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.

Still Camera on the National Mall, 1944

This is a second look back at a May 6, 2014 post of photos showing the OSS team training with cameras just prior to deployment.  The first look back, at the movie camera, is here.


November, 1944, The National Mall, Washington, D.C. – Our EJZ and a small group of buddies, having completed survival and tactical training on Catalina and crossed back to the East Coast by train, continue briefing at OSS offices in the Capital. Further outtakes from the post of May 6, 204 include several photos of a still camera, of which this is the most clear:

With the help of kind friends we have identified this as a Graflex Speed Graphic large-format press camera.  The "Anniversary Speed Graphic" of 1940-1946 is described  No grey metal exposed, satin black with chrome trim. Wartime model: no chrome. Bed and Body track rails linked, allowing focusing of wide angle lens within body. Solid wire frame viewfinder. Trim on face of body is found only on top and sides.

"Anniversary Speed Graphic"

as described on the Graflex.org site.

The Graflex FAQ has all the details, after starting off with an iconic image of a c1940s press photographer, just as is shown in Hollywood movies of the time.  From the FAQ:

The Speed Graphic camera has two shutters - focal plane and in-lens; three viewfinders - optical, wire frame and ground glass; interchangeable lenses; a rise and fall front; lateral shifts; a coupled rangefinder; and a double extension bellows adaptable to lenses from 90mm to over 300mm.

The Speed Graphic looks complicated, but is one of the simplest and most flexible cameras made. Afflicted by a ``Rube Goldberg'' variety of features - three viewfinders! - you prove your skill everytime you use it. Nothing in the Graphic is automated; if you don't pay attention you can double expose, shoot blanks, fog previous exposures or shoot out of focus images. However, once you get used to it, it is amazingly easy to use.

. . . In 1940, Graflex announced the Anniversary Speed Graphic with Kodak Anastigmat (or the then all-new Ektar) lens. The new features included the coupled rangefinder and flash solenoid to use the then popular flashbulb. The bed would drop past horizontal, allowing the use of the new wide angle lenses. . . The Speed Graphic was the still camera of World War II. . . 

The Graflex Speed Graphic is still in use and has fans.

Graflex Speed camera owned by a professional photographer

From a fan comment at photo.net:  A lot of American photographers (and others) used the Graflex Graphic cameras, which are large format sheet film cameras that were equipped with the finest lenses of their days. The large format plus the best lenses and fine-grained film resulted in tremendously sharp and obscenely detailed pictures with wonderful tonality. No digital camera will get you images with a comparable high resolution.

The same fan comments once more, mentioning things that stir the childhood memory:  Add fine-grained film and you get stunning, sharp and detailed pictures with extreme resolution. I guess not even the most expensive digital back available today will beat such a large format negative in terms of details and "megapixels" -- to say nothing of "bokeh" and the nice, diffused look of large flash bulbs. . .And of course the film wasn't processed by the local one-hour photo minilab with a bored high-school-age minimum wage worker, but by dedicated professionals with decades of experience (Capa's misfortune was caused by an excited and new lab technician... I always wonder what happened to him).

Bokeh is a term new to me; Wiktionary defines it as a subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of an image. . .   Sounds disturbing!  And it sounds like something not desirable in reconnaissance phototography. However, on looking again at old family photos, I'll see if anything of that description strikes me.  Can the photographer regulate how much bokeh enters into an exposure?

As for the nice, diffused look of large flash bulbs, that look is all over the interior shots of old family photos and wedding photos. Plus I remember standing often in an arranged group shot, the heat and light of JPZ's giant floodlights on stands full in all our faces.

Robert Capa's misfortune, mentioned by the fan, was that his images of the D-Day landings were almost all destroyed by a lab tech under pressure to rush the processing while unfamiliar with all the details of the film he was handling.  From a June, 2014 Vanity Fair article: Banks had put Capa’s films into the drying cabinet as usual, but was so frantic he closed the door with the heat on high, believing that would speed the process. Without ventilation, the heat melted all of the emulsion off the film.

The Graflex Anniversary Speed Graphic shows up in the Photobook in the hands of various team members - EJZ, Frenchie, and the third guy who shows up all the time but whose name we still do not know.  Now that we have seen clear pictures of this and the movie camera, and had some names to associate with them and some of their parts, we can notice them more reliably while looking through the photos in the Trove. That is the hope, anyway.

