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<em>Joe Stilwell</em> was the soldiers’ General of World War II and one of the greatest combat soldiers of our times.</p>
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He was born in Palatka, Florida, on the 19th of March, 1883, but his home was in Yonkers, New York. He was the second of four children born to Doctor and Mrs. Benjamin W. Stilwell. His father was one of the most prominent men in Yonkers, both in civic affairs and in business.</p>
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Joe graduated from Yonkers Public School No. 6 and Yonkers High School and was ready to enter Yale at the age of sixteen. Because of his youth, his father induced him to wait a year before entering the University and during this time he became interested in the Army, received an appointment, and entered West Point in July, 1900. He graduated in 1904 and at the time of his death he was the only member of his Class on active duty.</p>
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His enthusiasm and interest in all phases of activities soon proved him to be a leader among his classmates. In his academic work Joe showed outstanding ability in languages and graduated 32 in a class of 124. He possessed unusual physical coordination and stamina and became one of the outstanding athletes at West Point. At that time the Academy participated only in intercollegiate football and baseball. Joe knew the value of intercollegiate sports and did everything in his power to introduce and foster increased participation in basketball, track and cross country. As a Cadet he organized and led the first cross country team and was directly responsible for the introduction and prominence of basketball at West Point.</p>
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Upon graduation from West Point Joe chose the Infantry. His feelings in regard to the Infantry Soldier are probably best expressed in an extract of an article which he wrote for publication on Infantry Day:</p>
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“Ever since the first man on foot shot the first armored knight off his horse, the Infantry has had the right of way on the field of battle. In no other way can we get a decision; it must still be by physical contact, man to man, with rifle and bayonet. It is our Infantry that the enemy must stop, and so it is our Infantry that is the target for all the hell they can pour on us. There is no rest; it goes on day after day and night after night. The doughboy must live in the mud, eat when he can, fight fatigue, hunger, thirst, cold, vermin, and fear, and still push on. He must absorb 70% of the casualties in his 20% of the strength of the army, and endure that too. There is no glamour or hoorah about this job; it’s all hell.</p>
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“Now I ask you, is one day a year suitable recognition of his devotion. Of course not—you can’t pack enough recognition into one day to adequately express our appreciation for the doughboy and his accomplishments. And anyway, he doesn’t need it. He wears a badge that adds it all up and says it for us,—the Combat Infantryman’s Badge—to which the doughboy himself has given full meaning by his deeds on the field of battle. For the man who has the right to wear it, every day is Infantry Day”</p>
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After serving two years with the 12th Infantry in the Philippines, Joe returned to West Point in 1906 as an instructor in Modern Languages. He remained at the Academy from 1906 until 1910 and during this time continued his leadership in the field of sports by coaching the cadet basketball team and serving as an assistant coach of the football team. He also organized a basketball team made up of officers on duty at West Point and in 1909 and 1910 had regular schedules with outside teams. A team made up of graduates of the Class of 1904 played a team from the First Class (1910) in February 1910 and beat them 23 to 21. After a tour of duty at West Point he again went to the Philippines and returned to West Point as an Instructor in 1913.</p>
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In World War I Joe participated in many major operations, became G-2 of the 4th Corps, and was awarded the D.S.M. with the following citation:</p>
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“For exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services. As Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, 4th Army Corps, during the St. Mihiel offensive and later during the operations in the Woevre, he displayed military attainments of a high order. With great energy and zeal he pursued the developments of the enemy activities on the corps front, securing invaluable information which assisted in a marked degree in the planning of the operations. He contributed by the excellent performance of his task to the success of these operations”.</p>
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During and after World War I Joe did a great deal of thinking about our military policy and the world situation. He considered the Army too defense-minded and felt very keenly that all our training should be for a war of movement which we were bound to encounter. His vision and understanding were far in advance of most of our leaders at that time.</p>
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When Joe returned from Europe in the summer of 1919 he was assigned to duty that was to take him away from routine military work and which was to tax all his mental and physical energies. He was assigned as a Chinese language student and began a friendship with the Chinese people which was to last for the rest of his life. Four years of language study were followed by three years of duty with the 15th Infantry in China (1926-29) and then four years as Military Attaché (1935-39). Before World War II began Joe had become the most proficient officer in the Army in the Chinese Language and knew more about that country, its customs, traditions and the psychology of the Chinese people than any other officer. He believed in China and in her destiny and China believed in him.</p>
