In War and Famine: Missionaries in China's Honan Province in the 1940s 9780773572591

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Maps
Introduction: The Cast of Characters
1 The Other Side of No Man's Land
2 Behind Enemy Lines
3 Honan Missions
4 The Honan Way of Life
5 Sitting on the Edge of a Volcano
6 After Pearl Harbor
7 The Long Months of Silence
8 Crop Failure and Famine
9 Helping the Famine-Stricken
10 Two Journalists Tour the Famine Area
11 The Suffering Continues
12 The Embassy Comes to Call
13 The Japanese Overrun Honan
14 "First war zone shattered"
15 The OSS's Top Secret "Project Tower"
16 Project Tower in China
17 Behind Japanese Lines with Team Viper
18 Reclaiming Honan Hospitals
19 The Return of the Missionaries
20 "If we like them could die for Thee"
Appendix: Spelling of Chinese Place Names
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

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IN WAR AND FAMINE

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In War and Famine missionaries in china's honan province in the 1940's Erleen j. Christensen

MIGILL.QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS

MONTEAL & KINGSTON. LONDON. THACA

© McGill-Queen's University Press 2005 ISBN 0-7735-2853-9 Legal deposit first quarter 2005 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Christensen, Erleen J. In war and famine: missionaries in China's Honan Province in the 1940s / by Erleen J. Christensen. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2853-9

McGill-Queen's University Press acknowl-

I. Missionaries - China - Henan Sheng -

edges the support of the Canada Council for

History - 20th century.

the Arts for our publishing program. We also

China - Henan Sheng - History - 20th

acknowledge the financial support of the

century.

Government of Canada through the Book

20th century.

Publishing Industry Development Program

Sheng - History - 20th century.

(BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

BV3420.H6C46 2005

3. Henan Sheng (China) - History 4. Famines — China — Henan

C2004-904639-X Set in 10.5/13.5 Sabon with Dearest and Gill Sans. Book design and typesetting by zijn digital.

2. Missions -

I.Title.

266'.00951' 1809044

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Maps

vii

ix

Introduction: The Cast of Characters i The Other Side of No Man's Land 2, Behind Enemy Lines 3 Honan Missions

2,7

41

4 The Honan Way of Life

55

9

3

CONTENTS

VI

5 Sitting on the Edge of a Volcano 6 After Pearl Harbor

63

71

7 The Long Months of Silence 79 8 Crop Failure and Famine

94

9 Helping the Famine-Stricken

100

10 Two Journalists Tour the Famine Area 11 The Suffering Continues

no

12.1

12 The Embassy Comes to Call

135

13 The Japanese Overrun Honan 14 "First war zone shattered"

146

158

15 The O S S 's Top Secret "Project Tower" 16 Project Tower in China

170

180

17 Behind Japanese Lines with Team Viper 18 Reclaiming Honan Hospitals 19 The Return of the Missionaries

190

2.01 212

20 "If we like them could die for Thee"

222

Appendix: Spelling of Chinese Place Names Notes

241

Bibliography

267

Illustration Credits Index

277

275

237

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the letters from Honan saved by missionary families and the staffs of missionary societies, this story could never have been told. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the families of John L. Benson and Thomas Lee and to my own family for saving the letters that chronicled this tale of war and famine as it happened. My children and siblings have been enormously supportive and helpful as the boxes of letters, memoirs, and notes evolved into a book. I am especially indebted to my sister Faith Carlson and her assistant, Deb Dutton, who brought their expertise in graphic design to preparing the illustrations and maps.

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, and the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division. Martha Smalley of the Yale Divinity School Library and Archives helped me mine the riches of the Day Missions Collection; Terry Thompson of the Archives of the Missionary Society of the Church of Canada in Toronto led me to the Howard, Gibberd, and Clark manuscripts as well as a gold mine of letters; Lawrence McDonald and Milton Gustafson helped me find my way through military and diplomatic records in the U.S. National Archives; and Elisabeth Wittman of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America Archives in Chicago and Paul Daniels of the ELCA Region 3 Archives at the Luther Seminary in St Paul helped me trace the welter of Lutheran missionary organizations no longer in existence. I am especially appreciative of archivists who worked with me at long distance: Bill Sumners of the U.S. Southern Baptist Archives in Nashville, Margaret Dainton of the China Inland Mission/Overseas Missionary Fellowship Archives in the United Kingdom, Ingemar Ottosson in Sweden, and Mabel Helland and Solveig Nelson of the Lutheran Brethren in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. I cannot forget my fellow "mish kids": David Benson, who gave me copies of his father's letters early on; Cherrie Nelson Mathieson, who shared old memories and tracked down the Lutheran Brethren for me; Lavonne Marubbio, who answered so many questions about that group; Norman Cliff, who checked CIM records in the United Kingdom and found several elusive items for me; Alvyn Austin, whose Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1888-1959 set a standard of good scholarship and readability to aspire to; and Elizabeth Hulse, who copy-edited the manuscript for McGill-Queen's University Press. Closer to home, the staff at the University of Maine's Fogler Library, the Bangor Public Library, and the Grand Manan Community School Library and Access Centre were enormously helpful. And for day-to-day cheering me up and cheering me on, my heartfelt thanks to the Joans (Barberis and Marshall), to James Bates, who kept reading and demanding "More chapters!" and to Wendy Dathan, who gave the manuscript a herculean proofing and editing when it was at its most massive.

MAPS

1 Missionary Honan in the 19408 2 China during World War 11

xii

x

Missionary Honan in the 1940s

China during World War 11

IN WAR AND FAMINE

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introduction THE CAST OF C H A R A C T E R S

This is, in one sense, my own story, for I was there, a white-haired, bilingual child watching her fellow children starving in the streets of Honan. But In War and Famine is told principally by those who were both there and writing of that war and famine as it happened. My father, Dr Emery W. Carlson, a Lutheran missionary doctor, is the major narrator. The story begins when our family arrived in China in September 1940, some three years after the Japanese had taken control of the major cities of the coast and just over a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The story seemed headed toward a happy ending in 1946 when Emery turned his

4

IN WAR AND FAMINE

Elvera, Emery, and Erleen Carlson

Honan hospital over to a successor and the last of the injured Japanese soldiers in the compound were repatriated. However, when the Carlson family returned from furlough in 1947, they found Honan deep in another war, a civil war that closed down relentlessly on the missionaries, driving most of them out of the province by the end of 1948 and slamming the door on all of them three years later. Dr Carlson was neither the most fluent Westerner in Honan nor the most experienced, but he was uniquely qualified to be the major narrator of In War and Famine. He was in the province for more of World War II than almost any other Westerner, being among the

INTRODUCTION

S

last to leave during the Japanese ICHIGO advance in April-May 1944 and one of a small handful who were there in 1945 when the province was almost totally under Japanese control. Carlson worked at the Lutheran Hospital in Hsuchang, the only modern, Western-style hospital in the Chinese-controlled area of the province in the years 1941-44; he was active in relief work during the terrible famine of I942.-44; and in 1945, when almost all Westerners had fled, he was an intelligence officer working for the Office of Strategic Services behind Japanese lines in Honan province. Perhaps because of that connection, he was allowed to return to his mission's hospital at war's end while other missionaries cooled their heels in Chungking and other West China cities awaiting permission to travel. And he was one of the group who fled the province in 1947-48 as the Communists took control of ever larger centres and finally the whole province. While Emery Carlson's letters and other writings form a major thread in this story of war and famine, he is by no means the only narrator. His wife, Elvera Teed Carlson, contributes her point of view for the four years when the famine and the Japanese invasion were taking their heavy toll and the later years, when missionaries became enemies in a war of liberation from foreign interests. Others add their voices as well. About 150 missionaries from Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand were in Honan province on Pearl Harbor Day, and missionary numbers were back near that figure as the Communists took control of the province in 1947-48.1 have attempted to account for as many of them as possible, but most have had to come to these pages at second or third hand and some exist only in statistics. Others, however, speak - and speak eloquently - for themselves. One of these is William Simpson, a Canadian Anglican clergyman who attended the Peking College of Chinese Studies with Emery and Elvera Carlson. Bill Simpson served at Chengchow, a strategic railroad junction and major city that bore the brunt of both the famine and the Japanese attack. Like Emery Carlson, he was young, male, and a new missionary, which meant that he often made the arduous and dangerous trips by bicycle or on foot to other cities to deal with emergencies and carry famine relief money. Mere months before the Japanese ICHIGO advance of 1944, Bill

6

IN WAR AND FAMINE

Simpson married fellow missionary Mary Searle, who had been Emery Carlson's first patient in China when she almost died of typhus in 1940. The Simpsons and Dr Carlson escaped from Honan under enemy fire in 1944, making part of the journey together. Bill Simpson's narrative of that trip is an excellent first-hand account of the flight of civilians in war. The Canadian Anglican group, though small in number, looms large in courage and resourcefulness. Two brave women stand out especially: Grace Gibberd, who served alone in a city less than twenty miles from the front lines and was injured in a bomb attack, and Greta Clark, who walked through the battle lines of the I CHI GO advance after attempting to save her group of thirty-five orphaned babies from Chengchow. The Free Methodists were another small group, great in courage. In 1944 their Edith Jones walked some six hundred miles to safety with her group of orphans, and then walked back to their home base north of Chengchow after the Japanese surrender. Geneva Sayre, one of the last foreigners to leave the province, ran a large Bible school in Kaifeng for several years after the province became Communist and Mao Tse-tung was China's head of state. Probably the most detailed account of Honan in 1943-46 came from John L. Benson, one of Emery Carlson's fellow Augustana Lutheran missionaries. An experienced worker who knew the province well, Benson was serving as president of the mission when the Carlsons arrived in 1940. He went on furlough just months before Pearl Harbor and returned to Honan as a United China Relief administrator in 1943. Benson kept in close contact with Chinese church leaders in Honan while he was in exile in West China, and he joined Emery at Hsuchang in November of 1945 after the war was over. His numbered letters to his wife, based on a small pocket diary, are extraordinarily detailed. After the Communist takeover of the province, Thomas Lee of the Lutheran United Mission tried valiantly to maintain a network of contact and help for the Chinese Lutherans left in Honan. He sent his fellow missionaries regular newsletters full of specifics about individuals (Chinese and foreign), churches, hospitals and schools, and the political and military situations in the cities they had left behind in 1948.

INTRODUCTION

7

Honan was a bastion of brave women - women who staffed mission stations under the enemy guns alone; women who stayed on after the Japanese advance in 1944, hiding out in the hills with the Chinese, the embassy officials in Chungking evidently unaware they had stayed. Some of the bravest live only in second- and thirdhand accounts, but Katie Murray, who ran the American Southern Baptist Mission, left a fair amount of official correspondence. Sister Thyra Lawson, an Augustana Lutheran nurse and teacher, kept a diary for the years 1940-45. Others wrote unpublished accounts of their adventures in China in the relative tranquility of war-enforced furloughs and revolution-induced changes in employment status. Among these brave women were a group of Chinese nurses who hid out in the mountains in 1944-45 and managed to save a fair amount of equipment from the Lutheran Hospital at Hsuchang. Their report to the annual conference held after the war shows just how much of the humanitarian and religious work of the province rested in the hands of courageous, capable, and dedicated Chinese, rather than with the missionaries. The voice of male Chinese is heard as well, especially the Anglicans' Archdeacon Bernard Tseng and Dr Joseph Hsu. Had I been able to use untranslated Chinese sources, there might have been many more Chinese voices. Many of the narrators of In War and Famine speak primarily through the anonymity of annual reports and the minutes of meetings or in the more formal letters and articles that appeared in church and mission society publications. Most of what I have been able to report of several mission societies, including the largest Protestant group in the province, the China Inland Mission, comes from articles that missionaries wrote for such magazines as China's Millions or from reports and letters by their fellows in other denominations. Several people wrote book-length accounts of their experiences in Honan that were published shortly after they left China: Ernest Wampler, the Church of the Brethren (Mennonite) missionary who was the first United China Relief administrator for the province; Hans M. Nesse, who managed to be an active missionary in a city under Japanese occupation and during his internment by the Japanese; and Carlo Suigo, a young Italian priest who was kidnapped by Communist guerillas in 1945 and held hostage for

8

IN WAR AND FAMINE

almost a year. A former UNRRA worker named William Hinton presented a sympathetic picture of the Communist land-reform period, based on notes and interviews taken in a village not far from where Suigo was held hostage and covering much the same period of time. Sister Ann Colette Wolf provided details about the Catholic sisters in Kaifeng under the Japanese and, later, as the city was one of the last in the province to be taken by the Communists. The memoirs of Joseph Henkels, a Catholic priest who worked with Emery Carlson on the Linju-Lushan relief committee, most ably supplement and augment accounts written at the time. His bishop, Thomas Megan, died without finding time to tell his own story, but his biography, written by one of his fellow priests, a Honan missionary who spent World War II in a Japanese internment camp, relies to some extent on Megan's letters from China during the decade. Thomas Megan, like Emery Carlson, was working with the Office of Strategic Services at war's end, even as they tended their fellow Christians and tried to relieve human suffering. The OSS, as befits an intelligence agency, kept copious records. The detailed reports by Carlson's superiors and the weekly accounts of the work of his Team Viper provide details that could never have been included in the letters he wrote behind the Japanese lines in the mountains of Honan in 1945. Journalists were rarely seen in Honan during the war, but while the eyes of the world were focused on the war in Europe and Pearl Harbor was waiting to happen, Israel Epstein and Jack Belden got out into the villages, talking to peasants and reporting what they saw. And during the height of the famine, Theodore White and Harrison Foreman toured the province, seeing the suffering for themselves. I have used the Wade-Giles spelling of Chinese place names common in the 19405, regularizing the phonetic spellings and variations used from person to person, which might cause confusion. A list of place names used in the book, with the modern Pinyin spelling, as well as variant names and forms, is found in the appendix.

chapter one THE O^HER S I D E OF NO M A N ' S LAND

On ii May 1938 General Shang Chen of the Chinese Nationalist Army stood on the banks of the mighty Hwang Ho and ordered the dikes blown. Yellow river water roared through a breach two hundred meters wide. Freed from the confining dikes that had forced it to flow east and north, the mighty river surged and sprawled south, killing a Japanese army advancing on the important railroad junction of Chengchow as well as almost 900,000 Chinese peasants, whose government had given them no warning of their impending doom.1 For eight years the river flowed unfettered across the level plains of eastern Honan province, shifting course as

10

IN WAR AND FAMINE

it willed, flooding when and how it wished. Close to 4 million people were displaced and approximately 3,500 villages and towns wiped out. In places, the devastated area was ten to twenty miles wide, and all along the length of the new channel, desperate people who had lost their homes and farmland tried to stay alive in the ways that such people are wont to do.2 General Shang's daring move stopped the advancing Japanese army, and a war that no one thought China could win reached a stalemate that lasted until 1944, when Japan was clearly losing its battle for supremacy in Asia. From 1938 to 1944 the shifting course of the river formed the boundary between the Japanese army, dug in to the east of the new channel, and Chiang Kai-shek's "Free China" on the western side of the no man's land formed by the sprawling riverbed. While Japan turned most of its military attention to the resource-rich colonies of Southeast Asia and a daring move to squeeze the Americans out of the Pacific, it kept China under an effective blockade, reducing the country to a group of inland provinces squeezed up against the mountains and deserts of the west and northwest. China became a country with no access to the sea or even to effective land transport to the rest of the world. It lost its industrial base, its modern cities, its communications networks, its universities and research facilities - in short, almost everything a country needed to function in the modern world. The no man's land of China's Hwang Ho, better known in the West as the Yellow River, marks the boundary between my unremembered life as an American baby and my vividly remembered Chinese childhood. In November 1940 my parents and I crossed that no man's land in a Chinese junk. We headed west, away from the American consulate, which had issued a "go home" warning, away from the Peking College of Chinese Studies, where my parents had planned to study the language for two years, away from the ocean liners that might still carry us back east across the Pacific. We headed out of Peking in a southerly direction, giving the slip to the Japanese officials, who would not allow us permission to make the trip through the front lines and across the no man's land to the Augustana Lutheran mission field in Honan province, a field surrounded on three sides by the Japanese and on the fourth by mountains but still nominally under the control of Chiang Kaishek's Nationalist government and army.

THE OTHER SIDE OF NO MAN'S LAND

II

My mother kept a journal recording each day's discoveries, disasters, and divine guidance. I retain only a landscape on which the facts of war arranged themselves in a way both mythic and real. No bogeymen or nightmares disturbed my childhood dreams. Instead, by night, I was stalked by the Japanese lines, a caterpillar-like monster made up of thousands of soldiers. It roared in from the east, bringing the barren no man's land where nothing grew and bandits killed in the night into our city, our compound, our house. At table, adult conversation underlined the reality of both the Japanese lines and the no man's land a day's journey to the east of us. With my own eyes, I could watch the gleam of a Japanese bomber flying overhead or see the gory separateness of a bandit's head hung on the gate of a city. The reality to the east and before I came to Honan was what I could not recall. I studied the pictures in my baby book and the snapshots that arrived in letters, wanting what my parents and the other missionaries had - memories of a homeland more beautiful and good than China. One of the hardest games of imagination I played on sleepless nights was trying to make a little group of foreigners in someone's house into a vast crowd on the streets, a place where, in my mother's words, "everyone looks like you." But I never succeeded in visualizing that world, and the truth was that my blond and blue-eyed sister came home from her first day of school in the United States and reported that one of her classmates had told her: "I can tell you're Chinese by your slanty eyes." But that was after this story ended. In May 1938, when General Shang was changing the course of the Yellow River, my father, Emery W. Carlson, was looking the other way, as oblivious of the cutting of the dikes in China as I, a two-month-old baby, was. That month, as the war between Japan and China ground to a stalemate along the new course of the river, Emery was about to graduate from the University of Nebraska Medical School. In 1937 he had written to the mission board of the Augustana Lutheran Church of North America: "During the past several years the question of going on the mission field as a doctor has always been in the background of my mind ... After making this matter a definite prayer topic for two years, my wife and I now feel sure that we want to go into this work, and that we will be going for the sole purpose of serving our Master and our fellow-man."3

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IN WAR AND FAMINE

The He/on Maru: Dr Emery Carlson holds daughter Erleen, centre

The board was interested, and when Emery finished his medical internship in Kansas City in 1939, he and Elvera were commissioned as missionaries. Denied a visa to study tropical medicine at the University of London, Emery attended Tulane University in New Orleans, and on 7 September 1940 the family boarded a Japanese passenger liner, the Heian Maru. A picture in my baby book shows the boat ready to leave the dock with a handful of Caucasians lost in a sea of grim-faced Asians. The Heian Maru, operating as a troopship, was sunk in Truk Lagoon less than five years later, with great loss of life. Emery and Elvera Carlson spent their first ocean voyage enjoying the new adventure, getting acquainted with their fellow passengers, mostly missionaries, and writing long and detailed letters home. They got off the Heian Maru in Yokohama and watched coolies unloading ore that would, no doubt, be used in some way in the air war directed against them in central China a few short months in the future. Then, along with another Augustana Lutheran mission-

THE OTHER SIDE OF NO MAN'S LAND

13

ary, eight French Canadian priests, and a bevy of Japanese, the three Carlsons boarded a smaller boat for Tangku, the port for Peking.4 As the boat docked, they saw a young Chinese man with a sign reading "To meet Dr and Mrs Carlson." The young man, who spoke English, helped them through customs and put them on the train to Peking. The Japanese officials were courteous and efficient, and Emery and Elvera seemed scarcely aware that they were dealing with occupying forces in a country at war.5 The students at the College of Chinese Studies at Peking University included scholars, military men, businessmen and diplomats of many nationalities, and missionaries of many denominations. Three years of war and Japanese occupation had reduced the size of the student body by the time Emery and Elvera Carlson arrived, but the school still had about one hundred students.6 Elvera was impressed with the facilities, describing the campus as "not a great deal different than an American college at home." The Carlson family had a single room in one of the hostels. An amah came in to babysit, and the family took their meals in the common dining hall with the other students. The schedule was rigorous, but both Emery and Elvera were impressed with their teachers and fellow students, who came from the "U.S., Canada, China, Norway, Sweden, England, Australia." 7 A scant nine days after arriving in Peking, Elvera reported in her journal: "The School is informed of the news that American women and children are advised to leave China because of strained relations between Japan & U.S."8 Her entry sounded as if the school had received a general warning, but the files of the United States Department of State show that every American was sent a letter from the consul in Peking which urged "withdrawal, so far as practical, of American citizens to the United States," adding the ominous statement "The Department [of State] requests that this Embassy call to the attention of Americans here the advisability of taking advantage of facilities for transportation while still available." Among the copies signed and returned by people who declined to leave is one that says, in Emery's hand, "Emery W. Carlson, 31, Elvera T. Carlson, 33, Erleen J. Carlson zx/z."9 Neither the Carlsons nor the other missionaries at the language school seemed to take the diplomat's warning very seriously. For

14

IN WAR AND FAMINE

several days after they received the warning, Elvera's daily journal entries and letters home were about studies and classmates, tennis and Bible study, cocoa parties and sightseeing, little shopping expeditions and a big Peking duck dinner. On 13 October 1940, however, she wrote: "In the evening our Aug. Luth. group meet in our rooms for prayer and discussion on the question of going in to the interior."10 The Augustana Lutheran group in Peking included the three new missionaries who came out on the Heian Maru and Stella Carlson, who had come from Honan to Peking for medical care. Going into the interior was not one of the options that the U.S. Department of State had in mind for Americans when it issued its warning. Ambassador Johnson in Chungking sent a telegram to the consul in Peking that minced no words on the subject: "Americans evincing a desire to travel from occupied areas to the unoccupied area by the Honan route should be clearly informed of the Chinese restrictions and of the impropriety and danger of such travel."11 The "Honan route" the ambassador spoke of was a clandestine and roundabout way through the uncharted and constantly changing floodlands of the new Yellow River channel and the no man's land that surrounded it. It went from Kweiteh, on the Japanese-occupied side of the no man's land, to Chowkiakow, in Nationalist Chinese territory, avoiding the Japanese-held capital of Kaifeng, where the railroad had once crossed the river. Transportation in the area, both by land and by water, was primitive in the extreme and unpredictable. The roads were little more than paths; the shallow river channel shifted and fluctuated constantly. Although the Japanese nominally controlled the eastern bank of the river, the countryside was contested between Communist and Nationalist Chinese. Banditry and other lawlessness flourished. People and goods made their way across the no man's land unsanctioned and unprotected by either the Chinese Nationalist government in Chungking or the Japanese army and its puppet government on the coast. This inconvenient and dangerous route, which the Carlsons and others considered taking, was the one that the ambassador discouraged in his strongest terms. On 2,6 October three more Augustana workers, two of them experienced missionaries, arrived from the United States. Ethel

THE OTHER SIDE OF NO MAN'S LAND

15

Akins, a personable and decisive woman who had first come to China in i9zi, was returning from furlough to resume her job as principal of the large girls' middle school (high school) at Hsuchang, the Augustana Lutherans' head station. Emery, writing late in life, described Ethel as "the prime mover of our decision to go inland to Free China instead of to America or the Philippines."12 A scant two days after Ethel's arrival, Elvera wrote, "We make the big decision tonight to go into the interior." Two days later they applied for passes and prepared to travel inland.13 Since the first part of the journey from Peking to Honan would be by train through the area occupied by the Japanese, who controlled the coastal cities and transportation routes, the group hoped to get official Japanese permission to travel to Honan, but no passes came through, and on 7 November, "After our earnest prayers of the morning, we decided that Sister Astrid should go down to the [Japanese embassy] and get back our passports. We felt that a definite prayer was answered when they were returned" and "by late afternoon all checked baggage was off."14 At this point, the Carlsons wrote to the family at home: "Things are very uncertain here, and travel most difficult. What would mean a few hours trip in America may take us days here, and perhaps even a month as it took a party of our missionaries to go out in September. But we are all ready to leave in the morning and unless the Lord directs us through existing circumstances to come back here to the language school or go to U.S., we will be in Hsuchang by the time this letter reaches you."15 Stella Carlson and the new missionaries (the Carlsons, Alyce Anderson, and Margaret Miller) went by train to Tientsin, where they joined the Danielsons, a Norwegian couple with a baby who were going to southern Honan. Astrid Erling and Ethel Atkins, the two veteran Augustana missionaries, followed a little later with two new Lutheran United missionaries and Canadian Anglican Bill Simpson. The group split up, as Simpson recounts, "so that we would not be too large, and attract undue attention."16 Because Tientsin was in Japanese-held territory, the travellers needed no passes to go there. When the missionaries got off the train in the city, they were farther from their intended destination than they had been in Peking, but the authorities there were less

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IN WAR AND FAMINE

watchful, or perhaps the missionary who helped Emery get passes in Tientsin was more skilled in diplomacy. Emery recalled in his memoirs, "At Tientsin the British missionary who had sent the man to meet us at Tangku went with me to a Japanese Army office and I carried 6 passports. The little officer stamped them promptly while the Britisher talked of Cherry Blossom time."17 The group left Tientsin on the morning of 9 November and changed trains at Hsuchow the following morning. At 11 a.m. they got off the train for the last time, still in Japanese territory but in the eastern part of Honan province.18 After two days' travel on regularly scheduled trains and with a minimum of inconvenience, the Carlsons had covered over 80 per cent of the distance they had to go and were only about one hundred miles as the crow flies from their destination; however, the most difficult part of the journey still lay ahead. Before 1938 they would not have gotten off the train at Kweiteh. Instead, they would have continued west through Kaifeng to Chengchow, the junction between the east-west Lunghai railroad and the north-south Pinghan, which ran through Hsuchang on its way to Hankow. However, in 1940 both the railroad bridge and the tracks between Kaifeng and Chengchow were gone, and the no man's land of the new Yellow River channel formed the "front lines" where the Japanese and Chinese armies that had fought to a standoff in 1938 were dug into a position which would not change radically for four years. The north-south tracks between Chengchow and Hsuchang were gone as well, torn out by the Chinese hoping to stop any Japanese advance. Kweiteh, where the group detrained, had been the major city of eastern Honan before the war and the breaking of the Yellow River dikes, and the Canadian Anglicans had a large hospital there. While the Japanese severely regulated travel from Kweiteh west to Kaifeng, they had less control over the illegal traffic that moved slowly to the southwest through the no man's land via tiny roads, primitive man-powered vehicles, and small, shallow-draft boats. Between 30 October and 20 November 1940, four different parties of missionaries made the dangerous trip, and the Kweiteh missionaries were growing adept at making arrangements. The stay in Kweiteh gave Elvera and Emery their first chance to see a China mission

THE OTHER SIDE OF NO MAN'S LAND

17

Two-wheeled cart of the type used on the trip from Kweiteh to the floodlands

station in operation and meet their fellow Honan missionaries, and it was their first exposure to the inland cities of China, still relatively untouched by Western ways.19 The Carlsons' party left Kweiteh on 16 November 1940, two days after Canadian Anglican missionaries Mary Searle and Frances Howard, who travelled with a Chinese pastor and his family. Howard described the carts used for the trip as having "two rubbertired wheels set about the middle of a wooden chassis" and "pulled by a man who uses a rope or a strap slung over one shoulder like a harness." Each man pulled 450-500 pounds and the group had thirteen carts. The Japanese were in evidence the first day. "Numerous trucks smothered us with dust as they jitneyed back and forth between Kweiteh and Checheng. In one place we saw a group practicing crawling up on a village using grave mounds as shelters. Poor spirits of the departed! How shocked they must be to see their resting place so desecrated!"20

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The route from Kweiteh to Checheng was a "motor road, not paved or macadamized, not even gravel, just dirt. There is constant reconstruction necessary, since the big trucks tear up the road and scatter it as dust. Big, little, old, young, man, woman, and boy were all busy doing their share digging new ditches besides the road. All road construction is done by the local people, each village being responsible for a section of the road."21 On their first day out, Elvera also noted "two convoys of Japanese trucks." After a night in an inn, "where we all slept and cooked our meals with the village looking on in curiosity," the group travelled on small cart roads and paths. These became "narrow and choppy with ditches on either side," and a cart tipped over. So they did not arrive at the village of Liang Kou until dark. "Here our party all slept in one end of the inn room and the rickshaw men amongst our baggage and carts in the other end."22 At this point, the travellers were in the no man's land of the uncontrolled Yellow River channel and well to the south and east of the final destinations of the Augustana Lutheran and Anglican parties, Hsuchang and Chengchow. The area they were crossing, even in the best of times, was poor and backward, historically a "bandit area" where the long arm of government had difficulty reaching. In 1940, with twenty counties (hsiens) and thousands of villages and cities under water or totally uninhabitable, the sort of banditry born of desperation and displacement was rife in the area. But there was another factor as well, the Communist-Nationalist conflict. In the aftermath of the Japanese advances of 1937-38, the Communists, who had been powerful in the Shanghai-NankingHangchow region, maintained a strong guerilla force just to the south of the area through which the missionary parties were travelling. When the Communists and Nationalists laid their differences aside to fight the Japanese in 1937-38, this force, called the New Fourth Army, remained under Communist control, although Chiang Kai-shek, as commander-in-chief of all the Chinese armies, had authority to order it around. As Israel Epstein, a reporter who covered China closely from the front lines but who definitely was more in sympathy with the Communists than the Nationalists, reported, "Late in 1940 the super-landlord Ho Ying-chin, in his capacity of War Minister and Chief of Staff, ordered the New

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19

Fourth Army to leave its bases behind the enemy lines in the Yangtze Valley and move several hundred miles to the north bank of the Yellow River, there to join forces with the Eighth Route [Army]."23 On 18 November 1940, Elvera wrote, "The big question of the day - to take a boat here or continue further by cart." The group chose a Chinese junk about 25 feet by 7 feet. "With most of our baggage in the holds, we had a little room in the center 6' x 6' over which they placed matting and here the 5 women, Erleen & the baby stayed. The men stood around on the deck most of the time."24 On the i9th the group travelled about fourteen // (five miles) through "flooded farmland which looks in places like a Minnesota lake." For the Chinese boatmen, the journey was brutally hard work. "We were going against the current all the time so the boat was being pulled by men on shore most of the time and poled by men on the fore deck. The men on shore pulled so hard at times they almost bent over to the ground." The zoth proved even worse. "The men who pulled the boat this morning really had a job as they had to wade in mud as they pulled. Suddenly a tree loomed into sight and the current was rather strong and the boy pulled the rudder the wrong way and our boat hit, breaking the mast as if it had been a toothpick. The mast as well as all our roof covering fell in upon us like a house upon its occupants. When they finally dropped anchor our boat looked like the Wreck of the Hesperus. The mast and the poles which held our coverings were all in one heap. We crawled out of the mess, looked around and surely thanked God we had been graciously spared." The Simpson-Akins party, in another boat, "came along and pulled us until we reached a desolate looking flooded village completely surrounded by water. However the few people left in the village came out to welcome our boat, seemed quite happy, and when asked if they had anything to eat, said they had a little corn meal and millet. We all found our beds beneath the stars again and so ended the 3rd day."25 The next two days on the junk brought more prosaic difficulties: "Our biggest problem was getting water for drinking and washing. Today was a record day as we all got to brush our teeth and wash our faces for the first time in several days." They spent the night

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Elvera's note on the back of this picture reads,"The Chinese Junk in which we lived for 7 days. Erleen and daddy are on the fore deck. In the right background is mommy. You can see that there wasn't much space for 7 grownups and two children."

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21

Elvera's note on the back of this picture reads,"After the wreck on the Chinese Junk. Note the fallen mast in the center, our old suitcase on the rear deck. In the foreground where you see the jumbled mass of bedding, clothing, thermos bottles, etc. is where we slept, ate and lived for 7 days.The right foreground is Rev. Danielson who was killed."

"near another deserted village where there seemed to be a guerilla garrison." The 2,2,nd was a rainy, miserable day. "We all sat huddled closer together than ever to keep from getting wet. We spend thE ight along another dyke where quite a number of boats were stationed for the night. Our boat was quite damp and we wondered how we would sleep. By turning over the boards of the lower deck and putting up the sail and umbrella to form a tent, the Augustana Synod slept on the lower deck and the [Lutheran United Mission] up above."26 On the 2.3rd, "One of the interesting sights of the day was a wedding boat with bride in bright red wedding chair and her wedding presents - furniture, etc. in the rear of the boat." One of the crew members told the missionaries he "expected to be married as soon as his wife was half paid for."27 The following day,

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2,4 November, was the last full one on the junk. The missionaries sailed late. "The wind was very cold and we all sat huddled together like animals - too cold to talk." On 2,5 November Elvera was able to write, "A big day - we reach the end of our journey on the Chinese Junk 'Laiha' about mid afternoon. We were still about 7 li from Chieh Kou. The men went on their bikes into the city and came back with Ko Kuang Wen." Ko, the buyer or business manager for the Hsuchang mission, had been at Chieh Kou waiting for them for eleven days. Chieh Kou was a busy place, and Elvera observed, "There must have been at least 60 boats at this place and a lot of eating places on shore ready to serve people from the boats."28 Israel Epstein described the city as a place "embellished with streets of stone residences, shops, warehouses, hotels, restaurants and houses of prostitution more elegant and opulent than anything to be seen in Chungking," a place where "commerce reigned supreme" and so did espionage.29 The route the Carlson party took from Kweiteh to Hsuchang was V-shaped, with the lowest point of the V at Chieh Kou. They spent one last night on the junk, and Elvera wrote, "We go without breakfast and start the long drawn out process of loading our baggage on wheelbarrows. What a sight we were as we started for the city - 17 wheelbarrows, 3 bikes, and all of us walking. We got into [Chieh Kou] about noon and went immediately to the C.I.M. outstation where we had good Chinese food, then we proceeded to the river." This was the Sha River, where they boarded "an old barge pulled by wood burning steam engine." Their 10 foot by 10 foot room on the barge seemed downright luxurious after the junk. The Danielsons and the two Lutheran United Mission single women left the party in Chieh Kou. "Emery & Stella went to see them, and got there in time to see them cross the river."30 When the two groups parted, the LUM missionaries had an overland journey of about two days to their stations southwest of Chieh Kou. The Augustana Lutherans and Anglican Bill Simpson would be travelling north-northwest to their stations. Only a portion of the trip was made on the river barge. On 2,9 November they disembarked and made their way to the China Inland Mission station in Chowkiakow, where they stayed with the Kennedy and Rockness

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23

Hsuchang pagoda

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LEFT: Mrs Danielson RIGHT: Baby Astrid

families, people who would be their neighbours and co-workers in the coming years. Elvera noted, "This was our first experience in a home since we left Kweiteh and how we appreciated everything especially our baths."31 On the last leg of their journey, the Carlsons' party travelled by rickshaw and made good time - ninety li, or thirty miles, the first day. They spent the night at a CIM outstation and on i December, "cut down our mileage some and spent the night at [Linying] with the Hardings," another CIM couple.32 Emery wrote an account of the trip through no man's land for the Augustana church magazine, Lutheran Companion, capturing the joy - and the unexpected sadness - of their arrival at the mission station that would be their home for most of their years in China: Hsuchang! First, the lovely pagoda south of the city, then the smoke stacks of the factories (now abandoned) the sight

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25

Mrs Danielson and the baby at Gerhardt Danielson's grave

of the city and the large mission compound, the hearty greeting of "pingan" (peace) from the gate-keeper, and then the meeting of the folks we had so long anticipated seeing oh, what a joy was ours! But our joy was mingled with sadness, as the news of the misfortune which had overtaken our Norwegian friends awaited us. They traveled overland by cart from where we parted, and the first night out, being unable to reach their desired stopping place, they had stopped in a small unwalled village. Shortly after midnight bandits broke in on them, and shot Pastor Danielson without provocation. He was mortally wounded and died before morning.33 News of Gerhardt Danielson's murder spread rapidly through the missionary community, but it did not provoke either a mass exodus from the area or complaints to the authorities. Martyrdom

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was a fact of missionary life. The missionaries, by and large, accepted the tragedy as God's will. Harold Martinson of the Lutheran United Mission was the first of the missionaries to hear of the tragedy - in a telegram in badly garbled Chinese from someone whose name he did not recognize. He could, however, figure out that the person killed must be a foreigner and that the message was from the town of Shen Ch'iu. It took him a full day to get to a CIM station near the village and learn who had been killed. Martinson took charge of getting the body to the LUM station at Kioshan, where "Mr. Danielson could rest in consecrated ground."34 Bill Simpson, in an undated letter to friends in Canada, added one sobering fact about the murder that Martinson kindly omitted from the published account: "The party in their anxiety to reach their destination had disobeyed one of the primary laws of travelling in China and had not spent the night in a large walled town."35

chapter two BEHIND ENEMY L I N E S

Elvera Carlson recorded the news of Gerhardt Danielson's murder and closed her diary for three and a half months. If she had not written numerous letters during those months, we might think she suffered regrets about coming to the mission field or wrestled with fears about her safety, but her letters were cheery and chatty, full of enthusiasm for the new venture, and her tone was a mite superior as she reassured the family at home that she and Emery were doing the Lord's will. In March, when she reconstructed those first days in Hsuchang in her journal, she emphasized the social life, "coffee parties," and "community suppers" that greeted their arrival, say-

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ing, "We found everything so much lovelier than we had ever hoped it could be."1 Elvera's euphoria about China was real - and valid. In the United States, Emery had been a poor farmer's son lacking the.financial backing to buy a small-town medical practice. After graduating from medical school, he had worked vacation relief for doctors in small Kansas towns and given physicals at Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Missouri. The little family lived out of a suitcase, seldom in one place for more than a month or two. Elvera often stayed with her parents, caring for her mother, who had broken a hip and remained crippled. Missionary work did not pay particularly well; the hazards to life and health were many, and a missionary was a missionary twentyfour hours a day, 365 days a year. But for a dedicated Christian who did want to bring the light of the gospel to the heathen, it offered a secure living as well as a great deal of prestige. The Lord, the Mission Board, and grateful Christian converts put food on the missionaries' tables, clothes on their backs, roofs over their heads, and spirited them away when conflicts came. Missionaries did not get fired or laid off, and demand seemed always to exceed supply. The enormous difference between the Chinese standard of living and the Western one meant that until inflation hit with a vengeance during World War II, contributions to missions and missionary salaries went a long, long way. Missions and individual missionaries were able to be generous in a grand way on amounts of money that made only small dents in a foreign bank account. While the missionaries did without many things that people took for granted at home, even living modestly, they enjoyed material blessings much above most of the people around them. As Elvera's letters and journals clearly indicate, the social milieu was the headiest perk of the missionary's job. In the homeland, missionaries were children, siblings, neighbours, or co-workers to motley groups of people who might neither share their religious convictions nor respect them. In the workplace, family, neighbourhood, and even church, people missionaries considered their moral and spiritual inferiors would have power over them and would fail to respect their authority. The worldly, even the wicked, would rub shoulders with them in public and sit down beside them in private.

