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:

Australian Warrior in China Admires His Yank Counterparts

Gilbert Stuart:

The OSS operational groups were the first American military men to achieve substantial success in training Asians.  Every last OSS instructor knew his specialty from A to Z.  Each had a record of success in his subject.  Therefore, he was given considerable independence in his teaching.

Each commando soon reflected his teachers' personalities.  And oddly enough, these tough Yanks who came to teach the Chinese how to kill also brough [sic] with them more brotherly love than many do-gooders I have met on Asian soil.

This is a quote from the 1965 book by Stuart and Levy, Kind-Hearted Tiger.

The passage appears in typescript notes made by R. Harris Smith for his own book, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency.

The Harris notes are in the "China" file in the collection of R. Harris Smith papers: Box 2, Folder 1, Hoover Institution Archives.


We have read quotes from Stuart and Levy previously, here.

A New York Times book note of June 1, 1964 describes Stuart as follows:

"KIND-HEARTED TIGER. By Gilbert Stuart with Alan Levy. 375 pages. Little, Brown $5.95.

The bold adventures of Gilbert Stuart, a British-born Australian who served with Chinese forces during the Sino-Japanese War, are detailed in this fast-moving story of his life."

In this blog we have been examining events, personalities, and assessments within a particular field of interest; we are going to continue with more particulars.  For background and the big picture, which after all we all need, one place to start is good old Wikipedia:

Second Sino-Japanese 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

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.