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Between Joe’s tours of duty In China, he took the Advanced Course at the Infantry School, the course at the Command and General Staff School, and also served as an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. His work as a student and as an instructor was outstanding. It was during this period that his penetrating and colorful comments on the work of inattentive students earned him the nickname of “Vinegar Joe”.</p>
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Upon his return from China in 1939 he was promoted to brigadier general and became Deputy Commander of the 2nd Division at Fort Sam Houston. In July 1940 Joe activated and assumed command of the 7th Division at Fort Ord and, under his direction, this division became one of the crack outfits of the Army Ground Forces. In his farewell address to the 7th Division when, before Pearl Harbor, he had been promoted to command the Third Corps, he said:</p>
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“As for me, I’ve been demoted and must move on. And I have no sermon to preach to you. I have found that the American soldier gets an idea from example and demonstration far better than he does from being jawed at. Long years ago I heard a remark made upon the occasion of the promotion of an officer to general rank. He assembled the command and harangued them for an hour and a half. When he finally stopped talking as the troops stumbled out, I heard a sergeant say, ‘Well, the higher up a monkey climbs, the more you can see of his backside.”</p>
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Early in 1942 Joe was ordered to Washington to organize and command the contemplated invasion of North Africa. At this time the seriousness of the situation in the Far East was growing in magnitude and Mr. Stimson, the Secretary of War, personally selected Joe to represent the United States in the Far East and later to command the China-Burma-India Theater.</p>
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To describe General Stilwell’s career in the C.B.I. in World War II would take many times the space allotted to this article; much has been written and much more will be written on this important subject. What Mr. Henry L. Stimson had to say about Joe’s accomplishments in China, Burma, and India is particularly appropriate for this article and therefore, with permission of the publishers. Harper and Brothers, the following extracts are quoted from <em>On Active Service In Peace and</em> <em>War</em><em>,</em> by Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy:</p>
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“Because of his interest in the Chinese situation, Stimson played a conspicuous part in the selection of this representative, and of few things was he more proud than of his share in the eventual choice of General Joseph W. Stilwell. </p>
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Stilwell’s central military objective was to strengthen the Chinese armies and bring their force to bear on the Japanese in Asia. His enemies were of four kinds—Japanese, Chinese, British, and American.</p>
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“More than any other American theater commander in the war, Stilwell required the constant and vigorous political support of his own government, and less than any other commander did he get it. Engaged as he was in a great effort to make China strong almost against her will, he was bound to find himself frequently in the disagreeable position of telling unpleasant truths to an autocrat. </p>
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“The last act in Stilwell’s mission was played In October, 1944. By that time Stilwell had fully justified his insistence on a Burma campaign by his brilliant advance in north Burma, culminating in the capture of Myltkyina—this was one of the great and insufficiently noticed military epics of the war. But none of this satisfied Chiang, who had grown to hate Stilwell-even as Stilwell had grown to hate him.</p>
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“Stilwell has been the one successful element of the three forces that have been supposed to cooperate in Burma. The British dragged their feet, and Mountbatten last spring almost as soon as he got there sent us word that he wanted to have the campaign go over until after the monsoon. If we had accepted that, we would not yet have begun. On the other hand, Chiang Kai-shek has several times interfered with the Yunnan forces of Chinese whom he had promised to send and did send as far as the Salween River. In between these two hesitating and halting forces, Stilwell with his three American-trained Chinese divisions coming down the Ledo Road, and Wingate and Merrill with their air troops and raiders flying in to help, have brought victory out of hesitation and defeat. The British, stung by their example, have at last thrown the Japanese out of Imphal and our troops are well down near the Irrawaddy River. Stilwell has taken Myitkyina, and north Burma is virtually free of the Japanese. This campaign in all the difficulties of the monsoon has been a triumphant vindication of Stilwell’s courage and sagacity. He had been pecked at from both sides, carped at by the British from India, and ham-strung at every moment by Chiang Kai-shek. Now the Japanese in China, stung by these defeats in Burma, have called their main forces into action in China and are closing in against the regular Chinese armies. It Chiang Kai-shek had supported Stilwell, we should have had a well-trained nucleus of these Chinese troops to meet them. As it is, they are still impotent Chinese, untrained and badly led. Incidentally, this result on both sides has shown the wisdom of Stilwell’s diagnosis a year and a half or two years ago when he insisted that we must have ground bases and ground troops in China, well trained, to defeat just such an attack of Japanese; and on the other hand, at the same time Chennault was insisting that he could beat and drive off the Japanese attack by the use of air alone. Chennault has been given almost twice as much in the way of equipment over the Hump as he asked for and yet he is now failing abjectly to stop the Japanese. On the other hand, Stilwell fighting against all obstacles, British incompetence and sluggishness, Chinese disloyalty, and the lack of supplies over the Hump line which Chennault’s demands made necessary, has provided the only success in the whole horizon. </p>