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Chapel in theAugustana Lutheran compound, west suburb, Hsuchang

On the mission field, the sheep had been separated from the goats. The worldly and unchristian of the Caucasian race stuck to the large cities and had little if any commerce with the missionaries. On the mission fields of the interior, the unrepentant heathen spoke Chinese and did not darken the door of the church; they came to the clinics and schools as recipients of the missionaries' benevolence and largesse. The Chinese Christian might rise to positions of power, might find employment in the church, but a glass ceiling placed the missionaries at the top of the Christian hierarchy in practice accountable only to God. The line between social and religious life blurred as missionaries shared evenings of song and testimony and meals with table grace and after-meal devotions. The church life of the Chinese congregations was patterned on the Western one, with Sunday services morning and evening, special services for church holidays, and evangelical (revival-style) gatherings. There were Bible studies and catechism classes for inquirers and children, and schools put on Christmas and Easter programs, graduation ceremonies, and school picnics. Missionaries participated in the Chinese Christian activities as well as having their own services, Bible studies, and informal

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gatherings. Elvera's description of her first Christmas and New Year's in Honan is illustrative. On 2,0 December she attended a feast at the Girls' School, where "We must have had at least 16 dishes - mostly soup, meat & fish." She visited the hospital, where some of the sick children sang "Jesus Loves Me" and one even recited a piece.2 A few days after Christmas the missionaries gave a party for mothers and children under school age, and some sixty children "sang, spoke, tumbled around on the floor and drank tea and ate pounds of Chinese cakes and cookies." For Christmas itself, ten missionaries sat down to Christmas Eve supper at the Benson home, opened gifts, and "sang the good old Christmas songs and read the sweet old story." At 4 a.m. on Christmas morning the children from the boys' and girls' schools were out carolling, and at 6 a.m. everyone attended the traditional Swedish-style Christmas morning service. There was another service at 10 a.m., a noon dinner at Dr Fischer's for the missionaries, and an afternoon program at the chapel put on by the Chinese Sunday school children. The day ended with "supper and an evening of singing both Swedish and English songs" at the Swenson home.3 Three of the women who lived in Hsuchang were not at the festivities, having made the day-long journey to Yuhsien (less than thirty miles away) for the holiday. They returned for New Year's bringing three other single women who joined the group eating popcorn and apples, listening to Handel's Messiah on records, and kneeling in prayers of thanks at midnight. On New Year's Day, Elvera went to "an impressive service - 78 were baptized - babies and grown ups from all walks of life. There was a blind beggar in tattered rags and the wife of the mandarin (mayor of Hsuchang) who were brought to the Lord in Baptism."4 Hsuchang was the central station for the Augustana Lutheran Mission, the headquarters for the group's entire work in China. There was a church and a school in the heart of the city and a mission complex just outside the west gate which contained four connected walled compounds - the Boys' School, the Girls' School, the hospital, and four brick missionary houses with front yards and sidewalks - and a wall where a street would be in a North American town. Emery reported "about 185 girls in their school and

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House no. 4, where the Carlsons lived in the Hsuchang Lutheran compound

just about as many boys," as well as "a seminary class of 14, and a few boys taking the Bible School course." A nursing school in the hospital trained both men and women, "usually young people who have gone to school in the schools here."5 Among the guests during December were a group of about forty Chinese officials visiting the welfare camp in an abandoned tobacco factory next to the Augustana compound. Elver a and Emery joined the officials in touring the camp, and she wrote, "The trip to the Welfare camp was a thrill - 1700 children in an abandoned tobacco factory - 1200 boys & 500 girls. It is run on a military basis with Christian leaders, teachers, etc. in charge. Wherever we went about the grounds or in the buildings, the children came to attention and saluted. The children practically live on millet, bean sprouts, sweet potatoes. They use about a 1000 Ibs. of millet a day."6 Honan was (and has been again) the tobacco-growing centre of China. Before the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937-38, the BritishAmerican Tobacco Company had a large operation in Hsuchang, but with the destruction of the railroad and Japanese control of

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Hsuchang mission compound backyard and wall; Erleen in foreground

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33

the cities, the tobacco factory shut down. The fighting and the cutting of the dikes on the Yellow River had killed huge numbers of people, and Honan had large numbers of orphan children to care for. The provincial government sponsored the welfare camp in the old tobacco factory, but the headmaster and many of the teachers were Lutherans, Chinese church members who had come up through the Augustana schools in Hsuchang. Emery's letter of 16 December 1940 went into more detail about what the children did: "Half of their time is spent at work and the other half in classes. Their work is of all kinds, Gardening, spinning, sewing, woodwork, shoemaking, blacksmithing etc. They make all of their own clothes starting with the raw cotton, and from the untanned leather."7 Three years of warfare on three sides of the province, the massive displacement caused by the cutting of the Yellow River dikes, and the consequent change in the river's course left central Honan with an enormous refugee problem. The affluent and the able could make it to the larger cities of the west - Chungking, Chengtu, Sian - or to the fertile Szechwan plains, where some new workers could be absorbed into the agricultural population, but millions ran out of resources. Although the government camps took care of some of them, there were still plenty of refugees in desperate need of what help the missions could give. In his annual report for 1940, presented at the group's February 1941 conference, Augustana mission president John L. Benson observed, "Refugees from war-infested areas and flooded districts eastward are scattered all over our field." The minutes went on to record that in 1940 more than 3,200 children were cared for in the refugee camps the Augustana churches were supervising in Yuhsien and Hsuchang. The Hsuchang International Famine Relief Committee, composed of two Italian Catholic priests, two Augustana missionaries, and two Chinese Christians, ran soup kitchens and relief camps with up to 500 residents in several flooded districts to the east of Hsuchang, and they helped 3 5,000 refugees make their way farther west to places where they could find land to farm or employment, as well as distributing nearly $200,000 (Chinese) in direct relief to individuals.8 If the situation was that difficult in a year when crop yields were fairly good, it is not hard to imagine

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how desperate the people would be in subsequent years when crops failed. The new missionaries resumed their language study in the new year, but the war soon interrupted. On 2.6 January 1941, the Carlsons saw their first Japanese plane. The next day, two weeks of air raids and bombing began.9 Called ching pao (ning bao, jing pao, or "c.p."), these air-raid alarms were a permanent part of people's lives in Honan during World War II. Elvera and others who kept journals often simply noted, "no cps for over a week" or "7 cps today." In the Hsuchang mission compound, the most frequently used air-raid shelter was a ditch that had been dug in a row of trees in the schoolyard. In Loyang a system of elaborate tunnels had been dug in the firm, rocklike loess soil under the city, some of them public shelters, others for the use of the residents of a particular compound, but in Chengchow's sandy soil, only shallow ditches and one-person hidey-holes could be dug.10 Loyang and Chengchow were strategic targets bombed much more than the other cities of Honan; however, random bombing kept the citizens of all cities on the alert. The alarm system was province-wide, and alarms were given when planes were sighted, so that people usually had sufficient time to take cover when their city became a target. The combination of alarms and shelters made it possible for people to continue to live in places that were virtually destroyed by bombing. On 30 January Elvera recorded 3 5 killed in Hsuchang. The next day the Lutheran compound in the city was hit. The bomb "made a large hole in the street but none of the 25-30 people in the gate house were injured." For two weeks the bombing continued, and the schoolchildren were evacuated. Elvera wrote, "Most of the children and young people went to the hills. They traveled at night in groups. I shall never forget the sad scene as we went over to the welfare camp and saw them as they were ready to leave one night hundreds of girls with heavy packs on their backs ready to start out on their trek - almost a children's crusade."11 An official Nationalist (Kuomintang) history described this campaign as the Battle of Southern Honan, although the troop movements began in the northern part of the province when Japanese units moved toward Chengchow from both the north and

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35

the east. However, at least for the missionaries, the major effect of the troop movement and the fighting was in the southern part of the province, on the Lutheran United Mission field where Gerhardt Danielson had been killed. In a pincer movement, Japanese troops in southern Honan moved north and west on 25 January, taking Junan and Sinyang, two cities where LUM and Catholic missionaries were in residence.12 Bombing was heavy at Chengchow and Loyang, but the bombing was province-wide, with extensive damage at both Yuhsien and Linju on the Augustana field. Surprisingly, the Lutheran mission compounds in those two cities suffered little damage.13 Missions and missionaries were, on the whole, spared. The exception was the Seventh-day Adventist compound at Yencheng (southwest of Hsuchang), which was badly damaged. The damage seemed to have been no accident or miscalculation on the part of the bomber crew. A telegram in the U.S. State Department records noted, "The mission compound stands by itself outside the city and should have been easily identified from the air. American flags were painted on church and hospital roofs. The plane flew straight for the compound."14 Throughout the province, the bombing seemed aimed at civilians as much as at the military. One historian described it as "punitive" and "indiscriminate," citing the bombing of Chowkiakow, forty miles from the railroad, as typical of the Japanese penchant for targeting any place "within easy range" of the Japanese air base in Changte (Anyang), seventy-five miles north of Chengchow.15 The Chinese ground troops offered little resistance, and when they retreated, Japanese forces looted and turned back to substantially the same positions they had held before the advance. Historian Frank Dorn commented derisively, "Having nothing to do but march along without hindrance, young Japanese soldiers full of boundless energy relieved their boredom by burning farm hamlets, by occasional looting, and by hastily raping females of any age at the hourly halts for lo-minute rests."16 To be more generous to the Chinese, however, one should not forget the terrible hardship under which the country was operating. By 1940 China had lost all its factories capable of producing vehicles and equipment - indeed, ammunition of any size. It had less

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than eight hundred artillery pieces, and its small arsenals could in a year barely produce enough small arms ammunition for a month's fighting. So it is little wonder Chinese troops rarely faced the Japanese in open battle.17 Furthermore, in early 1941 China's forces were anything but cohesive. They were a loose and politically unstable mix of Nationalist troops nominally loyal to Chiang Kai-shek's Chungking government, Communist troops loyal to Mao Tse-tung's insurgents with their base in Yenan, and a welter of warlord armies left over from the internal conflicts of the 19205 and 19305, the strongest under the governor of Yunnan province. In addition, there were secret-society zealots fuelled by quasi-religious mysticism, local home guards and crop-protection societies not inclined to fight outside their home areas, and out-and-out bandit gangs, some of whom under duress or out of self-interest might become puppet troops fighting under the Japanese and Wang Ching-wei's Chinese puppet government. Most of these people were strictly interested in defending only their own village or small area. Nowhere was the insecurity of China's military more confusing than in the no man's land of the new Yellow River bed. In January 1941 the Nationalists carried out what they called a "bandit extermination" campaign against Communist New Fourth Army guerillas, capturing and killing headquarters and support staff and taking the general in command prisoner.18 Harassment by air continued throughout January and February, with Loyang and Chengchow the hardest hit, but random bombing and frequent ching paos persisted throughout central Honan during the first months of 1941. While the Seventh-day Adventist compound in Yencheng was severely damaged, it was the LUM and Catholic missionaries in Sinyang who coped with the most severe depredations of the campaign. Journal excerpts about the occupation of Sinyang appeared in the Missionary. They chronicled life in Sinyang from Monday, 2,7 January 1941, as the Japanese approached the city, to Sunday, 9 February, two days after they had left. Thursday, January 30 - Last night was a night of terrorism ... There was the noise of cavalry, as thousands of hoofs clattered by. There was the shouting of men, the crying of

BEHIND ENEMY LINES

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Destruction in Sinyang

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women. The Chinese say the raping and carrying on last night was terrific, beyond all imagination. We have tried to get proclamations of protection, but they do not give them. We are told by the puppet government, which was set up on the second day, I believe, that the soldiery have been promised the first three days for unbridled liberty to loot, rape, and carry on as they see fit, as a reward for the taking of the city.19 Fires burned all over the city, and so many had fled that there was virtually no one to fight them. It was a "constant fight to keep soldiers out" of the compound, whose gates had been bricked up. By i February the Lutherans were in touch with the Catholic mission in the city, which had close to a thousand Chinese refugees and twenty foreigners in its compound. The Chinese refugees in the Lutheran compound numbered in the hundreds. Two foreigners, one an elderly female in frail health, were stationed in Sinyang, but several missionaries from outlying stations were probably there as well. One such is mentioned by initials in the diary excerpts. The two groups of missionaries, along with a Japanese officer, a Buddhist who spoke a little English, managed to save some of the grain in the city to feed the refugees. By 3 February the stench of burning corpses was terrible. Tuesday, 4 February, brought better news: "There are rumors of withdrawal. So many have left that we have been lighthearted and gay today ... From outside come rumors of there being large numbers of Chinese soldiers around and of the Japs' taking punishment up north."20 Sister Thyra Lawson, an Augustana missionary with many years' experience in Honan, kept a diary faithfully throughout the war years. Entries for January and February 1941 in Kiahsien give some indication of the effect of the campaign on areas neither heavily bombed nor invaded: Jan. 5 - Did not permit the students to go out to-day - too many bad soldiers around. Jan. 15 - Most of the 40,000 guerilla soldiers have now left the Kiahsien District and we thank God.

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39

Jan. 28 - 10,000 soldiers have arrived. Jan. 29 - Japs have crossed the Y[ellow] river Jan 30 - Scouting and bombing planes coming and going all day. They bombed a theatrical crowd [Chinese New Year]. Jan. 31 - Bombing planes were around before breakfast. They kept us dodging most of the morning. Heard some 20 or more bomb explosions. One fell in the city in the open field next to our house. Praise God for protection. Feb. i - People were busy moving out of the city all night but the expected did not happen. No bombing. Feb. 2 - Had six a.m. services after which all scattered to the country. I went with some of the students to Hsinteh - about four miles out. Juchow [Linju] was bombed badly. Feb. 3 - Bombing planes coming and going all morning. Feb. 5 - Juchow badly bombed again. Feb. 6 - No airplanes today. The Japs are said to have taken Sinyang. Feb. 7 - Few alarms and planes. Cook has left. Feb. 8 - The Japs are retreating.Cannot praise the Lord enough for His mercies to us in these parts. Cities all around us have suffered much.21 The missionaries in Chengchow said surprisingly little about the military action and bombing in their letters of January and February. Most were experienced missionaries, and a number of them were not only the survivors of the depredations on Chengchow but had relocated from stations in Japanese-held territory on the east side of the no man's land or lived through the fierce fighting of 1938. Adversity had made something of a common community of people from different countries and denominations. The Canadian Anglicans included George Andrew and his wife, new missionary Bill Simpson, and three single women (Mary Searle, Greta Clark, and Grace Gibberd); the Baptists were represented only by Katie Murray, although she had a few co-workers in nearby cities. The elderly Ashcrafts were the only Free Methodists in the city, and their fellow missionary, Edith Jones, was in a small city even closer to the enemy lines. Myron Terry of the Christian Literature

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Society was in the city temporarily. Exactly which Catholic missionaries were in Chengchow in January and February 1941 is unclear, but the priests in the city were usually Italians. The Chengchow missionaries had been through a harrowing winter. Mary Searle had almost died of typhus, and Bill Simpson came down with a severe case of mumps, a dangerous disease for a grown man. The living arrangements of the Chengchow missionary group were a mute testimony to the amount of damage in that much-bombed city. Bill Simpson shared a bomb-damaged house with George Andrew and his wife, while Greta Clark had a tiny apartment at the other end of the building. Myron Terry kept a room in the closed Baptist hospital, and Mary Searle moved in with Katie Murray in the same compound when she was well enough to leave the little Catholic clinic. Within months, the Baptist quarters were damaged, and the Free Methodist quarters badly wrecked.22

chapter three HONAM M I S S I O N S

Once the ching paos and bombings ended, the Augustana missionaries turned their attention to holding their annual conference. This affair was the planning and decision-making session for the next year's work and the evaluating and reporting session on the previous year. All the missionaries were expected to attend, and considerable effort was made toward consensus rather than simple majority rule in making decisions. The proceedings were printed up as the Annual Report and circulated at home as part of the public relations effort that influenced the financial support the mission received.

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Annual conference of the Augustana Synod Mission in China, 21-26 February 1941. Front row, left to right: Mrs Nelly Friberg, Sister Ingeborg Nystul, Evodia (Mrs Victor) Swenson.Victor Swenson, Mauritz B. Hanson, John L Benson, Lillie (Mrs John L) Benson, Stella Carlson, Chang Sheng (Anna Olson's adopted child), Margaret Miller; middle row: Daniel Friberg, Dr Arthur J.Colberg, Cherrie Nelson (held by her father), Russell Nelson, Eleanor (Mrs Russell) Nelson, Dr Emery Carlson holding Erleen Carlson, Elvera (Mrs Emery) Carlson, Ethel Akins, Anna Olson, Magda (Mrs John) Lindbeckjohn W. Lindbeck; back row: Sister Thyra Lawson, Minnie Tack, Margaret Friberg, Sister Astrid Erling, Dr Lillian Olson, Alice K.Anderson, Dr Viola Fischer, Sister Myrtle Anderson, Alyce E.Anderson

HONAN MISSIONS

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The report on work in 1940 makes clear just how much the Chinese church operated on its own with its twenty-three pastors, sixty-eight congregations, and 180 outstations. Foreign missionaries were stationed in less than half the towns and cities listed. Even in two major cities, Chengchow and Kaifeng, the work was exclusively in Chinese hands. The foreigners were primarily responsible for the administration of schools and medical facilities and the supervision of evangelistic work in unchurched districts; in other words, operations that depended largely on donated money from North America had foreign supervision, while the churches and other operations supported primarily by Chinese funds were under Chinese supervision. A Chinese conference met later, at which the pastors and delegates from the largely self-supporting Chinese congregations made decisions about their group work.1 There were twenty-eight adults at the February 1941 conference; the only missionaries missing were two men stationed at the cooperative Lutheran Union Seminary near Hankow, in Japaneseheld territory, and a woman attending language school in the Philippines. All would be interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. The fifty-mile trip from Hsuchang to Kiahsien took two days by cart or bicycle. Part of the problem was that "in order to keep out the enemy they have dug out the roads, made deep trenches of them, practically all bridges and culverts have been torn up too, so one just has to sort of pick his way along." Once at the conference, the group crowded into the two foreign houses on the compound for eating, sleeping, and three days of meetings.2 Kiahsien was a smaller city than Hsuchang, with more modest facilities: "Just outside the city is the foreign compound which ... also contains a small dispensary. This is not as nice nor is it as well equipped or as large as the hospital at Hsuchang." In a city compound the mission had "a large, well kept up church, primary school, industrial school for girls, and homes for Chinese pastors and workers."3 When the Augustana missionaries returned to Hsuchang, the Bensons left on furlough, and the Carlsons bought their supplies, including "coal, wood, some 60 quarts of canned fruit, sugar and some tinned supplies" as well as "a good supply of pork, which the cook had sugar cured, and smoked." They also took over respon-

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sibility for the servants, which made Emery a bit uncomfortable. He wrote to his family, "It seems strange and not at all right for we three to have three people taking care of us, but of course now language study takes up all of our time and later such arrangements will allow everyone possible to devote most of their time to work which the Chinese can't do."4 Emery did not seem very excited about language study; nor did Elvera, who chafed at the idea that she was doing worse than Emery and that neither of the adult Carlsons was picking up the language anywhere near as fast as their child. Elvera grumbled in a letter of 28 March 1941, "Erleen is surely talking Chinese well for a child, and for being here such a short time. Many of the Chinese remark how well she speaks. In fact they tell me that she speaks better than her mother. It is so much easier to learn the language as a child than as an adult."5 Their fellow language student, Alyce E. Anderson, made the whole business the subject of a rather lighthearted article called "The Trials of a Language Student - Learning to Speak Chinese," which appeared in the Lutheran Companion, prominently featuring a photograph labelled "Erlene Carlson, Star Language Student."6 Having servants also meant taking responsibility for their spiritual training. Emery described their attempts at holding morning devotions: "Elvera and I stumble through the reading of the verses as it comes our turn and the cook prompts us when we are stuck. We have a New Testament with the English text on one side and the Chinese on the other side of the page, so we often have to get the meanings from that." Saying the Lord's Prayer produced mayhem because "the Chinese mumble through it so fast it becomes impossible for us to follow." As for memorizing verses, "usually the cook and his wife who read quite well are the only ones who have the memory work done."7 Shortly after the missionaries returned from conference, the Hsuchang church hosted the Spring Chu Hui, or evangelical meetings. "The Chu Huis are primarily a Chinese affair," Emery observed, "organized and run by the Chinese pastors. It is the custom to have these meetings spring and fall in all of the main stations at which time the Christians from all the outstations come into the central station or church for 3 to 5 days of meetings. They pool

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The "star language pupil" with her amah and friends

their resources maintaining a community kitchen, and sleep in every available place in the buildings, have 4 meetings a day when local and visiting pastors both Chinese and foreign take turns preaching. It is a great occasion and as the Chinese enjoy a crowd they really have a big time and feast greatly on the Word."8 Sister Astrid Erling, who spent much of her time in outlying villages giving one- and two-week reading and Bible study courses, had a room in the Carlsons' home. With Erling living in their home, Emery and Elvera became increasingly aware of this work. Elvera explained in a letter: "The courses teach the Phonetic Script (a simplified alphabet which enables them to read without being able to read the Chinese characters). This becomes necessary as so many people especially the women are unable to read. Apparently, in the two weeks time many of these people learn to read simple tracts, and bible verses. For those who can read, courses of Bible Study are conducted, and the rest of the time is taken up by devotions and the instruction of inquirers in the catechism."9

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Sister Astrid Erling

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The organization and methods the Augustana Lutherans used were fairly typical of Protestant mission practice in China in the 19405. By the time the Carlsons arrived in Honan, the province had been "opened" for slightly over half a century and the country had had missionaries for almost a century and a half. Missionary histories liked to go back further than the nineteenth century, to mention the North African Nestorians, who came overland from the Near East during the heyday of the Silk Road in the eighth and ninth centuries, or Matteo Ricci, an astronomer sent with papal authority as an adviser to the court in Peking in the thirteenth century, as well as the Jesuits, who established an ecclesiastic network that covered much of China in the sixteenth century. The Jesuits, however, were expelled in a power struggle between the pope and the emperor on the issue of ancestor worship, and several centuries of isolation and persecution virtually erased Christianity from China until European traders began finding (or making) cracks in the wall of isolation the Chinese emperors built around the "Middle Kingdom." Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society, who came to China in 1807, is usually thought of as the first Protestant missionary. Lutherans also like to mention Karl Gutzlaff, a German who arrived in China in 1826. Those less interested in looking for missionary firsts are wont to call attention to Gutzlaff's role in some of the shady dealings that accompanied the British attempt to introduce opium into China; they present him as a spy and interpreter during the British invasion of China in the 18405, usually called the First Opium War.10 The treaty that ended that war opened China's major ports to foreign trade and gave foreigners widespread concessions in buying and controlling property, as well as total immunity from Chinese law. Missionaries and traders made use of those powers to set up operations in the "treaty port" cities, and before long Shanghai, Canton, Tientsin, and even the Yangtze River port of Hankow, several hundred miles inland, had foreign enclaves that looked like European cities and were populated by foreigners (the English word normally used to describe Caucasians in China). The two most visible foreign powers were France, under whose sponsorship the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical network was re-established, and

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Britain, homeland and/or linguistic affiliation for the majority of Protestant missionary groups. Missionaries slowly built a base for Christianity in the treaty port cities, but they ventured into the hinterland at their own peril. The rural gentry was conservative and uncooperative, and the immunities that gave foreigners enormous rights and powers in the treaty ports did not apply in the countryside. Chinese officials in the hinterland still had the power to keep foreigners from buying or renting property in their areas, not to mention the power to shape public opinion and play on fears and suspicions - and the ability to look the other way when the rabble became violent. Several centuries of rumours about horrid and un-Chinese Christian rites had floated and bloated in the wake of the expulsion of the Jesuits and could inspire simple peasants to see the strange-looking, hairy barbarians peddling a new religion as something evil and a good deal less than human.11 During the nineteenth century, the missionary impulse roared through Protestant Europe and North America with a great fervour, inspiring both incipient missionaries and generous donors. The new industrialist class often wrote large cheques to such inspiring and inspired missionaries as Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission. Taylor, who opened the interior of China to missionary work beginning in the 18505, would often say that he never asked anyone but the Lord for money, but the funds the Lord produced came in pounds sterling. By the time he died in 1905, his organization had a network of mission stations that covered most of inland China. The CIM would remain the dominant Protestant mission until the Communists expelled all missionaries in the 19 505.n The nineteenth-century industrialists gave of their children as well as their money. Missionary fervour spread through the colleges and universities. For a time, many of the brightest and best at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, volunteered for missionary service. Missions caught the imagination of the daughters of the affluent even more than the sons. A goodly number of the first women attending medical school did so solely with the intent of going to the mission field. The late nineteenth century was a period of unrest and change in China. As the Ch'ing dynasty moved toward dissolution, the coast

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was dominated and controlled by foreign powers. In the International Settlement and the French Settlement in Shanghai, literally thousands of foreigners lived a European-style life in which Chinese intruded only as the servant class. Enterprising Chinese businessmen made millions as compradors for foreign businessmen who never even bothered to learn the Chinese language. In the interior, which was racked by rebellion and anarchy, secret societies blossomed. Some were bands of the desperate finding a way to survive. Others were quasi-religious groups with rites and ceremonies that gave them immunity to bullets and swords. Some, such as the Red Spears and the White Lotus, had a history that went back for centuries; others were new. The Taipings of the 1860s were a group led by a man who believed he was Jesus Christ's younger brother. Peasants by the thousands joined this egalitarian and austere group, and at one time they controlled much of South China. Their rebellion might well have succeeded had the foreign governments not entered the fray on the emperor's side.13 The Boxer Rebellion in 1900 was more reactionary and violently anti-foreign and anti-Christian, a vote in favour of the old ways. The Boxers, or "Harmonious Fists," were supported by the rural gentry and the emperor. When the movement erupted into massacres of missionaries and Chinese Christians, the foreigners stepped in, put down the rebellion, and demanded (and got) concessions in the interior even more far-reaching than the ones they had had on the coast.14 With that "open door," missionary work mushroomed. In 192.2, a massive statistical study, aptly titled The Christian Occupation of China, showed just how completely the missionaries had "conquered" China. Christian universities, both Catholic and Protestant, offered educations as thorough as good universities in the foreigners' homelands. Peking Union Hospital and Medical School, thanks to Rockefeller money, was a teaching hospital on a par with the best the United States or Canada could offer, and it was by no means the only large teaching hospital in the country. Seminaries trained Chinese pastors and priests in a variety of faiths, including the Lutheran. Hospitals and secondary schools were established throughout the land. There were nurses' training schools in conjunction with many missionary hospitals, including the Augustana

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Lutheran hospital in Hsuchang. Agricultural schools and industrial and farm-marketing co-operatives were being developed by missionary organizations as well.15 Christianity was one of China's religions by 192,0, even if the people had not forsaken their traditional religions in huge numbers to embrace the new religion from the West. Furthermore, Christianity was not merely a phenomenon of the Westernized, coastal, treaty port cities. Christian missionaries had reached almost every corner of China: they were in the inland cities and the market towns of the hinterland and in the inaccessible mountain areas with tribal groups who had never quite been assimilated into the mainstream of Chinese society.16 Nor was Christianity in China solely a foreign endeavour. The twentieth century saw an explosion of indigenous religious activity, groups and individuals with no connection to missions or the churches they had established. Not only were Chinese Christians (many of them second- and third-generation Christians) taking more and more responsibility in the churches established initially by foreigners, but groups totally unaffiliated with missions and missionary institutions, such as the True Jesus Church, the Little Flock, and the Jesus Family (who lived communally) had large and growing networks of Christian communities throughout the land, and there were other, smaller groups unaffiliated on a wider scale. China even had its colourful evangelists who held revivals that attracted thousands. One, Watchman Nee, was well known even outside China and his writings translated into other languages. It is these groups, even more than the direct descendants of the missionary effort, who have contributed to a marked growth in Christianity in China since 1979.17 As to Honan province, The Christian Occupation of China observed, "No part of Honan is unclaimed by Protestant missions." The missionaries were not all fighting over the same group of Chinese either. As early as 1890, the principle of "comity" was in effect. Mission groups divided up the country, avoiding overlapping missionary work and co-operating to see that a maximum number of people were given a chance to hear the Christian message. In the smaller and rural areas a missionary group would usually have responsibility for a hsien (county).18

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The Christian coverage even in rural and primitive Honan was amazing. The statistics from 1920 showed a Protestant evangelistic centre for every 150 square miles in the province and 394 foreigners and 1,106 Chinese employed. Catholic statistics were kept a little differently. The Catholic Annuaire reported by bishoprics and tallied only nuns, priests, and brothers. Catholic figures for foreigners are fairly analogous to the Protestant ones, but Protestant figures for Chinese workers account for jobs not tallied in the Catholic ones. In 1942-43, the Annuaire listed 344 foreign and 404 Chinese priests, nuns, and brothers.19 Honan's first missionaries were Catholics from the Milan Missionary Society, who established their first bishopric in Weihwei, north of the Yellow River, in the i86os. Italians dominated Catholic missionary work in Honan until the 19305, when the Society of the Divine Word, a Netherlands-based order that also had a seminary in Illinois, took responsibility for staffing some of the missions in Honan. During World War II the Catholics had nine dioceses in the province: five in Japanese-held areas and four in Chinese-held territory. One of the bishops was Japanese, two were Chinese, one was Spanish, one was American, and the remaining four were Italians.20 While Hudson Taylor was intent on opening the Chinese interior, his China Inland Mission did not begin work in Honan province until 1875, and Chowkiakow, its oldest station in the province, was not opened until i884.21 Nevertheless, by 1940 the CIM had more stations, and more missionaries, in Honan than any other Protestant group. They were predominantly in the east and southeast, although a band of CIM territory also extended west, separating two Lutheran fields, and an affiliated mission, the Swedish Mission in China, had the area just west and north of Loyang. Unlike the United Church of Canada Mission or the Augustana Lutheran Mission, the China Inland Mission had no network of supporting churches in its European and North American homelands from which to draw its missionaries or financial support. Ecumenical and international in scope, the CIM existed solely to recruit and support missionaries in China.22 The largest Protestant field in Honan belonged to the United Church of Canada and covered the entire "top hat" of the pro-

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vince, the portion north of the Yellow River. This area, the same region where the Italian Catholics began work, was opened in 1888 by Canadian Presbyterians. The CIM missionaries co-operated totally with the Canadians' efforts to set up work, even lending them native workers, but relations were less cordial with the Italian Catholics who shared the field.23 The Presbyterians' initial group included Dr William McClure, whose Honan-born son, Dr Robert McClure, plays a part in the closing chapters of this story, as well as the fiery evangelist Jonathan Goforth, who went out on his own after the parent group in Canada became part of the United Church of Canada.24 The year after the CIM missionaries at Chowkiakow helped the Canadian Presbyterians establish their mission north of the Yellow River, they assisted a group of Norwegian Lutherans from North America in founding a mission in the southern part of the province.25 Scandinavians and Scandinavian immigrants in North America spawned a confusing welter of missionary societies during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. Some were Lutherans of a bewildering array of mutations; some were affiliated with the China Inland Mission; some were of other evangelical persuasions. Most came to Honan and neighbouring provinces. By the i9zos many of the groups had amalgamated in the homelands, and more had co-operated so that the Chinese churches that they established worked together as the Lutheran Church in China. Lutherans made up about 40 per cent of Honan Protestants. There was much interaction between the Lutheran groups, with guest speakers and area meetings that crossed the mission field lines in the province. In addition, the Lutherans cooperated on larger projects such as a seminary, a printing firm, a mission home, and a school for missionary children.26 The first Lutheran group in Honan (sponsored by Norwegian immigrant churches in North America) was, by the time the Carlsons arrived in the province, called the Lutheran United Mission, although its sponsoring church group was the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America. The LUM had one field in southeastern Honan and another in the southwest with a small group called the Lutheran Brethren staffing three hsiens in between the two Lutheran United fields. A few hsiens of the China Inland Mission

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lay between the Norwegian American Lutherans and the Swedish American Augustana Lutheran mission in which the Carlsons served. Just to the southwest of the Augustana field were several hsiens staffed by Lutherans from Norway, and to the northwest was the CIM field staffed by missionaries from Sweden. The small Lutheran Free Church field was in Japanese-held territory east of the Yellow River no man's land.27 The Augustana field was opened in 1906. A year later Canadian Anglicans began work in Honan, setting up their first station in Kaifeng, which remained their episcopal seat. The Anglicans had stations in the important cities along the railroad - Kweiteh, Kaifeng, Chengchow, Loyang - together with a number of smaller parishes in eastern Honan and the Hsincheng parish on the west side. Anglican work in China was unified under a system of bishops, and the leadership of the Chinese church fairly quickly became independent of the various national churches that sent missionaries to China (Canada, Britain, United States, etc.). In 1940 the bishop of Honan was Chinese. During World War II the church carried on a rather awkward and unnatural division in which Honan's Bishop Lindel Tsen and Dr Joseph Hsu, director of St Paul's Hospital in Kweiteh, were in charge of the east Honan field while all the foreign missionaries were in the Chengchow and Loyang area without schools, hospitals, and such institutions. The churches on the west side had Chinese pastors, and the missionaries essentially worked as individuals, except in administrative dealings with the home church in Canada.28 The Free Methodists and the Southern Baptists also found their fields in the Chengchow-Kaifeng-Kweiteh area split by the war. In late 1940 and 1941, anti-British violence and general harassment of foreigners caused missions with stations on both sides of the battle lines to transfer their people. Most of those who stayed in the province were in the Chengchow area during the years 1941-44 and loomed large in mission work during the war because of the strategic importance of that city and the tremendous amount of suffering they ministered to. A few Southern Baptist, Free Methodist, Lutheran Free Church, and Canadian Anglican missionaries were still at stations in east Honan on Pearl Harbor Day and were interned by the Japanese.29

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In addition to the groups who had divided the province into fields under the comity agreements of the pioneering days, there were other groups such as the Pentecostals and Seventh-day Adventists, who had come fairly late to the province and had single stations rather than large "fields." There were also the tiny independent missions with intriguing names - William Nowack's Ebenezer Mission and Helen Bailey's Yellow River Boat Mission - and finally, at least two totally independent missionaries who lived among the Chinese: a former Lutheran, former CIM Pentecostal woman, who came to Hsuchang in May 1941, and Graham Anderson, originally with the CIM, who visited in the Carlson home in I942,.30

chapter four THE H^JNAN HfJNAN ^A/OF ^£A/OF LIFE

Honan province is located some four hundred miles west of such coastal cities as Peking, Shanghai, and Nanking and some six hundred miles north of the major cities of the south, Hong Kong and Canton. China's most ancient capitals lay along the Hwang Ho, or Yellow River, which cuts across the top of the province: Loyang, Kaifeng, and Changte were all in one dynasty or another the seat of empire. Archaeological sites abound in the province, and the birthplace of Zen Buddhism was on the Augustana Lutheran field.

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The province was, to some extent, frozen in time. Its peasants farmed as their forebears had thousands of years ago. The system of local government, the fabric of village and family life, the markets, even the travelling theatricals, had changed little since the birth of Christ. Honan was well equipped by both nature and history for self-sufficiency. It was blessed with fertile land and a long growing season. It had coal and wood, clay for pottery and bricks, and people who knew how to use what was there efficiently. The weather was often dry, but much of the land was flat and laced with rivers. Honan farmers managed to get two grain crops a year out of their land: winter wheat, harvested in May, and millet and sorg'hum (kaoliang), harvested in the fall. They raised cotton and tobacco, silkworms and peanuts, as well as sundry fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Not an inch of ground was wasted. Almost anything one needed, except modern luxuries such as petroleum and manufactured products, was found, grown, or made in the province. Even a building going up in the Hsuchang mission compound used local materials and traditional building techniques: a foundation of "flat stone which is brought from the hills some 50 miles away," walls of "gray native brick which is burned in kilns right in the community," and roof timbers 12-20 inches thick, which were "just plain tree trunks, squared up only where it is absolutely necessary." On top of close-set stringers and rafters lay 6 by 6 inch tiles smeared with mud mixed with straw, topped by "curved roof tiles" laid, unnailed, "in a thick layer of mortar." Only the eaves were made of exposed wood. Emery observed, "All the lumber used in building is sawed from logs right there on the job, by two men one on each end of a long saw. It is then planed with crude planes made of a blade and a wood block. The window frames and windows are all mortised together, again no nails being used."1 Honan province was heavily populated but overwhelmingly rural; most of its people lived on small farms of less than two acres and eked out a living in an economy that had few, if any, jobs elsewhere that might supplement their income. Elvera, after a donkey ride out to a country village, wrote, "It is exceedingly rare in this area to ever look across the landscape and not see people everywhere, in the fields, on the roads, on paths across the fields and gathered in the small farm villages which are so plentiful and close

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Man with carrying pole transporting two children

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together here." She observed, "There are 490 people per square mile in the province," as she described people walking and carrying "if not a package in the hand, then one on the end of a stick carried on the shoulder, but more frequently it is a load on a long shoulder pole balanced across the shoulder." She saw bicycles, rickshaws, and two-wheeled carts pulled by coolies and donkeys but "no trucks or trains," commenting that "freight comes by donkey" or wheelbarrow. She felt "a deep sense of pity for the men who must push these loads often too great for one man," and added, "We even saw children of 5-8 helping to pull these loads."2 On a map, Honan looks a little like a silhouette of Uncle Sam's head. There's the "top hat" north of the Yellow River, with Peking in the heavens above it, and a straggly beard on the southeast, pointing toward Shanghai. Kweiteh is in the nose pointing toward the China Sea on the east, and the back of the head is a hairy mass of ragged mountains, while the face is the fertile plains with the three major cities of Kaifeng, Chengchow, and Loyang strung along the river and the railroad at about the level of the hairline. The top hat of the north was fertile country, well blessed with coal deposits as well as good farm land. The Catholic fathers in the area dubbed it "paradise" for its rich land and mineral deposits. Unfortunately, the Japanese thought it a paradise as well, and by 1940 they controlled north Honan and the railroad that ran through it to Manchuria, a hop, skip, and a jump from Japan itself. The Chinese armed forces north of the Yellow River were Communists loyal to Mao Tse-tung, rather than Nationalists who supported Chiang Kai-shek. Japanese in the cities and Communist guerrillas in the country spelled double jeopardy for missionaries and Chinese Christians in north Honan. By 1940, only a few missionaries were left north of the Yellow River, most of them Italian Catholic fathers.3 The straggly beard of mountains in the southeast had been a haven for the Communists as Chiang Kai-shek gained power and turned against them in the 19305. But as the war reached stalemate and Japanese-held territory separated them from their fellow Communists north of the Yellow River and from the cities of the coast, their position became tenuous. In 1941 some joined their comrades to the north, others were annihilated by Chiang's troops

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in the New Fourth Army Incident, and still others went underground and quietly built their strength as the war continued. The back of Honan's head, the mountains of the west, formed a hardscrabble land inhabited by incredibly poor people scratching out a living on steep mountain slopes, living in tiny villages connected only by torturously winding footpaths. In the mountains, travel by wheeled vehicles, even bicycles and wheelbarrows, was well nigh impossible. There was one main route to the west: the ancient Silk Road (and modern railroad), which entered Honan at Tungkuan Pass, on the back of the head. This narrow gateway connected Loyang (the provincial capital in 1940) with Sian, the capital of Shensi province, and Chungking, the country's wartime capital. A motor road ran from Loyang to Nanyang in southwestern Honan, where the land levelled out somewhat, and dry riverbeds supplemented primitive roads, allowing limited truck travel. After 1938, Honan's face area wore a deep scar, the no man's land of the new Yellow River channel. On the front of the face, the former capital, Kaifeng, and another large city on the railroad, Kweiteh, were in Japanese hands, isolated from the rest of the province by the no man's land, although they still faced the coast and retained their connection with its cities via the Japanese-held railroad. The large cities to the west of the scar, Chengchow and Loyang, were uncomfortably close to the Yellow River and the Japanese and Communists on the other side. The rest of the face of Honan remained the breadbasket, harvesting wheat in May and millet in September and October, and squeezing as many other crops as it could by, in, and around those two. Honan had in hsiens, or counties, that were about a day's journey in breadth or length (20-30 miles). The hsiens had traditionally been grouped into districts. Hsuchang was one of these district centres where the chuan yuan, also called the mandarin, held office. Like most of Honan's rural cities, Hsuchang had torn down its city wall, leaving a dirt ridge and four gates at the four cardinal points. The "big streets" that entered at the gates intersected under a decorative arch in the middle of the city. As Emery observed, however, "The streets are very narrow, none of them wide enough for two automobiles to meet, if there were two cars in the city." Of the commerce on the streets and sidewalks, he com-

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West Gate to the city of Hsuchang (taken in the 1930s, before the wall was torn down)

mented, "Some stores are quite large but most are merely little onecounter stalls. The places which handle the common everyday things are fairly well stocked, but those which used to carry the imported goods or such that has to come from the coast look pretty empty. General Stores or rather hodge-podge stores predominate. There are grain shops, but no grocery stores or butcher shops. Vegetables and meats are sold in the markets, held early in the morning." Emery liked the way the restaurants had their kitchens at the front, so they could easily be inspected, but he was less impressed with the medicine shops selling "native concoctions" or displaying "empty ampoule boxes," and he was intrigued by "little factory establishments," including one where they made their own flashlight batteries.4 As a farmer's son, Emery was highly conscious of the crop year and farming techniques, of the ways that Honan resembled or differed from farming as he knew it. On 9 March 1941 he wrote: "I am afraid that Colorado farmers wouldn't think much of the irrigation methods used out here, but they get the job done without much overhead expense. 'Irrigating is done by raising water in buckets from shallow dug wells in the fields. They have a sort of balanced

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pole derrick contraption, which works very nicely, and one man can keep up a stream of water which it would take a fairly large pump and engine to equal."5 During wheat harvest, Emery noticed the sharp contrast between North America's mechanical harvest and China's labour-intensive one, but he was touched most by the terribly thin margin the Chinese peasant had between survival and starvation: "Nothing can be left in the field overnight as someone would be sure to steal it, in fact the standing grain is even stolen ... Consequently, the farmers put some member of the family out to watch the field, some even building little shelters to stay under. Where life has such a narrow margin of course there is much stealing that people wouldn't bother with if there was plenty for everyone.6 The contrast between East and West became even sharper after the harvest: "The fields are not stubble fields as they are at home, most of the grain having been taken out by hand root and all so the ground is left as barren as if it had been ploughed ... Nothing can be left to replenish the soil, as were one farmer to leave a stubble with that purpose in mind, someone else would come and dig up the roots when he wasn't looking. So the only way to fertilize the harsh worn soil is to gather every bit of dung dropped by man or beast and carefully preserve it until planting time.7 Emery was less aware of the relationship between the desperate plight of the Chinese farmer and what he saw on a trip to Linju and Loyang at the end of August. After travelling for the first time on Honan's main "motor road," he wrote, "I am not stretching things a bit when I say that except for occasional breaks of a few hundred yards here and there the road from [Loyang] to [Linju] was one continual stream of carts, most of them hauling grain. Between the ox and mule carts the light rickshaw frame carts and the wheelbarrows wend their way. The grain is going to West China to feed the armies, being transshipped here by rail, besides this there is cotton, pottery, tobacco, and cloth on some carts."8 Emery was seeing the result of a change in the system of taxation. The land tax, which had been a provincial levy, in July 1941 became a national one collected in kind, that is, in grain. The farmer was responsible for hauling the grain to the collection or shipping point, and he had to wait his turn to have his grain accepted and

