OSS CBI Photobook 20, continued - Jump into Action, continued

 

 The second half of Page 20 includes several portraits and a jump shot.

 

Boris Chu? That's my guess. He was among the four JACKALs in the first sendoff from Hsian to near Hsin-Hsiang. MMB page 47 specifically mentions him as interpreter for that subgroup, or "echelon." The photo MMB page 52 shows them in the C-47, and "Interpreter" is second from left. Sure looks like him, 'stache and all.

Boris Chu is also described on MMB page 60 as donning a uniform of the Puppet Army to guard the closed cart sneaking Paul Cyr into and then back out of Hsin-Hsiang for that meeting with General Sun.

 Now, who are these men?

 

 

 

 

In the previous post, we referenced MMB Chapter 2 with its listing of the second echelon consisting of Zarembo, Jackson, Eisenberg, Zdrojewski. Now let's move on to MMB Chapter 3, page 87, with a different listing: 

 

Zarembo

Robichaud

Zdrojewski

Sung Cho-ching

Hsu Teh-chung

Tien San-Shang.

 

Hypothesis: Eisenberg was switched out at the last minute and Robichaud switched in. Those last three names are names of three of the men in the photos above, and in this one from the previous post:

 

 

Our EJZ writes in his JACKAL Diary, or Team Log, that The first three were the remainder of Team JACKAL. Zdrojewski came as Jerry Welo's replacement. The three Chinese officers were from the First War Area and were to work with Team JACKAL.

 

The original Team Log is in a drawer somewhere in the National Archives. Col. Mills asked the staff there for a photocopy to use as source material when writing his book with Dr. Brunner. Robert Mills has very kindly sent to us the bound copy of the Team Log. 

 

We will see more of it as we try to correlate it with the book and the photo collection, plus other things that are stacked up around here.

 

 

OSS CBI Photobook 20 - Jump into Action

With Page 20 we begin to correlate images with further events in OSS Special Operations in China, our "MMB."  A previous post discussed both background and spoiler relating to MMB Chapter 2, which describes the insertion of JACKAL into its designated area of operations.  

Above is the top of page 20 of this photo collection. Paul Cyr, leader of Team Jackal, is quickly recognized just below the jumper patch. Dad is among the men in the photo at top left. All the others I do not know and so fervently wish I knew and could tell you.  I will just tell you what I know and identify what I guess.

If some reader somewhere on the InterTubes sees these and knows something, that reader is encouraged to comment.  Meantime I just drag the primary source material up into the Cloud to transmit it all to the next generations.

Dad is fourth from left there, so I wonder who took the picture and whether it is in Hsian or the later location, Hsin-Hsiang. Fifth man looks new, and sixth man looks familar from previous photos. The first three men certainly look committed to their cause, while their momentary states of mind are clearly visible on their faces.  Dad told me he "taught the Chinese how to place C4 to blow up bridges." The history books tell us that the Americans also taught the Chinese hand-to-hand combat of the style they had learned in that whole SAS-OSS school.

 

 

One of the Jackals, above, sports a captured Japanese helmet and sword-scabbard. He has a Japanese officer's sword. He also has a cigar, a battle-face, and emaciation, possibly from amoebiasis. His triumph, his victory, is sober. Is it Dad, or someone else? It is strange, so strange, that I cannot tell for sure. Could be Dad; look at his right hand, so broad. Looks like mine. But I do not think we will know for sure, this side of the River. 

If you enlarge this photo and look carefully at the topmost of the three buttons on this man's cap, you will see that it is star-symbol of Nationalist China.

Route of Team Jackal is the title of this map, per the legend. Enlarge the image to see, for example, that a "Drop Area" is indicated by a triangle. Initial Drop is triangle #1 near center bottom of the image.  Initial drop, on May 22 1945, was insertion of half of JACKAL to an area south of Hsin-Hsiang. Cyr, Chu, Welo, and Friele made that jump. Details of this operation make exciting reading in MMB p. 42-55.  

