At the end of 1943, I returned from the "war zone" (i.e., the place of war or actual work) to Washington, D.C., the administrative capital, a gathering place where representatives of the relevant agencies of the various theaters of war were gathered, where everyone vied for the attention of the decision-making center.
I can sympathize with the urgency of a member of Congress rushing back to Washington from a district ravaged by floods, storms, and other natural and man-made disasters to solve the problem.
And how can I bring the urgent needs of wartime China to Washington, which is in chaos?
I found myself having to adjust from a life in Chongqing that was predominantly interpersonal to a bureaucratic Washington where impersonal interaction was rife.
Nonetheless, my understanding of Chinese politics is no longer abstract and relates to specific people and situations, which will help me ask questions about U.S. policy.
Coming out of wartime China, there was a spiritual need for a transition, and the process began in Kunming.
Re-entering the lifestyle of the U.S. Army Welfare Society, as I did in 1972, went from the hard and simple life of Mao Zedong to the material affluence of Hong Kong's upper class—a rapid transition from an ascetic to a lavish profligate, and life lost its original innocence.
Against the backdrop of China's material poverty, the spiritual and moral qualities of my Chinese friends shine brightly.
In contrast, American military personnel fill the void of the spiritual world with pornographic images, stories, and movies. Magazines such as Time, Life, and Newsweek only provide them with news that they imagine from their senses and that take place in the new world.
It seems to me that everything only shows that their sexual desires are not satisfied and that they have a confused perception of global events.
You just understand what is happening in the world, but you can't imprint it in your heart. Because, everything is just a flash in front of your eyes, but you have never experienced it yourself.
Traveling was also a pleasure for the beholder, and I sat in the glass cockpit of the bow of a B-26 bomber, and in the bright moonlight, the plane flew over the eastern end of the Himalayas, continuing west over the "hump".
Due to the glass cabin at the front of the bomber, which was placed on a rib-shaped steel frame, sitting in it seemed to be protruding from space.
Old photos of the B-26 bomber flying in the air The picture comes from the Internet
Under the full moon, the plane flew over lakes and rice paddies, as if rushing into the thin surface of the earth, like a searchlight on the subway, faintly shining through the brief gap in the tunnel.
The moon overhead, like me, remained motionless in the thin and cold air, as if frozen. And the reflection of the moon in the water below, flickering and flickering, is moving rapidly forward on the ground.
However, at this point, I felt a little dizzy, so I slowly passed through the movable door, entered the cockpit, and put on the oxygen mask in time.
Although I was given priority to number three, it still took three weeks to cross the Middle East and Africa. Wilma and I then met up in Miami, and we had two days off to talk to each other.
Back in Washington, I became a first-hand witness of the current wartime situation in China, and for six weeks, I was very popular.
Many of the 10~12 groups that invited me to give a presentation had already read my letters and memoranda before. Therefore, I am mainly responsible for answering questions and trying to let these colleagues get an indirect feeling of the current situation in China.
Of course, it was not easy, but at least people generally began to develop a sense of distrust of the Kuomintang regime. I am just providing new evidence for these China experts, who have long since formed a unified view.
In the early 1940s, Chiang Tinghuang and Wang Shijie traveled to New York on behalf of the Nationalist Government to rebuild confidence in the Nationalist Government, but their lobbying speeches had no effect.
In the 17 months since I was away, Washington's agencies have expanded, with Fred Gilgo's interagency committee for foreign publications being the largest.
He took over a theater, the historic Washington Auditorium, and had 100 staff members handling material in about 50 languages from nine overseas bases.
U.S. Wartime Information Bureau staff are processing messages from around the world Pictures from the web
Fred still looked young, dressed in a crisp second lieutenant uniform, and his administrative prowess made him stand out from the crowd. It was because he always kept his authority intact that the Interdepartmental Committee on Procurement of Foreign Publications flourished.
For two months, I made Laughlin Currie's office a base in order to continue the project, and now he is busy with the work of the War Economic Council, and he has nothing to do with the China problem.
I started working on my next steps. Neither the Interdepartmental Procurement Committee for Foreign Publications nor the Strategic Intelligence Bureau have reserved jobs for me, and the other jobs available seem to be too narrow.
I was more interested in giving advice than in concrete implementation, and in my letter to Mike Fisher, head of the wartime Information Bureau in Chongqing, I concluded:
"With the exception of the 14th Air Brigade, the War Information Bureau is doing more excellent work than any other American organization, and Washington is a dynamic place."