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unloaded. Theoretically, collection and shipment points were within a day's journey of his farm, but carts travelling from Hsuchang to Loyang clearly would not be able to make the trip any faster than Emery had on a bicycle, and it took him three days going, four days returning. The tax amounted initially to 30 per cent of the assessed evaluation of the land, but a variety of other hsien and provincial levies about equalled the land tax. The military grain levy, exacted to feed the large number of soldiers in service because of the Sino-Japanese War (and the fear of a Communist rebellion), was also about equal to the land tax. The high rate of taxation and inefficient method of collection, coupled with widespread corruption and assessment records that were ancient and wildly incorrect, added up to a system that weighed heavily on the poorest peasants, especially when crops were poor, as they had been in i94i.9 Veteran International News Service correspondent Jack Belden completed a six-month tour of Honan and surrounding provinces about the time Emery went to Loyang. He spoke Chinese fluently and lived simply. Belden conversed extensively with peasants in the countryside. On his return to Chungking, he talked at length with his friend John Service, who worked for the U.S. embassy in Chungking. Service, himself a China-born missionaries' son, saw that those long lines of carts full of tax grain spelled trouble ahead and reported to the ambassador, "He [Belden] felt that there would be a definite shortage, the importance of which had not been sufficiently realized." Service went on to say, "These districts were already suffering from military requisitions and he did not believe that they could give any more grain as tax."10 People who had suffered actual occupation were more tolerant of military food requisitions and subsequent hardship than those who had suffered only the hardship of supporting Chinese troops in their area, but bitterness about conscription was widespread, particularly because the wealthy could buy their way out. Belden told of one village of 150 families which gave thirty-nine men in 1939, forty in 1940, and twenty in the first six months of 1941.n

chapter five SITTINGS ON THE EDGE OF Of A V O L C A N O

The war in the world at large escalated markedly in the spring of 1941. Germany and Italy ran rampant in the Near East and North Africa, eastern Europe was falling fast, and Norway surrendered to Germany. Japan and Russia negotiated a neutrality pact, Thailand and French Indochina signed a peace treaty with Tokyo, and Chungking "achieved the dubious distinction of being at the time the most bombed place on earth."1 In May, fighting broke out northwest of Loyang, in the area where the Chinese troops on the south side of the river were Nationalists while the ones on the north were Communists. The Nationalists ordered between 150,000 and

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2,00,000 of their crack troops to the area and kept them there throughout the war, part, no doubt, of the campaign to keep the Chinese Communists under control.2 The Augustana missionaries did not note any battles or depredations on their own field, but air raids increased radically, and troops moved up the motor road that went from Nanyang in the southwest through Linju to Loyang. On 3 May, Elvera noted in her journal, "ist 'Ging Pao' in several months. 2 of them today." For the two weeks that followed, the ching pao count was the dominant theme of her journal, but her only note of damage was "May 6 Chengchow bombed."3 The Chengchow missionaries suffered both personal injury and property damage. Bill Simpson wrote that Myron Terry "received a souvenir in his right shoulder" and that "yesterday after prayer and poultices I was enabled to find it and remove it with tweezers." He went on to report that the Ashcrafts of the Free Methodist mission "felt restrained to stay in their front hallway during one visitation instead of going into a shelter in the garden, which they have used daily. The shelter was hit by a direct hit and absolutely nothing left of it - not even a hole in the ground. The house was badly wrecked and the wall around them sprayed with shrapnel but they were untouched."4 On 7 July the Baptist compound in which Simpson and Terry lived was hit. Bill reported that there was no alarm, but "loss of life was comparatively small compared to most bombings." His own quarters suffered only broken windows and falling plaster, but "Other houses, the hospital, garages are badly spoiled. No less than seven bombs on the two compounds."5 Loyang, the provincial capital, district military headquarters, and eastern terminus of the railroad, was repeatedly and severely bombed, but Emery observed during his August visit that "it is surprising how work goes on in spite of the destruction. Many windows have been broken here in the [Augustana] mission compound, but no bombs have hit directly although they have picked up many shrapnel fragments." He gave most of the credit for saving lives to the caves dug deep in the loess soil: "Here on the compound they have a cave which goes down over 30 feet into the ground; it is a great long thing with many branches, air holes and several entrances from the various parts of the compound. When

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Hsuchang children in air-raid ditch with Stella Carlson

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the air raid alarm sounds they put on wraps, take their lanterns and go down into the caves, at times they have spent almost the entire day in the cave. There are similar shelters in the city maintained by the government and many lives have been saved by going down into them." At one time, however, a plane spotted people loitering near a cave entrance and killed two hundred. 6 The Anglican and Swedish CIM missions in Loyang had not been as fortunate as the Lutherans. Bombing had rendered their properties "uninhabitable," and their missionaries had moved in with the four Augustana missionaries.7 As 1941 wore on, Japanese assets in the United States were frozen and the United States declared an oil embargo against "aggressor states." The Japanese cabinet resigned, leaving the military in control of the country. Conditions in Japanese-held Honan worsened. Baptist Katie Murray wrote that missionaries in Kaifeng "were given three days in which to get out" and then told to wait. She did not dare to send a messenger inquiring about them since "One of our Kaifeng evangelists who attempted to cross the river was arrested and killed."8 Holders of British passports had been forced to leave Kaifeng in 1940, and quite a few missionaries of other nationalities had left then as well, but several of Murray's fellow Southern Baptists were still in the city, along with a Swiss CIM missionary and his family and a group of Catholic nuns and priests, Italian and American. Canadian Anglican Sue Kelsey and several Americans, Baptist and Lutheran, were in the Kweiteh area to the east. On 2, October 1941 Chengchow was bombed heavily, clearing the way for Japanese troops to enter the city and occupy it for four weeks. After the Japanese left, Greta Clark wrote, "The looting of those 4 weeks was terrible but most of the people had left the city and have now returned, many to find even the doors and windows carried away." She mentioned nothing of her own close call when the church compound was struck by a small bomb while she and Chinese co-workers were inside.9 George Andrew received "a slap in the face and supplies taken away" when he attempted to get food for the refugee camp; however, "the next day we fared much better, for after an interview with the highest official, he had it not only given to us but sent to us on two ox carts."10

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Conditions were serious for the Chinese who were stranded in the city of Chengchow. Women and girls were especially vulnerable. As the LUM report of the invasion of Sinyang noted earlier in the year, armies were given carte blanche to rape and loot as a reward for taking a city. The grisly stories that came out of "the Rape of Nanking" in 1937-38 were repeated again and again in other cities, towns, and villages as the war progressed. The soldiers had a little more respect for the property and persons of foreigners, and so civilians, especially women, crowded into the mission compounds, and the missionaries did what they could to keep soldiers from getting in. Often they bricked up or sandbagged the gates and only needed keep watch for men attempting to come over the walls. Murray had about thirty young women in her house for four weeks and about one hundred in the compound.11 The news of the occupation arrived in Hsuchang on 3 October, carried by Anglican missionary Grace Gibberd, who had been injured in a bomb attack on her station. The hospital was full, many of the welfare camp children had typhoid, one of the male nurses was desperately ill, and Emery was replacing Dr Ho, who was seriously ill himself.12 Gibberd was the only foreigner living in Hsincheng, halfway between Chengchow and Hsuchang. She shared a compound with her cook and his family and a Chinese pastor and his family. The first bomb attack of the day centred on the fields outside the city, where a number of schoolchildren were killed. When a second plane came over, it seemed almost anticlimactic, but that plane made a direct hit on Gibberd's house, filling her backside with shrapnel. Not wanting to be caught by the Japanese in such a condition, she set off for Hsuchang, leaving as still another attack began. She travelled all night and arrived at the Hsuchang hospital the next afternoon.13 In Hsuchang, ching paos continued on the 4th and the 5th. By the night of the 6th, "a false report had come out that the Japs were 60 li away. The girl students got quite panicky." Ethel Akins of the Girls' School and Sister Myrtle Anderson of the nursing school tried to calm them down, but "There was bedlam for several hours. During the night many of the boy students, welfare camp children and girls fled." Things were calmer on the yth and the 8th, with only a few alarms. But the 9th brought more panic. Yuhsien, thirty

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li away, had been bombed. The wife of the Carlsons' cook wanted to flee and, "we finally let her go though it is an expensive trip. One cart costs $120.00." On the loth, Elvera wrote, "The boys at the Welfare camp are busy moving things, and some gates are being bricked up, otherwise things go on very much as usual."14 "At present we are having the experience of sitting on the edge of a volcano again," she commented, downplaying the situation as she went on to describe "frozen money" the Lord would eventually melt and "little people from the east" who "are near enough to give us a bit of excitement."15 In October, missionary guests came through bound for the coast and home, and "Yuhsien was bombed on 2,ist and quite a number killed and injured. A few of the injured came to our hospital." On the z/th, the Hsuchang mission decided to move the Girls' and Boys' Schools to Linju, on the motor road, nearer the mountains.16 The first word from Chengchow came on 28 October in a letter that Myron Terry wrote to Grace Gibberd. While the rest of the missionaries were in Chengchow for the entire four weeks of occupation, Terry was able to leave Chengchow on 13 October and head to Sian. Once there, he sent news of the Anglican missionaries to Canon Leonard Dixon in Canada, reporting that they "were all safe and well when I left. Their plan is to stay on in Chengchow and look after the church and the people. There is a great deal they can do of course for the few who are left in the city."17 On 2. November Elvera wrote a long letter assuring the family that they were managing despite the war. She opened with an account of the schoolchildren fleeing to the mountains and closed with ominous news about the money situation: "The other day Pastor Swenson had to send out a letter to all evangelists and Bible women saying that they would not be able to give out any more mission funds unless we could get our money. Most of the missionaries here have not had any deposits made on their bank accounts since April, and in our case no check has been cashed since July, so we are really running low on funds."18 On 15 November she commented, "Emery is still working at the hospital taking the place of the Chinese doctor Dr. Ho who has been sick many weeks with para-typhoid. If he can possibly get away, he hopes to make a bicycle trip next week to Kiahsien and [Linju] where Sister Thyra

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Lawson and Anna Olson (respectively) are carrying on alone, now that Dr. Lillian Olson, Dr. Colberg, and the Fribergs have gone to the states."19 The next day, Bill Simpson surprised the Carlsons by arriving unannounced. During his stay in Hsuchang, he told Canon Dixon, "I made the trip down, almost as soon as the road was at all passable and the purpose of the trip was to borrow funds for our Chengchow Relief Camps."20 Grace Gibberd was still several weeks from full recovery, but she left Hsuchang with Simpson on zo November in cold, nasty weather. He later wrote, "We had a very exciting trip back as we ran into a bad snowstorm the first day and into heavy mud the second. The mud was so heavy that after using a donkey to help the man pull Miss Gibberd's cart, we finally had to change and use an ox. The result was a broken cart and ended with Miss Gibberd having to ride over 10 li by donkey in order that we reach her station before nightfall. Not a very good treatment of Miss Gibberd after her seven weeks in the hospital."21 Gibberd came home to a bomb-shattered home, frozen in time. "The clock still registered ten minutes to eleven, the time at which it had been stopped by the bomb. For the weeks of danger of occupation by the enemy, the Pastor and his family, my cook with his wife and children, together with most of the people of the town had taken refuge from the almost daily bombings in the country."22 For a brief time, life returned to something approaching normal, and on i December Emery left on his long-delayed trip to Kiahsien and Linju.23 He was still away on the day the Japanese bombed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. On the Chinese side of the International Date Line, the bombs fell on 8 December, and the bombs dropped on British and American ships in Chinese waters that day loomed larger in the public mind than the ones that fell in Hawaii. Emery was on his way back to Hsuchang when a "Chinese Army officer stopped me and told me of an event that had happened that day ... America was with the Chinese in the war against the Japanese. The Chinese were puzzled, but were also elated."24 The attack on Pearl Harbor threw North Americans into the maelstrom of a war they had previously kept at a distance. But for the foreigners in Honan, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the bombing of British and American ships in Shanghai brought an eerie quiet

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and an absolute and total isolation from their ancestral world and lands of citizenship. All the tenuous connections with their families and their pasts abruptly disappeared. A wall of silence fell between them and the Chinese coast - mail no longer came through, the English-language papers stopped publication, foreigners no longer made their way through the no man's land, and money frozen in Shanghai banks could just as well have been in Antarctica. The fate of co-workers, friends, spouses, and missionary boarding-school children trapped in Japanese-held territory weighed heavily on every missionary's mind. For Caucasians in China, their very identity as foreigners had been taken away. Throughout the years since the Japanese invasion, they had formed a body, a group of people united in a common dedication to relieving the suffering of those around them. They were people who saw themselves as neutrals who stayed outside the political intrigues of an Asian war and endeavoured to do their jobs as best they could. The international relief committees that had existed throughout the country were made up of people from every nation. The man who headed the committee in Nanking during the infamous "Rape of Nanking" was both a German and a nominal Nazi.25 The Hsuchang committee and others in Honan included Italian priests. With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the consequent declarations of war that divided the world into Axis and Allies, the foreigners in China became enemies, allies, or neutrals depending on the country named on their passports and their location in China on 8 December 1941. American Emery Carlson found himself embraced as an ally in Hsuchang, but a hundred miles farther north another American, Thomas Megan, the Catholic bishop of Sinsiang, became an enemy alien. Megan himself escaped to the hills and made his way across the river, but twelve other American Catholic priests north of the Yellow River trudged off to internment. On the other hand, a contingent of Italian priests carried on north of the Yellow River during the war, while their Italian compatriots south of the river were interned in a Chinese camp for enemy aliens in Neihsiang.26

chapter six AFTERV^EARL HARBOR

It is difficult to determine exactly how many foreigners were in Honan on Pearl Harbor Day, but there seems to have been only one non-missionary on the "Free China" side of the river, an old reprobate in Chengchow who lived in a bombed-out factory and could not speak Chinese, even though he had been in the country for twenty years.1 As to missionaries, the figure was upwards of 250. In Chinese-held territory, the Augustana Lutherans had nineteen adult missionaries, the Canadian Anglicans seven. The Southern Baptists and the Free Methodists had three each. There were four Seventhday Adventists, two Pentecostals, and about four independents of

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various kinds. The Lutherans from Norway had six missionaries serving their own churches and two on loan to the Lutheran United Mission. The LUM itself numbered seven other missionaries in Chinese-held territory and five in Japanese-held southern Honan, who would eventually be interned. The tiny Lutheran Brethren field in southwestern Honan still had four missionaries, while China Inland Mission rosters for 1942. indicate fifty-four missionaries, including eleven Swedish Alliance people near Loyang and a Swiss missionary and his wife, who were able to stay on in Japanese-held Kaifeng. Missionary children are not included in those figures. Of the 134 Catholic missionaries in 1942,, the majority were Italians, most of whom were interned by the Chinese according to the American Catholic priests. U.S. consular records show six American Catholics in "Free China."2 The U.S. consulate's January 1941 list of American citizens in eastern Honan included twenty-four Catholics and twenty-three Protestants in Kaifeng, four Protestants in Kweiteh and six in smaller centres under Japanese control. Missionary letters subsequently confirm that at least thirteen Protestant missionaries, including Canadian Anglican Sue Kelsey, five Southern Baptists, and two Lutherans, were interned in 1942,. Eighteen Catholic nuns and an unspecified number of priests were held in Kaifeng, as well as the twelve American priests in Sinsiang. In addition, some Honan missionaries travelling home were interned.3 On Pearl Harbor Day, Honan could be roughly divided into four parts: the north, east, and south, which were in Japanese hands, and the central-west, under Chinese control. Roughly 2,0 per cent of the province's Protestants lived on the United Church of Canada field north of the Yellow River. In the same area, the Catholics had two dioceses, one at Weihwei staffed by Italians and the other at Sinsiang staffed by the Society of the Divine Word, a Netherlandsbased order with some American priests as well as people from Axis countries. In the years between the Japanese invasion of North Honan and the attack on Pearl Harbor, a number of Chinese working with the Canadian missionaries had been harassed and killed, and the United Church missionaries stationed north of the Yellow River had left the area. Chinese medical and evangelical

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workers carried on the work as best they could under Japanese occupation. The Italians in the Weihwei diocese stayed, and at least one priest felt that the difficulties with the Communist guerillas were far worse than anything they suffered from the Japanese.4 The Japanese in Sinsiang were both aggressive and prompt in rounding up the American Divine Word fathers in the diocese and interned all except Thomas Megan and Joseph Henkels, who managed to escape to the Chinese-held side of the river. They did, however, allow Polish and German Divine Word priests to stay at their posts throughout the war. In eastern Honan the situation was more complex, and the internment of missionaries proceeded erratically and unpredictably over a period of just over a year. There were a large number of Protestant fields east of the new Yellow River channel - CIM, Canadian Anglican, Southern Baptist, Free Methodist, a small Lutheran group, and Mennonite. Most of these groups worked on both sides of the Yellow River no man's land, and activities on the Japaneseheld side had been scaled down. The British, especially, had been harassed and asked to leave, but a few missionaries, most of them single women, were still east of the no man's land in December 1941. One of the two Catholic dioceses east of the new Yellow River channel, Kweiteh, had a Japanese bishop. In the other diocese, Kaifeng, the bishop and two priests, all Italians, had been killed "by bandits" in late November 1941, and the "rector of the regional seminary" was in charge until Rome could be informed and appoint a successor.5 Central and western Honan was "Free China" and under the control of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces. The Lutherans, who made up 40 per cent of Honan's Protestants, were concentrated in this portion of the province; the missionaries were LUM, Lutheran Brethren, and Augustana Lutherans from North America, as well as a Norwegian Lutheran group. CIM stations, including an affiliated Swedish group, were interspersed with the Lutherans. Some Pentecostal missionaries and a Seventh-day Adventist group rounded out the Protestants, all from Allied or neutral countries. The Catholics, however, had Italian bishops in all three dioceses in the area, and most of their non-Chinese priests were Italians.

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The percentage of the missionaries who were medical people was pitifully small, in both the Chinese-held and the Japanese-held territories. Two of the four Augustana missionaries who left on furlough in November 1941 were doctors (AJ. Colberg of Linju and Lillian Olson of Kiahsien), and Pearl Harbor Day found the Augustana Lutherans' two remaining missionary doctors and their only Chinese doctor with medical-college training in Hsuchang. The February conference recommended that Emery replace Dr Colberg at Linju when Colberg went on furlough, and shortly after Pearl Harbor Day the Carlsons moved.6 Given the high price of cart rental, the financial crisis in which money was frozen in Shanghai, and the precarious military situation, the family took very little with them. Still, there were delays: problems with carters, postponements because of illness, and, since this was Honan, delays because of the weather. The second day of the three-day trip was especially hard. "Emery worked like a coolie, pushing and lifting the carts. Darkness overtook us before we reached Kiahsien but there was a bright moon so we were able to make it," Elvera wrote. They lay over an extra day in Kiahsien because Emery took sick. Within days of arriving in Linju, Elvera wrote, "Emery is sick with infectious jaundice - so weak, not able to eat, etc."7 Today this disease is usually called hepatitis B. A viral infection, it is transmitted by fecally contaminated water. The disease was endemic in central China in the 19408, where human excreta was used as fertilizer and protected water supplies and sanitary sewer systems were virtually non-existent.8 The disease must have been especially prevalent in Honan that winter, for Bill Simpson in Chengchow took ill with it as Emery was getting well, and Catholic father Mario Frassinetti, who initially treated Bill, came down with it within a few days after Simpson was struck.9 On 9 February 1942, Elvera wrote, "Emery came from the hospital at noon today saying that a telegram had arrived from Kiahsien saying that Bill Simpson of Chengchow was very ill and that Astrid was already on her way. At 2:45 ne left here, going to Kiahsien by bike." It was not easy for Elvera to see Emery go: she was eight months pregnant and Erleen was ill. Her fears were not groundless; after Emery came home, she wrote, "He told of the

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Chengchow Baptist Hospital

incident of the soldier by the roadside with his finger on the trigger of the pistol and other incidents which made us realize in what great danger he was and how mercifully God can protect."10 While in Chengchow, Emery not only took care of Simpson, but he gave physicals to all the Anglican missionaries, looked after "some of the Italian priests there who were sick," and "had the opportunity to get some drugs and supplies from the Baptist hospital which has been closed for some time."11 The Southern Baptists had just completed their large, modern hospital, equipped with a state-of-the-art X-ray machine, in 1937 when the Sino-Japanese War shifted into high gear and headed toward Chengchow. In mid-March 1938 the hospital was damaged, and one patient killed and seven injured. In 1940 its American doctor-director returned to the United States, and the hospital was closed.12 Katie Murray, a teacher by vocation, was the Southern Baptist left responsible for the hospital in Chengchow. Like the other missionaries, the Southern Baptists felt the pinch of frozen funds, and she seemed awed by responsibility for the hospital and the mission's financial affairs. On 10 February 1942, she reported

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selling the hospital's light plant, commenting, "There is such a dearth of medicine in this area that it would seem a crime to store it so we are selling it."13 With the Japanese only fifteen miles away, Murray was especially concerned about the X-ray machine. In that same letter she reported, "Through an English Baptist doctor in Sian we are trying to find someone who can dismantle the x-ray without injury to it. Our thought is to store it with the English Baptists in Sian or with some mission hospital further from the border line."14 A few days later, Emery showed up in Chengchow, and Murray wrote: "This morning I spent several hours at the hospital with a Lutheran doctor who is in great need of some medicines which we have. He took a look in the x-ray room and remarked that it was too valuable a machine to be exposed to such danger this near the border. I rather hoped that some of the Lutheran hospitals might be able to use and store it but he was not interested as their hospitals are also in Honan."15 In southern Honan the Lutheran United Mission had closed its Kioshan hospital and turned its Hwangchuan hospital over to a Chinese doctor to run as a private operation after the mission's foreign doctors left on furlough.16 Before the war, Honan University had maintained a medical school in Kaifeng; during the war it operated in exile in west Honan under much reduced circumstances. When relief chairman Ernest Wampler visited the facility in May 1942,, he observed, "They had repaired an old temple and were using those old buildings for the schoolwork. The wards were located in other places in the city."17 A letter written by Anglican George Andrew in the summer of 1941 gives a grim picture of the staffing of the Honan medical school. Andrew said that the doctor who cared for Mary Searle when she had typhus in Chengchow had died at the Hsiunghsien facility, and "he had no doctor to attend to him."18 That comment raises the possibility that Dr Hansen was the only fully trained doctor on the faculty and thus had no doctor to tend him when he himself became ill. All of this would seem to indicate that the seventy-five-bed Augustana hospital at Hsuchang was, indeed, as Emery claimed, the only fully functioning modern hospital in the "Free China" part of the province between 1941 and 1944.

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Bernard Tseng asserted that the Anglican St Paul's Hospital in Kweiteh was the only one in Japanese-held eastern Honan, and his assessment is probably accurate for that area of the province. With hospitals hi Japanese-held north and south Honan also closed, the 30 million people or so in the province were being served by two hospitals with a capacity of something less than 150 beds - at a time when Honan was a war zone and its people under siege.19 The Anglican hospital in Kweiteh was able to stay open under Japanese occupation, but it did so with severe restrictions. Dr Hsu, its head, had to sign the facility over to the Japanese as a "spoils" hospital, and the Japanese controlled the finances, although they did not interfere much with the medical operation. Canadian nurse Sue Kelsey, who had been in Kweiteh for some time, was not allowed to work in the hospital.20 Both the Augustana Lutherans and the Catholics maintained less sophisticated "native-style" hospitals and had other facilities described as either clinics or dispensaries, the Catholics in Loyang and Chengchow, the Lutherans in Loyang, Kiahsien, and Linju. The facility that Emery Carlson and nurse Anna Olson were running in Linju in 1942 was a native-style hospital, one in which the treatment and operating areas were cared for by the hospital staff, but the patients stayed in shelters where their families cooked and cared for them. The terms "clinic" and "dispensary" were used for a variety of medical facilities, often run by people with minimal medical training.21 Apart from the hospitals, the province was not totally without modern medical care. The Catholics had some priests and brothers with medical training: Father Mario Frassinetti of Chengchow escaped internment because of his medical usefulness, one Italian brother was a dentist, and Father Carlo Suigo, who worked north of the Yellow River in Japanese-held territory, was a trained nurse. The Japanese allowed Suigo, an Italian, to work quite freely, but in 1945 he was taken captive by the Communists, evidently because he had maintained a dispensary and his captors insisted that he was a doctor.22 Chinese doctors were in private practice in some of the cities. A few were medical school graduates with Western-style medical training, more were nursing school graduates who understood the

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importance of cleanliness and sterilization of tools in dealing with injuries and childbirth. Most of the male graduates of the Hsuchang Nurses' Training School and other such institutions set themselves up as "doctors" after graduation, and because the traditional herbalists, midwives, and acupuncturists tended to have no concept of asepsis and introduced infections as they treated their patients, these nurse-doctors filled a real need. Missions provided almost all the charity work in the province, and they came nowhere near meeting the needs, even of the most desperately ill.

chapter sevgen THE LONG M O N T H S OF S I L E N C E

For months, the Honan missionaries received neither mail nor money from the home countries. The English-language newspapers from the coast had ceased publication, and Chinese papers were few, heavily censored, and unreliable; so without radio or telephone, their news of the war and even of events beyond the mountains or across the river came largely by word of mouth or rumour. Those missions whose fields were split by the lines of war were as cut off from their homelands and West China as the Augustana missionaries, but they were far more conscious of what lay just the other side of the battle lines - of their stations and churches in

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Japanese-held Honan, which were being occupied, looted, or destroyed; of co-workers, Chinese and foreign, who were in custody or suffering from the depredations of the enemy. The Japanese were no monolith, and their treatment of missionaries in the south, north, and east of the province differed radically. The Lutheran United Mission's southwest field, which spilled over into adjoining Hopei province, was fairly far from the battle lines; however, its southeastern field was partially in Japanese hands, including the central station in Sinyang.1 Unlike the northern and eastern battle lines defined by the river, the southern line was less sharply defined, less hotly contested. The Japanese kept their hold on Sinyang with a confidence that allowed them to give the missionaries there a fairly free rein. Until April 1942., the working conditions for the three LUM missionaries in the two stations in Japanese-held territory in southeastern Honan did not seem very different from conditions in the five stations under Chinese control. Pastor Hans Nesse was allowed to come and go freely in the months before Pearl Harbor and the first few months after. He later wrote, "Japan's war with the United States did not bring about any sudden change in our status. If I would please notify the military police where I intended to go, that would be all that was necessary. Their country was at war with my country and yet I was treated with the utmost courtesy and consideration."2 Perhaps part of the reason for trust and courtesy lay in the Japanese command in Sinyang; perhaps much rested in the LUM missionaries themselves. All three had deep roots in the area. Martha Kulberg, who had been in China since 1912., was the "youngster" of the trio; Nesse had come two years earlier; and Marie Anderson had arrived in China in 1897. Nesse described Marie Anderson in these terms: "To the non-Christian she was respectful and courteous. Chinese politeness seemed second nature to her."3 He himself seems to have behaved with the same dignity and politeness, showing a generosity of spirit coupled with firmness even in his dealings with the Japanese. The first hint of a change came when Japanese soldiers walked into the church where Pastor Nesse was leading a Good Friday service. They told him he was ordered to return to Sinyang imme-

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diately. Once back in the city, he was informed that orders "directly from Tokyo" commanded "immediate evacuation to Hankow." In a little farewell speech at the station, the Japanese officer in charge told Nesse he regretted the missionaries were leaving, adding that "their departure was no wish of his or of the Japanese in Sinyang."4 When the three missionaries arrived in Hankow, they went unguarded to the Lutheran Home and Agency building, where they would have stayed before the war. After a few days, they were interned in the Hankow Union Hospital along with about forty others, including two Augustana Lutheran pastors from the Lutheran Union Seminary just outside the city. In September 1942 the three LUM missionaries were transferred to another compound, along with a number of other internees. Eventually, they were taken across the Yangtze to Wuchang. Nesse remained there until the war was over; the two women died.5 Anderson's health was failing before internment, and she might have died even under better circumstances; but Martha Kulberg seems not to have been in ill health before internment. The food allowance, which "at first did cover the cost of food," was not enough for "the wood for the stoves on which we cooked the food" as inflation set in. Nesse commented that without the aid of the Swedish missionaries in Wuchang, "we would surely have starved to death."6 He did not mention that any Catholics were taken to Hankow with the Lutherans, and the two American priests whom Joseph Henkels reported were in Sinyang in early I94Z were in neighbouring cities on the Chinese side of the lines in 1944. Unlike Nesse, the Catholics had evidently taken advantage of the opportunity to walk to freedom on the other side since they had a dozen Swiss, German, and Polish co-workers who could stay in Sinyang and take care of things.7 It is quite clear that in the first months after Pearl Harbor, local commanders were allowed wide discretion in the handling of any "enemy aliens" in their territory. The courteous treatment of missionaries in Sinyang in southern Honan contrasted sharply with the harsh handling of missionaries in Sinsiang, north of the Yellow River. Ironically, the American Catholic priests in Sinyang (where the bishop was Chinese) were from the same order as the priests in Sinsiang.

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Well before Pearl Harbor, Thomas Megan, the bishop of Sinsiang, had evolved a plan whereby the American priests in Japanese-held territory north of the Yellow River would be replaced by Chinese, Italian, or German priests. Unfortunately, the scheme was only partially in place when the attack occurred. Megan himself escaped to the mountains nearby, keeping in contact with Chinese Catholics in Sinsiang through trusted intermediaries. The Japanese put a $10,000 price on his head and promptly rounded up the remaining twelve American priests in the area, confining them to the hospital. According to Megan's biographer, who was one of the twelve priestly prisoners, "Day in and day out, the Japanese military police put each missionary through grinding sessions of interminable interrogation. They always ended a session with the refrain, 'Where is Bishop Megan?'"8 No doubt much of the blame for such hostility rested on the Japanese command in the area. But part may have rested on Megan, who was not only bishop of Sinsiang but was also the superior of an order of Chinese lay brothers called the Little Brothers of St John the Baptist. This order had been founded as ambulance bearers for Chiang Kai-shek's army in the 19305, and in the words of the bishop's biographer, "Megan enjoyed the highest authority with the Nationalist regime and had access to their most exclusive military circles."9 On Easter 1942,, as Nesse and his fellow Lutherans were leaving Sinyang for internment in Hankow, Thomas Megan and Father Joseph Henkels were departing the relative safety of the Taihang mountains to cross the Yellow River and enter Free China. They went at the behest of the Vatican's diplomatic representative in China, who was concerned about the Italian priests being interned as enemy aliens in Chinese-held Honan. Megan made it safely to Loyang, and he and Henkels spent the next two years in Loyang and Lushan respectively.10 The Anglicans and the Southern Baptists, who had major centres on both sides of the river, felt the division in the province and the separation from their fellow missionaries more keenly than most missions. Over half the Southern Baptists' foreign personnel were on the Japanese side, interned. The painful cleavage was personal as well as institutional. The prisoners of war interned on the east

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side of the river were co-workers who had been friends and often housemates of the missionaries on the west side of the river. Single women found the separation especially hard. The Sisterhood of Single Ladies, the Comradehood of the Chao Shus, was an almost familial one. Single women routinely shared a household; they vacationed together. They shared many a louse-infested quilt and gritty dish of millet with their fellow Chao Shus as they held short courses in isolated villages and lived with the Chinese. For them the separation by war was wrenching. The missionaries on the east side of the new Yellow River bed were treated neither as harshly as the Catholic fathers north of the river nor as gently as the Lutherans in the southern part of the province. They were confined promptly after Pearl Harbor, the people from the Kweiteh area in the Lutheran compound in that city and the Kaifeng missionaries (a somewhat larger group) in various compounds in that city. Chinese travellers were able to bring news at second or third hand, and Katie Murray of the Southern Baptists cabled her superiors in January, "Sallee, Ward, Bostick, [G]arratt, Prosser in custody on mission compound." Sallee and Ward were in Kaifeng, the others were in Kweiteh, along with Canadian Anglican Sue Kelsey.11 The first news to arrive directly from a missionary in Kweiteh came in a birthday card that Murray received in March 1942. In that unsealed letter, Attie Bostick wrote, "13 missionaries had a helpful Bible conference of 56 days beginning Dec. 8 in the Lutheran compound in the city of Kweiteh."12 After the "Bible conference," the missionaries in Kweiteh were returned to their respective compounds. While Garratt and Prosser were taken back to their home station of Pochow and confined in the church but not allowed to go into their home, Kelsey was restricted to her home compound in Kweiteh but not allowed to go to the hospital or church.13 In so-called Free China, the Carlsons began 1942, by settling into temporary quarters in Linju with Anna Olson. Linju was a radically different station from Hsuchang. Both the mission station and the city were significantly smaller, though a place with a population of 2,80,000 people hardly seems small and rural to North Americans. Nestled against the mountains, Linju had always been considered a "bandit town," with its handy getaways and hiding places in the

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hardscrabble mountains nearby. During the conflicts of the 19x05 and 19305, two Augustana missionaries had been kidnapped and held hostage for many weeks, and the mission's property outside the city wall was destroyed.14 No other denominations had foreign missionaries in Linju, and nurse Anna Olson was the only Augustana missionary stationed there when the Carlsons arrived. Ollie, as she was usually called, lived with two adopted Chinese boys in the east suburb, Tung Kuan. Only the foreign-style house in which Ollie lived and a small building used as a clinic and dispensary had been rebuilt since the damage of the 19305. Emery described the dispensary as "some buildings off to the side built into the compound wall which were used for hospital rooms." Patients were carried from these rooms to an operating room "heated by a coal or wood stove so we had an open fire when we gave open anesthetics." He added, "It is fortunate that we never blew the place up."15 About a mile away, in the heart of the city, the mission owned another compound containing the church and two Chinese-style houses. Pastor Tu lived in the front house with his large family, and the Carlsons moved into the back one after Elvera's baby was born. Emery would walk or bicycle to the clinic in the east suburb when he was not out on emergencies or at his twice-monthly clinics in Kiahsien, a day's journey to the southeast. He automatically became the administrative head of the Augustana evangelistic work in the Linju-Iyang district in addition to having responsibility for the clinics at Linju and Kiahsien. He disliked administration and had more than enough to do with his medical and relief work. Writing in old age, he observed, "There were good experienced lady evangelists as well as Chinese, but the rule was that a White male had to be in charge, and so I was appointed. My knowledge of Chinese was insufficient and my experience entirely inadequate, so I really made a mess of that assignment."16 Emery did enjoy getting out to see the territory and meet the people. He waxed particularly enthusiastic about an April trip to lyang, thirty miles southwest of Linju. He rode his bicycle "up over a mountain pass about 1000 feet high and looked down on a beautiful valley with the tree-bordered road winding through it." Once

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Anna Olson with Chang Sheng as a toddler

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in the hsien, he found "a nice church built several years ago and a number of outstations in the valleys and out in the mountains."17 In 1942. the Lutherans had a Chinese staff of eleven in Linju hsien. Only one of these was an ordained minister, but there were nine organized congregations, three outstations, and ten preaching places. In lyang hsien the mission had seven Chinese staff members (again, only one was an ordained minister). lyang had five organized congregations, one outstation, and eight preaching places.18 The work at outstations and preaching places was done by travelling teams segregated by sex; the Chinese male workers were called evangelists, and the females were known as Bible women. These people were dedicated Christians who knew the Bible and understood and practised the Lutheran brand of their faith. They had been trained both in the mission's school for evangelists and in apprenticeship with missionaries. With few exceptions, they were literate. Unlike the pastors, however, they did not have high school or college educations. Pastors had attended the Lutheran Union Seminary in Hankow, which required a middle school (i.e., high school) education.19 Among the Augustana group were six foreign women missionaries doing evangelistic work at the outstations and preaching places on their field. They usually teamed up with a Chinese Bible woman, and Emery had an enormous respect for them. He commented in his memoirs, "I have always felt that the single women did the major work in China. These ladies had an avenue of fellowship with the depressed Chinese women. They often worked in isolated villages, sometimes alone so that their contact with the Chinese people was very intimate, and through the women they had contact with the men and the rest of the family. They often stayed out for two weeks at the time and lived with the Chinese."20 Stella Carlson, one of these evangelical workers, moved to Linju in the spring of 1941; she lived with both the Carlsons and Ollie while spending most of her time out in the villages of the district giving short courses. The Augustana Lutheran conference held on 10-15 March 1942 was not as well attended as most: eleven voting members came and four were absent. Linju was completely unrepresented, since both Emery and Ollie preferred to be with Elvera for the birth of the

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new baby. In the previous year nine missionaries had left the field; six of those were known to be interned by the Japanese, and only two had safely returned to the United States. Six of the fifteen missionaries left on the field had been reassigned to new stations. Emery and Viola Fischer were the only foreign doctors, Dr Ho the only fully trained Chinese doctor, and Anna Olson and Sisters Astrid Erling and Myrtle Anderson were the only foreign nurses in full-time medical work. Sister Thyra Lawson, trained as a nurse, assisted when possible, but her major responsibility was for the women's industrial school in Kiahsien. A third to a half of the revenue for the stations in 1942, came from some rather innovative emergency measures to raise cash: such things as "Sale of Iron," "borrowed from the Loyang hospital," "Profit on sale of wheat," "Sale of Mission Car," or "Relief funds" showed up as credits. In some station or hospital reports, the item was on the debit side of the ledger: "Lent to Yenshih station" or "Loan to station account."21 The shortage of foreign pastors was a topic of much missionary concern, but the greatest threats to the evangelical work were actually the foreign funds frozen in Shanghai since October and the collapse of communication with the outside world. Shortly after receiving news of the freezing of funds, mission president Victor Swenson had notified the evangelists and Bible women that there was no longer money left to pay their salaries. A short quotation from the "Evangelism Report" says it all: "One serious problem is that of so many workers finding it necessary to discontinue their evangelism work and seek other means of gaining a livelihood."22 The Lutheran joint enterprises were essentially defunct, although a Swedish missionary used his neutral status to protect the Lutheran Home and Agency in Hankow by living in it. Another elderly Swede lived a more isolated life on Kikungshan mountain, where he was not very successful in protecting the school and summer homes by his presence. What was called a seminary was operating in Hsuchang with three foreign and two Chinese teachers for its nine pupils.23 Victor Swenson's "President's Report" was not as detailed and specific as the ones that John L. Benson made in previous years. A jarring note, however, lay in what was included: a section on the

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Hsuchang International Famine Relief Committee, which mentioned sending money to Kikungshan (well outside the Hsuchang district) to help repair damage to the mission school and summer homes, and Swenson's plan to build a summer cottage for missionaries in the mountains near Tengfeng.24 Summers in Honan were brutal, with intense heat and frequent dust storms. The Lutheran missionaries who pioneered in southern Honan rather quickly cast a longing eye on the mountains to the east of their station in Sinyang. By the fall of 1903 they owned a valley on the mountain's north side and had divided it into lots and begun building little stone cottages there. This "North Valley" quickly became a missionary summer settlement with a spring and a small swimming pool, tennis courts and a church, homes owned by individual missionaries, and a group of larger buildings that housed a year-round boarding school for missionary children.25 By 1940, in the midst of a gruelling summer on the plains, the missionaries could only think wistfully of Kikungshan, now in Japanese hands. Swenson, however, dedicated himself to finding an alternative retreat. In a mountainous area between Linju and Loyang, on the Augustana field, lay Tengfeng, a city in which the Augustana mission had a congregation with a Chinese pastor. The area was not a great hotbed of Lutheranism - after all, Shaolin Monastery, the birthplace of Zen Buddhism, lay a few li away. In March 1941 Swenson wrote to the mission director in the United States proposing to build permanent "retreat" facilities in Tengfeng.26 The next year he raised the issue at the annual conference on the mission field. In the financial section of the annual report, the third item to be voted on (and passed) read: "3. Voted, that $6,000 (proceeds of sale of mission car) be granted for building at Siungshan (mountain near Tengfeng) and that the president be authorized to request ten thousand dollars from Relief funds of the International Relief Com. For use for refugee labor."27 Ironically enough, four items down, the annual report records that the missionaries voted: "7. That the funds at present available in the district treasuries be used to pay all Chinese workers' salaries to the end of 1941."28 No one seemed to notice just how much money that could have been used for item number 7 had disappeared in order to finance

