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Stilwell the Patriot: Vinegar Joe, the Brits, and Chiang Kai-Shek. By David Rooney. London: Greenhill Books, 2005. 256 pages. $34.95. Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel David M. Toczek, currently assigned to NATO's Allied Land Component Command, Heidelberg.
If you were to ask an informed American about personalities in the China- Burma-India (CBI) Theater of World War II, the names Joseph Stilwell, Claire Chennault, Frank Merrill, and Chaing Kai-Shek would most likely be among those mentioned. Ask an informed member of the British Commonwealth the same question, however, and you would probably get a significantly different list, aside from Chiang, with names like Louis Mountbatten, Archibald Wavell, William Slim, and Orde Wingate. Although all the figures mentioned appear in American historical standards like Stilwell and the American Experience in China and the US Army Green Books, the British usually serve as a backdrop of supporting characters. In Stilwell the Patriot: Vinegar Joe, the Brits, and Chiang Kai-Shek, David Rooney seeks to address this gap in the historiography of the CBI by illuminating the often tense relationships between General Joseph W. Stilwell and his British coalition partners. Although the work does provide a British perspective to readers unfamiliar with the contributions of the Chindits, it falls short of the publisher's characterization as a "revelatory . . . new and meticulously researched biography."
Rooney brings both experience in and knowledge of the CBI to the work. As...