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Excerpt from 1997 Chinese OG reunion: Ellsworth (Al)
Johnson Operations: We were in France and, as has been said, you had small options. You either volunteered to go to China or you went back in the regular military, so that I imagine few went back to the military; they went to China with the rest of us. We did the training. We had the small groups. I think our group was 181 Chinese that we trained. These plus the cadre of officers and enlisted men amounted to about 200. We were the liaison or the catalyst that would make the comandos work, but they didn't; they functioned poorly. I remember Capt. Cook, our Commanding Officer, getting one of the Chinamen to go up to the front with the end of a pistol at his head, saying, "Get up and fight or you'll get shot"—that sort of thing. It took extreme measures with them. I made a map in China on rice paper, a larger map because I wasn't going to get lost. It shows our drop zone, the area in which we travelled, and the Japanese installations. Jim Gardner was saying it was our privilege, supposedly, to keep the rice from going back to Japan; that's what we had to try to prevent. After we had done all these things that Jim has spoken about, and the wounded were evacuated and we were back at the Buddha temple, Jim got a message over the radio that the bomb was dropped, the war was done, but keep fighting. They don't want us out. We were in actually about 30 days after the end of the war. Harry Truman disbanded the OSS so we were a man without a country. About 5 or 6 of us went down to Hing Yang and were finally taken out the middle to the end of September. Al refers to the
write-up (copy of which he gave us - a 68-page manuscript, "One
Small Part") of his thoughts and experiences which includes this
Chinese operation and other items that are not written down or spoken
of. The National Archives report we obtained includes only a few sentences
about BLUEBERRY. Possibly this is because there was little interest
after the war and "why list something that had no interest of an
organization that didn't exist any more! So no one was interrogated
like they were coming out of France."
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