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number 3. But a glance at the actual expenditures shows that the Linju-Iyang district, which Emery administered, spent $20,041 on salaries for its eighteen employees in 1941.29 Some quick arithmetic demonstrates that the money from the sale of the mission car would have paid the salaries of some six more Chinese workers for a year - at a time when the missionaries were feeling keenly the loss of Chinese workers who had been let go for lack of funds. While the conference met in Hsuchang, the Carlsons' new baby arrived in Linju. The little dispensary at Tuan Kuan was definitely not a hospital, and Elvera's baby was born in an upstairs bedroom in Anna Olson's home. Elvera's journal account of the birth of her second daughter was ecstatic and triumphant: "Faith Louise's birthday. According to our watch baby arrived at 8:40 A.M. Although they had instruments sterilized, none were used, anesthesia & analgesics were in readiness too but none were used. I did not insist either, though the pain was so intense at times it was not too endurable, and now how happy I am to be able to say 'I know what it really is to give birth to a child' -1 didn't know when Erleen was born as I was too 'doped.' As each new pain came and I 'bore down' with all my might, Jesus seemed to stand right over the foot of my bed and I could feel His love and strength coming to me."30 Emery and Ollie tried to follow much the same routine as would have been followed in a U.S. hospital once the baby was born. Ollie took major responsibility for the care of the newborn, and Elvera rested in bed for eleven days, rising briefly on the seventh day so Pastor Mauritz Hanson could baptize the baby when he passed through Linju.31 In April the Carlsons moved into the little house in the back of the city compound. They could no longer afford an amah, and Elvera's world was increasingly confined to her home, but she did not let that keep her from her Christian duties. "Faith is an unusually good baby. On Sunday mornings, I leave her sleeping here in the house when we go to church, and then I come back once during the service, and so far she has still been asleep when we returned home from the services at noon." The letter closed on a humorous note: "One day I heard [Erleen] in the bathroom praying in Chinese, and from the sound of the rise and fall of her voice, you would think she was a good Pentecostal."32 When I think of that time and place I hear Stella Carlson

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playing her accordion in the dark. Elvera wrote of one of those evenings, "After supper Stella, Emery, Erleen & I sat out on the porch and had Sat. evening prayer service. How we have enjoyed singing to the accompaniment of Stella's accordion."33 In May the Anglicans, foreign and Chinese, gathered in Chengchow for one of the great ceremonies of the church, an ordination into the priesthood. The Japanese would not allow the bishop of Honan to cross the Yellow River and preside at the ceremony. So Bishop Shen of the neighbouring province of Shensi made the long, strenuous trip over the mountains. He stopped in Loyang for confirmations and then travelled by cart three days to Hsincheng, walking a good deal of the way since the roads were bad and his rickshaw broke down. In Hsincheng he held another confirmation service, and Grace Gibberd and the Chinese workers in that city joined him for the trip to Chengchow. George Andrew's account of the ceremony began: "Deacon W.H. Simpson has been priested." A Canadian priest was ordained by a Chinese bishop, and three of the four priests assisting with the "laying on of hands" were Chinese. The ceremony was festive, and "the church was full to overflowing with a very interested congregation."34 As the Honan missionaries tended to their daily business, a vehicle that would play a large role in their lives for the next few years was wending its way toward them. A three-quarter-ton truck, usually called the SDA truck, it was one of several belonging to the Seventh-day Adventist mission, whose station in Yencheng had been so badly damaged in the bombing of January 1941. The truck arrived in Rangoon not much ahead of the Japanese. E.L. Longway, the president of the SDA's China Division, was usually at the wheel of the vehicle, which transported goods and people on the "motor roads" of central and western Honan, and it was "Mr. Longway, together with four other missionary families," who made their way via the Burma Road from Rangoon to Chungking in I942.35 Some of the people who were convoyed in Adventist trucks were not, strictly speaking, families. Elliot Aandahl Jr of the Lutheran Brethren, who joined his parents in the land of his birth when he returned to Honan, had left his wife and children in the United States. Ernest Wampler and O.C. Sollenberger of the Church of the Brethren (Mennonites) came as relief workers in 1942, but they

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Erleen and Faith Carlson in Linju, 1942

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had been missionaries in southern Shansi, just north of the Yellow River, when the Japanese first invaded.36 The truck might never have left Rangoon at all had it not been for Robert McClure, the United Church of Canada missionary who had headed the Hwaiking hospital in North Honan before the war. In 1942, McClure was with the Friends Ambulance Unit, a group that ministered to the needs of Chinese soldiers fighting in South China. He became something of an expert on keeping trucks repaired and travelling on fuels they were never designed for, such as charcoal and sesame seed oil.37 Aandahl left the convoy in Chungking, making his way to his station in southern Honan along the route many of his fellow missionaries would be using to flee the province a few years later and staying with people whom readers will encounter elsewhere in this story: Mauritz Hanson of the Augustana Lutherans in Loyang, Ansgar Espegren of the Norsk Kinaforbund (Norwegian) mission at Nanyang, and Aandahl's own parents in Tsaoyang. His trip from Minnesota to Tsaoyang had taken him five months.38 George Andrew, who had a school-aged son in Canada, wrote in April, "None of us have had any letters from home since the fall of Shanghai [8 December]."39 The first post-Pearl Harbor letters arrived in Honan in May. Andrew wrote exultantly to his superior on 19 May, "We were all thrilled last night when Bill [Simpson] actually received an air-mail letter from his father ... That was the first Canadian letter anyone of us has received since those written last October! Even the small details of the doings of the people whom only Bill knew in Millbrook became of interest to us all and we all listened to letters from both his father and mother much as if they told of our own well known friends."40 Emery and Elvera had to wait until June to hear any word from home. Few things reinforced the feelings of isolation, of being cut off from home and family, like hearing the news of Emery's father's death six months after the fact - as an aside in a letter from Elvera's sister, who assumed that cables, or at least letters, from Emery's mother and siblings had arrived. Two days later, a letter from Emery's sister giving details of the death and funeral reached him, but a cable the family sent never came.41 In one of my own vivid visual memories of childhood, I am standing in front of my father

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looking up through the thin airmail paper as he reads and his tears drop onto the page, making the paper translucent while the ink blurs. Evidently, my childish attempts to console him made an impression on him, for he wrote in his memoirs, "I shall never forget our little girl comforting her Dad."42 A few days after Emery received the news of his father's death, he and Bill Simpson left on a trip to Sian. On n June 1942. Elvera wrote in her journal, "It is hard to see daddy go but he needs the vacation and we are praying much that it will give him the 'lift' that he needs at present."43 The two men stopped in Loyang on the way. Mary Searle recorded in a letter home, "Bill Simpson and Dr. Carlson from the Lutheran Mission passed through here about a week ago on their way to Sian - the capital of Shensi. They will stay there for a week or so and then come back."44 There is no hint in that letter that the two visits to Loyang were part of a quiet courtship, but eighteen months later Mary and Bill married. As for the other reasons for the trip, Emery and Bill were badly in need of a vacation: both had been through bouts of severe illness, and Emery was dealing with the news of his father's death; both were new missionaries who had been on the mission field less than two years, had completed what language training they were going to have time for, and were shouldering enormous burdens of responsibility in their respective missions. The trip was business as well as pleasure. They stayed with Simpson's bishop; Emery talked to the U.S. consul about his military obligation and procured some badly needed medicines; Simpson negotiated for relief funds; and they forged a small link between the Honan missionaries and the outside world. Any letters that Emery wrote about the trip were lost, but Elvera captured something of the joy of seeing a modern city again in a July letter: "From the viewpoint of drugs purchased, contacts made in the interest of the mission, and real diversion it was a most profitable trip. Sian is a city much like Peking. He found quite a number of foreigners there, also considerable English speaking Chinese, was asked to speak at the Rotary Club. I guess it was quite a thrill to ride on a train again and to see a bustling, live city again."45

chapter eight

CROP FAILURE AND^AMINE

In the summer of 1942, famine threatened Honan and prices rose. Elvera told her family at home, "Some weeks ago kerosene was $2400.00 for a 5 gal tin, so we don't use kerosene for lamps but use sesame seed oil. Cheap cotton cloth is $10.00 a ft. and cotton stockings $50.00 a pair. Flour is $3.00 a pound." (The exchange rate was $18 in Chinese currency to US$i.) She tried to reassure them by mentioning the tomatoes and sweet corn from the garden and the four quarts of milk a day their goats gave, but that information only underscored the importance of food produced on the mission compound. Cook Lin, by this time the only servant, planted millet

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on a lot the mission owned next to the compound "and drew water and irrigated the crop all summer."1 The relentless heat and growing drought dominated Elvera's journal in July. The family slept outside in the yard, and she wrote of desperately hot nights when people yelled and rattled pans all night to encourage rain. Clouds raised hopes, but only a few sprinkles fell. At month's end she commented, "This year's wheat crop was not only poor but so much has gone out of the province for the military. Emery bought over $4000.00 worth of wheat today." As the drought worsened, her journal simply listed the daily Bible verses she memorized.2 On 22 August, Elvera wrote, "Babies were left on the steps of our compound last Sunday and also Tuesday night. Later folks came and got them. We hear of many who are leaving to go to places where chances for existence are better. On his return from Kiahsien Wed. Emery told of the number of holdups, etc. around there."3 The view from Kiahsien was as sombre as it was from Linju, but Sister Thyra was in the thick of things as Elvera was not, and her journal contained more of the grim specifics of famine: Aug. 2 - Drought Serious. Increasing unrest. We fast Wednesdays. Aug. 7 - Dry - much grain stealing. Resisters killed. Several wounded in the hospital. Wheat 48. Aug. 8 - Wheat 50. Flour 25 cents U.S. a pound. Aug. 9 - food shortage - people gathering thistles and weeds. Aug. 10 - Cholera and typhoid shots. Shooting & looting. Aug. 11 - Looting & killing continue. Even women are being bandits. Aug. 12-2 meetings. Sick calls. Baby girl left on wall outside mission. Aug. 14-50 destitute children to [welfare camp] here, but they cut costs by keeping only ones old enough to work! Aug. 18 - miller shorts us over $3000 on school grain. Aug. 25 - People desperate/out of control. Big groups pounce on ripening fields. Aug. 26 - Reports of whole families committing suicide.4

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Mission president Victor Swenson seemed to live in a different world from his co-workers. On 8 August he wrote a letter to "Friends in the Homeland" from the summer cottage he had just built in the mountains above Tengfeng: "At our last annual conference we decided to set aside $6000.00 for the building of a small cottage up here in the mountains. The above sum is about $300.00 in U.S. currency and is the sum received from selling our old Ford car. Several Chinese friends helped me out with about the same amount as above and I have given some money myself. The labor has been done by very poor people." (A portion of the last sentence is crossed out - a portion that read, "and famine funds have been used to pay them.")5 Chengchow had been in worse shape than either Linju or Kiahsien going into the 1942. growing season, and the situation grew grimmer still after harvest. George Andrew wrote in August that the city had gone from 180,000 people to about 15,000, and 2,000 people who had tried to go west and been turned back came to the Chengchow welfare camp.6 When September brought "rumours as to the coming over of the chaps that visited us this time last year," Andrew and his wife, who were no longer young, headed for Loyang. Grace Gibberd left Hsincheng as well and took a teaching position at a middle school near Loyang, where she lived with the Chinese teachers and students.7 Greta Clark and Bill Simpson were the only Anglican missionaries left in Chengchow, with none in outlying towns. Katie Murray and Grace Stribling represented the Southern Baptists, with Addie Cox forty miles away in Weishih, a short distance from enemy lines. The Free Methodists had the elderly Ashcrafts in Chengchow and Edith Jones a few miles north in a city that faced Japanese guns just across the river. The Catholics had young Father Frassinetti. Also nearby was another solitary missionary, Helen Bailey of the Yellow River Boat Mission at Kunghsien.8 When Mary Searle wrote her June letter about Emery's and Bill's visit to Loyang, she also noted that it had been a year since Dr Hansen had died. The Catholics in Chengchow had evidently not been able to replace him, and Emery continued to be the doctor not only for his Linju hospital and the Kiahsien dispensary but also for other cities of central Honan. As he travelled to medical emergen-

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cies in September, he saw the grim impact of war and famine. Tengfeng was bombed, and rumour had it the Japanese were "bringing in tanks & reinforcements at Kaifeng." There were "many hold-ups and deaths on the road" and "robber bands reorganizing here [Linju]." Emery came back from Hsuchang telling of "terrible sights along the road - hundreds of refugees - going, going they know not where, living on watermelon rinds and grass" as "men with guns, spears, swords, etc." patrolled the roads.9 On one especially hectic day, Emery bicycled to Kiahsien for an emergency operation. A few hours after he left, a wire came from Loyang asking his help with an appendix there. It was evening before he got back to Linju, but he was on the "bus" to Loyang the next morning.10 The bus trip "took us most of the day to go 60 miles (Linju to Loyang). A 1932, V-8 truck loaded with four tons of salt and 13 people doesn't move too very fast burning poor alcohol." With neither gas nor regular oil available, "alcohol or charcoal do for the first, and castor oil or sesame seed oil for the latter; this even on mountain roads." In closing his letter, Emery added, "3000 refugees go thru Loyang daily."11 On 2,5 September he reassured his sister and mother that "there will be bread for us and our servant," but "In spite of our own position it is hard to see the poor refugees on the roads, a wheelbarrow - one or two kiddies helping pull it along, a little bedding, a kettle and perhaps a baby or a grandma on top; father pushes the barrow and behind trail the larger children and the women, most of the time they are ranging in the adjacent fields picking anything that they can lay hands on." He "met hundreds of these poor people" headed for Loyang, "where they have hopes of boarding the train and getting out west where the crops were good." However, many refugees were turned away at the railhead, and "many die especially babies as when mother has nothing to eat except melons rinds there isn't much milk."12 Relief efforts had been necessary and underway even before the crops failed, especially in Chengchow. On 27 August 1942, George Andrew wrote to the United China Relief office in Chungking, explaining how the humanitarian crisis had deepened in the four years since war came to Honan: "The first year we were filled with folks that had fled from their homes in North China and East

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Honan from the onrush of the invader. These people had gone up to Sian and many as far as Szechwan but having spent all their money and hearing that their old homes were at peace more or less they passed through here desirous of returning there." Even as those people were helped on their way, thousands more showed up "from the flooded regions" where the dikes had been cut.13 The initial refugee camps thinned out in summer, leaving primarily orphan children. When the Japanese had occupied Chengchow in October 1941, there were only "summer people on hand - about two hundred of them." The camps had no food stores, however, and "When the enemy left us, Chengchow was in a worse state than ever and it has never since recovered." The wheat crop failed in the 1942. growing season and then corn, followed by kaoliang and millet, the last of the grains, so that by the time Andrew was writing, "thousands of people have really nothing to eat."14 As the summer of 1942, progressed, "Batches of men, women and children would come and camp at the gates with nothing to eat and no place to stay, and try as one would they finally got in, a few today, a few the next day, until the camp along with those at the smaller camp at the Roman Catholic Church, had 1,900 people in it." Day after day, E.P. Ashcraft, the Free Methodist missionary who superintended the camp, had "twenty to a hundred and sometimes many many more encamped around his gate and in his yard beseeching to be taken in."15 As Andrew's letter makes clear, relief efforts in Honan before the famine struck were aimed primarily at refugees from the war zone and the areas where the cutting of the Yellow River dikes in 1938 had caused uncontrolled flooding and sudden channel changes. In a region where the hardship and suffering of the war were already severe, the relief needed, in both amount and kind, when crops failed was numbing. Ernest Wampler of United China Relief came to the province to assess the situation and reported that, "we found, by going to the government of each of the counties, that we could not meet nearly all the needs but would have to take some of these sufferers and try to save them and then allow the others to flee or starve."16 Wampler initially came to Honan in the spring of 1942 hoping to do relief work on his old field in Shansi, but with the Eighth Route

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Army and the Japanese contesting the area, that was out of the question. When he came back to Honan in September, he knew that his work would be limited by the same factor. Of the 111 hsiens in the province, approximately 42, were in the Free China area he was responsible for. The United China Relief-American Advisory Committee relief committees were not the only groups in the province providing assistance in those counties. They avoided duplicating efforts by co-operating with other groups, most notably Buddhist societies and national and local government agencies.17 In October 1942, Time magazine gave the famine its first wide publicity in the United States. Theodore (Teddy) White, the author of the Time article, was harshly critical of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government and its role in relief efforts,18 but Wampler, writing in 1945, gave a rather different picture. While he acknowledged that the government was slower than the international relief agencies in getting efforts started, he observed that, "by late winter and spring it [the Nationalist Government] helped more than any other agency did."19 In Japanese-held territory the famine hit hard, but no help came in from outside. The Japanese designated twenty-six hsiens of north and east Honan as key grain-producing areas, and neighbourhoods were given huge quotas that had to be delivered, at depressed prices. Little was left for civilians, or Communist guerilla soldiers and cadres. The Communist Party attempted to equalize the suffering by providing protection for the peasants during harvest, raiding Nationalist-held areas, redistributing grain hoarded by the gentry, and policing the habits of their own. "Even high-ranking officers had to subsist on yams," and any cadre caught eating a steamed bun was severely censured, wheat flour and bread being at the time a luxury food. In spite of such measures, many starved or fled.20

chapter nine HELPING T H E F A M I N E - S T R I C K E N

October 1942, brought frequent ching paos and bombing in the area, but Elvera mentioned them in her journal almost casually as she recorded that baby Faith was sitting up and trying to creep.1 While the bombs dropped and the famine deepened, spiritual routines seemed especially important to the Chinese Christians and the missionaries. Linju held its Fall Chu Hui meetings. The speakers, like those in the spring, came from nearby: a Chinese pastor from Lushan, the hsien to the south, and an "Independent Missionary" Elvera described as an engineer, who taught for some

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years in Tientsin and converted in his early thirties. "He now lives entirely by faith," she observed, "walking from one mission station to another, asking for no money but just a place to sleep and food to eat." Emery had given him cart fare, but Elvera found it later in a dresser drawer.2 Relief work was not suspended because of Chu Hui. Administrator Wampler arrived while Elvera entertained twelve pastors and church workers at dinner on the Sabbath of Chu Hui, and the next day Norwegian Lutheran missionary Andreas Bo and Catholic father Joseph Henkels of Lushan arrived for a meeting that lasted well into the evening.3 While the meetings were going on, officials' wives in Linju established a foundling home for abandoned babies and asked Elvera to assist. The wives themselves did not work in the home; instead, a Chinese Lutheran woman supervised the place and hired wet nurses. The five wet nurses fed and cared for ten babies, mostly girls, and Elvera noted soberly: "Wet nurses are easily procured in China especially in famine years when the salary is wheat for hungry mouths."4 On 17 November 1942. Emery wrote to his brother, "This county has a normal population of 280,000 people and when I was at the mandarin's office about a month ago he said that 50,000 had left for other parts then, now even more have probably left." He told of the help they were getting from the American Advisory Committee in Chungking (United China Relief) and his work as chairman of their four-county relief committee: "Our first work is to distribute 200,000 yuan ($10,000 U.S.) for the purchase of seed. It sounds like a lot but at present prices it didn't go far. Most of the farmers receiving seed farm less than one American acre. During the winter, there will be money for direct relief, but the policy is to keep the people in their homes and to keep them at some sort of work as no amount of money will completely care for them at the present prices." He continued, "Now a little about the actual famine conditions. In many places the people only eat one meal a day. In one place they say that the people have only the hulls of the millet to eat, and in others they are even mixing stone with the flours." Chinese workers distributed the relief, "but even that presents a

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problem as our mission funds failing to come through most of them have not received any salaries for some time and they too are in line for relief as much as any." Emery closed his letter by mentioning his "outside contacts," including a meeting with the governor of the province a few days earlier.5 United China Relief, with headquarters in New York, was an umbrella organization that coordinated the work of many humanitarian agencies and channelled funds to its Chungking office. The funds of the different fundraising groups were kept separate. The major monies reaching Honan province came from the American Advisory Committee of Church World Service, a consort of mission societies and church groups in North America. Arnold Vaught, of the Canadian Business Agency in Chungking, was field director of AAC and field supervisor Wampler's immediate superior. He also handled funds and financial matters in Chungking for the Augustana mission, the Canadian Anglican mission, and evidently other missions in Honan as well.6 Wampler was the liaison between Chungking-New York and the "local committees" in Chengchow, Loyang, Yencheng (i.e., Loho), Hsuchang, and Linju. The committees were ecumenical, and all missions operating in the area, Catholic and Protestant, were represented. Wampler later wrote of committee members, "They have won the admiration and the deep respect of all who have watched their work, including government officials, and those whom they have served. Several of the Chinese staff were robbed as they went about their work, losing personal property, bicycles and clothing, the replacing of which would cost a great deal. One lost his life at the hands of bandits. But still these workers went to their tasks unfalteringly."7 The local districts seem small by modern standards. For instance, the Linju district had just four hsiens initially and an area of about fifty miles in breadth and length, but with telephone service virtually non-existent, mail carried on foot, and transportation only by foot or bicycle, either Emery and the Chinese committee members in Linju made the thirty-mile trip to Lushan, or Father Henkels and Pastor Bo of Lushan and their Chinese co-workers travelled to Linju for meetings. Banks were unreliable and actual money

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(bills) had to be carried from place to place. The job often fell to the foreigners. Bill Simpson wrote that "it is a risky business to carry large amounts of money in China during these unsettled times. I, as a foreigner, was able to do so when our Chinese colleagues dared not do so."8 The administration of aid was no easier. Throughout the province the majority of the people were peasant farmers living on tiny farms, several hundred farms to the square mile, and the famine was hitting most desperately and directly in the many villages that dotted the landscape. Relief workers walked or rode bicycles on the narrow footpaths that connected the villages, and they found much to be done in every square mile of their districts. The first priority in the fall of 1942. was providing for crops in the spring; seed for wheat, Chinese turnip, and oil seed - all things that could be planted in the fall - were distributed to farmers, who were asked to return the same amount of wheat they had received at harvest time. Almost all did. The other two types of seeds were gifts, but the understanding was that the produce would be shared with other poor people at harvest time. In the spring of 1943 the committees distributed seed for summer crops, including cotton, corn, millet, and sweet potato starts. The year 1943 was another one of drought and flood, as well as grasshopper infestation, so the seed grants did not tide people over as well as they might have, had the year been better. But they helped. Wampler later reported that 10,399 families were assisted through the seed grain program.9 Keeping people alive over the winter was a major priority, but the need was so staggering that it was virtually impossible to have enough grain. "Counties with populations of as many as four hundred thousand reported that more than half of their people would be in need of help before the winter passed," Wampler wrote. "One county reported that eighty thousand to one hundred thousand individuals had already left the country, a large per cent of them going into Shensi, fleeing starvation. Cities and villages were full of people begging for food. In the fall hundreds were in the fields hunting roots and weeds to eat."10 One strategy used by both government and charitable organizations was to give refugees a little money to help them move toward

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the western provinces, where crops had been normal. Wampler reported one railroad station master as saying that in fifteen days he had had 1,500 people pass through. He was giving each person five dollars (about twenty-five cents U.S.), but he had run out of the government or charity organization funds that he had been given.11 Distributing actual food was an overwhelming problem. In any time of shortage, prices on the open market skyrocket as people compete to buy what little is available. But bringing grain into Honan from less-affected areas was much compounded by the transportation problem. Walter H. Mallory, the author of a book called China: Land of Famine, estimated that, during an earlier famine in 1920-21, a coolie carrying a hundred catties of grain, the maximum load for such transport, consumed about two catties a day and actually needed seven and a half per day if he were to feed his dependants as well. Since 17 kilometres a day is about the maximum a carrier can sustain, in thirteen days the carrier and his dependants would have consumed his whole load. Thus trying to carry grain more than in kilometres, or 75 miles, is counterproductive, since the transporter and his dependants are consuming his entire load, and there is no excess to feed anyone else. With a carrying distance of more than 75 miles, a carrier would not even be bringing in enough for his own dependants. Unfortunately, in 1942-43 most of the grain transported into Honan province had to be brought in by this slow and inefficient method.12 The AAC committees imported relatively little grain, but by spring 1943 the Chinese government was doing quite a lot at cost, and the committees were able to buy grain economically from the government for use in their soup kitchens and grain distribution programs. The AAC operated four soup kitchens in Chengchow, one in Loyang, and one in Linju. In addition, by spring the government had opened one or more kitchens in every county.13 The missionaries themselves tended to concentrate their efforts in the hsien towns (county seats), where almost all of them lived. Soup kitchens, refugee camps, children's camps, and nurseries were operated by the missions directly, or the missionaries aided benevolentminded Chinese, as Elvera did in helping with the foundling home in Linju. Government camps also had their tangential relationship

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with the missions and the Chinese churches; the large one in Hsuchang was under the management of a man who was a staunch member of the Lutheran church there. Similar connections existed in the other cities of the province. Another form of aid that the AAC committees sponsored was vocational work, with spinning, weaving, and knitting being especially prevalent. The committee would provide small amounts of cotton or wool, which the recipient could process and sell at a profit. A group near Chengchow did small-scale flour milling, and modest amounts of aid were given to a variety of individuals so that they might process raw materials into value-added products. Most of the medical aid in the area was simply a continuation of what the mission hospitals and clinics had been doing all along, but the IRC, AAC, and Red Cross assisted in providing medicine to the hospitals and clinics, and during the summer of 1943 the Catholics' Loyang and Chengchow clinics "were taken over by the medical team which was sent up from the Chengtu medical school for summer aid in the famine area." Supply and transport were problems with medicine as with food.14 Missionaries had been writing of the famine to friends and families, mission boards and church presses, United China Relief and the Red Cross in Chungking, but journalists were less interested in the story. Theodore White, who represented Time-Life, eventually came to Honan in February and March 1943. His first famine story (Time, 2,6 October 1942) was based on a conversation he had with Catholic bishop Paul Yu-pin, who had just returned to Chungking after a trip to Honan. A major feature of the article was a wrenching quotation from a letter that Free Methodist missionary Ashcraft wrote in September from Chengchow: "At the mission a few days ago six children were tied to a tree by their parents so they would not follow them as they went in search of food. One mother with a baby and two older children, tired from the long search for food, sat down to rest under the tree. She sent the two older children to the village ahead to beg a little food. When they returned the mother had died of starvation and the baby was still trying to nurse at her breast.Children are being sold, I mean larger ones, both boys and girls, for less than ten dollars."15

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Early the next month Dwight Edwards, of United China Relief's Chungking office, did a radio broadcast with hsien-by-hsien details about the famine: Yehsien. [Hsuchang Relief District] one fifth of the people in danger of starvation, the other four fifths have land and homes but because of poor crops and heavy taxes will be in serious difficulty getting sufficient to eat this coming winter. In the northern part of the county about 60% of the people have left. Liny ing. [Loho District] Crops have averaged about 20% this year. About 40% of the people will be in serious difficulty this coming winter. It is a common sight even now to see many scratching round for watermelon skin, leaves of trees and weeds to eat. Sihwa. [Loho District] Owing to drought the wheat crop harvested was less than zo% normal. Autumn crop due to drought and locusts was about 10%. Over izo,ooo people in the country are in dire need now. Added to all this the Yellow River dykes in the eastern section of the county burst and 10% of the east of the county is totally inundated. Fifty thousand people have lost their homes in the flooded area with all stored grain and crops lost.16 Even as Edwards was broadcasting, his superior in the United States, Lenning Sweet, was writing him a chilling letter about United China Relief's inability to be effective in Honan: "We feel that this [Honan famine] is too big for us to do a great deal about and that it ought to be handled mostly by the Chinese Government with such assistance from either the Red Cross or the American Government as may seem to be advisable."17 The American Red Cross did not feel it was its place to make any large effort toward famine relief in Honan or in China generally; however, the Canadian Red Cross was more generous. The wrangling about responsibility continued through the winter as the situation in Honan worsened. By February, Edwards's tone in a letter to Sweet was somewhat testy: "It seems to me that the question is not

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what is the technical and theoretical responsibility of the Chinese Government, but as to what actually the Chinese Government can do with the resources at its command and how the private relief agencies and international friends can best supplement this Government relief program in ways that are stimulating and helpful to the government in discharging its responsibilities."18 One way to try to understand the staggering extent of the problem is to look closely at a single village. A confidential report from Chieh Pai Chen village in Suiping hsien, about fifty miles south of Hsuchang, gave details so specific they could be translated into calories per person per day and what that meant in terms of relief needs. Chieh Pai Chen had 2,8,165 people living on 17,747 cultivated acres in an area so heavily populated there were no buffering woodlands or wetlands in which to hunt and scavenge. In 1941, a year of normal harvest, the per person grain production was 941 pounds, of which 216 pounds went to pay taxes, including the cost of quartering (feeding) troops stationed in the area because of the Japanese a few miles away, while 39 pounds (per person) was needed to use as seed grain for the following year. That left 686 pounds of grain per individual to eat as food or sell to provide for other needs. In North America we assume that the average person needs about 2,400 calories a day to maintain health. A pound of wheat (or other grain, such as millet or corn) yields about 1,500 calories. That translates into 554 pounds of grain per person per year for food. The average Chieh Pai Chen peasant, even in a good year like 1941, would only have 126 pounds of grain left after meeting his or her basic caloric needs. This could be sold for such "luxuries" and "extras" as meat, cooking oil, tools, and clothing. In 1942, the first of the famine years, production was down for all crops - sweet potatoes, beans, as well as grain. Total food production was only 47 per cent of what it had been the year before. Even if taxes were totally remitted and every ounce of grain and all other food stuffs raised in the village were used as human food, each individual would have 444 pounds, or about 1,900 calories a day - probably enough to sustain life over the winter. With taxes and quartering of troops subtracted from the meagre food produc-

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tion, villagers would be left with only about half that amount. A people already slim and somewhat malnourished could not hope to live through a long, cold winter on such rations.19 In his 25 November 1942, report to the UCR office in the United States, Dwight Edwards acknowledged "the additional grant" of $50,000 for the last quarter of 1942, and "a similar sum" for the first quarter of the next year. He was already receiving $100,000 per month and had a contingency fund of $250,000. That sounds like so much money - until one starts figuring. With wheat at U.S.$i8 a bushel, the monthly grant amounted to 6,244 bushels of wheat - enough to provide 21,000 people with a full 2,4oo-calorie diet for one day, enough to give 1,000 people a 2,4OO-calorie diet for twenty-one days. It would be enough money to supplement the supplies of Chieh Pai Chen village for a couple of days, if one were to give the villagers a full 2,400 calories a day, a week or so at a more marginal level. The 6,244 bushels of wheat was a drop in the bucket to Honan's 30,000,000 plus citizens, the great majority of whom had only about as much as the people of Chieh Pai Chen had to get them through the winter.20 From 20 November until n December 1942 Eleanor Nelson of Yuhsien and her two children visited the Carlsons in Linju. The Nelson and Carlson children were of an age, and the two young mothers had not seen each other since Christmas 1941, when the Carlsons spent the holidays with Eleanor and her husband, Russell, as they travelled from Hsuchang to Linju. The long visit was a chance for two mothers to show each other their babies, for two little girls who knew no other foreign children to enjoy the phenomenon of "someone who looks just like me." For the grown-ups there was the rare treat of ice cream, something that used expensive salt and honey (there was no sugar) and could only be attempted in the cold of winter when nature provided the ice. Four-year-old Cherrie Nelson was not impressed; she did not know what it was and complained that it was cold. Twice during the visit, people attempted to sell the missionaries what were probably stolen goods: a dictionary with Ethel Akins's name in it and "two children's dresses - of the styles of 1890, a plaid wool very moth eaten and a fussy embroidered one."21 The children's dresses dated from the period before the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. They may well have

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belonged originally to some of the hundreds of missionaries killed in that demonstration of anti-foreign and anti-Christian feeling. Christmas itself was less than festive. Ollie was in bed with an injured leg, both Elvera and Erleen were ill, and guests came through on business rather than to celebrate the holiday. In typical post-Christmas letters, Elvera recounted menus and gifts, guests and details of Christmas services and observances, but galloping inflation and the famine dominated the Christmas 1942. news. Emery wrote that "a Ford truck rescued from Burma sold recently near here for $110,000.00," and "drugs (some which have been hoarded, others brought, or I should say, smuggled in from Shanghai) bring tremendous prices. Sulphapyradine can be bought on the street for $2.0.00 per pill." The $100,000 the four hsiens received for relief money did not go far, and Emery commented that "you can see why people are eating stones, hulls, weeds and straw, throwing out their babies, and still are starving to death. Why bandits with muzzle loading shotguns are running around the country killing people and stealing anything they can get ahold of especially a few measures of grain." He closed his letter home with the plea, "Oh for a few big Air freighters to bring us some concentrated food stuffs.22 On Z3 March 1943 Emery's plea for planeloads of wheat appeared in the Kansas City Star, along with a small picture of the envelope in which it came: "Honan is the Middle West of China," the letter began. "Five years of war have reduced many villages to ashes. Killing, plundering and rape have taken place along with the air raids. The people have given their sons to China's armies, and their grain surplus to feed them. Their crop is wheat, as in Kansas." "Wheat has risen to $2,3 a bushel in United States currency," the letter continued, "and the country people are eating millet hulls, sweet potato vines, weeds, straw and even soft stone." Emery closed with the anguished plea: "Isn't there some way of getting some plane loads of Kansas flour into Honan right now?"23

chapter ten TWO J O U R N A L I S T S TOUR THE FAMINE AREA

The Augustana Lutheran Annual Conference was held in Hsuchang on 5-10 January 1943 with only twelve voting members present. The numbers might well have been lower had the group not met in the station where the most missionaries were stationed. None of the Loyang missionaries, who had the farthest distance to travel, were present, and Emery was the only one to make the three-day trip from Linju. Three of the twelve at the conference were overdue for furlough, and now that there was some possibility of getting to India and eventually home, the three would leave: Stella Carlson,

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Dr Viola Fischer (the only other Augustana missionary doctor), and Sister Myrtle Anderson (the director of nurse's training at the Hsuchang hospital). The group reassigned Emery to the Hsuchang hospital, leaving Anna Olson to run the Linju dispensary with the part-time help of Chinese doctor Tu, who maintained a private practice in Linju. Sister Astrid Erling was to take over the nurses' training job in Hsuchang, where she joined Dr Catherine Simmons, on loan from the China Inland Mission, and Chinese doctor Ho, who had been on the staff for some time. The Kiahsien dispensary would operate under Sister Thyra Lawson's supervision with a couple of Chinese nurses and occasional help from another Dr Tu, who had a private practice in Kiahsien. At Loyang Dr Wang Fee Ran, who had served a long apprenticeship under the missionary doctor there in earlier years, ran the hospital while missionary Mauritz Hanson handled the accounts. Sister Ingeborg Nystul, also in Loyang, was trained as a nurse, but devoted much of her time to evangelistic work. Many of the normal evangelism activities, such as the short-term Bible schools, were dropped because of lack of funds, and the president's report included the terse statement "very few Chinese are in the employ of the mission at the present time. The simple reason is that we lack funds."1 At home in Linju with the children, Elvera wrote in her journal of dust storms, which normally occurred in spring and fall, continuing unremittingly in winter. There were thirty abandoned babies in the foundling home, and "When we came back from Miss O's Friday a wee slip of a baby girl was lying on the cold brick floor at our compound entrance - just like one would put down an animal." After describing the hunger on the faces of people in church, she added, "We have been brought up to think of bread as one of the necessities of life. It is a definite luxury to the majority of Chinese here. I don't take bread for granted as I often did at home." In that same letter she said wheat was selling for U.S.$2,5 a bushel; a month later flour was $12.00 for 18 ounces, and "grains are increasingly hard to obtain."2 One of the most poignant letters about conditions is one that E.P. Ashcraft of Chengchow wrote to Arnold Vaught in United China Relief's Chungking office on 2,8 January 1943:

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The last few weeks have been more or less spent running around the country centres distributing relief. It is a sorry business. I have never seen sadder sights, except perhaps when we attended to over fifty thousand wounded soldiers coming from the Hsuchow front in 1938. We went with the object of seeking out those who were desperate. In many homes we came across people already unconscious and whose lives were ebbing out, due to starvation. Going past the front doors of these homes were carts loaded with grain for Military use. There is absolutely no relief apart from what we do with the One hundred thousand granted monthly in these eleven counties. I have only to stop typing to hear the cries of an abandoned baby lying at our front gate, left there by a distraught and starving mother. We will let it lie there for awhile to see if a Chinese will take pity on it, otherwise we shall have to do something about it. One is disappointed at the little help we have had from the banks. The $400,000 we were holding on account here was distributed between Hsuchang, Chengchow, Lushan and Loho. We were only able to collect in the proportion of 60% small notes and 40% large. Evidently the Bank in Loyang held onto all the small notes. Ashcraft's letter closed with the news that Mr Frudinger, the relief chairman for Loho, the district south of Hsuchang, had dropped dead at his desk three weeks earlier.3 The problem with small notes was a real one. In order to get direct relief to as many people as possible and to counteract galloping inflation, each individual or family was given only a small amount - CN$5~io (less than a kilo of grain). The extortion and downright theft of small notes made this tactic counterproductive as well as robbing the relief committees of the money that was due them. By February the Chinese government in Chungking was contributing to famine relief, matching United China Relief funds with "up to CN$1,000,000 per month."4 However, with flour selling for CN$n.oo a pound, that amount would barely feed 5,000 people in a province where three million or more would eventually die. Early in 1943, journalist Theodore White, the author of the Time magazine article about the Honan famine, received permission to

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travel to Honan with Harrison Foreman of the London Times. According to Joseph Henkels's memoirs, the two journalists arrived in Loyang in late January and stayed with Bishop Megan. They wanted to travel to Chengchow, Hsuchang, Yehsien, and Lushan to find out just how serious the famine conditions in Honan were. The Chinese military commander in Loyang provided the two journalists and the bishop with horses and two officers, who served as a military escort on their trip around the province.5 White, both in the book Thunder Out of China and in his Time magazine article, made two things clear: first, that they began their tour in Chengchow and, second, that they rode into that city in a snowstorm. Elvera and several other missionaries recorded a snowstorm on i February 1943, so that was probably the day White was describing in this passage from Thunder Out of China: When we awoke in the morning, the city was a white sepulcher peopled with gray ghosts. Death ruled Chengchow, for the famine centered there. Before the war it had held 12,0,000 people; now it had less than 40,000. The city had been bombed, shelled, and occupied by the Japanese, so that it had the half-destroyed air of all battlefront cities. Rubble was stacked along the gutters, and the great buildings, roofless, were open to the sky. Over the rubble and ruins the snow spread a mantle that deadened every sound. We stood at the head of the main street, looked down the deserted way for all its length - and saw nothing.6 The day after the snowstorm Elvera quoted a letter from Bill Simpson that explained one reason why the streets were so deserted: "They shoo the starving off the street so that they die outside the city rather than on the street."7 Father Henkels was proud of his own role in getting White's article published promptly (it appeared in Time magazine on 2,2, March 1943). White typed the article on Henkels's typewriter in Lushan, and the priest got the head of the Chinese Central News Agency there to wire it to Chungking so that it appeared just two weeks after it was written.8 Bill Simpson, who met the two journalists in Loyang, praised them for being "out to do all they could for us and for the people, and not just for a story." He added, in a

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letter to Canon Dixon, "We had told them of conditions as they started on their tour of inspection, but they said we didn't even exaggerate, in fact we had been overly moderate."9 Emery seems to have neither met the two reporters nor been aware of their visit, though his travels for medical emergencies and relief business had him in cities they visited on or about the same time they were there. He was in Loyang in late January, when Maja Lundmark of the Swedish Mission was dangerously ill, in Hsuchang in early February operating on an Italian priest with tuberculosis of the abdomen, and in Lushan for a relief meeting on 2,2-2.3 February.10 It is unclear whether Foreman and White actually made it to Hsuchang and Yehsien. The only cities White mentioned specifically in his article and later book about the famine were Loyang and Chengchow, and neither relief supervisor Wampler's 1945 book nor other missionary documents, such as Thyra Lawson's journal (Kiahsien) or letters that Katie Murray and Greta Clark wrote from Chengchow during the period, record that the visiting reporters contacted them about their work. Many of the women missionaries in Honan had been there for years and had extensive contacts among the Chinese. Addie Cox, a Baptist missionary ten miles from the front lines and forty miles from the nearest other missionary, responded to the famine by giving most of her own supper to the starving at the gates, and as her Chinese co-workers saw her growing thin, "there began to come in from various churches, or chapels, and individual Christians gifts of potatoes, peanuts, beans and other good things to eat."11 Anglican Greta Clark of Chengchow was so moved by the starving at her door that she began offering gruel daily, and two or three families quickly became 150 people or more. She wrote, "I have sold everything that would bring me any money to help with this, and on Sunday, February 2ist, after a week of trying experiences I pleaded in prayer that God would send me $10,000.00 Chinese. That night I got word that our Anglican Church had sent $4,000.00 gold and I might have 1/7 which would be at the present rate of exchange about $9,500 [Chinese]."12 The concern for the starving closest to home led at times to attitudes that might seem sectarian and petty to outsiders. At about

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the time Chengchow city officials entertained White and his party at a meal that was lavish enough to make the journalists uncomfortable, Southern Baptist Katie Murray wrote from Chengchow, "Please cable Board seven Christians starved. Many eating dirt and bark. For February Chengchow needs in gold: workers $1,2,00, church relief $5,000, emergency school $z,5oo." In response, her mission board sent $5,000 in the regular Honan UCR allowance. Murray could not conceal her anger and frustration as she answered, "This of course means we get a very small percent, as it is distributed through the International Relief Committee made up of Catholics and Protestants ... If this $5,000 gold monthly could be directed to the emergency school for Baptist boys and girls who are starving, some could be kept alive until wheat harvest in May."13 By 1943 Murray had been in Chengchow for twenty-one years. The starving for whom she pleaded were her people, not merely the pathetic folk that White and Foreman saw dying in the streets or barely staying alive on the spare rations in the relief camps. These were her fellow Baptists: the children she had saved from death, the old women who were young when she first brought them to the Lord, the men who had been serving the church faithfully for decades. They included the deacon whose family had enough chaff and elm bark to feed themselves for another two weeks and the 250 children that could be kept alive on $5,000; they included the 160 people her fellow Baptist, Addie Cox in Weishih, had managed to keep alive because "The Lord has rewarded her faith and they have not had to fast many times."14 Viewed out of context, Murray's concern that Baptist money be used to feed Baptist children may seem narrowly sectarian, but seen in context, it reveals a sexism of which she was not consciously aware. The missionaries in the public eye making the decisions, calling the shots, and controlling the purse strings were men, such as Bishop Megan. Men talked to the governor, knew generals, perhaps even met Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The missionaries out living Chinese-style among those who were suffering the worst, however, were mostly female. During the 19405 almost all "one-man" stations in Honan were staffed by a single female; those who stuck to their posts closest to enemy lines were women. It was women who managed to stay on

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after the Japanese advanced, taking over most of the mission fields in central and southern Honan. Yet when Theodore White filed his report about the famine, he said nary a word about heroic single women staffing stations alone under enemy guns, nor about Chinese who risked their lives - and died - to get relief to the starving. Instead, he saved his praise exclusively for the only missionary he named, the man based in a major city on the motor road and the railway, a man who knew the officials and the military leaders, the "great-hearted Irish padre" who took time off to ride around the province with the journalists and attend the lavish feast the officials in Chengchow threw for the visiting foreigners.15 As the winter of early 1943 deepened, horror stories about the famine abounded. I turned five that March, and the letter Elvera wrote about my birthday party with lots of Chinese friends playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey and eating bread and peanuts included something I remember, though I do not recall the party: the story of the baby eaten by a rat. In Elvera's letter the story has a happy ending: "The baby's wound was dressed at the hospital and we gave the folks some rice."16 But when John L. Benson returned a few months later, he told the full story to his wife, who knew the family, people who had once worked for the mission: "Kwo Sefu starved to death last winter. One day the wife was out begging having left the children alone at home. When she returned she found the rats had bitten big gashes in the baby's head; so the baby died also."17 As the famine worsened, funds came in both from relief organizations in North America and from the Chinese government, but problems and frustrations mounted. Bill Simpson, who often made long, rigorous, and dangerous trips to secure and bring back grain, on 17 March 1943 wrote of the inefficiency, dishonesty, and corruption: I have been in Loyang now some five weeks, I was sent here in February by our local Chengchow relief committee to buy grain for them there. This is a rather complicated business in China these days what with inflation of currency, high rise of prices, long haulage distances, with very inadequate means of transportation, but I am sorry to have to add that it is not these problems that really hold up our program of relief, but

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Linju compound, winter 1942-43: Erleen in centre with cook Lin's sonTimoti (behind), Ollie's Chang Sheng (upper right), Pastor Tu's daughters (lower and middle right), and Ollie's Hsing Cheng (left)

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it is the endless red-tape the gov't control and interference and the eternal problems of China, of "Face and Squeeze," that we find balking us. I have received endless promises of gov't help from all officials even to the Honan Governor, but in spite of their good intentions very little has borne fruit.18 Simpson had been able to get only eleven tons of bran and some wheat. He added that "last week some of the wheat I bought cost 68 cents, Canadian money, a pound - or $40.80 a bushel. I don't know what you are paying for poor wheat at home now but you'll know what we are up against here. The wheat by the way wouldn't usually make good chicken feed."19 The Augustana missionaries faced an even more serious situation: one of their own missionaries was part of the problem rather than the solution. Elvera made only one reference in her journal to the shocking news: "18 March 1943 - Mr. Wampler leaves this morn. We are all pretty heartsick over the news of the Hsuchang Relief Committee being unable to get any more relief funds because of Swenson's misuse of same. He used relief funds in part to build the cottage at Tengfeng. Hanson comes today to see what he can do about it, and brings Sister Thyra and Alice K. with him. Nelson also comes."20 It was a week when the Carlsons were busy packing for the move back to Hsuchang and both Emery and Erleen were seriously ill, but the emergency had to be dealt with. Swenson came a few days later, and as Elvera euphemistically put it in her journal, "2,5 March 1943 - The group is all here for dinner - 10 in all. Executive Committee meets for important discussions."21 In a sense, the Augustana missionaries closed ranks around Swenson after Hsuchang's relief funds were cut off. Elvera's terse sentence in her journal did not make it into any letters home, nor was there any of the public hand-wringing that there had been earlier about the Chinese pastors with "pentecostal tendencies," the students with "communist leanings," or the Chinese nurses dismissed apparently for sexual activity. There was no mention of the incident in the conference report for the year, and Swenson was re-elected the next year as chairman of the mission. But he was relieved of the chairmanship of the Hsuchang relief committee, and Emery became treasurer of that group once he got to Hsuchang.