Movie Camera on the National Mall, 1944

November, 1944, The National Mall, Washington, D.C. –   Our EJZ and a small group of buddies, having completed survival and tactical training on Catalina and crossed back to the East Coast by train, continue briefing at OSS offices in the Capital.

The Photobook, page 7, as well as certain outtakes related to it, show them on the National Mall practicing with the camera equipment they will be taking to China.  That post includes several photos of a certain movie camera, of which this one is the clearest:

Kind friends have identified it for us as a Cunningham Combat Camera. The Imperial War Museum has a good example.

From the IWM blurb:  Made from magnesium, it was a lightweight design which made it ideal for filming live combat footage. Features included special grip handles and a rifle stock which ensured it was steady enough for hand-held use in the field. It was electric-powered and ran off small batteries, had a four-lens turret and lenses robust enough for use in tough conditions.

Y.M. Cinema Magazine published several good images of this camera, such as this one:

From their article:  The camera excelled in its usability and simplification. Changing the film magazine was allowed on a push of a button, and the focusing mechanism was pretty sraightforward and simplified. Choosing the frame rate was done by a convenient switch. The options were 16, 24, and 32 frames per second.

American Cinematographer has an excellent short video up describing the Cunningham and showing how it works. They flip all the switches, push all the buttons, and let the viewer look through the viewfinder.

Matynka Ancestors and Relatives: Suddenly the Family is Bigger

My maternal grandfather, Adam Matynka, was one of 8 children, and I never knew it.

Undoubtedly, my parents took me with them to weddings and funerals where these great-aunts and great-uncles would have been met.  But I was to small to remember more than impressions, while the particulars were never written down.

But now we have particulars in abundance, thanks to long-lost - indeed, never-known - cousin, Timothy Warchocki.  His pages at MyHeritage.com make clear the various branches of the family lineage, indicate dates, and are illustrated with photos, including some old ones from this blog.

I am grateful to Tim for making it possible for me to update part of the Matynka family page here.

"Auntie Stella," "Auntie Veronica," and "Uncle Tony" were for me names heard in childhood.  Now they are persons with places on the family tree.  Thank you, Tim.

Dziadzi Matynka had 7 brothers and sisters.

Clara and Adam Matynka,
at 554 Walden Avenue, Buffalo.
It looks like the 1950s.

Adam Matynka in his uniform
of municipal bus driver
in Buffalo.

Chopin, Christmas, and "For Our Freedom and Yours!"

Lulajże, Jezuniu, “Lullaby, Little Jesus” is a traditional Polish Christmas carol dating from the nineteenth century, or who knows, perhaps earlier. Here is a lyric in original and in translation; very homey, yes?

Lulajże Jezuniu, moja Perełko,

 

Lulaj ulubione me Pieścidełko.

 

Lulajże Jezuniu, lulaj, że lulaj

 

A ty go matulu w płaczu utulaj

 

          Hush little Jesus, my little pearl,

          Hush my favourite little delight.

          Hush little Jesus, hush, hush

          But you lovely mother, solace him in tears

Here it is sung by Stefan Witas in a 1932 recording for Columbia. It is worth the trouble to follow the link and take a listen, as it is a great recording of a nice tenor voice, plus all the scratchy vinyl versimilitude.

And here is another, recent recording, perhaps a little syrupy, but with the advantage of clarity, sung slowly enough that it is easy to listen and read the lyric at the same time.

Fryderyk Chopin incorporated this carol into his first scherzo, his Scherzo No.1 in B minor, Op. 20. Why would he do that? And for that matter, why would he set a musical joke in a minor key?

In 1830, Chopin was in Vienna.  The Polish military cadets in Warsaw launched an uprising against the Russian Tsar. This November Uprising of 1830 involved Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarus, and went on for 8 or 9 months until its ultimate defeat.  This was their battle flag:

                                                     IN THE NAME       OF GOD

                                                     FOR                                AND
                                                    OUR                              YOUR

                                                                  FREEDOM

This is translated as  For our freedom and yours, and has been repeated in subsequent wars, and is repeated now.

Chopin’s friends persuaded him to remain in Vienna while this insurrection raged in his homeland.  So his compatriots were fighting for independence far away; he had TB anyway; he could not fight.  I think that, obsessed with the knowledge of the fight and feeling the agony of his homeland, he must have considered a musical joke perfectly appropriate.  It was a sick joke that Fate was playing on the Poles and their allies. The music speaks of frenzy.

