OSS CBI Photobook 25 - Part 1 - Studying the Map

 

OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 4, Smashups and Shapeshifters

While the first drop of the advance team of JACKAL was happening, Captain Zarembo was sent to Kunming for supplies for the team. From the Team Log started by Zarembo, quoted on MMB 55:

" . . . One week later I returned, much worse for wear and tear but with the supplies firmly clutched to my military bosom - two C-47s loaded with containers, all packed and ready for JACKAL's second drop of men and supplies . . . "

The C-47 Skytrain was modified from the civilian Douglas DC-3 for military use "being fitted with a cargo door, hoist attachment and strengthened floor - along with a shortened tail cone for glider-towing shackles, and an astrodome in the cabin roof." The C-53 came along a bit later; it was bigger, with greater capacity. But the C-47 had a couple of advantages: it could do with a shorter runway, and American industry produced a lot of them:

"More than 10,000 aircraft were produced in Long Beach and Santa Monica, California, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Between March 1943 and August 1945, the Oklahoma City plant produced 5,354 C-47s."

These were the planes of the Flying Tigers, of flying The Hump, and of the Berlin Airlift.

From the American Airpower Museum:

 

 

The airplane had a crew of 4 and deluxe cabin accomodation, as we have already seen. Here is a shiny cargo bay from one they have at Hendon Aerodrome.

 

 

 

So Cyr, Chu, Friele, Robichaud, and Welo on landing dealt with smashed rifles, smashed cameras, Welo's smashed-up leg, and reports of multitudes of Japanese search parties detailed to look for them, so that "out of twenty consecutive days" they must make "fourteen daily moves." All around were Japanese troops, Chinese troops, Chinese Puppets-of-the-Japanese troops, and Chinese troops who don Puppet uniforms to go mingle with the CPoJ troops, in emulation of their commander Sun Ping-Ying,  publicly a Puppet, but secretly not, sort of like the Scarlet Pimpernel but with a different style of poetry.

Cyr traveled by means of a closed-in, horse-drawn cart to meet with Sun Ping-Ying in Hsinhsiang/Xinxiang. We have seen a cart like that in a photo on Photobook Page 17:

The SCR-694 radio mentioned on MMB 65 as being repaired by Welo and Friele is a kind we have seen before.

Want one? They are available.

This advance team came to an understanding with Sun Ping-Ying about chain of command with the First War Area and the Americans; they agreed that all would wait and strike together according to an agreed-upon plan; they reconnoitered some potential targets in the city.  

Finally, they began to understand and get used to the psychological situation. In Europe as Jedburghs they had fought alongside "resistance groups that had feelings of patriotism in fighting for their countries against the Germans. Chinese resistance was motivated by individual hatred toward the Japanese invaders for their barbaric and savage treatment of the populace, and not for . . . their country, China, which wasn't really an effective country organization or entity at all because of the Civil War in progress." (MMB 66) That reads to me as a requirement for them to go without hearing the signals of national patriotism to which they were accustomed, and learn to concentrate on an array of different-sounding signals, to make possible after all their mutual goal.

Will the signal-to-noise ratio be constant, or even knowable?

    

 

 

 

 

 

OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 3, Kunming to Chengtu to Hsian to HsinHsiang to a Drop Zone

 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?

What happened after they hit the ground? When did the rest of the team arrive? Did anybody write anything down? Until next time - keep reading!

 

 

 

More Finds for the Map Collection

G&C Maps Page has been spiffed up with new additions. 

One comes from the very good overview article Second Sino-Japanese War, which provides discussion, illustration, maps, links to video, and references.

"Japanese Empire's Territorial Expansion" clearly shows the location and year of each move, beginning with the 1874 taking of the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa, and moving on and up through the 1931 invasion of Manchuria and 1939 of Haiman. This illustrates the historical setting of what the US and Allies considered the China Theater of the Pacific War of WWII.

 

What a relief it was to find a couple of good, readable river maps. This map of the Yellow River (Huang He) shows very clearly the course of the river, its tributaries and basin, basic regional topography, important cities, and surrounding regions. Hsian/Xian, at the junction of the Wei and Jing tributaries, was the OSS center of forward operations in the history we are considering.

One city, part of our story, that is not on this map is Kaifeng. That would be the mysterious Kaifeng-on-the-Dollar-Bill, of which we may or may not ever figure out the meaning.

Kaifeng is located east of Zhengzhou, right at the place where the Yellow River bends to the northeast.

The source of this map is an essay that goes into a lot of detail, on historical courses of the river, for example, or the deliberate 1938 KMT flooding of the Yellow River valley to deter Japanese troops.

