East Asia. This was ABDA Command under Wavell's overall command. Separate from and nominally co-equal to ABDA Command was the China theatre, of which Chiang Kai-shek was named Supreme Commander. Symbolically, this status represented an Allied desire to provide moral support to China, in recognition of four years of lonely, unaided combat against Japan (see China incident). But it was also anomalous because it did not integrate China or Chiang Kai-shek into ABDA Command, or any larger Allied structure, on the grounds that Chiang would never agree to foreign authority over any part of China.

After initial hesitation, the US war department nominated the unenthusiastic Lt-General Stilwell to be the senior American commander in the region. Stilwell knew China better than any field-grade officer in the US Army, and spoke Chinese fluently. His appointment reflected the confusion of the early months after Pearl Harbor and the complexity of the region to which he was sent. He was simultaneously ‘Commanding General of the United States Army Forces in the Chinese Theatre of Operations, Burma, and India’, and ‘Chief of Staff to the Supreme Commander of the Chinese Theatre’, i.e. Chiang Kai-shek. But since the American forces were a part of ABDA Command, he also served under Wavell, whose jurisdiction included Burma. Furthermore, Stilwell was to have direct command over Chinese forces assigned to operations in Burma, originally three armies (a total of ten divisions, perhaps 80,000–100,000 men). Then and later, however Stilwell had great difficulty exercising this authority in the face of Chiang Kai-shek's frequent interference.

In February 1942, following the fall of Singapore and the Japanese invasion of Java, ABDA Command was abolished. Thenceforth, the Pacific was an American responsibility, the British were in charge from Singapore to Suez, and Chiang Kai-shek remained Supreme Commander of the China theatre. Wavell continued to exercise overall command in India and Burma. As part of this restructuring, Stilwell formed a Headquarters, American Armed Forces: China, Burma, and India. The new command embraced a small pre-existing American Military Mission to China (AMMISCA) and the American Volunteer Group of Maj-General Chennault, later a part of Tenth Army Air Force and eventually of Fourteenth Army Air Force.

This command structure lasted until the autumn of 1943, when it was replaced, after several false starts, by what seemed to be a more integrated South-East Asia Command (SEAC) and operational control of British forces fighting in Burma passed from C-in-C India ( Auchinleck since June 1943) to it. SEAC's Supreme commander was Mountbatten and Stilwell was named his deputy commander. The China theatre, under Chiang Kaishek, remained independent of SEAC, though Stilwell's role as Chiang's Chief of Staff was supposed to provide liaison and co-operation among the various parties.

Unfortunately, SEAC was not much more effective than its predecessor, and for the same reasons: there was little agreement as to policy goals and strategies to be pursued (see Axiom Mission). The Chinese expression ‘same bed, different dreams’ fits the situation well. Nor were these tensions and disagreements limited to relations among the Allies, for they existed within the forces of each of the three nations as well, particularly within the US CBI command.

Keenly aware of its own severely strained military assets, the UK gave high priority to protecting India and to defusing an Indian nationalism that threatened collaboration with Japan. The UK saw Burma primarily in terms of these priorities, rather than as an avenue to the strengthening of a China in whose wartime utility and post-war capacities it had little confidence. Yet at the same time, Churchill sought to accommodate Roose velt's much more sanguine view of China, of which the campaign to recover Burma was a central component. British support for the Burma campaign was thus by turns half-hearted and determined.

Stilwell, who had long held anglophobic views, believed that the British were more interested in maintaining their empire in India and Burma than in engaging Japan; he was convinced that the British exercised undue and baneful influence over Roosevelt; and he disliked intensely what he viewed as smug and patron izing British formality. He was obsessed with the recovery of Burma. Strategically, he believed that China could become an important theatre and an important contributor in the war against Japan only if its armies could be markedly improved. To the extent that improved effectiveness required massive infusions of heavy equipment, he believed that a secure overland route to China from India was absolutely essential. Such a route—it became known as the Ledo Road when it was begun—could only go through Burma.

