Being almost completely literary in point of view, I did not really know anything about the visual world. I knew little about painting or composition. Now I started to understand the power and wonder of visual media. I wanted to know all about films—but up to then my method of learning was to read about the subject.
One of the things I liked about filmmaking was the immediate connection you had to your work. You took your camera out, photographed a story, and two days later saw the result on the screen. And the idea of editing was appealing—being able to sit in a room and handle the material without having to go out and be in contact with people: you could play with them without their interfering. Editing promised to be the best end of the business, but the school taught us very little about it. We were being trained as field camera crews. The film would be edited in the United States at the studio. So we were left to editing within our cameras, a skill that would later inform my work at Grove Press and Evergreen Review, as I mentioned to friends more than once over the years.
One of my instructors at the film center, a lieutenant, was particularly annoying. He was very neurotic and was supposedly suffering from shell shock after a tour in Italy, which was probably true. One time I sat in his office for several hours waiting for my daily story assignment. The morning was almost gone when he finally told me to go out to a swimming pool and photograph whatever was going on there. It was not even being used. I was disgusted by this useless assignment and made it obvious. He was furious. He had his revenge; only a few days later I received my orders for overseas duty. I was not really disturbed by this; I wanted to go. The school gave me a mark of “satisfactory” in my record—the worst I was to receive as an officer.
My embarkation camp or “staging” area was about ten miles from Marysville, California, and it was a bleak hole. Far inland, the camp was like an oven in August. I hated it—and I hated the waiting. Waiting is something that you spend a lot of time doing in the Army.
Finally our outfit was put on alert, but I did not know where we were going. We were to board the train without being told our ultimate destination. I had already decided we were headed for China, although there was no evidence to support my notion. I just wanted to go there. My copy of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China was always with me. Then one of the men in our shipment found out that the train was being stocked with provisions for a week. We were certainly not going to a town in California. After a train ride that seemed to last years, though it was really only about six days after we left Northern California, we came to a final stop in a camp in Virginia where, after a week of cooling our feet, we were pushed aboard a ship loaded with 2,000 or more troops.
We still had no idea of our destination, and our voyage was a particularly bad one. Twelve of us—ten doctors and two photographers—were crammed into a minute cabin without portholes. The tension steadily increased for over three weeks. I was extremely irritable but some others were even more so. A young doctor, one of my bunkmates, lost a card game and threw the cards all over the floor of the cabin. I told him he was a crazy bastard. He lifted his fist and tried to wallop me in the jaw. That enraged me but I did nothing more than hold onto him until some of the officers who were in the cabin with us were able to stop the fight.
The voyage went on for forty days, down the Atlantic to the Panama Canal, across the Pacific and the Equator, and around Australia, and on to India, where we finally made port in Bombay. I got off the ship for an evening furlough before we officially disembarked, and lapped up as much whiskey as I could. When I got back onboard I was drunk but happy.
4
China: The Forgotten Theater
We disembarked in Bombay. The trip by train across India was somehow beautiful and sometimes sad. About ten of us, almost arbitrarily assembled, went from Bombay to Calcutta in four days. The coaches were divided into five classes: I, II, III, Intermediate, and IV. Our coach was class IV. It had wooden benches and was stiflingly hot, but I didn’t notice the discomfort. I liked India. I tried to learn Hindustani words out of a guidebook and practiced them on little children who ran up to the train. I stared out at the villages, at the women kneeling beside flat baskets filled with rice and bananas, and suckling babies who would never get enough milk. At one stop when I was on guard duty—we had to watch out for thieves—the train’s conductor and its engineer invited me into the station for a cup of tea. When we returned to the platform the train was gone. However, the next train, which we boarded, somehow caught up to mine, and I was able to resume my guard duty post without my absence having been noticed.
