John S. Service Oral History Interview, Chap III-IV

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and John S. Service, dated March 7, 1980.

No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with John S. Service requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to grant or deny permission.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

John S. Service, "State Department Duty in China, The McCarthy Era, and After, 1933-1977," an oral history conducted 1977-1978 by Rosemary Levenson, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1981.

Opened March, 1980
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[98]

CHAPTER III

III APPRENTICESHIP OF A FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER, 1933-1942

Clerkship in Yunnanfu

J. SERVICE: Almost as soon as I got to Shanghai I went around to call on the American consul-general, Cunningham, a very elderly gentleman who had been in Shanghai a long time, and applied for a clerkship .

It wasn't too long--I think it was only about six weeks--when Cunningham asked me to come and see him and said, "Would you like a job as clerk at Yunnanfu?" which in those days was considered the end of everything. I mean to hell-and-gone , a remote and isolated post in South West China. He said, "You don't have to say today." I rushed off and sent a telegram to Caroline.

I didn’t get an answer right away, but I went back to Cunningham I think the next day and said yes, I'd take the job. Then, Caroline's cablegram came in saying, "No, don't go!" But, the die was cast. I had committed myself, so I went to Yunnanfu which is now known as Kunming. In fact, to the Chinese even in those days it was known as Kunming. It was only the foreigners who still called it Yunnanfu because that is what it had been
before 1912. The old Chinese name was Yunnanfu.

LEVENSON: So, that was your first post. What did it pay?

J. SERVICE: The pay was $1800, U.S. dollars, for that day and age, a very fine job. But as soon as Roosevelt came in the Economy Act cut all federal salaries 15 percent across the board. That still didn't bother me. I had plenty to live on. But then they started devaluing the dollar. This meant that our paycheck went down as the U.S. dollar went down.

[99]

J. SERVICE: It was particularly bad in Yunnan because it was in the French sphere of influence and a lot of prices were based on the French Indochinese piaster, which was a gold-based currency. So, we had a very substantial cut in pay.

Eventually the government got around to compensating us, not for the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, but for the "appreciation of foreign exchange." So, it meant I had eventually quite a nice lump sum payment which I promptly proceeded to deposit in the bank, the American Oriental Bank in Shanghai.

Duties

LEVENSON: What were your duties? First off, to whom did you report?

J. SERVICE: When I first got there there were two officers -- two vice consuls actually. The senior vice consul who was in charge was a man named [Charles] Reed. Then, there was John Davies.

Everybody in the Foreign Service was usually sent first to a Mexican or a Canadian border post for a short trial period, usually three months or so. Then, you came to Washington for Foreign Service School which was another three months, sort of indoctrination, orientation, whatever you want to call it. Then you were sent out to the field. So this was John Davies' first field post really. He'd been in Windsor, Ontario, and then Foreign Service School.

Very soon after I got there they decided that with two men there--in other words the chief vice consul and me--there was no need for John Davies. They were cutting down every- where. John then was transferred up to Peking as a language student. You asked who I reported to. Well, there was only one person to report to, and that was the vice consul.

The office, of course, reported to the legation--it hadn’t been raised to embassy status. We always said Peking, but actually the capital of the country was Nanking. In 1928, the Nationalist Kuomintang government made Nanking the capital.

This was very unpopular with the foreigners because, well, they loved Peking and they had their establishments in Peking. They had no lovely buildings in Nanking. So, the ambassador kept most of his office--most of the chancery was in Peking. He would make occasional visits to Nanking to conduct business.

[100]

J. SERVICE: So, we would always say that we reported to the legation in Peking. We generally reported by mail which might take two or three weeks, because the only way to get to Yunnan was a long trip through Hongkong, then down to Haiphong, then by train, the French railway, from Haiphong--which in those days was a three-day trip because they didn’t run at night--up to Yunnan. You could come directly overland but it would have taken you weeks and weeks to make the trip. So the only practical way was this two-week trip around.

LEVENSON: When you say direct--

J. SERVICE: Well, you’d go up the Yangtze to Chungking and then overland to Kunming, but it would take you about four weeks to do it.

LEVENSON: What were your duties there?

J. SERVICE: I did everything. Files, of course. I maintained the files. I did all the filing. I did all the typing and I was not a trained typist. This was to create a lot of grief because Reed was terribly worried about promotions and much concerned about almost everything, social position, everything else.

But he couldn’t stand any erasures or any mistakes on a page. I was always having to retype things so they would go in looking perfect. I myself don't mind little things like that. [laughter]

He had me do trade letters, commercial work. But, there really weren’t any commercial opportunities in Kunming. There couldn't be because the French were not about to let any Americans do business--or anyone else except themselves, any other foreigners except themselves--do business in Yunnan. All goods had to come through French Indochina.

We would get trade inquiries--what is the market for beer, for instance, in your consular district? The only real letter to send them back was just, "There isn’t any." But not my boss! He insisted that we write them a full dress discussion of the market and procedures for importing and the desirability of getting a local agent, the desirability and necessity of getting a forwarding agent in Haiphong, and all the rest of this. Every trade letter had to be a certain number of pages.

I had gotten eventually to do most of the routine consular work, registration of American citizens, issuance of passports, registration of births, marriages, this sort of thing.

[101]

J. SERVICE: After a year I was commissioned as a vice consul with no increase in pay.

LEVENSON: Your first title was what?

J. SERVICE: Just clerk, foreign service clerk. But then they commissioned me a vice consul, which meant that I could perform services like passports since I had signing authority. I could do notarials.

"Bureaucrats are Made, not Born"

J. SERVICE: My chief was not a China service man. We had a Chinese interpreter in the office who was supposed to call attention to newsworthy things in the [Chinese] newspapers and translate them if necessary.

But, my vice consul didn't think he was doing a very good job. So he'd make poor Mr. Hwang sit down beside him, and he would point at the paper, [sternly] "Now, what is this? What’s this?" You know, point at the headlines here and there and make this poor Chinese translate.

Actually, most of his political reporting was from talking to the British consul general who was an old China hand and whose Chinese was excellent. He was eccentric like a lot of British people in remote places. Homosexual and a Mohammedan to boot. He’d served in places like Kashgar.

But he was not alone in being unique or peculiar. In the French consulate, one of their members was a Buddhist.

But, anyway, Charles Reed talked mainly to the British consul general. He'd go to the club and hear the gossip at the club. The commissioner of customs and the commissioner of posts had Chinese colleagues, theoretically on the same level they were. So, they got a good deal of news because they had to know where the disturbances were. The political reporting basically was the sort of gossip Reed got from talking to other people. We had to submit a monthly political report. If anything urgent came along we would make a special report. If it was something really vital we'd send a telegram, but that was very unusual.

[102]

J. SERVICE: I remember one night. I think we were having a Christmas party and a telegram came in--any telegram was an event. We had to leave the party, rush down to the office, open the safe and get out the code book.

The telegram was from the legation in Peking relaying a circular from the Department of State saying that the president had declared December 24th a holiday because of the weekend arrangements or something like that. But, of course, we’d passed December 24th [laughter] by the time we got the telegram. So, we went back to the party.

The political reporting was, shall we say, very low key, very unimportant .

LEVENSON: So, you don’t feel you really got any good training in this--

J. SERVICE: Negative training, mostly negative.

LEVENSON: In what sense?

J. SERVICE: How not to do it. This was a favorite phrase of Mao Tse-tung, training by negative example.

We ought to go back to Kunming because I rejected out of hand the value of serving there. That really wasn't true, because although I wasn't getting any very useful training in political reporting, I was learning to be a bureaucrat.

This is something that should not be treated facetiously. Bureaucrats are made, not born. Nothing in my background trained me or prepared me to be a bureaucrat. It's very important. It's not all negative. If you're going to get along in a bureaucratic system, bureaucratic organization, you've got to learn what things are acceptable, what you can do, what you can't do. You've got to learn prudence and caution, how to get things done, things like that.

Actually I became, I think in most people's minds, a pretty good bureaucrat. Most of my career was spent as a bureaucrat. I've made a little summary here. Actually, out of my twenty-nine years of service--which were diminished by five and a half by firing, leaving twenty-three and a half years as actual time served in the Foreign Service--I only spent about five years in political reporting.

[103]

J. SERVICE: This is what I'm generally known for, and this is probably why I'm sitting here talking to you. But, actually administrative and consular work, which are usually lumped together, were about fourteen years of my time. So most of my time was, shall we say, in bureaucratic pursuits.

Of course, in the Amerasia case I violated a lot of bureaucratic rules, and I acted in a very unbureaucratic way. That's one of the reasons why I got into trouble. But that's something that comes later.

Also, the business of being a clerk and learning from the ground up how things are actually done--filing, coding a telegram, all the routine operation--was something that always stood me in good stead.

I had it in Kunming. I had it for a while in Peking because after things got busy in China politically, then they needed extra help in the code room, and the language officers were called out for night code room duty.

Then in Shanghai, as we'll see later, most of my work was administrative .

Always in my later Foreign Service career I knew what the practical problems were. I knew the advantages of writing, breaking up a despatch, for instance, into various smaller despatches, because then they would be filed more easily under the appropriate topic. You write a grab bag type of despatch, why the file clerk has got a terrible problem.

Learning how to draft telegrams so that the night duty officer could get the subject right away and decide whether or not it's worth decoding in the middle of the night, and learning how to deal with subordinates. All these and more were improved by having had a basic grounding. Most Foreign Service officers come in and start as a commissioned officer. They never had the noncommissioned, grassroots, down-to-earth sort of experience. Anyway, that covers my addendum.

Incidentally, talking about bureaucracy, I was going to relate an incident in Kunming when I was learning to be a bureaucrat. Every post in those days was required to submit weekly, for the U.S. Public Health Service, what was called a quarantine report. It was supposed to report epidemics for the U.S. Public Health Service.

[104]

J. SERVICE: Generally, most consuls were in seaports. But Kunming was five hundred miles from any water. We didn’t even know the population, and there were no medical statistics. So, we simply had a form statement. We would put it on this form each week, "The population is estimated to be 150,000. There are no statistics, but typhoid, smallpox, syphilis, are prevalent, and such and such diseases are endemic, cholera and so on." When I had spare time I would type these up in advance and have them all ready. It just seemed to me completely absurd that we should do this.

So, I kept telling Mr. Reed that we should explain and object. He laughed at me and he said it was no use. But, I persisted. He said, "Well, okay. Write a despatch and send it in."

So we wrote a formal despatch to the Department of State explaining all the circumstances. We waited months and eventually a reply came back.

[paraphrasing] The Department of State has forwarded our despatch to the Treasury Department which in turn had forwarded it to the U.S. Public Health Service (which was under Treasury). They now had pleasure in transmitting the reply back through the same channels.

The Public Health Service reported they read our reports with great interest, found them of much value, and hoped that the consulate at Kunming would be instructed to continue to submit them.

Reed laughed, of course, when this came in. He said, "I told you so."

But, he also had his foible in bureaucracy because he was trying, all of the time he was there, to get Kunming declared an unhealthy post. In those days you got service credit for time and a half if you served in an unhealthy post.

Kunming was considered a healthy post simply because somebody looked at a map and said, "Well, it’s on a plateau; the elevation is six thousand feet, lovely climate." So, we were a healthy post.

But, Shanghai and Hangkow--Shanghai was a modern city. You lived in a foreign concession. There was sewage, sanitation, doctors, and all the rest of it. But, Shanghai was listed as an unhealthy post.

[104a]

AMERICAN CONSULATE
YUNNANFU, CHINA.

GENERAL INFORMATION CONCERNING THE YUNNANFU CONSULAR DISTRICT

Area, Climate, and Topography. The Province of Yunnan, comprising the Yunnanfu Consular District, covers an area of approximately 146,714 square miles and is situated in the southwestern-most part of China Proper between latitude 21° and 29° N. and longitude 98° and 106° E. Although a mountainous province, various conditions combine to give Yunnan a striking assembly of topographic and climatic contrasts. In the lower districts adjacent to the Indo-China and Burma frontiers, high temperatures prevail throughout the year with an abundant rainfall. Much of this area supports a tropical forest. In the southeastern region, broad stretches of elevated plains surround the principal commercial centers. The average elevation here is in excess of 6,000 feet above sea level, hence there is the salubrious climate of low-latitude highlands. At Yunnanfu there is a marked periodicity of rainfall, most of the annual precipitation coming between May and September. The topography of the western and northern regions, which is characteristic of three-fourths of the surface area of the province, is formed by wide belts of elongated peaks and broken plateaus trenched by canyons and deep river valleys. The average altitude in these parts is a little over 8,000 feet. Several large areas of Yunnan are still unsurveyed.

Population, Language, and Standard of Living. The native population is estimated at slightly over 11,000,000, or 75 to the square mile. A little more than two-thirds are Chinese, the remainder being highland tribesmen of undetermined ethnical and linguistic affinities. The tropical districts are so isolated by mountains, rivers, and dense forests that the few who live there are mostly aborigines having little in common with the Chinese. In the west and north, the population is scattered over widely separated areas. Fertile stretches in the large river valleys support a dense agricultural population, but the majority of the inhabitants eke out a scanty subsistence from live stock raising on the grassy slopes. Because of level surface, fertile soil, and communication facilities, the southeastern table-lands are the most densely populated and have become the political and commercial center of the province. There are about 500 foreign residents in Yunnan, most of whom are French.

A Mandarin dialect is spoken by the Chinese and is the language of business. Correspondence may be conducted in French with a few firms in Yunnanfu.

The standard of living among the common people is very low. The average annual income of a family of five is $120.00. The purchasing power per capita for foreign imports is $2.50 per annum. The average daily wage of coolie labor is $0.25. Foreign imports are largely confined to necessities and nearly all other considerations are secondary to price.

Chief Cities and Leading Occupation. Yunnanfu, with a population of about 150,000, is the provincial capital and chief commercial center. The city is 6,400 feet above sea level and 534 miles by rail from the seaport of Haiphong. The treaty ports of Mengtsz, Hokow, Szemao and Teugyueh are trading centers. Talifu is of commercial importance in the western region.

The chief occupation of 90% of the population is agriculture: this is intensively carried on in the river valleys and fertile plains where native irrigation systems have been developed. Farming methods are antiquated but well adapted to local conditions. Rice, poppy, beans, wheat and corn are the principal crops. Sericulture and stock raising are also important. Aside from manufacturing for local consumption, which is still in the handicraft stage, the only important industry is mining. Yunnan is rich in undeveloped mineral resources but only tin, coal, and salt are of commercial importance. In 1930 Yunnan produced 4 ½ % of the world's output of tin ore.

Foreign Trade. The value of the whole foreign trade of Yunnan in 1930 was approximately $20,556,194. The principal foreign imports were cotton yarn ($5,203,082), piece goods ($1,264,106), kerosene ($481,996), rice ($472,906), dyes and pigments ($174, 732). The bulk of foreign imports are of Japanese, French, and English origin. Exports to Hong Kong and foreign countries consisted chiefly of tin in slabs ($5,643,731), hides and skins (untanned) ($726,874), yellow silk ($608,462), medicines ($62,016), pig bristles ($60,755).

Customs Tariff. In addition to the duties collected under the regular Chinese Customs tariff, a special local consumption tax. ranging from 2½% to 17½% ad valorem is also levied. To this may be added transit dues amounting to approximately 2½% ad valorem on goods entering Yunnan through Tonking.

Postal Tariff and Telegraph*, Rates of the Universal Postal Union apply to all mail matter from the United States. The international parcel post and money order services may be used to advantage. Yunnanfu maintains radio-telegraphic communication with all parts of the world.

Transportation Conditions and Connections. The majority of foreign imports enter this province through the port of Haiphong, French Indo-China, thence by rail to the distributing centers of Mengtsz and Yunnanfu, where pack animals and coolie carriers are engaged to transport them over primitive caravan routes to interior points. Several American steamship companies are prepared to serve the port of Haiphong or to transship at Hong Kong under a through bill-of-lading.

Character of Packing Desirable. Goods destined for this province should be packed to withstand repeated transshipments, rough handling and the hot, damp climate of Indo-China through which they pass. Moisture-proof containers and metal-bound cases are desirable.

Banking Facilities and Credit Term*. The Banque de l'Indochine (French), with branches at Mengtsz and Yunnanfu, is the only foreign bank. It offers very limited banking facilities for direct trade with the United States. Importers usually arrange for goods to be shipped on the payment of sight drafts on the bank’s New York correspondent. Telegraphic transfers and irrevocable export credits are generally unobtainable. Cash with order or substantial partial payments in advance of delivery are the usual terms imposed on local firms.

Advertising. Modern advertising methods are practically unknown, although some progress is being made to introduce them through the medium of posters and newspapers. Posters to be effective must be intelligent to the masses, that is, they must explain themselves by the pictures they bear, and draw attention to the trade-mark or "chop." Newspaper advertising rates are not heavy. Descriptive literature of American products should be accompanied by price lists. If the product is used in Yunnan, the all important factor is how much it will cost the local importer. If the manufacturer's letter gives this
information, i.e., current prices c.i.f. Haiphong or Hong Kong, the local merchant is in a better position to know at once whether business is possible.

Entering the Market. On account of the language barrier and the unfamiliarity of Yunnanese firms with Western business practices, it is usually advisable for American exporters to deal with foreign commission houses in Hong Kong or Shanghai. Most of these firms have branch offices or representatives in the United States, with which it is frequently advantageous to communicate before endeavoring to do business with local establishments.

This office is prepared to supply lists of local firms without assuming responsibility for their integrity or financial standing. For further information address :

THE AMERICAN CONSUL, YUNNANFU, CHINA.
Revised February, 1, 1931.

[105]

J. SERVICE: Reed spent a good deal of his time in Kunming on a campaign to get this changed, but he was as unsuccessful as I. [laughter]

Marriage to Caroline Schulz in Haiphong, 1933

LEVENSON: You got married pretty soon after you were posted to Yunnanfu, didn't you?

J. SERVICE: Well yes. Caroline came out to China with my mother. You know all this probably from her. She got sick in Shanghai. Whether or not it was really appendicitis was later cast in doubt by another doctor. But, at any rate, she had her appendix out and came up to Kunming -- came to Haiphong first.

Everyone felt that it would be very difficult for a strange woman to come alone up the railway, so I should go down to meet her. But, then we couldn't possible travel up the railway alone three days together! So, we had to get married in Haiphong which turned out to be an incredibly difficult thing to do. French colony, French regulations and laws.

We were probably the first and maybe the only Americans ever to have been married in French Indochina. We had to get dispensations from the governor-general in Saigon. All sorts of special documents had to be obtained that we were entitled to get married under our own laws, of our own states. Everything had to be translated into French.

With the help of the French consul-general in Shanghai and the French consul-general in Kunming and the governor- general in Saigon it was all finally arranged. The only problem was that Caroline's ship ran into a typhoon, which meant that she was stranded off the island of Hainan for three days.

A whole series of holidays were coming, the birthday of the emperor of Annam and Armistice Day and a weekend. There were three or four days of holiday. Her ship finally came in. The mayor--it was a civil wedding--stayed in his office specially. He obviously had given instructions to customs to get her through fast.

So we rushed to his office and in five minutes it was all done--for a fee, I think, of one or two piasters. But we spent fifty times that amount in hassling and documents, because they all had to be certified as correct translations. All had to be notarized.

[106]

J. SERVICE: We stayed that first night in the flat of the American head of the Standard Oil Company and then took the train up and had another wedding up in Kunming in the home of the YMCA secretary. There was an American missionary--named Romig--who happened to be in town because his wife was having a baby. So, he married us. A few years ago he turned up as minister of a church down in Oakland.

Soon after we were married the [American Oriental] bank went bust, because of deflation in Shanghai, which was caused by the U.S. silver purchasing program. This caused the price of silver to go up, which meant deflation in China. Prices went down as the price of silver went up.

Anyway, the bank went under--it may have gone under for other reasons too, who knows? We eventually got about 37 per cent back.

You ought to stop me if I'm saying things that Caroline has said.

LEVENSON: No, she didn’t say any of this.

J. SERVICE: All right.

Yunnanfu Society

J. SERVICE: I'm sure Caroline has talked about Charles Reed. We lived in a couple of rooms off on a wing of the consulate which was a semiforeign, semi-Chinese style place--which we revisited in '75 when we were in Yunnan.

LEVENSON: Who were the American nationals in Yunnan?

J. SERVICE: There was an American YMCA secretary. There were, I think, two families in the Seventh Day Adventist mission. There was an American who was commissioner of customs. He was a Californian named Talbot, from Berkeley, who had known my parents.

The foreign community was very small. There was a commissioner of customs, a commissioner of posts, British consul-general, French consul-general--and then he had two staff, two officers under him. Then there were some people with the French railway. The French had a doctor there. The

[107]

J. SERVICE: French had a hospital, as they did in Chengtu also. One of the same doctors who had been in Chengtu in my boyhood was now one of the doctors in Kunming.

