When the Second World War ended, one difficulty that seemed impossible to set right was China. There were three Theaters of Operation in the war, Europe, the Pacific, and the China/Burma/India theater. The last was the least remembered as a separate theater, yet here the war had been going on far longer. Japan first invaded Manchuria in the early 1930's. They had sunk an American gunboat - and the Republicans had demanded Pres. Roosevelt do nothing in response - two years before Hitler invaded Poland. The Allied commander in China, Gen. Stilwell, had to beg borrow and plead to get supplies, and then they had to come in "over the hump" - be flown in from India over the Himalayas, a daunting challenge.
Matters in China were even more complicated because of the communist revolt going on. While Mao and Chinese Republican leader Chiang Kai-shek had reached a temporary accord, the nationalists had been breaking the pledge from the beginning, jailing thousands of known communists and their supporters and sympathizers, and even those suspected by them of being so. Some were summarily executed. The matter was made worse by the double-dealing of some of the American advisers of the nationalist leaders. Joseph Alsop's biographer details how he, as an intelligence adviser to the Chiang's, actively sought to undermine Stilwell in part because Stilwell reported accurately on the corruption and criminality of the Nationalist leaders. While Alsop won in the short term - Stilwell was eventually sacked - the Chinese would pay dearly in the end.
When the war was over, there were thousands of Japanese troops still in China; the communists, having decided that the cease-fire was now officially over, restarted their insurgency against the Nationalists. Outside a few cities, the civil and social and physical infrastructure was in such tatters that many thought China might never fully recover. The US decided to help out by, among other things, sending the First Marine Division to China. Among those who would spend nearly a year in China was a young 18-year-old Marine intelligence operative named David Johnston. His older sister, Virginia, would, over the course of time, become my mother.
David was going to be mustered out. He and his group had been training all summer for the invasion of Japan. After the surrender, everything was on hold. Then, the orders came down; he and his group wouldn't be needed, and he and many others would be discharged from the Marine Corps. Then, within a few days, those orders changed, and David, assigned to the 1st Div. even though he actually operated outside the usual lines of command, would sail from the east coast, through the Panama Canal, and eventually wind up in the city then known as Tientsin, on the Pacific coast across the Yellow Sea from Korea.
His adventures - and they were adventures - were numerous. Some were dangerous. Some were exciting. Some of his time was very peaceful; David has fond memories of sitting on the wall around the old city of what was then known as Peiping (Beijing), eating local melons and watching the sun set through the dust storms from the Mongolian Desert. Yet, his trip was tinged with a bitter sadness.
While onboard the transport, he received a communique that his young wife of just six months, Marine Sgt. Janice Charteris, had been killed in an automobile accident in Camp Lejeune, NC. Sgt. Charteris had been pregnant at the time. David had yet to tell his family he had married Janice in a whirlwind courtship just after boot camp; with the sole exception of his oldest brother, no one in the family would learn of this first marriage or its tragic ending, for decades.
My family has served in a variety of ways over the years in the armed forces, from my great-grandfather lying about his age and serving in the GAR at the end of the Civil War to my mother's younger brother Ivan, who was a Navy pilot, flying planes off boats (among other things). David's experiences in China, like his older brother Eugene's time in the Navy during WWII, were long held secret for a simple reason - they, like all intelligence operatives before and since, were ordered to forget all that happened, once they wrote their reports to their superiors. Except, of course, being told to forget, and actually forgetting, are two different things.
If there's someone you know, or someone to whom you are related, who has served in the military, in whatever capacity, thank them today.
