OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 1: Front Matter

Previous discussions of Mills, Mills, and Brunner 2002 are these:

OSS CBI Photobook 15 - Southwest China, 1945- Reconnaissance, Part 2, Is this "Frenchie?"

Nationalist Warlords, Ambivalent Warlords, Commies, and Americans (This is about related material in the R. Harris Smith book.)

Looking for Log in All the Wrong Places

I can find no citation for the front jacket image. Was it of the Yellow River Bridges Mission of August 9, 1945? Or was it of another mission, earlier in the summer?

Who took the photo? Pfc. Eugene Zdrojewski, Field Photo? Or Captain Zarembo? Or Frenchie? Or members of another Team?

This scan of the back jacket image shows guys under awnings in a boat. What is the location - perhaps Kaifeng, city of canals? 

We've looked at photos of Kaifeng before, here, then here as well, and also here. 

Francis Mills's Acknowledgements begin with the reason this book was written when it was:

Preparation of this book was started in 1985 when the CIA declassified many of the secret reports prepared by commanders of Special Operations teams of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), with details about the guerrilla wars they conducted in mainland China against the Japanese Expeditionary Army during  1945 . . 

Chinese place-names, common and proper nouns, and other terms that we run across at G&C are spelled in English in different ways, for example Peking/Beijing. John W. Brunner's Preface includes mention of the nineteenth-century Wade-Giles system of Romanized transcription of Mandarin to English:

At the time when the events in this book took place, the most prevalent practice was to use the Wade-Giles system . . . Because the pertinent documents and military maps of the period generally used this system, that is the system that will be used here.

We are doing that here, too, because we are looking at all this primary material. So far, the only place-name for which I routinely give two spellings is Sian/Xian.

The Introduction explains that Francis Mills was

. . . in charge of Special Operations in the large area of China north of the Yangtze River, extending north to . . . Peking. In this story he describes the operations in North China and also tells about the expansion of other guerrilla attacks in the southern half of the country that were so effective against the strong, clever, ruthless and barbaric Japanese Expeditionary Army during the last year of the war . . . the . . . Japanese Army of about one million men that had occupied and controlled the eastern area of China extending about 300 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.

More detail is found in an online essay about the book; here are the first three paragraphs from that essay's "About the Author" section:

In 1943, as an Army Major in the Field Artillery, Frank Mills volunteered for overseas duty with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After training in Special Operations, he was ordered to London to join the combined Special Forces Command of British, French and Americans, to support Resistance efforts in Europe as part of the Allied invasion of France. 

 With OSS Special Forces Detachment 101, he landed in the D-Day Invasion with advance elements of the First Infantry Division on Omaha Beach. He coordinated French Resistance activities with the military operations of First Army as the Allied invasion forces went ashore and moved through France.

 When the German forces had been driven out of France in late 1944, he was named OSS Chief of Special Operations for the Central Field Command in China. In that capacity he was in charge of all OSS guerrilla warfare against the Japanese Expeditionary Army in the area extending about 1,000 miles north from the Yangtze River and along the Yellow River.  He remained at that command until September, 1945.

Did Francis Mills meet Albert Robichaud, our "Frenchie," in France? So far I've found no reference to that; we'll keep on the alert for clues. Next up: Chapter 1, The China Situation, Background for War.

Still Camera on the National Mall, 1944

This is a second look back at a May 6, 2014 post of photos showing the OSS team training with cameras just prior to deployment.  The first look back, at the movie camera, is here.


November, 1944, The National Mall, Washington, D.C. – Our EJZ and a small group of buddies, having completed survival and tactical training on Catalina and crossed back to the East Coast by train, continue briefing at OSS offices in the Capital. Further outtakes from the post of May 6, 204 include several photos of a still camera, of which this is the most clear:

With the help of kind friends we have identified this as a Graflex Speed Graphic large-format press camera.  The "Anniversary Speed Graphic" of 1940-1946 is described  No grey metal exposed, satin black with chrome trim. Wartime model: no chrome. Bed and Body track rails linked, allowing focusing of wide angle lens within body. Solid wire frame viewfinder. Trim on face of body is found only on top and sides.

"Anniversary Speed Graphic"

as described on the Graflex.org site.

The Graflex FAQ has all the details, after starting off with an iconic image of a c1940s press photographer, just as is shown in Hollywood movies of the time.  From the FAQ:

The Speed Graphic camera has two shutters - focal plane and in-lens; three viewfinders - optical, wire frame and ground glass; interchangeable lenses; a rise and fall front; lateral shifts; a coupled rangefinder; and a double extension bellows adaptable to lenses from 90mm to over 300mm.