About the only thing to do in Kunming was to go to dinner parties with the same people. You always knew where you were going to sit. My usual place was next to the daughter of the postal commissioner, for instance. Caroline always sat higher because women were relatively scarce. I would be always at the middle of the table.

You had picnics, Sunday picnics. That was a big thing. Then there was the Cercle portif de Yunnanfu, the foreign club which was dominated by the French. People went there almost every afternoon for tennis or bridge and for a few drinks.

I taught one or two Chinese students who wanted to get some help on English. But, actually we saw very few Chinese. It was a foreign life floating on the surface of China.

LEVENSON: Were there any journalists out there?

J. SERVICE: No. None ever got to Kunming, as I recall, when we were there. Nor did we have very many American visitors, and almost no tourists.

There was one American tourist. He was a young chap named Fulton, who I think later on became a member of Congress. He was just out of college, bumming around the world. He had had some money apparently. So, he was just going to out-of-the-way places.

We had one party of [American] consular people from Canton who came up on an overland trip. Reed was still there, and he was going to put them up at the hotel. When these people got there and found out they were going to be put up in a hotel, why they said, "Come on, can't we stay at the consulate?" So I took them up, and Reed was furious. They had been on the road for three weeks or something like that and staying at inns. They weren't about to go to a crummy little local hotel.

We put up what few people there were, like the airplane people, the CNAC [China National Air Corporation] people. We usually put them up. But, I don t recall any newspaper people. There wasn't much reason why they should be there .

LEVENSON: What was your Impression of the French colonial government?

[108]

J. SERVICE: Their consular people were quite good. They learned Chinese. They had a specialized China service, very much the way we did and the British did. I thought they were quite capable. I didn’t see too much of the railway people. They ran the railway fairly efficiently, a narrow gauge, a little railway.

The community was more notable for people who had come up as labor contractors when the railway was being built, some of them Greeks. They had come up as labor bosses. They would contract to build a certain section of the railway. They stayed on and went into business.

They had little import-export or general stores in Kunming--names like Miniatis and Kominatos. They were mainstays of the club. Most of them played bridge very well. They'd all come to bridge by way of whist and goodness knows what else. In those days contract was just coming in.

A British salesman came up there to try to sell some airplanes. He was trying to break the French monopoly. So, he had this plane and he offered us a ride. Ginny had just been born, and Caroline said, "We can’t. It would be awful to leave Ginny behind, in case something happened to us." So, we took Ginny along. [laughter] She was only about two weeks old I think, two or three weeks old.

But, when the CNAC people were there I went out with them to the airfield. They had to do some work on the plane, and I could be helpful as an interpreter if they needed one. So, they got the plane--did whatever they were going to do. Then they said, "Come on, let’s take a ride!"

So, I jumped in the plane and we flew to Kweiyan, which is the capital of Kweichow province, a neighboring province to the east. We flew there and just landed on a mud field, military field there, and then took off again and flew back. We were away a little less than two hours altogether.

That evening I told the consul what we had done. He scolded me for leaving the consular district without authority because Kweichow province was not in our consular district and regulations say that a consul should get authority before he leaves his consular district.

But we had done in that two hours what would be the equivalent of four weeks travel, because it was two weeks each way, a minimum of two weeks each way by mule or sedan chair.

[109]

J. SERVICE: The first trip I made to Shanghai was down by boat to Hong Kong. We stopped at Hainan Island. I always got off the boat and called on the missionaries there, Presbyterians I think.

The boat was staying there long enough so they asked me to stay overnight. The next morning at breakfast, the head of the house asked me to say grace. In a missionary home they always said grace, but I had gotten so out of the habit that I was just caught completely unawares. I managed to rally and say a few words. The young Foreign Service clerk had already slipped far from his missionary rearing.

There were crackpots. Yunnan was not a regular mission field for the older established missions. Most of the people we had were Assemblies of God or Pentacostalists or people who were drawn there because it was remote, close to Tibet.

We had some Baptists down on the Burma border that were always getting into trouble because they had made their work among some of the aboriginal people down there. The aborigines were miserably treated by the Chinese. The missionaries came in and when the aborigines found a protector, someone on their side, then they converted by the village, just en masse.

This caused all sorts of problems. There was nothing we could do about it. [chuckling] They were way down, you know, three weeks travel away down there on the Burma border. Yunnan, on the whole, was a screwball sort of place.

The Opium Trade

LEVENSON: What sort of trouble did these missionaries get into?

J. SERVICE: They were always trying to protect their converts against what they considered persecution by the Chinese. Heavy taxation--opium. The Chinese wanted them to grow opium. How else were they going to get any taxes out of them? This was typical pretty much all over.

I think that the missionaries were gulled at times by their converts. No doubt their people were badly treated. Most of the aborigines were badly treated by the Chinese. The Chinese took the best land. The aborigines either were left in the valleys if they were malarial, or were pushed up on the mountains. Where the land was good the Chinese were in occupation. In taxation, in everything that concerned government, they were discriminated against.

[110]

LEVENSON: What about the opium trade? Did that ever come under your official eye or did you manage not to notice?

J. SERVICE: You couldn't help but have it under your eye since the poppies were every- where. Whole fields around the city of Kunming were a mass of poppies in the spring- time. There was vacant land inside the city walls, right outside the walls of the consulate, that was planted with poppies.

Did the trade come to our notice? Certainly you couldn't avoid knowing about it. There were certain people there in town, French people, that had no visible means of support. One assumed that they were engaged in it some way or another.

Some foreigners smoked opium. The Frenchman who was the local representative for the Salt Gabelle which was the third Chinese organization run by foreigners, smoked opium.(Others were the Maritime Customs and the Posts.) After dinner he would generally retire and smoke.

The whole life style, the daily schedule of a city like Kunming was tied to opium smoking. People got up very late in the morning, and late in the evening they would come out in the streets to get a snack. The whole town was geared to the prevalence of opium smoking.

You saw it everywhere you went. If you traveled, the inns were full of the smell of it. Your chair bearers and so on would smoke. It was a very commonly seen thing.

We took trips on ferry boats on a lake near Kunming. I remember watching an old man, for instance, curl up on deck and then smoke, just taking advantage of the relaxation, quiet on the boat crossing the lake to smoke.

One thing I may not have stressed was the fact that Yunnan was one of the principal opium producing regions of China. It was an important cash crop. The opium was shipped out through various other warlord domains down the river to Shanghai, Hangkow, and also particularly down the West River to Canton. Of course, some of it went into Indochina, and some of it we suspected was processed into morphine and heroin.

[111]

J. SERVICE: Soldiers and opium were what Yunnan really lived on, exporting soldiers and exporting opium.

The United States government was very much interested, then as now, to stop opium traffic, narcotics traffic. So we were supposed to report on that.

I just happened to pick up recently a Bulletin of the Concerned Asian Scholars, July-September, 1976. I see there's a long article in here, a very good article as a matter of fact, on opium and the politics of gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927-45. One of the important sources this author, Jonathan Marshall, uses our American consular reports from all over China. I find a number of reports in here that were written by Reed and Ringwalt while I was in the consulate in Kunming and which I myself typed and prepared to be sent out.

They mention in one place a figure of 130,000,000 ounces for 1933.

LEVENSON: From the province of Yunnan?

J. SERVICE: The province of Yunnan.

LEVENSON: Doesn't that seem like an extraordinarily high figure?

J. SERVICE: It's a tremendous figure but--I don’t know. No one actually knew of course. It was a guess, but if you saw the countryside around Kunming in the springtime when it was just a mass, a sea of opium poppies, you could believe an awful lot was produced.

LEVENSON: How did you and your seniors arrive at these figures? This sort of statistics collection has always struck me as a tremendous problem.

J. SERVICE: Well yes. You had ideas of the magnitude of the trade through the size of military convoys that would take it out of the province for instance.

LEVENSON: Military convoys?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes.

LEVENSON: Whose army?

J. SERVICE: Well, it had to be by military to give it safety. Most of it moved in very large shipments. One warlord shipping it through the territory of another warlord, by arrangement of course.

[112]

J. SERVICE: There would be a pay-off. But you would hear, for instance, of convoys of a hundred or two hundred mules. Well, we're talking here about ounces, so you'd convert that to pounds, into mule loads. A hundred mule loads is a lot of opium.

LEVENSON: Of course it is.

J. SERVICE: And so, it's actually tons, and perhaps hundreds of tons, of opium that was being produced, that one could actually get very clear evidence of .

LEVENSON: Who counted? Was it direct observation or did you have sources who brought you these reports?

J. SERVICE: Sometimes scuttlebutt, rumor. Sometimes missionaries had seen them. Sometimes Chinese reported them. Occasionally something would get in the newspapers, but not very much of that sort of thing. This was generally gossip and rumor. But sometimes if you just happened to be traveling yourself you might see them on the road. We didn’t do much traveling, but if a large shipment was being made it would get talked about.

LEVENSON: I look forward to reading that article.

J. SERVICE: The thing that's interesting about this article, one thing to me that's interesting about this article, is that in the late 1950s, or around 1960, there was a man named K-o-e-n, I think it is, who wrote a book on the China Lobby. This was his Ph.D. dissertation, a rewrite of it, and it was being published by Macmillan. In it he made some accusations, some statements tying the Kuomintang to opium business.

After the book was published Macmillan got cold feet, withdrew the book, tried to get back all copies from libraries and people they sold it to, and simply squashed the book. I’ve been told, and I think it s probably true, that it was the State Department that brought pressure on Macmillan to withdraw the book.

Yet here is this article written now, much later, all based on U.S. government consular reports showing absolute, complete, and very intimate tie-up of government in China, including the Kuomintang government, with the opium business, deriving income from it.

Levenson: On a fairly institutionalized basis.

[113]

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, sure. And yet the State Department apparently forced Macmillan or scared Macmillan into withdrawing this book. It became a collector's item, of course, until it was reprinted here recently.(Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics, New York, Macmillan, 1960.)

LEVENSON: How does the book stand up?

J. SERVICE: Oh, it stands up very well. The part on the opium is quite peripheral. It's not at all integral to the story of the book.

LEVENSON: I think that's a very interesting footnote.

Did opium users function okay?

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes. Opium in moderation is probably no worse than cigarette smoking, and cheaper in those days in Yunnan.

People would smoke usually in the evening. Then, about ten-thirty or eleven o'clock they would want some refreshment, and the streets would suddenly be quite full of people. A great many peddlers selling Chinese-type snacks would be on the street, noodles and things like this, for this post-smoking snack, like the after-theater crowd.

We knew it was just as well not to try to get hold of our number one boy along in the middle of the forenoon, or in the middle of the afternoon, because he was down in his room having a few pipes.

You would telephone people in government offices. We did have telephones, although they didn't work very well. Particularly in Chengtu when I was a boy, if you telephoned somebody or you tried to call on somebody, and they said, "He's out telephoning," it always meant that he was having opium!

Lung Yun, the Local Warlord

LEVENSON: What relations did you have with the provincial government? Did you have your own warlord or conflicting ones?

J. SERVICE: There very definitely was a local warlord named Lung Yun, "Dragon Cloud," who was part aborigine, probably mixed Chinese and aborigine. But, he had gotten Yunnan very firmly in his

[114]

J. SERVICE: grip. Of course, he worked with the French, but I think the French were quite content to let him govern.

But they had him really under a very tight rein because it was impossible for him to import any arms, buy any arms, except from them. The foreign trade had to come through Indochina. The only outlet to the world that was usable was through Indochina .

I think that they had agreements with him on things like handling of political exiles. There were always some dissidents, Annamese dissidents who were opposed to French rule. So, I'm sure that the French, or Lung Yun for the French, kept a pretty close watch on that.

Then, there were problems like deserters from the Foreign Legion. A good part of the garrison in Indochina was Foreign Legion, and some of them would take off and run to the hills occasionally, end up in Kunming. They always got returned to the French.

But, Lung Yun ran Yunnan as a separate country in effect. There was a representative of the ministry of foreign affairs--

LEVENSON: The Chinese?

J. SERVICE: Yes, the Chinese Nationalist government in Nanking. But, he had to be someone who was acceptable to the local people. In other words he was someone designated by Lung Yun and then given a commission by the foreign office.

He was the person we normally dealt with. What little business we had was with this old gentleman who was an old Mandarin holdover from the days of the [Ch'ing] empire who, I’m sure, consumed his share of opium as most people did.

Assorted Chores

LEVENSON: Was there something further on your notes?

J. SERVICE: Oh well, I've got all sorts of things.

We didn't have any dealings with the central Chinese government except for this local representative. We didn't have much business anyway except for missionaries that got into trouble or had complaints, or in some cases a missionary might die.

[114a]

American Consul

Kunming

October 3, 4 p.m. Following from the Department: "Two, October 2, 3 p.m. The president has approved the appointment of Service Yunnanfu as foreign service officer unclassified twenty-five hundred dollars per annum effective October 1, 1935. Shall take three separate oaths as foreign service officer unclassified, as vice consul of career and as a secretary of the diplomatic service of the United States and file bond and affidavit in accordance Consular Regulations. Service is assigned vice consul Yunnanfu.

Rent unchanged. Cost of living increased to two hundred sixty-six dollars per annum effective October 1, 1935.

The above has been repeated to Shanghai for delivery to Service.

For the Ambassador

LOCKHART

[115]

J. SERVICE: I remember one missionary who died. She was a very large woman who had lived in a remote city for many years and gotten so heavy she couldn’t be carried in a sedan chair. So there was no way for her to leave. She simply died there all alone. It turned out that despite her having been there for ten or twelve years she had no converts, no one to look after her. The local magistrate took charge of her possessions and sent them up to the consulate.

We didn’t have a great deal of business. We were there mainly because it was so remote; there was no other way for Americans to get protection or consular services, passports, and so on, except by having a consulate there.

But, also we were there to watch the French. In earlier more actively "imperialist" days, there had been concern about what were the French up to.

After about a year, Reed was transferred, and a Chinese language officer, Arthur Ringwalt, was assigned to the consulate.

Also, after a year--I think after Caroline became pregnant--we were given a rent allowance, $150 a year, which was ridiculous.

But anyway, we then moved out of the consulate and rented a house belonging to an Englishman, an English Methodist missionary, I think. They had a small mission hospital there, and the doctor was going on home leave.

Ringwalt was a more pleasant person to work for. I was in charge actually for a while between the two men. Then, Ringwalt did some traveling and left me in charge.

The Long March Skirts Kunming

LEVENSON: When the Long March skirted Yunnanfu, what advance intelligence, if any, did you have?

J. SERVICE: Well, I'm not sure. Of course, the Chinese newspapers had something but not very much. They were strictly controlled and heavily censored. Also, we had only Kuomintang communiqués which were always that the enemy is at full retreat. But, very often the enemy is in full retreat toward our rear, you know. [laughter]

[116]

LEVENSON: That‘s a nice expression.

J. SERVICE: I think that probably most of our information came from people in the customs and the post office, and also from missionaries, because in those days the Communists were super anti-imperialists. If they had a chance to snatch missionaries, they would hold them for ransom or sometimes try them for imperialist crimes.

Not so much the Mao group, but some of the subsidiary groups actually executed a few, held trials, executed them as imperialist agents, which they could be. If you wanted to talk about passing on information, missionaries did serve in some ways as spies. We'll come to some of that later on.

We got reports from missionaries who were having to flee because of the Communist advance, telegrams and so on. This got closer and closer and people traveling as best they could, began to arrive in Kunming. So, we knew the Communists were coming our way.

Late one night--The consuls were trying to keep in touch. I forget what time this was, but it was quite late. We got a chit from the British consul-general, I think, who was very
close to the French consul-general--they were near neighbors saying that they had decided that all women and children should leave by the morning train.

They'd made arrangements with the railway. There was one train a day, early morning. So I rounded up the few Americans there were, running around knocking on their front gates, got them up and got them off on the train.

There was an American plant explorer there, a rather famous man named Joseph Rock who did a lot of work for the Harvard Arboretum and for the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was living in Kunming at that time, and a bit of an old maid. He wanted us to tell him whether or not he should evacuate. We said, "Our instructions are women and children should evacuate." He asked, "Did we think it was dangerous?" Well, we didn’t know. So he left on the train the day after the women and children did.

The Long March came very close to the city. Some of it did. Of course, an army of that size doesn't all trudge single file on a single road. They move through a country like a cloud of locusts, in a way.

[117]

J. SERVICE: Villages very close to Kunming were told the day beforehand--hey had scouts out ahead --"Prepare so much rice. So many people are going to be here tomorrow. You'll be paid." The remarkable thing was that everything worked out just as the scouts had said. So many people did come the next day, rice was prepared, and they were paid.

Of course, they were robbing landlords along the way, seizing what they could in the way of silver. Apparently they did have enough money to pay. It made a tremendous impression because people were not used to being paid for anything that was provided to soldiers.

For an army like this on the move to be so well organized and to pay off made a tremendous impression. This was not in the papers. It was what you heard from talking to people, the grapevine type of news.

Obviously their intent was to make a dash for the Yangtze, which they did. They had completely sidestepped the provincial army which had marched forth to meet them in Kweichow. The Communists were so mobile, so fast in marching, that they simply marched around them.

The night of the crisis some Yunnanese troops dragged into town, dead beat from being force-marched from further west. They would have been poor defenders--Kunming could have been captured if the Communists had thought it worth the time. But they knew their lives probably depended on getting across the Yangtze. So the Communists didn’t delay.

LEVENSON: Have you any estimate of the numbers in the Long March at this point?

J. SERVICE: We had heard all sorts of figures. I don't think anybody knew. We heard figures from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand, probably closer to fifty thousand.

LEVENSON: Did you see any of it?

J. SERVICE: No. No, we didn’t try to go outside the city walls. It would have been foolhardy. We went down to the club and consoled ourselves with the Cercle Sportif! [laughter] So, no one saw any of them. They just went by like ghosts. After about a week, we called the women and children back from Indochina. I think it was a week. Caroline probably told you. She remembers those things much better than I do.

[118]

LEVENSON: Can you recall your own estimate of what it meant?

J. SERVICE: Not really, no. No one really thought that these people were terribly important. Yes, they had held out in Kansu. But, I don’t think anyone felt that they were a real threat to the country or likely to take over.

Everybody felt that they were semi-brigands--and some of them were semi-brigands or had been brigands. There was always a lot of unrest and dissatisfaction. Yes, they were legendary for their marching ability, for their deftness in maneuvering.

But, they had been defeated. That's why the Long March took place. They had been driven out. They had lost, I think most people felt that this was sort of a remnant, defeated remnant, that was running for shelter and safety in some far western areas.

LEVENSON: Were leaders names talked about?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, of course, a great deal. Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh and Chou En-lai were famous names, and they were continually being reported as having died or been killed or died of wounds. Chou En-lai died numerous deaths. All of them--Mao Tse-tung was tubercular, at death’s door. These names were already legends.

LEVENSON: Amongst the foreign community?

J. SERVICE: And Chinese, yes. I don't know how much among the Chinese, but I would guess quite as much.

LEVENSON: I would have thought more amongst the Chinese.

J. SERVICE: Yes. My own contacts with Chinese were so limited in those days that I can't speak with assurance, as I could for instance in later days.

It was very impressive though, this organization and their treatment of the people. It made a very real impression.

LEVENSON: Did it linger? What was the effect of the March on the surrounding communities?

J. SERVICE: I don't think very much because they couldn't stay very long. They undoubtedly left wherever they went, a memory. People were paid and they treated the people well. In those days they took it from the landlords and gave it to the people.

[119]

J. SERVICE: What they couldn’t carry away they said, "Come in and help yourselves." It was sort of Robin Hood.

The ideology didn't have a chance to sink in as far as Yunnan was concerned.

The Chiangs Visit Yunnanfu

LEVENSON: Was it soon after that that Chiang Kai-shek and his wife came to visit?

J. SERVICE: Yes. The Kuomintang armies and Kuomintang airplanes were pursuing the Communists. This was how Chiang extended his control to some of the western provinces. Kweichow and Yunnan at this time began to come under central government control. It wasn't really effective until '37 when the Japanese war started. But, organizations like the Bank of China began to get into Yunnan.

The Chiangs came up to Yunnan, and they had a reception for the foreign community. Ringwalt, who was very absent-minded, didn't think about taking us. We found out later that the British consul had taken his cypher clerk, a man who was lower in status than I. But, Ringwalt just didn't think of it. So, we didn't meet Chiang and his lady, [laughing] Did Caroline say we did? I think she's wrong about this.

LEVENSON: No, Caroline remembers it that you went and she didn't.

J. SERVICE: No, no. Neither one of us went.

LEVENSON: Do you remember what impression they made? Obviously, you can't speak first person on this.

