OSS CBI Photobook 24 - Goals, Gear, Guns, and Goofballs

 At Field Base near Hsin-Hsiang, negotiations about cooperation seemingly completed, missions involving rail sabotage are in the planning and preparation stage. The Chinese volunteers and their OSS mentors continue with their training and now we see them packing up arms for airdrop.  That's Cyr standing in the middle of that empty wrapper; behind all the men, up those few steps, is a pile of black duffel sacks ready to be filled for the drop.

Hey I thought you guys were spooks. Aren't you supposed to be keeping a low profile?

These two irregulars are sure living up to the designation. EJZ at left, and Berent Friele at right, are both smoking cigars. Did they get this from Robichaud/Frenchie? I wonder. We see that captured Japanese sword again; the combat knife; the pistol in scabbard with the signature leather leg-tie thing; the boots close up; a new thing: those black gaiters, which we will see again later in this post. Pretty interesting for an Orchard Lake altar boy! Friele models the captured Japanese helmet with those long chin straps they had; a Puppet army shirt worn over his USA shirt; again the gaiters.

 

Here we have Cyr trying to camouflage himself with shades, beard, and Puppet army duds. Boris Chiu, next to him, is looking pretty serious. I would too. 

 

Our Chinese language consultant sees a few words in the partially-obscured wall poster behind Paul Cyr:

I can catch some of the words on the painted wall in your picture. I see smoothly...and straight-on...and treasure (noun or verb).    Thanks, K.

So it is wartime propaganda, perhaps the equivalent of Keep Calm and Carry On. 

 

 

 

Something is exploding or exploded. What?

 

Now I wonder if the guy at left is Zarembo, the West Pointer. His diary is all in a consistantly humorous tone - see MMB55 ff - so maybe he likes organizing skits as well. For this ID I have nothing more to go on than this inference on the basis of personality. Let's all stay on the lookout for more clues.

The man on the left has excessive thoracic kyphosis and a shortened right leg. He stands with his right foot on a brick so that his back will not hurt from asymmetrical strain. Mills explains in MMB Chapter 1 the hatred of the Chinese for Tojo's sadistic invaders. The locals would get together and build an airstrip for American planes in one day (MMB Chapter 3) or they would fight if they were lame. 

 

These guys are going over the plans for a mission. Cyr, with his experience from his previous deployment in occupied France, set the parameters for map-making; Dad/our EJZ drafted maps according to Cyr's specifications. (I have a sheaf of them and will start posting them once I get them figured out.) Third from left is Boris Chiu with cigar; fourth from left is Paul Cyr with pencil. I think those black things on the table are flashlights. The window curtain is a piece of parachute, such as we can see on the back dust jacket of the MMB book. 

 

Exfiltration Followed By Infiltration

Last post we read the May 29 entry in the Team Log: At 0530 the trainer and six fighters arrived. 

The flight in this trainer plane took several hours. So indeed it was at night, and therefore was tricky in itself. A fighter escort of six indicates awareness that additional trouble could arise from the ground en route.  MMB78 has a photo of the pilot, Captain "1-B" Riley, sitting in the cockpit of that trainer plane with a pretty dark-looking sky all around.  Col. Mills writes on MMB77: The air landing and pickup operation was risky. Chennault didn't say whether his Fighter/Bomber group had done it before but I gathered that it was the first time for them. I remember the pilot well who volunteered and flew our mission. He was a brave man to fly and navigate at night, even with an escort of six fighter planes. As soon as it was light enough for the pilots to see, he would fly 400 miles into Japanese territory, locate and land on a hastily prepared dirt airstrip that he had never seen, load the injured man, fill his tanks with gasoline in cans brought along for the return trip, avoid attack by the Japanese, and then fly back to the base at Hsian!

The May 29 Team Log entry continues the tale: The trainer made a beautiful landing and within a half hour the trainer unloaded its cargo of carbines, 45s, and Tommy Guns with ammunition, took Jerry Welo on board with letters and information and was up in the air and on its way back to Hsian. 