The Speed Graphic looks complicated, but is one of the simplest and most flexible cameras made. Afflicted by a ``Rube Goldberg'' variety of features - three viewfinders! - you prove your skill everytime you use it. Nothing in the Graphic is automated; if you don't pay attention you can double expose, shoot blanks, fog previous exposures or shoot out of focus images. However, once you get used to it, it is amazingly easy to use.

. . . In 1940, Graflex announced the Anniversary Speed Graphic with Kodak Anastigmat (or the then all-new Ektar) lens. The new features included the coupled rangefinder and flash solenoid to use the then popular flashbulb. The bed would drop past horizontal, allowing the use of the new wide angle lenses. . . The Speed Graphic was the still camera of World War II. . . 

The Graflex Speed Graphic is still in use and has fans.

Graflex Speed camera owned by a professional photographer

From a fan comment at photo.net:  A lot of American photographers (and others) used the Graflex Graphic cameras, which are large format sheet film cameras that were equipped with the finest lenses of their days. The large format plus the best lenses and fine-grained film resulted in tremendously sharp and obscenely detailed pictures with wonderful tonality. No digital camera will get you images with a comparable high resolution.

The same fan comments once more, mentioning things that stir the childhood memory:  Add fine-grained film and you get stunning, sharp and detailed pictures with extreme resolution. I guess not even the most expensive digital back available today will beat such a large format negative in terms of details and "megapixels" -- to say nothing of "bokeh" and the nice, diffused look of large flash bulbs. . .And of course the film wasn't processed by the local one-hour photo minilab with a bored high-school-age minimum wage worker, but by dedicated professionals with decades of experience (Capa's misfortune was caused by an excited and new lab technician... I always wonder what happened to him).

Bokeh is a term new to me; Wiktionary defines it as a subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of an image. . .   Sounds disturbing!  And it sounds like something not desirable in reconnaissance phototography. However, on looking again at old family photos, I'll see if anything of that description strikes me.  Can the photographer regulate how much bokeh enters into an exposure?

As for the nice, diffused look of large flash bulbs, that look is all over the interior shots of old family photos and wedding photos. Plus I remember standing often in an arranged group shot, the heat and light of JPZ's giant floodlights on stands full in all our faces.

Robert Capa's misfortune, mentioned by the fan, was that his images of the D-Day landings were almost all destroyed by a lab tech under pressure to rush the processing while unfamiliar with all the details of the film he was handling.  From a June, 2014 Vanity Fair article: Banks had put Capa’s films into the drying cabinet as usual, but was so frantic he closed the door with the heat on high, believing that would speed the process. Without ventilation, the heat melted all of the emulsion off the film.

The Graflex Anniversary Speed Graphic shows up in the Photobook in the hands of various team members - EJZ, Frenchie, and the third guy who shows up all the time but whose name we still do not know.  Now that we have seen clear pictures of this and the movie camera, and had some names to associate with them and some of their parts, we can notice them more reliably while looking through the photos in the Trove. That is the hope, anyway.

Movie Camera on the National Mall, 1944

November, 1944, The National Mall, Washington, D.C. –   Our EJZ and a small group of buddies, having completed survival and tactical training on Catalina and crossed back to the East Coast by train, continue briefing at OSS offices in the Capital.

The Photobook, page 7, as well as certain outtakes related to it, show them on the National Mall practicing with the camera equipment they will be taking to China.  That post includes several photos of a certain movie camera, of which this one is the clearest:

Kind friends have identified it for us as a Cunningham Combat Camera. The Imperial War Museum has a good example.

From the IWM blurb:  Made from magnesium, it was a lightweight design which made it ideal for filming live combat footage. Features included special grip handles and a rifle stock which ensured it was steady enough for hand-held use in the field. It was electric-powered and ran off small batteries, had a four-lens turret and lenses robust enough for use in tough conditions.

Y.M. Cinema Magazine published several good images of this camera, such as this one:

From their article:  The camera excelled in its usability and simplification. Changing the film magazine was allowed on a push of a button, and the focusing mechanism was pretty sraightforward and simplified. Choosing the frame rate was done by a convenient switch. The options were 16, 24, and 32 frames per second.

American Cinematographer has an excellent short video up describing the Cunningham and showing how it works. They flip all the switches, push all the buttons, and let the viewer look through the viewfinder.