J. SERVICE: No. The big problem locally, the big question, was whether they were going to come before the opium was harvested, the poppies were harvested. If they were going to come before the opium was in, then the Chinese realized they were going to have to do some chopping, at least in the fields close to the city.

But, fortunately the crop was got in all right. Now, how this was arranged or why, I don’t know. But the fact is that there were no great losses of the local crop.

LEVENSON: Tact, I dare say, at some level.

[120]

J. SERVICE: The way the Chinese work things out.

The "Y" Discharges Roy Service: His Final Illness

J. SERVICE: My father was discharged from the YMCA about this time, which was a very traumatic thing for my parents. Have you finished my mother's autobiography?

LEVENSON: No, I haven't.

J. SERVICE: Well, you'll see that she's terribly embittered about it. The YMCA ran into serious trouble in the Depression. I suppose donations to things like missions and foreign works are probably the first things that a lot of people cut. American Y's had to maintain their local programs and probably cut their foreign donations first.

So the Y, I think, had a catastrophic loss of income. They were forced to reduce their foreign staff in China to a few people that they felt were essential or were good money-raisers, good public figures, this sort of thing. My father was just not that kind of person.

But he took it very hard. One thing was he felt he had made a lifetime commitment. That's what he'd been told when he joined the Y. Also he had his own support, partly from the Y here at Berkeley, although I think that had tapered off a good deal.

But he also had a friend who had been in China and who had gone back to the States and become YMCA secretary, general secretary, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who was apparently a great admirer of my father and what he was doing. He had generated support in Scranton.

So, my father had his own support. He had enough money coming into the Y to pay his salary. So, he felt that it was very unjust that he be one of the people to be laid off.

Ginny was born in July, 1935, and in the fall the air company that was partly owned by Pan Am and partly by the Chinese government, called China National Aviation Corporation, decided to start an airline to Kunming. They already had a line up the Yangtze which got as far as Chungking and Chengtu, and now they were going to have a branch come down to Kunming. We had quite an interesting time with those people when they stayed at the consulate.

[121]

J. SERVICE: My father had gotten a job meanwhile with the China International Famine Relief Commission. But my mother telegraphed in September that he was ill and apparently the doctors had no hope for him.

Fortunately, these air people had finished their preliminary survey and were just about to fly back to Shanghai. So I was able to make the trip before the airline was actually established, on this trial reconnaissance trip. They were going straight through, so I flew direct to Shanghai in two days.

It was actually quite exciting. It was a Ford tri-motor plane, a "tin goose" they called it. We got to Chungking, and the only field was a Chinese military field, which was quite a long ways down the river. We would have had to go up the river by launch for several hours to reach the city. So they decided it would be easier to go all the way to Hangkow.

When we reached Hangkow, it had gotten dark. The field had no lights. They had several motor cars with their head lights on. And they lit two drums of oil, waste oil, to mark the end of the runway.

The next day we went on to Shanghai. But, flying was much simpler in those days. [laughter]

My father was dying of what was probably cancer of the liver. The doctor said we could consider it cancer, but he called it cirrhosis, acute cirrhosis. He went downhill very quickly.

My second brother, Bob, the one who had come out to China after leaving college, had gotten a job in Macao with an engineering firm that was building a water works, a British contracting firm. He came up to Shanghai.

My youngest brother, Dick, had just come out from the States after graduation, so that all three of us were there.

We simply took care of my father at home, divided up the twenty-four hours. He didn't want to go to the hospital. He died the twenty-ninth of September.

He knew about his granddaughter, Ginny, being born. But, he just missed my becoming a Foreign Service officer. It was just a few days after that that I got word--I was in Shanghai--that I'd been appointed.

It was three years, roughly three years, from the time I took the exam. Normally after the exam, the eligible period is

[122]

J. SERVICE: two years. If you're not appointed in two years they drop you off the list. But, of course, they had to extend the list during the Depression.

So, I was then appointed a Foreign Service officer and assigned to Peking. They had already asked me, if I was appointed, would I volunteer for China language? I had said yes. So, my original orders just transferred me from Kunming to Peking.

To Peking as Chinese Language Attache

J. SERVICE: We arrived in Peking in December, 1935. I was assigned as a [Chinese] language attache. That's where we sent all our people for language study. In fact, all the foreign missions sent their people to Peking for language study. I had two years in Peking, which were a wonderful two years, an idyllic place to be with ostensibly no responsibilities except to study.

LEVENSON: Was this your first serious exposure to the written language?

J. SERVICE: Yes, that's right. I had sat in on a course here at Berkeley for a while, but not long enough to, really learn anything. As I said before, I had learned the numerals from comparing the English and the Chinese on the streetcars in Shanghai when I was a boy. But, I was basically illiterate in Chinese. I spoke a backwoodsy Szechwan dialect.

The first quarter in Peking we were sent to what was then called the North China Union Language School, which was run by a man named Pettus, mostly for missionaries, but also some business people and scholars.

It was the equivalent in those days of this sort of school in Taiwan now. But, there weren't very many scholars. [John King] Fairbank and Woody [Woodbridge] Bingham, people like that, were in Peking or had been in Peking just recently, Marty Wilbur and so on. All the China scholars went to Peking for a while, and they studied at this North China Language School .

But, the legation sent its people there only for the first quarter for an introduction. After that we studied on our own with our own teachers, following our own course, our own book.

[123]

J. SERVICE: We had a different emphasis. The missionaries were learning to read the Bible and to preach. We were interested in Chinese official correspondence and reading newspapers and being able to translate and interpret for official interviews.

The teachers, as I say, were horrified at my accent, my dialect, and insisted that I try to forget everything I had known and start completely anew.

LEVENSON: Was that very difficult?

J. SERVICE: Yes, it was. But, I think I did it fairly successfully.

LEVENSON: That's what I’ve heard!

J. SERVICE: I tried to forget my Szechwanese and just assume I didn't know any Chinese. So, I worked "wo, ni, t‘a," "I, you, he," this sort of thing.

LEVENSON: What did you think of the system of teaching?

J. SERVICE: It's a very time-wasting system, I'm sure, because basically, after we finished the language school we were just on our own with two or three teachers. We would spend practically all day with a teacher across the table working on the text. But, the teacher knew no English, and at the beginning you knew very little Chinese. I think that the modern methods of using tapes and so on would be far better.

But, we had two years to do it. In the army and the navy they had three years to do it.

LEVENSON: Oh really.

J. SERVICE: Yes. So, if you're willing to invest that amount of time and you've got full time to do it, why it works. We could learn Chinese.

LEVENSON: It sounds enormously luxurious to have a one-to-one relationship.

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes.

My brother Dick, after my father died, had gotten a job as clerk in the consulate in Foochow. He found out at this time that he had intestinal TB [tuberculosis]. He had an operation for appendicitis in Foochow and the doctor, when he opened his abdomen, found he had intestinal TB.

[124]

J. SERVICE: So, he came to Peking and was in the Rockefeller Hospital, the PUMC [Peking Union Medical College]. They recommended that we find a place outside the city. We went out to the Western Hills, maybe fifteen or twenty miles outside of Peking, and rented a house. Foreigners had bungalows out in the Western Hills. We lived out there for something over six months with Dick after he came out of the hospital.

I only had one teacher, and he came out by bus every day. He'd take a morning bus out to the bottom of the hill--we weren't very far up the hill. Then, he would stay there all day and go back in the afternoon. T his was not as good as having two or three teachers. But, we got along all right.

LEVENSON: So, you had no other duties than to study Chinese?

J. SERVICE: You had to read. You took an exam at the end of the first year and an exam at the end of the second year. You took exams on Chinese geography, foreign rights in China--extraterritoriality in other words--some Chinese history. You had to know something about China. This was not regarded as terribly important. Your main job was to learn Chinese.

But, I did a lot of reading. I can remember very definitely a milestone in my attitude or knowledge of China was coming across and reading R.H. Tawney’s Land and Labour in China, a very good book, still a very good book. But, it was the first, analytical, economic-sociological approach to China that I had seen.

There was a good deal on foreign relations in China. H.B. Morse and Tyler Dennett's Americans in Eastern Asia. Then, there was a two volume compilation by a man named [Westel Woodbury] Willoughby about foreign rights in China, all sorts of things about extraterritoriality because, of course, we had to protect our rights and even to serve as
consular judges at times.

Then, the history of China. In those days there wasn't very much. [Chauncey] Goodrich, and the old histories. The succession of the dynasties and Confucianism. You got a fuzzy idea about the wonders and virtues and ethical beauties of Confucianism and the examination system where even the poorest man had a chance, you know.

But, there was not much along the lines of a Marxist approach or any sort of a class analysis of China or what really went on with the peasants. You knew vaguely that there

[125]

J. SERVICE: was an elite culture. But, no one really went down to the soil and looked. You had had agricultural people come out and write books, like a man named King, an American, who wrote a fine book, Farmers of Forty Centuries. He was lauding the virtues of the Chinese system of agriculture, how it was self-sustaining and self-supporting and so conserving of everything, like night soil. He wrote panegyrics about Chinese agriculture, but nothing about systems of land tenure or life of the peasants or anything like that.

So, to read something like Tawney’s modern, social analysis of what China was all about was quite new.

LEVENSON: Did you come across [Max] Weber's work on China?

J. SERVICE: No, not at that time. No, actually it was not on the list, and I don't think it even was in the library at the legation. [laughter]

At the end of the first year we took comprehensive exams. We checked in about once every quarter at the embassy to find out how we were doing. Then, at the end of the year we took the exams. There were three students.

LEVENSON: Who were they?

J. SERVICE: Three at first. Two of them--One was Ed Rice, who's out here in Tiburon, and another man named Millet. We had a lot of jokes about Rice and Millet working together. Millet is the staple food for North China and rice for South China, of course. Then the second year another man was assigned, a man named Troy Perkins, who had already been in China, and had served for a while as a consular officer.

LEVENSON: Was there any professional training for your job as political officers?

J. SERVICE: Very little. I'd had some introductory political science, political theory, at Oberlin. But, it was a very sketchy course under a Hungarian named Jaszi, who was quite an interesting person who served in one of the early post-World War I governments in Hungary.

But, we really didn't have to know very much. We didn't go to anything like West Point or Annapolis. There wasn't any sort of special training academy.

[126]

J. SERVICE: Normally in the Foreign Service you went to an orientation course in the Department. Rut, that was only about a six week course. They'd show you what a visa was and what a passport was and a consular invoice was. You learned a little about routine operations.

I never attended the course because I'd been a clerk for two and a half years and I went from Kunming direct to Peking. So, I never had this orientation. But, I'm sure I was much better off than the people who had to rely on that.

You asked whether I'd read any Marxist and Leninist materials. No. I don't think I read anything directly by Marx or Lenin until I got to Yenan.

When I got to Yenan I realized --

LEVENSON: In 1944.

J. SERVICE: In 1944 I realized that I hadn't, and so I scratched around and asked the Communists, "Look, haven't you got any of these things here?" [laughter] They did. They found some very dog-eared, old copies that some of them had, some English versions of [Marx's] Communist Manifesto and things like that.

A Lotus-Eater's Paradise

LEVENSON: What can you remember about the foreign community there?

J. SERVICE: Oh, it was a wonderful place. Peking was a lotus-eater's paradise in those days. The life and the homes, the old Chinese homes that people were able to rent or buy, attracted people who simply wanted a lovely place to live. There was an artist community.

There were people like Harold Acton, a British poet. There were foreigners who were teaching in the universities there. Pei Ta [Peking National University] and Tsing Hua had several foreigners on the staff. Ivor Richards, a British philosopher and linguist was there.

There were people there that just liked living in Peking. There was an American sculptress named Lucille Swan. There was Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit archaeologist, paleontologist, but philosopher as well.

[127]

J. SERVICE: There was a diplomatic community. There was a missionary community. And there was a community of language students. There were the Marine guards.

For those who wanted it there was horse racing. A lot of people had polo ponies and played polo. We didn't. We stayed away from the club. Of course, we were out of town, living in the hills for a part of the time. But I was more interested in study than in going to the club.

But you couldn't avoid living a fairly busy social life. You met a few Chinese, not very many.

LEVENSON: I was going to ask about your Chinese contacts.

J. SERVICE: Hu Shih was there and various other people. Chiang Monlin who later on was president of Pei Ta. Hu Shih was lecturing in Chinese philosophy. I went to Hu Shih's lectures one year, my second year, when I could understand enough.

LEVENSON: How did they impress you?

J. SERVICE: Well, it was very interesting. Philosophy is not my subject unfortunately. I'm a nuts and bolts--I' m a facts and figures man, and I don't deal well with abstract concepts. But, the lectures were interesting, history of Chinese philosophy.

LEVENSON: Did you ever come across George Kates who wrote The Years that were Fat?

J. SERVICE: Yes. I didn't know him very well. He was a bit of an eccentric, sort of lived by himself.

People like [Owen] Lattimore were there. [Edgar] Snow was there. There was a foreign newspaper community, a foreign writers' community. As I said, there was quite a large, active artist colony.

We took several trips. I went up to Inner Mongolia with a man in the embassy named Salisbury. A group of us--Phil Sprouse and a couple of Marine language officers--took a trip out in the hills to an old Trappist monastery which was way back about four or five days' travel back in the mountains. They had developed their own little valley, put in irrigation, sort of a Shangri-la type of place.

But a lot has been written about Peking. I think we're wasting our time talking about life in Peking!

[128]

An Informal Study Group and Edgar Snow's Report on his First Trip to Yenan (Paoan)

J. SERVICE. You asked me about Ed Snow as a person. I wasn't an intimate with Ed, although we knew each other in Peking from the December 9 student demonstrations. But, we weren't very close. I've said almost everything I know about Ed in a piece that I did for the China Quarterly (John S. Service. "Edgar Snow, Some Personal Reminiscences, " The China Quarterly, April/ June, 1972, #50, pp 209-229.) after his death. I don't know whether we can incorporate this or not. Ed was a wonderful person, but you really don't want me to spend a lot of time talking about him, do you? [tape off]

It's actually mentioned in the memoir here, my second year in Peking I joined a group, very informal group, that used to meet about once a month at one of the member's homes.

Generally these were people who were scholars, writers. Hu Shih was a member. Owen Lattimore was a member. There was a Swedish newspaper man--half newspaper man, half scholar--people who were in Peking for postgraduate study or graduate study.

Ed Snow was a member. We knew in the summer of '36 that he was out of town, but nobody seemed to know exactly where. Then, he came back in the fall of '36, and it just happened that that month's meeting was at my house.

So he came and told us about the trip to Yenan. It was a very interesting, exciting evening.

LEVENSON: Visiting --

J. SERVICE: Yenan, his first trip to visit Mao Tse-tung, and the Communist army-- actually not to Yenan but Paoan, which was where they were located then. But, we always lump Paoan and Yenan and think of it as the Yenan period. It was at the beginning of the Yenan period, but they hadn't yet reached and occupied Yenan.

What was happening then, of course, was the hope for a United Front. What Ed Snow brought back was the Communist push for a United Front.

[129]

LEVENSON: With the Kuomintang?

J. SERVICE: With the Kuomintang. The Sian Incident hadn't yet occurred, but it took place very soon after that.(When Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by the Chinese Communists, 1936.) I think most of us, and even Ed Snow himself really, didn’t seem to feel that the Communists had any chance of coming out on top.

There was this possibility, a rather exciting one, that the civil war might end. But that was the extent of our expectations at that time.

Ed's political views at the time, well, [chuckling] we didn't categorize people by political views, and our political concerns were generally limited to China. Ed was certainly sympathetic with the Chinese left. He'd already published a volume of translations of stories, mostly short stories, by left-wing writers in China. But, then most of the promising young writers in China were left-wing, anti-Kuomintang , Lu Hsun and so on.

We knew that he was a friend of Lu Hsun and Madame Sun Yat-sen. He was in contact with the left. He and his wife, Nym Wales, had been sort of co-conspirators with the student leaders at Yenching during the December 9 riots.

We didn't know at the time the extent of the Communist influence in those riots, but I think the Communist influence moved in very rapidly. It may not have been there as an instigator at the beginning, but certainly the Communists did move in. A lot of those leaders, of course, ended up by becoming Communists.

You ask what information we had on the Communists. Snow's description of his trip to Yenan was really all we knew about the Communists.

LEVENSON: What was the focus of the study group?

J. SERVICE: The focus really was whatever study or research people were doing. Owen Lattimore, I remember, was still writing his Inner Asian Frontiers of China. He was doing research on the history of the long conflict between the nomads and the settled farmers.

[130]

J. SERVICE: I remember there was a lot of discussion at one of these sessions about who first invented trousers and the significance of trousers! Of course, you couldn't really develop cavalry until you had pants. [laughing] You could have chariots. But, if you were going to ride, as the Mongols did, you had to have trousers. So, there was a lot of discussion as to just when--the Scythians are supposed to have had trousers.

It tried to be scholarly. There were several members that usually had some topic of interest. I don't remember Hu Shih ever giving us a talk, but he used to show up occasionally.

LEVENSON: When you commented on Ed Snow's political views you said that people weren't categorized in those days. Now I don't know to what extent people were being categorized in the United States in the mid-thirties?

J. SERVICE: Probably more than we were in China. I think we were much more isolated in China and naive perhaps. But by the mid-thirties certainly there was Communist influence in the writing field and labor unions in the States. But we didn't, as I recall, think much about it in China.

LEVENSON: I just read a review of a book about Norman Thomas and a comment that like many American political activists he despised too much intellectual baggage--political theory. Am I getting the right impression that political theory just wasn't a significant part of the intellectual life of the group you're describing in the 30's in China?

J. SERVICE: Yes. I think it was probably felt to be irrelevant. It didn't impinge very much.

I think I mentioned earlier that in 1932, when I was a graduate student here, Norman Thomas came to Berkeley during the presidential campaign. He couldn't speak on the campus. He spoke on the steps of I[nternational] House.

I was one of a large crowd that heard him speak. I voted Socialist in '32 and if you asked me, I probably would have said that I was a Socialist; certainly Ed Snow and his wife were Socialists. But I wouldn't have thought very much about it.

I hadn't met any Communists at this time. I didn't think of people as being Communists.

[131]

Embassies Insulated from Chinese Political Events

LEVENSON: What political judgments were you able to form? Or were you just so busy that--

J. SERVICE: Actually, I think it was a sort of a vacuum. No, that isn't true. The political climate was mainly the Japanese threat. The Japanese were trying by a nibbling process, to carve off North China or at least cut it out from under direct Nanking control. They talked about "autonomy" for the North China provinces, and that would mean the withdrawal of Chiang Kai-shek's own troops and strengthening local people.

There was a flight of Japanese airplanes over Peking the day we got there. They were dropping leaflets in favor of autonomy for what was called East Hopei, where they finally did set up a separate regime, East Hopei Autonomous Region.

Then only a few days after I was in Peking, the students in the universities all demonstrated, December 9 movement [1935]. John Israel has written a book about it.

Of course, I took off. I mean I didn't go to school when something like that was going on. I was the only person really, except for people like the Snows and Jimmy White who was the AP [Associated Press] man--the newspaper people were out--but I was the only American official as far as I know that was in the streets while these demonstrations were going on. I went back to the office and told them about it.

LEVENSON: Was that apathy typical of the diplomatic corps?

J. SERVICE: Very much. They'd got enough to do at the office, and they stayed at the office.

At any rate I had a wonderful time following the students all day. That afternoon, they were beaten up very badly by the gendarmes, sprayed with water hoses, and driven into alleys where the police could beat them up. The police had belts with heavy buckles and they used those. I’m sure they learned a lot of these things from the French police. Don’t they call them gendarmes?

LEVENSON: Yes.

J. SERVICE: Then at the end of '36--just after a year-- there was the Sian Incident when the Generalissimo was kidnapped in Sian. Of course, this was a tremendous affair.

[132]

J. SERVICE: I remember seeing Chinese like Chiang Monlin weep when the Generalissimo was released, when the word came that he was safe and coming back. The Chinese felt--people of that kind who were, you know, Kuomintang people--felt very emotional about it.

I had a shortwave radio which really we got for my brother, because when he was sick out in the Western Hills he was in bed most of the time. I was fiddling with it during the Sian affair, and suddenly I realized I was hearing Sian, Sian calling, an English voice. It was Agnes Smedley who happened to be in Sian. She was broadcasting the news.

So, I went down to the embassy the next day and told them about news being broadcast from Sian, and they were absolutely staggered. [laughing]

LEVENSON: Did they not have anybody monitoring?

J. SERVICE: No. Things were very simple in those days. People didn't think of these things. The idea that there were news broadcasts in English that they could pick up from Sian was something that no one had ever thought of.

LEVENSON: Was anything done to change the situation?