In trying to create a professional, apolitical military force in China, patterned along western lines, Stilwell—despite his deep knowledge of the country—significantly misread the fundamentally political nature of Chinese armies: personal control of core armies was Chiang Kai-shek's major asset, both to maintain his supremacy during the war and to contest the communists after it. Stilwell believed that the Chinese Army required top-to-bottom reorganization, with an end to corruption, incompetence, and political interference. Since such reforms would have threatened his personal control over the armed forces, Chiang never undertook them, always delaying, promising to do so later when conditions were more suitable, and occasionally hanging out a little window dressing in order to keep American aid flowing into his hands. This oblique stonewalling infuriated Stilwell and goaded him into ever angrier outbursts.

Stilwell's belief in Burma's importance was predicated on his estimate that China would be a major theatre of war. But as 1942 turned into 1943, this estimate grew more and more out of touch with reality. The trans-Pacific island-hopping strategy became more and more apparently the means for defeating Japan from the air and eventually, it was presumed, through amphibious warfare landings. This approach rendered China a sideshow, important mainly for tying down about one million Japanese troops and preventing their deployment else-where. With China thus marginalized, the recovery of Burma became less urgent. Unlike Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese communist leader, Mao Tse-tung, both of whom understood the implications of Japan's eventual defeat (mainly by the USA and elsewhere than in China), Stilwell remained unshaken in his effort to make China a major combatant. He therefore remained determined to recover Burma. This obsession with Burma had personal dimensions as well. He sought to avenge the humiliating defeat suffered in early 1942, when vastly superior Japanese forces drove scattered Allied units—British, American, and Chinese—from the region. During the retreat, Stilwell had refused the air evacuation offered to his headquarters detachment, and insisted on walking out at the head of his soldiers. ‘We got a hell of a beating’, he said at the time, and he was determined to even the score.

Stilwell had another point to make. He believed that nationalist Chinese troops—considered worthless by the Japanese, by most of the Allies, and even within China—could be the equal of the finest soldiers in the world, if they were properly fed, trained, supplied, and officered. Burma was to be the proving-ground for this belief, an irrefutable example of the effectiveness of the reforms which Stilwell advocated throughout the Chinese armed forces.

A training centre was established at Ramgarh in north-eastern India, to which Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly assigned two divisions (see Chart) with Chinese officers serving under US command. From December 1943 these divisions fought under Stilwell on the Northern Front (called Northern Combat Area Command by the Americans) alongside American and British units in the Burma campaign, and they largely vindicated Stilwell's confidence in them. But Chiang Kai-shek never again trusted the commanders who led these units.

Plans, dating back to pre-Pearl Harbor days, were also in place to help equip and train an initial 30 Chinese divisions. In one form or another the ‘Thirty Division Plan’, as it was known, remained an integral part of US efforts to invigorate the Chinese Army, but was never fully implemented.

Within the American CBI command, Stilwell and Chennault were at perpetual loggerheads. Both strong characters little given to compromise, they also disagreed on important policy issues. One of these had to do with the allocation of slender resources available to them and to China. With the loss of Burma in the spring of 1942, the Hump air route was the only link between China and the outside world. However, what this could provide was but a drop in the bucket of China's immense needs. Conflict over the allocation of Hump tonnage was perpetual: Chiang Kai-shek wanted full authority over what was sent and who got it, Stilwell wanted most of it to go on a quid pro quo basis to reformed army units, and Chennault argued that it be allocated to the air forces under his command.