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With those changes, the reorganized group began to receive relief funds again. The only inkling of how Swenson was "punished" came in some candid remarks John L. Benson made in his letters to his wife and in the tone of Emery's descriptions of Swenson in his memoirs. A subtle sort of disapproval and shunning seemed to have settled about the man as his moral stature diminished, but this was a private matter among the missionaries, who evidently tried to shield him from the disapproval of the Chinese and the supporters at home. The Carlsons got news of Swenson's misuse of relief funds at the same time that White's account of his visit to Honan was published in Time magazine (2.2, March 1943). White's article described eloquently what the two reporters saw, under four catchy subheadings: "Those Who Run Away," an account of the refugees streaming west at a rate of ten thousand a day; "Those Who Stay and Beg," with its accounts of Megan's dispensary and the roadside trees bare of bark; "Those Who Die," about Chengchow, its relief efforts, and its dying; and "Those Who Eat," about tax grain and soldiers, and the banquet given by officials in Chengchow, which left White with a feeling of rage at the inequities.22 In 1944 White published Thunder Out of China, which has a longer, more detailed narrative of the visit in a chapter entitled "The Honan Famine." The book remains one of the few accounts of the famine that is fairly well known and widely available, but it is not the most detailed and specific description of the famine. That honour goes to Ernest Wampler, whose China Suffers, published by a small church press, chronicled his term as Honan relief chairman (May 1942, - August 1943). Wampler was in the province practically the whole time he served as chairman. He tramped, bicycled, and rode from city to city, meeting with the relief committees, staying in the mission stations, outstations, and homes of Chinese workers. His book thoroughly covered the scope of the work in all the districts. At the end, he thanked the missionaries who helped in the relief effort, listing them in alphabetical order, as individuals and denominations, in an effort to be both comprehensive and fair. Wampler's book, however, reached the same sort of limited audience that missionary letters did. Few Honan missionaries were savvy about the media. During the year before White's article

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appeared in Time, they relied on the familiar channels of hometown papers, relatives and friends, supporting churches and mission societies. White's article on Honan in Time brought results that missionary accounts had not. The reporter had hardly got back to Chungking when E.P. Ashcraft of Chengchow received a response to a telegram to H.H. Kung, Chiang Kai-shek's finance minister, that said, "You have seen White Foreman telegram verifying terrible conditions here. Local committee requesting American Advisory Committee provide five million monthly saving twenty thousand persons. May we ask you provide monthly five millions for 2.0,000 more?" Ashcraft got action not only on that request but on a subsequent request to release rice stocks held back for the military and to another for funds to replace farm work animals (cattle) killed off for food.23

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When the Carlsons returned to Hsuchang, neither Elvera nor Erleen had been more than an hour's walk from home since they moved to Linju fifteen months earlier. Once again, the eighty-mile trip meant three days of slow and uncomfortable cart travel on dusty or muddy roads. Bad weather and the deep ditches that had been dug across the roads to impede Japanese troop movement caused delays and frustrations. The famine was ever visible. Willow trees were stripped of leaves and bark, and people were out gathering weeds and leaves for food. The starving lined the roads.

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When the Carlsons stopped to eat "the beggars almost took the food from our hands."1 On the second day of the trip, darkness found the carts mired in mud, and first Emery and then Elvera and the baby set off on foot toward Yuhsien, leaving Erleen and the carts to be rescued a bit later by men with donkeys. The disasters of the final day's travel from Yuhsien to Hsuchang included a tipped cart, a baby with a bruised leg, and a mother with two sprained fingers.2 Shortly after arriving in Hsuchang, Emery made a trip to Lushan, the acting capital of the province, riding "on a bank truck with 10 million dollars in note currency, and a group of guards." He sprained an arm when the truck tipped over. Elvera closed her account of the family's recent journeys by saying, "You can draw your own conclusions about travel in China."3 At the Hsuchang hospital, Emery faced a ticklish situation. He was young, fairly inexperienced, and new to China, but the only missionary doctor the Augustana Lutherans had. Indeed, the only other practising missionary doctor in the province was Catherine Simmons of the China Inland Mission, also working at the Hsuchang hospital. Howell Ho, the other doctor at the hospital, was a qualified physician fully trained in Western medicine at a medical school in Fukien province. He had more experience than Emery or Dr Simmons, and when Dr Fischer went on furlough in February, he assumed that he would become superintendent. When Emery arrived, Ho told him he intended to be superintendent and did not understand why Emery was there. Elvera reported sanctimoniously, "The Dr. continues to do things that we cannot reconcile with Christian living, and we are saddened." But it is hard not to feel Dr Ho had a legitimate complaint. Whether he was passed over because his religious commitment did not pass muster or because the missionaries felt the superintendent had to be a foreigner, the move smacked of the sort of unequal treatment that would soon lead to the expulsion of missionaries from China. Ho subsequently did a great deal to keep the mission operation together during the Japanese occupation when the missionaries were not there, and his relationship with Emery after the Japanese surrender was excellent. Nothing was ever said specifically to connect his behaviour with Swenson's misuse of relief funds, but the doctor's

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rebellion may well have had some relationship to his inability to reconcile the mission president's behaviour with "Christian living."4 Not long after Emery arrived in Hsuchang, he and Ho worked together on an especially grisly situation at one of the local soup kitchens. "When we arrived at the place we found people lying all over the yard some dead and others in bad shape, their faces were blue and they seemed very dopey. Two or three doctors (nurses) from the street were already there and had used stomach pumps on some of the people already. We called for large supplies of water and washed out as many stomachs as we could and gave stimulants, most of them got rid of what they had eaten and survived, but at least six were dead when we left and perhaps more died later." Emery was mystified by what poisoned the people, but not by why. He pointed out that the food was "extracted from the local people who have some means" and that it was "not always given willingly."5 Reporting home on conditions in the province, Emery cautioned that the famine, in addition to killing many outright, was also taking its toll from survivors. "Many people come to the hospital seeking help in medicine when that which they really need is a few nourishing meals. Often times, too, the leaves and weeds which they eat do them more harm than good." One particular tree leaf caused "marked swelling of the tissues, particularly the face and limbs." Emery was relieved that the only epidemic was relapsing fever, "which is easily cared for by an injection of a drug which is obtainable although very expensive."6 Relapsing fever was a dangerous disease, nonetheless. On 2.7 April, Emery was called to Linying where "Kiddies [were] dying like flies." Elvera reported when he returned, "Emery was impressed that the [mandarin] thought enough of the kids in the [children's welfare camp] to call a Dr. to come 2,0 miles to see them."7 Most of the work at the hospital, however, was with bullet wounds and other results of violence. In a letter home, Emery observed that "only a few come from the front." More were caused by "banditry," and "a surprising number are results of carelessness with firearms, which are found everywhere." He related the story of a young woman shot in the abdomen by a policeman "monkeying with his gun." She was brought in at night, and they operated by

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the light of some of the small amount of kerosene that had been saved for such emergencies, but the woman died of shock. "We have no facilities for blood transfusions; if we had the chemicals, Sodium Citrate, we might be able to get the technique worked up in time, but with the present unrest it is difficult. Plasma etc. available to U.S. Army doctors is of course not available here, the best we can do is salt solution under the skin." He went on to thank God for sulfanilamide to fight infections, but added that "now our stocks are running low, and we can't get replacements."8 In his desperation to get sulfanilamide, Emery even wrote to Mission Tidings, saying that "if the postal authorities would allow it, friends at home could do a great service by sending small quantities of these drugs to us by air mail." Another item in short supply was rubber gloves, something readers were somewhat more likely to be able to send.9 While Emery scrounged for sulpha drugs and rubber gloves, Dr McClure, of the Friends Ambulance Unit in southwestern China, came to the province in search of a much bigger medical prize - the Chengchow Baptist Hospital X-ray machine. McClure, who was born just north of the Yellow River, had worked in the Chengchow Baptist Hospital after his own United Church of Canada field fell to the Japanese in 1938. When he came back from furlough just before Pearl Harbor, however, it was to southwestern China not Honan, and not as a missionary but as part of a team of conscientious objectors who treated the wounded on the battlefields. This group was well funded, with ambulances, trained foreign personnel, and money and supplies to work with. Undaunted by thousands of miles of mountain roads, McClure successfully hauled the huge X-ray machine over the mountains on nine man-carts and installed it in the Industrial Co-operative Hospital in Paochi, some four hundred miles west.10 Bill Simpson was in Loyang buying relief grain when McClure came to town, and the flamboyant doctor accompanied the young cleric on his trip home to Chengchow. Simpson wrote on zz April 1943, "I had heard so much about him but it was the first time we had met. He certainly is a great fellow. We borrowed bikes and rode down here to Chengchow together. The presence of a tall Britisher from the Embassy Staff Chungking [Heath, of whom we

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will hear more in the next year] meant that we had quite a party and a lot of fun along the road."11 While the American Catholic priests north of the Yellow River had been rounded up and sent off to internment almost immediately after Pearl Harbor and the Lutheran United missionaries in southern Honan were interned within months, the Japanese proceeded at a leisurely pace east of the Yellow River no man's land. It was March 1943 before Canadian Anglican Sue Kelsey and her fellow missionaries in Kweiteh were finally taken to the large internment camp in Weihsien, Shantung. The news arrived in Chengchow in stages. First, two Chinese doctors travelling from Peking to the west brought news that most foreigners in northern China had been "rounded up and sent to concentration camp." Kelsey had written that she "expected to go, and felt it would be better to be in a big camp than under local authorities," mentioning that in Kweiteh it was "dangerous for any of her Chinese friends, who even dared to recognize her." Finally, a Chinese Baptist pastor in Chengchow reported that "his colleague in Kweiteh had gone to the hospital one day just in time to see the four [missionaries] leave by car for the station. None were allowed to speak to them, but as the car slowed down at the gate the Pastor was able to throw in a small package for them."12 The four were nurse Kelsey, Southern Baptist Attie Bostick, and Pastor and Mrs Arthur Olson of the Lutheran Free Church. The group had been confined together immediately after Pearl Harbor but then moved back to their individual compounds. In June 1942. Bostick was transferred from her own compound to the Anglican one. Kelsey was grateful for Bostick's company, writing in a letter, "I still have a policeman to look after me but he considers his duty done if he greets me affably when I pass him, or he takes a stroll in my garden to admire the flowers. Very different from the specimen recently in charge of Miss Bostick who was uncomfortably conscientious in performing what he considered his duty."13 On 2 September 1942, the Olsons, from Suihsien, arrived at the Anglican compound in Kweiteh expecting that the whole group would be repatriated. They were still there on 31 January 1943 when Kelsey wrote: "I am still living comfortably in my own home

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with Miss Bostick and the Olsons with me. My money is all used up but we are using Mr. Olson's and when that is gone we can probably borrow through the Swiss Consulate as others are doing."14 In March, when the four arrived at the Weihsien camp, they joined some 1,800 others, about half missionaries. Among Kelsey's fellow internees were the two Augustana Lutheran missionaries who had been in Peking on Pearl Harbor day, nurse Margaret Friberg and her mother, Nelly, ten American nuns from Kaifeng, and missionaries from other parts of eastern China. The LUM missionaries, however, were still in Wuhan, on the Yangtze, when the war ended.15 On 6 June 1943 Kelsey was able to write a letter to three women missionaries who had been her co-workers before the war: We have been here since March 2,1, nearly zooo of us of all sorts and conditions, so you may imagine we are having all sorts of interesting experiences. It is a busy communal life in which every one does their share. I am very fortunate in having my own profession so that I am nursing in the hospital instead of having to take my turn at potato peeling or toilet cleaning. I am much enjoying the busy life after sitting still for a year, the companionship after my solitary life, and all the activities: classes, concerts, Bible study, church services etc. I am very fortunate also in my dormitory crowd, Miss [Attie] Bostick and I being in an airy upstairs room with eleven others, all missionaries but two and all congenial and glad to do their share in the common jobs of carrying water etc. Of course there are discomforts but we are provided with enough food and in war time one does not expect luxuries. I miss the friends in Kweiteh and if you can get word to them wish you would send my greetings and assurances of prayer. I long for news both of them and my home people from whom I have not heard for nearly two years. If possible would you forward this letter to my brother, and beg them to answer in your care. We may receive letters here duly

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censored, of course. If you write to me in charge of the Swiss Consul in Tsingtao, or Peking he will get it to me.16 Writing after she returned to Canada, Kelsey recalled, "Though many rebelled at their confinement, I quite enjoyed the experiences there, especially the varied society and many activities after the loneliness of my life in the interior and I also felt safer there in an organized camp than in Kweiteh where I had no protection."17 In 1942, and 1943 the neutral Swedish government arranged the exchange of civilian Japanese in North America for foreigners confined in China. Those repatriated were transported on a Swedish ship, the SS Gripsholm. The process was unpredictable and arbitrary. Gustav Carlberg and A.W. Edwins of the Augustana Lutheran mission, who had been at the Union Seminary just outside Hankow, were repatriated in the first group in June 1942: their fellow Hankow internees, Hans Nesse, Marie Anderson, and Martha Kuhlberg were never repatriated. Edwins was in ill health and died on board the repatriation ship, but Anderson was ill as well: she died in internment. Sue Kelsey, who was among those repatriated in 1943, later said, "Though I would willingly have exchanged with some who had more urgent reasons than myself for wishing to return home, no alteration in the list was permitted."18 She was one of about 2.50 people who made the trip from Weihsien to Shanghai in 1943. Augustana Lutherans Margaret and Nelly Friberg were also in the group. A Chungking edition of the Shanghai Evening Post gave a complete list of names - 1,2.36 people in all.19 The SS Gripsholm stopped in Manila to pick up people interned in the Philippines. Dr Lillian Olson's Methodist friend Florence Evans was repatriated in 1943, but Olson herself spent the entire war in the Philippines. Even before Evans left, Olson had suffered a severe bout of dengue fever. She never regained her health - or went back to China.20 Initially, the 1943 crops looked promising, with the blessed moisture of winter snows to help the wheat, but rains were erratic and the year brought new problems: floods where there were rains, grasshoppers to eat the crops that did grow, and all the fallout of the disaster of the year before - the work animals that had been

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killed for food, the wasted bodies susceptible to devastating diseases, banditry and corruption, and discouragement among those who tried to help. Bill Simpson expressed the mood of many when he wrote in April, "Our whole life dates really from Harvest time. We are just trying to hang on till then. We estimate that at least one third of the population has already died. Cattle and donkeys they say perhaps 8/ioths have starved or been slaughtered in desperation."21 A fortnight later, Emery wrote a letter that began on a happy note, but soon went on to relate facts as grim as the ones Simpson had reported from Chengchow: We have had a lovely spring with occasional rains just like today and the compound and countryside look very beautiful. The barley is nearly ripe and the wheat is in that luxuriant blue-green stage just after it has blossomed. One sees a beauty deeper than the color of the waving grain when one realized that the harvest will mean solid cereal food again for hungry stomachs that have been constantly filled and refilled with leaves, weeds, cottonseed cake and various other things unfit for human consumption. The sad thing is though, that many who planted will not be here to reap. Thousands have died and none of those who fled last autumn when they realized what lay ahead have as yet returned and most of them will never return. Some villages are reported to be devoid of people, and in most of them the population has dwindled a fourth to one half of what it was last year.22 A few days later, Emery received some of the grimmest news of a year already too full of bad news: "Evangelist Bei Yong Hsin, our trusted friend and helper in Linju was killed by bandits. Mr. Bei was evidently either going to or returning from the small country church where he usually went to preach on Sundays." Bei had been active in relief work, and "the most logical conclusion is that he was accosted by people who knew who he was and thought he might be carrying a large sum of relief funds. He had evidently been strangled

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to death. His bicycle was gone as well as his outer garment. His body was found several days later about a mile and a half from the city, his Bible lying beside him.23 After Emery moved back to Hsuchang, the relief committees were reorganized. Kiahsien, where Sister Thyra ran the Industrial School for Women, and Yuhsien, with its welfare camp, were transferred from the large Hsuchang district to the small Linju-Lushan one. The Augustana Lutheran Mission reimbursed the AAC-UCR organization for the money used on the cottage in Tengfeng, taking the money out of the mission's own treasury. Emery took over as secretary-treasurer of the Hsuchang committee, and this appointment seemed to satisfy the funding agencies that future monies would be handled responsibly.24 The relief work in Hsuchang brought closer ties with the Catholics. As baby Faith took her first steps, Elvera recorded that Bishop Megan and Father Frassinetti had been guests in the Carlson home,25 and a few days later she wrote, "I am often surprised at some of the things which happen here that could not happen at home. For example Easter Sunday two Catholic nuns (Chinese) attended our morning service, and listened with rapt attention."26 Mario Frassinetti supervised the Catholic hospital in Chengchow. Both he and Bishop Megan were very active in relief work. Megan (whose own diocese was in Sinsiang, north of the Yellow River in Japanese-held territory) lived near Loyang and supervised Catholic work in the Free China dioceses of Honan, all three of which had Italian bishops (Loyang, Chengchow, and Nanyang). Emery spoke of the bishop of Chengchow, Bishop Calsa, as living in Hsuchang, but Megan's biographer and Father Joseph Henkels describe him as interned at Neihsiang, along with Bishop Bassi of Loyang. In 1943 the job of field supervisor for Honan's relief work passed from Ernest Wampler to a man new to the relief job but not to Honan, Augustana Lutheran John L. Benson, who had gone on furlough in 1941. On 8 May 1943, as he was being briefed in Chungking, Benson began a series of numbered letters to his wife letters full of details about his work and news of the people, Chinese and foreign, with whom they both had worked for many years. In Chungking, Benson talked to Dr McClure, just back from

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his trip to Honan for the Baptist X-ray machine, and spent much of his time with two Honan Chinese "active in various Christian and Communal activities." He read reports and letters, and wrote of "unwanted girl babies everywhere," cannibalism and banditry in Honan, and suffering "beyond anything we can imagine," especially in Chengchow and Hsuchang.27 Benson did not reach Honan until June, and it was July before Elvera wrote, "After a long wait we welcome Rev. Benson. He came about midmorning from [Hsiangcheng] on Emery's bike so worn & tired. Erleen put her arms around him & kissed him. Faith snuggled up to him as much as to say, 'Now I've found a grandpa.'"28 There was good reason for Benson to be a tired man. After leaving Chungking, he met with Wampler and Chinese leaders in Sian for several days and then made the three-day trek via crowded train and truck to Loyang, getting robbed not once but twice during the journey. In the course of slightly more than a week in Loyang, he finally saw the conditions in Honan for himself and got a chance to talk directly to people administering relief and those receiving it.29 At the bus station, waiting to leave Loyang, Benson met Marie Petterson, a Swedish missionary who had a large orphanage in Sinanhsien. Seven hundred dollars destined for her orphanage had been stolen from him, but "I could not see the orphans cheated," he wrote, not revealing how he made up the difference. The sixtymile trip to Linju took all day, and on hills passengers got off and pushed the bus. At Anna Olson's house outside Linju, "Miss Akins and Pastor [Tu] appeared and from then on it was a constant powwow until suppertime."30 The next day Benson and Tu bicycled to Lushan. Along the way, hordes of locusts were eating the millet. Benson observed, "At night they go out and light fires in the fields. This attracts the locusts and they collect whole loadfulls of them and use them for food." In Lushan the two men met with the International Relief Committee, and Benson "called on the Governor and his wife about relief work."31 Benson's coats were stolen from his bicycle as he stopped for a drink of water on the way to Paofeng. There he and Tu stayed with the Chinese Lutheran pastor, who "has TB of the spine and has

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been ill for nearly two years." The next day's travel brought the two to the Augustana mission in Kiahsien, where Sister Thyra was reopening the Industrial School for Women and Kuo Cheng Min of Hsuchang was inspecting one of the three welfare camps he managed. The camps were obviously needed. "In some villages more than one third of the villagers have died of either starvation or pestilence," Benson commented. At Hsiangcheng he mentioned thievery yet again: "Guinness has lost three bikes by theft this spring; so now he walks."32 Hsuchang, the next stop, "felt like coming home," but the city "suffered from the famine more than any other place. It seems about the only place where Christians have died of starvation. About 50 Christians have starved to death they claimed. In some villages south and east a large proportion of the population either starved to death or evacuated and probably died on the road. In one village 10 li south 7 whole families were wiped out and of the rest from one to three died. On one street in Wu Ny Dien only seven families were left out of 3 5,33 Later, Benson reported of the area east of Hsuchang, "Wang Tsan Chen has just been in to see me. He says in his village out of 370 people 2,60 died of starvation before the wheat harvest. Terrific deathrate! Nor is this an isolated case."34 As Benson headed back north, he took time for mission business, spending a night in Tengfeng, where Chinese pastor Tsi and his congregation had built a "fine new church." He announced proudly, "Two other places in the district are ready to call pastors, even tho the famine hit them hard." A subsequent day's climb up the mountain to Swenson's summer cottage had him complaining, "Here [Victor Swenson] sits like a pope or a buddha and calls a meeting of the Executive Committee: so there is nothing to do but to come up here and join the many pilgrims that come to this holy mountain from far and near to offer sacrifices and burn incense, only we brought neither incense nor sacrifices."35 Strangely enough in that time of drought, Emery arrived home from the Tengfeng meeting muddy and exhausted, and he found CIM missionary Arthur Kennedy staying at the Carlson home for the night, on his way to Fukow, just east of Hsuchang, where massive floods had broken the dikes.36 Since the cutting of the dikes

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in 1938, Fukow and other places along the new Yellow River channel to the east of Hsuchang had chronic and frequent problems with flooding, but there were also problems with floods along the old channel between Loyang and Chengchow. On the last leg of his tour, Benson travelled along the river from Chengchow to Loyang, spending his first night in a cave just outside Szushui, which was "almost wholly destroyed by floods." The next night, in Kunghsien, he and his fellow travellers slept in "the Baptist chapel which had been under several feet of water and was still very damp and evil smelling." At Yenshih there was "an epidemic of frogs." The rest of the way into Loyang "the locust were hanging over the fields like thick clouds and pouncing down on their prey."37 While Benson commented on the insects when he came through Kiahsien in July, by August he was reporting, "Billions and billions of locusts infest all of Central Honan and are destroying everything. The people have orders to fight and they do till they drop dead of exhaustion. The men are either in the army, or they build roads or they build dikes, and only women and children and old men are left to take care of the farm and fight the locusts, and most of them don't have the strength for it."38 Benson's tour of the famine-stricken province was nothing if not thorough; he met with every international relief committee, visited stations of every denomination that had missionaries in the province, and talked personally to virtually every missionary in the Free China portion of Honan, as well as with Chinese clergy, church leaders, teachers, local officials, and ordinary people along the roads and byways. A small man, unpretentious and not particularly good-looking, Benson was a warm-hearted and generous human being who loved and respected the Chinese and had lived and worked among the people he was observing on this tour since 1914. On 4 September 1943 he was back in Loyang, having "ridden on bicycle 12,45 Chinese miles this summer (415 English miles)." He was especially impressed by the work in Chengchow, where "Father Frassinetti and Bill Simpson get along so well, yet tease each other a lot." He was proud of the way the missionaries from different countries and different denominations worked together, but he was especially proud of Lutheran pastor Wan and his wife,

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who led his own mission's efforts in the city and worked on an equal footing with the missionaries. Wan's "pet enterprise," cotton carding and spinning, "is now almost self-supporting. They plan to take care of 2500 destitute families by this means this winter."39 Another of Chengchow's success stories was Anglican missionary Greta Clark's work with starving women and abandoned babies. She and a full-time Chinese helper "opened a gruel kitchen for poor mothers with infants in arms and gave [150 women with babies] good food twice a day." They also had a home for deserted babies, though "many had suffered so before coming that they treated our Infants' Home like an inn and were only guests for a few hours or days as they traveled on to their Eternal Home." Nonetheless, by the end of August there were twenty-four babies in the home.40 On 20 October Benson wrote a field report, which began with details of a recent meeting with the Lushan committee: Catholic Joseph Henkels, four Lutheran ministers (Norwegian Andreas Bo, American Russell Nelson, and Chinese pastors Kwo and Tu), and one female Lutheran missionary, Thyra Lawson. What the group decided to do with the CN $4 20,000 available for that district gives some idea of how relief money was distributed to different projects. The group allocated $20,000 per hsien for direct relief to feed the starving, and $20,000 each for six hsiens and $10,000 each for two hsiens for a seed wheat program. (The amounts were influenced both by the size of the hsien and the amount of grasshopper damage.) Grants, usually $10,000 each, went to a variety of programs: flood relief in lyang, a joint Augustana-Catholic pottery project in Shenho, a weaving project in Linju, and schools for destitute women and orphans or baby camps in five of the hsiens. Catholics and Protestants co-operated on many of the projects, and in several hsiens the work was completely run by Chinese.41 Benson's report continued with news from other districts. In Hsiangcheng, southwest of Hsuchang, a dike that had protected the city for twenty-two years gave way, and in places streets were buried in silt fifteen feet deep. "The silt is as hard as rock. 18 villages in this area were wholly or partly destroyed by flood." Finally, $100,000 of "the $600,000 Canadian grant" was allocated to Chengchow, "having chiefly in mind the flood victims in

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Chengmou and Weishih but leaving it with the Chengchow Committee to use these funds where most needed, taking account of the most serious immediate need."42 Benson's letter to his wife on 4 November 1943 included news that did not become part of the report to Arnold Vaught of AAC-UCR: "One pastor after another is going into secular work. Only 15 of the 2,6 ordained pastors are now in active service serving the church."43

chapter twelve THE EMBASSY C O M E S TO CALL

Early 1944 in Honan was beginning to seem cautiously hopeful: fall rains had the wheat crop looking green and healthy, the skies were quiet, the battle lines were stable. Relief efforts were in place. Mail was coming through reliably, albeit slowly, from North America and Europe. Those leaving China were making their way gradually and circuitously home, and a few foreigners were actually coming to Honan. Not all of them were missionaries. Emery wrote to his brother, "At the station where I was last year there are even a few of the boys from home."1 Benson met the Americans and served as

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interpreter when Pastor Tu and Elder Wang of Linju treated them to "a big Sino-American Armistice Day celebration."2 The twenty-six Americans were living at a temple in the mountains near Linju and training Chinese guerilla troops. In March of 1943 Elvera had celebrated her younger daughter's first birthday by visiting the temple and was impressed by the parklike surroundings with "lovely evergreens" and by one of the Buddhist priests, who "had spent three years in the U.S."3 Even earlier, at Christmas time, Thomas Megan had entertained a scouting party for the group in Loyang. Called the Sino-American Co-operative Organization (SACO), they were an intelligence organization spearheaded by Chiang Kai-shek's chief security officer, Tai Li, and a U.S. navy captain, Milton "Mary" Miles.4 Tai Li's awesome network of agents spread into villages all over China south of the Yellow River, both in Chinese-controlled territory and behind Japanese lines. Captain Miles provided Americans to train Tai Li's agents and equipped them with modern American arms and ammunition. In return, he got weather reports and intelligence about the Japanese.5 The navy, however, is not a nation's normal intelligencegathering organization, and an intelligence network that could not operate effectively north of the Yellow River, where Mao's Communists controlled the countryside, had a fatal flaw. Almost from the beginning, some of the Americans who worked for SACO had been hired by another intelligence agency being developed in Washington, one that would eventually be called the Central Intelligence Agency. During World War 11 it was known as the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. 6 The SACO-OSS partnership was a less-than-happy one. The OSS liked to hire missionaries, scholars, "old China hands". Tai Li was death on Americans who had lived in China and could speak Chinese, and Miles supported him on this. Furthermore, Tai Li's detractors felt that the organization was used almost exclusively against Chiang's internal enemies, especially the Communists, and that there was actual collaboration going on between Tai Li's operatives and the Japanese. Thus OSS and SACO were at loggerheads on two issues about which it was well nigh impossible to compromise. The men in charge of SAGO'S Camp Three in Linju were OSS men. The camp got off to a slow start. When Pastor Tu and Elder

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Wang threw their Armistice Day party, the camp had yet to graduate its first class of trained guerilla operatives. The first class did graduate in late January 1944, but by then Captain Miles was in Washington "because of trouble with OSS." The "trouble" that Miles referred to so euphemistically was simply his own removal from responsibility for OSS people in China as the Office of Strategic Services quietly set up shop independently in Chungking.7 Neither while the "Navy boys" were in the temple north of Linju nor later did Emery learn any of this, but by September 1944 his name was on a list of people whom OSS had plans to recruit, and by 1945 both Emery and Thomas Megan were part of the OSS's intelligence network.8 On 2.3 November 1943 a guest named Everett Drumright of Drumright, Oklahoma, and Sian, Shensi, signed Elvera's guest book. In the "Mission" column of the guest book, Drumright wrote, "U.S. Embassy." In official State Department correspondence he identified himself as "Second Secretary on detail in Sian, Shensi." Drumright arrived in Loyang in November and spent December touring the province, sometimes in the company of John L. Benson. He had done his homework before he arrived in Honan. On 15 September 1943 he sent a two-page report on "Conditions in Honan Province" to the embassy in Chungking. The report seemed to rely heavily on Benson's reports from his first and second trips around the province for AAC-UCR and ended on this sombre note: "Another serious refugee problem presses on the Chinese authorities for solution and, as last year, they appear to be procrastinating and hesitating to employ decisive measures to relieve the plight of the poor refugees who, by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, seem doomed to spend another winter of starvation, want and endless waiting."9 U.S. ambassador to China Clarence Gauss forwarded the report to the U.S. secretary of state in Washington, along with details from China's Central News Agency dispatches, which noted that the Chinese government was continuing to collect taxes in kind. That meant that the government was still taxing by collecting grain and hauling it out of a province where people were already starving. The ambassador minced no words as he closed his letter to the secretary of state:

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Appropriations of money are not as vital or as useful as food supplies, for the import into the province of foodstuffs from other areas is handicapped by transportation difficulties. It would, therefore, be of much greater assistance in solving the relief problem in this grievously stricken province if the Central Government would grant complete relief from taxation under its grain collection and purchase tax programs in the famine afflicted areas, acquiring food for its armies by outright purchase from those areas in Honan not seriously affected by famine conditions. The large stocks held by the army officers at profiteering prices was said to be one of the major scandals of the famine in 1942.10 Neither the U.S. secretary of state nor the American president could force the issue of tax collection and tax relief in another sovereign country, China. By the time Drumright came to Honan in November, he had evidently given up on getting the Chinese government to change its tax-collection policy. His dispatches from Honan in November and December dealt with military matters, not famine and taxes. Drumright's initial reports showed a special interest in the situation in Manchuria and a possible Japanese push to connect the railroad through Manchuria with the railroad they held south of Honan, a military objective that did not bode well for the Honan missionaries or the Chinese people they served.11 Drumright had travelled with Benson on part of his tour of the northern area of the province, but when Benson returned to Loyang, the embassy secretary was off again, "borrowing the Catholic Bishop's bicycle and going way down to the Covenant and Norwegian fields in Hupeh."12 The "Norwegian" field Benson wrote of was the Lutheran United Mission's southwest region, two hsiens in Honan and contiguous hsiens in Hupeh province. (The Covenant field was entirely in Hupeh.) Eight of the LUM stations in southwest Honan still had foreign missionaries in them in 1943. In conjunction with Chinese pastors and evangelists, they kept a modest amount of evangelical and educational work going. At Hwangchuan, where Chinese doctor Chang had been using the mission building as a private hospital, the LUM reclaimed its Luther Hospital as a missionary enterprise with the arrival of Dr

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Nathanael Fedde on 16 November 1943. The hospital did not stay in mission hands long, however. Dr Fedde and the other missionaries there left on 10 April 1944, as the Japanese ICHIGO advance threatened.13 The tiny Lutheran Brethren group in southwestern Honan had suffered more than most from Japanese bombing. Its missionaries in 1943 consisted of Karoline Oudal, a middle-aged Norwegian woman who would be one of the few missionaries to stay throughout the war, elderly Mr and Mrs Elliot Aandahl Sr, and his son, Elliot Aandahl Jr, who had taken his wife and children to the United States and returned to China via the Burma Road on the SDA truck. When the group met in conference on 2 February 1944, financial matters dominated their report. They were selling off as much mission property as possible so that they could rebuild one of the damaged mission stations, and they urged the home office to send travel funds, especially for the elderly Aandahls, who "are in need."14 The embassy secretary returned to Loyang on 19 December and stayed until Christmas Eve. Benson remarked, "I enjoyed him very much; for he was so congenial and so democratic and not at all difficult to have around. He took things as they were and made no fuss." Drumright also enlisted Benson's help in registering "all American males in this area of ages 18 to 44 for U.S. Selective Service Program," a task that Benson carried out on his next tour of the province.15 The biggest surprise guest in Loyang in December was not the U.S. embassy's Mr Drumright but an elderly Swede who had been behind the Japanese lines in southern Honan since 1940. Hugo Linder, as a citizen of a neutral nation, had not been interned. He had lived alone on Kikungshan mountain trying, in vain, to look after the empty summer houses and the school for missionary children. "All the houses on [Kikungshan] have been cleaned out of everything loose. In many windows and doors are gone. Some have lost their roofs," he reported to Benson at the end of his twohundred-mile journey to Loyang, a trip that took him five weeks.16 Christmas 1943 seemed a good deal cheerier than the previous year. On a global scale, the military situation for the Allies had improved markedly. The war in North Africa was over and Italy had surrendered. The Russians were beating the Germans back on

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the Eastern Front. German cities, not English ones, were being battered by bombing attacks, and the Allies were planning the DDay landing, which would put them on European soil within a few months. In the Pacific, island by island the Allies were driving the Japanese into retreat. Only in China were the Japanese threatening offensives rather than defending positions stubbornly and valiantly. The mood in Honan was guardedly hopeful, and Elvera called the holiday "the most peaceful and enjoyable Christmas since coming to China." She was proud of her attempts to approximate a traditional Scandinavian Christmas meal: "A small tin of tuna fish carefully saved for this Christmas from the small store of canned goods brought in three years ago this fall, served as lutefisk. We have no Irish potatoes but someone had given us a gift of a Chinese root vegetable (from another section) which was better than nothing as a substitute for 'spuds.' Hot fruit soup was made from our own dried apples, dates (the tough skinned dried fruit which we must substitute for prunes) and spiced with ginger & cinnamon bought locally. And of course we had the usual rice &c milk dish but without raisins."17 Emery was ecstatic about "fresh coffee (REAL STUFF) something that we have not had for two years," a gift from Bishop Calsa, and "real American hard candy," a gift from an army captain.18 The Honan missionaries entered 1944 with a cautious optimism. The absolute and total isolation that had crashed down on them in 1942 had lifted. The gruesome famine they had faced a year ago was by no means over, but they had gained some experience, and got some help, in dealing with it. They were back in touch with the outside world. Foreigners other than the missionaries who had been in the province when the news of Pearl Harbor slammed the gates were actually coming into the province. Everett Drumright, of the U.S. embassy, seemed almost part of the missionary family after two months in Honan, borrowing missionary bicycles to get from one place to another, sleeping in missionary beds, and sharing morning millet and evening devotions. "King George's Envoys," as Benson called the British representatives, were also in evidence. The ubiquitous Mr Heath, of the attache's office of the British embassy, had evidently learned to "ride 3rd class, and like it" after his visit to the province with Dr Bob McClure.19 Heath travelled