Here is The Taking of the Warsaw Arsenal, Marcin Zaleski 1831.

This is easily imagined on hearing the scherzo.  Here is Artur Rubenstein performing.

The structure of the thing is all there to read about, but the stunner is what happens in the very center of it.  At 3’20” in this recording, the waking nightmare pauses, and reverie takes over.  We hear the melody of Lulajże, Jezuniu.  We hear just the melody, as if we were being rocked in maternal arms, or as if we were in meditation before the Manger, or as if we were at home at Christmas.

But then we are jerked awake, startled back to the present and to war.

There are times when, after reading the news for an hour, I deliberately send my thoughts back to the security and the wholeness of my own childhood – for I was lucky to have such. My father would look at me and say Pieścidełko – little dear one.

I see the twinkling tree and all the glowing lights; I sense the dark snowy winds beyond the curtains; I hear the music; I sense the fragrances from the kitchen; I notice the rustlings of dear ones moving around the house.  Yes, I go back there in memory on purpose, but then startle awake, jerk back to the present, where there is knowledge of protracted, seemingly distant, yet decisive battle.

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.

Kunming, Julia McWilliams Child, and Tad Nagaki

Sisterhood of Spies is an account of women in the OSS in the European and CBI theaters in WWII.  Author Elizabeth P. McIntosh discusses China in her Chapter 19, Over the Hump to China.  She notes that Julia McWilliams Child, of whom we have read mention in R. H. Smith's history, was stationed in the OSS HQ in Kunming from early1945.  From pp. 296-297 of the paperback edition:

At the same time that new OSS women were checking into Chungking's Green Gate, the OSS advance base in K'unming four hundred miles south of Chungking was also expanding.  I flew over the Hump in a storm-tossed flight with imperturable Julia McWilliams, who calmly read a book while all the rest of us were preparing to die. . . 

The OSS compound was located on the outskirts of town, surrounded by high mud walls.  Before the war K'un-ming had been a resort town the end of the rail line from Indochina where French colonials spent their vacations enjoying this invigorating mountain retreat, the sparkling sunshine, and the medieval ambience of the walled city itself.  To the north was a beautiful lake with a fleet of fishing sampans.  Towering above the city was West Mountain, the landmark for Hump and combat pilots nearing that welcome safe haven, K'un-ming Airport. K'un-ming was also the end of the Burma Road, closed from 1942 to early 1945 while the Japanese controlled that country.  Vital military supplies were now arriving aboard lubering trucks caked with red clay from Burma.

Most of the women at K'un-ming headquarters had special operational skills.  Julia McWilliams continued the important job of organizing Registry material, as she had done in Ceylon.  Reports were coming in constantly from OSS field missions that were gradually spreading out to China's coastal cities.  One priority target was the pinpointing of prisoner-of-war camp sites.  Later this specific intelligence data enabled OSS rescue teams to zero in on these camps accurately and liberate Allied prisoners held by the Japanese.

The liberation to which McIntosh refers is specifically the rescue of Allied military and civilian POWs held by the Japanese as quickly as possible after the Japanese surrender, before the POW camp commanders had time to kill them.

The mission undertaken by Tad Nagaki, a Nisei OSS commando who rescued civilian prisoners held at a concentration camp in Shantung province, provides an example.  From an account written up years later when rescuer and rescuees maintained their friendship when back in the USA:

Reports had reached American headquarters in China the summer of 1945 that Japan planned to kill all Prisoners of War (POW). To prevent the massacre, seven-man rescue teams that included medics, communications specialists, and interpreters were hastily organized to find and evacuate POWs in China, Manchuria, and Korea.  

Determined to make one last difference as World War II came to an end, especially since so many lives were at stake, Nagaki immediately volunteered for the mission. As the “Armored Angel” droned toward Weihsien Concentration Camp in the Shantung Province, he remembered how he almost didn’t get the chance. 

It's an excellent story.

Lake Dian and West Mountain; Kunming

An earlier Kunming post includes photos of OSS personnel there to train the Chinese.  One of them I think is our EJZ.

