Kunming, Julia McWilliams Child, and Tad Nagaki

Sisterhood of Spies is an account of women in the OSS in the European and CBI theaters in WWII.  Author Elizabeth P. McIntosh discusses China in her Chapter 19, Over the Hump to China.  She notes that Julia McWilliams Child, of whom we have read mention in R. H. Smith's history, was stationed in the OSS HQ in Kunming from early1945.  From pp. 296-297 of the paperback edition:

At the same time that new OSS women were checking into Chungking's Green Gate, the OSS advance base in K'unming four hundred miles south of Chungking was also expanding.  I flew over the Hump in a storm-tossed flight with imperturable Julia McWilliams, who calmly read a book while all the rest of us were preparing to die. . . 

The OSS compound was located on the outskirts of town, surrounded by high mud walls.  Before the war K'un-ming had been a resort town the end of the rail line from Indochina where French colonials spent their vacations enjoying this invigorating mountain retreat, the sparkling sunshine, and the medieval ambience of the walled city itself.  To the north was a beautiful lake with a fleet of fishing sampans.  Towering above the city was West Mountain, the landmark for Hump and combat pilots nearing that welcome safe haven, K'un-ming Airport. K'un-ming was also the end of the Burma Road, closed from 1942 to early 1945 while the Japanese controlled that country.  Vital military supplies were now arriving aboard lubering trucks caked with red clay from Burma.

Most of the women at K'un-ming headquarters had special operational skills.  Julia McWilliams continued the important job of organizing Registry material, as she had done in Ceylon.  Reports were coming in constantly from OSS field missions that were gradually spreading out to China's coastal cities.  One priority target was the pinpointing of prisoner-of-war camp sites.  Later this specific intelligence data enabled OSS rescue teams to zero in on these camps accurately and liberate Allied prisoners held by the Japanese.

The liberation to which McIntosh refers is specifically the rescue of Allied military and civilian POWs held by the Japanese as quickly as possible after the Japanese surrender, before the POW camp commanders had time to kill them.

The mission undertaken by Tad Nagaki, a Nisei OSS commando who rescued civilian prisoners held at a concentration camp in Shantung province, provides an example.  From an account written up years later when rescuer and rescuees maintained their friendship when back in the USA:

Reports had reached American headquarters in China the summer of 1945 that Japan planned to kill all Prisoners of War (POW). To prevent the massacre, seven-man rescue teams that included medics, communications specialists, and interpreters were hastily organized to find and evacuate POWs in China, Manchuria, and Korea.  

Determined to make one last difference as World War II came to an end, especially since so many lives were at stake, Nagaki immediately volunteered for the mission. As the “Armored Angel” droned toward Weihsien Concentration Camp in the Shantung Province, he remembered how he almost didn’t get the chance. 

It's an excellent story.

Lake Dian and West Mountain; Kunming

An earlier Kunming post includes photos of OSS personnel there to train the Chinese.  One of them I think is our EJZ.

VDH Lectures

Scholar and farmer Victor Davis Hanson recorded six lectures on aspects of WWII, prepared according the same approach he took in writing his recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.  Instead of straight chronological narrative, he considers war in the air across the entire span of the conflict; next naval warfare ditto; next the ground wars; next artillery.  These four themes - air, water, earth, and fire - come naturally to a classicist and military historian; treating them in the context of WWII is highly effective.

Dr. Hanson's fifth lecture, People, discusses the cultures of the various combatants, how their cultures affected their thinking and induced them to act, and what were some of the results.  These ideas are helpful in trying to understand the very specific history we've been reading about here in recent posts:

Looking for Log in All the Wrong Places
Nationalist Warlords, Ambivalent Warlords, Commies, and Americans
Fighting Idealists Find Raw Cynicism
"The Chinese Puzzle" Considered With Some Source Material from the Hoover
Mysterious Letter from Chungking

The final VDH lecture, "Ends," concerns long-term outcome and assessment.  All these lectures are preceded by an introductory talk by Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, in which he gives the widest context, setting the stage for the VDH lectures.