J. SERVICE: I think that they picked up--After all the navy had a big radio station there. All of our communications were by navy radio. So, I assume from then on--when they got the time and wave length from me that they started listening.

LEVENSON: You assume, but you're not sure.

J. SERVICE: No, I don't know.

LEVENSON: That's an extraordinary story.

J. SERVICE: I just went in and told them, Agnes Smedley's in Sian, and she's telling us all about it. Chou En-lai was there, of course, negotiating the whole settlement and the release.

LEVENSON: What did Agnes Smedley have to say if you recall?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I don't recall. It was just a news bulletin. I don't remember very much of what she said, but that the Generalissimo was safe and things like that, because people on the outside weren't sure. I think she was just giving an account of negotiations going on and the terms of the Young Marshal, Chang Hsueh-liang. She was talking from the point of view of

[132a]

Photo Guide

1. Caroline Service, Peking, ca. 1936.
2. John S. Service, Western Hills, Peking, ca. 1936.
3. John S. Service en route to present his credentials to Chaing Kai-shek, May 26, 1941.
4. Jack and Caroline Service in front of American Club, Shanghai, 1939.
5. Chungking, 1941. The full staff of the American Embassy: 5 Career Officers, 4 clerks. Back row from left: Ruess, Service, Vincent, ? , Hart; front row: Craig, Small, Ambassador Gauss, Macdonald.
6. American consulate, Yunnanfu (Kunming), July 4, 1934. Warlord Lung Yun, center front. John S. Service, 3rd row, far right.
7. A Masonic group, Shanghai, 1941. John S. Service, back row, right.

(page of photos not included)

[133]

J. SERVICE: Chang Hsueh-liang rather than from the point of view of the Communists. But, I think she mentioned the fact that Chou En-lai was there, as I recall. Well, that's enough of that.

LEVENSON: Okay.

Red Star Over China

LEVENSON: When was Snow's book, Red Star Over China, published?

J. SERVICE: [gets up to get book] Actually, Gollancz brought it out in '37. Here's the first English edition, but third printing unfortunately.

We saw it first in the British edition in China. It was late '37, as I recall. Practically everyone read it in China.

By the time Snow wrote the book, things had changed because the Sian Incident had taken place. He had to do a lot of frantic, last minute revision. The war against the Japanese had started. The United Front was in existence. It looked in those early, optimistic days of the United Front that there might be real peace in China and that the civil war really was over.

LEVENSON: This is 1937.

J. SERVICE: Nineteen thirty-seven, early '38. A Chinese edition came out in '38. The Chinese translated it immediately. It was a sensational best seller, of course, in China. No attempts to suppress it. This was published in Shanghai, and it was in Shanghai that I saw it on sale. I can't tell you for sure what the situation was inland.

But, I think in the very early months of the war the United Front was really quite effective. [telephone interruption. New York Times correspondent checking on Philip Sprouse’s obituary]

LEVENSON: You commented before I turned the tape back on that the pictures in the Chinese edition of Red Star Over China were very much more interesting than the ones in the English, Gollancz edition. How do you account for that?

J. SERVICE: I really don't know. Ed's wife, Nym Wales, went up to Yenan just after he did. When he came out she went in. A lot of the photographs in the English edition are actually by Nym Wales.

[134]

J. SERVICE: I would guess maybe that she--she was not one for a back seat--may have wanted some of her pictures in. They're very stereotyped pictures of dance troupes and things like that. Whereas, the others were probably selected by the Chinese from a stack of photographs that Ed had. He took a lot of pictures.

Incidentally, Ed gave all the proceeds of the Chinese edition to the Chinese Red Cross. He didn't get a dime out of it. There were also pirated editions that were put out. But,
this is the authorized edition.

LEVENSON: I see notations on the Chinese edition. Did you read most of it in Chinese?

J. SERVICE: Yes, I read it once long ago. It's a good job.

LEVENSON: It's a historical document now.

J. SERVICE: Okay?

LEVENSON: Okay.

The Marco Polo Incident: Jack in Hospital with Scarlet Fever

J. SERVICE: The war started when we were in Peking, in the summer of '37. Caroline's father and mother came out to visit her. Her father had retired. His last post with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been in San Francisco. They came out and stayed with us for a while.

Then, they decided to go off to a beach resort, Peitaiho. My mother was also down there with my brother Dick. On the third of July--they were going to leave after the fourth-- I had a terrible sore throat. I went to the embassy guard. They had a navy doctor there, a couple of them.

The doctor was amazed at my throat. He called the other doctor over to look at it. "Isn't this a beauty?" So, they told me to go home and gargle with salt water. I said, "We've got a small baby. How about that?" He said, "Sure, you better stay away from the baby. Don't get too close to the baby. Mustn't give the baby your sore throat."

The next day I went to the Fourth of July reception at the embassy--all Americans were invited, of course, to the embassy on the Fourth of July--and talked to everybody, but I felt miserable.

[135]

J. SERVICE: The next day--the fifth--I had quite a fever. So a doctor finally came to my house, and he said, "You know what you've got?" I said, "No." He said, "You've got scarlet fever."

They sent me immediately to the PUMC isolation ward, which was full of children. It was mostly diphtheria, and they had tubes in their windpipes. Chinese don't go to hospitals until they're in extremis normally. I think I was the only adult in this ward for a while with all these little kids with diphtheria.

Anyway, the family had already gone off to the beach before they knew I had scarlet fever and had to go to the hospital.

Then, the seventh, which was two days after I went in, I could hear the firing at Loukouchiao from my hospital bed. You know, ten miles or so outside of Peking, eight or ten miles, was Marco Polo bridge. I could actually hear the war starting in the night and then heavy fighting in the days after that.

Germany had just developed the first sulfa drug, sulfanilomide.

LEVENSON: Yes.

J. SERVICE: The PUMC had just gotten some, and they were trying it out. I was one of the first people that they used it on, and it was absolutely dramatic, the effect. Within twenty-four hours all my fever had gone and I felt quite normal, felt fine.

But, they didn't know what to do about the normal quarantine, so they made me stay the full--I think it was three weeks that I stayed in isolation. It was quite a long period. But, eventually I got in a room by myself. There was an American dietician who tried to make me gain weight because she thought I was awfully thin. So, she was stuffing me.

They told me that I could not put my feet on the floor. It was part of this isolation. But, I found I could get all around the room by hopping from one piece of furniture to another, [laughter] From the bedside table to a chiffonier to something else, I could get all around the room without ever putting my feet on the floor.

LEVENSON: Why weren't you allowed to put your feet on the floor?

[136]

J. SERVICE: I don't know, but the rules were that I wasn't supposed to put my feet on the floor. The nurses came in and found me once perched on top of the dresser.

LEVENSON: Sounds like a Thurber cartoon. [laughter]

J. SERVICE: The nurses were all missionary-trained nurses, practically all.

LEVENSON: Chinese?

J. SERVICE: Chinese nurses, yes. Several of them tried very hard to find out whether or not I was right with Christ. I finally complained about it and said I thought it was unfair to take advantage of a man in this situation. The head nurse said that she would speak to them, so I was not bothered after that. [tape off]

LEVENSON: So, then the Japanese had taken over Peking. Is that correct?

J. SERVICE: The Japanese took over Peking and I think Caroline came back with her parents from the beach when they were able to travel.

But some time after the occupation—I'm not quite sure why--it was decided that everyone should move into the Legation Quarter, where there were foreign guards. It was an enclave.

So the family moved in and stayed with some of our friends in the embassy. Everybody doubled up, sort of like in the siege of the legations--if you’ve ever read about that in the Boxer time.

I was not allowed to go in because of my recent scarlet fever. I stayed in our house which was in one of the PUMC compounds, trying to find out what was happening in the city. I apparently stimulated a few rifle shots. So I gave up exploring .

After a few days, it was decided to evacuate people who could leave. So, Caroline and her family then left and went to Japan.

[137]

Edgar Snow Smuggles Teng Ying-ch'ao out of Peking

J. SERVICE: About this time I took her trunk down to my mother. Trains were just beginning to run. I think I was on the first train after a long break. Ed Snow was on the train, I remember, and he had an amah with him.

I was quite surprised that he had an amah, and he seemed rather solicitous. I said something to him, and he said, "Can’t tell you now." It turned out that this was Chou En-lai's wife, Teng Ying-ch'ao, whom I met next in Yenan in 1944. He was smuggling her out of town. She'd been having treatment in a hospital in Peking, I think for TB.

Anyway, the train trip to Tientsin, which normally takes about two hours, took us over twelve hours, because we were always being sidetracked for Japanese troop trains coming south.

I was escorting a couple of American women tourists who had been stranded in Peking. I delivered them to Tientsin and went on to Chinwangtao. This was where my mother was catching a boat south. Because of the delays, I got there--with her trunk--just as the gangplank was being raised.

Mother got to Shanghai precisely as the hostilities were starting there, and was caught on the Bund on August 13 when the bomb was dropped by the Palace Hotel that killed Bob Reischauer and hundreds of other people.

LEVENSON: Were you physically afraid at this point in China?

SERVICE: I've never thought much about it. Perhaps a part of being an optimist is that one tends not to be very fearful. But things like war, gunfire, and bombing haven't usually bothered me very much. At least, as my mother would have said, I haven't been "frightened out of my wits."

When we came down in the houseboat from Chengtu in 1920, when I was going to school, we had to go past a place on the river bank where there were bandits. We expected the bandits to try to stop us. The baggage in the bottom of the boat was moved over to the side toward the shore, so my mother and the baby could get down behind the trunks.

When we came to the place on the river, sure enough, they started firing with rifles. The boatmen all jumped off the boat, on the far side and held on to the oars. Mr. Helde and

[138]

J. SERVICE: I went out on the front deck to row the boat and to persuade the boatmen to get up. I remember watching the bullets hitting the water around us.

But, in the excitement of things like that you're not really afraid. I'd heard much fighting going on, as I mentioned before. In coming down the Yangtze--in '21 I think--there was a big battle in Ichang during the night when some of Wu Pei-fu’s troops came up and tried to attack the city. Our steamer was sort of in between. I heard the firing, but I don't remember being terribly afraid. I stayed in bed.

You don't necessarily want to walk into it. But, if you hear it you know you're not going to feel it. [laughter]

[Interview 4: May 3, 1977]

The Foreign Press Corps

J. SERVICE: You asked about the caliber of the foreign press corps. Actually, Shanghai was probably more the center of news. Peking was a bit of a backwater. The capital was Nanking, which is accessible and easily covered from Shanghai.

Most of the regular foreign press in China was chiefly interested in developments that affected foreigners, business, the principal political developments, wars, and things like that. They generally had a rather scoffing attitude about Chinese warlord affairs. You know, the Chinese armies always carried umbrellas, and they didn't fight when it rained. "Silver bullets" were what really won the wars, or were the major weapons. It was a sort of a looking down the nose, a slightly sneering attitude.

There wasn't very much real concern with what was going on in China. There were exceptions, of course. Ed Snow was probably the best exception.

When the Sino-Japanese War started they picked up people to be stringers who happened to be in Peking. A young fellow named Haldore Hanson was teaching in a YMCA school there in Peking. He started working for A[ssociated] P[ress], I think.

[139]

J. SERVICE: There were a number of people in China, young Americans. After all these were Depression days, and people were footloose. Some of them had come to China just to try to make a living as well as they could. A lot of these people started working as journalists.

There was a Reuters man in Peking named Oliver who was quite good, but then there were others that just went to the embassy for the handout and talked to a few Chinese.

I think even that people like the New York Times depended mainly on the handout material, contact with the embassy, the superficial news. Generally they had one or two Chinese friends or Chinese contacts who they hoped could give them the inside story politically of what was going on. But, it wasn't particularly analytical reporting.

LEVENSON: With the exception of Ed Snow, would you say that there were any China specialists who really knew the language and had a detailed knowledge of the Chinese political scene who were working as reporters for the American press?

J. SERVICE: Not who really knew Chinese. There were people like Hallet Abend, for instance, who had been for many years with the New York Times. But these people were Treaty Port people, reporting from Shanghai and they didn't really know Chinese. They might have had Chinese informants, but basically their reporting was Treaty Port and foreign interests oriented.

LEVENSON: I think we'll go on with this later when we move to Chungking.

J. SERVICE: Good. [interruption: workman to fix window]

We were talking about censorship in the Chinese press. During the suppression campaign against the Communists, prior to the formation of the United Front, there was very little news published about the Communists. It was very heavily censored. The Chinese government news was always, "The Communists are near defeat and are retreating." After the United Front began to break down, you again heard very little about what the Communists were doing.

You asked me a question about circulation of Ed Snow’s book. My guess is that that was probably not heavily suppressed at the peak period of the United Front. But, I’m just not sure how much it circulated outside of sanctuaries like Shanghai. In the International Concession of Shanghai, of course, Kuomintang censorship couldn't apply.

[140]

J. SERVICE: Certainly the Communists were never given a good press in China or by foreign correspondents. But, I think there was a period when they were not completely cut out of the news, as they were before and after the United Front.

Passes Second Year Chinese: Shanghai, a Disappointing Posting

LEVENSON: Let's return to chronology now.

J. SERVICE: Yes. We had Caroline being evacuated from China in, I think, September [1937]. She went and stayed in Japan for a while, and then the State Department decided that things were not going to be good for returning to China. So she was authorized to come to the United States. We had two small children. She came to the States and stayed with her parents.

Meanwhile, I stayed on in Peking. I kept the house, a Peking Union Medical College house, in what was called the south compound .

There was an American newspaperman that I mentioned earlier, Haldore Hanson, who had been taken on as a stringer, I think by AP. He'd followed the Japanese army south from Peking on bicycle and had gotten himself into Paoting, which was a city about seventy-five miles south of Peking, and then was found there by the Japanese.

They gave him a very hard time for a while, kept him under detention, and then finally let him out. They were suspicious of what he was doing, of course. Anyway, he was, I think, rather shaken up and he needed a place to stay. He came and stayed with me and shared the house.

He did a good book on the war (Humane Endeavor;" The Story of the China War, New York, Toronto, Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1939.), but he was one of the people jumped on by [Senator Joseph] McCarthy because of his writings at this period. Some of them were published by Amerasia magazine.

[141]

J. SERVICE: The language exams were supposed to be given in late December. My two other fellow students, Millet and Rice, asked for a little extra time which was granted. Goodness knows, there had been interruptions to our studies. We were having to do night code room duty. So, we got a slight extension. We took the exams and I passed, and then got word that I was assigned to Shanghai, which was a terrible disappointment to me.

LEVENSON: What did you hope for?

J. SERVICE: I hoped for a smaller post and one where I would have a chance to do political reporting and to use my Chinese. We had two years of required language study. Then there was a third year optional exam, which you didn't get time off for. You simply prepared yourself for your third exam at whatever post you were at.

I wanted very much to do that. Very few people in those years had been taking the third year exam. But, since I had a good start it seemed to me a shame not to do it.

I figured Shanghai would be a difficult place, and it turned out to be exactly as I expected, a very difficult place to prepare for the third year exam, for various reasons.

LEVENSON: Why?

J. SERVICE: For one thing, it's not a Mandarin speaking area. But I met a peculiar situation in the administration of the post. The executive officer, a man named [Richard] Butrick, was very anti-China language service.

This was quite common. There was, I think I mentioned before, some tension between China service and non-China service people. He gave orders that I was not, for instance, to have any access to the Chinese correspondence coming to the office. I had hoped to be able to either supervise the translation--We had a Chinese interpreter, but we always had an officer that checked the translations.

He would not allow me to have any contact with the Chinese correspondence and felt that I was supposed to devote full time to my duties in the office and made it as difficult as possible for me to study for my third year exam. [laughing]

LEVENSON: What a terrible waste!

[142]

J. SERVICE: He was a very peculiar man. He’s famous in the Foreign Service, as I say. Dick Butrick, all sorts of nicknames have been applied to him "black bastard" probably the most common. He was very darkhaired.

He apparently believed that most China people became effete snobs or went native.

At any rate, I was disappointed going to Shanghai, but of course there was nothing to do except to go.

LEVENSON: Did you enjoy it when you got there?

J. SERVICE: Well, yes, a very, very busy life. Caroline came back to China after I'd been there a few months. We had a hassle when I got there. This is again, as we were speaking of, "the science of bureaucracy . "

When I arrived, I was not met at the boat, which was rather typical of this man who was executive officer. Anyway, I presented myself to the consulate as soon as possible, and he said, "You’ll have quarters in the bachelors' quarters." There was an apartment for bachelors above the office in a big office building in downtown Shanghai. "You'll be up there since your family's not with you."

I was entitled to quarters. There was allowance for quarters. "I am a married officer," I said. "My family"--He said, "Your family is not with you. You'll be up there."

Soon my household effects arrived from Peking. So, I applied for a quarters allowance "to store my effects," and I made sure it got on [Clarence] Gauss’ desk who was consul- general. Gauss was sharp enough to know there was some background to this.

He called me and said, "What the hell is going on here?" And I explained the situation and he said, "I'll take care of that." I had very little trouble with our executive officer after that. I got a nice apartment and moved in.

[142a]

DEPARTMENT OF STATE

DIVISION OF FAR EASTERN AFFAIRS

April 15, 1937.

To: John S. Service

From: The Division of Far Eastern Affairs

The Division of Far Eastern Affairs offers hearty congratulations upon your recent promotion in the Foreign Service.

[142b]

Dinner honoring Clarence Edward Gauss on his appointment as First Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Commonwealth of Australia at the Columbia Country Club, Shanghai, March 30, 1940 (dinner menu).

[143]

Comments on the Social and Political Backgrounds of Foreign Service Officers in the 1930s

LEVENSON: You said that you voted Socialist in '32. I think we more or less talked about how you stood politically. I don't know what the Foreign Service rulings were on political affiliations for active members of the Foreign Service?

J. SERVICE: There were no rules. There were absolutely no rules, as far as I know. How you voted was supposed to be your own business. There wasn't any loyalty, security program, of course, at this time. I doubt if there were any Communists in the Foreign Service. But there was no effort to find out really if there were. The great majority of the people in the Foreign Service were probably good, rock-ribbed Republicans. Basically they came from very conservative backgrounds, usually from families with some money, social position, Eastern establishment.

Probably the Foreign Service in China, the China branch of the Foreign Service, was by and large more liberal than the Foreign Service as a whole. We weren't from this same sort of background. Most of us were either China-born or mid-western, this and that. There were one or two, of course, from the Ivy League schools. But, most of us were not. The group I was with were children of the Depression to some extent.

LEVENSON: Just for the record, did you know any members of the Chinese Communist party before Pearl Harbor?

J. SERVICE: Well, Pearl Harbor's hardly the right date to use here. I didn't know any before Chungking. I got to Chungking about the beginning of May, 1941. Almost immediately, as soon as I got to Chungking, I met them because I was introduced to them by a man in the embassy who had been keeping contact with them for the embassy for political reporting purposes.

LEVENSON: Would you still have described yourself as a Socialist --

J. SERVICE: Oh no.

LEVENSON: --in the mid-thirties?

J. SERVICE: Actually, after the New Deal came in--after Roosevelt came in and the New Deal--most of us considered that Roosevelt was carrying out many of the things that Norman Thomas had been talking about in his speech in Berkeley in '32. So, we all became, I think, good supporters of Roosevelt and the New Deal.

[144]

J. SERVICE: While I always felt that there were a lot of things about Socialism that we should try to work towards, I never considered myself an active member of the Socialist party or an active Socialist. I figured that Roosevelt was moving us in that direction at a reasonable pace, an evolutionary way.

Jack's Estimation of the Chinese Political Scene

J. SERVICE: In the United Front period, which was '37, '38, perhaps the end of '38, most of us felt that the Communist party was willing to accept the leadership of the Kuomintang, work in the United Front; that the Kuomintang itself had liberalized itself and was able to take in or accept other views. None of us--I keep saying "none of us," which is bad; I should speak for myself--I don't think I thought that the Communists were an important threat to the Kuomintang or an imminent rival.

LEVENSON: I feel that this question is anachronistic, but again I d like to ask it, because after World War II, world leadership of Communism seemed for a while firmly rooted in Russia, with the possible exception of Yugoslavia and Tito. But, now in the seventies we see that Communism is not monolithic and is polycentric. When did the possibilities of polycentric Communism with China as one of the centers seem an alternative worth considering to you?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I think not until after wed been in Yenan for quite a long time and had gotten to know a good deal more about the situation up there, and the Chinese Communists' relations with the Soviet Union, or rather the tenseness and delicacy of their relations with the Soviet Union, and until we had seen the example of Tito.

I think that this was something that came at the end, when we thought that the Chinese Communists were not necessarily Russian Communists and were really quite likely to pursue their own nationalistic way. But, this came late on.

