Part 1 in this series concerns the front matter of the book, which by the way I will refer to shorthand as "MMB."
Here in Part 2 we take a look at the first full chapter, "The China Situation - Background for War."
The approach is to set the scene in Kunming, site of OSS HQ, where Mills et. al. landed to kick off operations after being briefed.
MMB summarize the topics covered in the briefing:
civil war between the KMT and the Communists;
Imperial Japanese occupation of the eastern third of China;
Japanese difficulty in moving westward, due to terrain and Chinese resistance;
"puppet governments," i.e. Chinese localities, and their armies, set up by the Japanese and loyal to them;
unapologetic use by the KMT of American forces and materiel to consolidate KMT position and control the Communist incursions;
the position of the Communists:
US Army Air Force, the 14th (successor to Chennault's Flying Tigers) and the 10th;
complete inability of Chinese infantry to fight regular ground warfare, and the consequent reliance on guerilla warfare, for which the OSS trained contingents of them;
Navy Intelligence operatives; SACO; Donovan getting the OSS independent of SACO;
Tai Li, magnate of Chinese Secret Police.
Thus in a few pages we are given the background situation. Does it sound familiar to G&C readers? Well, I hope so! The R. Harris Smith papers gave us some nitty-gritty on these topics:
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
This first chapter also describes forcefully what we would call the lack in China of modern infrastructure, most painfully of roads and motorized vehicles:
MMB Chapter 1 also lays out some OSS organizational structure.
Col. Richard Heppner, Commander of OSS Detachment 202, HQ Kunming;
Functional branches, "carefully compartmented for information security:"
SI, Secret Intelligence, espionage;
SO, Special Operations, guerilla warfare and sabotage;
X-2, Counterintelligence;
MO, Morale Operations, psychological warfare;
MU, Maritime Unit;
Research and Analysis;
Field Photography;
Communications.
Finally, in this Chapter the authors emphasize that the support of Chinese people, military and civilian, made possible the success of OSS operations in China.
Next up: Chapter 2, "The Ping-Han Railway."
I invite G&C readers to acquire personal copies of the book and turn this into a group read. Solving puzzles with missing pieces is not an outstanding talent of mine; fellow readers will contribute to a good time, and also catch errors!
As we go along in this reading of MMB, I will point out ways to use the blog to find related matter. For example:
If you enter "OSS CBI Photobook," it will give you all posts having that phrase in the title, with the most recent at the head of the parade.
If you enter "OSS CBI Photobook 11" it will give you the first pages in the Photobook to have photos of China. Page 11 is covered in two posts: first here, and next here.
If you search for "OSS CBI Photobook 12," the results will be then here, and finally here.
Page 12 has the CBI patch pasted on it among the photos.
Does that mean that Page 11 is not China at all, but rather a rest camp in Assam, taken prior to deploying to China? It's your turn to squint at those photographs again for clues.
Page 12 has several shots of a village, like this one, not at all Kunming-looking:
Here in Part 2 we take a look at the first full chapter, "The China Situation - Background for War."
The approach is to set the scene in Kunming, site of OSS HQ, where Mills et. al. landed to kick off operations after being briefed.
Kunming is a large, bustling, beautiful city in Yunnan, the province that occupies the southwest corner of China. Located on a plateau at an altitude of about 6,000 feet, beside a beautiful lake, it is the capital of the province, bordered by Tibet to the northwest, the Himalayas to the west, Laos and Vietnam to the south. The climate is said to be the best in all of China, and it became the location of summer palaces and a resort for Chinese royalty and high government officials. When we arrived, the province had a population of some seventeen million including farmers and refugees from war-torn areas to the east.(Here at Gene & Clara's, if you enter "Kunming" in the blog search utility high on the right sidebar, it will give you 13 posts having the label "Kunming." Even so, I have not been able to identify any photo in the Photobook as being of that city. Was that a matter of security policy, even in September 1945, when our EJZ was in Kunming being debriefed?)
