Joseph Stilwell

Joseph Warren Stilwell was a United States Army general who served in the China Burma India Theater during World War II. An early American popular hero of WW2 for leading a column walking out of Burma pursued by victorious Japanese forces, his implacable demands for units debilitated by disease to be sent into heavy combat resulted in Merrill's Marauders becoming disenchanted with him. Infuriated by the 1944 fall of Changsha to a Japanese offensive, Stilwell threatened Chiang Kai-shek that Lend-Lease aid to China would be cut off. This led Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley to decide Stilwell had to be replaced. Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had been intent on keeping Lend-Lease supplies for fighting Communists, while Stilwell had been obeying instructions to get the Chinese Communists and Nationalists to cooperate against Japan. Influential voices such as journalist Brooks Atkinson viewed the Chinese Communists as benign and Stilwell as a victim of a corrupt regime. The ousting of Stilwell sparked the beginning of anti-Chiang Kai-shek feeling among US policymakers that culminated in the 1947 ceasing of American assistance to Nationalist Chinese forces in the Chinese Civil War. Admirers of Stilwell saw him as having been given resources and authority that were so insufficient, his task was virtually impossible. Critics viewed him as a hard-charging, but ultimately unprofessional officer whose failings contributed to the Loss of China.