China; the remembered life

By Paul Frillmann

Subjects: Sino-Japanese Conflict, 1937-1945, American Personal narratives, Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945

Description: Paul Frillmann was twenty-four when he arrived in China in 1936 as a Lutheran missionary. After the Japanese invasion he was left alone to guard the big Lutheran compound in Hankow, with only a defective Lugar and a police dog for defense, and soon found himself host to hundreds of peasant women seeking refuge from rape. Later he spent a year as chaplain to General Chennault's Flying Tigers, that legendary band of American pilots who volunteered before their country was at war and in a few battered planes harried the Japanese bombers over Rangoon and the Burma road. When the Flying Tigers were disbanded six months after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Frillmann became a combat intelligence officer for the 14th Air Force in China, serving again under Chennault. It was at this time he came to know a fellow officer named John Birch, who in life gave no indication of the posthumous role that would be thrust upon him. In 1943 Mr. Frillmann, then a lieutenant, accompanied by a corporal, was trapped in the little city of Changteh, under siege by at least twenty thousand Japanese troops. He escaped through sheer fluke, and for the next year and a half was an OSS officer behind enemy lines. His work was to find Japanese targets for air attack, but he could not help seeing the deterioration of Chinese life and morale, while disturbing rumors floated from Chungking of the Chennault-Stilwell feud and the court politics surrounding Chiang Kai-shek. After the Japanese surrender in 1945 Mr. Frillmann spent several months as chief of the OSS mission in Peking, then transferred to the U.S. Information service of the state department, and as a consul in Mukden and Shanghai witnessed the last three years of the Nationalist debacle he had seen approaching during the war. -- from dust cover.