It is housed in the Social Security Building, a behemoth made of a mixture of stone and glass, and the Far East Department has four offices here, "where the temperature, the noise, the light, everything can be adjusted".
The head of the wartime press bureau was Elmer Davis, whose Indian-esque nasal voice on CBS's nightly channel was seen by honest people as a guarantor of the truth.
Suddenly a leader with thousands of employees around the world, Elmer Davis had a confidant, business manager Ed Claubel, who helped Elmer Davis launch his career and become a first-class journalist without the hassle of trivial matters and negotiating contracts.
Ed Krauberel looks like an experienced mafia, with a burly physique and a tenacious personality that is not easy to deal with, and his role as guardian is strengthened by his appearance.
In 1944, on the day of the D-Day landings, Wilma and I dined with Davis and his young bride.
He told us that he was 35 years older than the bride and that from a business point of view, the bride would soon be free and prosperous due to the huge age difference between the two. Both of them are very charming, and the combination of old and young looks quite harmonious.
The director of the wartime press bureau was Elmer Davis, and the deputy director below him was Ed Barrett. Barrett was the editor of Newsweek, and his assistant Barnard came from the Walt Thompson advertising agency.
At the same time, Jim, a Spirit-like man from Life magazine, assisted them in their work.
Such a trio of editors and business contacts represent a mix of non-governmental news outlets, always on the alert to prevent any government agency from controlling the news.
The three of them, as young and energetic supervisors at home, have always fought against totalitarians abroad. As a result, the wartime information bureau often carefully restricted the domestic news output to the American public.
As assistants to the Deputy Director, there are three Regional Representatives:
Wallace Carroll, a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and Ferdinand Kuhn, who was in charge of the Commonwealth region, were first-rate correspondents, and Kuhn was the editor-in-chief of the New York Times in London during Hitler's offensive and the Battle of Britain;
In charge of the Far East, a scholar named Andy Tai, invited me to lead the China section.
Originally from England, George received his master's degree from the University of Birmingham in 1928, and then went on a Commonwealth scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, where he continued his studies at Harvard University, where he was awarded a Harvard-Yenching Institute scholarship to study at Yenching University.
We met in Beijing, where he wrote a seminal essay entitled "The Social and Economic Background of the Taiping Rebellion." After that, he taught for many years at the Central Political School founded by Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing.
George is a natural leader, with a strong imagination to break new ground and a caring heart for his people. At the same time, he has the ability to control interpersonal relationships, maintaining good relationships not only with his superiors, but also with pretentious colleagues.
I jumped at the chance to be his assistant and work with him. While he was away, I issued documents in the name of assistant to the deputy director of the wartime information bureau and could exercise some authority, and of course, I was the lowest-ranking subordinate of the top management.
I know that George didn't know much about the war in China, and he needed someone to help with the government. It seems to me that we built a good team in Washington in 1944 and the first half of 1945. As for what we have achieved, it is clearly a different matter.
One of the principles of Deward's leadership is that the principles of the social sciences must be applied to China, and the actual situation in China must be taken into account.
During the war with Japan, he considered it necessary for sociologists and psychologists to understand and figure out Japan's motives for waging a war of aggression.
He hired Clyde Clarkhorn and Florence Clarkhorn, as well as Alexander Layton, to do the work.
They were desperate for a classic work on the subject. And Ruth Benedict's "The Chrysanthemum and the Knife", published in 1946, is undoubtedly a masterpiece.
I was joined by Dirk Bude, who is on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, and Rende, who has been teaching psychology at Yenching University for many years and has returned to China.
Together, a few of us are good enough for the job, but how can we use our intellect to win the war, and, far from China?
Every day, we receive a steady stream of telegrams with slightly left-wing views from all over the country, often from some public publication, but classified as classified documents, presumably because we are not allowed to read them publicly.
We are the think tank that directs the wartime press bureau in the content of the information it publishes. However, for those of us in Washington, D.C., it is a bit of a stretch to steer the direction of the discourse of the publishers in New York, San Francisco, London, and other world centers in this noisy world.
We can guide, review the manuscript, and identify the main thrust, but we can't control the public opinion war in the United States, and what will happen to it, after all, there are too many powerful people involved.
My job was to represent the Third Theater at the weekly meetings of the Wartime Information Bureau, and in the meetings I worked out, or often squeezed out the Central Directives.
This is like Newsweek's weekly editorial meeting, which analyzes the current form of warfare and clarifies the direction of the Voice of America and other media outlets.
