(5 of 20)
I saw Chou again seven days later in Hangchow, one of the beauty spots of China. Nixon and Chou strolled over one of the several bridges spanning the lake with affected nonchalance. Nixon, who noticed me first, pointed me out to Chou, and I could not catch what he said. Chou said, "But that is Teddy White. He has not come back to China since the liberation." I was angry; I had tried without success for 20 years to reach Chou En-lai and to revisit China, so I shot back: "It's not my fault I haven't been able to come back." At which Chou En-lai shot back a jest in Chinese. My command of Chinese had by then rusted away; the official interpreter said that Chou En-lai had responded, "Maybe it's both our faults."
It sounded like the Chou En-lai I had once known, who was amused by Westerners' efforts to understand China, yet appreciated the effort. He might have accepted the Kipling phrase —"East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." But I like the way he said it better: "Maybe it's both our faults."
Chennault and the Kunming Whorehouse
After Pearl Harbor, Lieut. General Joseph Stilwell, U.S. Commander of the China-Burma-India theater, quarreled constantly with Chiang, whom he once described to White as "an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch." There was also a feud with one of his own men, Brigadier General Claire Chennault of the famed Flying Tigers, Commander of the U.S. China Air Task Force.
Stilwell and Chennault despised each other, but their feud was not merely personal. They fought over a conceptual difference about war, a conceptual difference which to this day splits all American defense and war plans: the concept of ground war as against the concept of air war.
I backed into the feud inadvertently. TIME had directed me in 1943 to write a study of Chennault, out of which they would carve the story that would run with his portrait on the cover. By then the Stilwell-Chennault feud could not be ignored.
I began by asking Chennault, off the record, where and how his great feud with Stilwell had begun. "That whorehouse of mine," he said obliquely. His first breach with Stilwell—over a whorehouse! Chennault's early strategy in 1942 rested on a strike force of fewer than 80 planes. But sometimes as many as half his planes might be grounded by accidents of casual copulation—ground and air crews both being hospitalized for infections acquired in Kunming's famous Slit Alley. Venereal disease reduced Chennault's combat effectiveness as if his planes had been bombed on the ground. Intolerable. Thus, since he could not pen up his young Americans in stockades, he must recognize their appetites, yet protect their health to keep his planes flying. Therefore Chennault had sent a U.S. Air Corps plane, with a medical crew aboard, over the Hump to India, where twelve nondiseased Indian prostitutes had been inspected, medically cleared and recruited for the service of the China Air Task Force; and had flown them back in an American plane to our forward strike base, where the air and ground crews might dally with them and not be infected.
Stilwell had not authorized this, and exploded when he heard of it.