Stilwell, General Joseph W.

Stilwell, General Joseph W. (1883–1946),US Army officer who, as Chiang Kai-shek's Allied chief of staff in Chiang's capacity as a Supreme Allied Commander, commanded US and Chinese forces in the China–Burma–India theatre.

After serving in France during the First World War, where he rose to the rank of colonel, Stilwell had four tours of duty in China which made him fluent in the language and familiar with its people. The US Army chief of staff, General Marshall, thought him one of the most brilliant and cultured men in the US Army and in February 1942 he was appointed to head the US military mission to China, to supervise Lend-Lease to the country, and to be Chiang Kai-shek's Allied chief of staff with the rank of lt-general. In March he took nominal control of two Chinese armies (equal to two reinforced US divisions) in the Burma campaign and, when the Japanese were driving all before them, led a small group of refugees 225 km. (140 mi.) across the mountains to India. When asked about the ‘glorious retreat’ and ‘heroic voluntary withdrawal’ described by the British generals, Stilwell replied with typical forthrightness that ‘no military commander in history ever made a voluntary withdrawal. And there's no such thing as a glorious retreat. All retreats are as ignominious as hell. I claim we got a hell of a licking.’ This did not increase his popularity with the British whom he anyway disliked.

Operating primarily from Chiang's capital Chungking, he tried to improve the fighting efficiency of the Chinese forces and increase the effectiveness of US aid, tasks which proved political minefields. A meeting with Roosevelt at the Cairo conference in December 1943 (see SEXTANT) did nothing to clarify his mission which had become no simpler when, two months previously, he had been made deputy Supreme Allied commander under Mountbatten in the newly formed South-East Asia Command.

In October 1943 Chinese troops belonging to Stilwell's Northern Combat Area Command, who were led by his deputy, Brig-General Hayden Boatner, began the battle to recapture northern Burma. When Boatner fell ill Stilwell took command and, with the help of Merrill's Marauders (see GALAHAD) and the Chindits, eventually retook Myitkyina, the strategic key to the area, in August 1944. This campaign, which opened a shorter air route for supplies to China than the Hump, proved Stilwell's point that Chinese troops, if properly treated, could fight, and gained him promotion to four-star general.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had begun an offensive (ICHI-GŌ) which swept across central and southern China, but when Roosevelt suggested Stilwell command all Chinese forces to resist it, Chiang, no ally of Stilwell's, demurred, and in October 1944 had Stilwell recalled. From June to October 1945 Stilwell commanded Tenth US Army on Okinawa. He died of cancer five months before he was due to retire.

Stilwell possessed a fierce integrity, and a hatred of incompetence and pretentiousness, but as Mountbatten found out, he could also be devious and secretive (seeAxiom Mission). He was probably unsuited to the intricate problems he faced, as temperamentally—and despite being purblind—he was a fighting general not a diplomat. His cantankerous personality earned him the nickname ‘Vinegar Joe’, but, as has been pointed out, if Saint Francis of Assisi had been sent to China in Stilwell's place, he would now probably be known as Vinegar Frank.

Bibliography

Carver, M. (ed.), The War Lords (London, 1976).
Tuchman, B. , Sand Against the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 (New York, 1970).
White, T. H. (ed.), The Stilwell Papers (New York, 1948).