The Far Eastern manuscript deals primarily with Japanese propaganda, and when I come to the meeting and sit at the long table, it is usually Colonel Phillips and his assistant who represent the United States Naval Intelligence to express their views in a vague manner.
After all, the Naval Intelligence Agency has been fighting Japan for a generation now. Who would expect to learn from an unreliable professor?
When I was arguing with the Colonel on a certain issue, I made my point out loud, and he was surprised by my loud rebuttal. My colleagues at the wartime press bureau were overjoyed by this, and we had some say from then on.
When I visited the Voice of America Far East radio station in San Francisco, I found that Washington's instructions, including those of the Naval Intelligence Agency, did not help.
San Francisco's Voice of America is in the midst of a battle with Radio Tokyo in Japan. Those who listen to radio programmes on the other side of the Pacific are mainly enemy radio personnel, since they are almost the only ones who have radio equipment to listen to the radio.
This is in contrast to the radio warfare planned by Wally Carroll to be used on the European fronts, where the lack of radio for the general public has left us with a very limited number of listeners in the Far East.
The radio war is still going on among the staff of the radio stations. Despite this, VOA is still a daily and regular radio station in Burma, Thailand, Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies.
Another major branch of the Wartime Information Bureau, which was also under its control, was the Overseas News Feature Office on 57th Street in New York. It is a monster with a unique temperament, and is in charge of several radio stations that broadcast programs to European countries.
Europe is like a miniature version of a turbulent world, with exiled intellectuals competing with each other to spread their insights.
Even if they saw Washington's directives — which we often wonder if they did—they had to be translated into the languages of each country by translators, and then broadcast by broadcasters.
Trying to influence another city is like shouting at the propellers of an airplane, which is almost impossible for anyone to hear, and when they do, they are often ignored.
George doesn't have time to look at the Overseas News Feature Office, but I find the people here very interesting. So, for a while, every other week, I would go to New York and talk to the staff of the Overseas News Feature Office to explain Washington's approach to the Far East.
Although they maintained the politeness of a New Yorker to me, I didn't think they were interested in my tirade.
Washington's directive mainly helped Wally Carroll to discuss and provide topics with his editors in New York on the phone every day, and it provided the subject for our columnist Owen Wexler, whose finished manuscript would be broadcast under the name of Admiral Raymond or other celebrities.
The Overseas News Feature Office is a buzzing beehive, with a flood of news and commentaries, feature stories, news photos (transmitted by radio fax, the predecessor of television), photo exhibitions, and other reports.
And its main content is the figurative propaganda of the United States. They took flashy pictures of well-nourished, well-dressed school children, while European refugees living in ruins found it difficult to relate to their lives.
Moreover, it was natural for the Poles and Bulgarians who emigrated to the United States to praise the virtues of the Americans to their original compatriots with joy.
However, if this content is placed on Asians, it is likely to be misunderstood or even perceived as an act of aggression due to the huge cultural differences.
In July 1944, I gave Elmer Davis and Ed Barrett an overview of the operations of the War Information Bureau, when we were active in the Central Pacific Theater (under Nimitz), the South Pacific Theater (under MacArthur), and the China-Burma-India Theater (under Stilwell).
In Washington, we continue to liaise with agencies such as the State Department, the Department of the Navy, and the Strategic Intelligence Service. At the same time, from our offices in Washington, D.C., we have developed new guidelines for San Francisco and New York, which are directly reflected in the work plans of each country.
In addition, we take care of personnel management and stock printed matter and film for emergency use.
In July, I started the Washington Weekly Tipster to send out letters to outposts in Honolulu, Brisbane, New Delhi and Chongqing to help outpost staff in Honolulu, Brisbane, New Delhi and Chongqing learn more about the plans at Washington headquarters.
At the same time, in order to cooperate with the psychological warfare team in drafting leaflets to be airdropped into enemy territory, I also started a weekly "Coordinator" telegram. However, my efforts to promote the co-ordination of the various actions are merely akin to a maid cleaning a room in a neat and tidy manner, and I suspect that they will not be of much use.
In order to expand our weekly contribution to the central directives of the Bureau of Wartime Information, every Friday we communicate with the British and then consult with our drafters.
Every Monday at 11 a.m., there are discussions with regional experts, and at 3 p.m., after a review by the Review Committee, a document is put together.
The purpose of our propaganda is to strengthen our belief in victory on the one hand, and at the same time to create doubt and confusion among the enemy. In fact, we can't change any of the facts, just take advantage of the situation.
