By JANE PERLEZ
CHONGQING, China — Early in his tenure as commander of the United
States’ World War II mission in China, Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell expressed a
grudging fondness for the damp, ramshackle capital deep in the country’s
southwest that would be his base for the next several years.
“Chungking isn’t half bad when the sun shines,” the plainspoken general
wrote in his diary, using the spelling of the period. But his tolerance for the
underserviced, refugeeladen town perched high above the Yangtze River did
not last.
A year later, he composed a fivestanza poem that went, in part:
“The garbage is rich, as it rots in the ditch, / And the honeycarts scatter
pollution.”
By the time General Stilwell was recalled to the United States in the fall of
1944, he grumbled that Washington was “as big a pile of manure as Chungking
was.”
Still, that unflattering take on Chongqing, now a metropolis of 30 million,
has not stopped a wellspring of local pride and scholarship about General
Stilwell, the American military hero who was sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help the Chinese battle the Japanese.
A museum dedicated to General Stilwell opened here more than 20 years
ago in the graystone, flatroofed house set in a garden of palm trees where the
general lived and worked. Scholars in Chongqing say that when William J.
Perry, then the defense secretary, came for the opening of the museum in
1994, his plane was the first American aircraft to touch down here since the
victory of the Communists in 1949.
In a sign of the official respect for General Stilwell, the Chongqing
municipal government runs the museum.
One of the epic personality battles of the war played out here: Two
stubborn and hostile men, General Stilwell and Chiang Kaishek, the
Nationalist leader, vied for the affection of the American president, even
though they were supposed to be allies. General Stilwell openly referred to
Chiang as “Peanut” and railed against his corruption, complaining that it left
conscripts starving in the streets of Chongqing.
Dark wood furniture, a sepiatoned wall map of the region in the
conference area and a spartan dining table where General Stilwell entertained
make it easy to envision what went on in the modest rooms. Other touches — a
gray steel Remington typewriter, a glassfronted bookcase behind the general’s
desk and a woodframed bed — are of the period but did not belong to the
general, according to his grandson, John Easterbrook.
The photos on the walls reflect the intrigue of a city that was not only an
encampment for American military and government advisers who dealt with
Chiang but also home to a small cell of Communists led by Zhou Enlai, later
the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, who stayed not far from
General Stilwell’s house.
It was, wrote Theodore H. White, Time magazine’s correspondent in
China, “as if the ablest and most devoted executives of New York, Boston and Washington had been driven from home to set up resistance to an enemy from
the hills of Appalachia.”