A map of the Yangtze has similar advantages in clarity, showing just enough detail of the course, drainage basin, geographical relation to the Yellow and the Pearl Rivers, geographical relation to Tibet, India, Burma, and the coast. It shows us Kunming and Hsian/Xian, clearly and on the same map.

Last but not least, a 1959 set of topographical maps of eastern and southern China is available for download from the University of Texas Libraries. The master map looks like this:

 From the landing page, I clicked on Hsian from the list of major place-names, zoomed in a bit, and took a screenshot of the ancient city and the rivers nearby:

This kind of reading and map study is useful in reminding us of the who-what-when-where of the broader stage and action in which fits our JACKAL story, to which we return.

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.

Just the Right Issue of the Saturday Evening Post

Major Paul Cyr was in command of Team Jackal in China in 1945.  After the war, he wrote up several missions, including the big one on the night of August 9, for the Saturday Evening Post. He then gave a copy of the article to Frank Mills and to R. Harris Smith.

Copies of the March 23, 1946 issue are available on eBay; mine just came.  If you shop on eBay for your own copy, make sure you are considering a "full copy" of the magazine, not merely a detached cover photo.

Skillful cover art depicts the Windy City.

Notice the font used for the issue date: military-stamp style.
At this point not all our soldiers were home yet.
The whole country, not just the US Armed Forces,
was going through a lengthy demobilization.

It is going to take some time to post the entire article of two entire 11" x14" pages plus parts of four more.  The result will span multiple posts; although I certainly will link them together for reference, some readers might have a better time with the entire article in hand.

And the entire issue is quite interesting.  For ten cents the customer got work by Irving Wallace, H. E. Bates, technically skilled artists, and highly entertaining advertising designers.  The abundant ads are aimed at men and women, country folk and city-dwellers, military and civilians, young and old, dirt farmers, cattlemen, miners, mechanics, homemakers.  Americans were not all just in our information "silos" at that time; we were more aware of each other, of the lives and concerns of our countrymen in various walks of life.

Nationalist Warlords, Ambivalent Warlords, Commies, and Americans

Last post concluded with a mention of the R. Harris Smith collection at the Hoover Institution. This collection is described as including

. . . research material for the book by R. H. Smith, entitled OSS : The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, 1972).

If you search the collection for "China" it turns up one hit:  "Box 2: China."  Could that box have, after all,  anything of interest to us in pursuit of Team Jackal data?  I took a look the old-fashioned way, by consulting the Index in EJZ's old copy of the book.  Anybody else recall seeing this book lying around?  I often saw him sitting on the sofa, reading it intently, but he said nothing directly about it.

While Smith does not treat in his book the Yellow River Bridge mission specifically or in detail, he does discuss the interplay between the Communists, the Nationalists, and the Americans in the area north of Sian/Xian, where they all met increasingly often in 1944-45.  In Chapter 6 of this 1972 edition, "The Chinese Puzzle," pp. 280-281, Smith describes the Communists staking out claims to Chinese positions in anticipation of the Americans' ousting of the Japanese occupation forces, and the Nationalists protesting, though not fighting any harder:

The American position in this dispute was a model of ambiguity.  Wedemeyer ordered American forces to aid the central government armies in the reoccupation of enemy areas. They were to provide transport to Chiang's troops and were authorized to accept Japanese surrenders on behalf of the Chiang government.  But, added Wedemeyer, none of these actions should violate the basic principle that American forces were not to be used to aid the Chinese government in a civil war with the Communists!

OSS officers were the first to see the absurdity of this dream of "neutrality."   In April 1945, forty-six OSS men set up headquarters at an old Seventh Day Adventist mission at Sian in north China, some 150 miles south of Yenan.

. . .

Dad was in that contingent.

The map of Japanese occupation at that stage of the war shows "Communist base areas"  throughout the central section of the the Japanese-occupied areas, plus areas just to the west in north China.

Take a squint at an enlarged image of this map and see Kunming, in Yunnan province in the south, just east of Burma.  This is the big base where men gathered for training after coming from Burma.  See Shian/Xian/Xi'an, in Shaanxi province to the north.  See the giant red-stipple area just north of that ancient city, surrounding Yenan and with a salient headed due south toward Xian and its railroad.  That is where Jackal went.

. . . 