Levenson: Just to wrap up this section--We keep making glancing mentions of the Kuomintang. How much really did you know about Chiang Kai-shek and other leading Kuomintang figures at this time, again, '36, '37, '38?

J. SERVICE: Very little. Actually, most of the political reporting in those days was not, as I've already said, particularly penetrating or analytical.

[145]

J. SERVICE: We generally tended to accept Chiang as being what he seemed to be, a leader of China. I don't think most people really gave very much thought as to how he managed to maintain his leadership and control. Internal groups within the Kuomintang, the factions, were not particularly well understood.

This is digressing, but when I came back on leave in early '43, I was in the Department, and they sent me around to talk to an old Foreign Service officer named [Clarence] Spiker who had been consul in Chungking with my parents in 1924. He was the consul in Chungking when my father was almost blinded by the shot through the glass door.

Spiker, as a China service man, had spent all of his career in China. He was in the Department, an old man. He was too old now to send to the field. So, they had him in what was then a research branch in the State Department doing intelligence research.

He had read some of our reports. Apparently he'd asked to see me because he was very perplexed by references in our reports from Chungking that I'd written in '42, '43, about different factions and groups and cliques in the Kuomintang. He didn't know anything at all about them.

So, I had this odd experience of sitting and talking to this man whom I'd known as a boy, when he was consul in Chungking, and telling him almost in A-B-C terms about the Political Science group, the CC clique, the Whampoa clique, all of the congerie of competing factions and groups within the Kuomintang which Chiang was able to manipulate, and how he was able to keep control by setting one against the other.

This poor old guy who spent all his life in China just seemed to be amazed. He didn't know any of this, hadn't really apparently been concerned about it. So, I would say that State Department knowledge of China was fairly superficial.

LEVENSON: Would there have been others better informed in the State Department?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes. I picked a rather extreme example.

There were people like Willys Peck who had been counselor of embassy in Chungking before John Carter Vincent, who certainly knew something about these things, understood some of them. But, there wasn't a great deal of reporting on them. [tape off]

[146]

Consular Duties, Shanghai; Jack of all Trades

J. SERVICE: Actually, my posting to Shanghai turned out to be a very interesting, and in many ways, a very valuable assignment. I was used as a relief officer. It was one of the largest offices we had in the world at that time and the largest consulate. There were about twelve officers, I think, which in those days was a big office.

We didn't have "home leave" in those days, but in remote countries, far countries like China, we were ordered home on consultation. It was the only way they could get you home at government expense. When anyone was on home leave or away from the office, then I would move into his chair.

So, I spent three and a half years--I was there almost three and a half years--in a constant rotation from one job to another, usually three or four months in one job.

You know, we were young. Caroline liked the social life in Shanghai which was very busy. We joined the Columbia Country Club. I didn't play golf, but I used to play tennis out there. We had a social life within the consulate. Then, we had a lot of other friends in Shanghai. I had my family's friends.

We knew a few Chinese, but they were all highly foreignized Chinese that mixed in the foreign community. It was a busy life, much too many parties. I was not very keen on it, and for a while I managed to quit going to parties entirely to get ready for my third year language exam.

Press Survey

J. SERVICE: The first job I was given--I had just arrived--they were way behind in writing a survey of the press. The office was required to write a press summary of the English language press. This had been assigned to an officer who was in charge of the shipping section.

This was the beginning of '38. I got there just after New Year. The man in the shipping section apparently didn't know how to go about writing this sort of report.

Gauss, who was the consul-general, called me in and asked me to do it. It was just a problem of getting the clippings organized. You had an outline of things to cover. And unlike the shipping man, I could give the job full time. Gauss liked my report and I got a very nice note commending me.

[147]

J. SERVICE: Incidentally, while I was in Shanghai the legislation was passed that consolidated the agriculture Foreign Service and the commerce Foreign Service with the State Department's Foreign Service. They used to have their separate--up to that time had had separate attaches abroad. A commercial attache was responsible only to the Department of Commerce.

I was always the man that was called in when some special job needed to be done, task force and so on. So, I was the person who had to carry out all the routine of the amalgamation of the offices, inventorying their furniture and transferring it to our inventory.

Visa Section, I

J. SERVICE: I was assigned soon after arrival to the visa section, which was a normal thing for the low man on the totem pole. I worked under the man named [John B.] Sawyer who was a classmate of my mother and father's at UC, and had looked out for me when I was a boarder at the American school.

He had never passed the Foreign Service examination. He was what was called a non-career vice-consul. But, he was the great authority on Chinese visas. He wrote the manual on issuing Chinese visas, which were a very, very special thing in those days.

We had exclusion laws. Chinese could only come to the United States under certain conditions, as a student or as a merchant trader under Section Six of such and such a treaty. A Section Six trader, we called them.

Anyway, one day soon after I got to the desk a White Russian woman came along, a young White Russian woman, and asked to speak to me.

She told me this heart-rending story about how her father had been an American engineer in the Soviet Union, been caught there by the revolution--there were American engineers in the Soviet Union, mining engineers and so on--and that she lost all her papers. Her father had died when they were trying to escape the Soviet Union. She had come to Shanghai with her mother, but since her father was American, she had a claim to American citizenship, and wanted a visa to the United States.

[148]

J. SERVICE: I wrote a long memorandum about this. The other men in the visa section said nothing at all until I presented my memorandum. It turned out that she was a case that had been doing this for years and years with every new person she saw in the visa section!

Political Office: "How to be a Successful Political Reporter"

J. SERVICE: I did every job in the consulate except sitting in the consul-general's chair
--accounts, shipping, invoices. I had at least two spells in what was called the political section.

This, I think, was where I really had my first lessons in political reporting. There were two people in the political section, a man named Ed Stanton--who was a very fine officer and later ended up as ambassador to Thailand--and then quite a brilliant man named Monroe B. Hall who was a Japan language officer. But, he was stationed in China because the Chinese-Japanese war had started, and we were having a great many problems with the Japanese army occupying American properties wherever they advanced in China, molesting American missions, and a lot of protection cases, we called them.

Form is sometimes more important than content. You're not going to be a successful reporter unless your reports are read. So there is some sense in saying that the first thing is to learn to write well. People get typed. They get a reputation as being good or bad, easy to read, interesting, and so on.

Hall particularly was a good writer. He used to kid me unmercifully about what I submitted. "Terrible, tear it up. Do it over again. You're using too many words. Boil it down. Be concise. "

Gauss himself was a master of concise, succinct drafting. He did all of his own, sat down to the typewriter. He had been a court reporter before he came in the Foreign Service. He was an excellent typist, and he almost never had to retype. He'd just sit down at the typewriter and be able to do it all. His drafting of telegrams was a model of very brief, concise writing.

So, in Shanghai I at least had a good training in drafting, writing. Most of the work I did was, as I say, protection cases, writing notes to the Japanese. I worked out a sort of progression of letters, the first-second-third-fourth, like dunning letters. [laughter]

[149]

J. SERVICE: "For example, "We wrote you on such and such a date about the occupation of this mission chapel. Nothing's happened." The second letter would be tougher.

I finally got so mean in writing these, these final stages, that the Japanese consulate--we had to send them to the Japanese consulate-general, and they transmitted them to the military--sent a delegate to come around to the consulate and ask us to please not use such rough language because they didn’t dare [chuckling] give them to the military.

LEVENSON: Did you get the properties back?

J. SERVICE: Oh, generally yes--eventually. The Japanese weren't seizing and holding them, but the military had absolutely no respect for foreign properties. This was partly intentional, part of the way their attitude was. In the Panay case, for instance, the officers on the spot certainly knew that it was an American gunboat. It had big American flags painted all over the top of it.

But there were a lot of wild-eyed, hot-headed, anti-foreign junior officers, I'm sure, that didn't care. We had proclamations and signs, all sorts of things. But in military operations, who cares?

Then also, of course, the missions opened their premises to the refugees. So, all sorts of people came in, and from the viewpoint of the Japanese, they felt they had a right to go in at least to search for Chinese soldiers. Probably there were Chinese soldiers in some cases, not in their uniforms. The Japanese usually raped the women. But, wartime –it's pretty hard to protect property in circumstances like that.

Third Year Language Exams; Stratagems for Study

J. SERVICE: One thing in Shanghai I've already alluded to was this effort to work for my third year exam. The chief interpreter was an old friend of mine. He'd been in Peking, and been transferred to Shanghai because they had a lot of work. I worked out a system where I had an hour lesson early in the morning with a young Chinese woman whom I also had met in Peking. Her family had moved to Shanghai. She came for an hour's class early in the morning before I left the house for the office.

[150]

J. SERVICE: The senior Chinese clerks in the consulate had lunch brought in from a Chinese restaurant nearby. We were very close to Foochow Road, which is a street in Shanghai which is where all the best restaurants are. They had a contract with one of these restaurants to bring in food in containers, hot food.

There was a room where the chauffeurs and so on sat around where they had a big round table, you know, a collapsible table, which could be set up. That was always set up and food would come in promptly at twelve o'clock. I went down and ate with the Chinese clerks.

Chinese eat very fast. We'd eat in about twelve minutes, and then I would have a lesson with the interpreter for the rest of the lunch hour. This was a bit unusual, and probably seemed strange to my colleagues. I'm sure it had never been done before.

LEVENSON: Was it frowned on?

J. SERVICE: I was never told I couldn't do it. I'm not sure that Butrick knew about it.

But anyway, I had the hour in the morning, I had lunch with the clerks, and then I had an hour's class during the noon hour. Then, in slightly over a year--we had a home leave in there--I took my exam.

A funny thing happened. I wrote to the embassy in Peking and told them I planned to take the exam. The customary thing was to send you a sample of the questions that had been asked in earlier exams.

Between the time that I asked to take the exam, and the time I took the exam, there had been a change of officers in Peking. When I got my exam questions for the exam I thought [chuckling] that they seemed familiar. They sent me the same exam I’d already been sent as a sample. Unfortunately, I had assumed that I wouldn't be asked the same questions, so I hadn't concentrated on them. [laughter]

Discovery of Lax Accounting and Lax Security in the Consulate

J. SERVICE: I think this having lunch with the Chinese staff was probably a good thing in many ways, beside the linguistic one. I was assigned, at one point, to be in charge of the accounting section.

[151]

J. SERVICE: I did all the accounts. We kept the register of fees. The immigration visa was ten dollars--one dollar for the application, nine dollars for the visa itself.

The man in the visa section, the clerk, had to come over to our section to sign in the book. There had to be a record of fees, and the record of fees for the whole consulate was kept in our section. He would come over and make an entry, describe the service, what the fee was. He would get what we called a service number which then would be applied to the document.

A Chinese clerk that was working for me in the accounts section said to me one day that he thought it very odd that so many "no fee" services were being performed by the visa section. I said, "Next time one comes, let me know about if it you think maybe it's peculiar."

Soon he came in my office and said, "Come look." We went and there was a no fee service that had just been put in by a Chinese clerk in the visa section. What the clerk did was to fill out this little slip for the service, and then he handed it to the American officer for initial. The American officer normally never read the slip. He just put his initial on it.

I went over and spoke to the officer who had signed the slip. I said, "Did you just sign a slip for a no fee service?" He said, "No." He recalled it was a visa.

We went immediately to the clerk's desk and asked him to stand aside. We looked in his desk, searched his desk, and there we found a whole lot of nine dollar fee stamps that were bogus. A nine dollar fee stamp was gray, and he had simply gone out and had some photographic ones made, gray. It was quite easy.

What he had been doing, for goodness knows how long, was putting in this slip for a no fee service for a nine dollar one, when the service was really nine dollars. Then, he pocketed the nine dollars and took one of his fake stamps and put it on the visa.

So, we had the goods on him. We asked him to come along and went right up to the consul-general's office--it was not Gauss by this time; it was another man named Lockhart--explained the situation and called the police.

But, Lockhart would not prosecute. He thought it would be too embarrassing. However in this whole affair we then found out that the Japanese were paying some of our employees,

[152]

J. SERVICE: messengers for wastepaper, for picking up whatever they could and taking it out. But nothing was done about that either.

We had Chinese messengers going in and out of the file room. They could pick up things. They picked up things like office directories, Department of State directories. We tried to tighten up a little but, there wasn’t any real security system then.

We don't know that they got anything important, but of course we had to fire a few people. The man who was working for the Japanese was a relative of one of the very senior Chinese employees, so that was a very nasty business.

But at any rate, this possibly wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for the fact that I had established, shall we say, good relations with the Chinese staff .

LEVENSON: Did it cause trouble when you had the firings of Chinese employees?

J. SERVICE: No, not really.

LEVENSON: I meant disturb your rapport?

J. SERVICE: Oh, not that I recall. We had the goods on this man. He lost face completely on it. Everybody around saw what the situation was, so that there wasn't anything bad there.

There were some hard feelings about the messenger that we had to fire, but that was the loss of face by his uncle or whoever it was that recommended him. I didn't feel badly about it. In fact, I think I felt somewhat self -righteously angry.

Home Leave, 1938: A Class VIII Officer

J. SERVICE: We had home leave in October, I think it was, of '38. This was the first time I'd been back to the States for over five years since I left in early '33. We got a car, picked up a car in Detroit, drove to Washington, and back across the continent, which we subsequently always did on every home leave. We always crossed the continent at least once by car.

I've crossed the continent I don't know; I've tried to count--something like twenty times.

[153]

J. SERVICE: Being in the [State] Department was interesting. It was my first real appearance in the Department since I'd been a Foreign Service officer, since I took my exams in January, '33. In those days you had to go calling in the Department.

You left a card on the secretary of state and on the under secretary. You called on the chief of personnel. Generally you had to talk with everybody at that level, have a short talk.

You, of course, talked to the people in the Far Eastern section, Stanley Hornbeck and the other old worthies of the Department.

LEVENSON: How did they impress you?

J. SERVICE: Well, I was rather awed, shall we say. I felt somewhat differently later on after I'd come back from Chungking. But, after all, I couldn't claim any great expertise in those days. I'd studied language, but as a language student you were sort of removed from the actual, what was going on. In Shanghai, as I say, I'd been general relief man.

So, I sat and listened respectfully, I think, when I talked to the chief of personnel. He said, "You're doing okay, Service. Don't be worried."

Actually, I was doing quite well because, having passed my third year exam, I was promoted to class VIII. You have three unclassified grades. You start as unclassified C, then unclassified B and unclassified A.

It put me in class VIII four years from the time I was commissioned. That was well ahead of most of my contemporaries--in those days it was generally taking about seven years to reach class VIII.

LEVENSON: Class IX is the last class, isn't it?

J. SERVICE: They don't call it class IX. They just call it unclassified. Eight is the lowest numbered grade.

LEVENSON: Right. So that was accelerated promotion.

[153a]

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Shanghai, May 1, 1941.

Dear Jack:

I am sorry I did not find a better way to express my appreciation of your help in
V.S.(Visa Section) As a last resort 1 am sending you a box of chocolates.

You have helped us four times in the past four years, but this last time was the best. Never in all my government experience have I known anyone to turn in a better performance.

I am glad you are to be in the Embassy. When we holler for help, we will have the satisfaction of knowing that there is someone there who knows whether we are bluffing or not.

I realize full well that I am on my last lap and that my stride does not have the spring that it once had, but whether I am in China or in California, I shall remember with pleasure our association together and shall follow your career with the greatest interest.

My very best wishes always!

Sincerely yours,

(Approved by the Department
January 10, 1924)

MEMORANDUM

AMERICAN CONSULAR SERVICE
SHANGHAI

Referred to for --

[154]

Visa Section II: The Trap Snapped Shut in Europe

J. SERVICE: By 1940, it began to be obvious that things were headed for trouble in the Far East, particularly after the European war really came to life in April, 1940. As soon as France fell, Japan moved into the northern part of Indochina.

This was a sort of a weather vane of what was going to happen. Japan was going to move in and take over the colonies, Dutch East Indies, French, British, and so on, the Far East if she could.

This really is what changed American policy. It wasn't so much sympathy for China as it was our concern about Europe, what we began to think of more and more by this time as our allies. The Lend-Lease Act was beginning to start.

In late 1940--I think we had already given notice in July of the cancellation of the commercial treaty with Japan--the State Department decided to order families back to the States. They couldn't expect other Americans to do anything unless they set the example of ordering their own back.

So our families were all told. An American ship was brought into Shanghai, one of the Matson liners, to evacuate them. Caroline and the children and my mother and my brother Dick's wife were all on that same ship, the Monterey, in November, 1940, which I'm sure Caroline has told you about.

Then, I became a bachelor, which was--Oh, I didn't carouse as much maybe as some, but there was a fair amount of night life.

By this time the Jews in Europe had no other place to go really except China. They could only get out for a while through Italy. From Vienna they could go to Italy. Italy didn't come into the war until after France fell or about the time that France fell.

LEVENSON: Nineteen forty.

J. SERVICE: Yes. Up to that time Jews could get out through Italy. Where could they go? Shanghai was one of the few places. So, I forget, twenty or thirty thousand came to Shanghai.

They had all registered for American visas in consulates in Europe, in Paris, or Warsaw, or Vienna, or wherever it was. But, the waiting list [for an American visa] was years and years

[155]

J. SERVICE: long. They asked to have their case transferred to Shanghai. But, when the case came in, all we could say was, "five years wait" or something like that.

But then when Italy came in, when the war really started--and France was occupied by Germany--then the Department informed us in Shanghai that we had to start considering these cases, because people who were caught in Europe could no longer have any hope of getting out. Therefore, the Jews that were out of Europe in Shanghai had a right to have their cases considered.

This was a great surprise and shock to Shanghai because our little old visa section under Mr. Sawyer had perhaps handled two cases a day or something like that. Suddenly we had thousands of cases that we had to deal with.

So, I was told to organize a task force to go into the visa section, to set up a special unit in the visa section, and try to handle these cases, which we did. We got in touch with other offices to find out how big offices handled their load, got some hints on how to do it, how to set up an interview schedule--one every fifteen minutes--and how to manage files and records on a wholesale basis.

Unfortunately the American Immigration law still contained a check rein in it because of the provision that you couldn't issue a visa to anyone who was "liable to become a public charge." Even though he might be qualified, even though his number had come up, if the consular officer considered that he was liable to become a public charge, you couldn't give him a visa.

This was a hangover from the Depression. We still had a lot of unemployed in the States. American labor unions were powerful.

The consul was always under a kind of sword of Damocles. Because even when he issued a visa, this wasn't necessarily final. The immigration officer, the immigration service at the port of entry, had the final say. Immigration could still turn someone back, even though the unfortunate person had received a visa in the field, in China.

This made you quite cautious in applying this "liable to become a public charge." But we did issue a lot of visas. As you probably know, Max Knight here in Berkeley, who worked for the UC Press for many years, was one that I gave a visa to. I remember him very well.

[156]

J. SERVICE: But, you got an awful lot of pressure of various kinds, emotional pressure and some offers, shall we say, of money and other inducements to get people out. A lot of them were--[breaks down] What I'm trying to say is somebody who'd been in a concentration camp and obviously had the scars of a concentration camp, you might not be able to give a visa to because he didn't speak any English, had no close relatives in the United States, had no trade.

People like a doctor couldn’t get any assurance--They couldn't get a license to practice in the United States under many state laws. People who had all sorts of professional training would have to stay in the United States for a long time to pass licensing examinations that were obviously aimed against foreigners and people like this. So there it was--a bad business.

LEVENSON: I'm sorry to upset you, Jack. I've heard you criticized, or rather not you personally but the consular service--

J. SERVICE: Oh, of course. Oh, of course.

LEVENSON: -- in Shanghai, criticized in your own house here by a guest.

J. SERVICE: No.

LEVENSON: Just for the record, I’d like to know what were the stringencies that were imposed on you from Washington. You've told me about the immigration service stringency. But, as I recall, the quotas were tiny at that point.

J. SERVICE: Yes, the quotas were fairly small, but that wasn't the basic problem, the size of the quota. Besides, at this time, the war was on, the Polish quota, who could come out on it? The people in Poland couldn’t come out. Bona fide Poles weren't immigrating.

The quota is determined by where you're born. If you're a Jew and you're born in Austria or in Poland, you come under those countries' quotas.

The whole quota system was set up on a very arbitrary, biased basis to favor the northern European countries at this time, so that countries like Poland and Russia had quite large quotas.

After the war started and people couldn't leave these countries it wasn't the size of the quota that was so much limiting as much, I think, as this business of having to decide well, is this poor man going to be able to make a living in the States?

[157]

J. SERVICE: Of course, a lot of them could, because they would be taken care of by the community or organizations helping refugees. In places like New York there were whole colonies of refugees, and a man didn't need to learn English or know English to be able to get a job in a German butchery in the Queens.

But, we felt under a good deal of pressure on it, certainly. I would say that we tried to apply the law as leniently as we could, as we felt that we could get away with, at least as long as I was running the visa special unit.

But, some of these people were pathetic. They'd been in concentration camps, as I say. But, people like Max Knight--Max Knight had gotten himself a job. He was teaching English in Shanghai and writing for the English newspaper in Shanghai. Obviously a person like this, good God, give him a visa quick.

I've got a letter that was written by Mr. Sawyer which was very nice. You want to shut it off? We got a minute? I'll go down and dig it out if I can.

LEVENSON: Fine.

J. SERVICE: The visa work ran until the time that I was transferred. What happened was that since my family had left I was living alone in an apartment. Really I'd had enough of Shanghai and enough of this continuous rotation.

I must say I didn't really relish the high pressure--high pressure in every way--visa work.

Comments on Gauss and His Tight Ship at the Shanghai Consulate

LEVENSON: Do you have any other comments on Clarence Gauss and the sort of character he built in the consulate at Shanghai?

J. SERVICE: He was always thought of as being crusty and cold, sort of hard-bitten, gimlet-eyed. He was very demanding, very hard working. He had no real interest except his work as far as I could see.

He had a wife and a son, but they were not in China. He and his wife usually lived apart, or did in those years. He ran a very tight ship in the office, expected everyone else to work hard and up to high standards.

[158]

J. SERVICE: The only thing that most of us could criticize about him was that he put up with Butrick. But, Butrick was a hard-working guy himself. No one could call him lazy.

Actually, my relations with Gauss became very close, particularly at Chungking, not so much at Shanghai which was a big office. But, in Chungking I lived in a small house with him and Vincent. He had almost a sort of a father relationship to me.

LEVENSON: What about the rest of the staff? Were any of the others people who subsequently became called "The China Hands?"

J. SERVICE: There were several. Edmund Clubb came to Shanghai later on. He was, of course, considerably senior to me.

There was another China man there named Smith, but he was not much of a China scholar and he worked in the commercial section.

"Service Transferred Chungking Soonest"

J. SERVICE: Early in '41--I forget just how I did it --I got myself transferred to Chungking. I think what I did was to write to the ambassador in Chungking, Nelson Johnson, whom I had known from Peking; he'd been ambassador in Peking and said that I'd welcome an assignment to Chungking, which was then the temporary capital of China.

In those days, it was not a particularly desirable post, and anybody that volunteered got it. Very quickly, soon thereafter there was a telegram came to the department, “Service transferred Chungking soonest.” So, I left and went to Chungking.

[158a]

Shanghai

Dear Caroline and Mother

I had a letter in the works before the last boat left. But something happened and I never did find the thing. It probably got attached to some visa dossier and will show up in the files years from now to puzzle someone.

I think the main thing that I wrote was that I had received a letter from Drumright - in the Embassy at Chungking. Then I wrote Drum a letter of introduction for Bob Barnett a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I would like Chungking for an assignment. His letter was to tell me that he had mentioned my suggestion to Johnson (Nelson T) and that Johnson had sat write down and written a personal letter to Kornbeck strongly suggesting the assignment of Service to Chungking. Drum said that Johnson had let him read the letter. It is probable that nothing will come of this - there are rumors that the Department is trying to avoid making any transfers now. But it is possible – perhaps a little more so if Johnson's letter arrives in Washington while Gauss is there - so I am telling you. But don't mention it to anyone until it has become a fact. As you know I would be very pleased.

Things go on here about the same with me. "Social" life seems to be tapering off but I'm getting into a routine which keeps me busy - too busy for any reading or study except my two nights of Chinese a week.

Saturday afternoons I've gotten into the habit of playing bridge at the Club. A sharky affair with Al Shumaker the No. 1 shark. He looks enough like one ordinarily but you should him hot in a bridge game. Nonetheless he is very pleasant at it. Others in the game are usually a Chinese Dr. Liu, Mortimer of the Chinese-American, a movie man named Goltz, a German (or Swiss) named Neumann (not my old friend Achie) and one or two others. Believe it or not I am still more plus than minus. Saturday night a bit of roistering with some of the office. But this Saturday, Dave Berger had a poker game. My luck was lousy and I lost gradually all evening. Table stakes. I'd win a little, then lose more. Until the very last hand which was draw poker. I went in with three aces. We doubled the ante and nearly everybody stayed in. It turned out that I had three Aces, Harold Pease had three Queens and somebody else (I think John Carter Vincent) had three tens. I made over $100 on that one hand and ended the long evening up $11.

The last few Sundays I've been having barbecue dinner

[158b]

out at the Columbia Country Club with bridge afterward. Mainly Brownie's promotion. There have been various other members - Mary Tandy, Tommy Pond, and one week Freddie Kinke from the Tientsin Consulate was on his way home. And about 1 night a week, Bill Hines, and Brownie and I manage to get together. Fourth man is now Chaplain Trump of the 4th Marines.

Tuesday and Friday the Chinese class - Allman, Mansfield Freeman, George Green and myself - meet at my house and listen and argue over a glass of beer. Mansfield is a great old arguer. George practically never opens his mouth.

Tonight I've been reading essays for the annual contest at the American School. I found out recently to my horror that I'm on three committees of the Junior Chamber. Barr has been trying to rope me into plans for a men's discussion group at Community Church (but I have successfully avoided being one of the speakers at the opening meeting) and I haven't missed a Masonic meeting since you left.

As for work, I sort of went on strike about the first of April when we counted up and found that we had had 207 new cases register last month. Although we are turning them out at the unprecedented rate of over 350 a month (more than Tokyo says that 3 offices in Japan together can manage ) the net gain of less than 150 – against our waiting list of 2700 seems discouraging. One feels as though it wasn't much use. I think I told you about Lockhart's finally getting up courage to ask for more help when he saw a five page message sent by Tokyo telling about the terrible time they are having (with a problem less than one/tenth the size of ours) and asking for 2 FSO's and 4 American clerks.

Anyway, instead of working till 7:00 or 7:30 every night the way I have been doing for 2 months, I quit now at 5:15 or 5:30 and go to the Y for (you guessed it) running. There is a good bunch out this year - all the old regulars and a new fellow who ran at Pomono (Cohen) and a boy named Lionel Stagg from USC. The last two, especially Stagg, are comparatively hot stuff and Service will be a fill-in in the relay this year. However, I'm feeling pretty good - if not as far as running ability goes, at lease in physical condition - surprising good considering the bum life I have been leading.

Mother, did you see Dick when he went thru? I judged not. The next few months will be tough for him but I hope that he buckles down and really sweats. This will be a good time to show the determination that Helen looks as though she had - though to handle a Service she will have to exercise it tactfully. (Maybe it's not the Service but the Boggs in us.

Much love Jack

[159]

IV CHUNGKING POSTING, 1941
[Interview 5: September 12, 1977]

Background to Jack's Appointment to Chungking

LEVENSON: I'm glad to be back here after the summer, Jack. When we left off last time, you said that you had applied for posting from Shanghai to Chungking. But, in rereading E.J. Kahn's China Hands, he says that your transfer was recommended by [Everett F.] Drumright, "oddly." (E.J. Kahn, Jr. The China Hands: America's Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 67.) What do you think he meant by that?

J. SERVICE: Well I can't really speak for Jack Kahn, but when he wrote his book he decided to talk to someone beyond the circle of China hands who were fired. I don't know who suggested it or how he happened to choose Drumright. He knew that Drumright disagreed rather basically, particularly later on, with those of us who were fired.

I think that when Kahn mentioned my coming to Chungking--and this is all my hypothesis--Drumright said that yes, he was in Chungking when Service's letter to Ambassador Nelson T. Johnson arrived. I can well assume that Johnson would have asked around, particularly Drumright, if he knew Service, what do you think of him, what should he (Johnson) recommend?

Drumright probably knew me as an active younger officer. The service in China was very small. Gossip and rumor went around. Everybody had an idea of other people's capabilities, how they stood, how good they were. Certainly Drumright knew that I was the only person since he himself had done it to

[160]

J. SERVICE: have taken a third year Chinese exam. I would guess that my reputation was fairly good as a very young officer. He probably said to Johnson, "Why sure, Service is a good, hard worker."

So Drumright could say to Kahn that he recommended me. My transfer was on the basis of my having written and asked for a transfer. I think that Kahn, not really knowing the situation at the time, thinks this was odd. But it wasn't really odd.

At this time, in 1941, early '41, there was no [American] debate going on in China about China policy. There was no real disagreement among people serving the government about our attitude toward the Chiang Kai-shek regime. We were pretty much all of one mind. So there really wasn't anything very odd about it. Later on, as we look back on it-- Drumright having served as ambassador to Taiwan and fought many battles for the Taiwan government--now it looks odd that Drumright should have been the guy that said, "Well, yes, you better get this guy."

Night Flight, Hong Kong to Chungking

LEVENSON: How did you travel from Shanghai to Chungking?

J. SERVICE: In Spring, 1941, there was still a daily flight run by the China National Aviation Corporation, which was jointly owned by the Chinese government and Pan American. Pan American supplied the know how, operations, and so on. Crews were Pan Am. The flight left Hong Kong—Haven't I described this to you?--

LEVENSON: No.

J. SERVICE: Very late at night at an undetermined hour--You never knew what time you were going to leave. You were simply told to come to the airport at midnight or 1 a.m. Then somewhere around two or three in the morning they would take off from the old Kai Tak airport there in Hong Kong and circle above Hong Kong, or actually go out to sea a ways. Then when they got enough elevation--those were DC-3's in those days; the DC-2 was just going out and the DC-3 was just coming in--when they had enough elevation then they would go off across occupied China. They had to head across Hong Kong, head across Canton, and so on, Kwangtung, Kwangsi, and on up to Chungking.

They would fly across at night. This was before effective radar and night fighting, so there wasn't much the Japanese could do about them. Then they would arrive in Chungking soon after daybreak.

[161]

LEVENSON: Before the bombers.

J. SERVICE: Before the bombers. I flew up on the same plane with the Luces. We arrived on a misty morning just barely after dawn. Clouds were around.

It was pretty hairy because the airport was down beside the river, high hills on both sides. The pilot knew it well. He got down through and we came in.

You were very, very strictly limited on weight. I was very much annoyed because I knew when I went to Chungking that I was going to have to attend a presentation of credentials by our new ambassador. By that time Gauss had been appointed. The Chinese insisted on all the rigmarole. They had to do it properly. In the American system we've got no diplomatic uniforms. If you go to a presentation of credentials you've got to wear a white tie.

LEVENSON: Tails?

J. SERVICE: Tails. [laughter] So I had to take my tail coat, et cetera to Chungking with me because I couldn't expect to borrow anyone else's. I was thin as a rail in those days. I weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds. I had to take my white tie outfit, taking up valuable luggage. I was allowed forty pounds, something like that.

Then Drumright, who was in Chungking, knew I was coming, and he wrote to me in Shanghai and asked me to bring his flat silver. For some strange reason he wanted flat silver! So I had all of his flat silver in a briefcase which practically weighed me down. Anyway, I got by with the heavy briefcase partly because I was a foreigner.

There was a large Chinese passenger who was being weighed just ahead of me. He just ballooned out all around, sort of like a tent. The clerk in charge of weighing in says, "This won't do. What have you got on? Let's see." So he started to take off layer after layer after layer. He had all sorts of things inside, [laughter] The whole crowd at the airport, all of us who were waiting to be weighed in, got great enjoyment out of this poor fellow's embarrassment.

[162]

Ambassadorial Styles: Nelson T. Johnson and Clarence E. Gauss

LEVENSON: Then when you came to the embassy you served under two different ambassadors. Would you comment on their different styles?

J. SERVICE: I came in just on the tag end of Nelson T. Johnson. He was transferred to Australia. Clarence Gauss, who had been my boss in Shanghai when I first went to Shanghai in '38 was sent to Chungking.

Johnson was very easygoing. We referred to him as a sort of Taoist. "Do nothing and there is nothing that will not be done." [repeats saying in Chinese] He was fairly inactive and passive. At that time we were neutral in the Chinese war. Roosevelt had tried in his quarantine speech in '38 to get the United States to do something. That had been strongly rejected by public opinion. I think the general attitude in Washington was that we should try to not get involved and stay out of the line of fire.

The American embassy, for instance, under Johnson had set up offices on the south bank across the city from Chungking in an area which had been largely taken over by foreign business people. So it was regarded as a semi-foreign area, not normally a target by the Japanese. All the other embassies were in the city of Chungking.

The embassy had no motor car. We were isolated, and he was quite content to let a very active and very able naval attaché named McHugh maintain close contacts with Mme. Chiang, the Generalissimo, important people. Quite abnormal in most embassies to abdicate the important contacts, the important political reporting, to a service attaché.

LEVENSON: Why not a foreign service officer?

J. SERVICE: Well, here was this guy. He was in the navy. He had a car. The navy had a sampan to get across the river. Crossing the river was a problem. He was a very active, aggressive person who had been in China a long time, knew these people, was adept at developing his contacts.

The embassy under Johnson was rather content to take life easy. Johnson regarded Chungking as a temporary office and made no attempt to build up the embassy. He was just, I say, a Taoist, to repeat myself. [laughter] He was a raconteur who took life quite easily, liked to socialize and talk. He

[163]

J. SERVICE: played the guitar. He was a rotund, rather jolly person who liked to sit around and talk, had a great fund of anecdotes and stories.

Gauss was the complete opposite. He was a tough, hardboiled guy, no small talk, no interest in socializing, very touchy and sensitive about prerogatives and about the embassy exercising its proper role in things like political reporting.

He brought in new staff. The old staff was due to go out anyway. They'd been there a long time with Johnson. They'd followed him up from Nanking to Hangkow and finally to Chungking. So they were all due for a transfer.

Before Gauss came he tried to solve the transportation problem by getting a motor car from the Department. Later on that's why I was sent to Rangoon, because the Department took so long to get the motor car that it was on the high seas at the time of Pearl Harbor. It had been promised early in the year [1941], but they had to wait for the next fiscal year before they had funds, and then they had to get bids and so on, all this sort of thing, a real bureaucratic fairy tale.

Johnson himself never did any official political reporting or drafting of telegrams. Gauss did a great deal of that. He just sat down at a typewriter and would bang out a dispatch.

LEVENSON: What was the norm at that point for an ambassador?

J. SERVICE: There aren't really any norms. I think that Johnson was nearer the norm than Gauss in many ways. Johnson was a very close and old personal friend of Stanley Hornbeck who was an old character in the State Department, had dominated the Far Eastern branch of the State Department many, many years and was a close friend of [Cordell] Hull.

Johnson did all of his work in personal letters to Hornbeck. He just scorned writing official despatches which were going to be read by a lot of people in the Department. It was all personal letters to Hornbeck who, of course, had the ear of [Cordell J Hull, the secretary of state.

Gauss had no real, close, personal contacts in Washington. He sat down and wrote official despatches or expected his staff to. So, we had a very much tighter organization under Gauss. It was very soon made known to the naval attaché" that the embassy was going to do the important political reporting. It expected to develop contacts with the top people, Chian's family, and so on.

[164]

J. SERVICE: Gauss was interested in a much more active role in getting his staff out in the country and doing much more reporting. There had been very little traveling by anybody in the embassy under Johnson. Gauss got the Chinese--fairly soon--to agree to let us send people out to various cities as observers, not setting up formal offices but so we could get some feel of what was going on in the country. We were isolated.

Gauss got to Chungking at the end of May, 1941. When France fell [June, 1940], Japan had moved into Indochina. When Japan moved into Indochina and began to threaten Indonesia, the United States became really concerned. Our whole attitude toward helping China began to become much more positive.

The Flying Tigers business was all being set up in the summer of '41, sub rosa. This was a mercenary force originally. But there was an airplane factory that was going to be set up on the border between Burma and China. American experts were being sent out to help advise the Chinese in improving the Burma Road, building it better, paving it, getting more traffic over it, organizing the traffic which was deplorably disorganized.

Gauss' Ceremonial Swearing In

J. SERVICE: I've got a picture of my going to the swearing in. Because of the occasion I was riding a [sedan] chair. I managed to borrow a hat. I found someone in the British embassy who had a silk hat.

LEVENSON: You look like Fred Astaire in Topper!

J. SERVICE: But this hat was much too large and I had to stuff paper inside it, so that it would stay on my head for a while at any rate.

LEVENSON: What was the ceremony like?

J. SERVICE: Well, all presentations of credentials are pretty cut and dried. The chief of protocol comes to your embassy to meet the new ambassador and escort him to the foreign office or to the presidential residence. The chief of government then was an old man named Lin Sen. That's right. It wasn't the Generalissimo. Lin Sen was the sort of head of government, chief of state, but he was a complete nonentity. It was just a figurehead position.

[165]

J. SERVICE: Then the president, or whoever, stands in the reception room and the ambassador and his staff are brought in and you bow once at the door and then you advance halfway and you bow again. Then you come up close and bow the third time. Then you hand him your credentials, your commission. Then one of your staff--in this case it was Drumright--reads a message. Then the head of state has his message read and then you withdraw the same way. Then you go in another room and there's a reception, a little more informal. The ambassador then introduces all of his staff. The military attaches are all in dress uniform. We're all in these silly white ties.

LEVENSON: There s a curious anomaly to think that this is going on in 1941, while China was falling apart!

J. SERVICE: Yes. That's right. That's right. And Chungking absolutely isolated and barricaded and beleaguered.

LEVENSON: Was the message delivered in English?

J. SERVICE: Originally it was in English, but Drumright read a Chinese translation. Each country usually insists that its own communication--the authoritative copy is the one that's in its own language, but they furnish a translation. We wrote to the Chinese in English and sent along a Chinese translation. The Chinese wrote in Chinese, but usually -- not always--sent along an English translation. We wrote to the Chinese in English and sent along a Chinese translation.

LEVENSON: Was it in any way fun or informative? Or was it a purely formal occasion?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I think the fun was afterwards when we got back to the embassy.

LEVENSON: In what sense?

J. SERVICE: We had a few drinks. [laughter] There wasn't any fun involved in the ceremony itself. It's a drag, very, very formal. You're representing a state. You're representing your country. Then it all becomes very formalized.

[165a]

Mr. John Service

Farewell dinner for Ambassador Nelson T. Johnson
at Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek's

Personal card: China-Burma-India Theater

[166]

First Meeting with Generalissimo and Madame Chiang

LEVENSON: When did you actually meet the Chiangs?

J. SERVICE: I got to Chungking just before Nelson Johnson left. In a sense this was an advantage to me because there was a whole round of official entertainment to say farewell to Johnson. Chinese liked Johnson. He was very pleasant and genial, said all the nice things, patted them on the back. He had a wonderful speech which he always gave in various formulations, various variations, about the three great documents: the Sermon on the Mount, the Gettysburg Address, and Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles, San Min Chu I. This was typical of the kind of speech that he'd give. There was always, "What a wonderful, great man Sun Yat-sen was," and how he was one of the world's great leaders.

At any rate, soon after I got there the Generalissimo gave a farewell dinner for Johnson and I was included simply because I was on the staff of the embassy. Officers were all included. That was when Madame Chiang heard my name and Jack Kahn says that she said, "Oh, we hope you'll be of service to China." She didn't seem to remember that she'd known my mother. My mother was at the wedding reception when the Chiangs were married in Shanghai. But the name didn't apparently ring any bell with her.

LEVENSON: Can you recall your initial impressions of them?

J. SERVICE: It's very hard, you know, to go back and peel off all the layers.

LEVENSON: I know it's hard, but it's interesting.

J. SERVICE: The Generalissimo--and I think that this would be my original impression--was very tense and very taut, no relaxation, very stiff. She was obviously very charming, in a rather heavily made up way, very heavily made up for a Chinese, and I thought somewhat artificial. But, these have been the impressions that have been heightened by subsequent memory.

I remember I was annoyed at the time about this "Hope you'll be of service to China." This sort of rubbed me the wrong way at the time. But I didn't have any real chance to talk to them. When you're junior man on the embassy staff you're very much in the back.

[167]

J. SERVICE: H.H. Kung for instance, who married Madame Chiang's older sister [Ai-ling]-- he was minister of finance at the time he gave a luncheon to say farewell to Johnson out at a summer house that he had some miles away from Chungking at some hot springs which was a very good place to get away from the bombing.

That meeting was much more pleasant in a way because H.H. Kung was an Oberlin graduate, had been a benefactor of Oberlin, and always apparently was able to find jobs in China for Chinese Oberlin graduates. Anyway, he knew I was from Oberlin and we had some talk. He seemed like a very pleasant, nice, old guy, sort of a granddaddy type.

LEVENSON: That impression, I imagine, changed as the war proceeded.

J. SERVICE: Yes. I don't think that there was so much entertainment when Gauss arrived. I don't recall the mention of a round of parties for Gauss. There must have been some, but I don't have any particular recollection on that.

