Glimpse of an Epic

Last week the pictures arrived, and U.S. citizens could see for themselves how Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell, 59, had looked on his heroic cross-country march from Burma last May.

They could see him in old khaki pants and shirt and a battered campaign hat, leading his company of 117 men & women up a single-file jungle path (see cut). They could see him sitting on a log repairing his tommy-gun with expert fingers--cigaret between his lips, his big American feet dangling awkwardly from skinny shanks, hat tilted back.

He did not look like a Napoleonic commander, performing a miracle of military endurance. He was only a plain, lanky, thin-lipped American, with a weather-beaten face, a dour smile, a sunburned neck: he might have been a hunter in the backwoods of his native Florida. But like the plain, lanky Americans who hacked the nation out of the wilderness, "Vinegar Joe" had created an epic--out of sweat and weariness and malaria, of retreat and desperation and endurance. And last week what he was doing for China (see p. 37) was worth all the noble and encouraging talk in the world.

For three weeks General Stilwell had led his little band through Burma's parched thickets, teakwood forests and steaming jungles, across the Chindwin River, up mountain trails over 7,000-ft. Saijapao Pass and down into India. And it was Uncle Joe, oldest man in the crowd, who always led them. He acted as company commander, mess sergeant, guide, gun bearer, nurse. He kept the company at a dogged, fixed pace of 105 steps a minute; his men called it "The Stilwell Stride."

The U.S. remembered what he had said when he got his band, all safe, to India: "I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it." Looking at Uncle Joe's picture last week, the U.S. could feel more confident about retaking Burma and everything else.

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