I still remember quite vividly the circus and carnival the Chinese Nationalist government made of a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Kunming. I was astonished by the spectacle I saw in May 1945, for while I was familiar with the capability of the Nationalists to abuse prisoners, I never expected to see inhuman acts committed by Chinese troops being trained and supervised by American forces at Kunming.
I was then visiting my psychological warfare team which had moved its headquarters from Chungking to Kunming during my long absence as a U. S. Army observer in the liberated and guerrilla areas of North China. Kunming was more strategic for our purpose since leaflets could be loaded directly on aircraft going to an enemy target area.
On that morning I had in mind a series of interviews with the Japanese POWs, to find out about enemy morale on the North Burma front and details as to the living conditions, attitude of the enemy troops to their superiors, to the natives and to Chinese Nationalist soldiers.
The Chinese Were Having a Grand Time
I turned off the main highway and got on a trail. To my surprise, I found hundreds of civilian Chinese either going or coming from the POW compound. Some stopped to buy cakes, candies and colored sweetened water from small stands that lined the roadside.
A carnival atmosphere prevailed and as I approached the compound, which was roped off, with tents pitched inside the enclosure, I found the visitors were having a grand time.
Inside a large tent with its flaps open, I saw about 20 women, most of whom were sitting in a circle, one behind the other, picking lice from each other's heads. They were ill-clad in tattered clothing, filthy and brown with dirt. Many Young "Comfort" Women Were Koreans
I talked to a Chinese Nationalist non-commissioned officer and obtained his permission to talk to the Japanese captives. I went into the large tent. Soon! I learned that these were "comfort" women who travelled with troops or visited garrisons. They not only entertained troops in order to make life more bearable for them in a foreign country in a war of aggression, but were also prostitutes.
Two women in their forties were the madams and they talked freely to me, relieved, I supposed, that someone in an American uniform spoke a language understandable to them. The majority of the young women were attractive despite the dirt and rags, and a great many looked like Koreans. So I asked them individually and practically all of them answered they were.
Some said they came from the cities and others from the farms. They all spoke Japanese, for Japan had occupied Korea for 40 years and forced her language on the populace.
Were they entertainers before they left Korea? I asked. A quiet woman in her early twenties sitting on the ground near me said that she and most of the others had been impressed into the "comfort" service. She said she wanted the war to end so that she could return to her parents in Korea.
I Could Not Help the Prisoners
Outside, hundreds of curious Chinese were craning their necks to get a good view of the women. The women resented their attention. They asked me if there was any way for them to get some straw to sleep on, instead of the cold, hard ground. They wanted water to cleanse themselves. They hadn't had any for weeks. Some of the women were sick because of the abuses they had taken from Japanese troops and later, after capture, from Nationalist soldiers and officers. They asked me if they could get medical attention. I was in no position to promise them anything.
I walked into another tent occupied by men. When they found that I spoke Japanese they brought two persons, who were their leaders. These men said they did not want to go to any Nationalist prison camp, for after what they had gone through in more than two months of marching from the Salween River front to Kunming, they said they could expect any conceivable kind of atrocity from the Nationalists.
Death March From Northern Burma To China
They had started the march with more than 200. Less than 80 survived.
Did they know that the Japanese troops had been merciless and cruel in China? I asked them. Perhaps they themselves, had been forced to heap abuses on the natives in occupied areas I said.
One of the leaders said that they were now prisoners, that they had been disarmed. He said that they wanted to lead a new life. Could I get in touch with Wataru Kaji for them? he asked.
I told the Japanese prisoners the truth that hurt. They hung their heads when I informed them that Kaji was not working with prisoners any more. His psychological warfare project they had heard about in the Japanese army had been stopped years ago by the Nationalist government.
Just at that moment someone rang a bell outside. Then a Chinese officer yelled a command. All the prisoners, including the sick and the crippled, trudged out of their tents. Chinese soldiers rushed into the tents and shoved the slow-moving prisoners with their rifles.