What I remember more clearly is after Pearl Harbor, after we got into the war, that there were then a series of meetings and dinners, to get all the Allies together. The Russians were always included then, and the British, and ourselves. And several public meetings where we'd all get on a platform--I would be in a chair right behind Gauss, sort of whispering into his ear a translation of what was going on.

Right next to me was Federenko, who later on was at the UN for many years. He became the Soviet representative at the UN. Federenko was whispering the same sort of thing, in Russian of course, into his ambassador's ear. And over here was an English man named - I think Derek Bryan--who was doing the same thing for his ambassador. We were all keeping our ambassadors informed, telling them what was being said, what was happening.

Only Nine Staff Members in the American Embassy

J. SERVICE: The work of the embassy started snowballing after Pearl Harbor. I got a little picture here which shows the embassy staff in the summer of 1941. You can see that it's tiny.

LEVENSON: Nine.

J. SERVICE: We had no women.

[168]

LEVENSON: That was something I was going to ask you about.

J. SERVICE: There were no women permitted. That was true for the Americans. British and other people had them, but we had no wives, no women allowed. So that four men out of the nine were clerks. Between those four they had to take care of all the coding and decoding, filing, and typing of anything that was confidential, most of it was classified. Then there's the ambassador and four officers.

This, of course, by present day standards is tiny. It's just incredible. The smallest country now has an embassy twice or three times this size. But this was in China, in Chungking. We had the ambassador, the counselor, John Carter Vincent. We had a second secretary named John Macdonald who was the economics man. He knew no Chinese, never served in China. So, all he could do was to take the handouts.

I was third secretary and a Chinese-speaking officer. Vincent was a Chinese-speaking officer, but his language was weak because he'd been out of China for most of his service. He'd been in Switzerland, at the League of Nations, for a long time. Then there was a very young foreign service officer named Boise Hart who was not a China man. B-o-i-s-e, I guess.

LEVENSON: How did this staff compare, for instance, with that of the British or the French?

J. SERVICE: Oh, we were more or less comparable. Things were all much simpler in those days. Yes, I don't think the British had a much larger staff than we did, although it may have been fancier. The ambassador was a very able man named Clark Kerr, who later on became Lord Inverchapel and was ambassador in Moscow--had a private secretary. That sort of thing. They may have had a slightly larger staff than we did, but it wasn't tremendous. But they did have some wives working and they had some girls in the embassy.

The Soviet embassy I think was considerably larger, but the Soviets always had a big staff because they brought their own cooks and chauffeurs and so on. They didn't use Chinese servants the way we did. They had language people. They had quite a big establishment.

LEVENSON: You commented that Johnson had his own people and that Gauss gradually brought in his people. Was this the usual practice for an ambassador to have a certain degree of control over postings and who he had in his embassy?

[169]

J. SERVICE: In those days it didn't go down very far. I'm not sure it does now. An ambassador usually had the privilege of asking for the top people. The counselor for instance, the number two man, was usually somebody whom the ambassador felt he could work with. The ambassador could ask for other people.

One of the first things that Gauss did when he got to Chungking was to tell me that he had not asked for me. He didn't want me to be under any misapprehension that he had asked for me, since I had been assigned there almost the same time that he was assigned there. I told him, of course, that I realized that, because I had asked to be assigned there before I knew he was going to be assigned! [laughter]

LEVENSON: What was the implication of that, that he didn't want you to be under an obligation?

J. SERVICE: No, no. He didn't want me to feel that I could expect any special preferential treatment. He was absolutely just straight as a die, you know, on anything like that, no favoritism.

Jack as "Chief of Chancery" or General Handyman

J. SERVICE: Eventually I got to know people in Chungking and to get around more. And then Boise Hart arrived. He took over the consular chores, and I moved more into political reporting, although even that was part-time. It wasn't a full time job. We were always very much tied to the office, tied to the desk.

LEVENSON: That's interesting. How many hours did you have to spend at the office?

J. SERVICE: Oh, we spent a full eight hours usually and very often more. We were busy and getting more and more busy. We had to help out in the code room and things like that. The code room staff was very inadequate. Traffic built up. We all had to give a hand at doing telegrams, and this might mean at night sometimes.

LEVENSON: What were your assignments in Chungking?

J. SERVICE: It's hard to recount-- It was such a small staff, of course, you had to do a lot of things. When I first arrived I think I was just made general handyman. They call you chief of chancery. It's a misnomer, the title, because it just means you're chief clerk, a minor administrative officer, taking care of all the

[170]

J. SERVICE: chores that need to be done. Nowadays they've built up administrative officer into a glorious, big job. But in those days, before the administrative sciences had been developed, apparently we got along with very little administration!

When Drumright left--I think some time in the fall, or maybe even before that--I was put in charge of what did they call it? I was made a sort of a Chinese secretary in charge of checking translations and correspondence to and from the foreign office. We had the Chinese translator but someone was supposed to look over it, make sure that everything was all right.

The translator, when he had some time, translated articles from the press or articles that we asked him to do. But I soon found that nothing really was done in any immediate way to check the press. It took the translator a long time. He did laborious, word by word translations. He only did things that he was asked to do generally. He couldn't do very much.

There were about eight newspapers, seven or eight papers, in Chungking. Every political grouping or faction, clique, would have its paper. I don't want to get into a lot of Chinese names here. I started looking at the editorials. We got the papers usually quite early in the morning. I would skim the editorials of all the papers and then write a paragraph or so, just the gist of each editorial.

Later on, of course, all this thing was highly developed. After the war started, the 0[ffice] of W[ar] I[nformation] got organized, and they had a whole corps of people doing this, Chinese translators doing it. But for a while it just would take up a couple hours of my morning, just skim the editorials and then try to capture the gist of it in a little capsule.

Madame Chiang's Unique American Visa Issued by Jack

J. SERVICE: I also did consular work, visas and so on. You were asking if there were differences between Gauss and Johnson. Soon after I got there, I was doing these sorts of consular chores--the embassy still had to do things like passports and visa--the Foreign Office sent over the passport of Mme. Chiang. Mme. Chiang apparently made a practice of keeping an American visa in her passport so she could leave on short notice.

[171]

J. SERVICE: They sent a little note saying that they had sent the passport over many times, and it seemed to be much easier if we could just issue a permanent visa. Well, there's no such thing as a permanent visa, wasn't then. Visas are limited, for a certain period.

So, I took the thing up to Johnson and he said, "Oh, go ahead. [laughter] Just leave out any expiry date. Just give her a visa and don't mention an expiration date." So, I gave Mme. Chiang a unique State Department visa!

Of course, with Gauss this would never have worked. Gauss had written a manual on notarial procedures that was the "Bible" all through the Foreign Service. He would have insisted on the regulations and the law.

Embassy Relations with American Army and Navy Intelligence

LEVENSON: So Gauss built up a professional office as quickly as he could. Another thing that you said that interested me is that he told off the navy in no uncertain terms. What sort of liaison did he have at that time with information that the army and the navy were getting?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I think quite good. I don't think there was any complaint. Under Johnson, of course, he was reporting [navy] information and giving credit. He would say, "McHugh has seen Mme. Chiang and reports the following," and then send it in. I don't think that McHugh was holding out particularly. The military attaché was Meyer, who had taken the place of Stilwell, who by this time had left China as attaché. I don't think that there was any problem with the army either.

McHugh got into hot water later on when he began to try to play politics a little bit. He sort of joined the anti-Stilwell faction, and this eventually got him in the wringer.

Most of Meyer's contacts were not political contacts so much, as military contacts. He watched what was happening militarily in the Sino-Japanese war and gave us copies of his reports.

[172]

Chungking: A Precipitous City Divided by the Fast-flowing Yangtze River

J. SERVICE: The American embassy was, as I said, situated very unsuitably and inconveniently on the south bank across the Yangtze. Crossing the Yangtze at night was sometimes a chancy and perilous business. Some nights you just couldn't do it. If the water was flooding the boats wouldn't cross. You had to cross by a little sampan with people rowing, and you'd get swept way down the river and then you'd hang on and pull yourselves up on the boats on the other side.

LEVENSON: How wide is the Yangtze there? It's a confluence, isn't it, of two rivers?

J. SERVICE: Yes, two rivers. Oh, I suppose maybe half a mile wide. It doesn't get much wider when it floods because the banks are very steep. The Yangtze flowed down through these very steep shores. The city of Chungking is built on a high rock, like a ship almost, between these two rivers, and anyplace you go is up. In those days you had a long, long line of steps. People used to say that there were 365 steps at the landing where we normally went. I think that s slightly exaggerated, but in any case it would differ a good deal depending on the stage of the water because the difference between high water and low water level was a hundred feet. So obviously at low water you had a lot more steps to go up.

A lot of people found the steps difficult. Gauss usually had to get a sedan chair to go up. There were no wheel vehicles until you got up onto the top, the plateau at the top. Then you'd have some rickshaws and buses. But there was only one place in Chungking where a motor car could get down to the river. That was where they had a ferry across for trucks and so on.

Along the cliff side as the water went down people built bamboo houses, huts, and when the water came up in the spring time they all had to be torn down. This happened every year. Houses would move down as the water went down and be dismantled when the river came up the next spring.

The commercial airport was an island in the river, a glorified sandbar. But then every summer that was flooded. So then they had to use another airport much further away from town, the military field. But the river was very swift, and when it was rising in flood, it could be quite dangerous.

[173]

J. SERVICE: They had launches, steam ferries, that operated during the day time, hut they quit in very early evening. After that, a sampan, a small rowboat was the only way of getting across.

LEVENSON: Were these rowed by men or women?

J. SERVICE: Men. You're thinking of South China where it's women. But in Szechwan it's a man's job. They row by standing up, facing forward, not our way of sitting down, backward.

LEVENSON: I've never been able to figure out how that works!

Domestic Arrangements.

LEVENSON: Where and how did you live in Chungking?

J. SERVICE: The embassy rented a bungalow that belonged to Standard Oil.

In normal times, Standard Oil was a fairly large company in Chungking because it was the distributing center for Szechwan and areas west. So kerosene was shipped there in bulk, and put into five gallon cans to be shipped out by other means from Chungking.

Since fairly early in the war the river had been blocked. It was barricaded just above Ichang to keep the Japanese from being able to come up the Yangtze, so that nothing could come in and Standard Oil was doing no business. They had one man there, sort of a caretaker. But several of their houses were available and they had a bungalow up in the hills, in what was called the Second Range, the south bank of Chungking. The embassy rented that bungalow, and they also had a house down fairly near the river. That was the house that was right next to the ambassador and the counselor.

When I arrived the man that I was replacing had lived up in the hill bungalow and I went up there. I didn't mind. It was a half hour or forty minutes from the office, but I normally did it by foot. Some people did it by chair. It was more arduous, I thought, by chair than by foot.

But the ambassador and the counselor and the counselor's private secretary lived in the Standard Oil house down fairly near the river, near the office.

[174]

J. SERVICE: We rented a building from a Chinese landlord, which I think was put up in a hurry, for the office, which became very inadequate. Other people rented houses. The rest of the staff lived in a couple of houses that were owned by a widow of an American doctor who had left the mission and gone into business. He started a private hospital in Chungking, a drugstore, and so on. They built several houses which they rented. But we were all there on the south bank.

In the fall of '41 I was asked to come down from my hill house and move in with the ambassador and the counselor, Gauss and Vincent. So I did that. I lived there until I left Chungking in late '42.

LEVENSON: Did you have a Chinese staff, a cook, amah, and so on?

J. SERVICE: Yes. Some of the staff had been brought in by Johnson and other people, from Nanking, Hangkow.

LEVENSON: Who ran the house?

J. SERVICE: That was one of my chores really. I was the junior man, and so it was my job to do the accounts and pay the cook, and do things like that, watch out that we weren't squeezed too much and so on.

Coffee was a tremendous problem. These crazy, perverse things that happen in times of scarcity-- Coffee became a sort of a fad in Chungking, which was completely cut off from the world. Coffee houses sprang up all over town. The in thing to do was to have coffee. Where did they get their coffee? They got their coffee, of course, largely from foreign establishments like ours.

We had an agreement with the cook that if we got forty-five cups of coffee out of each pound of coffee, that was okay. We sort of kept a check. [laughter] How long the coffee lasted. Of course, what they did was to dry the grounds. Grounds were all dried and sold to the coffee houses, maybe sweetened a little bit with some fresh coffee. But mostly it was grounds that you got when you went to town. They boiled them to death!

You had to be very careful because things got terribly scarce, terribly expensive. Light bulbs would disappear. You couldn't leave a light bulb out on the porch, for instance, things like that. You had to bring it in at night. You got along fairly well without imported stuff.

[175]

J. SERVICE: The navy had a gunboat there. I think around the time of Pearl Harbor, or maybe even before Pearl Harbor, it was decided to pull the crew of the gunboat out. It couldn't do anything. It couldn't go anyplace. So, they sold a lot of their supplies to the embassy staff.

As I mentioned the naval attaché had a car, and the navy had a truck which went on a regular supply run, first to Indochina, when the road was open from Indochina, to Chungking, and then from the Burma Road later on. So they would bring in some supplies. But after the gunboat stopped operating, the truck was discontinued, and we were really cut off.

LEVENSON: Did you eat Western style or Chinese?

J. SERVICE: Completely Western.

LEVENSON: Really? Was this Gauss preference?

J. SERVICE: Yes. He had no interest in Chinese food.

One thing that we got from the gunboat was a case of tabasco sauce, and Gauss liked tabasco sauce. We had soup at lunch, we had soup at dinner, and always had tabasco sauce. I had learned that eggs with tabasco sauce are very good, so I had tabasco sauce three meals a day. I had eggs for breakfast. [laughter]

But this was normal. Most foreigners were quite nationalistic in that they insisted that the cook prepare foreign style food, bread and so on.

LEVENSON: Were there other residents in that house?

J. SERVICE: It was a rather small house and it was just the three of us, Gauss, Vincent and myself. The bungalow up on the hill I always shared with someone else.

Japanese Bombing Rituals

J. SERVICE: The summer of '41 was the last heavy season of bombing. The Japanese did most of their bombings in the summer in Chungking for some reason. We had very heavy, sometimes almost continuous bombing in the summer of '41, whenever the weather was good.

[176]

J. SERVICE: It was all quite ritualized. If the weather was good the Japanese from Hangkow would send up a reconnaissance plane to check the weather in Chungking. You could hear it buzzing about. Then you would know that in about two hours or three hours, various alerts would start going off.

The Chinese had a wonderful system of air raid warnings. A lot of credit is given to the Chinese for this. But it was organized by [Claire Lee] Chennault. Chennault then worked for the Chinese. This was before the Flying Tigers, the Fourteenth Air Force.

It was made easier by the fact that the Japanese operated only from one particular locality, Hangkow. They built their base in Hangkow. The Chinese had watchers apparently almost beside the field, right in Hangkow. So they knew when the Japanese were getting ready for a raid, they could tell when they took off, and all the rest of it. The watchers could tell when they got to two hundred kilometers, a hundred kilometers, fifty kilometers from Chungking. By that time you heard them and everybody went underground.

LEVENSON: You had air raid shelters.

J SERVICE: Oh yes. We had one for the embassy. Everyone was instructed, required, you might say, to prepare shelters. Chungking is on soft sandstone, quite easy to dig into.

We normally used to stay outside of the shelter until we could see the planes and see where they were coming from. In the city, because of so many people, police required you to go underground, but we would stand outside and watch the planes. If the planes weren't coming over us then we would normally not go in. Even that was not without some danger because Chinese did have anti-aircraft and you had shrapnel falling around.

The first day I was there--I came up on a plane with Mrs. Luce, Henry Luce and Mrs. [Claire Boothe] Luce. They came over and called at the embassy and there was an air raid. I was standing about three feet from Mrs. Luce on the edge of a terrace looking out toward the city, a whizzing sound, and a piece of shrapnel fell right between us on the ground, a small piece about as big as your finger.

LEVENSON: How did she react to it?

J. SERVICE: She reacted very well. She was very calm. I made the mistake, foolishly and ignorantly, of trying to pick it up too soon, before it got cold. Shrapnel gets very, very hot.

[177]

J. SERVICE: But anyway we would watch, and then if the planes were in a threatening position we'd go in the shelter. If you had a shelter then you were required to let the neighborhood people in. There were a lot of poor people, ordinary people who couldn't build shelters. So if you had a shelter you had to have open house.

One day we went into the shelter and I noticed a woman holding a child who was obviously quite sick. So I asked her what was wrong with the child. The mother gestured: "Something wrong with his throat." It was mumps. So at an appropriate time after that I got sick. We had a navy doctor there from the gunboat. The navy doctor says, "You've got a fine case of mumps. Get yourself up the hill." I was living up on top of the hill at that time. "Get yourself up the hill and ride a chair." That was the only time, I think, I rode a chair up the hill. "Stay in bed. Don't get up. Don't walk around."

So I went up. I got the Chinese to get me some of these mats--they use them in South China a lot--to sleep on because it was much cooler than sleeping on a mattress and sheets. I unrolled the mat and I spent my two weeks up there. The doctor never came to see me.

LEVENSON: Were you very sick?

J. SERVICE: Not really. We had some night air raids. So all this made staying in bed not exactly comfortable.

But the embassy [staff] used to come up to the hill, to the cottage on the hill when they had day-long alerts. They would come up and they could work up there. The whole staff pretty much would move up--the coolies carried a few typewriters. We worked up there several times when we had these prolonged alerts. The Japanese would send over a few planes every two or three hours to keep the whole city immobilized. Food couldn't come in from the countryside. People would be kept in the shelters.

LEVENSON: What about fires?

J. SERVICE: Oh terrible fires, terrible fires.

LEVENSON: Did they have a reasonable firefighting system?

J. SERVICE: Well, very poor, very primitive. For one thing there was no water. The river was two hundred feet below, so it was very hard to get very much water. Very often the bombs would destroy whatever water supply there was, the mains and pipes. They had no real adequate water supply.

[178]

J. SERVICE: So that it very often was a matter of trying to stop the spread of a fire by tearing down, making firebreaks. You couldn't do much about putting out the fires. By the time the war was over Chungking had all been rebuilt several times. Most of it was just bamboo and sort of wattle. You know, they split bamboo and would weave it into a mat and then plaster mud on it and then outside a thin coat of lime plaster, white plaster. These things could burn down very quickly, but then they could be put up very quickly.

LEVENSON: What about communication? Was there an operating telephone system?

J. SERVICE: Yes but very, very poor. We could telephone to the city, but that again was subject to trouble when air raids came. But there was a telephone. It was almost like, not as bad as Chengtu in my youth, but you sent messages around. We had a coolie or two that spent his time carrying notes. It was some times more reliable and sometimes just as fast to send a message by courier.

We didn't try to do much business with the foreign office, for instance, by telephone. Yes, setting up appointments, something like that, with the ambassador, you could do that by phone. But if you wanted to do any business you didn't sit down and do it by telephone. You went over and saw the man.

LEVENSON: How good were Chungking's radio links with Japanese-occupied China?

J. SERVICE: They had small radios. I'm sure they had to move them around. In a place like Hangkow close to the Japanese they probably had small, portable things. You could work them with a bicycle [pedaling], you know. Well, that was one way they often did things. In a city like Hangkow they may have gotten house current. It was relayed, I'm sure, to some other point and then further on.

LEVENSON: But when you talk about sending telegrams, did you have reliable wire and/or radio service?

J. SERVICE: We used the navy, you see. The navy had a gunboat there and one purpose of the gunboat was for the radio. We worked through the Philippines. I'm not sure that we used the Chinese commercial telegraph at all. I don't recall ever using it at that time. I think everything went through our navy. When the gunboat was pulled out we still kept the navy radio staff. They stayed on and set up their station on land.

[179]

Jack's Evolution as Political Officer and Communist Specialist

LEVENSON: How did you become the embassy's "specialist" on the Chinese Communists? I put that in quotation marks. Again, Jack Kahn says that Gauss assigned you to find out all you could about the Communists, and Joseph Esherick (Ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Lost Chance in China; The World War II Despatches of John S. Service, New York, Random House, 1974, p. 169.) quotes you as saying that it was a simple career decision, that you weren't an economist" and you weren't this and you weren't that, but you could make it as a Communist specialist.

J. SERVICE: Well, people are, you know, speaking at different times and for different forums. Or is it fora?

LEVENSON: [laughing] I don't think so.

J. SERVICE: What Kahn is doing is quoting in effect from Gauss' testimony when he was testifying before my Loyalty Security Board in the State Department in 1950. Gauss is trying to explain, of course, that I was only carrying out orders. He's gilding the lily a little bit and so on. Certainly, I was assigned political reporting and part of the political reporting I was assigned was reporting on the Communists, maintaining contact with them. So, he's correct, as you say, that he sent me over there to find out all I could about them, I suppose.