The series is available as a free online course from Hillsdale, one of several on offer.

Mysterious Letter from Chungking

"The Chinese Puzzle" is the title of Chapter 8 in the second edition of R.H. Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency.  We've considered some quotations from that chapter here in the Cynicsm post, the Warlords post and the "Chinese Puzzle" post. 

In R.H. Smith's "China" folder of materials for his book is a typed letter, 1.5 pages long, dated "Chungking - Nov. 22, 1944.  It is unsigned. The salutation is:

                                                          Dear Mr. G.

[Chungking at this time was the Nationalist Chinese capital, the city of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, his globally-lethal Secret Police Chief General Tai Li, and their Koumintang Party.  In this letter, one "old China hand" is describing the situation to another such, the mysterious Mr. G.  An "old China hand" is a European or American, son of diplomatic, academic, religious, or commercial missionaries to China, who spent his youth in the country; for some of them Mandarin or Cantonese was the first language.  Smith discusses "old China hands" quite a bit in his Chapter 8, but as far as I can detect on very suspicious close reading, did not quote or paraphrase this letter in it.  So although it obviously must have informed Smith's understanding of the situation in China, it has remained mysterious since November 1944.  Here is a bit from the first paragraph:]

. . . There is so much that must remain unsaid and such a vast and complex field to cover-and I am so ignorant-that I hardly dare pretend to have anything to say about the China of today.  But of one thing I am sure- it is completely and radically different from the Pekin you knew and the life that was lead [sic] there when you were a young man. . .

[Here is a bit from the second paragraph of this letter of mystery.  I am looking at a scanned image of a yellowed sheet of typing paper bearing the characteristic grey typescript, output of a partly used-up typewriter ribbon:]

I don't know how to start or to end in describing the scene.  Indeed I'm not sure in can be described- that is, it is not consistent; . . . things are so fluid that they don't permit of conclusions as to pattern. . . In the first place the Chinese don't hate the Japanese and never have- they merely hope in some vague way , that the Japs will go away. . . Second, the Chinese have little, if any conception of nationhood.  And the Party [the unidentified writer here refers to the Koumintang  Party] has not appealed to the love of China, but rather insisted on devotion and loyalty to the Party and its leader- a narrow and limited appeal in any event and particularly sterile in recent years because of the "reactionary", or better, moribund leadership from the Gissimo down. . . Third, the soldier and the army are still the lowest in the social and intellectual scale.  there is no conscription; not one of the members of the government has suffered any personal loss of sons or brothers. 

[No skin in the game, and on purpose!  Contrast even the monarchs of medieval and Renaissance Europe as they went forth themselves, or sent their sons and Crown Princes, forth to battle the foe across the English Channel, for example. Whether their expeditions were defensive in nature, or venal attempts at territorial expansion, they put their own royal houses at stake.]

    On the contrary, all have profited hugely and are prosperous beyond their wildest dreams so that the great majority of government people, plus the traders, merchant and business man, doesn't [all caps, X'd over!] want the war to end. 

The young Chinese doesn't enlist; he pursues his studies.  Only coolies and forced conscripts join the army- they don't join- they are dragged off to a miserable life without enough food or clothing and with miserable quarters, etc.

[So imagine these specifically-trained Americans, come to defeat the Imperialist Japanese who had attacked their own country and also invaded, rampaging and doing murder, this ally China.  Some of these Americans descended from the Mayflower colonists, others from refugees crossing the Atlantic in steerage holds only forty years before, others, Nisei, sons of ethnic Japanese-American parents who loved their adopted country even as it did not yet love them back.  They rode, on ponies and trucks, or flew in, to find a thrall-and-warlord based feudal society enmeshed in complicated, opaque, and deadly strategic traps. Their mission was to help these guys fight the Japanese.  Okay, but. . . Just imagine it.]