MMB summarize the topics covered in the briefing:
civil war between the KMT and the Communists;
Imperial Japanese occupation of the eastern third of China;
Japanese difficulty in moving westward, due to terrain and Chinese resistance;
"puppet governments," i.e. Chinese localities, and their armies, set up by the Japanese and loyal to them;
unapologetic use by the KMT of American forces and materiel to consolidate KMT position and control the Communist incursions;
the position of the Communists:
The Communist Eighth Route Army under Mao was deployed along the western reaches of the Yellow River and in central China, and to the north and east toward Peiping. Mao's headquarters was in Yenan, about 300 miles north of Hsian [our Shian/Xian] where he sat out the war and waited for it to end so he could continue the fight against Chiang Kai-shek. When they were fighting at all, his efforts were directed against the Nationalists.Wedemeyer command of the China Theater from 1944;
US Army Air Force, the 14th (successor to Chennault's Flying Tigers) and the 10th;
complete inability of Chinese infantry to fight regular ground warfare, and the consequent reliance on guerilla warfare, for which the OSS trained contingents of them;
Navy Intelligence operatives; SACO; Donovan getting the OSS independent of SACO;
Tai Li, magnate of Chinese Secret Police.
Thus in a few pages we are given the background situation. Does it sound familiar to G&C readers? Well, I hope so! The R. Harris Smith papers gave us some nitty-gritty on these topics:
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
This first chapter also describes forcefully what we would call the lack in China of modern infrastructure, most painfully of roads and motorized vehicles:
So, for lack of more effective transportation, OSS teams and their guerrilla fighters just had to walk, and walk, and walk! They almost always moved at night for security, carrying all their weapons, ammunition, demolitions, food and other supplies with them. It had been somewhat like that in the Burma jungle campaigns, but not so in Europe where vehicle transportation was usually available when you needed it. China was quite a change for us.This recalls to mind a remark our EJZ made when asked straight out, on one occasion, what it was like for him in China. He paused, then said There was a lot of running.
MMB Chapter 1 also lays out some OSS organizational structure.
Col. Richard Heppner, Commander of OSS Detachment 202, HQ Kunming;
Functional branches, "carefully compartmented for information security:"
SI, Secret Intelligence, espionage;
SO, Special Operations, guerilla warfare and sabotage;
X-2, Counterintelligence;
MO, Morale Operations, psychological warfare;
MU, Maritime Unit;
Research and Analysis;
Field Photography;
Communications.
Finally, in this Chapter the authors emphasize that the support of Chinese people, military and civilian, made possible the success of OSS operations in China.
Remarkably, there were only five OSS personnel and several hundred of their Chinese Nationalist guerrilla soldiers killed in action during this last year of combat in China while accounting for 12,348 Japanese troops killed and the destruction of the enemy ground transportation system and logistics facilities. Reasons for the unusually low number of friendly casualties were their guerrilla tactics and most of all the wholehearted support from almost all civilian Chinese living in the areas of operations.If you've read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, about the 1942 Doolittle raids on Japan and the rescue and extraction of the US fliers downed in China, you have been given a full and vivid picture of the depth and universality of the Chinese civilian support of Americans there to fight the Japanese. With all the murder continuing to and through 1945, that Chinese support can only have grown.
Next up: Chapter 2, "The Ping-Han Railway."
I invite G&C readers to acquire personal copies of the book and turn this into a group read. Solving puzzles with missing pieces is not an outstanding talent of mine; fellow readers will contribute to a good time, and also catch errors!
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| from OSS CBI Photoboook 11 |
If you enter "OSS CBI Photobook," it will give you all posts having that phrase in the title, with the most recent at the head of the parade.
If you enter "OSS CBI Photobook 11" it will give you the first pages in the Photobook to have photos of China. Page 11 is covered in two posts: first here, and next here.
If you search for "OSS CBI Photobook 12," the results will be then here, and finally here.
Page 12 has the CBI patch pasted on it among the photos.
Does that mean that Page 11 is not China at all, but rather a rest camp in Assam, taken prior to deploying to China? It's your turn to squint at those photographs again for clues.
Page 12 has several shots of a village, like this one, not at all Kunming-looking:
