When the mist was on the rice-fields an’ the sun was droppin’ slow She’d git ‘er little banjo an’ she’d sing Kulla-lo-lo!
—RUDYARD KIPLING
The situation in North Africa and Indochina was so critical by February 1942 that Clare undertook a three-month assignment to cover both theaters for Life. She had scant hope of reporting directly from the front, but at least she could round out her self-education in global affairs.
Arriving at La Guardia Marine Terminal on the eleventh, she found herself the only woman among a planeload of military and diplomatic personnel en route to the Middle and Far East. As luck had it, the officer she most wanted to interview was traveling with her. He was Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek’s newly appointed Chief of Staff, not to mention Commander of all American forces in the CBI (China-Burma-India) theater. In his fifty-ninth year, “Vinegar Joe” was a wiry, bespectacled figure with a peppery directness and a well-known dislike of publicity. Warily, he noted in his diary for the day, “Clare Boothe gets to ride the plane.”1
Stilwell’s intelligence aide, Colonel Frank Roberts, caught sight of her in the crowd and was instantly beguiled. “Watch yourself,” he thought with a married man’s conscience, “you’re up against something very big.”2
Outside, Clare saw a familiar shape bobbing on the waters of the basin. It was the Clipper beneath whose star-spangled wings she had swum off Wake Island six months before. But the formerly sleek, silver flying boat had been transformed into a bulkier-looking warbird, camouflaged with wavy whites and grays. She understood that, once airborne, it would resemble “a giant scudding cloud.”3
In its sameness yet fundamental difference, the great plane seemed to symbolize the metamorphosis that Clare herself had undergone since her first sight of bombs dropping on Brussels. During the coming weeks she would gain some knowledge of desert and jungle warfare, and of the frustrations of a fractured Allied command. But not all of her experiences would be novel enough to translate into inspired writing, or to keep boredom at bay.
On March 30 Life ran Clare’s first dispatch, headlined BY CLIPPER TO AFRICAN FRONT. The subhead, over a photograph of a pensive author that showed the tranquil beauty of her eyes, read, “LIFE’s War Correspondent Crosses South Atlantic with Vanguard of U.S. Reinforcements.” But the text amounted to little more than a dogged travelogue of hops and delays. It was enlivened only by her brief description of standing “submarine watch” at the pilot’s request, searching the ocean beneath “for the long dark shapes that are prowling wolfishly in our territorial waters.”
Six other pieces were to appear at sporadic intervals through midsummer: “U.S. General Stilwell Commands Chinese on Burma Front,” “Brereton,” a portrait of the head of the Tenth U.S. Air Force in India, “Burma Mission” (in two parts), “The Battle for Egypt,” and “The A.V.G. Ends Its Famous Career.”4 The first two were workaday profiles, while the last were rendered dry by censorship and lack of cooperation from the American Volunteer Group’s fanatically daring leader, Colonel Claire Chennault. Only Burma, in its colonial death throes as the Japanese closed in, afforded Correspondent Boothe the kind of dramatic personal experience that excited her imagination.
A chance encounter at Stilwell’s Lashio headquarters led to the one big scoop of her trip. Going up a lamplit staircase on the evening of April 5, she met the general coming down. They had not seen each other since their shared crossing of the South Atlantic. He was smoking a cigarette in a long black holder and energetically chewing gum at the same time.
“Hello, hello,” he said brusquely. “Burma is no place for a woman.”
Despite Stilwell’s manner, there was no hostility in his voice. Clare had dutifully avoided mentioning him in her Clipper article for reasons of security. She started to protest, but he was already halfway down the stairs. At the bottom he turned. “Tomorrow I’m driving to Maymyo. If you can get up that early you can join me—on the Road to Mandalay.”5
Shortly before dawn the next morning, they set off together in a rattly old Ford for the five-hour drive to Burma’s summer capital. The sun came up as they careened along a dusty, curving road, fringed with tamarisk, bamboo, and banyan trees. Through a hot mist its dim rays revealed the gray outlines of needle-spired pagodas. As the day brightened, they turned from pink to rose to gold and finally chalk white.
An aide entertained them most of the way with stories of contretemps among the three Allies at the Toungoo front, causing Clare to ask herself, if not Stilwell, “Why is an American general leading Chinese armies in Burma?” And why was Chiang Kai-shek relinquishing command of his own troops to a foreigner—albeit one who spoke their language? She soon found out the answers. Chiang wanted American muscle to help him free China, while President Roosevelt’s prime aim in sending Stilwell to the CBI was to keep the Japanese out of India.
By mid-morning the party reached their destination in the Shan hills, where the air was soft and balmy with the scent of petals. “Florally, at least,” Clare noted, “East and West meet in Maymyo.” Poinsettias and roses, eucalyptus and larkspur, frangipani and honeysuckle grew side by side. Purple bougainvillea covered an old red-brick mission that served as U.S. Army headquarters.
In the mess she had lunch with Stilwell and some thirty other senior staff. Among them was Colonel Roberts, already infatuated after having escorted her in Brazil, Cairo, and Calcutta. Their conversation did not yield much hard military information. Somebody noticed that the strawberry shortcake was made with stewed fruit and asked, “What the hell goes on here?”
