‘Vinegar Joe’ Still Like a Fine Wine to China

Long before Beijing upset Washington by rattling sabers at Taiwan, before American warplanes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, before a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided in midair, there was a time when relations between the two countries’ militaries were warm -- even close.

That was more than half a century ago, when China was not yet a communist power and the U.S. wasn’t a super one, and both were locked in mortal combat against a common enemy: Japan.

American and Chinese soldiers strategized and trained together in Chongqing, the wartime capital then known as Chungking. For two years, a four-star Army general named Joseph W. Stilwell lived here and did more than almost any other American to lead the campaign that brought Japan’s occupation of China and the war in the Pacific to an end.

The Chinese have remained grateful to Stilwell ever since. Today, the courageous, acerbic commander nicknamed “Vinegar Joe” is the only American military figure -- possibly the only American -- to have a museum in China dedicated to him, a reminder that Sino-U.S. ties weren’t always so contentious and mistrustful.

“The resistance against Japan was possibly the best moment ever in U.S.-China relations,” said Xie Xianhui, the museum’s director.

Since it opened to the public in 1991, thousands of visitors, most of them Americans, have made the pilgrimage up the narrow lane to the cliff-side home that Stilwell occupied, a scenic spot overlooking the rippling, milk-chocolate canvas of the Jialing River.

This was Stilwell’s base as commander of American forces in the China-Burma-India theater of World War II from 1942 to 1944. Here he plotted strategy, practiced his fluent Mandarin and paced the floors as he tried to figure out how best to deal with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the head of China’s Nationalist government.

Stilwell was technically Chiang’s chief of staff but found the leader egotistical, capricious and unreliable, and he contemptuously referred to him as “Peanut” in his dispatches. (Other critics accused Chiang of “too much issimo-ing and not enough generaling.”)

The two men clashed over the deployment of China’s soldiers. Stilwell thought Chiang was more concerned with fighting his other enemies, the Chinese Communists, than with battling the Japanese Imperial Army.

Although the Communists and Nationalists had declared a temporary truce in order to join forces against the Japanese, Chiang wanted to save his crack troops for a future showdown against the Communists.

Stilwell was exasperated.

“He was there to fight a war and Chiang Kai-shek wasn’t fighting it,” said Houghton Freeman, an assistant U.S. naval attache at the time who lived a few doors up from Stilwell in Chongqing.

Shared antipathy toward Chiang may account for some of the present Communist government’s appreciation for Stilwell. China also remembers Stilwell fondly as a supporter of the U.S. government’s secret wartime mission to establish contact with the Communists in 1944.

But there are those who feel affection for the general himself, not merely his political views or military achievements.

Wang Chuying was a decorated young Chinese captain who was Stilwell’s assistant in Burma. Initially, Wang was put off by the gruff American, who barked orders and insulted him by suggesting that the young officer had gotten where he was because of family connections rather than bravery in battle.

“I didn’t reply and just stared at him because I was so angry,” Wang recalled. “A Chinese official immediately informed Stilwell that I was a courageous fighter who was not afraid of death.... Stilwell changed his attitude and offered me his hand.”

Thereafter, Wang was constantly at Stilwell’s side. He admired the American for his demanding attitude, discipline and lack of pretension. Stilwell responded by soliciting Wang’s opinions even though Wang was much younger and of lower rank.

“He was a very high-ranking officer and I was just a small fry, but he never put on any airs,” said Wang, 79, whose memory of the war is still clear. “Stilwell encouraged me to speak my mind. It’s very rare for Chinese generals to do that.

“I was very sad when he had to go. He called me back from the battlefront ... before he left and said goodbye to me in person. There were so many VIPs and generals, but he still remembered me. I never met a general like him, and I miss him to this day.”

Stilwell was forced to leave China because of his increasingly fractious relationship with Chiang, who pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt to recall the general in late 1944.

The blunt-talking Stilwell also had clashed with a U.S. general: Claire L. Chennault, commander of the Flying Tigers of the Army’s 14th Air Force. Chennault argued that the air campaign over Asia was more important than the ground effort.

Bitter at being undercut, Stilwell summoned two American reporters to his home in Chongqing before he left to show them classified documents and air his side of the feud with Chiang.

Stilwell died at age 63 in San Francisco in 1946. Two years ago, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 10-cent stamp in his honor.

For years after it opened as a museum, Stilwell’s home in Chongqing was a rundown structure filled with memorabilia provided by the U.S. government and the general’s heirs, including photographs, his uniform and a sword presented to him by his troops after a victory in Burma.

After a visit in 1999, Freeman, the former naval attache, was determined to see the place refurbished. “The city of Chungking had kept it open,” said Freeman, who is still accustomed to using the city’s wartime name. “They were selling 14th Air Force T-shirts to make a little money. It was in disrepair.”

Freeman’s private foundation based in Vermont has donated $1 million to the renovation now underway. The local government chipped in another million. A machinist’s shop and about 60 residents on the grounds were kicked out to make way for a new exhibition hall and garden, next to the home where Freeman, now 81, still remembers going to see movies at Stilwell’s invitation.

Museum officials are aiming to reopen the expanded facility March 19, the 120th anniversary of Stilwell’s birth.