(Again, note that this entry, penned by EJZ, was his transcription of notes by Zarembo and others.)

With the exfiltration of Welo done, the next day, May 30, is the day of infiltration of the rest of Team Jackal along with "44 bundles" of supplies and of arms to replace and augment  those lost in the initial drop. Two C-47 transport planes made their passes over drop field AFFIX. The map symbol for AFFIX is the numeral 5 and a triangle.

This operation is detailed in MMB 83-88. Four paragraphs concern our EJZ and the Log:

"Eugene Zdrojewski, the replacement for Jerry Welo, was Field Photo trained and, as it developed, he became a writer of sorts, keeping the day-by-day Team Log all the time JACKAL was in the field. Zdrojewski was young, about twenty I guess, but at least he had been parachute-trained in Kunming and I believe this was his first combat assignment. He was impressionable and his language in the Team Log reveals thoughts that most of us had but never expressed: fear, excitement, pride in the job and in JACKAL, his team. And the same spirit of adventure that I believe motivated all of us out there.

The Team Log was always guarded and placed in a separate container with incendiary grenades that could be ignited immediately if capture was imminent and it was reasonably secure with those precautions. I didn't know that JACKAL had kept a Team Log until Paul gave it to me after the war. If I had known, I would have stopped it because, as you will see, it is revealing and would have endangered our entire operation in North China if in Japanese hands, not to mention the lives of the team members and the hundreds of Chinese guerrillas who were working directly with them and protecting Team JACKAL. 

But the Log is important to this story and brings you closer to the attitudes and feelings of the team in the field. I don't know of any other operational teams in China that kept a log with this detail. The standard issue blue-lined paper from letter-size writing pads is now getting yellow and ragged with age, but Zdrojewski's handwritten entries in pencil script are clear.

I can picture him, sitting in one of the mud huts or in the rooms they had later in the walled compounds, writing down the day's events as they unfolded during the months to follow, probably just before climbing into his sleeping bag to grab a little sleep with his .45 pistol and grenades by his side and a lantern or candle or an Army issue flashlight lighting up the scene." 

We read about this operation in the Team Log, pages 8-11.

 

 

 

 

May 31 is the first day of EJZ authorship of the Team Log. That day will see them repairing and packing, and that night will see them disappear to a new location.

OSS CBI Photobook 23, Part 2

 Part 1 is here. 

Now we take a look at the bottom half of that page of the PhotoBook.

 

The vast, empty floodplain affords no cover.

 

See that little kid in the background? My initial scan, prior to adjustments, was so dark that he was invisible. As the image got lighter, he popped out of the darkness into view and scared me half to death. Then I laughed when for sure he said Boo!  This goes to show the truth of the Longmire quotation: Sometimes you have friends you don't know in places you've never been.

 

 Berent Friele fixes that radio again. Those distinctive and sturdy chairs are still being made. 

 

Paul Cyr is at the tailor's shop, where they measure him for some new britches that will make him completely blend in just like when he was in France, and be totally inconspicuous, invisible to the Japanese.  Right? They're only 400 miles into Japanese-held territory. And there are only 20,000 Imperial Japanese troops approaching right now. And finally, those Imperial spies in plainclothes, wandering around town looking for OSS guys, will be no problem to spot. Right?

We see an interesting table base, as well as another of those chairs.

Sturdy utility chairs with pegs are still being made in China. Friends brought some back from the mountainous country of Guangdong province:

 

 Do they spot an American plane? another drop?

 The JACKAL Team Log written up by our EJZ is in the National Archives. Robert Mills kindly sent me the bound photocopy that the MMB authors had the Archives staff make for them. We can take a look at a few pages from the .pdf version that I have converted to .jpeg in Preview.

Note that the entire Team Log is in EJZ's handwriting. As he explains on his first page, the first few pages, dated May 22 to May 30 1945, while in his handwriting, are transcribed from the Zarembo's diary, reprinted in MMB 55-65. Team Log entries after May 30 are of EJZ composition.