Roberts explained that bombed-out refugees from Mandalay were streaming into town, bringing cholera with them.
“You boys have eaten your last fresh food,” said a medic.
After lunch Stilwell, ignoring Clare, left to meet with Chiang and Britain’s General Sir Harold Alexander. He wanted to sell them his idea for entrapping the Japanese at Pyinmana. Frustrated, Clare rounded up a photographer and continued forty miles south to Mandalay. From a considerable distance she could see thick curls of smoke, and as the jeep drew closer, a smell of seared and rotting flesh assaulted her nostrils.
The legendary city was a scene of utter desolation. Monasteries, houses, and bazaars had been leveled to a mass of charred timbers and twisted roofs. Thebaw’s Palace survived, along with parts of the fort that had served as Government House. In its moat lotus pads floated on hot, green scum. As she walked about the perimeter, Clare saw the most chilling sight of all: babies’ bottoms “bobbing about like unripe apples … gray naked breasts of women … and the bellies of men—all with their limbs trailing like green stems beneath the stagnant water.”
Buzzards and carrion crows wheeled overhead. She learned that most of Mandalay’s 150,000 inhabitants were dead or had fled, except for several thousand entrapped in rubble. “Here and there lay a charred and blackened form swaddled in bloody rags, all its human lineaments grotesquely fore-shortened by that terrible etcher—fire.” Fewer than thirty live people were visible in the smoldering streets: a group of Burma Rifles, some native cyclists, and a flock of Buddhist priests in orange silk robes, carrying tattered black umbrellas.6
Back in Maymyo for dinner, Clare asked Stilwell if he had managed to sell his entrapment plan. “Yep,” he replied, “everybody took it right out of the spoon.”
“That’s nice, but—will it last?”
Roberts kicked her ankle beneath the table.
“Nope,” the general went on. “It won’t last long.” All they could do was play for time, and wait for RAF and AVG reinforcements to buttress their Indian and Chinese flanks, while Brereton’s Flying Fortresses bombarded the Japanese in Rangoon. Burma was the key to the whole Pacific war, Vinegar Joe insisted. Then he laughed. “But every general thinks the front he is on is the most vital.”
Clare with General Stilwell and the Chiangs, Maymyo, April 1942 (Illustration 37.1)
Clare sat up late in the liquor-free mission lounge eating peanuts with Frank Roberts before the fire. Huge, silent mosquitoes circled the room, waiting to pounce after lights-out. The mild-mannered colonel, professorial behind thick glasses, talked of imperial Burma, and the irony that Kipling had written “The Road to Mandalay” without having seen it. He said that whole lines of the poem, about a soldier’s yearning for a beautiful girl he was obliged to part from, kept coming back to him, “pregnant with new, unhappy meaning.”
Later, just as Clare was climbing into bed, she heard Frank call out to her from the landing. “The Japs have attacked Ceylon, and bombed some places in India.”7
Two days later she was typing notes in her room when a siren summoned everyone at Maymyo headquarters into slit trenches in a nearby grove. As she took shelter, Clare heard the steady hum of aircraft engines approaching, and in a patch of blue sky between the trees she saw what looked like twenty-eight “little white birds” flying in perfect formation. “They’re right overhead now,” Frank Roberts shouted. “Here it comes!”
Clare in a Burma trench with Frank Roberts, April 8, 1942 (Illustration 37.2)
More terrified than she had ever been, Clare burrowed animal-like against the muddy sides of the pit.
There was a long, long whine like the whistle of an onrushing train in an interminable tunnel. I closed my eyes and dug my chin into my breast, hunching my shoulders about my ears, as shuddering blast after blast tore the earth and air and woods all about us. And then the thrum, thrum, thrum faded and there was an awful silence.
My insides had not stopped quivering, but my hands had when we came out of the trench on the all-clear … Until you’ve heard death scream in shell or bomb through the insensible air, impersonally seeking you out personally, you never quite believe that you are mortal.
Right across from the mission several houses were in flames. A five-hundred-pounder had landed in the road, making a crater thirty feet deep.8
That afternoon Clare went to see General Alexander in his Victorian-style house on a hill outside town. She was greeted by a turbaned servant who showed her to a terrace overlooking immaculate gardens. There she found the veteran of Flanders and Libya sipping pink gin. He was dressed in a robin’s egg blue, Indian-style flannel bush jacket that matched the color of his eyes.9
He referred with Harrovian casualness to the morning’s assault—“Everything all right your way?” Then he escorted her to lunch at a table set with silver and exquisitely arranged flowers, and talked with utmost candor of his plans. “We will hold Burma as long as we can.”
Unlike Stilwell, Alexander was ready to admit that the country was strategically doomed. What was important was saving India. He said he would fight as hard a delaying action as “your MacArthur” had in the Philippines, destroying Burma’s oil fields if necessary, scorching the earth behind him and retreating to the western mountains to fight a guerrilla war. Tanks were useless in this terrain. “I’m getting my units into native transportation as rapidly as possible.” And he was as willing as Hannibal to use elephants, if he could get them.