VDH Lectures

Scholar and farmer Victor Davis Hanson recorded six lectures on aspects of WWII, prepared according the same approach he took in writing his recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.  Instead of straight chronological narrative, he considers war in the air across the entire span of the conflict; next naval warfare ditto; next the ground wars; next artillery.  These four themes - air, water, earth, and fire - come naturally to a classicist and military historian; treating them in the context of WWII is highly effective.

Dr. Hanson's fifth lecture, People, discusses the cultures of the various combatants, how their cultures affected their thinking and induced them to act, and what were some of the results.  These ideas are helpful in trying to understand the very specific history we've been reading about here in recent posts:

Looking for Log in All the Wrong Places
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

The final VDH lecture, "Ends," concerns long-term outcome and assessment.  All these lectures are preceded by an introductory talk by Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, in which he gives the widest context, setting the stage for the VDH lectures.

The series is available as a free online course from Hillsdale, one of several on offer.

Mysterious Letter from Chungking

"The Chinese Puzzle" is the title of Chapter 8 in the second edition of R.H. Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency.  We've considered some quotations from that chapter here in the Cynicsm post, the Warlords post and the "Chinese Puzzle" post. 

In R.H. Smith's "China" folder of materials for his book is a typed letter, 1.5 pages long, dated "Chungking - Nov. 22, 1944.  It is unsigned. The salutation is:

                                                          Dear Mr. G.

[Chungking at this time was the Nationalist Chinese capital, the city of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, his globally-lethal Secret Police Chief General Tai Li, and their Koumintang Party.  In this letter, one "old China hand" is describing the situation to another such, the mysterious Mr. G.  An "old China hand" is a European or American, son of diplomatic, academic, religious, or commercial missionaries to China, who spent his youth in the country; for some of them Mandarin or Cantonese was the first language.  Smith discusses "old China hands" quite a bit in his Chapter 8, but as far as I can detect on very suspicious close reading, did not quote or paraphrase this letter in it.  So although it obviously must have informed Smith's understanding of the situation in China, it has remained mysterious since November 1944.  Here is a bit from the first paragraph:]

. . . There is so much that must remain unsaid and such a vast and complex field to cover-and I am so ignorant-that I hardly dare pretend to have anything to say about the China of today.  But of one thing I am sure- it is completely and radically different from the Pekin you knew and the life that was lead [sic] there when you were a young man. . .

[Here is a bit from the second paragraph of this letter of mystery.  I am looking at a scanned image of a yellowed sheet of typing paper bearing the characteristic grey typescript, output of a partly used-up typewriter ribbon:]

I don't know how to start or to end in describing the scene.  Indeed I'm not sure in can be described- that is, it is not consistent; . . . things are so fluid that they don't permit of conclusions as to pattern. . . In the first place the Chinese don't hate the Japanese and never have- they merely hope in some vague way , that the Japs will go away. . . Second, the Chinese have little, if any conception of nationhood.  And the Party [the unidentified writer here refers to the Koumintang  Party] has not appealed to the love of China, but rather insisted on devotion and loyalty to the Party and its leader- a narrow and limited appeal in any event and particularly sterile in recent years because of the "reactionary", or better, moribund leadership from the Gissimo down. . . Third, the soldier and the army are still the lowest in the social and intellectual scale.  there is no conscription; not one of the members of the government has suffered any personal loss of sons or brothers. 

[No skin in the game, and on purpose!  Contrast even the monarchs of medieval and Renaissance Europe as they went forth themselves, or sent their sons and Crown Princes, forth to battle the foe across the English Channel, for example. Whether their expeditions were defensive in nature, or venal attempts at territorial expansion, they put their own royal houses at stake.]

    On the contrary, all have profited hugely and are prosperous beyond their wildest dreams so that the great majority of government people, plus the traders, merchant and business man, doesn't [all caps, X'd over!] want the war to end. 

The young Chinese doesn't enlist; he pursues his studies.  Only coolies and forced conscripts join the army- they don't join- they are dragged off to a miserable life without enough food or clothing and with miserable quarters, etc.

[So imagine these specifically-trained Americans, come to defeat the Imperialist Japanese who had attacked their own country and also invaded, rampaging and doing murder, this ally China.  Some of these Americans descended from the Mayflower colonists, others from refugees crossing the Atlantic in steerage holds only forty years before, others, Nisei, sons of ethnic Japanese-American parents who loved their adopted country even as it did not yet love them back.  They rode, on ponies and trucks, or flew in, to find a thrall-and-warlord based feudal society enmeshed in complicated, opaque, and deadly strategic traps. Their mission was to help these guys fight the Japanese.  Okay, but. . . Just imagine it.]