After traveling for four days and nights, we awakened one morning to find ourselves on a desolate siding in the middle of nowhere. The heat was unbearable, but still the five psychiatrists who were in my group were afraid to get out and look around—without orders. So, along with a homeopathist who by now had become my friend, I left them in the train car and walked down a dirt road lined with very tall coconut trees. A number of coconuts dropped to the ground within a few feet of us. Then we spotted the “perpetrators,” monkeys, who were throwing them at us. The enemy barrage was sustained for several kilometers until we stumbled, quite accidentally, on our new camp—a US replacement camp, thirty miles outside of Calcutta.
Camp Kanchrapara was a sweatbox. We were to stay there, living in uncertainty until our individual assignments came through. We lived in tents and ate horrible food while camp commanders invented things for us to do while we bided our time. Way too many men stationed here sweated each day and froze each night as jackals stole our shoes from our tents and rooted in our garbage.
I sneaked away as often as possible to Calcutta, where there were incredibly elegant brothels occupying some temporarily vacated palaces. One Indian girl, a successful courtesan/prostitute, became very friendly with me. I took her out to a film one afternoon, a highly unusual venture for an American officer. The English civilian audience included a goodly number of dowdy middle-class English women who seemed a bit disconcerted by the sight of me and my consort, in her elegant but understated sari. Earlier, I had photographed her putting it on aided by two extremely helpful English women who were her daytime servants in her suite at the palace/brothel.
Finally, orders came for me to report to the 164th Signal Photo Company in New Delhi, our company headquarters for China, Burma, and India (CBI). Officers here lived in better quarters than they did in the States. The food was good. There were big hotels and social functions. However, New Delhi reminded me of Washington, DC, and I didn’t like it any more than I did its American counterpart.
The 164th had one unit in China, another in Burma, and a third in India for the entire CBI theatre. When I arrived in Delhi, rumor had it that one of our officers in China had committed suicide so I volunteered to replace him. The war had been progressing very badly for the Allies in Southern China and it looked as if there might have to be a mass evacuation. I wanted to get there before it was too late. It was my chance to engage in what for me was the compelling part of the war. Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China was getting closer. They printed my orders, and I packed.
After waiting at an airbase, a steaming hole, for two days, I boarded one of the ungainly, underpowered C-46s for the plane ride over the Himalayas to China. Taking off from Assam, India, for Kunming, my unit’s Chinese HQ, in December of 1944, I was still a raw, semi-trained second lieutenant in the Signal Corps Photographic Service, twenty-two years old and with only a few dreams to cling to. Squashed under the weight of my equipment, I struggled onto the airplane and sat on the metal floor next to some uncommunicative Chinese soldiers. I leaned back in the curve of the bare fuselage, hugging a heavy parachute, which was a totally foreign object to me. We were in a death crate, a hulk of a cargo plane barely sustained by two undersized motors. As we puffed oxygen through our masks, the planet’s highest mountains glowered beneath us and loomed on both sides.
As we reached our destination, behind the door of the cockpit, the third red-alert light shone
as we descended, a sure sign that Japanese Zeros were tailing and using us for cover as they bombed the runway. On landing, I scrambled from the airplane into the night’s bewildering disorder—no contacts, no commanding officers, no what-to-do-next. My GI parachute stayed on the runway where I dropped it and ran. Somehow I arrived at a dimly lit, wooden shack crowded with Chinese patrons drinking hot yellow rice wine. Apparently, I had left the Kunming air base. The next thing I remember was waking up with a hangover in our outfit’s billet, the headache rendered irrelevant by the fact that I was in the China of my dreams.
The 164th Photo outfit was small and it shared a hostel in Kunming with another non-photo company. Our commanding officer was a Bostonian with traces of culture and sensitivity. It was quickly obvious that he wanted to get me out of Kunming to fill the hole in the lineup as expeditiously as possible. Other than the rumor about suicide, I really never learned how or why the deceased officer whom I had come to replace had died, and my instinct was not to probe. He told me the 164th was sending me to Kweiyang (Guiyàng), the other end of the line. He did not tell me very specifically what to do or how to do it. I was provided with a weapons carrier, which was a small but sturdy four-wheel-drive truck, some equipment and supplies for a still-photo field laboratory, a co-driver who was a young American GI, and written orders directing me to Kweiyang.