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with Bill Simpson (Chengchow), and his name shows up in Thyra Lawson's journal (Kiahsien), John L. Benson's letters (Loyang), and Emery Carlson's memoirs (Hsuchang), as well as in the accounts of the Catholics at Lushan and Loyang. Missionary numbers were low and falling lower, as people long overdue for furlough succeeded in leaving for home, but the Pacific was no longer Japanese, and if furloughees could reach home, replacements could also get back to China. John L. Benson was planning to slip quietly out of relief work and back into mission work; the Southern Baptist women who had been manning their mission alone were eagerly awaiting their Mr Strothers, who was slated to take over the relief administrator's job. Then there were those "Navy Boys" north of Linju who sometimes enjoyed a little home cooking at Ollie's. Contact with them and the other military men who came through brought news, little luxuries, and the reassuring feeling that the Allies were going to win this war after all. The relief work, which continued in the province during that long, cold winter, was by no means solely a missionary effort. The governments, local, provincial, and national, did their part. So did ordinary Chinese. Benson gave this account of the Buddhist soup kitchen in Loyang, which fed 3,000 people a day: "they have four large caldrons, and five flour mills crushing wheat. The crushed wheat is mixed with water into a thin congee which is boiled in the caldrons. Tickets are given to those who have been registered as refugees. Most of these people live in holes and caves dug in the ground. One representative from each family comes with a jar or kettle and gets one large bowlful of congee for each person in the family. This is given out early in the morning and is all they get for that day. But it does keep them alive."20 Chengchow was a first stop for refugees who came through the battle lines to the north and the east. North of the river, the Communists claimed to be fighting the famine better than the Nationalists were south of it, but the refugees who crossed the river told a different story. The famine had hit hard in the no man's land of the new Yellow River bed to the east of Chengchow. The Japanese and their puppet government there did little or nothing to relieve the suffering. And on top of dealing with a massive number

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of refugees, Chengchow had itself suffered relentless bombings and frequent raids by the Japanese, in addition to getting hit by famine, grasshoppers, and flood. The city continued to be the focal point of the largest relief effort in the province. Bill Simpson, writing on 10 February 1944, commented, "Our relief program has spread to alarming proportions and we are now facing a budget of some 2. million dollars a month."21 His annual report, written just after Christmas, estimated that "in this district, throughout the last year, 1/3 of the population starved to death, 1/3 rd moved to the west, and 1/3 rd remained on ... The harvest yield turned out to be less than one half, and then on top of this disappointment came the grasshoppers, and completely wiped out the crops." For a short while, people had carrots and sweet potatoes, but with those foods gone, "Their plight is even worse than last year for many have now no resistance to meet the cold and hunger. Their household furnishings, winter clothes and bedding have been sold; chairs table doors have been used for kindling and in many cases their little mud houses have been destroyed that rafters, straw, and gaoliang from the roofs might also be burned." The regular relief program - a school, Greta Clark's baby camp and feeding program for mothers, a refugee camp with 300 (mostly widows, orphans and cripples), and "a medical clinic that sees some 300 patients daily, free of charge and also maintains some zo free hospital beds" - were joined by a newly opened "grain distribution centre where some 1400 people receive a weekly ration of grain every Wednesday morning."22 Southern Baptist Katie Murray was growing heartily weary of her job as treasurer for the Chengchow Relief Committee and was eager to get back to spiritual work. Since Grace Stribling had gone to Chengtu for dental work and come down with typhus, Murray had been the only Baptist missionary in Chengchow. She sang the praise of two Mennonites scouting out the Baptist Hospital as a base for a mobile ambulance clinic as she awaited the return of the Baptists' own Mr Strothers.23 In February Benson toured the southern part of the province, checking on relief work and, as a duly sworn-in representative of the U.S. State Department, officially registering male Americans for the draft. He stopped in Yehsien and Chowkiakow, where there

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were government-sponsored child welfare camps and the China Inland Mission and Pentecostal missionaries supervised the relief effort. In Loho the CIM and Seventh-day Adventist people had a large relief effort that stretched out into the flooded areas to the east. Arthur Kennedy, an Australian ClMer, was especially active in the flood relief work. Benson did not make it all the way south to Junan, where an American Catholic priest lay ill; instead, Father Henkels of Lushan reported to Benson on the work there.24 The Augustana Lutheran annual conference met in Kiahsien, and all the voting members of the mission were there. Things went smoothly. In a letter to his wife, Benson was generous in praising Victor Swenson for running an orderly conference, but he also told her Swenson had been re-elected president because there was "Nobody to take his place. I could not be considered so long as I am head over heels in relief work."25 The missionaries may have treated Swenson with courtesy, even kindness, but he was under a heavy cloud; he had spent the summer at the cottage in the mountains whose building had brought the charge of misuse of relief funds down on his shoulders while all the others stayed at their posts through a gruelling summer of famine and grasshoppers. The mission had made restitution to the relief agency for the misused funds, and with the reorganization of the Hsuchang committee, relief funds had been restored, but the large relief district was understaffed. The Lutherans were few and overextended, and the Catholics, the only other missionaries in the district, were Italians, considered enemy aliens in Nationalist China. Their Bishop Calsa would die within the year, and his assistant was the man with TB of the stomach whom Emery had sewn back up after seeing that there was nothing he could do. In other districts there were strong and able Chinese pastors to take the lead, but Swenson's vendetta against Wang Tien Sing, the pastor defrocked for "pentecostal tendencies" in 1942, had alienated both pastors and church members in the Hsuchang area, and morale was low and evangelical work at a virtual standstill. Benson wrote sadly to his wife, "The best might be if Vic and Evodia took their furlough. Then somebody could step in and try to do something, but as long as they are there it will be mighty difficult for me or anybody else to step in there and try to put things in order."26

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The reports of the annual conference in Kiahsien paint a picture of a mission stretched extremely thin. Swenson had let a large number of the evangelists and Bible women go in 1942 when funds were frozen, and as inflation and famine took their toll, even pastors were supplementing their meagre salaries with other work or leaving the ministry altogether. While some evangelistic short courses continued, both Chinese and foreign workers were giving more and more time to relief work. Benson, of course, spent almost all his time on this work, and both Russell Nelson and Emery Carlson were giving major amounts of time to their district relief committee jobs; Thyra Lawson ran her Industrial School for destitute and refugee women at Kiahsien; and Minnie Tack had "a rescue project for a number of girls in Yuhsien."27 Educational work was increasingly restricted by the stringent economy and by increased government regulation, which put severe limits on religious instruction in the registered schools. The medical people stretched themselves ever thinner: Emery and Astrid Erling at the large Hsuchang hospital and nursing school, Anna Olson and Dr Tu at the small Linju hospital, Dr Wang and an all-Chinese staff of five at the Loyang hospital, which treated some 16,000 outpatients and 337 in-patients.28 Hsuchang had 2,z,ooo outpatients, plus 249 in the kala azar clinic, and 982 in-patients. Dr Ho had left the employ of the mission in August, but he set up a private practice in Hsuchang and so was at least providing medical care in the area. Dr Catherine Simmons was on the staff all year and a young woman intern from Honan University began work in October. Three medical students from Honan University spent a few weeks at the hospital in the summer, and Dr Ho's younger brother helped for a while in the autumn. The hospital also had a staff of seven graduate and sixteen student nurses.29 Thyra Lawson's report from the Kiahsien hospital contained the most poignant comment on the medical situation in the province: "May 2.oth we closed the hospital for a month's harvest vacation. Miss Lu left us at that time to return to her home. As this left us with just one graduate nurse, and Dr. Carlson was not able to make his periodical visits after moving to Hsuchang in March, we reopened the clinic only. But in September the Lord sent us Miss

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Dr Emery Carlson and Sister Astrid Erling holding a clinic outside Hsuchang hospital

Ma, another graduate, qualified nurse. This constrained us to reopen the hospital for the serious gunshot cases that kept coming."™ In addition to giving facts and figures on staffing and costs, Emery's report on the medical work afforded some insight into the larger problems of providing medical care in the midst of war and famine, where International Relief Committee supplies were becoming depleted and the few other drugs available were outrageously expensive and of questionable quality. He observed, "We have continued to do all types of surgery that we have felt competent to do, and fortunately our supplies have held out so far. Rubber gloves are an item that has caused us considerable anxiety; in fact, had we not recently received a consignment of them from the American Red Cross, we would not feel safe in doing abdominal surgery now. Our supply of ether for anesthetics can not last forever, and it will be almost impossible to re-supply this item. We are swinging over to the use of novocaine, spinal and local, wherever possible, and this may help some."31

hirteen THE J A P A N E S E O V E R R U N HONAN

Before he left Loyang in December, Secretary Drumright telegraphed the ambassador, "Jap garrison on south bank Yellow River north of Chengchow has been increased and old railway bridge is being repaired."1 Not long after, the Japanese started firing their big guns at Kwangwu and Free Methodist missionary Edith Jones and her orphans retreated to Chengchow.2 That step did not raise much alarm in the missionary community, and even Drumright's dispatches about Honan in the early months of 1944 seemed to point toward the usual Japanese foraging expeditions and raiding

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parties - campaigns that caused inconvenience and hardship for the locals but made little difference in the larger war.3 But by April 1944 it was clear this campaign was different. The Japanese called it the I CHI GO offensive, and by the time 1945 dawned, the face of China had changed. In April the Japanese crossed the Yellow River and rolled down the railroad until they met their fellows from the south reopening the Pinghan railroad line from sea to sea. Before 1944 was half over, they had driven the Chinese back into the mountains in Honan and were at the pass between Honan and Shensi, where Sian could be theirs and the road to Chungking. By the end of the year, three huge U.S. air bases in southern China (Changsha, Hengyang, and Kweilin) had fallen to the Japanese, and it seemed only a matter of time until China would be theirs.4 In 1944 China was a strange anomaly. That year the Russians drove the Germans back to their own borders, the Allies landed in Europe, Italy surrendered, and Japan itself lost control of the Pacific and was being slowly squeezed back in Southeast Asia, yet it seemed unstoppable in China. In late March, representatives of both the British and the American embassies made special trips to Honan to "put a derrick under the missionaries." John L. Benson, in Loyang, became what he called "the Honan Missionaries' Evacuation Commissioner and General flunky of the Loyang station" as he helped the other missionaries get to safety in West China.5 Loyang, the eastern terminus of what was left of the Lunghai railroad, was the only reasonable exit point for most people headed over the mountains to West China. A week after Benson dispatched his "Christian man on a bicycle" to notify missionaries, the first evacuees arrived in Loyang - the Augustana wives and children, who made the last leg of their journey by truck, thanks to "a Christian General." Over the course of the next twenty days, people streamed and straggled in: the elderly Ashcrafts, exhausted after an eight-day journey through the mud from Chengchow (the distance covered was only about sixty miles); Victor Swenson and his worldly goods, including a piano; and, after the Japanese had taken Chengchow, an "avalanche," including "Seven ClM'ers from Anhwei with nine children."6

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Typical Chinese train (this photograph was not taken during the height of the fleeing)

Once the evacuees were crowded into the Lutheran compound in Loyang, the adventures were not over. Missionaries were not the only people trying to leave town, and the job of getting evacuees and their baggage to the station and onto the train was sometimes no small feat. Benson said of one group, "The CIM party from Anhwei got away Saturday evening [z3rd], getting on through the windows." Alerts and bombings often kept evacuees from reaching the station in the first place, and one party was on the train when it was machine-gunned, "but they got through safely."7 As the days wore on, Benson's biggest worries were not about the people he was getting out of Loyang but about the ones still at their stations. Wives and small children had been among the first evacuees, but single women responsible for Chinese orphans were among the last. Some never did leave, including Maria Petterson of Sinanhsien, a Swedish missionary desperately ill with relapsing fever and responsible for 160 orphans when Benson left Loyang.8

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Anna Olson of Linju and her adopted son, Chang Sheng, arrived in Loyang just in time to be on "the last passenger train going through without being bombed." The next day Benson himself just missed a train that was bombed, "killing more than a hundred people." As he and Chinese leaders "organized a War Emergency Committee," they could see the burning train through a window. In the wee hours of the morning, Benson and two other missionaries headed west by bicycle. "As it got light planes appeared and strafed the traffic. We hid twice in the wet wheat. The roads were crowded with refugees streaming out of the city, carrying their precious belongings or a baby or an aged crippled mother - always forced to be on the lookout for planes who were mercilessly strafing traffic on the roads."9 Among the people unaccounted for when Benson left Loyang were most of the Chengchow missionaries, a group from Hsuchang, including Emery Carlson, Catherine Simmons, and Astrid Erling, as well as the Guinness family from Hsiangcheng, and a number of CIM people from Loho and Chumatien to the south and west of Hsuchang. Of the missing, Benson was least worried about the last group, who might have "turned off the road and headed southwest." These people were farthest from the Japanese advance, and there was road access out of the province and into West China in that direction. However, by the time he left Loyang on 2,5 April, he knew the Japanese had entered Chengchow five days earlier, with Hsuchang their next objective in their plan to control the northsouth railroad.10 The Canadian Anglicans in Chengchow knew of the warning to leave, but they were racing against time as they tried to find places for Greta Clark's baby camp and the middle school students, most of whom were orphans. The relief camps, which housed largely the elderly, the handicapped, and the ill, were a responsibility as well. On 18 April 1944, as the Japanese advanced on the city and Bill Simpson looked for a place in the mountains where the school could take refuge, he "paid out over one million dollars" in relief funds.11 As Bill and Mary Simpson wrapped up the relief work in Chengchow, Greta Clark and her helpers loaded up the babies six to a wheelbarrow and started west. On the third day they saw the

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Japanese burning villages and took refuge in some caves. They had no sooner fed the babies than they had to leave and hide in the wheat. After a day of "Hide and Seek with the enemy cavalry," they returned to the caves where, five days later, robbers found them - "Eight men with revolvers and swords came into the cave, others waited outside." Fearing they might be killed or held for ransom, Clark and her young assistant, Miss Wang, crawled into "a very small inner cave with an opening about two feet square over which we had placed an old wooden table top." The men demanded money. "Miss Wang's mother was exceedingly clever talking with them, they took about one fifth of our money, that amount being in the outer cave, they took all Miss Wang's belongings and many of my things, including my reading glasses. They came so near the entrance to our inner cave that we could see their lantern, they moved the wooden table top but not enough to see the hole, and they then went away."12 At this point, Clark sent a messenger to the Chinese pastor in Chengchow and learned the Japanese were looking for her. "The time had come when my presence was no longer helpful to the babies," she wrote. After prayers and goodbyes, Clark, with a small bundle and "my dear old woman servant who had been with me for about twenty years," started walking west. Miss Wang, who would remain in charge of the babies, accompanied them a little way, and "then we parted, she returning to endure and I seeking a way of escape."13 In the wee hours of the morning of 19 April, as Greta Clark and the babies hid in their cave, Bill and Mary Simpson joined the crowds fleeing Chengchow. They planned to ride out the battle or spend the summer in a mountain town about twenty miles from Chengchow. However, that night the Chinese troops who had been guarding the Yellow River bridge retreated through the town and advised them to leave. Bill wrote, "Friday April 21 we started on our way, little dreaming of what lay ahead for us."14 As they set out on the mountain paths to the southwest, Japanese planes came over and "hastened our departure and dispensed with many of the ceremonial goodbyes." Most of the Italian Catholics in the party stayed behind, but Father Frassinetti, Dr Paul Dohan, and his wife, Dr Jean Chiang,

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came with Bill and Mary and their cook and his family. About noon the Chinese military forced them off the small road and back to the main road, which was both busy and more likely to be bombed. Not too much later bombers came over in a place where the road went through a deep ravine and was "blocked with military oxcarts 6c refugees." At the middle of the traffic jam in the ravine were three cannons. The planes flew over and then "back they came, five in all - and three times they circled the ravine - each in turn with small fragmentation & incendiary bombs." Most of the Simpson party were fairly safe, but Bill wrote, "Mary & I and one Chinese boy had to take what shelter we could on a small ledge at the side of the road almost at road level. I received one small scratch on the calf of my right leg - fortunately I was wearing heavy riding 'Breeks' - all others were unscathed - in a few days my leg wa also completely healed." Their luggage was not so lucky: a briefcase with records, accounts, and $15,000 went up in flames, but "We soon learned to take these losses stoically for in the next few days almost all of our 'little all' was left behind." The group made their way slowly over mountain paths "even wheelbarrows couldn't pass," but "After the first two weeks we were out of the gravest danger." When the group arrived at Hsiunghsien, in the mountains southwest of Loyang, Bill was able to wire Grace Gibberd and make arrangements to meet at Lushih, a wellfortified town in west Honan. In Hsiunghsien, the place where Honan University and its medical school operated in exile, Bill and Mary Simpson and their party joined a group of refugees who had left Hsuchang about the same time as the Simpsons left Chengchow, and under similar circumstances. "On the morning of April 20, 1944, a peculiar caravan came out of the hospital gate and joined the crowds of refugees on the roads leading southwest from Hsuchang," begins the report written by Miss Hsu Hsueh Jang and the other five Chinese nurses who were part of the caravan. "There were oxcarts borrowed from farmers, wheelbarrows and frame carts manned by hospital servants; there were people on bicycles and groups of students walking along the road carrying small bundles." In the group were Dr Emery Carlson, Dr Catherine Simmons, Sister Astrid Erling, the director of nursing at the Hsuchang Hospital, and valu-

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able hospital equipment. A Japanese scouting plane flew over as the group left Hsuchang, and later in the day bombers passed over, "but they were more interested in ammunition carts coming up from the south and did not molest us."15 The group that left the Hsuchang hospital gates soon split, with the Chinese nurses and the hospital carts going directly to Kiahsien while the three foreigners bicycled toward Hsiangcheng, where the Guinness family nursed a dangerously ill baby. The foreigners were not as fortunate as the nurses had been with the bombers. Emery wrote, "Just before I got to Hsiangcheng that evening the Jap bombers came around and did a pretty thorough job of strafing the road just ahead of me. However the Lord had provided for me. A strong rope had been left by an old well, so I tied the rope around my chest, anchored the other end to a stone post and clambered into the well, bracing my feet and back against the sides. From there I could look up at the planes as they went over, but they couldn't see or hit me except with a lucky bomb shot."16 Sister Astrid made it to the Guinnesses' mission compound, but Dr Simmons had her own bomber story to tell: I had seen in Punch once something about lying on one's 'tummy' with one's mouth open, so I left my bike by the road and followed Mr. Punch's advice in a cornfield! I felt like a landmark for the planes to swing over as they circled to go back again and again to the city. When they had finished with the city they came bombing and machinegunning along the road - and there was nothing to hinder Jap planes from almost scraping the trees over their objectives! One of these was a row of military ox-carts a few hundred yards further along the road, so the planes were still in their dives as they came over me, and still sounded as if they were machine-gunning, but it must have been that the sound traveled more slowly.17 Once the bombers were gone, Dr Simmons hurried on to Hsiangcheng and the dangerously ill Guinness children. The nurses and hospital carts spent the night in a church compound at Ying Chiao and made it to Chung Tou the following night without further

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excitement. They arrived in Kiahsien on the 22nd just before it started to rain. The story was bleaker for the Guinness family. Emery's letter of 21 May 1944 recalled: "At [Hsiangcheng] we found the Guinness family in a quandary as to what to do. They had no orders from their government, their children were sick and they were low on money. We told them that they must come with us and we loaned them some money. Dr Catherine stayed to help them get ready, while Sister Astrid and I went on to Kiahsien. The next morning their little baby died. They buried him that evening and left the next morning."18 It was rainy and muddy. Emery "took a big mulecart and some servants and went out through the rain and mud to get the Guinnesses." The group spent the night in Kiahsien where there was cannon fire all night. Early in the morning, they pushed on toward Linju in spite of the mud. They did not linger in Linju. Emery wrote, "The next morning we started for lyang which is in the mountains and we thought relatively safe. Just as the sun came up the bombers came again. This time we took shelter in an old temple, while the bombs fell around us and machine gun bullets went through the roof. They were going for the oxcarts on the road which they thought were hauling army supplies. They killed a lot of oxen but most of the people had found shelter."19 The nurses and the rest of the party with the hospital carts had left earlier, at midnight, "afraid that if we waited until morning the bombers would attack before we could reach the small road leading to lyang." They had barely reached the small road when the bombers came, and "a fog moved up from the river and covered the area where we were. We could hear the planes and could see the bombs burst on the highway, but from above they could not see us."20 Both the missionaries and the Chinese nurses and hospital employees stayed in the Lutheran churchyard in lyang with Pastor Wei and his wife for several days while deciding what to do next. For the foreigners, the decision was to head across the border into Shensi province, where Elvera and the Carlson children and most of the other fleeing missionaries were in the Sian area. The Chinese nurses decided to go into the hills south of lyang, to the village of Shang Tien. However, once the nurses got to the

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village, government troops were retreating even from that small mountain town, and while the people could be fairly safe higher in the hills, they could not take carts and the heavier equipment. "With the help of a local official we piled the bulky things in the end of a small room and masoned up a false wall, hoping that it would not be noticed by the Japanese soldiers."21 While the nurses moved on to Shang Tien and beyond, the foreigners took "a nice mountain road" to Hsiunghsien, where they met the Chengchow folks. What Emery called "a cosmopolitan group: American, British, Italian, Austrian Jew, Canadian, and of course Chinese, Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, Catholic, and what not" then headed across the mountains by pack mule. "That is the baggage and the women did, the men still dragged those bikes up and down the mountains." Four days later they were in Lushih, a well-fortified town on the road out of Honan. The rest of the journey west was anticlimactic for Emery, a simple two-day bike ride on a "highway" and a day on a "refugee train."22 The Chinese nurses were not through with fleeing foreigners when they said goodbye to Emery, Sister Astrid, Dr Simmons, and the Guinnesses. They wrote: "One day word came to us that there were two foreigners on the road near lyang. We didn't know who they could be, but we sent a messenger to find them and bring them to us. When they arrived we found that it was Rev. and Mrs. Finn Larson of Kioshan. Their things had been stolen and they had barely escaped capture. They had been walking for days, their feet were sore and swollen and they were entirely exhausted. These old people stayed with us until they were strong enough to travel again and then we sent an escort with them to Neihsiang."23 The Larsons were retired missionaries who had been in charge of an orphanage in Kioshan on the LUM field in southeastern Honan. The orphanage was run as a private, Chinese operation and not as part of the LUM mission.24 It was 5 May 1944, some two weeks after Emery and his group left Hsuchang, before Elvera and the other missionaries safely in the Sian area got any news of him. Benson wrote to his wife with great relief, not merely about hearing that the Hsuchang folk were safe but also about knowing that "Five groups of CIM missionaries" were on their way out, along with Katie Murray and Edith Jones of

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Chengchow and the Pentecostal missionaries from Chumatien. Benson was trying to raise "road money" for a group of Chinese Baptists from Weishih who had several members of their group killed as they made their way out of the province. And he expressed relief that the "LUM and Lutheran Brethren folks are also on their way out; but they are not coming this way." One person was still missing, however - Greta Clark. Benson commented, "We are very much afraid she did not get out."25 On 5 May Clark was not yet out of Honan. Nor was Thomas Megan, who left Loyang on 8 May and said he was "the last foreigner, and nearly the last civilian to leave Loyang."26 Clark did not give a date for either her arrival in Loyang or her departure. But if the bishop was the last foreigner out of town, she was probably the next to the last. An examination of the elapsed time in her account shows that she could not have arrived in Loyang before 5 or 6 May, and she must have left a day or two later. After Greta Clark sent Miss Wang and the babies back to Chengchow, she and her Chinese companions were still in great danger and had miles of rugged mountain walking ahead of them. She later wrote, "The enemy had taken towns on the main road to the left and right of us but I did not know when I started out that they had also taken the main places directly west." Clark crossed enemy lines three times dressed like an old country woman and walking with a stoop as she prayed no Japanese would come close enough to recognize her as a foreigner. When she met her first Chinese army men, she felt fortunate; one was a mission school graduate concerned for her safety. She did not reach safety quickly. "All day long they sent me from one officer to the next higher one and at dark I reached the General's headquarters." Finally, she was given food and lodging and allowed to make her way by cart to Loyang, where she stayed in Grace Gibberd's empty house. At the railway station, they were not selling tickets, but Clark finally "talked with some of the men in charge," who found an open cattle car. There she sat for three days and two nights, "settled into a wooden chair among someone's furniture." It was a trip much delayed by alarms and panicky passengers who knew that recently "enemy aeroplanes had dropped incendiary bombs and over 200 people had been killed on a train." When Clark finally reached Sian, "the mission-

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aries could scarcely believe their eyes that it was I who had arrived. Mr. Russell had heard that day that I had been shot."27 While Greta Clark left Loyang on the railroad and had a relatively uneventful journey to Sian, when Bishop Megan closed down his Loyang mission on 8 May, he headed southwest into the mountains where the Hsuchang and Chengchow parties had exited from Honan, and there his excitement began. Megan went first to Mienchih, where the Tu-tao-Tuan, or Little Brothers of St John the Baptist, had headquarters. Catholic sources describe the group as stretcher bearers and an ambulance corps, a group whose function was to care for the injured and augment what medical care the military had available, but the group also was subsidized as the North China Frontline Masses-Supervising Service Group of the National Military Council of Chiang's government.28 Megan said of his arrival at Mienchih: "The enemy had massed troops on the north of the Yellow River and were preparing for a new crossing. In the face of this, there was only one thing to do trek even farther west. Within 8 hours, the Japs had crossed the river, were down in our territory, and even past the village we had assumed as our headquarters ... So, on May lyth, we took to the road again. We headed for Lushih, Honan, one of the strongest natural fortress towns in West Honan. But the enemy was too fast for us. They occupied the town two hours before we got there."29 Lushih, the town that had been a haven of rest for the HsuchangChengchow refugees less that a fortnight earlier, where Emery and the Simpsons had sent telegrams and letters, and where Bill and Mary Simpson had thought they could ride out the campaign, was enemy territory when Megan arrived. His party managed to sneak past the town in the darkness, but they spent five days "of hard marching over high mountains, with little food, constant danger, and an endless flood of refugees of every description." When they finally crossed the border into Shensi province, they felt safe enough to stop, regroup, and celebrate Pentecost with a little Catholic congregation there.30 The southwestern quadrant of Honan was not in quite as much danger as the rest of the province, but missionaries were still moving out by the military road to Nanyang and across the Shensi border to Laohokow, with its airfields. The SACO camp near Linju

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joined the exodus in this direction and relocated in Shangsien, Shensi, west of the Hiung Er mountain range. About a week after the SAGO people passed through Lushan, Joseph Henkels heard that the Japanese were crossing the river at several places west of Chengchow. Shortly after, the Nationalist army pulled out of Lushan, the provincial government packed up its documents and moved on to Neihsiang, nearer the Shensi border, and Henkels himself retreated to Neihsiang, where some of the Italian Catholic priests were interned. Eventually he joined the SACO group in Shensi.31 The LUM people in southwestern Honan, like Henkels, left Honan by the motor road in the south, but in their case they went first to Tenghsien, in far southwestern Honan, and held their annual conference on 4-6 May 1944, presenting their reports on the work of 1943. Then all but two of the missionaries headed west, six to go on furlough and nine to work in Shensi.32 The Norsk Luthersk Misjohnssambands people, as Norwegians, were not in as vulnerable a position as the Americans and Canadians, and some of them stayed. However, Arna Quello Sovik, an LUM missionary nurse who fled Honan in May 1944, recalled a poignant story about one of their missionary families: Ansgar Espegren, his wife and six-day-old baby, and his elderly parents. The Espegrens had been asked to go out quite a little while before this, and the old people wouldn't go, so the son didn't feel he could leave them. Our men were talking to the son and to the old people too and trying to let them understand that everybody had to get out of there. We left there in the morning with the old couple adamant that they weren't going out. Then when we got on about five miles or something, here comes Ansgar on a bicycle and asked if he could have two of our carts. So they went back and they got that family, including the old Espegrens, out. Just imagine her with a six-day-old baby and then in a predicament like that.33

chapter fourteen " F I R S T WAR ZQHE S H A T T E R E D "

To those who had crossed the mountains by everything from crowded refugee trains to their own weary feet, Sian seemed light years away from Honan and the war - a provincial capital, a large modern city connected by rail and road to the country's capital, a place shielded from the Japanese by a barrier of mountains. Surrounded by the army, the government, and the press, not just Chinese, but British and American, the missionaries quickly settled into temporary quarters in the Sian area and sorted out who would head home on furlough, who would find work in West China, and who would stay in the Sian area helping the fleeing Chinese, but

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poised to go back to Honan stations as soon as possible. The Augustana Lutherans had already rented a compound in Hsingping when Emery, the Simpsons, and their group arrived in Sian. However, mere days after Greta Clark "turned up like a branch rescued from the burning," Benson wrote to his wife, "We have here no abiding place."1 The missionaries had heard the news that U.S. embassy secretary Drumright wired to Ambassador Gauss on 14 May 1944: "First war zone shattered. Chinese suffered heavy losses in men, material and crops. Loss of wheat crop, best in years, most serious loss. Chinese reverses in Honan leave Shensi wide open to attack."2 The Japanese had come up from Sinyang and down from the north with sixty to seventy thousand troops, meeting resistance only when they got within a few miles of Loyang. Loyang "apparently fell May izth or i4th, having been deserted city from May ist." The Japanese moved west of Loyang along the railroad, taking Mienchih (where Megan's Chinese lay brothers had had their headquarters), and they were approaching Hsiunghsien (where the university and medical school were in exile). Drumright raised the possibility that the Japanese would stop when they got to the mountains but also the "possibility of Jap drives west from Loyang to Lushih." Only in the southwest did there seem some hope of holding on to a bit of Honan. "Thus far Japs do not seem to have made a drive on Nanyang, important military center west Honan, drive which presumable would lead to capture of Neihsiang to west and Laohokow (where there are air fields) and Fancheng and Siangyang Hupeh." Drumright closed his report with the news that a Chinese source had warned "fighting may not be confined to Honan area."3 Faced with consular orders to move on, the Augustana missionaries held an "Emergency Conference" and elected Benson president and Emery treasurer. They decided that the Swensons, the Nelsons, Margaret Miller, and Minnie Tack were to go on furlough. The rest would stay in Chungking or in west China.4 Emery wrote home, "The Jap campaign still seems to be making progress and we are planning to move on from here to Chungking tomorrow. We are all very well and Elvera is standing it very nicely. We are hoping that the baby will make his appearance in the rela-

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tive convenience of a hospital in Chungking." Three of the evacuees in the Hsingping compound would not make the trip to Chungking: the two goats that had tramped through the mountains with Emery's group and the Loyang cow, whose milk had helped round out the missionary diet in Hsingping.5 West China or furlough - those were the choices, whatever the missionary's denomination. Furlough was the best choice for the old and ill, such as the Free Methodist Ashcrafts, for the Southern Baptist women who had staffed their mission in the Chengchow area through seven long years of invasion and famine, even for people such as Bill and Mary Simpson, who had lost their little all but were anxious to be back in China, fresh and ready to work, when peace came. Going home, however, could be a long, drawnout, and expensive process that began with waiting patiently for a spot on the "Hump flights" over the Himalayas to India, flights on which civilians were a low priority. Once in India, the missionaries were well down on the waiting list for ships headed home. West China involved other choices. Some groups could place missionaries at their installations in other provinces. The China Inland Mission had work in every province of China; so did the Roman Catholics. The Southern Baptists had a West China field, and the Canadian Anglicans had close ties with their compatriots, the United Church of Canada people, who had a West China field in addition to their closed field in north Honan. Individuals could work for other missions if their theological differences were not too profound. The universities, hospitals, and other enterprises that had moved from large coastal cities to Chengtu and Chungking when the Japanese took the coast in 1938 and 1939 offered still another option. Three of the Augustana single women chose this route and took teaching jobs - Alice K. Anderson in Chengtu and Alyce E. Anderson and Ethel Akins in Chungking. Emery Carlson and Anna Olson made still another choice by accepting government employment.6 Taking a secular job did not necessarily mean putting the missionary calling on the shelf; teachers could have Bible studies with interested students in the evenings or help to organize a congregation in the neighbourhood. Akins helped with the Lutheran Seminary when it reopened in Chungking, as well as teaching English at

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a secular institution. And there was always one-on-one personal witnessing. Emery Carlson, with a pregnant wife and two young children, focused on getting his family away from the battlefield. The Carlsons joined a group of fifty missionaries who rented a boxcar and then a bus to go on to Chungking. On 2.3 May 1944 the group left Hsingping. "We thought there would be room for both baggage and people in the car but as usual the baggage exceeded our expectations and most of the folks rode in the 2,nd class, crowded, dirty coaches." Eleven of the Augustana Missionaries, including the Carlsons, rode on some bedding and mattresses spread on the luggage in the boxcar. "Our heads scraped the top when we tried to sit up. As per usual the top of the car was covered with Chinese passengers and whenever they moved they let down huge quantities of rust and dirt thru the numerous huge cracks in the top of the car. Fortunately for us it did not rain."7 At the railhead in Paochi, during the inevitable delay for transportation, the large number of missionaries was taken in, not by Christians of any of their denominational groups, but by the local "Jesus Family Church," an indigenous Chinese Christian congregation. After several days of camping in the Jesus Family church compound, the missionaries chartered a genuine passenger bus, not the usual Chinese truck with passengers perched atop a full load of baggage.8 Elvera's first letter from Chungking made the bus trip from Paochi sound like a vacation, and my own pencilled account at the bottom of the last page smacked of a childish attempt to be poetic. After almost four years in a flat, dry, dusty land where the crops withered in the fields, perhaps we can be forgiven our excesses. The mountains with their bubbling streams were spectacular, and Elvera effused, "Szechwan province is like a luxuriant garden with ample rainfall, beautiful trees, shrubbery and lovely wild flowers."9 Chungking, however, was a different matter. The Honan missionaries were greeted at the bus station by a great tangle of red tape, and "Chungking was so full of foreigners that they had not been able to find us any accommodation." Four of the Catholic nuns in the party solved the problem by finding the group rooms in the isolation quarters of their hospital. "The rooms had dirty cement

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floors. They were so damp and stuffy and we were very crowded. They had no screens and the mosquitoes were terrific. However the sisters were so kind and accommodating. They gave us breakfast every morning - thin rice gruel, eggs and tea but we had to send out to the street for our other meals."10 When the American consul instructed civilians to leave Sian, the order did not apply to two Honan refugees, Thomas Megan and Joseph Henkels. On 28 May 1944 Henkels, who was staying with the SACO unit in Shangnan, Shensi, just across the border from Honan, had a surprise visitor, Bishop Megan, who had hiked forty miles over the mountains. Megan gave Henkels permission to serve as a chaplain to the U.S. intelligence unit that had been evacuated from Linju and to go on to Sian with them. Megan and his lay brothers moved to new headquarters near Sian as well, and by the time Emery came back to Sian with the OSS, the Bishop seemed to be a fixture around OSS headquarters, although he did not officially join the intelligence organization until May I945.11 John L. Benson stayed in Paochi and resumed his role as evacuation commissioner. Once he had most of the missionaries safe somewhere, he switched to being relief commissioner for the hoards of Chinese refugees coming from Honan.12 He disposed of personal goods left behind in Paochi by missionaries who had gone on to Chungking. Things sold for unbelievable prices: the Loyang cow brought $50,000, and Swenson's piano $100,000. A letter from Talbert Ronning, a Canadian LUM missionary in Tenghsien, said that while most missionaries had left, far southwestern Honan was still peaceful. News from Hsuchang, though, indicated that the hospital was in ruins although other buildings had not been seriously damaged.13 Scarcely a week later, people were fleeing Paochi, but Benson stayed on in his room at the Y - an eight-foot square with a single bed its only furniture and no glass in the window. He laughed at his own hardships, but worried about his Honan refugees, especially since "more than 40 of the children and teachers of the Chengchow School located near here are down with relapsing fever. Some are very seriously ill. We have tried desperately to get enough 606 [medicine] to stop it. Tomorrow I take a trip to Sian."14

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When he returned from that trip, Benson described Sian as "the doomed city" and "almost deserted." He saw a few familiar faces: Drumright of the American embassy and Bishop Megan, who was at a Midsummer's Day gathering with the Norwegian missionaries. He noted that he and Megan were "elected members of the Shensi Provincial International Relief Committee, the only ones from Honan so honored. The main problem of the Committee is to take care of refugees from Honan."15 The Augustana missionaries in Chungking spent only a few days in the contagion ward of the Catholic hospital before they found more comfortable quarters. The Canadian Mission Hospital, which was interested in hiring Emery, rented them a house on the compound, and the Carlsons and the five single women moved in. The cost of living in Chungking was dreadfully high, and Elvera told her parents, "We will have the baby at the Canadian mission hospital here and don't be too surprised if the children and I reach American soil before the year is up."16 The Canadian Hospital group hoped that Emery could replace a doctor going on furlough, but that proved unviable. The hospital was a modern Western-style operation that needed a surgeon to train Chinese medical school interns. Emery had been practising medicine without even the most rudimentary surgical supplies for the last four years. Essentially, he had been a battlefield medic for people suffering from severe malnutrition and had done little surgery other than amputations, removing bullets, and sewing up the victims of war and violence. His first appendectomy left him feeling a bumbling incompetent and unwilling to take on the Canadian Hospital job.17 For the Carlson family, the summer of 1944 was a hot, miserable time when problems multiplied and solutions failed. After Elvera's baby was born, she spent six weeks in bed, elevating a leg with a bloody open sore called phlebitis, the ordeal made worse by humid heat and ants that found their way to the sore, even when the bed legs were set in buckets of water. Baby Jon Paul had such bad prickly heat that he looked like a mound of raw hamburger. Emery focused on getting the family out of hot, crowded, unhealthy, expensive Chungking.18

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Reaching India was no longer as difficult as it had been a few months earlier, but "It is very hard to get transportation from India to America these days, many soldiers who have been out here two years now are being returned to America for a rest, and civilians cannot expect to get accommodations."19 Even as she lay in bed with phlebitis, Elvera met some of the missionary famous who lived in or passed through Chungking. Some of these people remained nameless, such as "a Ph.D. who works in the War Information Office" and "an interesting young fellow who had just flown out from N.Y. to do some work in this office." Others, including Dr Martinson of the American Bible Society, Marcus Cheng ("the most well known Chinese pastor"), and Dr Daniel Nelson of the Lutheran World Convention, were proudly recorded as guests.20 In September a tiny Augustana conference met in the Canadian Hospital house. No missionaries were left on the field in Honan, and much of the news about the Chinese pastors and workers still in the province came second-hand. Benson reported receiving two letters from Pastor Ai, who had made it to Tenghsien, in the portion of southwestern Honan still in Nationalist hands, but "He and his family were alone of all our pastors to get away." Benson was especially worried about C.H. Wang, who was with the Nationalist military; some of Wang's family escaped to Shensi, but they had had no word from him.21 When Emery and Elvera left for India in October, the Augustana Lutheran Mission in China had only two full-time missionaries left: Sister Ingeborg Nystul in Paochi with the newly established refugee churches and John L. Benson in Chungking. Thyra Lawson left on furlough about the same time as the Carlsons, and Anna Olson and crippled Chang Shen, while still in Chungking, were living on the other side of the river. Ollie informed Benson that she was no longer in mission employ, although she never formally resigned. Ethel Akins and Alyce E. Anderson were in Chungking as well, but teaching English in the refugee universities and giving only spare time to mission work. Alice K. Anderson was in a similar situation in Chengtu. Even Benson had committed himself to teaching at the Lutheran Union Seminary in exile in Chungking, though he

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Farewell card to the Carlsons made by the Chungking missionaries and inspired by twoyear-old Faith's insistence that she was going to America in a wheelbarrow

retained his role of supervising and encouraging the Chinese church work and visited Sian and Paochi frequently. The only missionary with any real contact with the Honan Lutherans was Sister Ingeborg, whose Norwegian passport allowed her to thumb her nose at orders from the U.S. consulate and work in Paochi, where she saw the people who continued to escape from Japanese-occupied central Honan - people who sometimes carried news of those still in places such as Hsuchang, Linju, Chengchow, or Loyang. The two new churches established in Sian and Paochi were the stars in the mission's crown, the hope for its future. They had not been organized by missionaries but by Chinese Christians, who provided both the leadership and the financial support. Crowds came to services - Honan refugees and locals. Though the churches were independent, they were not hostile to the missionaries, looking to them for guidance and respecting them as fellow Christians and co-workers.

