"We Took a Hell of a Beating": General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell in Burma

Infantry Magazine, May-August, 2000 by Gordon Browne

As the column approached the river's edge, several native dugouts came paddling upstream as if summoned by some higher power, and were immediately put into service ferrying the column to the other side.

Once across, they started up the mountains. The three days of floating down the river had helped. They were rested. The climbing was difficult but not impossible. No sooner had they started up the steep mountain paths than the monsoon rains began, and climbing became extremely difficult. The trails were slippery and people repeatedly lost their footing. They were sick and tired and wanted the ordeal to be over.

In the late afternoon of the second day, exactly ten days from the start of their ordeal, they were met by a British civil servant who had with him the food supplies necessary to carry them the rest of the way into India. They had made it out, just as Stilwell said they would. Feeling safe at last, the people in the column began to change in attitude. As Jack Belden unhappily pointed out, "Before we were sort of homogeneous. A polyglot group hanging together to outwit fate. But once the outside world came in, almost everybody separated back into his or her past. That is the colonels became colonels again, the British became British, the Americans became Americans etc."

During one of the rest stops as they moved back into India, they were sitting by the side of the trail resting. General Stilwell turned to Jack Belden and in confidence told him that an American colonel had come to him with a list of names that he felt should receive medals and decorations for the retreat out of Burma. Silent for a moment, Stilwell finally stated that he just could not believe it and added, "They were just walking out trying to save their own lives and they wanted decorations."

In Time Magazine, Belden later wrote, "The iron-haired, grim, skeleton-thin Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell walked into India with a tommy gun on his shoulder at the head of a polyglot party of weary, hungry, sick American, British, and Chinese army officers, some enlisted men, Burmese nurses, Nagger, Chin, and Shan tribesmen and a devil's brew of Indian and Malayan mechanics, railway men, cooks, cipher clerks and the mixed breeds of Southern Asia. Though they were ragged and weary, everyone was in comparatively good health for so arduous a trip."

Gordon Browne is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and a veteran of the U.S. Army 2d Reconnaissance Squadron of the 7th Cavalry. He is a free-lance writer who recently published a series of articles on the subject of the Unsung American Hero. One of these heroes was highlighted in his article "A Fugitive Behind Japanese Lines: Private Leon Beck on Bataan, 1941-1945," which appeared in the May-August 1999 issue of Infantry.