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.

 

 

 

Mission Writeup in Saturday Evening Post, 1946, Part 2

Team Jackal first echelon jumped to their first field assignment in the previous post.

  

The caption reads: 'It got so cold . . . you could shiver and blame it on the temperature.' Two minutes after this picture was snapped, the men of Team Jackal took the dive - wondering what they would find below. 

 Part 1 is here. 

What happened next? Hsian sent a plane to evacuate Welo and bring out 3 Chinese officers and the next Jackal echelon: Zarembo, Robichaud, and Zdrojewski. 

 

 

 

  

Spoiler: The caption reads The mission ripped holes in Japanese communications and brought the night-traveling troop trains out into the open.  One of the seven bridges was torn apart by a thousand coolies and carried away. 

 

Back to the narrative:

 

 

 

(Note above the usual dysentery, worms, and fever. We have seen photo evidence of physical debilitation in previous posts, and we will see it again.)

 

     

. . . and?   and??  AND??        . . . bloody feet. 

 

The narrative will continue in Part 3.

 

Recall that this is scanned from the Saturday Evening Post of March 23, 1946.  If you like, you can get your own copy on ebay, and have in your possession the same issue of the magazine that our EJZ and CAMZ cut to fit in the Photobook we are going through.