Another point.  I said that the Chinese don't hate the Japanese- indeed they don't hate anybody.  Someone said here recently that there hasn't been a shot fired in anger by the Chinese since Dec. 8, 1941.  He meant merely, the Chinese decided then and there, it was our war and they would let us carry the ball.

[Those are two distinctly different points.  Some hate the murderous invader, of course: just remember Nanking.  But can they shoot back, or are they disarmed, starving, and powerless?  The Chinese who "decided" to "let us carry the ball" are  not the ones fighting, they are the ones not fighting, but protecting their localized power and commercial interests.]

          - quotations from a letter in the R. Harris Smith papers, Box 2, Folder 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 

I wonder who lent the original to our author, R.H.  Smith.  Below the last paragraph of typescript is a phrase in manuscript.  It just says Please return b 9.9.3.

"The Chinese Puzzle" Considered With Some Source Material from the Hoover

"The Chinese Puzzle" is the title of Chapter 8 in the second edition of R.H. Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency.  We've considered some quotations from that chapter here in the Cynicsm post and the Warlords post.  Here is another sample.  From Smith, p. 247:

OSS intelligence files at Chungking (conscientiously maintained by a jolly amateur chef named Julia McWilliams Child) bulged with reports about the incompetence of the Chinese military command.  In November 1944, when Japanese troops began an offensive that threatened Chennault's air bases, groups of OSS demolition teams were sent to destroy equipment that might be captured by the enemy.  A fifteen-man team commanded by a 25-year-old veteran of Detachment 101 discovered three huge ammunition dumps that held tons of arms and supplies.  They were told the equipment had been collected and hoarded for years against a crisis in east China.  With the Japanese only twenty miles away, the bungling Chinese Army commanders were still zealously hoarding the materiel.  The Americans were forced to destroy the entire stores only hours before the Japanese entered the town.

Since this entire blog is Amateur Hour, I'll give my take on this.  Bungling is a misdiagnosis.  Those commanders were not bungling, they were sticking with the program instilled in them by their entire warlord-owned culture: obey, be quiet, do not stand out; your warlord awaits his opportunity. Within that context, they performed their parts competently, according to their cultural algorithm.

A contrasting cultural algorithm can be discerned in the actions of the mechanics and farmboys in the US Army in Normandy, who on their own hook modified their tanks so they could roll right through those deadly hedgerows.

Chinese infantrymen with the Koumintang were treated like slaves.  H.R. Smith continues:

Other OSS officers were sickened by the treatment the Chinese government afforded its own troops.  An OSS doctor who helped select Chinese soldiers for guerilla training described the conditions in their army as a 'crime against humanity.'

Where could Smith have found that quotation?  Well!  We now possess scans of Smith's notes for this chapter, thanks to the work and help of the Hoover Institution Archives.  Thank you, Hoover pros!  Smith is quoting Stuart and Levy, from their 1965 Kind-Hearted Tiger:

R.H. Smith typescript described as "Stuart and Levy, 1965, p.347": 

 When OSS began to recruit Chinese soldiers for a second Commando group early in 1945,  [Note that our EJZ arrived in Kunming in early 1945, to train Chinese commandos.]   the surgeon general for the Chinese OGs (John Hamlin) found the Chinese troops from whom he was to select - "Their bodies were covered with standard thin cotton khaki trousers and tunics.  Some still had straw sandals.  Most were without footgear.  All were weak from marching and malnutrition. Many also had dysentery.

Said Hamlin, "We can't accept any of these men.  They're dying on their feet.  Even in trucks, I doubt if they'll last to Kunming. This is a crime against humanity.

In effect, selecting any of them for OSS training was saving their lives for it would mean shelter and decent food for the commandos who were to be trained.  When they reached Kunming, they were marched to their first real meal in months.  Some of them had never eaten meat before.

                            - R. Harris Smith papers, Box 2, Folder 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 

I am taking another look at this image scanned from G&C's OSS CBI Photobook, noticing the details:

That photo is included in the post OSS CBI Photobook 15 - Southwest China, 1945-Reconnaissance, Part 4.  The Photobook is here at Trove HQ.