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When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the OGs were ushered out of China so abruptly that an account of activities such as that of Lt. Col. Cox about France was not compiled at the time, and it took years for official records to be declassified. In 1997 about 60 OGs who had been in China with known addresses were notified of a reunion in New Hampshire and asked to speak about China. Fourteen attended. Extracts of a poor recording follow. Arthur P. Frizzell Operations: BLACKBERRY was the second OG mission in China, landing 19 July at Liuchow. Art and Vern Hoppers had drawn lots in 1944 to determine which should be the first Section to jump into France. Art won so Hop was given first mission in China. I wish that we had been made to prepare a report on our China operations as we had on the French operations! In Grenoble we wanted to get onto other things, so the report I put together with the help of George Huguet, Ernie Trudeau, Tiny Ouellet and others was pretty cryptic and could have been better presented, but what's there we enjoy seeing now and regret losing a lot about China over the last 50 years. When we finished the operation in France we were given the opportunity to stay with the OSS and go to the other side of the world and do what needed to be done over there against the Japanese, or we could get out of the OSS and go do regular military duty. I don't know how many opted not to stay in OSS. My own personal point of view is that it was the greatest group of guys ever assembled. Heading for China we didn't know exactly what the job was that we had to do with the Chinese, but, as in France, a lot of things were developed sort of on the spot. As Hank has said, we would serve as cadres to larger units of Chinese troops. Al Cox had set up a tactical training unit in Iliang where we would teach the Chinese small group tactics. Everything finally got pieced together, including training in Col. Rucker's parachute school. Vernon Hoppers took the first Chinese group into the field and I took the second. As an aside, when Connie and I were serving in London in 1971, I was riding home from work on a bus and spotted Hoppers outside and after a frantic effort caught up with him to make one of only a few contacts with him over a 50-year period. Hoppers present whereabouts is unknown. Emmet
F. McNamara Operations: Telephones were working fine so we get the message of the Southern France invasion. Do your best to get up to Paris, which we did. There were 11 of us that finally got up there. All volunteered to go to China. No one would look at the other guy and say, "I'm not going. Are you going? Yeah, I'm going." So we all go over to China. There we lived in Maryknoll Mission. I got a kick out of someone's story how the Chinese made pajamas out of the chutes. We all wore them. The night we parachuted alongside the river some dropped in dry rice paddies but some Chinese dropped in rice paddies containing water and drowned. The Chinese left them there. You go to heaven if you drown in China. We were chased by about 500 Japanese. We had to run for 3 days in stocking feet; we had no shoes. We had no food. We walked over the mountains and ended up in Father Connelly's Maryknoll Mission which was an orphanage for little girls—at least there was a little girl outside who had survived. We took her back in where there were around 100. The object there was to stop the traffic on the West River pulling the sampans with rice on them. The sampans would be pulled by a little motor boat which you could spot at night. You'd hit that and all the sampans would flip over and the Chinamen would come out of everywhere to grab these floating restaurants—they were full of rice. We heard the war was over. Some of us were sent back to Kunming. The rest stayed along the West River and went from town to town. Bates was our Lieutenant and he would know the details. Eventually we joined the others in Kunming. A few years ago Ernie Trudeau and I went to a meeting organized by by Dan Pinck at the Harvard Law School. That thing was not the OG type—a little more hierarchy—people who knew what was really going on—not us—the way I look at it we were just followers. James (Jim) A. Gardner Operations: Roy Gallant, Al Johnson and Tom McGuire were with me (Jim) in both France and China. We had the honor of taking a Japanese emplacement and during the process Roy was shot in the shoulder. The Chinese guerrillas started out with the OGs but when the mortars started they stopped, went up on a hill and watched the whole thing. They didn't get into action at all. The Japanese had the place all zeroed in —they had been there a number of years—and they had snipers all over the place. A Chinese kid was in front of me behind sort of a stone wall and he raised his head up to see what was going on and he was shot right between the eyes. Roy was next to me, fired, and the bullet ricoched across the stock of his gun. Then later on Roy got it. We pulled back to the Buddha temple. A funny thing came out of this when we made a shower out of bamboo and a can, the first shower the Chinese had ever seen. Yankee ingenuity. Dolezal (inaudible). All but 5 OGs were
flown out. The 5 went to Pyong Yang then back to Kunming where the Chinese
were fighting among themselves and running up and down the roads all
