Amid the turbulence and twists and turns in Sino-US relations, where do American World War II veterans find their way "home"?
- Chang Siying
- BBC Chinese
On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States, the outside world is eagerly awaiting how he will initiate dialogue with China after taking office for the second time. American veteran Bob Willett is also watching nervously. With.
The 98-year-old man has spent the past 30 years searching for the remains of his cousin, World War II pilot James Browne, in China. Jimmy went to China to support the Anti-Japanese War in 1942. The plane he was piloting crashed during a mission on the "Hump Route" and crashed in Cangshan Mountain, Yunnan. He was not yet 21 years old at the time.
"We're taking Jimmy home," Bob said. He was interviewed by the BBC at his home in Florida. The old man's voice was trembling but very firm.
In the past few years, the private sector has continuously promoted search operations and urged cooperation at the official level. Some scholars call it a "rare case of bilateral cooperation" between China and the United States. But amid ongoing tensions between the two countries, the search for the remains has been met with twists and turns.
Analysis points out that after the new U.S. government takes office, if Beijing adopts a more positive attitude, it may usher in a new turning point. But if Trump does not act accordingly and turns such humanitarian issues into bargaining chips, non-governmental cooperation may become a casualty again.
point of no return
According to Nicholas Burns, the ambassador to China, Jimmy is one of hundreds of U.S. combat personnel who are still missing in China during World War II and other conflicts.
He was born in Chicago, the United States, as the only child in his family. He loved adventure and flying since he was a child. He later entered the military academy and obtained a pilot's license.
In 1941, Jimmy went to England and joined the Airlift Auxiliary of the Royal Air Force, flying fighters and bombers throughout the British Isles. A year later, when he returned from the European battlefield, he happened to encounter China Airlines looking for pilots to help China resist Japanese aggression.
The young man was attracted by the mysterious East and persuaded his doting parents to travel to China in September 1942.
But unexpectedly, he embarked on a path of no return.
At that time, the Anti-Japanese War was in full swing. After the Pearl Harbor incident in 1941, the Japanese army began to occupy Southeast Asia, and China's land transportation was cut off.
Then the Pacific War broke out. In order to maintain its allies in the Asia-Pacific, the United States began to provide assistance to China and opened an air channel with the Chiang Kai-shek regime, the "Hump Route." This route is more than 800 kilometers long, extending from Assam in northeast India to Yunnan in southwest China.
"This route was the lifeline of China at that time. If there were no hump route, the Chinese government would not be able to survive." Chang Cheng, associate professor of history at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the BBC that the hump route transported about 650,000 tons in the three years since its opening. More than half of the supplies are aviation fuel, and others include US military war equipment, strategic supplies China exports to the United States, etc.
After arriving in China, Jimmy joined the US military's aid operation to China, performing tasks on the dangerous "Hump Route" to transport strategic weapons and supplies to China.
Flying on this route will pass through the Hengduan Mountains, the airflow is complicated, and you may encounter snowy mountains and experience sudden changes in temperature. According to official statistics, hundreds of US military aircraft have crashed here, and thousands of pilots have died.
In November 1942, Captain John J. Dean, co-pilot Jimmy, and Chinese radio operator Yang Guangliu flew an AVIC aircraft over the hump. They took off from Dinjan in Assam, India and landed in Kunming.
On the way back, Dean reported that the plane was seriously icy and asked about the weather conditions ahead. This was the last communication with the control center, and then disappeared in Cangshan Mountain.
Jimmy was not yet 21 years old at the time and had only been in China for a month.
Thirty years of searching for a bride
After Jimmy's disappearance, his parents were devastated and both passed away within a few years, but his cousin Bob was always thinking of him.
Bob and Jimmy are five years apart. They lived very close to each other when they were young and often visited each other. In Bob's impression, when he grew up, Jimmy often wore a crisp uniform and attended family gatherings. Although he came and went in a hurry every time, he always took the time to chat with Bob, which made his somewhat shy little cousin feel very kind.
"He was 6.1 feet tall, tall and handsome, and he always attracted pretty girls," Bob said. He also remembered Jimmy driving a convertible through his hometown town with a girl in the car.
Like Jimmy, Bob joined the Army and fought in World War II and the Korean War. After the war, he became a banker and was a keen student of military history. Around 1990, he began to study the plane piloted by Jimmy. Starting from the history of US military air crew casualties, he searched for the wreckage step by step, hoping to "bring Jimmy home."
