Singular Honor

China reserves its monuments for communist heroes, but it has made an exception for Gen. Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the World War II commander of American troops in the China-Burma-India theater. The cliffside building where Stilwell worked and lived in Chongqing has been reborn as the Stilwell Museum, the first and only museum in China dedicated to an American. It marks a small attempt to set the record straight on the role of U.S. troops in China during World War II. Until very recently, Chinese have been taught that Mao Tse-tung’s communist rebels were alone in battling Japanese invaders during the “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japan,” and history books have ignored Stilwell and the thousands of American soldiers and pilots stationed in China.