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Stilwell Marks Arrival of Distinguished Americans

The U.S. Postal Service has made it official: the 10¢ Joseph W. Stilwell stamp will be the first in a new Distinguished Americans definitive, the first U.S. stamp series of the new millennium.

The stamp will be issued Aug. 24 in Providence, R.I., at the opening of Stampshow 2000, the American Philatelic Society’s annual show and convention.

The first new sheet-format definitive series in 20 years, the Distinguished Americans will continue with a 33¢ Claude Pepper stamp Sept. 7 in Washington, D.C. . In time, stamps of the new series will replace the current Great Americans in all required denominations.

Banknote Corp. of America produced the bicolored stamps using intaglio for the line-engraved look of the portraits, but with colored framelines, inscriptions and names printed by offset.

The stamps were illustrated by Mark Summers, who has produced a number of designs for the series. Art direction, design and typography were provided by Richard Sheaff.

BCA printed 100 million of the 10¢ stamps in 20-stamp panes — not the 50-stamp panes originally indicated for this issue. That’s a new format for low-value lick-and-stick U.S. definitives.

The stamps were printed in offset red and intaglio black on prephosphored type I paper at Brown’s Summit, N.C.

The USPS technical specifications for the issue make no mention of any text in the pane margins to explain what made Joseph Warren Stilwell a Distinguished American.

Born in 1883, Stilwell spent most of World War II as Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff in China and Commander of U.S. Forces in China-Burma-India during 1942-44. He died in 1946.

Stilwell had one of the toughest jobs of any WWII general. He was responsible for keeping China in the war against Japan, while covering a vast theater of war run by three political entities, each with its own interests and goals. These often conflicted.

A keen appreciation of China’s problems, gained during 13 years of service there before WWII led to Stilwell’s appointment as Chiang’s chief of staff in January 1942. His mission was to “improve the combat efficiency of the Chinese Army.” However, additional responsibilities reflecting U.S. and British interests, as well as those of China, put him in an impossible position. He not only had to fight the Japanese, but was torn between conflicting loyalties and responsibilities — a situation not helped by his brusque, no-nonsense manner, which earned him the nickname “Vinegar Joe.”

By the time of his recall in 1944, Stilwell had established training centers in China and had laid the groundwork leading to the opening of the Ledo Road, which ended the land blockade of China.

Chiang acknowledged his important contributions toward improving China’s ability to resist the Japanese by renaming China’s land lifeline the “Stilwell Road.”

Although the route fell into disuse following WWII and the rise of the People’s Republic of China, there is talk of reopening the Stilwell Road in the future.