Another point.  I said that the Chinese don't hate the Japanese- indeed they don't hate anybody.  Someone said here recently that there hasn't been a shot fired in anger by the Chinese since Dec. 8, 1941.  He meant merely, the Chinese decided then and there, it was our war and they would let us carry the ball.

[Those are two distinctly different points.  Some hate the murderous invader, of course: just remember Nanking.  But can they shoot back, or are they disarmed, starving, and powerless?  The Chinese who "decided" to "let us carry the ball" are  not the ones fighting, they are the ones not fighting, but protecting their localized power and commercial interests.]

          - quotations from a letter in the R. Harris Smith papers, Box 2, Folder 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 

I wonder who lent the original to our author, R.H.  Smith.  Below the last paragraph of typescript is a phrase in manuscript.  It just says Please return b 9.9.3.

"The Chinese Puzzle" Considered With Some Source Material from the Hoover

"The Chinese Puzzle" is the title of Chapter 8 in the second edition of R.H. Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency.  We've considered some quotations from that chapter here in the Cynicsm post and the Warlords post.  Here is another sample.  From Smith, p. 247:

OSS intelligence files at Chungking (conscientiously maintained by a jolly amateur chef named Julia McWilliams Child) bulged with reports about the incompetence of the Chinese military command.  In November 1944, when Japanese troops began an offensive that threatened Chennault's air bases, groups of OSS demolition teams were sent to destroy equipment that might be captured by the enemy.  A fifteen-man team commanded by a 25-year-old veteran of Detachment 101 discovered three huge ammunition dumps that held tons of arms and supplies.  They were told the equipment had been collected and hoarded for years against a crisis in east China.  With the Japanese only twenty miles away, the bungling Chinese Army commanders were still zealously hoarding the materiel.  The Americans were forced to destroy the entire stores only hours before the Japanese entered the town.

Since this entire blog is Amateur Hour, I'll give my take on this.  Bungling is a misdiagnosis.  Those commanders were not bungling, they were sticking with the program instilled in them by their entire warlord-owned culture: obey, be quiet, do not stand out; your warlord awaits his opportunity. Within that context, they performed their parts competently, according to their cultural algorithm.

A contrasting cultural algorithm can be discerned in the actions of the mechanics and farmboys in the US Army in Normandy, who on their own hook modified their tanks so they could roll right through those deadly hedgerows.

Chinese infantrymen with the Koumintang were treated like slaves.  H.R. Smith continues:

Other OSS officers were sickened by the treatment the Chinese government afforded its own troops.  An OSS doctor who helped select Chinese soldiers for guerilla training described the conditions in their army as a 'crime against humanity.'

Where could Smith have found that quotation?  Well!  We now possess scans of Smith's notes for this chapter, thanks to the work and help of the Hoover Institution Archives.  Thank you, Hoover pros!  Smith is quoting Stuart and Levy, from their 1965 Kind-Hearted Tiger:

R.H. Smith typescript described as "Stuart and Levy, 1965, p.347": 

 When OSS began to recruit Chinese soldiers for a second Commando group early in 1945,  [Note that our EJZ arrived in Kunming in early 1945, to train Chinese commandos.]   the surgeon general for the Chinese OGs (John Hamlin) found the Chinese troops from whom he was to select - "Their bodies were covered with standard thin cotton khaki trousers and tunics.  Some still had straw sandals.  Most were without footgear.  All were weak from marching and malnutrition. Many also had dysentery.

Said Hamlin, "We can't accept any of these men.  They're dying on their feet.  Even in trucks, I doubt if they'll last to Kunming. This is a crime against humanity.

In effect, selecting any of them for OSS training was saving their lives for it would mean shelter and decent food for the commandos who were to be trained.  When they reached Kunming, they were marched to their first real meal in months.  Some of them had never eaten meat before.

                            - R. Harris Smith papers, Box 2, Folder 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 

I am taking another look at this image scanned from G&C's OSS CBI Photobook, noticing the details:

That photo is included in the post OSS CBI Photobook 15 - Southwest China, 1945-Reconnaissance, Part 4.  The Photobook is here at Trove HQ.