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!

 

 

 

OSS Special Operations in China, Close Reading 2: Chapter 1

Part 1 in this series concerns the front matter of the book, which by the way I will refer to shorthand as "MMB."

Here in Part 2 we take a look at the first full chapter, "The China Situation - Background for War."

The approach is to set the scene in Kunming, site of OSS HQ, where Mills et. al. landed to kick off operations after being briefed.

Kunming is a large, bustling, beautiful city in Yunnan, the province that occupies the southwest corner of China. Located on a plateau at an altitude of about 6,000 feet, beside a beautiful lake, it is the capital of the province, bordered by Tibet to the northwest, the Himalayas to the west, Laos and Vietnam to the south. The climate is said to be the best in all of China, and it became the location of summer palaces and a resort for Chinese royalty and high government officials. When we arrived, the province had a population of some seventeen million including farmers and refugees from war-torn areas to the east. 

(Here at Gene & Clara's, if you enter "Kunming" in the blog search utility high on the right sidebar, it will give you 13 posts having the label "Kunming." Even so, I have not been able to identify any photo in the Photobook as being of that city. Was that a matter of security policy, even in September 1945, when our EJZ was in Kunming being debriefed?)

MMB summarize the topics covered in the briefing:
          civil war between the KMT and the Communists;
          Imperial Japanese occupation of the eastern third of China;
          Japanese difficulty in moving westward, due to terrain and Chinese resistance;
          "puppet governments," i.e. Chinese localities, and their armies, set up by the Japanese and loyal to them;
          unapologetic use by the KMT of American forces and materiel to consolidate KMT position and control the Communist incursions;
          the position of the Communists:

The Communist Eighth Route Army under Mao was deployed along the western reaches of the Yellow River and in central China, and to the north and east toward Peiping. Mao's headquarters was in Yenan, about 300 miles north of Hsian [our Shian/Xian] where he sat out the war and waited for it to end so he could continue the fight against Chiang Kai-shek. When they were fighting at all, his efforts were directed against the Nationalists.

          Wedemeyer command of the China Theater from 1944;
          US Army Air Force, the 14th (successor to Chennault's Flying Tigers) and the 10th;
          complete inability of Chinese infantry to fight regular ground warfare, and the consequent reliance on guerilla warfare, for which the OSS trained contingents of them;
          Navy Intelligence operatives; SACO; Donovan getting the OSS independent of SACO;
          Tai Li, magnate of Chinese Secret Police.

Thus in a few pages we are given the background situation. Does it sound familiar to G&C readers? Well, I hope so! The R. Harris Smith papers gave us some nitty-gritty on these topics:  
  
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

This first chapter also describes forcefully what we would call the lack in China of modern infrastructure, most painfully of roads and motorized vehicles:

So, for lack of more effective transportation, OSS teams and their guerrilla fighters just had to walk, and walk, and walk! They almost always moved at night for security, carrying all their weapons, ammunition, demolitions, food and other supplies with them. It had been somewhat like that in the Burma jungle campaigns, but not so in Europe where vehicle transportation was usually available when you needed it. China was quite a change for us.

This recalls to mind a remark our EJZ made when asked straight out, on one occasion, what it was like for him in China. He paused, then said There was a lot of running.

MMB Chapter 1 also lays out some OSS organizational structure.
          Col. Richard Heppner, Commander of OSS Detachment 202, HQ Kunming;
          Functional branches, "carefully compartmented for information security:"
                    SI, Secret Intelligence, espionage;
                    SO, Special Operations, guerilla warfare and sabotage;
                    X-2, Counterintelligence;
                    MO, Morale Operations, psychological warfare;
                    MU, Maritime Unit;
                    Research and Analysis;
                    Field Photography;
                    Communications.

Finally, in this Chapter the authors emphasize that the support of Chinese people, military and civilian, made possible the success of OSS operations in China.

Remarkably, there were only five OSS personnel and several hundred of their Chinese Nationalist guerrilla soldiers killed in action during this last year of combat in China while accounting for 12,348 Japanese troops killed and the destruction of the enemy ground transportation system and logistics facilities. Reasons for the unusually low number of friendly casualties were their guerrilla tactics and most of all the wholehearted support from almost all civilian Chinese living in the areas of operations.

If you've read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, about the 1942 Doolittle raids on Japan and the rescue and extraction of the US fliers downed in China, you have been given a full and vivid picture of the depth and universality of the Chinese civilian support of Americans there to fight the Japanese. With all the murder continuing to and through 1945, that Chinese support can only have grown.

Next up: Chapter 2, "The Ping-Han Railway."

I invite G&C readers to acquire personal copies of the book and turn this into a group read. Solving puzzles with missing pieces is not an outstanding talent of mine; fellow readers will contribute to a good time, and also catch errors!

from OSS CBI Photoboook 11

As we go along in this reading of MMB, I will point out ways to use the blog to find related matter. For example:

If you enter "OSS CBI Photobook," it will give you all posts having that phrase in the title, with the most recent at the head of the parade.

If you enter "OSS CBI Photobook 11" it will give you the first pages in the Photobook to have photos of China. Page 11 is covered in two posts: first here, and next here.

If you search for "OSS CBI Photobook 12," the results will be  then here, and finally here.

Page 12 has the CBI patch pasted on it among the photos.

Does that mean that Page 11 is not China at all, but rather a rest camp in Assam, taken prior to deploying to China? It's your turn to squint at those photographs again for clues.

Page 12 has several shots of a village, like this one, not at all Kunming-looking:

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