OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 1: Front Matter

Previous discussions of Mills, Mills, and Brunner 2002 are these:

OSS CBI Photobook 15 - Southwest China, 1945- Reconnaissance, Part 2, Is this "Frenchie?"

Nationalist Warlords, Ambivalent Warlords, Commies, and Americans (This is about related material in the R. Harris Smith book.)

Looking for Log in All the Wrong Places

I can find no citation for the front jacket image. Was it of the Yellow River Bridges Mission of August 9, 1945? Or was it of another mission, earlier in the summer?

Who took the photo? Pfc. Eugene Zdrojewski, Field Photo? Or Captain Zarembo? Or Frenchie? Or members of another Team?

This scan of the back jacket image shows guys under awnings in a boat. What is the location - perhaps Kaifeng, city of canals? 

We've looked at photos of Kaifeng before, here, then here as well, and also here. 

Francis Mills's Acknowledgements begin with the reason this book was written when it was:

Preparation of this book was started in 1985 when the CIA declassified many of the secret reports prepared by commanders of Special Operations teams of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), with details about the guerrilla wars they conducted in mainland China against the Japanese Expeditionary Army during  1945 . . 

Chinese place-names, common and proper nouns, and other terms that we run across at G&C are spelled in English in different ways, for example Peking/Beijing. John W. Brunner's Preface includes mention of the nineteenth-century Wade-Giles system of Romanized transcription of Mandarin to English:

At the time when the events in this book took place, the most prevalent practice was to use the Wade-Giles system . . . Because the pertinent documents and military maps of the period generally used this system, that is the system that will be used here.

We are doing that here, too, because we are looking at all this primary material. So far, the only place-name for which I routinely give two spellings is Sian/Xian.

The Introduction explains that Francis Mills was

. . . in charge of Special Operations in the large area of China north of the Yangtze River, extending north to . . . Peking. In this story he describes the operations in North China and also tells about the expansion of other guerrilla attacks in the southern half of the country that were so effective against the strong, clever, ruthless and barbaric Japanese Expeditionary Army during the last year of the war . . . the . . . Japanese Army of about one million men that had occupied and controlled the eastern area of China extending about 300 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.

More detail is found in an online essay about the book; here are the first three paragraphs from that essay's "About the Author" section:

In 1943, as an Army Major in the Field Artillery, Frank Mills volunteered for overseas duty with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After training in Special Operations, he was ordered to London to join the combined Special Forces Command of British, French and Americans, to support Resistance efforts in Europe as part of the Allied invasion of France. 

 With OSS Special Forces Detachment 101, he landed in the D-Day Invasion with advance elements of the First Infantry Division on Omaha Beach. He coordinated French Resistance activities with the military operations of First Army as the Allied invasion forces went ashore and moved through France.

 When the German forces had been driven out of France in late 1944, he was named OSS Chief of Special Operations for the Central Field Command in China. In that capacity he was in charge of all OSS guerrilla warfare against the Japanese Expeditionary Army in the area extending about 1,000 miles north from the Yangtze River and along the Yellow River.  He remained at that command until September, 1945.

Did Francis Mills meet Albert Robichaud, our "Frenchie," in France? So far I've found no reference to that; we'll keep on the alert for clues. Next up: Chapter 1, The China Situation, Background for War.

Fighting Idealists Find Raw Cynicism

Last post, on the RH Smith book, we considered an extract dealing with Xi'an and points north.  Here are another couple of nuggets that have, from the perspective of a little kid growing up hearing occasional remarks at home, the ring of truth.

(Note that the page numbers are different for the two different editions of Smith's OSS.  In the 1972 edition, the paragraphs below appear on pp. 284-285.  In the 2005 edition, they appear on pp. 260-261.  In both editions, these are the concluding thoughts of his chapter "The Chinese Puzzle.")

First, a report from an OSS team way up north in Manchuria:

Another member of the OSS team in Manchuria was 26-year-old West Point Captain Roger Hilsman, a veteran of Detachment 101 in Burma.  He came to Mukden in the hope of finding his father, an Army general captured by the Japanese.  He was happily reunited with the senior Hilsman at one of the prison camps, but not before he and his teammates discovered Russian soldiers loading the entire Japanese industrial machinery of Manchuria on trains bound for the USSR.  When the OSS men began to photograph the brick-by-brick dismemberment of Manchuria's industry (supposedly belonging to China) they were arrested by the Russians and finally expelled from the area under pain of death.  By the end of September, Colonel Stevens in Chungking wrote unhappily that "the Soviet entry was received here with profound discouragement."

 So, whose allies are the Soviets, now?  Hard to tell.


Second, an assessment on the general level of suffering of the Chinese at the hands of their own warlords and political factions:

OSS became accustomed to profound discouragement in its four years in China. . . Major William Lockwood, a Shanghai-born professor and China specialist who joined the OSS Research and Analysis unit at Chennault's headquarters in 1944, later reflected: 'All around them in China our soldiers observed such poverty, ignorance, and disease as they had hardly imagined.  Most of the people had never known, nor could they hope for, anything much better.  The Chinese armies. . . [were]  miserably equipped and frequently half-starved. . . Their leaders in many areas seemed less interested in using them to kill Japanese than to jockey for postwar political advantage. . . On every hand were merchants, landlords, and poiticos sitting out the war, leaving it to their allies to finish off the Japanese.  Meanwhile, they themselves waxed fat with wartime graft and profiteering, frequently at the expense of the Americans. . . they [the OSS men] found little to praise in Kuomintang rule and didn't know whether the Communists up north were any better.'

The hunt for the Team Jackal field log will continue.

Scanning and uploading of photos from the Photobook will resume, interleaved with discussion of chapters of Mills, Mills, and Brunner as we go through that, too.

I've just found on eBay a copy of the 1946 Saturday Evening Post that includes Paul Cyr's article about the Yellow River Bridge mission.  Most of that same article is pasted into the Photobook, on Photobook pages we have yet to scan.  However, the last several paragraphs of the article are missing!  Apparently, they were discarded.  All right, so this "new" copy is due to arrive here at Trove HQ this Friday.  Let's hope it's all in there.  I'll let you know.

Love,
Julie