The plane driven by Jimmy and others belongs to the civil aviation industry. Strictly speaking, Jimmy is a civilian, not a soldier. It was not until 1991 that the U.S. Congress granted these pilots veteran status, and the task of recovering the remains fell under the jurisdiction of agencies affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense.
During this period, China experienced complex historical changes. First, the government of the Republic of China moved to Taiwan after the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, and the Communist Party of China led by Mao Zedong became the ruling party. Subsequently, China and the United States became enemies in the Cold War and fought fiercely in the Korean War. These major turns were very detrimental to the search for the crash, and there are few records of it.
In order to collect information about the crash, Bob has traveled to various agencies in the United States for the past thirty years. He wrote to the Senate, members of Congress, the State Department, the U.S. Army and Air Force, and more, but received few responses. He also participated in several briefings organized by the Ministry of Defense, but was told many times that China would not allow search and rescue personnel to enter the crash site.
“In all my interactions, I tried to treat Jimmy as a human being, describing him with photos and vivid characters, but I eventually realized that to them, Jimmy was not a person, just a case, but a case. We will cause trouble," Bob recorded his disappointment in a book published in 2020.
However, support from the public has given him hope again and again.
In 2004, he met Clayton Kuhles, an American explorer whose organization works to find crashed World War II planes. Clayton mapped the potential trajectory of the plane's crash by studying the characteristics of the plane Jimmy was flying, its speed, weather patterns and other factors.
Bob raised tens of thousands of dollars for this purpose. In 2011, Clayton, led by local villagers, entered Cangshan twice to search for plane wreckage. Towards the end of the year some fragments were found.
At that time, it was the early days of President Obama's administration, and US-China relations were developing actively and steadily. The two countries frequently hold high-level summits and strategic dialogues, have constant exchanges in the fields of commerce, trade, military and other fields, and people-to-people exchanges are also booming. In this case, the matter of the wreckage can be completed without official intervention.
"We finally know where to find Jimmy," Bob said, giving him his first hope.
Over the next few years, Bob contacted U.S. authorities again, telling them where the plane had crashed and hoping to launch a search for the remains. During this period, he received a letter from the United States stating that China was unable to enter the crash site due to the high altitude and rugged terrain.
The letter also stated that the crash site is located at an altitude of 12,000 feet and requires skilled climbers to climb for 15 days to reach it. It is not suitable for further investigation, so it is "strongly recommended to stop the investigation" and will consider cooperating with the mountaineering team.
In 2018, Bob met Sun Chunlong in Chengdu. He is the initiator of the "Veterans Return Home" charity event and helped veterans who participated in the Chinese army during World War II return home. Since the event was launched in 2008, more than 1,500 remains have been found in Myanmar, Yunnan and Henan in China, and more than 400 families have been reunited.
In October of that year, Bob authorized the agency to search for Jimmy's remains.
Sun Chunlong said that based on experience, the challenges in finding Jimmy's remains mainly lie in funds and technology. But I didn't expect that it would later rise to the political level.
Victims of the trade war
At the end of 2018, the U.S.-China trade war broke out. Competition between the two countries in the high-tech field has become increasingly fierce, and they are also at odds over issues such as Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea. When the COVID-19 epidemic broke out at the end of 2019, the two countries faced off tit-for-tat over the source of the virus, which even went so far as to close each other's consulates and sanction each other's officials. Many observers exclaimed that the two countries have moved from "contact" to "confrontation" and even entered a "new cold war."
Sun Chunlong, a former reporter at Xinhua News Agency, is keenly aware of the changes. He feels that "things may become very sensitive." Many friends within the system also told him, "This matter should be slowed down until the trade war is over."
What could have been accomplished through cooperation between the private sector and local governments has now become something that requires approval from the central government due to the deterioration in relations between the two countries.
At that time, the Cangshan crash site had been designated as a nature reserve, and entry required approval from the local government. In 2022, Sun Chunlong submitted an application, but "suddenly no one dared to move." Approval is reported to the central government.
While waiting, Sun Chunlong continued to receive emails from Bob asking about the progress. "I can feel his eagerness through the computer. It feels like the whole family is placing their hopes on us."
He felt ashamed of this old man who was nearly a hundred years old, and did not want to fail to fulfill his trust during the old man's lifetime. In May 2022, Sun Chunlong led the team into Cangshan Mountain without waiting for official permission.