However, our propaganda ideas are at least sensible. When we knew that the enemy was about to lose Karkov, we would advertise how they would "defend Karkov with all their might", but it would end in failure, and at the same time, exaggerate the crushing situation.
United Press reporter Forman and He Long took a group photo in Yan'an The picture comes from the Internet
At the same time, in the spring of 1944, a group of journalists set a precedent for U.S. contact with Yan'an. These reporters found an interested audience among the American public, and some began to participate in the blueprint for the beautification of Yan'an, as they had done with Chongqing.
In July 1944, after the Dixie Mission was stationed in Yan'an, we received eye-opening reports from Xie Weisi and John Davis about Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party.
While the Bureau was studying how to persuade the Japanese to surrender, Mike Fisher met in Yan'an a special commission of about 200 Japanese defectors who had voluntarily surrendered to Japan under the persuasion of Japanese Communist Party member Nosaka Sanzo.
We know that the Japanese prisoners captured by the U.S. Air Force were forced to surrender, and no Japanese surrendered to us, and Mack sent back a series of valuable reports about the Communists' treatment of prisoners of war.
In addition, Wataru Kaji, a short, clever Japanese who worked in the Nationalist Air Force, helped Jim Stewart deliver leaflets to the wartime information bureau, but his execution and leadership were far inferior to Nosaka's.
This was followed by a discussion about how to deal with the Japanese emperor, focusing on the extent to which the Japanese emperor was the spiritual pillar of militarism.
Generally speaking, Japanese experts believe that the Japanese emperor is indispensable for maintaining the stability of Japanese society and accepting peace treaties, while non-experts believe that certain constitutional checks need to be imposed on him so that he cannot be allowed to be above the law, that is, not to remain sacrosanct.
In the early summer of 1945, the War Information Bureau broadcast to Japan six comments by Admiral Ellis Zacharias, who had many former friends at the Japanese Admiralty.
The comments imply that Japan's imperial system will be respected in a peace agreement, but in the absence of Japan's formal acceptance of "unconditional surrender", it will not be officially announced and can only be done secretly through Washington.
Zacharias recorded the content in Japanese and sent it to Saipan for broadcast.
As the Pacific War drew to a close, the War Information Bureau began to intensively plan for stockpiling and shipping work, including newsprint, printing presses, related technology, books and other equipment and equipment from the United States and the post-war world to facilitate post-war peace information work.
During the war, the Information Bureau stockpiled the materials for transportation and put them on the various areas occupied, which were arranged by specialized agencies according to different directives.
In China, for example, the deliveries included: 45 commercial feature films (4 copies each), 46 commercial short films, 50 wartime information bureau documentaries, exhibition photographs, press materials, music recordings for radio stations (1. 50,000 copies are under order), radio manuscripts, and publications, including book series.
From May to August 1944, due to work needs, Deedward left here for the China-Burma-India theater of operations, and I took his place.
It was a great opportunity for me to use his established organization to reform, restructure and gain the appreciation of his superiors.
However, I don't want to use this to enter the highly busy officialdom of Washington, but rather to return to China.
Old photos of Mao Zedong, Zhu De and American soldiers in Yan'an The picture comes from the Internet
In late 1944, after we had already established contact with the Communists in Yan'an, General Stilwell was stripped of his title of Commander-in-Chief of the Theater. This foreshadowed a clear side of the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War.
Among them, many people feel that the Communist Party is growing in power, and think that our opposition to the Communist Party will only cause endless trouble for themselves. Nevertheless, these warnings had no effect on the new ambassador, General Patrick Hurley, a self-proclaimed mediator who had been seduced by Chiang Kai-shek and was completely caught up in it.
In May 1945, my wife, Wilma, traveled to Chongqing to serve as a cultural liaison officer at the Embassy in China. In Chongqing, she met our friend from her time in Beijing, Professor Ben Naide, who was in charge of liaison with the Chinese side at the embassy.
Big, intelligent and capable, Benard was very good at foreign affairs and helped Wilma a lot. Wilma resisted the intervention of the powerful ambassador and quickly set up the China section of the U.S. Department of State's Department of Cultural Relations.
With the departures of Henpek and Hamilton, the State Department's Far East office was taken over by Fan Xuande, which included a number of diplomats with long working experience in China.
The most obvious questions they face are:
how to avoid further involvement in chaos if the Kuomintang regime collapsed; And if the Communist Party is in power, how will it turn into a new relationship with the Chinese Communist Party?