What happened was, Welo suffered a broken leg on that jump; Friele got the radio going and called to Hsian for a trainer plane to come evacuate him; they spent a few days leveling an airstrip for that trainer plane.

Meanwhile Paul Cyr was spirited into Hsin-Hsiang for a meeting with the local Chinese General Sun, who was an officer of the Puppet Government (i.e. being used by the Japanese.) Sun was also, the Americans were assured, a double agent really working for the Nationalists and cooperating with the Americans. That adventure is detaled in MMP p. 60-65, in a long excerpt from Zarembo's team diary, that part being written by him retrospectively on the basis of reports from Cyr, Chu, Welo, and Friele.

Why is that? That is because Zarembo was, along with Jackson, Eisenberg, and Zdrojewski in a second insertion, a jump on May 30.

 Why have we no photos taken by Welo? It's because all their camera equipment was destroyed when its container crashed on that first jump.  

So I think the photos on this Page 20 of the Photobook are either: a mix of pictures taken at the field base near Hsian and at Hsin-Hsiang, perhaps with some of them taken by Zarembo; or all from Hsin-Hsiang, which is either confused or settled by the actual jump photos that begin to appear on Photobook pages 20, 21, and 22.

 

Above is Major Paul Cyr. Background information on him is in MMB, p. 48-49.  We will be entertaining ourselves with a complete upload of his 1946 Saturday Evening Post story when we finish up with Page 20 in the next post.

We will be examing another source, in parallel with MMB, from this point. This is the team diary composed by Zdrojewski. It, too, like Zarembo's, begins with a retrospective summary of events from May 22 (insertion of first half of JACKAL) and May 30 (insertion of second half of JACKAL,) with Zdrojewski replacing the injured Welo as representative from the Field Photo section. 

They soon realize that there are 400 Japanese just to the north of them, and 10,000 more approaching from the southeast. 

 

 

OSS CBI Photobook 19, Town and Country

 The encampment outside Hsian/Xian, and the city itself, continue as the subjects of the photos.

Below, we see the carbine in some detail, as well as the rifle strap, here and here, which made it to Marilla and is now in the Trove.

 

Who is the soldier below? Do his descendants have this picture of their own Mom and Dad, or grandparents?

 

 

Visual depth is provided by the figures walking along this receding, curving road. What's that blob in the middle, on the side of the road?

Enlarged on-screen, it looks for all the world like a snopek, a pile of grain sheaves stacked so as to make rain sluice off instead of soaking in.

 

Grain and rain, like those fluffy clouds in the sky, are the same the world over and through time. We have considered snopki before now, on G&C.  Here is a Polish painting from 1893.

 

 

 

The Drum Tower, in Hsian/Xian, shows up once more. Enlarged, we can see that the photographer must be sitting in the back of a Jeep that has the windshield turned down flat.

 

 

That little kid shows up again, tending to his business, but this time we see more figures in the background.  Enlarged, the double doors on the building in the background show pretty clearly.

This grain is barley, I'd say, from the way the seed head, heavy with seed, curves down a little, and also shows, even in the blurry background of the photo below, the suggestion of the famous barley "beard."

Botanical illustration does help.

        

"Barley or millet" were the crops north of the Yangtze, reported MMB. Millet does look quite different:

On the next page, things get serious, with photos relating to the drop in Hsinhsiang described in Chapter 2 of MMB.

