OSS CBI Photobook 22 - OSS Field Base near Hsian

 Here is the upper portion of Page 22. It looks like illustration the Field Base for the 30 six-man teams under command of Major Mills, with the base itself under command of Major Gus Krause.  This base, a walled compound formerly home to a Seventh Day Adventist mission, was located a few miles from the walled city of Hsian, as was an airfield of the 14th Army Air Force.  This Field Base is described in MMB pages 29, 30, 38, and 40.

The 200 men were flown in, from Kunming or wherever, to the airfield by transport plane. So this page is arranged to show the base compound where they prepared for team missions and trained Chinese. The team missions required transport from the airfield to a drop zone. Like his brother John said in his funeral oration, for our EJZ and his Field Photo buddies it was a matter of jumping out of an airplane and taking pictures all the way down. How many guys do you see in this photo? I see three in the air. I see one on the ground as a black dot next to his spread-out parachute.  Maybe two.

 

The two guards below carry curved hooks. Are they ready to drag open or shut a pair of large, heavy, fortified doors? This is classic guardhouse and gate design, with the narrow passageway controllable by guards at either end.

Looks like Dad. They're not eating too well. Mills describes how they found local cooks who snagged local pheasant to round out the menus. Good thing.
 

The local Chinese military commander in Hsian city provided troops. Many would then transfer to the OSS compound for training. Some Chinese troops a pictured below in the lower portion of Phtobook Page 22.

  

 

Berent Friele again, working on stuff.

 

The dark parachutes, below, were the red ones such as those pictured on the back of the jacket of MMB.

 This initial drop, May 22 1945, was to an area south of Hsin-Hsiang near the Yellow River. Map and details are to be found in the post Jump into Action.

OSS CBI Photobook 21 - Hanging Out While Paul Cyr Meets with the Local Commander in Hsian

 

Pages 21 and 22 show us Hsian, I surmise, with many scenes of hanging around, spying on stuff, trying to figure out who is who at least for the moment, being unavoidably conspicuous, and taking pictures. They must have had a lot of film. Above is the top part of Page 21.

I would say that the man in the photo above is Berent Friele. In MMB his photo is on p. 52. We saw him on Photobook Page 17 ; the photo from that post is below.

 Now, what about the lady in the photo with Friele? Is that Julia Child? If so, the location would have been back southwest, in Kunming. Elizabeth McIntosh in her book Sisterhood of Spies describes the Kunming billet for the OSS ladies as bungalows surrounded by flower gardens. In that photo, I see flowers and foliage, not dust like you see in Hsian.  Below are two photos of Julia Child from Kunming time:

 The photo below is from the wonderful site Pacific Paratrooper.

 So, what say you, dear readers? Is that Julia McWilliams, later Child, hanging out with Berent Friele in Kunming? with the photo somehow sliding over to Photobook Page 21 set in Hsian?

 

  

From the jump plane, a photo of the P-51 Mustang fighter escort in close formation.

 

Chu and Friele, above.

Paul Cyr, above.

Eugene Zdrojewski, above, catching some rays. 

Bottom part of Page 21, with the crazy-quilt style of photomontage continuing. It was a popular style at the time; I first noticed it in Mom's Kensington High yearbooks. Mom put this book together in 1946-47.

The wall above could well be that of Hsian. MMB 31-32 describes Hsian as surrounded by an ancient, massive stone bastion similar to sections of the Great Wall to the north. The wall is 30 feet high, 20 feet wide and is so wide and solid that good-sized trucks could be driven on top.  It formed a rectangle two miles wide and three miles long around the city . . . 

 

Above and below we see recruits for the local unit of Chinese who hated the Japanese invaders and so would fight them with the Americans.

Yep, Dad, it's a long way from Catalina, not to mention the University of Chicago and the Lake shore.

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.