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Sian and Paochi were full of refugees from Honan, and more arrived daily. Unlike some of the earlier refugees, those in the fall had usually lost everything; many were undernourished and ill. They had no warm clothing or bedding for the winter. They needed jobs, shelter, schooling. Relief work continued, both under government aegis and under mission and relief agency auspices. Some of the welfare camps and refugee schools had managed to flee to Sian, and their Chinese leaders were often fellows that Benson knew, church members and former students he mentioned by name to his wife, men who came to him for advice and guidance. To be in Sian was to be at the closest listening post to Honan, but much of the news that came through from the old field was grim: Pastor Kao had been killed, as had two men who had been cooks for the single women; Dr Tu in Linju had been beaten and put to coolie work when the Japanese learned he had worked with the Americans; Dr Wang in Loyang was "ill from mistreatment." Mission property was all in Japanese hands; there were conflicting reports of what (and how much) had disappeared or been destroyed. In some areas, churches were able to meet in alternative quarters; in others, even home meetings were dangerous. Some pastors had fled or been driven away. Famine looked probable - again. Benson commented, "There are so many sad stories coming out of Honan these days. There is no use of trying to report them. Most of them are too horrible to repeat." So he tried to tell some good news - in Chengchow, where everything had been pretty well destroyed long before the I CHI GO advance, the Japanese were not interfering with the work, and Mrs Wan, the Lutheran pastor's wife, had taken over the care of Greta Clark's orphans. There were four Japanese pastors in the area.22 The lives of the Hsuchang hospital nurses in the mountains grew grimmer and grimmer as the Japanese advance continued. They moved higher and higher into the mountains, but food grew scarce and dissention increased. The group split up, and six people went over the mountains to a village near Neihsiang, where they opened a small dispensary providing "free treatment to the sick and wounded in the area."23 "Early in July the puppets sent word to Mr. Shen [a Shang Tien official who helped to hide the nurses]

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requesting that he turn the hospital people and things over to them. This he refused to do and sent us off to the mountains. At one place we met a traitor who went to the next village and requested that the local leader capture us. This fellow agreed to do so but first he sent word to us about it and delayed his departure until it was impossible to catch us."24 Eventually, the Japanese attacked Shang Tien. The local militia managed to kill one hundred Japanese during a month of fighting, but the area was still not safe for the hospital group, and they settled in a village high in the mountains, where "We ground our own flour and picked up wood and sticks wherever we could find them on the mountainsides and used that for fuel." Yet they continued to do what they could to treat the sick.25 Not all the missionaries left Honan in 1944. North of the Yellow River the I CHI GO campaign made little difference at all. The Japanese had been in control of the cities since the 1937-38 campaigns. The Protestants had withdrawn their missionaries in 1939, while the Catholics' northernmost diocese, Weihwei, had an Italian bishop and priests who stayed at their posts throughout the Japanese occupation. In June 1944, Communist guerillas captured one of these Italian fathers, Carlo Suigo, and held him hostage for over a year, not for ransom but for his medical training as a nurse. Suigo felt strongly that the people suffered more at the hands of the Chinese Communists, who contested the area and harassed the countryside, than they did from the Japanese.26 Unfortunately, not all the Italians in Honan were in Japaneseheld territory. According to Megan's biographer, about a thousand Italians and Germans in China were interned by the Chinese Nationalists. He does not make clear how many of these people were interned in Honan. Both Megan and Henkels record that the internees were confined in Neihsiang, the city in far southwestern Honan that became the provincial capital after Lushan fell. They also indicate that the Chinese Nationalists made some exceptions for medical people. Father Frassinetti (an Italian) returned to Chengchow after he escaped with Bill and Mary Simpson and the others and was able to keep the little hospital in Chengchow going for the remainder of the war.27 The Hsuchang Italian contingent

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was not as fortunate. Elderly Bishop Calsa died, apparently of appendicitis, and another Italian priest there was killed by the Japanese while his fellow priest watched.28 The far southwestern part of Honan stayed under Chinese control until March 1945. At that time the two LUM men, George Holm and Talbert Ronning, left, but Karoline Oudal of the Lutheran Brethren and some of the Norwegian Lutherans stayed throughout the war. Scandinavian Alliance folks from neutral Sweden stuck it out west of Loyang until December 1944. One of their number remained throughout the war. When Benson came back to Honan in late 1945, he wrote, "You remember Maria Petterson and her orphanage. She elected to stay with her orphans when the rest of us left. Being from a neutral nation she thought it safe; but she has had to suffer many indignities. She and her orphans have at times been in danger of actually starving. God, however, has marvelously undertaken for her and protected when the situation looked darkest."29 After the war was over, when the U.S. consul was trying to prevent Ethel Akins from returning to Honan, Emery wrote to Elvera, "He doesn't know that there is already one American and two British women even closer to the Communist trouble than this."30 One of the two unnamed British women was Mrs Urich of the CIM, who lived in Kaifeng throughout the war - protected, no doubt, by the fact that her husband was Swiss. He was able to use his status as a citizen of a neutral country to keep an eye on mission property in Kaifeng and to serve as a communication channel between missionaries in Free China and their Chinese co-workers and church members. The Urich family included two children as well.31 Emery mentioned the American woman, Helen Bailey, in a letter written from Chengchow to Benson not long after the Japanese surrender, saying, "Miss Bailey of the Boat Mission is now living in the Ashcraft house here after two years in the hills in hiding."32 Some of the saddest stories of those left behind during the I CHI GO advance came from those who stayed for a time, but did not ride out the war in Honan. In December 1944 Benson wrote to his wife about the adventures of "a Britisher who has just come out of captivity in Honan." He did not identify the man by either name or denomination, but since Benson said the fellow "escaped from

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Chengchow just a Vi hour ahead of the Japanese," it seems likely he was the only foreign civilian anyone ever mentioned as living in the province during the war - Mr Hare, the "treaty porter" who joined the Anglican Church in Chengchow in 1941.33 According to Benson, the fellow "hid for weeks in caves and farmers' huts and had hairbreadth escapes from capture and had been robbed of everything." Benson closed his account of the poor fellow by saying that "he looked to me like a nervous wreck and probably incapacitated for life."34 It is not surprising that a treaty port civilian who had "lived for the cocktail hour" and knew no Chinese after decades in the country was done in by the adversity of his escape, but another person, who seemed well-integrated into Chinese society, was done in as well. Graham Anderson, the independent missionary who came to Linju in 1942 and would not even accept cart fare in thanks for his inspirational message to the Chu Hui meeting there, was in Sian in 1945, living in the Independent Church and "suffering from organic nervous disease aggravated by senility and the effects of living so much alone," according to the chair of the China Inland Mission. Anderson was no longer able to look after himself, and the CIM took charge of getting him evacuated to Chengtu, even though he was no longer affiliated with that mission.35

chapter fifteen T H E O S S ' S T O P S£CR€D " P R O J E C T T O W E R "

Before the I CHI GO campaign, the war in China seemed to be going fairly well. Supplies in goodly amounts flew in over "the Hump," and gas came by pipeline over the mountains from India. General Chennault's i4th Air Force guarded the skies, and the large American air bases in South China stood ready with air support for the Chinese army, should the Japanese try anything serious. I CHI GO changed all that. By May 1944 the Chinese defence had collapsed so thoroughly that Sian seemed next on the Japanese list of objectives, and no one had much faith that the Chinese troops which had collapsed in Honan would be able stop a Japanese

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advance to the west, or south across the Yangtze.1 By July even the big American air bases southwest of the Yangtze River were falling into Japanese hands.2 A cursory look at a map would show that the most efficient invasion route to Japan lay through North China, where the Communists seemed to be holding the line against the Japanese and keeping the peasants reasonably satisfied and supportive. By the summer of 1944, exploratory talks about co-operating with the Communists were going cautiously forward. A small U.S. group, including people from the navy, the army, the diplomatic corps, and the press, went to Yenan. The OSS was a major player. It called the operation the "Dixie Mission" and was gambling heavily on getting an intelligence net operating north of the Yellow River, one that would eventually stretch all the way to the coast and up into Korea, the closest land mass to Japan.3 When Emery worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps before going to China, he held a commission in the medical corps reserves, but in June 1944 when he went to the Chungking embassy to report his whereabouts, no one "could find any record" of the commission, and Ambassador Gauss "quizzed" him "intensively."4 Neither Emery nor Elvera ever mentioned this interview in the letters written from Chungking, and Emery may have been warned that he was being considered for something secret. By 6 September 1944 the OSS listed Dr Emery Carlson as a prospective "Advance-base Chief" for its proposed "Morale Operation Under AGAS Cover," and a Major Donald B. Monroe knew enough about Emery to write: "Dr. Emery W. Carlson, USAMCR, in mid-thirties, ist Lieutenant U.S.A. Medical Corps Reserve, on inactive status, attached as medical officer to Lutheran Mission in Northern Honan Province for the past four years and recently evacuated from there due to enemy movements, has adequate knowledge of spoken Chinese, wide acquaintance in that area, anxious for activation into service but in area familiar to him rather than in medical work exclusively, vigorous, intelligent, capable, and with pleasing personality."5 In 1944 the Office of Strategic Services, which would later become the CIA, was only a few years old, an intelligence agency independent of the armed services. It had an alphabet soup of operations behind enemy lines: men who came in with explosives and

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supplies for Chinese guerillas, men who taught Chinese operatives to use the guns and other equipment the United States was giving them, and men whose focus was on bringing back information about the enemy and conditions in their territory. The project Emery was being considered for, however, involved getting information to the enemy and the people in enemy territory. Called Morale Operations, or MO for short, these units disseminated rumours, printed material, prepared slogans, and made broadcasts (true or untrue) in an effort to destroy Japanese morale, encourage defection by puppet troops and collaborators, and inspire the general populace to resist and harass the enemy and co-operate with the Allies. The roots of OSS's Morale Operations were in Washington, where researchers dug through newspapers and radio broadcasts, intelligence reports, and military messages in languages from all over the world. Branch offices, such as the one in New Delhi for the China-India-Burma theatre, wrote, adapted, and appropriated material, producing leaflets, newspapers, and even phony train tickets for one scheme. Presses ran, mimeograph machines rolled, and packets of MO material flew off to the front and the enemy territory beyond.6 The material did not bear fruit until it reached the operatives behind enemy lines, who spread the rumours, painted graffiti, pasted up posters, and distributed leaflets and newspapers with the ring of truth and authority. That was why OSS needed a "Morale Operation under AGAS cover" in Honan, as well as the rest of China. OSS in its entirety was a small operation in 1944, with only 106 agents in China in October I944-7 Its proposed "Morale Operation under AGAS cover," in spite of its ambition to cover all of China, did not plan to use a great number of men. The eleven projected advance-base chiefs would be people "whose long-established residence and work in their areas has provided them with broad personal contacts with the local inhabitants, schools, religious or commercial groups and men of ability to serve the Allied benefit." In other words, an advance-base chief would be sent back to his old stomping ground behind enemy lines to "train and brief recruits locally - either individuals or groups that are trustworthy." The understanding was that the advance-base chiefs would aid other intelligence work in their area, especially the air force's AGAS. 8

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What support staff would an advance-base chief have? A 2,1 October 1944 proposal listed Emery Carlson as CO for the Sian and North China base and said he would have the following staff: "Another man of simulated rank, Daniel Nelson, who will operate in the Northern Honan and Southern Shansi areas," an enlisted man (Private Albert Seely) to be an assistant, and "Two enlisted men who will act as radio operators and cryptographers." Five people - but the three named individuals named knew China and spoke Chinese.9 Throughout September 1944 the paperwork flowed smoothly and Project Tower seemed to be falling into place. Plans were to have Emery and the other advance-base chiefs in the field by i November.10 Elizabeth MacDonald, chronicling her brief career as "the OSS Acting Chief MO, CBl" in a 1947 book, opened a chapter with the words "Our report to Washington for September 1944, modestly listed three outstanding achievements for the MO, Delhi Branch." The second item on her list was "Indoctrinated four missionaries enroute to China for MO." She identified the four as Dr William Fenn, Henry Lacy, Oliver Caldwell, and Dr Emery W. Carlson, and she went on to say, "Our four missionaries and their Swiss Friend who trained St. Bernard dogs for the famous Hospice in Switzerland were an incongruous lot when they walked into our office one day in early September and announced that they had been hired by our Washington major, during his last theatre visit, to work for the American government in China. That was all they knew."11 MacDonald's statement that the four missionaries were "enroute to China" in September of 1944 seems somewhat inaccurate. Fenn was a missionary in Chengtu before entering OSS. Emery was definitely in Chungking that September. Oliver Caldwell may have been in Chungking in September as well, but wherever he was, he had left his missionary career behind him and was an OSS employee and author of a number of the September documents about Project Tower now in the U.S. National Archives' OSS files. Emery Carlson and his family finally reached India on 17 October 1944, landing in Calcutta and staying only long enough for Emery to have his medical examination for OSS on 20 October,12 although he did not mention that fact in a letter about the flight to

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India and the family's plans to go on to an Augustana mission in South India.13 The projected start date for the OSS MO project, i November, came and went as Emery stayed at the mission in south India and assisted with an operation. He wrote in his memoirs: "The folks at Rahjamundry offered me a job there and they had a group meeting with us and discussed our staying. However, I was obligated to the OSS." 14 A great deal was happened in Chungking as the Carlsons made their way across India. By the end of October, the conflicts between Chiang Kai-shek and U.S. general Joseph W. Stilwell had reached such a state that the generalissimo asked for the general's resignation. General Stilwell's replacement, General Wedemeyer, requested (and got) a reorganization of the whole command structure in the China theatre, hoping thereby to forestall some of the problems that had beset Stilwell. The diplomatic corps was rearranged every bit as dramatically, with a wholesale reshuffling of personnel and a new ambassador who lacked Gauss's China experience.15 The shakeup that placed General Wedemeyer at the head of the China theatre extended to O S S as well. The biggest change, at th top, involved getting OSS completely out from under the control of SACO and making the new chief of OSS China answerable to General Wedemeyer, the commander of the China theatre, and through him to General Donovan, the OSS chief in Washington.16 Richard Heppner, the new chief of OSS China, had a list of conditions for taking the job, two of which would have an effect on Project Tower and Emery's work in OS S, although somewhat indirectly. These were a proposal to bring in 300 commandos no longer needed in Europe and put them to work preparing the way for an invasion of Japan, and a sub-base in Sian, not just for Morale Operations but also for SO, SI, and all the other OSS groups that would be part of training guerillas, gathering intelligence, blowing up bridges, and sundry other activities to lay the groundwork for an invasion of Japan.17 In late December and early January, General Donovan came to China and met with Heppner and General Wedemeyer. Morale Operations was simplified and its production staff moved from India to Kunming.18 But that is jumping ahead. Between October 1944 and May 1945, as the China theatre was being reorganized from the top

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down and OSS, especially the MO branch, was being rearranged radically, Project Tower limped along: plans were laid, submitted, approved; people were recruited, hired, outfitted. The Tower personnel had little to do but wait. No one got behind enemy lines or distributed any MO material. In November, William Fenn became director of Project Tower, and when Emery wrote to him inquiring about his own status in the enterprise, the letter had to go through another officer. Fenn answered Emery, "If you have occasion to write to me, please do not send the letter to me personally but write as you did in your letter of the 13th."19 By 27 November Fenn had eight "Officers and civilians" and "5 Enlisted Men for Communications," but he was still waiting for Emery to be "cleared in Washington."20 While the other men of Project Tower assembled at an out-of-the-way bungalow in Ranigunj, north of Calcutta, which was to be their training quarters, Emery settled the family into a mission boarding house in Bombay, the departure port for ships leaving India for North America. Elvera wrote home in late November, "We hope to be on our way soon but it doesn't look very encouraging."21 At year's end Project Tower plans had made it to the top and received the approval of General Donovan in Washington. Most of the people who would staff the project were already at the bungalow in Ranigunj or in Calcutta, and Emery reported to the OSS office in New Delhi on i January 1945.22 In his memoirs, he recalled, "My sign up with O.S.S. the Morale Operations division did not take long. The man in charge was a huge young man by the name of Caldwell who had been raised in a missionary family in South China."23 Caldwell had left China in 1938 after being in Nanking for the massacre and had returned in December 1943 as "a one-man shipment" whom the OSS New Delhi headquarters had never heard of, but was sent on to the SACO training centre in Chungking.24 Caldwell evidently left New Delhi for Calcutta in January 1945, at more or less the same time that Emery did. He and MacDonald both worked in Calcutta early that year, and in their respective books, they portray the city as the stuff of classic spy novels, complete with beautiful spies, intrigues at diplomatic parties, and mysterious attacks on dark streets. Emery, on the other hand, spent

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the early part of 1945 at Ranigunj with the other new Tower people - and nothing to do. Within a few days he learned that "the boat had refused to take children" and the family was still in Bombay. He wrote to his mother, "If they continue to refuse to take the children, we'll just have to settle down and go to work in South India until conditions change."25 While Emery enjoyed the food and pleasant surroundings at Ranigunj, he was embarrassed to have "about ten servants to wait on 6 men," and went on to complain, "There is absolutely nothing to do except hunt, chase the monkeys, read, write letters and gripe"26 Fenn was in Calcutta, hospitalized with malaria, as 1944 ended;27 he may have still been there in January when the six men at Ranigunj had little or no direction and almost nothing to do, but Emery, assessing the operation in his memoirs, took no account of either that situation or the shakeup going on in the ranks above him. However, it is hard not to sympathize with his point of view: "Apparently Morale Operations was a new effort as we were certainly not well organized. There was a lot of 'Cover Talk,' but apparently one's own cover was something one was supposed to figure out for oneself. I was assigned the cover of a doctor running a clinic for local Chinese, a natural thing for me, but in an unnatural situation. My real assignment was to print a Chinese newspaper."28 In the lavish bungalow in India, Emery was not even producing a Chinese newspaper. Sitting around waiting for his career in intelligence to begin did not come easy for him. The money he was making embarrassed him, and even long after the war was over, the lack of accountability would trouble him. He later recalled, "I was employed as a technical advisor with the simulated rank of a major, but I was paid the salary of a Lt. Colonel. Some place along the road we were given 345 caliber service pistol and ammunition and also a 3 z caliber pistol to be carried as a concealed weapon. qW later were issued 10 French gold coins. All of our supplies were unaccountable but I returned all of them including the gold coins at the end of the war."29 The family languished in Bombay as Emery tried to cut through the red tape over transportation and wrote amusing letters about Ranigunj and his fellows, such as this one: "My roommate tells a funny story about how the Tibetan tribespeople treat monkeys.

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Robert Chappelet, the "wild Swiss" who was Emery's colleague in OSS

They don't dare kill them, but they can't afford to have them continue to destroy their crops, so they capture the monkeys in the fields, put them into cages and then reach through the bars with bamboo poles and give them a thorough beating and turn them loose again."30 The roommate, Robert Chappelet, was Emery's partner throughout his time in O S S. Chappelet, whom Emery sometimes called the "Wild Tibetan" or the "Swiss Cowboy," was the one OSS compatriot he talked about in his letters or in later years. Emery presented him with affection, but felt a little sorry for the lonely bachelor with his beloved pipe and westerns. Oliver Caldwell had a wonderfully romantic explanation for Chappelet's bachelorhood, namely, that when he lived among the tribespeople in Tibet, he fell in love with a Tibetan chieftain's daughter who died while Chappelet was away on a trip.31 Emery described Chappelet as "a Swiss native who had been in the U.S.A. training Seeing Eye dogs and their blind masters," one of

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the first to do so. "He then went to Tibet to help the monks build a station in the Himalayas similar to the St. Bernard station in the Alps. This completed he had an argument with the monks and left. However, he stayed in Tibet and started farming. He had many friends among the tribespeople in the mountains. When some of his tribespeople went to Lhasa and did not return, he walked into India and was picked up by British Army Units. When the Americans came he transferred to the American Army."32 General Donovan, the head of OSS, may have approved Projec Tower in December, but the people at Ranigunj at the beginning of February 1945 were virtually the same group as was there two months earlier, and they had little to show for the time they had spent. Since neither Emery nor the rest of the Carlson family seemed any closer to leaving India than they had been in November, Fenn let Emery go back to Bombay.33 On 6 February, however, Heppner met with Fenn in Calcutta and told him, "Tower Project has been given sole responsibility for MO and related activities in the area north of and including the Yangtze River." Secrecy was out and so was trying to work under the cover of the air force. Fenn announced to his team that "the men at Ranigunj should be over the Hump within two weeks at the latest," and he closed his letter with an exultant "Till we meet in Kunming!"34 Within a week, Fenn was lining up medical supply for Emery, and on 21 February a revised version of the Tower Plan came out. Some things had changed since the initial plan - there were now eight, rather than eleven, forward areas - but the hope of getting into the Communist areas was still part of the scheme.35 "Actual operations will begin about 15 March 45 when the first teams will enter the operational areas," said the revised plan. A headquarters in Sian would handle "administration, personnel, and supply," including publication facilities. A sub-base at Laohokow would "coordinate forward area activities and maintain liaison with air force units." Emery would be in charge of Laohokow. With the plan is a map that vividly portrays the hope of using Laohokow and Sian as jumping-off places for Loyang, Chengchow, and places to the north and east along the route to an invasion of Japan itself.36 On 19 February the Tower people turned the bungalow at Ranigunj over to another OSS group. Executive Officer Evans made

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sure Carlson's personal effects "and all the Tower material including two drums of gasoline" were taken with to Calcutta. Fenn and Evans were the first Tower people over the Hump, Emery the last, though he was only a couple of days behind Chappelet.37 On 14 March Emery watched Elvera and the children walked up the gangplank of the USS General William Mann for their long, roundabout trip to the United States. Three days later he was at the new OSS-MO headquarters in Kunming.38

chapter sixteen PROJECT TOWER llsKCHINA

By the time Emery arrived in Kunming, Bill Fenn was in Sian (spelled Hsian in OSS documents) arranging housing for the men of Project Tower. Under the reorganized OSS structure, MO work would be a small part of the "Special Program for Agent Penetration of Japanese Inner Zone for Secret Intelligence Purposes." All O S S work north of the Yangtze would operate out of a single sub-base in Sian headed by a career service man, Major Gustav Krause, who was answerable to Colonel Heppner in Chungking.1 Emery waited almost two weeks in Kunming as the Japanese complicated things. Laohokow, Shensi, scheduled to be Emery's

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"advance base," fell to the Japanese along with its U.S. airfield, and the American consul in Sian "considered Japanese attack on Sian within two weeks more or less a distinct probability."2 On 2,7 March 1945 an OSS convoy of twenty trucks left Kunming on an overland journey to the new sub-base in Sian. Oliver Caldwell was with;3 Emery was not. Instead, two days later he flew to theatre headquarters in Chungking, staying the first night at "one of the army places" but spending the weekend attending the Augustana conference.4 John L. Benson's report on the conference opened, "And so we met, just the four of us." The four were Benson, Ethel Akins, and Alyce E. Anderson, all of whom were working in Chungking, and Emery. Only three other Augustana missionaries were still in China: Sister Ingeborg Nystul, doing missionary work among refugees in Paochi; Alice K. Anderson, teaching at Cheeloo University and West China Theological Seminary in Chengtu; and Anna Olson, in charge of an Office of War Information hostel in Chungking.5 The real news of the mission was about the Chinese Christians. Thousands of refugees were in Paochi, many of them from the Augustana Lutheran field in central Honan. A group of these people had formed a church in Paochi, and Wu Hsien Min, one of the Honan Lutherans, relocated his large Chengchow Refugee Children's School nearby. Another group of refugees from the Augustana field had formed a church in Sian. Both places were "listening posts" for information on the churches and the people behind enemy lines. The news was definitely mixed. In Chengchow the Wans were still keeping both the church and the nursery school going, and "Business in this war-ravaged city was booming because contact was now established with Peking, Tientsin and Shanghai." The ten congregations of the area were completely responsible for paying salaries to both Wan and other workers. In the northwest, Tengfeng, Hsiao Ih, Yenshih, Mengtsin, and Loyang were keeping work going in spite of "serious depredations." The Loyang hospital had reopened, but no schools. Two pastors had died. Inland, Pastor Wei was keeping things going in lyang, but in Linju the enemy held the mission property. No news came from Paofeng, where the pastor had died in 1943. In Kiahsien the pastor

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was in hiding, and work "in abeyance." In Yuhsien "all mission property is held by the enemy," but the pastor "can travel freely about on his bicycle visiting the congregations, holding meetings and services." As for the southeast, in Hsuchang, "All the institutions are occupied by enemy forces." Work went on pretty much as usual in Chango-Weichuan, and the pastor there "exercises a certain amount of supervision over the work in the Hsuchang-YenlingLinying area; but from what we hear there is not much that he can do." Some children from the Hsuchang and Yuhsien child welfare camps and the middle school in Hsuchang had been able to escape to West China, but supplies and equipment, other than those from the Hsuchang hospital brought out by the nurses, had been lost.6 No doubt when Emery was in Chungking, Benson passed on other missionary news as well: Grace Gibberd had left for Canada, Bill and Mary Simpson were expecting a baby, "the remainder of the LUM and the Norwegian fields was all overrun," and Dr Lillian Olson had been released from Japanese internment.7 The weekend in Chungking over, Emery flew on to Chengtu, arriving two days ahead of the OSS truck convoy. After it reached the city, Fenn grumbled, "Since the arrival of the convoy, there has been little but confusion."8 Changes in his own role were part of the confusion; on 9 April 1945 he was "temporarily assigned as representative of the M o Branch to the Sian Mission under command of Major Gustav J. Krause. In this capacity you will be under the operational command of Major Krause and will serve as a member of his staff. You will also serve as Liaison Officer between the Chief, MO Branch, and the Commanding Officer of the Sian Mission."9 Fenn's job had suddenly become very military, and very subordinate. As the higher-ups adapted their plans to the situation created by the Japanese advance, Emery looked up old missionary friends from Honan and checked on one of the Hsuchang nursing students, who was in hospital, and he joined the OSS fellows at a dinner party given by some of the West China missionaries, whom he found a little too worldly for his taste, complaining to Elvera about cigarettes and alcohol and concluding, "If you are going to be a missionary be one with a real message."10

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When the OSS convoy left Chengtu for Sian, "The entire Morale Operations unit, even some from headquarters, made the trip. We were all armed as this was considered a war zone. Some of us may not have known what to do with the pistols, carbines, and machine guns or shotguns we had but we had them. The man in command was from headquarters, he had been on campaigns in Africa, but he was an educator and not a soldier."11 To the "man in command," the trip was an adventure full of beautiful scenery, interesting people, good Chinese food, and dangers lurking in the bandit-infested hills. To Emery it was rather ordinary travel. He recalled, "Commander Caldwell arranged for our first night's stay at a Buddhist temple where the monks served us a vegetarian supper and breakfast. The next night we camped near a river and the Commander got excited about some lights on the mountainside, which were really just peasants wandering about."12 Caldwell, describing the same incident, wrote, "Someone began to signal with a flashlight from a farmhouse on the mountain across the river. He was answered by someone else at the ferry we had just crossed. This went on for some time, and it seemed reasonable to assume that we were the subject of this conversation. Our guards were strengthened, but nothing happened to spoil the peace of the starlight."13 On 19 April the convoy arrived at the railhead in Paochi, where the trucks were loaded onto flatcars for their trip to Sian. Emery's first rash of letters from Sian centred almost exclusively on mission business: a short visit with Sister Ingeborg in Paochi, news of the death of Hsuchang's Bishop Calsa, and a reunion with the Hsuchang nurses he had left behind in the mountains a year earlier.14 To the OSS, the nurses were Emery's version of Bishop Megan's Order of Little Brothers of St John the Baptist, a vehicle for building an intelligence network. These people, whose lives and loves extended back into the countryside now held by the Japanese, had the knowledge and the contacts to put Heppner's "Inner Zone Penetration" plan to work. Some of the people Emery met in Sian in April would go back into Honan with him in a little over a month, but neither in the letters of 1945 nor in his later recollections of the time, did he seem to view them as an intelligence network. He was a doctor and

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a Christian first and foremost. He did what he needed to do to get the MO material printed and distributed, but his heart was in his clinic, and in recollection, he would dismiss his Morale Operations work as largely useless. Hsu Hsueh Jang and another nurse, Chang Ai Mei, had been in Shensi since February. In early 1945, affairs had not gone smoothly for the group in the mountains. People "were making plans to get their hands on some of the things," and "rumors had reached us regarding reports that had gone to the foreigners in West China." So the two women went to Sian to report to the missionaries. Miss Chao Mei Hsien, Mr Niu Huan T'ang, and Miss Ma stayed in Shang Tien, retrieved the hospital property, and ran a clinic there. By summer, Ma and Niu were with Emery at his OSS -cover clinic in the mountains.15 At the Red Cross Hospital in Sian, Emery had a joyful reunion with Hsu, Chang, Wang T'ien Ching (a male nurse who would join Emery's OSS team), and several other Hsuchang nurses. He wrote, "They seemed just as happy to see me as I was to see them. Ai Mei would look at me and say, 'Is it really you?' Those kids have gone through a lot, but they have come out of it with flying colors." The nurses brought news of the Honan Lutherans: pastors, including Hsu's brother, were carrying on by one stratagem or another; "Astrid's cook" and "one of the Ts'uis" had been killed; but "the nurses have all survived and are well."16 A visit to the newly founded Sian church brought more reunions, including one with the daughter of Evangelist Bei of Linju, who had been murdered. There were at least two hundred at the service, and Emery commented, "Just think of what they have gone through, and yet here they are making a new start, and getting an active church going in less than a year's time."17 When he arrived in Sian on 21 April, he joined the rest of the Tower group in a house that Fenn had rented on the Baptist mission compound. The place was in the heart of the city, and the rest of the compound was being used by the mission. The MO group was not particularly large; some of the men dated back to the earliest days of Project Tower planning: Fenn, Emery, the young "mish-kid" Private Seely, Chappelet, Caldwell, and Caldwell's brother-in-law, John Pilley - all people who knew China and spoke

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Hsu Hsueh Jang, head nurse of the Hsuchang hospital and leader of the hospital group in the mountains in 1944-45

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Chinese. There were a couple of Chinese, recent hires, and new or newish Americans, including the new acting director, Herb Jackson, who was "military," spoke no Chinese, and had joined the group in Kunming.18 On 2,6 April, as five of the group finished supper, a Chinese girl who seemed somewhat unbalanced came in unannounced, and thus began an incident that sent Gustav Krause, the commander of the Sian base, and Richard Heppner, chief of O S S China, into orbit. When the dust settled, Fenn was gone - out of OSS completely; Oliver Caldwell had been shuffled off to plan a project that never came to fruition (or caused any harm); and only Emery, Chappelet, and Seely were left (of the foreigners) to send into the field to do MO work.19 In the U.S. National Archives OSS material, "The Case of the Sudden Girl" is a fat packet of reports on whose cover sheet Heppner scrawled, "I have had enough of this nonsense from MO Hsian. Please see that their house is closed at once and that they live & work with other O.S.S. people. If necessary liquidate the whole group."20 What had happened? Reconstructed from the reports of the four people involved and the "Acting Director," the affair went something like this: the girl came in unannounced, as the Chinese were wont to do, and Emery talked to her briefly before he left. She sat down in his chair and began wolfing down food; then she threw up. The four at the table, two Americans and two Chinese (one of whom did not speak Mandarin), decided that the girl might be a spy rather than a mental case and attempted to interrogate her. She became frightened and tried to leave. They detained her and notified the local police. Once the police showed up, they were interested in who occupied the house, but "Dr. Carlson who had returned home in the meantime and who knew China and the Chinese persuaded them to leave without giving them any information."21 There is no report by Emery in the files, and oddly enough, when the house had been closed and the men reassigned, Gustav Krause wrote Heppner a personal thank you in which he said nothing about the two Americans directly involved in the incident (Jackson and Paget). Instead, Krause's venom was directed toward Fenn, who was not around for the incident and had been shifted to Krause's own staff! In the note, Krause held Fenn responsible for

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an unexplained "Caldwell situation," which he blamed on Fenn's "propagandizing," and said, "I realized when I met the group for the first time that we were going to have trouble because I felt that the group as a whole were a lot of 'weak sisters' with big ideas." His distaste for missionaries scarcely disguised, Krause faulted new MO chief for China Dulin for "sending so many people of the same type."22 Krause did not make the mistake of tarring the whole unit with the same brush. He praised two people highly: Captain Evans, whom he transferred to Services, and Emery, whom he set up in a new dispensary.23 Emery seemed scarcely aware of "The Case of the Sudden Girl," mentioning the incident neither in his letters nor in his later recollections. He did write about the Seventh-day Adventist compound outside of town, which became OSS Field Command Headquarters - the quarters and the mess hall, his own little dispensary, and the Chinese soldiers and peasants, who "found the Americans very amusing and started mocking our speech." He felt sheepish about becoming irritated with one, not realizing he was wearing a sidearm and "the fellow probably feared for his life." And he wrote of the "Yugoslavians who had been with Tito's guerillas," men he described as "tough mountain people of Europe who knew no fear." Part of the three hundred commandos Heppner had brought in for the "Special Program for Agent Penetration of Japanese Inner Zone for Secret Intelligence Purposes," they were sometimes called Jedburghs.24 Even on base, Emery ran into old Honan missionaries. On 2,9 April, he wrote, "Saw the Irish Bishop and the Priest who used to visit in our home so much, the other day. They both dress just like I do now. Father H. is a chaplain, but the Bishop wears the clothes for convenience."25 The censor let the references to the two Catholics from Honan pass. Father Henkels, in spite of his long association with the SAGO boys at Linju and after, seems never to have been anything but a chaplain. Emery, even in his memoirs, never mentioned the bishop as a fellow OSS man, and OSS records do not show Thomas Megan as an employee until 18 May 1945, a few days before Emery and Robert Chappelet hiked into Honan to start MO work. Megan was then in charge of recruiting agents for something called the "North Carolina Project."26

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Megan had, however, been hanging around the OSS people and making himself useful for some time before he was formally hired. His name cropped up frequently as a source of information or personnel. For instance, Albert Seely's report number 5, made during his trip to Paochi, mentioned a fellow named Wang, whom Seely described as "hired for OSS by Col. Harding through Bishop Megan."27 In Undercover Girl, Elizabeth MacDonald was quite proud of herself for using Bishop Megan as an inspiration for Emery and his fellows when she indoctrinated them. She seemed unaware that they might have known the bishop or thought of his "little flock" as anything other than "his own espionage net in Free China," which "supplied intelligence to the Chinese secret service under General Tai Li."28 For Emery, simply being back doing something medical was a great relief. He wrote on 4 May, "I started working on my own little dispensary. If I do say it myself it is really going to be a nice little place. But as I handle all these new drugs and equipment I keep thinking of how wonderful it would have been to have had them during the past three years."29 In truth, even though he ran clinics for the Chinese help on the compound as well as the OSS men, Emery craved more active medical work. He held after-church clinics at the new church organized in Sian and dreamed of having a TB sanitarium in post-war Honan. On 7 May, when he finally got the news that the family had reached the United States, his answering letter was mostly about his dream of a TB sanitarium and Miss Hsu's dream of founding a nursing order of deaconesses that could staff such a facility.30 In May 1945 the GET US Plan, which coupled MO work much more strongly with S O work training guerrillas and planning sabotage behind the lines, replaced the Tower Plan. In the weekly report for ii to 18 May, Major Krause said that he intended "to get Dr. Carlson and his group started into the HONAN Area within seven days."31 Before he left, Emery went on several interesting "house calls," which had him brushing against history in the making. One included Koreans being trained for the invasion of Japan, another a trip into Communist-held territory north of the river. In a letter of 19 May, he said only, "I just had an interesting experience in doing a physical check-up on a native group stationed near here." But in

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his memoirs, he called them part of the "Commando Units" and commented disparagingly that "they had gall enough to surrender so I passed them all for the first contingent of the New Korean Army." Historian Maochun Yu, however, described the Korean commandos as the first major project for the Sian command.32 Whether or not Emery's next adventure, treating a White Russian ill in a cave behind the lines in Communist territory, had anything to do with the most famous White Russian involved in O S S work writer Leo Tolstoy's grandson Ilya, is not clear. OSS did, however, get involved in an attempt to place agents in Communist territory, and Tolstoy was a part of that scheme.33 Emery wrote on 26 May, "Emergency calls on this job come in longer distances, but of course the transportation is faster so the time is about the same as it used to be when I was riding a bike."34 While he included no specifics of the trip into Communist-held territory in that letter, in his memoirs he recorded, "Word came that a White Russian was sick in a cave up North near the Communist lines. There was a bridge over a river which was shared by the railroad and the highway. It was a long way around however. So, we took a short cut the Chinese told us of where we could cross the river on a ferry. We got stuck in quicksand." The Russian was recovering by the time they got to him, but Emery "stayed the night in the deep cave guarded by a Chinese sentry. It seems to me that I had nightmares that night and imagined someone coming to my bed but the Chinese sentry reassured me that no one had entered the cave." When Emery got back to Sian, he was called on the carpet and the commander "told me that a plane had been sent out the previous day to look for us and had not spotted us. He also told me that our outfit had left for the front the previous day and I had a day to get medical supplies in order and go by weapon carrier to catch up with the unit who were to pick up horses for us to take on our trip into the Western Honan mountains."35

chapter seventeen BEHIND J A P A N E S E L I N E S WITH T E A M V

"It may have been OSS's first penetration into west Honan, but for me it was a return home," Emery wrote in his memoirs.1 The old temple near Tantouchen that became his West Honan OSS headquarters was only about sixty miles from Linju, his daughter Faith's birthplace, and the churches he had been responsible for in lyang were even closer to the temple. Emery's journey back into Honan, like the one out the year before, was by modern transportation in Shensi province but on primitive mountain footpaths in Honan. The first day's travel, by truck, covered almost half the actual distance from Sian to Tan-

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touchen. The three foreigners on the team - Carlson, Chappelet, and Seely - had been on the original lists of Project Tower personnel, but now that they were in the field, the project had a new name, Team Viper. The four Chinese team members included two male nurses who had escaped from Hsuchang with Emery. Because of Emery's emergency call into Communist territory, his group left Sian a day after a sabotage group they were to travel with, catching up with them in Shangnan, Shensi. Emery recalled, "We stopped for the night and slept in a dry creek bed. As morning approached, farmers came down the creek carrying things to market and almost stepped on us. We got up and proceeded carefully as we did not want to overrun our group or run into the Japanese. As we rounded a bend in the road, we saw a group of American Gls washing up in a creek bed. This was our group, and this was as far as the Weapons carrier would take us."2 The other group, Team Lion, consisted of about fifty Chinese saboteurs and the American officers who trained and led them. These men would work south of Loyang and north and east of Emery's Morale Operation headquarters at Tantouchen. While he would set up a headquarters and clinic in the mountains and stay there, the sabotage team would be more mobile. Team Lion people regularly passed through Tantouchen, and they did some of their training there as well.3 After Team Viper met Team Lion, the journey became much slower and more difficult. Not only were they travelling through mountains on narrow footpaths, but they were in an area where active fighting was going on, and they needed to negotiate with the Chinese military and local and provincial governments in order to proceed. Emery recalled, "We were brought to the Chinese encampment and I found that I knew the commanding general as I had treated him at his home in Linju." 4 The Chinese fed the two teams royally and equipped them with mounts and pack animals. Once on their way, "we stopped and contacted Sian by radio, advising them of our movement. I am sure that the Japanese knew where we were too, but they did not molest us." Emery later recalled amusing things about the trip: hills so steep he got off his horse and held on to its tail for traction as he climbed, "a sort of a sex wrangle" in which mules loaded with highly explo-

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sive C-compound and percussion caps "chased each other down the mountainside off the road," somehow avoiding blowing everyone to bits, and the fact that the two interpreters OSS hired were Cantonese who spoke English but had to leave talking with the Honanese peasants to Emery.5 But the trip was not without dangers. Governor Liu of Honan held the group up for several days "because of fighting between Central Government and Communist troops in the area," but eventually allowed them to go to Tantouchen, "40 miles west of Hsiunghsien city." The tiny mountain village "was the temporary seat of the Hsiunghsien county government."6 Since 1938, the capital of Honan province had been fleeing westward as the Japanese advanced: the first move, from Kaifeng to Loyang, meant moving west but remaining on the railroad and in a major city; the next move, to Lushan, put the provincial government in a smaller city but still on the motor road between Loyang and Chungking and the rest of West China; with the I CHI GO advance in 1944, the provincial government moved still farther west, into Neihsiang. Emery's meeting with the governor was not even in Neihsiang city but in tiny Shang Ping, in the mountains on the western edge of the hsien, almost at the Shensi border. Team Viper was going into a Japanese-controlled area where even the Chinese local government had retreated to a village reachable only by footpath. Its headquarters would be in a temple a little way from that village. From there team members would provide MO "in the area covered roughly by a semi-circle south of the Lunghai Railroad centered on Loyang about a 50 mile radius," and expand its operation "to the Honan Plain in the Eastern portion of Honan Province."7 The group took four days to get from the government encampment to Tantouchen, making about ten miles a day. They had only one brush with danger: "One morning while we were riding down a mountain valley, Chappelet was ahead of me singing 'O What a Beautiful Morning.' All of a sudden a rifle shot rang out from the hills. No one was hit but Chappelet stopped singing. We identified ourselves as Americans and there were no more shots. The peasant guerrillas apologized. Being such a non-descript outfit, I could hardly blame them for shooting, but it frightened me as Chinese bandits had a reputation for shooting first and talking later."8

