OSS CBI Photobook 19, Town and Country

 The encampment outside Hsian/Xian, and the city itself, continue as the subjects of the photos.

Below, we see the carbine in some detail, as well as the rifle strap, here and here, which made it to Marilla and is now in the Trove.

 

Who is the soldier below? Do his descendants have this picture of their own Mom and Dad, or grandparents?

 

 

Visual depth is provided by the figures walking along this receding, curving road. What's that blob in the middle, on the side of the road?

Enlarged on-screen, it looks for all the world like a snopek, a pile of grain sheaves stacked so as to make rain sluice off instead of soaking in.

 

Grain and rain, like those fluffy clouds in the sky, are the same the world over and through time. We have considered snopki before now, on G&C.  Here is a Polish painting from 1893.

 

 

 

The Drum Tower, in Hsian/Xian, shows up once more. Enlarged, we can see that the photographer must be sitting in the back of a Jeep that has the windshield turned down flat.

 

 

That little kid shows up again, tending to his business, but this time we see more figures in the background.  Enlarged, the double doors on the building in the background show pretty clearly.

This grain is barley, I'd say, from the way the seed head, heavy with seed, curves down a little, and also shows, even in the blurry background of the photo below, the suggestion of the famous barley "beard."

Botanical illustration does help.

        

"Barley or millet" were the crops north of the Yangtze, reported MMB. Millet does look quite different:

On the next page, things get serious, with photos relating to the drop in Hsinhsiang described in Chapter 2 of MMB.

 

 

 

OSS CBI Photobook 18

We took the book apart in order to scan the pages. Now it is clear that the paper on which the prints were pasted has become fragile over the decades, so that when the scanning job is done we will probably not rebind it. Do not worry overmuch: I am putting each page into a plastic sleeve with a page-number label fixed to the plastic.

 

Page 18 scan, top half:

 

 

 

 

Zoom in, below, to see the window details of the eatery at #329.  "In Bounds United States Armed Forces."

 

So is this one of the "workhorse" DC-3s mentioned in MMB, Chapter 2?

 

 

 

 

Photobook page 18 scan, bottom half:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dopp Kit sitting on the end of the bench is one of bajillions issued to GIs in WWII. The name comes from Charles Doppelt who in 1919 patented the design.

A Dopp employee and nephew to Charles Doppelt, Jerome Harris, worked for the company for decades, eventually driving innovations himself. An interview with his son includes discussion of the WWII experience in Europe of Jerome Harris.

Found while looking, and failing to find, an image of Charles Doppelt or his Chicago factory, the image below, which is pretty famous. If an attribution is to be found, I would like to have it. No Dopp kit is in sight, but there has to have been one to hold that nice shaving brush. I also like the gas-can table de toilette.

 Next post, we return to Chapter 2 of OSS Special Operations in China.

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