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“Knowing the Secretary’s personal interest in his mission, Stilwell had written to Stimson a series of letters (some of them in longhand) which gave the full measure of the man—his insight and understanding of the Orient, his imaginative grasp of war-making; his modesty, and what General Marshall called his ‘amazing vigor’. This was a man who could refer to his extraordinary retreat from Burma in 1942 with a single laconic sentence, ‘I then picked up my headquarters group and brought them out’. This man’s personal vision created a new army almost in spite of its own government, in the face of the skepticism and obstructionism of most Englishmen and many Americans; yet to him jungle lighting was ‘a heavenly relief’ from planning and politics. Certainly, whatever else it was, Stilwell’s record in Asia was the record of a great American soldier. On February 10, 1945, Stimson decorated Stilwell with the Legion of Merit and an oak-leaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal. ‘I was particularly happy to lay this encomium on Stilwell’s hard and terrific work in Burma and in China and so I read the two citations myself and made a few comments to Stilwell which I think he appreciated. I said that I thought he had had the toughest job of any of our generals and that I had never conveyed one of these medals with such pleasure as I had in doing this.’”</p>
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The honesty of Joe’s classic statement after his epic retreat from Burma in 1942 won for him the hearts of the American people. He said; “I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it”. This statement was acclaimed by newspaper men as the most honest statement of the war.</p>
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Mr. Jack Belden, author of <em>Retreat With Stilwell</em>, had the following to say about Stilwell:</p>
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“Now, what made Joe Stilwell different from the ordinary run-of-the-mill commander was his character. He had principles, so he had a deep strength to fall back on in time of crisis. He was a determined man. He was resolute. He had faith in himself. Hardship could not crack him. Criticism could not ruin him. Because of his cultured mind he was not simply stubborn. He could change and shift to meet circumstances, but always on principle, not merely on an opportunistic basis”</p>
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Joe was relieved from the C.B.I. Theatre in October, 1944, and the final entry in his journal reads, “The personal experience of an individual fades into insignificance in the enormous scope and ramifications of war, especially if there is a grievance connected with it. And when the general result is success, who cares about the squawks of the disgruntled? If a man can say he did not let his country down, and if he can live with himself, there is nothing more he can reasonably ask for”.</p>
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Following Joe’s return to the United States he was assigned as Commanding General of the Army Ground Forces. In March and April of 1945 he made a detailed inspection in Okinawa and the Philippines, and visited all divisions in contact with the enemy. After Lt. Gen. Buckner’s death Joe was assigned to command the Tenth Army on Okinawa. He there had the pleasure of accepting the surrender of Okinawa by the Japanese on 31 August 1945. In September 1945 Joe was appointed to command the Sixth Army at the Presidio of San Francisco.</p>
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At the time of Joe Stilwell’s death in October, 1946, many statements were made by prominent citizens the world over about this great soldier. Only one will be quoted and that from the Secretary of War.</p>
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“In the death of General Stilwell every soldier in the Army has lost a faithful friend.</p>
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“His brilliant record in the China-Burma-India Theater and in Okinawa marks him as one of the ablest military leaders that the nation has ever had. Above all else, he was a soldier’s soldier, ready and willing to endure all the risks and hardships endured by those who served under him. He never spared himself.</p>
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“The memory of this brave soldier will serve as an inspiration to all ranks in the Army for all time.”</p>
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Joe is survived by his wife, Winifred Alison (Smith), of Syracuse, N. Y., to whom he was married on October 18, 1910, and who is now living in the house that she and Joe built in Carmel, California; by three daughters, Mrs. E. F. Easterbrook, Mrs. W. E. Cox, and Mrs. W. R. Cameron; and by two sons, Lt. Col. J. W. Stilwell, Jr., and Mr. B. W. Stilwell, II.</p>
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<em>—C. L. F.</em></p>
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