Underlying these controversies over Hump tonnage were fundamental differences in strategic outlook. Chennault believed that air power was a much more rapid and cost-efficient means of making war against Japan than the foot-slogging ground war envisaged by Stilwell. During 1942 and 1943, huge gangs of Chinese labour were building airfields in the south-eastern province of Kwangsi and in the inland province of Szechwan. From these bases, Chennault argued, Japanese forces throughout China could be gravely damaged and Japan's essential sealanes from South-East Asia to its Home Islands interdicted—but only if he was given the lion's share of Hump tonnage. This view appealed to Chiang Kai-shek, since it implied that his own forces could avoid not only major combat with Japan but also the reforms Stilwell was urging upon him. Meanwhile, Stilwell dismissed Chennault's vision as chimerical. He doubted aviation's capacities, independent of other branches; and he argued that as soon as air power began to hurt them, the Japanese would simply march in and take the air bases of south-east China—unless there was a strong and committed Chinese Army to defend them. Stilwell's gloomy prediction was borne out in mid-1944, during Japan's last great offensive in China, the ICHI-GŌ campaign, when all the airfields were captured without significant Chinese resistance.

The deficiencies revealed by ICHI-GŌ led to a crisis in Sino–US relations during the summer and early autumn of 1944. Roosevelt, thoroughly exasperated, urged Chiang Kai-shek in harsh terms to undertake sweeping political and military reforms and to place an American commander (presumably Stilwell) in direct command of the Chinese Army. Patrick J. Hurley (1883–1963) was sent to China as Roosevelt's personal representative, with the mission of smoothing over the crisis and mediating the growing tensions between the Chinese communists and the nationalists.

Chiang temporized in meeting Roosevelt's demands, meanwhile objecting to Stilwell's continuing presence in China. In the upshot, Stilwell was recalled to the USA and the more tact ful Wedemeyer replaced him. By October 1944, both Stilwell and Chennault were gone. Except for some cosmetic reforms, Roosevelt's demands were allowed to lapse. Patrick Hurley then became US ambassador to China.

As a part of these changes, CBI in a formal sense came to an end in October 1944, when it was divided into the India–Burma theatre and the China theatre. Wedemeyer took command of US forces in China and served as Chiang's Chief of Staff. Stilwell's deputy, Daniel I. Sultan, was made Commanding General of US forces in the India–Burma theatre, and, under Mountbatten, he directed the fighting on the Northern Front as head of the Northern Combat Area Command. Yet the familiar acronym CBI had become so well-established that it survived all these changes in formal structure.

Ironically, even as the Burma campaign was finally moving forward successfully, the China theatre was becoming less important militarily, if not politically. It was now utterly clear that Japan would be attacked from the maritime approaches, and perhaps from a staging area somewhere along the north China coast. In late 1944, Japanese forces were cleared from northern Burma, and near the end of January 1945, the first vehicles rolled along the Ledo Road, now renamed the Stilwell Road. During the last months of the war, Allied forces further secured the Burma base and rapidly increased the carrying capacity of the Stilwell Road. In China, Wedemeyer offered advice and assistance to Chiang Kai-shek and encouraged action that would prevent the transfer of Japanese troops from China to more active combat theatres and to the Home Islands.

Politically, Hurley's efforts to mediate the growing tension between the nationalists and the communists had failed badly. He later claimed to have been sabotaged by the state department and the embassy staff in China. But Hurley, whose ignorance of China was matched only by his overweening self-confidence as a negotiator, misread the nature of both parties and badly underestimated the deep antipathy with which they viewed each other.

With the Japanese surrender, the various command structures under the broad rubric ‘CBI’ were one by one decommissioned. American concerns had now grown to embrace the post-war role of China. The USA was deeply committed to Chiang Kai-shek and his regime, a regime over which it had limited influence but from which it could not detach itself. The contest between the nationalists and the communists hung in fateful balance. At the war's end, the USA was in a position to influence but not to determine the outcome, a position that had evolved from the military and political circumstances of which CBI was a major part.

Lyman P. Van Slyke

Bibliography

Romanus, C. F., and and Sunderland, R. , China–Burma–India Theater, 3 vols. (Washington, DC, 1953–9).
Tuchman, B. , Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New York, 1970).
White, T. (ed.), The Stilwell Papers (New York, 1948).