Special Section: In Search of History

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Stilwell was the theater commander; he was a puritan. Stilwell knew that the Japanese had whorehouses for their troops, the Prussians had whorehouses for their troops; the French had whorehouses for their troops. But not the U.S. Army, goddamn it; the U.S. Army would not fly whores across the Hump in Air Corps planes; it established no brothels for its men. Chennault wanted only to keep his planes flying and would do anything necessary to keep them in the air, to deliver his message with bombs. Stilwell had the morality of Oliver Cromwell—he was pure, absolutely pure, of graft, adultery, lying, thieving, or any transgression of the Ten Commandments. Such men served the U.S. Army in those days. Both were necessary—but Chennault had to close down his whorehouse.

Famine in Honan Province

"Of all marks on my thinking," writes White, "the Honan famine remains most indelible." It happened in the winter of 1943:

The scene was Honan, a province about the size of Missouri, but inhabited by 32 million peasants who grew wheat, corn, millet, soybeans, and cotton. Honan was a fine flat plain whose soil was a powdered, yellow loess which, when wet with rain, oozed with fertility. And which, when the rains did not come, grew nothing; then the peasants died. The rains had not come in 1942, and by 1943, Honan peasants, we heard in Chungking, were dying.

What a famine was, I did not know—nor did I know that the Honan famine of 1943 was one of the worst in modern history. But it sounded as if it would make a story. So, at the end of February 1943, I flew to North China with my friend Harrison Forman of the London Times, and won permission to travel the Lunghai railway from Paochi through Sian to the gap through which the Yellow River flowed and the railway ran. The Japanese, on the far side of the river, habitually shelled this gap by day. The station at the break, where we spent the evening, stank of urine, stank of shit, stank of bodies. All around us were acres of huddled peasants, bundles of flesh lying in the cold on the ground, waiting for the next train to take them east, to the rear area and food. Babies cried; but no one paid any attention, even if a baby was crying in the arms of a lifeless woman lying on the ground. Soldiers patrolled the mob, else they would have stampeded for the food or to board the trains that rolled at night.

In the morning a handlebar car was ready, too small a target for the Japanese artillery on the north bank of the Yellow River to shoot at. And thus, bundled in a soldier's padded robe, seated in the cold wind on an open pump-car, I traveled 30 miles that day as if I were a general reviewing his troops. But I was reviewing a famine.

There was, of course, much blood. First a man, lying by the rail line, still alive, crying, with his leg severed at the shin and the shinbone sticking out like a white cornstalk. He must have fallen under the wheels of the train. Then another man, still alive, his hip mangled and bloody. But the blood was not my chief distress; it was my inability to make any sense of what I was seeing. In a famine, where no one kills but nature, there are no marks on the body when people die; nature itself is the enemy—and only government can save from nature.

All day, along the railway tracks, as far as I could see, trailed an endless procession. They walked in