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.