Post: #1

Its pretty sad that the top US Army field commander (top of his graduating class and top peer-ranked among all commanders at the United States Army War College pre-WWII) is almost completely unknown in America for his WWII legacy due to the politics and history of his area of operations during and after the war.

Stilwell was overall commander of the China-Burma-India theater and successfully fought a major jungle warfare campaign against the Japanese Army in northern Burma for 3 years with 2 Chinese armies, American special forces, and 10th Air Force. Right from the start he had to fight with the lowest priority resources of any theater of war because nobody wanted to fight in Burma. The British were panicked and had already written off Burma; they were too busy saving their own ass from the Germans and were preparing for the fall of India, either from Japanese or Indian revolutionaries. The Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang didn't want to lose the last of his best troops in a tough jungle campaign because he was so politically weak and at risk of being overthrown internally. Roosevalt's lend-lease policy was "Europe-first" and what did get sent to Burma got split between Stilwell and the 14th Airforce (led by another General Chennault) because his top priority was to satisfy the political needs of Chiang over pure military strategy.

Despite being written off as a hopeless situation by the British and the Americans, Stilwell eventually managed to re-capture the sole major airfield in northern Burma at the Battle of Myitkyina, restoring China's only supply line and causing major embarrasment to the British (Mountbatten) who had said that it wasn't possible.

Stillwell waived practically all the benefits awarded to him as an officer, learned to read and speak fluent Chinese, did not care about uniform or military pomp, and personally led his command HQ staff out of Burma on foot during the 1943 allied retreat despite a plane being sent for his personal evacuation and the significant possibility he would have been captured or killed by invading Japanese forces. He was selected to command the first army to invade the Japanese home islands and yet might have been the humblest general of the war.

There are a few reasons why all this is unknown. One is that the CBI theater was low profile even at the time. Britain's greatest general (as voted by British historians), Gen. Bill Slim, also comes out of the Burma theater although most people in the UK probably never heard of him. Most American's conception of WWII today is basically Band of Brothers, namely that WWII got started at the Omaha Beach landings and pretty much finished after the Battle of the Bulge. As for the Pacific, it started with Pearl Harbor, then a few islands like Iwo Jima, then nuke. There is little conception of the huge campaigns fought by China (or more importantly Russia) and the critical roles they played in grinding and bogging down the Axis war machine. Burma has also been basically closed off since the 60's due to military dictatorship so you can't really visit any historical sites. Even in China, people are pretty ignorant (until very recently) of their own military history during WWII because the Communists suppressed most of the knowledge about it. Its pretty embarrasing for them to admit they participated in 0/22 of the major land battles against the Japanese army and basically just sat it all out until Chiang exhausted his powerbase.

If you're into WWII history, rather than reading another book about the Normandy Campaign, I can recommend this book about the CBI theater. You will learn all the major players such as the Generillisimo, Madame, Chennault, Roosevalt, Mountbatten, Augenblick, Slim, Merill, Windgate, and Stilwell. You will also learn a lot about Chinese history and how it set up the situation we have in modern China presently. If you are brand new to all of this, the book may seem somewhat overwhelming at 700 pages, but its hard to skip over the political material and just focus on the military aspect because politics was such an integral part of this theater of war. Recommended

Post: #2

Thank you for sharing. Its always good to learn about the less heard of theaters of the Second World War. I have a decent knowledge about Burma in post-WW2 when Aung San Suu Kyi's father came to power for a short time and then the ensuing military dictatorship that has existed to this day.

I'd love to give this book a read if I could dedicate time to it.