World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ASIA: The General Goes Home

To leathery, hard-bitten General Joseph W. Stilwell went the final practical proof of what the textbooks had told him 40 years before at West Point: there is more to war than just fighting. Last week “Uncle Joe,” hero of Burma and the U.S.’s No. 1 soldier in China, was summarily relieved and ordered home.

The White House announcement, published only three months after Stilwell had been made the Army’s sixth four-star general,* was a crisp, close-mouthed paragraph. It gave no explanation of General Stilwell’s unceremonious removal from his glamorous list of jobs as 1) Chief of Staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek; 2) Deputy to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. Commander in Chief of Allied Forces, Southeast Asia; 3) U.S. Commander of the China-Burma-India theater.

But informed newsmen could and did speculate, and on one point they were agreed: somehow Soldier Stilwell had been caught in the swirling crosscurrents of global politics and washed off his feet.

Off to Chungking. As a soldier, General Stilwell had reached a hero’s height since the grim spring of 1942 when he retreated through Burma and marched over the mountains into India with his famous summary of an inglorious campaign: “We got a hell of a beating.” Since then he had trained a new army, fought back across north Burma through the monsoon, had all but finished the opening of a new supply road to China across jungles and mountains.

From Chungking came censor-blurred reports of “Vinegar Joe’s” further doings. There were reports of a new training plan for the Chinese Army. There were reports of more supplies to be sent into China over the Burma-Ledo road when it was finished. Backgrounding all the rumors were the delicate political situation in China, the conflict of Chinese and British interests in southeast Asia, and the pressure of Communists in and out of China. Army men, who knew about Chinese-speaking Joe Stilwell’s blunt forthrightness, reflected that his job called for the diplomacy of a super-Eisenhower.

In September of this year, when China’s military situation was at its grimmest in five years, Stilwell came back to Chungking to see his chief, the Generalissimo. With him came another American soldier. Suave, worldly Major General Patrick Hurley, emissary of the White House in high diplomatic affairs, settled down in Chungking to confer with the Generalissimo and work out a new solution for the Asia Command. The conferences proceeded. Pat Hurley was hopeful.

In the middle of this delicate diplomatic situation, something unexpected happened. Something like an ultimatum was delivered to the Generalissimo, insisting that he give Stilwell full command of the Chinese armies. Whatever may have been its justification, it was a proposition that no self-respecting head of a state, at war more than seven years, could accept.

The sequel was inevitable. Stilwell and Chiang must part.

Still in China, still the hero of the people and the confidant of the Generalissimo was Major General Claire Chennault with his small but effective air force; still in China were thousands of U.S. technicians. U.S. aid to China would continue. But there would be a difference, which reporters in China last week were helpless to define. At week’s end the Associated Press received this dispatch:

“Chungking, October 29—Stilwell is known to have taken formal leave of Chiang.

“Editor: American censor excised 388 words and Chinese censor 104 words, leaving only foregoing excerpts from one sentence.”

The China-Burma-India theater was split up when General Stilwell was relieved. The new China theater went to scholarly, 48-year-old Major General Albert Coady Wedemeyer, who has been Deputy Chief of Staff to Mountbatten since October 1943. Wedemeyer, a West Pointer who studied in the German War College for two years (1936-38), was once one of General Marshall’s war-planning aides. He will be Chiang’s new Chief of Staff.

To burly, methodical Lieut. General Daniel I. Sultan, another West Pointer, who has been Stilwell’s second-in-command in the CBI theater, went command of U.S. forces in India and Burma.

Joe Stilwell’s new job was not announced. Said the War Department: he will get “a new and important but at present undisclosed assignment.”

* Total of the Navy’s four-star admirals: 17.