 

 

 

OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 4, Smashups and Shapeshifters

While the first drop of the advance team of JACKAL was happening, Captain Zarembo was sent to Kunming for supplies for the team. From the Team Log started by Zarembo, quoted on MMB 55:

" . . . One week later I returned, much worse for wear and tear but with the supplies firmly clutched to my military bosom - two C-47s loaded with containers, all packed and ready for JACKAL's second drop of men and supplies . . . "

The C-47 Skytrain was modified from the civilian Douglas DC-3 for military use "being fitted with a cargo door, hoist attachment and strengthened floor - along with a shortened tail cone for glider-towing shackles, and an astrodome in the cabin roof." The C-53 came along a bit later; it was bigger, with greater capacity. But the C-47 had a couple of advantages: it could do with a shorter runway, and American industry produced a lot of them:

"More than 10,000 aircraft were produced in Long Beach and Santa Monica, California, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Between March 1943 and August 1945, the Oklahoma City plant produced 5,354 C-47s."

These were the planes of the Flying Tigers, of flying The Hump, and of the Berlin Airlift.

From the American Airpower Museum:

 

 

The airplane had a crew of 4 and deluxe cabin accomodation, as we have already seen. Here is a shiny cargo bay from one they have at Hendon Aerodrome.

 

 

 

So Cyr, Chu, Friele, Robichaud, and Welo on landing dealt with smashed rifles, smashed cameras, Welo's smashed-up leg, and reports of multitudes of Japanese search parties detailed to look for them, so that "out of twenty consecutive days" they must make "fourteen daily moves." All around were Japanese troops, Chinese troops, Chinese Puppets-of-the-Japanese troops, and Chinese troops who don Puppet uniforms to go mingle with the CPoJ troops, in emulation of their commander Sun Ping-Ying,  publicly a Puppet, but secretly not, sort of like the Scarlet Pimpernel but with a different style of poetry.

Cyr traveled by means of a closed-in, horse-drawn cart to meet with Sun Ping-Ying in Hsinhsiang/Xinxiang. We have seen a cart like that in a photo on Photobook Page 17:

The SCR-694 radio mentioned on MMB 65 as being repaired by Welo and Friele is a kind we have seen before.

Want one? They are available.

This advance team came to an understanding with Sun Ping-Ying about chain of command with the First War Area and the Americans; they agreed that all would wait and strike together according to an agreed-upon plan; they reconnoitered some potential targets in the city.  

Finally, they began to understand and get used to the psychological situation. In Europe as Jedburghs they had fought alongside "resistance groups that had feelings of patriotism in fighting for their countries against the Germans. Chinese resistance was motivated by individual hatred toward the Japanese invaders for their barbaric and savage treatment of the populace, and not for . . . their country, China, which wasn't really an effective country organization or entity at all because of the Civil War in progress." (MMB 66) That reads to me as a requirement for them to go without hearing the signals of national patriotism to which they were accustomed, and learn to concentrate on an array of different-sounding signals, to make possible after all their mutual goal.

Will the signal-to-noise ratio be constant, or even knowable?

    

 

 

 

 

 

OSS CBI Photobook 18

We took the book apart in order to scan the pages. Now it is clear that the paper on which the prints were pasted has become fragile over the decades, so that when the scanning job is done we will probably not rebind it. Do not worry overmuch: I am putting each page into a plastic sleeve with a page-number label fixed to the plastic.

 

Page 18 scan, top half:

 

 

 

 

Zoom in, below, to see the window details of the eatery at #329.  "In Bounds United States Armed Forces."

 

So is this one of the "workhorse" DC-3s mentioned in MMB, Chapter 2?

 

 

 

 

Photobook page 18 scan, bottom half:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dopp Kit sitting on the end of the bench is one of bajillions issued to GIs in WWII. The name comes from Charles Doppelt who in 1919 patented the design.

A Dopp employee and nephew to Charles Doppelt, Jerome Harris, worked for the company for decades, eventually driving innovations himself. An interview with his son includes discussion of the WWII experience in Europe of Jerome Harris.

Found while looking, and failing to find, an image of Charles Doppelt or his Chicago factory, the image below, which is pretty famous. If an attribution is to be found, I would like to have it. No Dopp kit is in sight, but there has to have been one to hold that nice shaving brush. I also like the gas-can table de toilette.

 Next post, we return to Chapter 2 of OSS Special Operations in China.