Stillwell and the American Experience in China Review

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Stillwell and the American Experience in China ReviewI read this book over 20 years ago. I sometimes bought the paperback to give to friends. It was that good and true and well-written, to me. In brief, Stillwell was a four-star general who was attached to the nationalists during WWII. His rank was equal to Eisenhower and MacArthur. Tuchman is very sympathetic to Stillwell, emphasizing his fluency in the Chinese language and knowledge of the country and its politics. He had served in China as a career army officer between the world wars and often traveled about disguised as a native.
He detested Chiang Kai-Shek, who he considered to be a warlord and coward. Stillwell suggested overtures to Mao, to use him to fight the Japanese and even consider them as future rulers of China. In 1944 Stillwell was sent back to the states. His stance against Kai-Shek did not sit well with the China Lobby (pro-Chiang lobby) in the USA.
What I most remember about the book after all these years is 1) Stillwell led an Indian Jones life, even leading his defeated troops on foot out of Burma 2) Stillwell was right about Mao and the China Lobby (Luce at Time magazine and others) was wrong, 3) and when China fell the Democrats and Chinese Experts in the State department were blamed for "losing" China. All these Chinese speaking Experts, often children of missionaries, knew the language and the greater region of East and Southeast Asia. They all got purged in the days of McCarthy. Nobody of competence was around to raise red flags as we got sucked into Viet Nam in the late 50s and early 60s.
There are today way too few Arab speaking experts in the State Department. George W. Bush, being briefed by exiled Iraqis, just weeks before pre-emptive war, revealed no clue that there were Sunni and Shiite and Kurdish factions in Iraq (see Packer's book, Assassin's Gate). This is what I mean by my title, a paraphrase of a famous remark, history is always the same, and the players just change.
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Thunder out of China Review

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Thunder out of China ReviewWhite and Jacoby, both correspondants for Time Magazine during WW2 and its aftermath, provide an insider's portrayal of China's convoluted mechanisms of governence. While other contemporary accounts are mostly small in their scope, and unapologetically biased towards either the Communists or the Nationalists, Thunder Out of China is brutally fair, sympathetic to the Nationalists while exposing their corruption, and detailing the incompentence of the American intervention which resulted in a resumption of the disasterous civil war 1945-1949. The book covers such disasters as the Hunan famine, the farce of Chinese "resistance" to the Japanese invaders, the recalcitrant corruption and conservatism of the Nationalist leaders, and the sacking of Stillwell.
Snow's Red Star Over China may be more readable, but it's chatty, personal, pro-Red, and semi-fictionalized account is much less revealing historically than Thunder Out of China. Time was unapologetically, even fanatically, supportive of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, and the magazine's propaganda in the US explains much of America's distastrous intervention (read China Hands for more on this). White and Jacoby used this book to expose much of what their employer wouldn't let them say, and it remains one of the best accounts written of wartime China.Thunder out of China Overview

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Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 Review

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Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 ReviewThis book is about a period that is both so important and yet largely neglected in American education. The book is quite easy to read with its strong steady narrative flow, its interest in the personalities at play as well as its study of the background of their struggles. Since the book came out around the time of the Vietnam War, I assumed it would be more anti-American foreign policy in tone than it is. It's quite balanced.
Tuchman obviously regards Stilwell as the hero of the tale. It's hard to come to any other conclusion about this deeply humble but brilliant, unwearying but always frustrated man. Yet she is quite fair in assessing the difficulties faced by Stilwell's close-to-home antagonist, Chiang Kai Shek. She is also not sparing in describing the courage, success and tactical genius of Claire Chennault, whose (clearly wrong-headed) conception of the War was opposed to that of Stilwell.
The story of America in China in WWII and its aftermath is so fascinating, so HUGELY important - and still so relatively little publicized - especially in relation to the affairs of MacArthur, Nimitz and Halsey in the Pacific or Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton in Europe.
I long for a movie that will show the fascinating struggle among Stilwell, Chiang, and Chennault in relation to the Japanese and Mao's Communists. It can be said that America's foreign policy in 1943-50 has far less immediate impact in post Cold War Europe today than in Japan, China, Burma, and Indonesia. America's two costly wars since WWII have been in Asia. This book gives a wonderful background to anyone interested in how did the existing state of affairs in China come to pass?
America was intimately involved - particularly two Americans - 1) Claire Lee Chennault, a maverick Cajun from Louisiana who resigned from the American Air Force in rage at their refusal to adopt his revolutionary views on fighters and bombing - and became the head of China's Air Force in 1937; 2) Joseph Stilwell, an upper middle class WASP from a family that went back to the early 1600s, who had been intimately involved with China since the 1920s.
It's just a great story, and it's unlikely you know much of it.Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 Overview

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