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

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

Looking for Log in All the Wrong Places

Mills, Mills, and Brunner's 2002 OSS Special Operations in China introduces Team Jackal, including a subgroup, or "echelon," consisting of "Zarembo, . . . Robichaud . . . and . . . Zdrojewski."

The authors confirm that Eugene Zdrojewski, aka Dad, also kept the Team Log for JACKAL.  The first part of that record, plus his hand-drawn maps and other notes, are now in the Argyle Trove.  The records here cover the period of preparation for the Yellow River Bridges mission.  The log and other records stop when the Bridges mission begins. From Mills, et. al. pp. 84-85 :      

The Team Log was always guarded and placed in a separate container with incendiary grenades that cold be ignited immediately if capture was imminent and it was reasonably secure with these precautions.  I didn’t know that jackal had kept a Team Log until Paul [Paul Cyr] gave it to me after the war. . . 

. . . 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 that 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.

Eugene Zdrojewski no doubt took the photo used on the jacket of that book.

So I wondered if the Hoover might have that journal as it continues through the mission, because I saw Frenchie's grinning face on a banner photo on their website on one occasion.

My inquiry to the curators of the OSS Archives at the Hoover received a very gracious response.  One of the Archivists performed online search of all Hoover holdings listed in the Online Archive of California. This search came up bupkis for search terms Jackal, JACKAL, Yellow River Bridge, Cyr, Zdrojewski.

However, when the archivist used search term OSS China, 80 matches were found.  She sent me that page, as well as pages of search tips for Wedemeyer and for Donovan.

Just to be sure, I've now examined all 80 of those collection listings.  These are listings of the contents of 80 batches of private papers donated to various  California academic institutions.  Some of them are pretty interesting; if you go to Online Archive of California and search "OSS China" you will see them too.  

But none of the listed contents in any of them relate to or discuss JACKAL.

The archivist recommends a return to the National Archives.  I know there is a drawer there with EJZ's US Army serial number on it.  So we will pursue that next.

However, next post will feature a couple of intriguing quotes from a different book, one I often saw Dad reading on the living room sofa, and whose author's papers are at the Hoover. The listing for his collection pointed right towards them. 

We've been looking for Log in all the wrong places, but there is something interesting to show for it.  Stay tuned.

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

Last post included this photo of a man in Dad's unit:

So far there is nothing found in the Trove that gives a clue to his identity.  However, several sleepless nights and absent-minded days have brought back a memory that might pertain to this man.  I remember Mom explaining to us kids about the nightmares Dad would have fairly often.  Obviously he was reliving skirmishes in his dreams.  One recurring line was:

"Hey, Frenchie!  Look out! Look out, Frenchie!!"

Mills, Mills, and Brunner's 2002 OSS Special Operations in China introduces Team Jackal, including a subgroup, or "echelon," consisting of "Zarembo, . . . Robichaud . . . and . . . Zdrojewski."

For the moment we will concentrate on the introduction therein to Lieutenant Albert Robichaud. He had   "completed two operational missions behind the lines in France, testing circuits of the clandestine travel routes operated by the combined ODD/British SOE 'DF Section' for Western Europe that were used to move people, equipment, money, and messages between Europe and London. The most important function was to move secret agents working for the British and OSS into France and other countries and to bring them out again to the London headquarters.  The travel nets were also used for the return to England of downed airmen from the air attacks over Western Europe.   So Lieutenant Robichaud was another combat OSS veteran redeployed from operations in France and a welcome addition to the team." (Mills, Mills, and Brunner, 2002, p. 83-84.)

Surely, Lt. Robichaud is "Frenchie."  Here it is, 2014, and the heirs of our own EJZ finally figure this out.  Would that these two have both lived long enough to have found each other, emailed each other, and arranged a meetup here on Earth.  It is heart-rending to realize that that almost  happened, but did not.

So, all right, we shall try to find this Lieutenant Albert, and what we find we shall report.

In the meantime, restful dreams, to them both.

Z