Having my directive, I drove eastward on the only road, unpaved, toward Kweiyang, the capital of Kweichow (Guizhou), the adjoining province and a main place of concentration for Chinese civilians fleeing before what still seemed to be the oncoming Japanese army. I named my weapons carrier “Foto Moto” and painted the name in large letters on the front radiator. The truck was the equivalent of a big strong mule, not nimble but willing, and I was literally driving it toward the oncoming Japanese.
Or was I? What nobody said to me my last night in Kunming, and what was most likely not known, was that the current Japanese offensive had halted just short of the outskirts of Kweiyang, circling part of the city from the East, North, and South just as I was rolling in from the West. Going in our direction there was no traffic to hinder us. It turned out to be an historic moment in the history of the Sino-Japanese War, marking, I believe, the deepest penetration into China by the Japanese during all of World War II.
Arriving in Kweiyang after a dizzying ride on dirt roads and hairpin curves, I went to the main American enclave. It consisted of the remnants of a beautiful inn, plus odds and ends of additional buildings. In it was an incredible concentration of Army brass—at least seven West Point grads, all of them full colonels and a one-star general. What they were doing there I never really learned.
As if they had expected me, Chinese servants wearing the white jackets of another era took my gear and escorted me to a small, second-floor room whose paper-parchment walls barely made it to the ceiling. On the rafters there was a continuous noisy, and often visible, traffic of rats. I spread my sleeping bag on the bed, which filled most of the room, and went out into Kweiyang.
New Year’s Eve, 1944. The dirt streets were crowded and lively with an air of hope and desperation. There were rumored to be Chinese bounty hunters in the crowd, paid by the Japanese to pick off Americans, but my thoughts were not of them. There was space in my parchment-walled room at the inn for a girlfriend whom I had only to find and lead back. And I found her! We had our own New Year’s Eve, feeling, holding, and experimenting. The fact that we were almost completely surrounded by the Japanese seemed to make no impact on our celebration.
In the morning I discovered we had an audience on the other side of the thin parchment wall. A certain Father O’Donaghue, Catholic priest and Maryknoll missionary, had heard me sin. My Irish Catholic mother’s influence made me erupt in shame, but the good father heard my silent confession and absolved me. He would remain a staunch friend throughout my time in China.
I was trying to figure out how to put together a photo lab in Kweiyang when I came across a rather thick pamphlet lying in the dirt. It was a manual, not new by any means, published by the US Navy. And, miracles of miracles, it contained detailed, easily understandable instructions on how to build a photo lab under field conditions.
Soon after my arrival, I made a new friend, Meredith “Muddy” Rhule, who was an American naval officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The Chinese OSS people whom he commanded were situated on both sides of the Japanese lines—shuttling back and forth on search and destroy missions. Muddy was a stocky, fearless, bull-necked cop from Springfield, Illinois. He also had been a professional wrestler and a sharpshooter before his demolition training.
Rhule trained his Chinese demolition teams to act with precision. Their mission was to penetrate Japanese-held areas and destroy anything of potential value to the Japanese Armed Forces. Now we had to destroy weapons in order to keep the Japanese from using them against us. With Rhule I became a sort of unofficial OSS man, without the knowledge of my HQ or his, helping him get his men to their areas of operation and then back to home base. I covered many miles of Chinese roads with Muddy Rhule and his cadres, all the while doing unofficial and unpaid work on behalf of the OSS.
Perhaps it would be appropriate to say a few words here about why I was rejected by the OSS. This is something I didn’t learn about until many years later when, through the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to access files and learned I was being investigated even in 1945. Here is a report by Lt. Bordwell ascertaining whether or not I was a good candidate for the Secret Service:
FOIA Document #25
[In CIA Ltr OTO 8/29/75 this is Document 177.]