Clare asked, “How are we then going to lick the Japs in this part of the world?”
“You always forget,” Alexander replied, “people who are not militarists always forget, that Japs have their troubles too.” The enemy’s lines were already overextended. They did not have the capacity to replace lost planes quickly, and would soon have to cope with the monsoon.
Clare pointed out that flood rains affected the Allies as well.
Alexander’s eyes blazed, but he was thinking of the war elsewhere. “What happens out here is only secondarily important … We’ve got to beat the Hun first. He’s the real enemy. Never forget that.” Only when Germany was crushed could America concentrate wholly on the Pacific theater. The Allies would help by sending “everything we have from the Near East. Russia will then be free to attack from Siberia.”
In her account of the interview Clare wrote, “I thought: ‘Where a soldier’s heart is, there is his battlefront also.’ Alexander’s heart, bitter with the vengeance he had brought off Dunkirk, lay not in the Burmese jungle fronts of Empire but on the White Cliffs of Dover.”10
Her piece on Stilwell was unrewarding by comparison. This was due as much to her growing reportorial laziness as to his unquotable Anglophobia and horror of news cameras. “You’ll never get a picture of me at any front drinking any cup of tea.” Had she been a Martha Gellhorn or a Margaret Bourke-White, Clare would have pestered him until he gave her something worth publishing. But the truth was that her interest in war was not so much journalistic as voyeuristic, even envious. She felt more at home with men in the field than with her own sex. Her thirty-ninth birthday, moreover, evoked telltale signs of melancholy. She turned down an invitation to spend an afternoon with Madame Chiang, pleading, “I’m tired,” and a chance to visit the Burma front lines—“I’d get fatigued.”11
Returning home via North Africa, Clare wrote at length about critical distances between water holes and oil dumps, maintenance of sand-choked machinery, and comparative equipping of British and German bivouacs. Perhaps realizing her prose was dry, she tried to liven it with dropped names, such as those of Sir Stafford Cripps, Special Envoy to the Indian independence movement, General Sir Claude Auchinleck, and Sir Arthur Tedder, RAF commander in Egypt, not to mention Cecil Beaton, now a war photographer, and the Cairo socialites Sir John and “Momo” Marriott.12 Her chronic propensity to settle for dinner-table chat, rather than do necessary legwork, led her to fill columns with inconsequential anecdotes and potted military history. Almost cynically, she fell back on long passages of overwriting, as in this description of the Sahara.
Its vast, blind, dry demonic face, pocked with scabrous holes, pimpled with jagged rocks, wrinkled with barren wadies, bearded like the jowls of a lunatic with dirty tufts of scrub or camels’-thorn, or here and there smooth and glistening cheekbones of a skull, seems … more real and terrible than the iron snouts of tanks. It is gluttonous alike of men and machines, insatiable alike of bone and iron, blood and oil … The tired, thirsty soldier cannot throw himself down and suckle at its breast, for its breast is dry and withered as an old crone’s.13
Such literary padding represented “War Correspondent Clare Boothe” at her garrulous worst. Confident that through Harry she could jockey for any amount of space in his magazines, she indulged a fatal facility with words, at the expense of her real gift, epigrammatic terseness. Asked at Lashio airport what the story of U.S. involvement in Burma was, she cracked, “Veni, Vidi, Evacui … We came, we saw, we got the hell out.”14
Though the trip failed to enhance Clare’s reputation as a reporter, it increased her store of military and foreign policy knowledge. It also enhanced her list of power players around the world. These last may not have told her all they could, but they were taken with her by now perfected combination of feminine wiles and intelligence. “Charming and lovely women are nature’s autocrats,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote after his first meeting with her in New Delhi.
Clare in turn thought that the coming man of Indian politics had the greatest mind, along with that of Buckminster Fuller, she had yet encountered. She admitted finding Nehru “beautiful” and said she had fallen “a bit in love” with him. They were to develop an epistolary friendship over the next few years.15
At Trinidad, her penultimate stop before returning to New York, she found herself the subject of a mini-crisis in Anglo-American relations. British colonial authorities, inspecting her briefcase when she deplaned for the night, found that she had broken the official censor’s seal placed on her notes before she left Cairo. Since much of what she had scribbled was either classified or disparaging of the British Army, the papers were confiscated and sent to His Majesty’s Ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax.16
Clare’s material, on closer scrutiny, was more mocking than subversive. She wrote of effeteness and lack of offensive spirit in the British command in Egypt, of General Ritchie sending his laundry from the front to Cairo, and of General Auchinleck living far from the battlegrounds on a Nile houseboat (unlike Rommel, whom she said the average Tommy admired for staying close to his troops). As for the vaunted pilots of the RAF, she disdainfully referred to them as “flying fairies.”17
On May 1, Clare was permitted to proceed to New York. Coincidentally or not, General Ritchie would be relieved as commander of the Eighth Army a few weeks later, thus clearing the way for the eventual succession of General Bernard Montgomery.