May 23: Boris Chiu rides off to HsienHsiang to arrange a meeting of General Sun with Paul Cyr:

May 24: Cyr takes his Bride-cart ride to the meeting.  See MMB63.

May 25:  . . . Maj. Cyr and Lt. Chiu began work on the city itself. First studying a map of the city, Lt. Chiu went out into the streetsw to "rub elbows" with the Japs and find important buildings and bombing targets . . . 

 

 May 26, 27, 28, 29: see MMB 74-76.

 

When we pick this up again we will get Welo out and EJZ in.

OSS CBI Photobook 23, Part 1 - Of Arms

We have scanned about a third of this collection of photographs. When they start to seem repetitive, some detail always pops out during the post-scan image adjustments, and that little detail poses interesting new questions.

Here is the top half of Page 23. 

What are those things stacked in that niche?  Spare roof tiles?

Seems like it. So: remember Dad's wine cellar in the Marilla basement?  When he needed wine racks to line one wall down there, he got himself some loads of terra cotta drain tiles. Terra cotta was used before everybody with a wet hayfield switched over to plastic pipe with holes in it. Now that this image has come up, his choice of material seems perfectly natural!

So they are hanging around in Hsinhsiang, negotiating with KMT General Sun, checking around for Tojo's soldiers, and trying not to look conspicuous even though they obviously are conspicuous. Here we have Paul Cyr wearing his KMT outfit while spying around with his field glasses.  See page 64 of MMB.

The negotiations bearing fruit, KMT soldiers continued to be seconded to OSS. This contingent has been issued at least two kinds of weapons, as we can see if we squint at what they are holding.

 

 

 

The man at the far left, sitting in what appears to be the third row, has a Thompson submachine gun. OF the many models developed over time, the M1928A1 (with the "drum magazine" iconic of 1930s gangsters) was followed by the M1A1 (with the 30-round rectangular magazine, such as we can see by the man's right arm) and the M3 "grease gun" (cheapest and so more abundant.)

 

Thompson M1A1

 

Also from that Wiki article: 

"Thompsons had also been widely used throughout China, where several Chinese warlords and their military factions running various parts of the fragmented country made purchases of the weapon, and subsequently produced many local copies.

Nationalist China acquired a substantial number of Thompson guns for use against Japanese land forces. They began producing copies of the Thompson in small quantities for use by their armies and militias. In the 1930s, Taiyuan Arsenal (a Chinese weapons manufacturer) produced copies of the Thompson for Yan Xishan, the then warlord of Shanxi province."

To return to our photo, the man at the left end of what appears to be the second row has a different weapon, a Browning Automatic Rifle.  From its Wiki article:

Browning M1919A4

We see the distinctive holes for air-cooling, such as we can make out in our photo. We see no tripod in our photo; maybe one will show up in a future one.

Notice the ammunition box sitting on the ground to the man's left. The men worked in pairs, with one shooting and one feeding the ammo belt evenly so as not to jam it. 

The last photo at the top of this Photobook page is of this serious man - another man whose identity we will never know. Did he survive this war, and the wars after this?

 

 

 

 

Mission Writeup in Saturday Evening Post, 1946, Part 4

 

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here. 

Part 3 is here.

 

First Lieutenant Tien Sen Shang, who lit the fuses as described, was on the list as member of the second echelon, or second drop - the list from the Zdrojewski Jackal diary we first saw in conjunction with our look at Page 20 of the Photobook. One of those photos is a photo of Tien. Which one?

 

 

Cyr describes Tien as having "sat down with his camera" as the fuses burned and the troop train approached. So it may be that Tien took the photograph we see on the dust jacket of MMB. 

 

Mission Writeup in Saturday Evening Post, 1946, Part 3

 Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here. 

 

 From an earlier post we bring forward this zoomed-in map of assigned areas near railroad bridges:

 

Northrup designed the P-61 "Black Widow" night fighter for the USAAF. The radar is in the nose of the airplane and the radar operator sits in a viewing area in the tail. Wikipedia has descriptions, schematic, and photos.