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Emery wrote in his final report to OSS, "Living conditions in the mountain areas are of a very low standard and often times it was impossible to obtain proper food. However, whenever contact was made with Chinese civilian or military officials we were entertained very well." He continued, "Contacts were made with guerrilla leaders, through the area. Except for their apprehension for our safety, because of the communist threats, the leaders were all favorable to our coming into the area. At several points gifts of Red Cross drugs taken along were made to commanders, and to Chinese medical officers contacted."9 The temple Team Viper used as its headquarters was a spacious building with rooms on either side of a bricked courtyard. The Chinese soldiers used one side, and the Americans had two rooms on the opposite side: "one we used for beds and the other for dining." The most attractive feature, however, was across the road - a mountain stream with a pool and beach. "The beach was used by the Texan to train the Chinese soldiers in guerilla attacks, but the pool immediately became a place for skinny dipping by the Americans." Skinny-dipping had its dangers, however: sore throats and amoebic dysentery.10 When Team Viper arrived in Tantouchen, Emery had the medical necessities he needed and the group had two radio sets, but the first weekly report from headquarters in Sian noted "signal plan, code pads and other accessories just received from Kunming will have to be air dropped as soon as a dropping area is arranged. In the interim, Team Lion's radio facility will be utilized by Viper. Reproduction equipment, on order from Kunming, will be air dropped when received."11 Ten days after Emery and Team Viper arrived at Tantouchen, they got their first air drop.12 Emery set up his clinic in Tantouchen and stayed there, except for one emergency medical trip, but both Chappelet and Albert Seely ranged throughout their assigned area disseminating MO material and, as people with more knowledge of China and the Chinese, helped the sabotage team with practical matters of translation, communication, and the ordinary business of life. The two Chinese male nurses, Wang and Niu, ranged around the area as well and held clinics at other villages even closer to the Japanese and actual fighting. The weekly report for 19 June 1945 described Team

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The temple at Tantouchen, headquarters for OSS Team Viper in 1945

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Viper's MO work as "leaflets on pin pointed targets" and "Rumors and poison pen letters" whose "targets will be all personnel on the lines of communication: the Japanese army; the puppets; and the Chinese civilian populace." In addition, they supplied "Daily radio intelligence reports" on possible targets.13 The official work spelled out in the 19 June report by no means took up all of Emery's time; other members of the group did most of it. The locals were "congenial and co-operative" and fixed up a clinic where he treated the "same old skin sores, but also some Kala Azars which I am glad I have drugs to treat." He told Elvera, "I'm getting more and more inspired for the return after the Jays are cleared out. I'm more and more convinced that my work will lie in Public Health and especially T.B. The fellows ask me why in the world I want to throw my life away out here rather than to work at home. I tell them I just can't help it, and furthermore it is just so much more fun to practice medicine out here than at home."14 Controlling or eradicating kala azar was high on Emery's list of public health priorities. The disease was endemic in Honan in the 19405 and hit children particularly hard. Kala azar is a disease most North Americans, even doctors, are not familiar with. The word means "black sickness" in Hindi. The skin of its victims darkens to a clayish grey, and they usually die of an overwhelming dysentery and/or pneumonia. The disease attacks the spleen and comes on slowly over a period of time. Transmitted in a rather complicated fashion through a parasite on sandflies, it can wipe out whole villages, becoming endemic once the sandflies of an area are infected. Kala azar, also called Leishmaniasis, first showed up along the watercourses of southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and spread like wild fire, but the details of its transmission were not completely understood until 1924-25. Early attempts to treat the disease with antimony compounds were not very successful; however, by 1935 an effective treatment had been found, a pentavalent antimonial usually called Pentostam. This was the medicine Emery was using in his kala azar clinics. United Church missionaries in Honan Dr William McClure and Dr Jean Dow are credited with discovering the cure.15 Emery explained the treatment procedure: "Since the most obvious symptom of the disease is an enlarged spleen, the effec-

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tiveness of the treatment is gauged by the size of the spleen. We would probe the patient's spleen and trace its outline on the skin with mercurochrome. The outline would still be there when the patient came to the clinic the next week, and we could easily ascertain whether the spleen was shrinking."16 Emery and Team Viper were not at Tantouchen long before news of their arrival moved through the Chinese grapevine. The Hsuchang nurses sent a servant who "returned with a supply of American Red Cross drugs for us to use at Shang Tien."17 Emery's final report to OSS said that the man also carried MO material to Kiahsien. A little later one of the female Hsuchang nurses, Miss Ma, also came to Tantouchen to help. Albert Seely, who was actually part of Viper's Morale Operation team, served as an interpreter for Lieutenant Rudd of Team Lion until 29 June. This was because the Chinese man assigned to the group as an interpreter did not speak the Honanese dialect; Seely, a "mish-kid," did. After the group being trained by Team Lion left Tantouchen, Seely and William Li, one of the Chinese OSS men, went on an MO trip to the southwest, to cities such as Kiahsien, Hsiangcheng, Hsuchang, and Yuhsien, where the Lutheran, CIM, and Catholic missionaries had been before the ICHIGO advance.18 Another Team Lion man, Captain Brown, headed north and east and reported: "Much difficulty has been experienced with the Communist-Nationalist situation. A large portion of this area is controlled by the Communists who have filtered down from North of the Yellow River. They move into areas just as soon as the Japs withdraw, and fight the Chinese Nationalists for possession of the land when necessary. An attack is planned against the enemy supply line East of Loning. This attack will take place as soon as the rest of the group and the equipment has moved North from Tantouchen."19 On 18 June Chappelet and Nurse Wang headed north toward the Hsiunghsien area and "organized the first distribution of MO material through General Hsu's guerrillas. The most fantastic rumors were circulating in the city about thousands of American and Chinese troops arriving at Tantouchen with artillery. And also about paratroop landings." Chappelet set Wang up in a clinic in Hwangt-

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sun, where he "did an excellent job, taking care of hundreds of sick and wounded, and vaccinating the guerrillas." Chappelet himself visited the front lines, where three hundred Japanese were holed up in hundreds of caves, retaliating for sniper fire by killing civilians. He reported, "I visited every guerrilla and army outpost. Talking everywhere to the men and giving them the news. Many did not know or did not believe that Germany had surrendered."20 Back in Tantouchen, Emery held morning clinics, and "the 80 to 100 [patients] is about all my disposition and strength will endure." A system of paper registration slips backfired when people started making their own. "It sounds funny but it is pitiful too; they are just that hard up for medical care," Emery said, adding that "there are a lot of advanced T.B.s and cancers." Chappelet fell ill ninety li away, and Emery, after a nine-hour trip afoot and by horseback to tend him, "was so tired that I just laid down on a bed and stayed there."21 In the larger picture, Morale Operations material was produced in Kunming, with its writers and researchers, its typesetters and printers, but the logistics of getting anything into Tantouchen was such that bringing in actual leaflets and other printed material was fairly impractical. Team Viper depended heavily on setting up its own production of printed material in the field. Emery reported: "During the time in the field a daily mimeographed bulletin of the news in Chinese was published and distributed to local officials. A contract was made with a local printer for use of a stone lithograph press. On this press a weekly newspaper was published and distributed along with other MO material. This publication consisted of about one half authentic news gleaned from radio broadcasts and half editorials with a black slant. Two thousand copies were printed and distributed each week."22 By 8 July Team Viper was in high gear. "Large quantities of MO material have been distributed in Loyang, Hsiunghsien, lyang through contacts with guerillas in conjunction with SO Team Lion. Two Chinese team members [of Team Viper] are in vicinity of lyang to expedite distribution of material."23 A week later it could report that "9800 items have been distributed since n June among Jap troops and Chinese civilians in the Loyang, lyang, Hsiunghsien

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areas. Included were 3000 items directed at Jap and Korean troops in occupied areas ... A Chinese team member who can write both Chinese and Japanese will write material which can be reproduced on a stone press and a mimeograph. A small 'black' newspaper is already being printed using these facilities."24 The man who wrote both Chinese and Japanese was the "interpreter" who initially had been nearly useless in dealing with the local Honanese. However, because of the ideographic nature of written Chinese, he had no problem with writing for the Honanese - and even for the Japanese and Koreans. On 6 July Seely and Li had gone on an MO trip to the southeast which basically kept them in the old Augustana, CIM, and Norwegian Lutheran fields until the end of the war. Emery said in his final report, "Pfc. Seely's contacts stimulated General Kao to start MO production and distribution of his own."25 Chappelet spent the early part of July in Tantouchen preparing an airstrip for the second air drop, but once that came, he was off again, delivering supplies to Team Lion. He travelled through Communist territory and reported, "On the way I had to send my army and guerrilla escort numbering 40 back because of lack of food." He returned to Tantouchen "in rather bad condition after a 2.00 mile hike through the mountains."26 Team Viper's second air drop, on 18 July, was a good deal more exciting than the first: it brought them a new co-worker, mail, supplies, and a bright red parachute that provided a jazzy new decor for the drab old temple.27 Emery recalled, "The radio man who had come to us was a young soldier who had never jumped before and he told the men in the plane, 'If those fellows could do it, I guess I can.' The airmen had replied, 'They walked in,' and pushed him on his way."28 Two days after the air drop, Emery wrote to Elvera, "More and more of the nurses are coming around one by one, and gradually I'm getting the stories together. I'm praying for guidance as to how to keep these people in tow until the time conies when we can use them again. I hope that it will not be too long."29 On 2,7 July a group of fifty newly trained troops arrived at Tantouchen and Team Lion made plans to move east. Chappelet

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accompanied them, but not before passing on the news he had received from a Chinese general: "a body of approximately 100,000 puppet troops, covering the major portion of Honan Province and the two railways, are ready to surrender."30 When Elizabeth MacDonald wrote Undercover Girl, she must have been impressed by the number, for she commented, "At the close of the war reports came in on July 2.6 that Viper was arranging the surrender of some 100,000 puppet troops, virtually all the Chinese who were under arms in Honan Province."31 Team Viper had been sent in to encourage defection but not to deal with it personally, especially in such huge numbers. Rather than trying to handle a situation of such a magnitude solely by wire, Emery and two of his co-workers left Tantouchen on 7 August and started walking west to Lushih, where they could catch a ride to Sian. They had thought the trip was to consult about the 100,000 puppet troops, but when they arrived at headquarters, a much larger surrender was in the offing. "Our informal camp had changed into a spit and polish dressup place. That day there had been news of the atomic bomb dropping and the next day came the news of the Japanese surrender."32 Emery and his co-workers were not the only guests at O S S headquarters. General Donovan, the OSS chief from Washington, had been meeting with General Wedemeyer and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, as well as with Colonel Heppner, head of OSS China, and they flew to Sian on 7 August for an inspection tour.33 When Emery wrote to Elvera on V J day, 15 August, he said nothing about the visiting dignitaries, and his view was cautionary not euphoric: "The Chinese are jubilant, but other questions are looming up which do not make their future as rosy as it should be. Large Jap armies are not defeated and this country does not know Peace as we know it."34 When the surrender came through, Robert Chappelet was right at the front, where he observed the actual surrender of Japanese troops and saw how the winners and the losers comported themselves. He and Nurse Niu had left Tantouchen on 30 July, hiking in to an area of heavy fighting where Nurse Wang was ill. On 3 August Chappelet continued on, making his third MO distribution in the

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Hsiunghsien area. At Shang Tien, where the Hsuchang nurses had established their clinic, he "organized a field base at the hospital" and was "40 miles away over four mountains" on V J day.35 Some details of the surrender in the field disturbed him greatly. In lyang the Japanese were allowed to escape, and "my presence was no more welcomed by the Chinese," who wanted no witness of "the looting and the execution of true or supposed traitors." In Hsiunghsien a Japanese commander who tried to surrender was executed, and Chappelet found evidence that "the commander of the [Hsiunghsien] garrison should be put on the list of war criminals." He said in disgust, "Never during three months of operations in the field, did I get so near to become a casualty as walking in the streets of [Hsiunghsien]. Twenty odd people were executed as traitors, despite the traitors left with the Japs taking their families with them." Chappelet returned to Tantouchen on 2,2, August.36 With the Japanese surrender, there was no longer any need for the propaganda that was Team Viper's reason for existence. On the day of the surrender, Emery was already at headquarters in Sian; Wally Streilien, the newly arrived radio operator, and one of the interpreters were holding the fort at Tantouchen; and Seely was headed that way. By 2.6 August all the men assembled at Tantouchen had been flown out, and when Chappelet wrote his final report on 8 September 1945, the operation was over.37

chapter eighteen R E C L A I M I N G HONAN HOSPITALS

As the Chinese wildly celebrated Japan's defeat, Emery wrote soberly, "The war is over but I don't think that the Chinese really realize what it means yet. All of these millions of soldiers who have grown up in the army, and know nothing else. How are they to be returned to normal civilian life? It is different from American boys who have home ties and something to go back to."1 When Japan surrendered in 1945, there were 1.75 million civilian Japanese in China and over 2 million soldiers, not counting puppet troops.2 Repatriation was not simply a matter of finding people and transporting them back to Japan. At issue was whom the

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Japanese should surrender to and where, as well as what should happen to the territories they had controlled. Russia complicated things by declaring war on Japan the day before the United States dropped its second atomic bomb on Japan, and Russian soldiers rushed to Manchuria to accept the Japanese surrender and take over the distribution of the weapons and materiel in China's most industrialized province. Plenty of other forces were available to do the job, the most obvious being the Chinese, with about 3.7 million troops in their own country. But therein lay the problem - about i million of those Chinese men were Communist Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army troops, and these were in the nearest proximity to the surrendering Japanese. They were also the soldiers Chiang Kaishek least wanted collecting arms from surrendering Japanese or administering the newly freed portions of northern and coastal China. In fact, Chiang was willing to let puppets, and even Japanese, remain in positions where they could prevent Communists from stepping in.3 The Allies, especially the Americans, helped the Nationalists both by transporting their troops and by sending their own troops into such major cities as Shanghai, Tientsin, and Peking during September and October of 194 5.4 While Emery's MO team disbanded quickly, other OSS work in North China took on a new urgency with Japan's surrender, and Sian OSS people joined in evacuating POWs (and gathering intelligence).5 Emery could have joined the "surrender teams"; Thomas Megan did. On 15 August, in "the line of duty," he flew to Peking and was there to greet the Sinsiang priests who had been interned at the Franciscan House of Studies. There was no such happy ending for one of Megan's and Carlson's fellow missionaries turned OSS officers, Baptist John Birch, who was shot and killed not far from Honan's eastern border a little over a week after the surrender.6 Emery chose to return to mission work and wrote an eloquent warning to other missionaries planning to do so: If you see any of the new workers who plan to come out you should stress that they are coming to an established church, which has stood on its own for some years. That they will be

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working with Pastors and other workers who are mature spiritually, and have gone through experiences of testing far beyond those experienced by any young missionary. They are not coming to a heathen country or to a dominated country but to an independent power whose people have heard the gospel and seen its results both in their own country and in other parts of the world. If anyone expects to come out and be a little potentate with an army of Chinese workers under his control, he will be sadly mistaken.7 When the remaining Augustana missionaries met for an interim conference in early September, a similar caution governed as they voted to discontinue the foreign missionary conference, institute a Joint Council of Missionaries and Chinese, and prepare "All district and institutional reports and accounts" in both Chinese and English as they worked toward "the ideal that the Chinese Church have full autonomy." While the foreigners would still decide on the stationing of missionaries, "The wishes of the Chinese Church must be ascertained and followed as far as practical." When the annual conference itself met in Hsuchang in January 1946, most of the delegates were Chinese, and reports by the Chinese who had handled the work in 1945 constituted the major portion of the printed report.8 Even before he took the family to India in 1944, Emery had written a long report to the Chinese National Health Administration explaining the history of the Augustana Lutheran medical work, the facilities and personnel the Augustana group had in Honan, and their plans for the future. With the repeal of the extraterritoriality treaties, the Chinese had begun regulating and controlling health care in their own country, and they expected missions to co-operate with the civil authorities.9 Emery went back to Honan to reopen the Hsuchang hospital with money and supplies from "several agencies which have promised emergency help, including UNRRA [the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration], the [Chinese] National Health Administration, IRC [International Red Cross] and Amercom."10 He went armed with "letters to the local authorities" from the Chinese National Health Administration, but getting transportation

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back to Honan proved frustratingly slow, and he told Elvera, "I will not get to take much with me on the plane but perhaps the Friends Ambulance Unit will send up the stuff later."11 Transportation appeared suddenly and spectacularly when Emery and nurse Wang Tien Ching (also no longer with O S S) went out to the OSS base. There "Capt. Gates asked me where I was going, and when I said Hsuchang he asked me if I wanted to drive down." Actually, the truck had to ride a flatcar to Loyang, where Emery spent some time checking out the Augustana work and property. Then he endured "six days of bucking mud and hills" to get to Chengchow. Once there, he wrote, "The Japs are still very much everywhere here in Honan; they strut around town with swords and weapons, drive around in cars and trucks and even run railroads and airplanes."12 While in Chengchow, Emery wrote to John L. Benson: Pastor Wan [of Chengchow] is well and they have been getting on all right. Mrs. Wan is in Kaifeng for medical treatment. There are no civilian hospitals here. Saw Dr. Wang Fi Ran and Pastor Wu Yu Yun in Loyang and they are all right. The hospital is carrying on after a fashion. The Japs just live in our houses. Miss Bailey of the Boat Mission is now living in the Ashcraft house here after two years in the hills in hiding. The Chinese took mighty good care of her. She certainly has a real testimony. The CIM Hospital in Kaifeng has been returned to the Mission and Mr. Urich (Swiss) is carrying on there.13 It did not take Emery long to travel from Chengchow to Hsuchang, and once in Hsuchang, he was very much part of the business of getting the Japanese out of town, although he did not officially accept anyone's surrender. The first night back he slept in the police station because "the Japs are in all our property and the Chief of Police being one of the old officials offered us accommodations." The Japanese had turned the entire west compound into a hospital for over a thousand patients, but things moved fast on other fronts. The day after Emery arrived, he saw the general "and

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didn't even have to ask him about the [city] property until he suggested that the Japs get out right away." The Japanese were, however, "carrying off all the furniture and even tearing down the building until we stopped them." Emery made plans to move the welfare camp into the west compound temporarily and observed, "The Japs are very polite and do pretty much what they are told especially when there is an American around, but they can pull some pretty nasty tricks yet. Dr. Ho claims that they push the peasants off the trains causing accidents."14 Joseph Henkels recorded in his autobiography that he caught a ride back to his field with a surrender team. The "other Americans" who accompanied Emery to Hsuchang may have been with this team, for Henkels said, "The Japanese troops stationed in Honan were ordered to move into the city of Hsuchang and wait there until a team of Chinese and American officers arrived to accept their surrender."15 This situation may also explain the presence of so many Japanese troops in a city that had not previously played a crucial strategic role in the war. On his second night back, Emery "slept in a spring bed that belonged to our mission" and dreamed of opening the primary school. Pastor Hsu Sueh Djong, Nurse Hsu's brother, was with him in the city compound as well. Emery called Pastor Hsu "one of our most outstanding pastors" and added, "He and I are just about as full of dreams and ideas; I wonder how many can be carried out."16 Pastor Hsu Sueh Djong was about forty-five years old and a native of Linju. His was an old Augustana Lutheran family: his father was one of the first evangelists in Kiahsien, his mother had been a Bible woman, and an older brother was at one time principal of the middle school in Hsuchang. Hsu Sueh Djong attended mission schools, but according to Gustav Carlberg's Thirty Years in China, he "entered upon prodigal ways." Carlberg went on to say, "He joined a bandit army. Became an officer and later a general." However, when Emery reported a conversation with Hsu about his past, the army days certainly were not portrayed as "bandit" in nature.17 On Emery's first Sunday back in Hsuchang, "Pastor Hsu had a great time in the pulpit and preached a fine sermon. The old ladies were so happy to be back in the church that I thought that they

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Clockwise: Emery Carlson, Pastor Hsu of Hsuchang, Pastor Ho of Loyang, and Pastor Wan of Chengchow

would jump, but the service was very decorous." After the service it was time for the children to gather around, ask about Erleen, see photos of the Carlson children, and get taken for a ride around the block in the "Jap car" Emery was using. Emery's letter closed with the news, "The Japs are out of the city property but they are very much in the west suburb property. Tomorrow morning I am to see the General about it again to get the details for the turnover thrashed out. It seems that we will have to take over gradually one compound at the time." Getting the Japanese out of the hospital and the west suburb compound would prove no easy task, and Emery ended up following Chinese advice and simply moving in with the Japanese, saying that "perhaps that will be the only way to get them out and save the equipment."18 Emery was becoming more and more anxious to get the medical supplies he had acquired in Chungking to Hsuchang; he wrote, "The General has been holding out on me and now he says that

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there are bandits on the road so I can't go for that reason. I have been very impatient about it all, but perhaps the Lord has a better plan in view. This is really my first experience with being left all alone without anyone who can speak English to converse with. (Of course there is Dr. Ho but he is so out of practice that he prefers to speak Chinese exclusively.)" The authorities feared Communists in Linju, Kiahsien, and Paofeng and would not allow Emery even to go and "look around."19 The morning of n October 1945, Pastor Hsu, Nurse Wang, and Emery began the day by praying about the truck and hospital problems, and when Wang and Emery went out to the hospital and talked to the Japanese commander, "We reached an agreement that he is to vacate the hospital building proper by November ist." Little was left in the place except thirty steel beds and the light plant, which, however, the Japanese had running. Two Japanese additions, an X-ray machine and an ice plant, "are to be left in place."20 Answered prayer did not stop at the gates of the hospital. Wang, Hsu, and Carlson went on to the general's headquarters, and "Without our even asking about it the General wanted to know when we wanted the truck. After I got my breath I said that we would start tomorrow." Truck and gasoline were to be delivered, and "tomorrow I hope to be on my way to Sian driving a Japanese made truck flying an American flag."21 On 15 October Emery wrote from Sian, "This has been a big day. I drove the first surrendered Jap truck into Sian." His first experience with a right-hand-drive vehicle was in "a 2,-ton truck loaded with salt, cloth & people." They spent their first night without incident in a village where "they told us that the communists were 8 li out in another village." Next, they unloaded in Nanyang and drove the empty truck to Neihsiang. Beyond Neihsiang they crossed a river, plowing through sand. "The truck couldn't make it so about 50 men pulled and pushed and we finally got over." On their last day, they "drove through the desolation of the Hsi Hsia Kou battlefield where the Chinese and Japs fought all spring and summer." No crops had been planted for miles, and "the farmers were just coming back" to "no houses standing. Just burned out walls." Much affected by the desolation, Emery planned to contact UNRRA about building materials for the people. The

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last lap of the trip, through the Tsin Ling mountains, was beautiful, but "All of the bridges are out so we consistently crossed rivers by driving down into the water." In crowded Sian, Emery shared a room with Bishop Peng Fu, the head of the Lutheran Church in China, and the next day he journeyed on to Paochi with the bishop and two Chinese Lutheran pastors, "they to have Chu Hui and I to pick up the medicines etc. which should be there by now."22 While Emery was thinking of himself as strictly a missionary going back to Sian to pick up necessary medical supplies and other things for the missions, the fact that he was driving a surrendered Japanese truck (indeed, one he said was the first surrendered truck brought back to Sian) lent credence to the idea that he was still doing what MO chief Dulin called "special government service" in a telegram of 25 September 1945 listing OSS personnel still in China in a "private capacity."23 When Emery headed back to Honan with his medical supplies, he had yet another truck, but "This time Dr. McClure and the Friend's Ambulance Unit people have been with me on this whole deal. Now they are staying here in Chengchow to try to get the Baptist Hospital going and I am going down to Hsuchang to try to get the ball rolling there."24 Emery made two trips to Loyang in the truck before heading to Chengchow. While in Loyang, he "got the Japs cleared out of the property," but he worried there was no one to occupy the houses.25 People such as Emery, McClure, Henkels, and Megan seemed to be getting back into the province because of their military connections, but missionaries in West China, including John L. Benson and the single women, were having less success getting permission. Emery and the truck did have some passengers who had been in Hsuchang during the war - cook Lin's wife and children, four nurses, including Misses Hsu and Chang, and Father Zulian, "the little Italian I did a hernia operation on some weeks before we had to flee." Emery told Elvera about the priest's experiences with the Japanese: Father Zulian "really went through a lot there at Hsuchang after we left. His fellow priest was killed, bayoneted, right there in the compound right in front of him. He was kicked and beaten terrible."26

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The sixty-mile trip from Chengchow to Hsuchang took all day, and getting the truck off the flatbed was no picnic, but, Emery wrote, "it was certainly fortunate that I was able to make this trip. This is the first shipment of Allied medical supplies to reach this area, and we can surely make good use of them. Then there are the schoolbooks which the kids are getting today."27 On i November, Emery reclaimed the Hsuchang hospital and wrote to supporters, "Just this morning we took over the hospital building from the Japanese. We left the building the morning of April 20, 1944, with the Jap planes overhead and the Jap armies less than thirty miles from town. We returned riding in an American Army Jeep driven by a Captain who happens to be here now and were greeted by an amiable Jap major who bowed low and apologized for the condition of the building." Japanese soldiers would be put to work whitewashing and cleaning up the hospital, which had not been as severely damaged by bombing as had been reported earlier. Much of the furniture was gone, "but there are enough beds so that as soon as we get mattresses, and linen ready we can begin admitting patients." Emery cautioned supporters that the Japanese military hospital would be in the schools and outbuildings for a while because "it will be impossible for them to move all of their sick for some time." He added, "Several of our former staff nurses have returned, and some of the students will soon be around, and we hope that we can get the nursing school reopened by the first of the year. More foreign staff is needed; both doctors and nurses and they are needed now." He closed his report to friends by saying, "Our hospital building here is one of the finest in this part of China, and we are thankful to God that it has been saved throughout these years of war. Now perhaps with thankful hearts we can start planning for the Nurses Home, a Chapel and maybe a Tuberculosis building."28 Sixty miles north Dr Robert McClure, with the aid of his Friends Ambulance Unit, was able to get the Baptist hospital up and running far more quickly. In December not only did he perform his first major operation in the Baptist hospital,29 but he was able to spare a lab man, a foreign doctor, and a Chinese doctor and a Chinese intern to help out in Hsuchang when both Emery and Miss

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The Hsuchang hospital back in operation

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Hsu were very ill. At the time, the entire Hsuchang staff consisted of Dr Ho, Emery, and the Chinese nurses.30 McClure was not so fortunate, however, in reclaiming the hospitals on his own United Church of Canada field north of the Yellow River. The Weihwei hospital had been left in the hands of a Chinese doctor who collaborated with the Japanese, and the local presbytery was having difficulty getting it back. The Hwaiking mission, where McClure had lived as boy and man, was in ruins, the city in Communist hands. The UCC's Changte hospital was its one success story. McClure was able to staff it with a Friends Ambulance Unit team, and in 1946 UCC missionaries arrived to take over. The city of Changte "was a little island of Nationalist control in a sea of Communism." That island would be the last bastion of United Church work in the province. Dr Isabelle McTavish and the Reverend Norman McKensie, the last two UCC missionaries on the North Honan field, were airlifted out of Changte in June 1947, just before the city fell to the Communists.31

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THE RETURN OF THE M I S S I O N A R I E S

As 1945 ended, missionaries, even experienced men already in West China awaiting transportation and permissions, were having difficulty getting to Honan. George Holm of the Lutheran United Mission managed to reach Sinyang, the southernmost Honan city on the north-south (Pinghan) railroad, but he wrote that "the Chinese government has declared Honan Province a war area, and until after September i, 1946, it does not favor the return of foreign missionaries to the province."1 Both the OSS reports from western Honan during the summer of 1945 and Emery's letters about his trip to Sian with the Japanese truck in October give us some sense of the Communist presence

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south of the Yellow River as the Japanese surrendered. However, even as Emery drove through western Honan, the Nationalists successfully regained control of much of the area between Hsuchang and Sian, while the Communists retreated to Tungpei, in the southwestern part of the province.2 The Communists were by no means beaten in Honan or in China as a whole. Instead, Mao, "a better strategist than Chiang Kai-shek," was concentrating his forces in the north.3 North of the Yellow River the Communists quietly and effectively secured their hold on the area village by village. In a Shensi village a few miles west of the Honan border, a former UNRRA worker, William Hinton, chronicled the process of land reform, which he called fanshen, as it happened. This was the same area of the Taihang mountains where Italian Catholic Carlo Suigo had been held hostage during much of 1945. F°r the residents of Long Bow village, the process of land reform began right after the Japanese surrender, when the villagers were called out to accuse the gentry who had collaborated with the Japanese and expropriate their property. The process used local peasants who had joined the Eighth Route Army, but the district leaders of the Communist Party orchestrated the process carefully, getting the poor peasants and hired labourers to speak out about past wrongs and make their own decisions about how to redistribute .wealth and make retribution for past wrongs.4 The process was often brutal, and a number of the accused were beaten to death by their angry fellow villagers. Others ran away before they could be accused, but by February 1946 more than a quarter of Long Bow's 931 acres had been expropriated from the rich and redistributed among the poor. Livestock, tools, grain, clothing, bedding, and money were also redistributed, and the process of arousing a Communist consciousness among the poor peasants and labourers begun.5 That year brought a pause in the Communist-Nationalist conflict as U.S. general George Marshall attempted to broker a peace. The two groups signed a ceasefire, effective 13 January 1946, and threeman peace teams appeared on the ground in Honan to negotiate between the commanders in the field.6 Once the ceasefire took effect, some missionaries were able to check conditions at the stations on their fields. Sometimes the two projects made strange

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bedfellows. Joseph Henkels travelled with the "Sinsiang peace team" to stations at Hwaiking and Fengchiu, which were under Communist control, and came back after negotiating plans to reopen schools and expand a hospital.7 Lutheran Brethren missionary Elliot Aandahl Jr, then in the U.S. military, surreptitiously checked the mission stations on his field from the air as he flew with a Communist negotiator from Sinyang to Hankow. At Tungpei, a Communist headquarters, the group's mission was in ruins.8 Other missionaries made more conventional trips around their fields while the ceasefire was in effect. A common thread runs through the reports - an admiration of the Chinese Christians, the Chinese church, which had proved its mettle through a time of severe testing. The "indigenous church" could no longer be viewed as a child the foreign missionaries were fostering. It had grown up during the difficult years on its own, and interest in and commitment to Christianity increased impressively while the missionaries were gone. The China Inland Mission, for instance, reported over i,8oo baptisms during the less-than-two-year period when missionaries were not in residence in the province.9 The missionaries doing these evaluations were individuals who had been in the province during the war and understood what people had suffered and how China had changed: Robert McClure of the United Church of Canada and the Catholics' Thomas Megan, George Holm of the LUM and John L. Benson of the Augustana Lutherans, the CIM'S three-man Honan Survey Team (Gaussen, Hillis, and Guinness). A number were China-born (Aandahl, McClure, Guinness, and Southern Baptist doctor Sanford Ayers). George Holm of the LUM summed up the situation: "Extraterritoriality is gone. The nationalistic tendency is evident. The Gospel does not rest on any special privilege accorded because of racial or national affinities." He went on to point out how those two things affected missions: missionary dollars would no longer go as far as they had in the past; no longer would mission property be exempt from taxes; Chinese laws about licensing and registering schools and hospitals would control those services; and unless Chinese laws were changed, churches would be treated as ordinary corporations.10 Holm only foresaw the problems that missions would face under a Nationalist government led by a professed Christian, in a country

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that seemed quite receptive to the Christian message and the missionary presence; he did not consider total Communist control. Missionary letters and reports in 1946 almost universally anticipated a future where relief funds from UNRRA and other humanitarian organizations, reparations from the Japanese, and increased donations from both the missionary-minded at home and the Chinese themselves could rebuild the mission plant and rejuvenate the evangelistic effort and social services the mission provided. The Chinese churches had, to a surprising degree, been able to continue in "business as usual," as the CIM team put it - they held services, sent out preaching bands, ran schools, ordained pastors, even organized churches into districts that could support full-time workers. In Fukow, hard-pressed by nature (floods) as well as by human enemies (Japanese and Communists), the Christians moved into the damaged church compound, staving off soldiers "by reliance on prayer alone" and managing to tithe, even though "most of them were living by the sale of their furniture and clothes, as their land was all under water." The church was packed the first Sunday the CIM team visited, and "while so many had fled from the floods, yet the number of new inquirers kept the church full."11 The amount of physical damage that mission property in the province had suffered was enormous. Looting had been widespread, and most missions had at least some property that was totally demolished. George Holm reported that on the LUM field, "Most stations seriously damaged. The destruction is worst at Junan where the mission station, church, chapel, etc. have been leveled with the ground."12 Emery had reported on the condition of two major Augustana stations (Loyang and Hsuchang), and when John L. Benson arrived, he described some of the smaller facilities: "Lungmen was just about wiped off the map. Behmasz area is almost wiped out. Yenshih is not doing so well." In Linju the compound where Emery's daughter Faith was born "is a wilderness. Even the foundations are gone." The city compound in Linju was also badly damaged, and "lyang suffered no less than 5 sieges."13 During the first three months of 1946, the peace talks continued and the ceasefire held. The Nationalists seemed firmly in control of central Honan, and they increased their control in the north, east, and south. Missionaries started to return. In January, Sue Kelsey,

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the Anglican nurse from Kweiteh who had been interned in Weihsien, travelled up from Hankow with Anna Olson, the Augustana nurse who had served in Linju. The two came close on the heels of Augustana teacher Ethel Akins.14 When Kelsey got back to her station east of the Yellow River, one of the missionaries who had shared her home during Japanese confinement joined her - Arthur Olson of the Lutheran Free Church. Not much later, Kelsey's roommate in both Kweiteh and Weihsien, Southern Baptist Attie Bostick, returned to Honan as well.15 Almost all the returning missionaries were no strangers to either Honan or the war. Most had either been in the province during the years 1941-44, or Pearl Harbor had found them on furlough. Internees were among the first missionaries to return to their posts, whether Italians held by the Chinese in Neihsiang or American priests who came back from Peking with Bishop Megan "in his official capacity" after the surrender there. People who had been repatriated from Japanese internment camps, such as Sue Kelsey, had to await return passage to China before they could resume their posts in China, but many were among the early returnees. A second group who returned quickly were those who, like Emery Carlson and Anna Olson, had been in military or government employ in West China. Some had been in Chinese employ, including the LUM's Dr Fedde, who, after fleeing the ICHIGO offensive, worked in a West China government hospital before returning to reopen the Kioshan hospital in 1946.^ In 1946 the stationing lists of almost every denomination contain a litany of familiar names. Even the "new missionaries" were often not new to China. Dr Sanford Ayers, who took over the Chengchow Baptist Hospital from the Friends Ambulance Unit, was a China-born "mish kid," as was the UCC's Norman McKensie at Changte. A good half-dozen people who had attended American School Kikungshan as children were "back home in Honan" as adult missionaries. Perhaps most surprising on the list of returnees was the Canadian Anglicans' Bishop William White, who had founded the Honan mission and, during the 19303, fought long and hard to have Chinese bishop Lindel Tsen appointed head of a Chinese church, independent of foreign control. White arrived in Kaifeng in June

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1946, accompanied by Anglican missionaries who had been in Chengchow during the war: George Andrew, Bill and Mary Simpson, Frances Howard, and Greta Clark. He planned to assist Bishop Tsen; however, with the Communist threat looming, White and his wife left for Canada in May 1947.17 The total number of missionaries who returned in 1946 was not large; the CIM had only "six couples and a dozen ladies" out of the forty to fifty missionaries who had been available six years earlier.18 Furthermore, most of those coming back in the early months of 1946 were replacing people who had been able to return to the province in 1945. Emery Carlson departed in March when Dr A.J. Colberg, who had left China mere days before Pearl Harbor, returned to replace him. Dr Robert McClure left two months later, returning the Chengchow hospital to Baptist hands - to Dr Sanford Ayers, who had been the head doctor at the hospital in 1937-38.19 By April 1946 the peace process had already broken down and fighting resumed, but the Communists were pursuing a "horizontal strategy" which had them concentrating their energies in the north and on cutting the Nationalist supply lines coming up to Manchuria from the south. While they were taking more and more of Manchuria, Honan was comparatively quiet. The Nationalists concentrated on a "vertical strategy" of controlling the coast and the rail lines, and throughout early 1946 they were quite successful in containing the Communists, indeed, reducing the amount of territory they controlled in Honan. At the end of 1946, George Holm wrote, "For a while the political center of communism in central China was on our field. This has now been forced to evacuate, and in the latter months of the year there was comparative peace so the work was continued without interruption."20 The Communists had lost control of forty-nine of the sixty-four hsiens they had controlled earlier in the year.21 A number of the hsiens that returned to Nationalist control were on the LUM and Lutheran Brethren fields, thus giving those groups the feeling all was well. A return to Nationalist control in a mission's immediate area meant optimism about re-establishing work and beginning to repair and refurbish facilities, an optimism that extended to much of the province when people could travel by rail, whether south to Hankow or east to Shanghai.

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One sign of just how much optimism the missionaries felt was the reopening of American School Kikungshan in October 1946. True, the school reopened in Sinyang rather than in its old quarters on the mountain east of Sinyang, where the buildings had been severely damaged during the war. It opened with only four students from two families, but by the end of the school year there were fifteen students, some of them boarders.22 Another cause for optimism in 1946 was the sailing of the Marine Lynx on 15 December with a great influx of new missionaries. China's Millions featured a picture of "20 returning workers, 18 new workers, and 20 children" lined up on the dock in front of the boat, and these 5 8 people were only the China Inland Mission people.23 When the boat sailed for China again in February 1947, it carried "over 200 other missionaries of various faiths" travelling "Emergency Class," crammed into dormitories, waiting in long lines for food that was "plain" but "ample," and taking over the lounge as a children's playroom and locus for Bible studies and services.24 The positive tone of the early missionary reports on conditions in the field, the pleas for new workers, the peace negotiations, and the return of many larger centres to Nationalist control engendered enough optimism by year's end that substantial numbers of missionaries prepared to return. By May 1946, the Communists had not only been driven back in Honan; they were suffering severe food shortages in the south. However, they also had made strategic moves. By August 1946 they had connected their territory in southwestern Honan with their power base in Yenan; by year's end they had consolidated their gains in Manchuria.25 North of the Yellow River, in spite of Communist control of much of the area, missionaries retained a measure of optimism. The Catholics reopened schools and expanded the hospital in Sinsiang. In November 1945 the United Church of Canada missionaries returned to their stations at Weihwei and Changte. The Nationalists, who welcomed the missionaries, controlled the railroad that ran from Chengchow through Sinsiang and north to Weihwei and Changte, but only a narrow corridor on either side of the railroad, and many county seats were in Communist hands or shifted back and forth. Missionaries "were able frequently because

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of the constant manoeuvering of the two opposing armies for position, to work in areas from which the Communists had retreated." They had "first hand information as to Communist policy, methods and practice." What the UCC missionaries were hearing was unsettling. A seven-page listing of some of the atrocities reported by the "constant influx of refugees from Communist-occupied villages" included reports of coercion that, as time went on, escalated into "extortion, torture and death" and systematic attempts to "arrest or otherwise dispose of Christian leaders."26 In early 1946 the Canadian Red Cross asked Dr Stewart Allen of Chungking to visit "the hospitals in China ordinarily supported by Canadian funds and to report on their present conditions, needs, prospects, with a view to assist with equipment and funds." 27 However, after Allen and McClure attempted to survey UCC work in the Communist territory north of the Yellow River, twentysix people who had contacted the Canadian doctors when they were in Hwaiking were arrested, and seventeen who were unable to escape from detention were killed. Thereafter the UCC curtailed any attempt to work in Communist territory, although it kept its hospital in Changte operating until the city fell to the Communists in I947.28 The Catholics kept medical work going north of the river for a time as well. Throughout 1946 Thomas Megan was busy trying to locate staff, supplies, and financing for three hospitals, especially the star facility in Sinsiang. The Catholic hospitals in Hwaiking and Fengchiu were in areas more vulnerable to the Communists, but they were kept open with largely Chinese staffs until early i94y.29 The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, or UNRRA, was the big player in relief projects of all sorts. Emery complained in January 1946, after a trip to Chengchow and a twoday meeting, "UNRRA is awfully slow at getting anything started. They are just getting the Kaifeng office set up now and there seems to be little hope of an effective program getting started very soon. Bob McClure is in Hankow now trying to get something stirred up for the medical side of things."30 However, even before Emery left Honan in May 1946, kala azar clinics (a major health need in the province) were up and running. Furthermore, he reported in February 1946, "When I first came back I wrote several reports on

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the Yellow River flood area situation, and one of those was taken to Washington by an UNRRA representative. This project now has No. 2 priority in China and it is really a big thing."31 Unfortunately, the Communists viewed dike repair on the Yellow River not as a humanitarian aid project but as a military move to disrupt their "horizontal plan" and destroy their east Honan power base. The project was begun, but repairs were halted in i