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During the 1990s, a few years before my father, Dave, passed away in December of 2000, he wrote a 35-page autobiography. Excerpts from it will be published here, as companions to the diaries my mother, Dorothy, kept in 1945 and 1946—the year she met Dave. My dad was born in 1927, in Hamilton, Ohio. The family eventually moved to the south side of Chicago.
Part 16
War's End
A few days after being deemed unsuitable to be a part of what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency, a group of us OSS personnel were flown over the Himalayas, or the “Hump” as these peaks were informally named, into Kunming, China. Our assignment was to train Chinese Nationalist troops to be skilled paratroopers. My job: to push out anyone who happened to freeze at the doorway.
There were quite a few who did freeze, particularly given that none of them had ever set foot in an aircraft. A canvas sling was attached to rings near the open door, and then wrapped around my waist, to prevent me from accidentally falling out. When someone balked at jumping, I would plant my foot on their backside, and push. It must have been sheer terror for these people.
After all the Chinese troops had jumped, we had the option of remaining on board for the trip back, or jumping ourselves. On one trip I decided to do the latter. On my way down, I saw what I took to be a shallow pond. Wanting to see what landing in water was like, I steered my chute towards it. About ten feet over the ground, I hit the quick release, the chute flying off to one side, and I landed waist-deep in the water. Or what I thought would be water. I soon learned it was not. Instead, it was the collection pit for the Chinese locals' chamber pots, or “night soil,” as they called it.
It was November of 1945, and an inglorious ending to my time in the Far East.
Dave, in Burma, 1945
In Karachi, Pakistan, the departure point for the journey back home, I met up with a couple dozen OSS-101 personnel, including many of my fellow soldiers who I had not seen since our Congressional Country Club and Catalina Island days.
Some of my friends and acquaitances had spent their entire tours of duty working with the Chinese Nationalist Army. The Arakan group–the one I had been briefly a part of–had seen extensive action along Burma's south island coast. Listening to their stories, I realized I'd been fortunate to have had what appeared to be a better assignment.
We embarked from Karachi, sailing the Arabian Sea, then up thru the Red Sea to Cairo via the Suez Canal. From there, we traveled across the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar and on into the cold and stormy weather of the North Atlantic. After 14 uneventful days at sea, the Statue of Liberty was finally in sight off the port bow and, rising up behind it, New York City.
Without much delay, we were next transported to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where we were then processed. With back pay and a travel allowance in my pocket, I was out of the army, and on my way back home, to Chicago.
* * *
End of Part 16
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