MEMO OTO 2/27/45 According to CIA Cover Itr OTO 8/29/75 this is “Released.”
HEADQUARTERS
OSS SU DETACHMENT 202
X-2 Branch
MEMO:
FROM: 2nd Lt Paul H. Bordwell.
TO: LT (jg) Arthur H. Thurston, USNR.
1. It was requested by Major Harding that I make an inquiry re the wire from Washington on 2nd Lt. Barnett [sic] Rosset of the 165th Signal (Photo) Co.
2. On the morning of the 27th of January I called on his commanding officer and frankly told him why I wanted to know the whereabouts and availability of Rosset. His commanding officer was most obliging and gave me a rather complete story on Rosset.
3. It seems that Rosset is a 22 year old officer who in most instances seems to act round about the age of 17 rather than 22. He is not particularly mature. It also seems that his father is some New Deal “bigwig”, to quote the CO, and that this attempt to get him into OSS has been going on for quite some time. …
4. At present Rosset is in charge of a Field Photographic team consisting of himself and several enlisted men, operating out of Kweiyang. At the immediate writing, Rosset is strictly speaking not available due to a shortage of personnel. However, three or four additional officers are in the process of being shipped in, in which case, the CO is willing to release Rosset.
5. From a personal point of view of his CO, Rosset certainly would not be fitted for any intelligence work. One, he has had no experience whatsoever; two, he is far too immature, and three, he does not impress you as being too intelligent.
6. In summation, from his CO’s point of view, it might be said that the said officer is under the impression that the entire scheme is one of “dirty politics.”
Instead of taking me into the OSS, they suggested in another memo that I be transferred to another photographic unit.
Now the Chinese followed the Japanese—who were self-propelling themselves back home, toward the East. My Signal Corps Photo team’s job was to record this strange retreat. Apparently, Chiang Kai-shek held to the dictum of the ancient philosopher Sun Tzu, who wrote in his Art of War that the acme of skill is to subdue the enemy without fighting at all. There were supposedly 20,000 or more Chinese troops with mobile artillery “pursuing” the enemy, yet a few Japanese soldiers with machine guns held them off again and again.
One night in the middle of a burnt-ou
t village, Corporal Cedric Poland, a truly invaluable member of our photo unit, and I stopped at a desolate, destroyed road intersection to sleep. We tied our hammocks between the jeep and its trailer. Occasionally, in the darkness, we could see ghostlike figures moving around in the ruins of the buildings but nobody came close to us. Hordes, literally thousands, of rats scurried directly under our hammocks to cross the dirt road.
There had been rumors of Japanese re-infiltration. Nervous, I began keeping my gun very close to me. We had not eaten after we stopped. I had brought along a large number of cans of fruit, and stood shirtless in the hot gloom, wolfing down some pears. The place smelled of death.
Morning light brought reality with it. The homeless wanderers who meandered through the refuse no longer looked like Japanese soldiers. We started off, looking for the most forward American liaison team. On one stretch we found perhaps twenty dead Japanese cavalrymen and their horses. They had either been ambushed by guerrillas or strafed by the 14th Air Force—both groups later claimed credit. The open areas were covered with growing corn, and it was perfectly quiet. It was almost like being on a dirt road in Iowa in the summer. Only the stench of the dead ruined such daydreams.
Bridges became increasingly difficult to cross. They had been destroyed and then repaired in the flimsiest fashion. Poland and I were thankful that we had switched to a lighter jeep, having left “Foto Moto” back in his stable. We came to a town that we knew was very close to the front. It had once boasted a British consulate whose roof was now gone, and with one fallen wall that exposed the remains of the rooms. A few other buildings were intact, but most were smashed and debris blocked the streets. We crept forward, got stuck, backed up, and slowly made our way through town. The people were gaunt, and they hardly seemed to notice us, although we knew that not many Americans could have preceded us there. Eventually, we made our way to the US Liaison Team’s headquarters located in a half-battered-down house on the town outskirts.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 5