Esherick's statement is aimed at a refutation of the general assumption that I reported on the Communists because of a political interest in the Communists. This was a very common attitude. If you reported on something it must be because you're interested in that yourself. In other words you're under suspicion simply because of having reported on it.

I was saying that certainly I was interested in political reporting--the gravy, you know; this was the way to fame and fortune, but it's also the interesting part for most people in Foreign Service work--and that I had been very much impressed by talking to old hands like Clubb, [Edmund 0.]. Clubb who had advised me, advised any young man, to make a specialty of something, get to be known as being an authority on some particular
subject, some topic.

[180]

J. SERVICE: After I got to Chungking it was quite obvious--to me at any rate--that the big problem in the future, the political issue, was going to be the Kuomintang-Communist thing.

LEVENSON: You say that as though it were self-evident. But from my reading in that period it doesn't seem to have been evident to many people who regarded the Kuomintang, both in China and in the West, as the government and that the Communists were done for.

J. SERVICE: Well, yes. I can't say that this was immediately apparent. It became apparent over a period of time. But almost as soon as I got to Chungking, or my very first few weeks there I think, Drumright was having a meeting at dinner with Chou En-lai and some of the people on Chou En-lai's staff, and he took me along.

He knew that he was leaving. I was coming in. This was sort of turning over his contacts, introducing me and so on. This was a very "proper, thoughtful thing to do. But it was recognition and we all recognized at that time that the Communists were an important factor.

There were very few China language officers in the embassy at that time, so I think it was just taken for granted that the Communist contact would be maintained, and that I would be the one to maintain it.

New Fourth Army Incident and the Eighth Route Army: Factions Within the Communist Party

J. SERVICE: The New Fourth Army incident had just recently taken place in January that year [1941). The British ambassador Clark Kerr, made some very strong statements on it. We kept our mouths shut. We said nothing at all. Johnson was ambassador and we just saw no evil, heard no evil, and so on.

LEVENSON: Would you put the New Fourth Army incident in context?

J. SERVICE: At the beginning of the war--

LEVENSON: Excuse me. What do you mean? Everybody has a different date for the beginning of the war.

J. SERVICE: We're talking about the Sino-Japanese war. At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war in '37 it had been understood or perhaps agreed on, but at least implicitly understood, that

[181]

J. SERVICE: the Chinese Communist forces, who at that time were based in north Shensi around Yenan, would be allowed to operate in North China behind the Japanese lines, which they did very successfully. Very quickly they expanded their control in the North China provinces.

But at the same time there were still some remnants, old "Red" guerrillas, in the south Yangtze areas, Kansu where the Communists had operated from 1928 until 1934 when they were driven out. But they'd had a republic in Kansu, and they had left behind a lot of people who were indoctrinated, who had been in their army, who were fighters, and who had maintained a shadowy glimmer of a guerrilla struggle.

Ch'en Yi for instance, who later on became foreign minister, remained in that area. One of Mao's brothers had stayed but was caught and killed.

But during the early honeymoon period of the war--late '37, early '38, and particularly when the capital was in Hangkow--the proposal was made: "Everything to fight the Japanese." Therefore we've got these people down here. They're old, experienced people, guerrilla people. The Kuomintang agreed to allow another Communist force to be formed which was called the New Fourth Army. The Fourth Army had been very famous in the 1926-27 Northern Expedition. So they took the name "New Fourth Army."

This became extremely successful, operating in the areas south and then eventually north of the Yangtze, the lower Yangtze valley. It became so successful the Kuomintang became very disturbed. Relations from '39 got very bad anyway. So the central government ordered the New Fourth Army to discontinue any operation south of the Yangtze and move all its operation north of the Yangtze.

What really happened and why is still a matter of debate. The Communists promised they would do so. They agreed in principle they would move. Most of their forces did go up north, but they had a very large headquarters contingent with wounded and various people like that, staff, civilian cadres, which were still south. Instead of moving in early January, instead of moving north, they started to move southeast, I think it was, anyway not toward the Yangtze.

They had some excuse that they couldn't cross the Yangtze where the Kuomintang wanted them to because of the Japanese presence. They had to take a roundabout route. But the Kuomintang apparently was ready, and they jumped on them and wiped them out.

[182]

J. SERVICE: Ten thousand or so people were practically obliterated. They captured the commander of the New Fourth Army and kept him prisoner through the war. He was killed at the end of the war.

There was a great outcry. As I say, Clark Kerr the British ambassador issued very strong critical statements of the action.

LEVENSON: To the Kuomintang, to Chiang?

J. SERVICE: To Chiang and to the press. It was given to the press. The Kuomintang officially dissolved the New Fourth Army, said that it would no longer recognize any New Fourth Army.

The Chinese Communists, of course, protested bitterly. Both sides put out big stories to the press. As I say the whole incident is still a mystery to some extent, because there was also internal friction within the Communist party. We know much more about these things now than we did then. We knew nothing then, generally speaking.

But some of the leaders of the New Fourth Army were apparently very close to Wang Ming and the Russian-trained faction, the Twenty-eighth Bolshevik faction within the Communist party. They were not Mao Tse-tung men. The Eighth Route Army people generally were hostile to them.

LEVENSON: The Eighth Route?

J. SERVICE: The Eighth Route Army which were the people based in Yenan.

All this goes back to my point that at some point in here it seemed to me that this was going to be a critical issue. As I began to get more Chinese friends, newspaper friends, they began to tell me this. This perhaps was the summer of '42. So that it seemed to me that I should concentrate on Communist politics.

In that sense you could say, as Esherick does, that this specialization was a career decision. It was not a decision based on my own political sympathies particularly. It was looking for something that was going to be the main--the ball game.

[183]

Japanese and American Negotiations, 1941: The American Embassy in Chungking Was Not Informed

J. SERVICE: In the summer of '41, things in Washington were warming up between the United States versus Japan. Our War and Navy Departments at that time said that they weren't ready and they had to have delay. They didn't want to have hostilities if they could avoid it. So in Washington there began to be this long negotiation with the Japanese to try to reach some sort of a modus vivendi, it was called.

We in Chungking were kept completely in the dark about this. It was partly the disorganized way that the State Department very often operated. But also it was regarded as a very tightly held secret business, although the Chinese in Washington found out about it. Hu Shih was the ambassador but T.V. Soong, who was very aggressive, very pushing, and also developed excellent contacts in Washington, was there.

Gauss got called in several times by the Chinese foreign minister, named Quo T'ai-ch'i. Quo was a wonderful old man--I think he'd been ambassador in London as a matter of fact, and educated at Oxford. Quo asked Gauss what was happening in Washington. "Are you getting ready to sell us down the river? Our ambassador has been told by your secretary of state that it's necessary to have these discussions with the Japanese. What are you discussing?" Gauss was completely uninformed, and completely at a loss.

The reason I'm mentioning it is that he always used to take me along. My job was not to participate in the talks, but simply to listen and write the memorandum of conversation when we got home. Gauss almost never changed the memoranda that I wrote. Of course, I would try to get the conversation organized a little bit better. I wasn't trying to make a verbatim thing, but it had to be something that could be the basis of a telegram or despatch.

You asked once about training for political reporting. This was one aspect of reporting. You've got to be able to hear; you've got to be able to listen. So, all through this summer of '41, I was writing the memoranda of conversation at three or four of these meetings.

Last time I was telling you about accompanying the ambassador with his meetings with the foreign minister and my function being to prepare the memoranda of conversation. I'm not sure that I made it clear that I did not take notes. You don't take notes when you're sitting there having an interview with the foreign minister. It had to be pure memory.

[184]

J. SERVICE: It was like the old boy scout game of watching, going past a shop window or being shown a certain number of things and then having to see how much you could remember. It taught you to fasten on to key facts, dates, numbers. Anything specific, you'd try to fix in your mind.

Later on in New Zealand, to skip way ahead, my ambassador there used to do the same sort of thing. But he would go and talk to the prime minister without me being present and then he would come back to the office. He lived way out in the country: He wanted to get home. He would say, "I said this and Peter Fraser would say this and I said this and Peter said that. Now send a telegram." I would be expected to send a telegram.

But an important part of political reporting is just the ability to listen and to report correctly.

LEVENSON: Do you now have any explanation that makes sense to you of why State kept your ambassador in ignorance of these negotiations with the Japanese?

J. SERVICE: No, not really. The Chinese picked up some stuff, obviously, that they were not expected to pick up. I mean I'm sure they had some leaks available. But State did tell the Chinese ambassador something. I think that they may not have trusted the radio, the codes. We were reading the Japanese codes at this time--beginning to. They may not have trusted our codes. We were getting new codes. We knew our codes were not very good.

There was always a fear that Chungking was a bit like a sieve. Of course, this was the thing brought out later at Yalta, that there could be no secrets in Chungking. There was some justification that Chungking was probably more of a sieve even than Washington.

But also these negotiations were being carried on by [Joseph Clark] Grew and by [Joseph William] Ballantine, the Japan oriented people. Hornbeck was in it. I think that they just didn't think that the ambassador to China needed to be informed. We were discussing this with the Japanese. I think that they really never thought about where this left Gauss,
you see, in Chungking.

Gauss had no friends in the State Department as I say. Nobody in the Department really felt any great warmth or sympathy toward him. He was a cold man in many ways. There

[185]

J. SERVICE: wasn't this sort of tie with Hornbeck, for instance, that Johnson had had. If Johnson had been there, there might have been something in a private communication, something like that.

LEVENSON: I haven't seen that commented on anywhere in the literature, and it seems, as you talk about it, fairly important in terms of later developments, that our ambassador did not have a good relationship with State or with the executive.

J. SERVICE: Oh yes. Yes, this is important, always important.

LEVENSON: Has that been commented on? You know the literature much better than I do.

J. SERVICE: I don't recall any comment on this particular episode. In my monograph (John S. Service, The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the History of US-China Relations, Berkeley, China Research Monographs, University of California, 1971) .discussing a later period in 1944-45, I mention that the State Department had no real in with the White House.

People have commented generally on Roosevelt's distrust of the Foreign Service, but in this particular case I don't think it was Roosevelt. I think it was just that Grew and those people didn't feel under any compulsion to keep Gauss informed. They could justify that on the basis that, "Well after all, we're telling the Chinese." But they weren't telling the Chinese enough to satisfy the Chinese. Otherwise the Chinese wouldn't have gotten Gauss on the carpet so fiercely.

LEVENSON: So fiercely, what do you mean?

J. SERVICE: Well, the foreign minister was very agitated, very alarmed! "What is going on? What are you people doing? What are you going to do to us?"

LEVENSON: Legitimately, I would say.

J. SERVICE: Oh certainly. Chiang Kai-shek made some statement as I recall. But the foreign minister made no bones of the fact that he was talking for the Generalissimo. The Chinese were extremely alarmed.

[186]

Pearl Harbor: Great Chinese Celebrations

LEVENSON: What was the impact of the news of Pearl Harbor on Chungking?

J. SERVICE: Well, there was a great Chinese celebration. It was VJ Day as far as the Chinese were concerned, fireworks all over the city, a big celebration. The Chinese were beside themselves with excitement and pleasure because to them this meant assurance of victory. The war was over, and literally almost, as far as active participation in the war went. They sat back after that and didn't do much.

The impact on us was quite different. In the first place we decided we had to do something immediately about increasing coverage. We had to have somebody on duty in the evenings, things like that. We'd never had night duty officers. So immediately we started having someone on duty twenty-four hours in the office. I drew the first night. I spent all of my first night, that first night, decoding a long message that was delayed, telling us what to do in case of a sudden outbreak of hostilities, destroying codes, burning this and that. This had been delayed in transit through the Philippines and it went on for pages.

Jack's Dash to Rangoon for the Embassy Mercury

J. SERVICE: One thing that we realized in the embassy very quickly was that the motor car, which Gauss had gotten the State Department to promise us, was still on the high seas and would never reach us because from where we sat we realized, just took it for granted, that Hong Kong and Burma were going to fall very quickly. Hong Kong, of course, was attacked immediately. There was no hope of them holding out. The Japanese moved immediately into Thailand and began to move toward Burma and towards Singapore.

So we scouted around and found that the British American Tobacco Company had a new car, landed in Rangoon, which they were willing to sell because everybody in Burma also realized that they were in a bag. They had to be prepared to get out. So the car in Burma was a drag on the market. Anyway, we bought the car from the British American Tobacco Company.

I was very eager and the ambassador agreed to let me go down to drive it up. But he thought that it might be a good idea to have two people, partly for intelligence reasons, I

[187]

J. SERVICE: suppose. The military attaché wanted to send a young officer along, so he went with me. The Texaco Oil Company also managed to get a car in Rangoon. So the three of us went down by air, oh, just before Christmas in '41, stopped in Kunming.

The Chinese National Aviation Company was just starting this route from China down to Burma. They foresaw the end of the Hong Kong link. We spent the night at the border, Lashio, and then had to rent a car the next day and get down to the railhead and then took the train, came down into Rangoon.

When we were coming into Rangoon it was Christmas morning, which also happened to be a Sunday as I recall. The fields were just full of people, miles out of town, all these people out in the country. We couldn't understand what it was all about. Why should the Burmese all be going out and having a picnic in the countryside?

We got into the railway station. It was almost deserted. There were no porters, no crew. Vegetables and so on were piled up on the platform. We finally found somebody and asked. They said, "Oh, we were bombed yesterday by the Japanese." The Japanese had made their first very heavy bombing of the Rangoon docks.

The population--Burmese and Indian were the majority-- just evacuated, just left. They had no interest in the war. The Indians, of course, were trying to get back to India. A lot of them did, overland. The Burmese just went off to the villages. We went into a quiet, empty city.

The hotel had no staff. We went in and we finally found an assistant manager--it was the Strand Hotel in Rangoon--and said, "Can we stay here?" He said, "Well, go upstairs, find a room. You can have it." So we picked out what we thought was the best room, not too near the top, not too near the bottom, no outside windows, interior light well, that sort of thing.

We were just unpacking when the air raid alarm went off in the building right next door to us. So, we went downstairs and found the air raid shelter was a ballroom on the ground floor with mattresses up against the windows. We stayed in the hotel. We had to stay there. They couldn't throw us out. Eventually there were only a few of us that stayed. Sort of a hardcore--a Greek shipowner, a one-armed Frenchman who was trying to recruit for De Gaulle's Free French, some sort of a lady singer, uncertain age, Greek or something like that. I don't know whether she was European. Anyway, we were a very odd group, but we all got to be very chummy.

[188]

J. SERVICE: There was an Austrian Jewish, refugee who was a chef. There was a Swiss who was assistant manager. I don't know who the manager was. I never saw him. He wasn't around. There was Captain Cahill and myself, Americans, and these few other people, the one-armed Frenchman. We lived in a little group in the hotel.

The internal phones worked in the hotel. We got a call in our room one night. "Can you come down and help out in an emergency?" The hotel had been called up by British command. "We got a Sunderland flying boat full of VIPs coming through. "You've got to put them up. We got no place to take care of them."

It was all Australian brass from Tobruk. The siege of Tobruk had just been raised, and they were trying desperately to get these people--this was most of the high command of the Australian army--they were trying to get them back to Australia because the Japanese were coming down the Solomons. Australia was almost bare of troops.

I'd waited tables in college and washed dishes and so on. We went down and peeled potatoes and helped get ready and then I said, "We'll wait on tables." We set up a private dining room, and we waited on all these officers.

By the end of the meal, they began to get suspicious about these two Yanks. I had said something about "Captain" to Cahill. So they said, "What's going on?" We had quite an evening after that. T hey drank up most of the case of whiskey which we bought to take up to Chungking!

I ran into one of these guys years later when I was in New Zealand. The Australians felt that their military heroes should be rewarded and given nice jobs. So, he was sent to New Zealand as a trade commissioner. [laughter] Australian trade commissioner. We looked at each other for a long time. Then finally I asked him if perhaps he had passed through Rangoon. He looked at me and said, [lowering voice] "My God, that's it. I've got you now, mate!" [laughter]

Rangoon to Chungking Via the Burma Road, January 1942

J. SERVICE: We picked up the car, a Mercury, which at that time was nothing much except a fancy Ford. Unfortunately, New Year's Eve, my friend the army officer went out on a bit of a party and backed up,

[189]

J. SERVICE: didn't realize one of the back doors was open. So that door was badly sprung and didn't work very well. From then on, it was better to leave it closed. [laughter] There was no hope of getting it fixed in Rangoon of course.

Gauss smoked twelve cigars a day, which meant a box of twenty-five lasted him two days. When I went down he said, "Get me all the cigars you can." Of course, the stores were closed in Rangoon. Rangoon really was a dead city. Then things opened up a little bit. We got into stores. I finally bought three thousand cigars.

We had to buy spare tires. We had to buy extra springs for spare parts, loaded them all up on top of the car, inside the car. Then we drove up the Burma Road. It was a long trip, more than two weeks, three weeks, as I recall, from Rangoon to Chungking.

LEVENSON: How did you get enough gasoline?

J. SERVICE: Before we left Chungking we had to make arrangements with the Chinese National Resources Commission. So we had orders from them to supply us. In all the main cities there'd be a National Resources Commission depot and we'd get gasoline. We had extra cans, of course, to carry spare fuel. No gas stations along the road.

The road was chaotic. Incredible mismanagement and lack of management. Every Chinese government organization that had an interest in transportation maintained its own trucks, own transportation services, no unity or unification. Military, civilian, all sorts of different organizations. There was no policing of the road.

The road was continually being tinkered with. It was in atrocious condition. It was built by poor farmers, minority hill people that had never seen a road! They didn't know what it was all for. They had supervisors but there was no machinery or anything like that. It was carved out of the hillside. Many places were subject to slides. You had to cross the
Salween and the Mekong Rivers.

LEVENSON: How high do you go on the road?

J. SERVICE: You go up to about eight thousand, but then you run into these tremendous canyons you see. [cutting down with his hand] At some of them they had bridges. Sometimes you had to cross by ferry. The Chinese drivers, a lot of them were inexperienced, inexpert. They tried to save gasoline, so they would coast.

[190]

J. SERVICE: You had terrific, hairpin zigzags, guys trying to coast down to save gasoline. They were issued an allotment of gasoline for the trip. So anything they could save, they could sell at the black market. At that time gasoline, you know, was the equivalent of $5 U.S. a gallon on the market.

The trucks were terrifically overloaded. The Chinese themselves officially would overload the truck, but then the driver would take extra illicit cargo and a lot of illicit passengers, "yellow fish" and so on.

LEVENSON: Yellow fish?

J. SERVICE: Yellow fish was what the Chinese called them. So that the trucks were subject to atrocious road, to brutal overloading and to just horrendous misdriving. Some were wrecked. It was a tough road.

LEVENSON: What was the surface allegedly?

J. SERVICE: The surface was just gravel, earthbound macadam. You put in big rocks and then you put a layer of smaller rocks and then you put in fine rocks that have been--

LEVENSON: Tarred?

J. SERVICE: --beaten up, no tar. There was no tar except they were just starting to put blacktop on some of it down near the Burma border. There were a few miles down near the Burma border that were black-topped, but the rest of it when it rained--and it rained a great deal--was terrible because a lot of this earth was clay. It would get very slippery and slick. Then, of course, trucks pounding over it kept breaking it up.

LEVENSON: How did the trip go?

J. SERVICE: Without any great incident.

LEVENSON: Bombing? Refugees?

J. SERVICE: No. Lots of people on the road. There weren't many refugees. As I say, most of the Burmese simply had left Rangoon.

We went up north of Rangoon to a place called Tounggoo where the Flying Tigers had set their base. We spent a night there and went up to Maymyo, which is a hill station in the hills north of Mandalay where the British were training their people for jungle warfare.

[191]

J. SERVICE: It was pathetic to see these poor guys from the banks and the British trading companies who'd spent their life sitting at a desk, now suddenly trying to learn how to be a commando. I don't know how many of these guys came out alive, but they were no match for the Japanese of course, when it came to jungle warfare.

I don't know. It was all sort of dreamlike because no one really thought that the Japanese could be stopped. The Flying Tigers people were shooting down some, but had no way of getting spare parts. They were pretty much cut off. They were only fifty planes or something like that.

The poor British had outdated, old planes. They were no match for the Japanese. The Zeros just massacred them. Our people with the P-40's and Chennault's tactics did pretty well against the Zeros.

We spent the night at Maymyo. They'd hoped that they were going to be able to get parts, but the way things were going, the losses and the attrition, they didn't see much hope. These guys, yes, they were being very gung-ho and stiff upper lip and "stop in the afternoon for tea" at this hill station. But one felt a little uneasy about them.

Anyway, we got up the road okay without any serious mishap, and made it back to Chungking. Gauss said, "Did you get the cigars?" I said, "Yes, three thousand." And he said, "You'll look better when you get that beard off." [laughter]

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