Insult and Humiliation Repeated-Time and Again
Once the prisoners were lined up, with the women in the front row, the command was given for them to "count off." In Japanese they counted off and the spectators laughed heartily. When the exhibition, especially put on for the spectators, was over, the Japanese and the Korean women returned to their tents, angered at the humiliation and insult.
During the two hours I was there the prisoners were called out seven times to go through the same act for new Chinese spectators who kept coming to see their enemies.
I asked a Chinese officer if he felt such a show would boost the will of the people to resist the Japanese militarists. He did not think so. I asked him why such a circus was made of prisoners who should be rehabilitated. He told me that they were following orders from higher up.
Today, seven years later, when I read news reports that the U. S. command in Korea is using Nationalist officers from Formosa to "screen" prisoners of war at Koje? Island and elsewhere. I can well imagine the conduct of Chiang Kai-shek's officers. Their role at Koje has been reported in Mainland newspapers. Locally, the dailies censor such information.
I Wanted To Stay With My Team
In Kunming, we tried to get one or two Japanese prisoners to work for us in psychological warfare, just as we were doing in Burma. The Nationalists would not release any to us.
I wanted to stay with my Nisei team in Kunming. Half of our original team was still on the Burma front and those in Burma felt that with operations there coming to an end, their next assignment would be China. They suggested that I stay in Kunming and try to bring the whole team together, and have another member of our team assigned to Yenan in my place. My superiors in Chungking said that U. S. relationship with Yenan being very delicate, with the Chinese Communists blasting Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley as an insincere mediator between Yenan and Chungking, and an imperialist supporting Chiang in his civil war design, we should not switch personnel.
Cold War Atmosphere In Tenan
I flew back to Yenan to find American-Yenan relationship strained to a breaking point. I was surprised to see how some of our officers had hastily re-oriented themselves after Hurley had failed in his mediation and had thrown his full support behind Chiang. The officers who had high praise for the Yenan administration and its anti-Japanese resistance forces only a few weeks before, were calling them names in constant arguments with Chinese Communist liaison officers.
These officers drank a lot and one of them acquired a reputation for breaking the most earthen bottles against the walls of his cave after he had drunk the potent Tiger Bone wine. This was the same officer who had told me when I first arrived in Yenan to save used razor blades and cellophane wrappers from cigarette packages because the Chinese who were fighting the enemy with so little could make good use of them.
We Were Abundantly Ignorant About Communism
Coincidentally with this change of attitude toward Yenan among some officers of our observer division, our officers became rank-happy. In our dining room a separate table was set aside for officers and the former practice of enlisted men and officers eating together at a table, following Yenan's custom, was abolished. I had been commissioned by then and at our officers' table I heard interesting conversations.
The Americans argued, for instance, that only in a capitalistic economy can there be democracy. How long has the U. S. been a capitalist nation? the liaison officers asked. After they agreed on the period, they asked why one-tenth of the U. S. population, consisting of Negroes and ethnic minorities, is jim crowed and discriminated against in economic, social and political fields. They asked about the racist Bilbo, and the Dies un-American activities committee, the Pendergast and Tammany political machines and the Ku Klux Klan. The officers soon realized that they had better stay off the subject of communism, about which we were all abundantly ignorant.
The enlisted men sitting at their nearby tables listened and got a great bang out of the loud arguments that went on every day—at breakfast, lunch and supper. Some officers tried to influence them and recommended that they read an article denouncing the Chinese Communists in Readers' Digest by Max Eastman and J B. Powell. The article in effect said the opposite from what the enlisted men saw in Yenan with their own eyes and in this sense, some said it was educational.
The change in behavior of the leading members of the mission was on a small scale and similar in nature to the change in U. S. policy after FDR's death, bringing into being the Truman doctrine and the Marshall plan and the "get tough with Russia" policy. New Dealers and others who thought well of the Soviet Union during the last war, knuckled under red-baiting and witch-hunting of the cold war which makes the non-conformists and Independent thinkers unemployable.
But all observers in Yenan did not succumb to this unreasoning behavior, for we had to bring out downed U. S. pilots rescued by the guerrillas in enemy territory, we had to participate in defeating the Japanese militarists, and we were interested! in hurrying the peace and returning to our families.