Here is a links roundup for review of the background relevant to this book:
OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 1: Front Matter
Nationalist Warlords, Ambivalent Warlords, Commies, and Americans
Fighting Idealists Find Raw Cynicism
"The Chinese Puzzle" Considered With Some Material from the Hoover
Mysterious Letter from Chungking
Looking for Log in All the Wrong Places
MMB: Front Matter and Excerpt
OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 2: Chapter 1
G&C Maps Page
MMB Chapter 2 concerns the Ping-Han Railway, a north-south line held by the Japanese Army and essential to their troop transport and logistics.
But first comes the story of the 1,000 mile trip with Task Force TAPIR in a big motorized convoy, with the objective of destroying an airbase up north in Laoheku, so as to deny it to the Japanese. The Japanese take the base before TAPIR gets there, but never mind that. They get to go fishing with grenades. And we are introduced to Major Leonard Clark of OSS SI, whose exploits Mills summarizes on p. 19. Look out; here is Len Clark:
With regret I must report failure in finding you an image of Victor Yakovleff, of SI, interpreter and "bodyguard and personal gunman for Leonard Clark."
Those two guys are, to my mind, extreme examples of the kind of self-directing fighting man for which the US Armed Forces have always been famous. I think it was Stephen Ambrose who described the US Army squad or platoon and its largely autonomous mode of operation as essential to victory in Europe. The brass knew to what level to direct them; the knew to give them a goal and let them go to it.
Americans have organized and directed our own defense, far from the seat of authority, since 1607. Here is George Henry Boughton's 1867 painting Pilgrims Going to Church.
So as Mills describes on his p. 30, "Each OSS commander or team leader was given a mission and left to do his job the way he chose to do it, with few restrictions on how he managed, so long as the objective assigned to him was achieved." The setup sounds like our Wild West, for example, except that Tai Li and his organization sound a great deal more institutionalized and better equipped than Geronimo or Vittorio.
Hsian, aka Sian/Xsian, Mills describes as "surrounded by a massive stone bastion . . . [that] formed a rectangle two miles wide and three miles long around the city, with a deep moat dug recently just outside the wall in case the invading Japanese Army should advance that far to the west." (MMB 31-32.)
The Photobook has several pages of what is starting to look a lot like Hsian city and the OSS encampment outside the city. Looking ahead, I spy a photo of the tower that looks just like that on the "main street of Hsian" on MMB 35, and is likely the "Drum Tower." I also spy a photo of statuary sitting out in a cultivated field, such as on MMB 43 and 44. That statuary, all lined up in rows, flanked and guarded the entrance road to that ancient royal palace, which was at that time completely buried. After the war the place was excavated, and those famous buried ranks of terra-cotta soldiers found.
Sorry folks, I do not see in the upcoming Photobook pages any images of Dad yukking it up with General Donovan or General Hu, Commander of the KMT First War Area. There are, however, some very nice water buffalo to come. Stay tuned.
Hu was charged with defense of Hsian not only from Imperial Japanese, but also the Chinese Communists, headquartered "at Yenan, about 300 miles north." (MMB 37) When checking this out on Google Maps, note that the way the English spelling works now: "Yenan" is to the northeast, while "Yan'An," Mao's wartime capital, is directly north of Hsian.
The base compound Mills describes as "about a hundred yards square, enclosed by a stone and clay wall eight feet high." "The Special Operations 'Office' was a dirt-floor, one-room building." "The teams lived in large Army squad tents, one tent per team, and the men slept in their sleeping bags on canvas field cots." The Photobook has images of these things in the upcoming pages, so we will be having a close look.
There are about a hundred men at this base compound outside Hsian. Colonel Mills and his officers disperse them in teams of 9 or so to various areas of operation, some of which are outlined on the map on MMB 546. After squinting at this map a lot, and comparing it with others, I can say with confidence that the thick black line is the Yellow River, flowing south, taking that big bend just northeast of Hsian, and flowing east to the Yellow Sea.
The Ping-Han Railway, single-track according to the map legend, ran north-south from Beijing (Peiping) to Hanzhou:
The virtual loupe lets us enlarge the area of interest, in this case the area to which Team JACKAL was assigned. We see the Ping-Han crossing the Yellow River, between the LION and JACKAL zones. We see the Huang-Ho River, tributary of the Yellow. We see Kaifeng on the south bank of the Yellow. Not shown is Hsinshiang/Xinxiang, but I would place it on the Ping-Han where that black line from Kaifeng joins it. As we will see later, that is the "Hsinshiang-Kaifeng Railway." On May 22, 1945, half of Team JACKAL was flown over Hsinshiang/Xinxiang, at night, on the way to their drop zone. Flown "at 300 feet!" But there was no flack from that dark city.
The mission was to quit playing whack-a-mole with railway sabotage, and instead wreck all the rail bridges in that area at the same time. This May 22 insertion was the first of OSS team members to Chinese reception committee on the ground. Who made that first jump ?
Paul Cyr, of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Commanding:
Albert Robichaud, Lewiston, Maine schoolteacher: 
Berent E. Friele, of New York, New York:
Below is a photo from MMB52, scanned and tweaked. I kind of have my doubts about the caption. I am thinking "Major Cyr; Boris Chu, Interpreter; B. E. Friele, Radio; Jerry Welo, Photographer." It would be nice to find another photo somewhere of Jerry Welo, for further confirmation of these IDs. If you find one, let me know, all right?
No comments:
Post a Comment