R. Harris Smith continues:

In early August, the German-American colonel [that must be Kraus] who commanded the group (he was selected for the post because the local Chinese warlord had been educated in Berlin) began dispatching his OSS teams into the field.  These units encountered difficulties with Japanese and Chinese troops of all descriptions.  There was a thin line, for example, between Kuomintang loyalists and Chinese puppet soldiers who had fought for the Japanese. [!] One team commanded by a 24-year-old Jedburgh

[the team is JACKAL; the commander is Paul Cyr; the source is the Saturday Evening Post article we have here in the Trove]

 parachuted to their "drop zone" to find their "reception committee" composed of a "group of Chinese who were paid by the Japs - got their arms from the Japs and might easily be loyal to them."  The local warlord "had commanded a division for the Chinese Nationalist government;  when he was captured by the Japs, he commanded a division for them with the same aplomb and good nature.  It was our information that he was still in correspondence with Chiang Kai-shek, and would help if he didn't risk his own neck."  These puppet troops were only a temporary problem.  When the war ended, the warlord generals who had been traitors to their country abruptly realigned themselves with the Chiang government.  The Chungking regime accepted their support as allies against the Communists with open arms.

OSS had also become inadvertently concerned about growing Communist strength.  In the last month of the war, two OSS teams dispatched from Sian to the guerilla zones were arrested by Communist troops,  In both cases, the Dixie Mission at Yenan secured their release.  It appeared that local Communist zealots had acted without approval of Communist headquarters. Then in August dozens of OSS intelligence officers were sent into the northern hinterland from Sian to report on the local military conditions.  Communist troops, who saw these teams as tools for the Kuomintang, deliberately harassed the Americans.  In mid-August, the OSS commander at Sian [again, that would be Colonel Kraus] anxiously wired Kunming:  "Now appears all field teams face conflict with Communists in trying to carry out orders to occupy cities on Jap surrender and seize records. . . Request instructions on what action teams should take.  Suggest that if teams must fight Reds to carry out orders they be withdrawn to Sian.  Sincerely feel teams should not risk their lives in conflict with Reds.  Feeling in North China is civil war will start immediately after Jap capitulation."

Dad said that he and his buddies met up with Russians.  Stalin's army and NKVD were advising and training the Red Chinese.  Dad told me that during one of these wary, slow-motion encounters, one of the Russians took him to one side to beg him, plead with him:

Take me with you!   Please, please, take me with you!

Dad cried telling me that he had to reply:

I can't! I can't!


More tomorrow.
Julie

Gene's M-1. The Power and the Transmission of Memory.

Some things were seen; many were not seen. Some few things were known; many more were not known. In the end, one day, my brother shone a light in the darkness.

A certain leather strap was always in the same spot at one end of Dad’s closet. To the right of his shirts, hard by his tie rack, directly above the shoeshine kit, it hung on a spindly wire hanger.  Worn, oddly folded, and bearing odd buckles, it was part of our childhood landscape but we did not mess with it.  We also did not ask about it; somehow we knew it were better not to probe.

A clunky scrapbook, with forty-odd pages of photographic prints pasted in in the crazy-quilt style fashionable in the 1940s, was also part of our home. We looked, and we inquired, but the answers, though kind, were brief. Yes, I was in China. We rode ponies into China and when mine went lame I found saddle sores; there was nothing I could do for my pony.

We taught the Chinese to blow up bridges. We blacked our faces, swam out at night, and attached the explosives. When a train came over carrying Japanese soldiers, we blew up the bridge.

A few bits of backstory came to our ears indirectly. From an uncle: There was hand-to-hand. From our mother: He told them he knew English, Polish, Latin, and French, so they taught him Japanese, and then they sent him to China! At the dinner table, talking with my future father-in-law: Ha! Yes, we were flown back over the Hump in late ’45 and the Japanese were still shooting up at us. From the eulogy delivered by the uncle: He jumped out of that plane snapping pictures on the way down, so the planners would have an idea of the terrain for the land invasion they had to prepare.

And we knew from our mother that in his nightmares he would cry out, Hey, Frenchie, look out! Look out, Frenchie!

Yet when we grew up and asked for details, he would just smile and say, There was a lot of running.

Dad died with his boots on, as he had frequently proclaimed he would. Mom kept his bathrobe on her pillow for a few months, then followed him. My brother and I emptied our childhood home; on clearing their closets I took up that strap as though on autopilot, silently packing it for the trip to my office where a collection of Dad-related items began to grow.

On the last day, alone in the house by the woods, alone in the empty house, my brother felt that his job was not done. Not everything was safe. Question marks still hovered in the air. Something made him climb yet again into the big, low attic, turn on the flashlight, and slowly crawl all around looking for answers.

There, jammed way under the eaves, silent and generally invisible, were two grey packages. He took them out from their waiting place. From one he drew photo logs, hand-drawn maps, and a Bronze Star citation related to OSS Detachment 202 Team JACKAL. Out of the other came an Army money belt, from which tumbled medals, ribbons, a field compass, and Chinese coins.