The Far East Office of the State Department did not believe that American policy could determine China's fate, and it was probably at the urging of the United States that the Nationalist Government added a Communist Party representative to its delegation at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945: Mr. Dong Biwu, who was old, mediocre, and unusually peaceful.
Dong Biwu signed the "UN Charter" old photo The picture comes from the Internet
Like Mao Zedong, he was one of the founders of the Communist Party and at the same time his most loyal and reliable follower.
When he arrived in Washington, John Carter arranged a secret meeting with him for a day at my mother's residence on 33rd Street in Georgetown.
(After Wilma left for China, we moved out of our 34th Street residence and I moved in with my mother.) ）
This was entirely appropriate, given that Dong Biwu was a member of the delegation, but it also reflected the KMT's sensitivity to any move by the US State Department to take a neutral stance in China's internal struggle.
In May 1945, I received approval from the China Office to go to China to assist the head of the China Office of the War Information Bureau. The person in charge here is a New Zealander who has just become an American citizen named William Holland.
He is well known to all experts on the Far East, having served as executive secretary of the Pacific Academic Association for a long time, organizing major international conferences and promoting the publication of scholarly research.
His talent and experience make him perfectly positioned to succeed Mike Fisher, who has been in Chongqing for four years. In view of the expansion of the wartime information bureau in China, William (Bill) Holland invited me to work in the information department of the wartime information bureau and entrusted Jim Stewart with the execution of psychological warfare (airdrop leaflets).
I am planning to travel to China at the end of August or September on July 30th. After negotiation, the final departure time was determined on August 6 and September 15. However, peace made everything change suddenly.
As the war draws to a close, the work that needs to be dealt with is becoming more and more annoying. Japan accepted the terms of surrender in the Potsdam Proclamation (if it could pardon the emperor), and Secretary of State Burns consulted with the allies on the matter (the allies refused to pardon the emperor).
Finally, the reply was officially released at 11:30 a.m. on August 11. Despite this, the Japanese government did not make the results of the negotiations public, which may have given rise to the impression that it might be dragging out the war.
The picture comes from the Internet
Therefore, it is the duty of the wartime Information Bureau to inform the Japanese people of the truth and the content of the provisions, which are as follows:
1. The full text of Burns' reply was broadcast in San Francisco at 8:29 a.m. Washington time by radio communications using Morse code and radio broadcasts in English, in addition to news announcements in Japanese on Honolulu Shortwave Radio and Saipan Mediumwave Radio. At that time, it was about 4 o'clock in the morning Japan time.
2. San Francisco requested that stations in all bands broadcast the full text of Burns's reply in both Japanese and English at the same time, repeating it for 52 hours. Saipan's medium-wave radio stations also broadcast around the clock.
3. The Japanese section in San Francisco translated Burns' statement into Japanese and, with the approval of the State Department, sent the statement into Roman letters and sent it to Honolulu, Manila, and Kunming by telegram from the U.S. Army Communications Corps.
4. Send a telegram to the psychological warfare front to make Japanese leaflets to be airdropped locally, suggesting that the Pentagon's 20th Air Group be ready to fly B-29 bombers to drop leaflets over Japan.
To ensure that the content of the leaflets was accurate, San Francisco checked the Roman alphabet version of the report with Washington on a line.
The flyer title was officially approved by the Pentagon and the State Department [Archie McLeish suggested inserting "Every Japanese has the right to know the truth"), and at the same time, we also informed Honolulu of the contents in plain text via commercial wireless telephones.
5. Honolulu used shortwave radio to send the contents of the eight-page leaflet to Saipan, which was cut and reorganized and finalized, and 3 million leaflets were quickly printed using a Webster high-speed printing press (don't let me confirm it).
B-29 bombers of the 20th Air Group, laden with leaflets, dropped them on Tokyo and six other major cities. The entire process, from the time we began preparing the plan in Washington, D.C., to the airdrop took 29 hours, six hours before the Japanese government received Burns' statement diplomatically.
Don't just think of this as a technical achievement by a coordinated and skilled executive team. It is worth noting that in the process of translation, we translated the word "emperor" into the customary expression "Emperor of Japan" (the emperor of great honor).
And in Burns's reply, it was simply translated as "Emperor of Japan". It can be seen that our actions have strengthened the effectiveness of our policies.
During my time at the War Information Bureau in Washington, D.C., I did learn a lot about journalism, but I didn't have much exposure to China, which made me even more eager to return to Chongqing.