night with machine guns. 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." James W. Harrison Assignment: Claim to fame was shared with Al Johnson. One day in the field we had Chinese in a long line. I would go down the line and have them open their mouths. The rule was to extract the broken teeth, so Al and I extracted 88 teeth that afternoon. Just as the surrender
came someone in Canton was having a toothache so I went down there to
fix him up. I stayed there for a week and spent a million dollars in
Chinese money. It felt great. Then unfortunately I had infectious jaundice
and came back out. Lost 75 pounds. Robert Reppenhagen Operations: I was in France with Operation DONALD and then went to China. One interesting experience was that in going over the Burma Road—I think it was one of the first convoys in there—it took about 13 days. We went over some of the highest mountains in the world, and it was quite an experience. There was a big drop-off on one side all the time and some of the Chinese drivers seemed to be a little free with their lives, but we made it all right. Then when we got into China, incidentally, some officers came over and said, "OK, you guys, you can now wash the trucks." "What do you mean? We've been driving these things for 13 days. We don't want to wash trucks." So finally they let us off. In any case, later
on I was put in as a radio operator with the 10th Commando under Cap't
Gunderman, and we went in with the 8th and 9th Commandos. We fought
at Tanchuk. I remember a couple of incidents. Someone mentioned that
some of the Chinese dropped mortar shells into their own men and one
of the Commandos—there was a story around—I don't know how
true it was—a couple of boatloads of Chinese civilians came down
the river and one of the Commandos was supposed to stop the Japanese
if they retreated, so they opened up on the Chinese and they were shooting
up on all these Chinese civilians—women and children—killing
them all. So later we asked them what happened and they said, "Oh
no, those were Japanese,'' and we said, "They had women and children,"
and they said, "Well, they were collaborators: they were working
with the Japanese." Incidentally, today (Sept.2) is the anniversary of the 0fficial Japanese surrender. Raoul Pelletier Operations: One of my experiences in China was one afternoon when we took the Chinese down to the river to let them wash up. Capt. Frizzell probably remembers Frank, the best interpreter in the outfit. Frank and I were sitting on the riverbank and all of a sudden one of those little Chinese, about so high, goes in the water. I was screeming my head off, "Go on in and pull him out." They spread their legs out making room for him to go, and the river was very muddy. I jumped in the water and Frank looked at me as if I were an idiot. I ran back to camp, about a mile along the road, got some help, and with a chain tried to retrieve the body. We never found the guy.. I laid into Frank, my interpreter, who was an intelligent and very well educated man. That night he came to my tent and said, "Sergeant, I want to talk to you." I said, "Maybe you want to talk to me but I don't want to have anything to do with you." He said, "That's too bad but you'll have to listen to what I have to say. I.'m educated; those guys aren't. They have the old rules. If you save a man from drowning he's going to be your slave as long as he lives." That experience in China really stayed on my mind. I remember another thing, I had a Chinese coolie
I had adopted. I asked Capt. Cook, "Captain, can I bring that coolie
with me?" And he said, "I don't know why not. I think Capt.
Frizzell has one; you can have one, too." So I took him along with
me. Well, the idea was to have him carry my pack once we got off those
sampans. Chinese currency wasn't worth that much; we had that by the
satchel bag. I couldn't make out his name so I baptized him "Ginsberg."
He was so happy! Every time I called him "Ginsberg" he would
smile from ear to ear. We got on those sampans and we started down the
river. We had those two packs. We didn't get very far and at the first
rice paddy he started talk with guys and took currency out of the bag
and the first thing you know two guys came out of the rice paddy carrying
the bags and here's Ginsberg -- now he's the boss. Those Chinese weren't
all fools. Some were very smart. Ernest A. Trudeau Operations: Ernie spoke at length extolling the OGs, citing unsung valor and accomplishments as great as those of the most widely acclaimed heroes. Through his championing the OGs have been brought to the attention of people near his home, such as the French Consulate in Boston. His loyalty to and pride in the OGs is clearly voiced. Thomas F. McGuire Operations: Tom's brief remarks were not caught on tape. Tom, like several others, is a good collector and correspondent and has added good material to our collection. Roy Gallant Operations: Several weeks before the reunion Roy had open heart surgery and was well enough to join the group. He and Doris were motored from their home in Maine by his brother, Bill, and Bill's wife, Lydia. Roy was not up to a speech but references to him were made by Gardner, Johnson and McGuire, and are in manuscripts of Johnson and Hirtz and the book ready for publishing by Dave Boak.
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