The entire trove is here with me now; I am partway through a proper study and have made some progress. Scanned photos reveal a lot. I figured out who Frenchie was, for which my relatives will forever be grateful. Still, the papers from under the eaves refer to events prior to and after the big mission, in the same way that the scrapbook contains no photos of the big mission, and little information beyond what is offered in the Saturday Evening Post article of March 23,1946, which is pasted right in there. He took home what they let him take home, just as he spoke only of what they let him speak. His handwritten mission journal is in Box 862 of something called “OSS Personnel Files – RG 226 Entry 224” in an OSS/CIA stronghold – maybe the Hoover. Some day I would like to hold that journal in my hands.

The strap is the sling from his M1. The earliest photo of his rifle is from A.S.T.P. training at the University of Chicago.

By the time he shipped out, he had been training with this rifle for a year and a half. As far as I can tell, the rifle is a version of a .30 Caliber M1 carbine.

Its next photographic appearance is somewhere near Kunming, where his buddy snapped a shot of Gene demonstrating how the OSS looks for bad guys in caves.

And there we see the leather carbine sling. We see the pistol in the holster, either a US M3 fighting knife or US M4 bayonet with hilt visible behind the holster, and a magazine pouch mounted on the stock. A 15-round magazine is visible just below the sight.

A true gent named David Fletcher at Iton’s Cave explained to me that “the vertical thing in the carbine stock is a strap well.” Further, “. . .the string arrangement under the pistol holster is a leg tie string, which was often braided if the holster was not secured to the leg at the bottom. . . There was a special method for braiding them, at least in the USA.” Thank you, David Fletcher.

The photo below of a US Army paratrooper’s kit is from the 1938 edition of Philip B. Sharp’s The Rifle in America. The paratrooper’s M1 is a little shorter than the standard rifle that ground troops would carry, according to the text. It does not look exactly the same: the strap well on the stock looks different. It is an “M11903A1.” But look, you can see very well how the strap attaches to the rifle.

A person looking through the China section of the scrapbook thus far, with almost touristic scenes of the rural area near Kunming, would conclude they were just fooling around, wasting film. Actually, they were working. From end-May through early August, 1945, they made multiple sorties north to sabotage things critical to Japanese transport, while preparing for their big mission. 

George C. Chalou edited the 1992 National Archives and Records Administration’s book The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II.From page 95:

          "Vital to Japan’s control of the Chinese interior was the mile-long bridge that crossed the Hwang-Ho (Yellow) River near Kaifeng. This double-track bridge was the thread that joined the Japanese armies of north and south China. Against all odds, Jed veterans and a brave band of Chinese guerillas under the command of Col. Frank Mills and Maj. Paul Cyr mined the great Hwang-Ho bridge. On August 9, 1945, the day Nagasaki was bombed, [in fact over the night of 8-9 August] SO Mission Jackal blew away two large spans in the bridge just as a Japanese troop train was passing over. The entire train, carrying some 2,000 Japanese soldiers, was dragged to the bottom of the Hwang-Ho."

Frank Mills, et. al., published in 2002 OSS Special Operations in China. Chapter 3 discusses the Hwang-Ho Bridges mission, relying on the mission journal. From pages 84-85, Gene:

          . . . was Field Photo trained and . . . [kept] the day-by-day Team Log all the time JACKAL was in the field. Zdrojewski was young, about twenty I guess, [he was 22] but he had been parachute-trained in Kunming and I believe this was his first combat assignment. He was impressionable and his language in the Team Log reveals thoughts that most of us had but never expressed . . . The Team Log was always guarded and placed in a separate container with incendiary grenades that could be ignited immediately if capture was imminent . . .I don’t know of any other operational teams in China that kept a log with this detail. The standard issue blue-lined paper from letter-size writing pads is now getting yellow and ragged with age, but Zdrojewski’s handwritten entries in pencil script are clear.I can picture him, sitting in one of the mud huts or in the rooms they had later in the walled compounds, writing down the day’s events as they unfolded during the months to follow, probably just before climbing into his sleeping bag to grab a little sleep with his.45 pistol and grenades by his side and a lantern or candle or an Army issue flashlight lighting up the scene."

The trove waits for me to resume study, as it had to be set aside for a while. But now I can start again. And I have been keeping that strap oiled.

To the right of his shirts, hard by his tie rack, directly above the shoeshine kit, Gene’s rifle strap was never farther than 12 feet from his hand, every night since he came home in 1946.

(An earlier version of this photoessay appeared on the Member Feed at Ricochet.com)