However, before they reached the crash site, the local government mobilized them to go down the mountain with great fanfare. It is known that someone reported that they entered the no-man's land without permission, and major media subsequently reported on it, putting pressure on the local government. Among them, the official People's Daily published: "13 people lost contact after secretly entering Cangshan Mountain in Dali. All parties are conducting urgent search and rescue."
The report quickly hit the hot search list, and the discussion focused on the US military aircraft. Many people accused Sun Chunlong and his party of accepting money from the United States and doing things for the Americans.
Sun Chunlong said that Bob had offered to donate part of the funds, but he did not accept it. He mainly raised funds through descendants of AVIC and volunteers.
"With bad relations between major powers, the nationalist sentiments of the lower class people in China have been incited," he said. "This feeling has become more and more serious in recent years. This is currently the biggest obstacle for us to do this."
What happened next made the search for the remains even more difficult. In August 2022, the then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. The situation in the Taiwan Strait became acutely tense, and the U.S. and Chinese militaries interrupted exchanges.
It took a year for a turnaround. In November 2023, the heads of state of the United States and China held a summit in San Francisco and agreed to resume high-level military exchanges. In the same month, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense stated that the two militaries held a video conference on the search for the remains of US troops to exchange case investigation status and cooperation matters.
"The resumption of cooperation after the epidemic is related to the gradual stabilization and improvement of relations between the two countries from 2023. In particular, the resumption of exchanges between the two militaries after Xi's visit has also provided a good atmosphere for the two sides to continue to cooperate in finding the remains of US troops." International relations scholar Professor Zhu Zhiqun told the BBC.
"The resumption of cooperation between the two militaries in the search for the remains of US troops is worthy of recognition from both sides, and is also conducive to the relaxation and improvement of relations between the two militaries and the relationship between the two countries."
Sean Everette, public relations director of the U.S. Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency (DPAA), said in response to inquiries from the BBC that in November 2023 and May 2024, interviews were conducted by phone and face-to-face respectively. way, Jimmy's case was discussed with the PLA.
However, the department said it had not received any further notice of action from China.
In August 2024, Bob learned that China would enter Cangshan Mountain to investigate the crash site in October, but it would later be suspended "due to weather effects." The BBC inquired about this matter from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs but received no response.
New turning points and unknowns
When the U.S. government changed, Bob regained hope. In December, he received a letter from Burns, the immediate past ambassador to China, stating that the United States and China "will continue to cooperate on this matter."
"Despite the difficulties of reaching the suspected crash site at an altitude of nearly 12,000 feet, this case will remain a priority for DPAA and the U.S. Representative Office in China."
Ambassador Burns also said that "in recent months, cooperation between the Chinese and American governments has become more effective and progress has been made in several cases," including the completion of two surveys aimed at recovering the remains of World War II soldiers. ——This is the first time the US has completed such a mission in China in the past five years.
Bob was very happy and said he would further contact Burns and establish contact as soon as possible after the arrival of the new ambassador to China, David Perdue.
The 98-year-old's time is running out, but what comes next could be a mixed bag.
Sun Taiyi, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Christopher Newport University in the United States, told the BBC that during the Biden administration, the search for military remains will be an important part of military exchanges, but the new Trump administration "may not have a strong motive." to promote this matter.”
However, he said that the relevant issue is not very sensitive and "neither side has much reason to object. Once bilateral relations warm up, the issue is likely to be put back on the agenda."
Song Wendi, a researcher at the Atlantic Council, a US think tank, told the BBC that Trump is a transactionalist and "may turn the search for the remains of missing US soldiers from an independent humanitarian issue into a bargaining chip, which will make the United Nations Search becomes complicated."
But on the other hand, Song Wendi pointed out that ambassador-designate Perdue has long-term business ties in China. "It is in his interest to do good things on such non-politically sensitive historical issues. It is a way to build bridges with China and express goodwill." . So Perdue has every reason to keep working on it.”
According to Bob's recollection, many years after Jimmy's death, his mother often imagined her son coming home: someone would push open the kitchen door and ask loudly, "Mom, what's for dinner?"
Bob began to write a book, hoping to wrap up the story of "Bringing Jimmy Home." He also handed over the baton to his son Tom (Tom Willett) to help him complete the mission of finding the remains.
"Maybe this chapter will go through ups and downs like many times in the past, or there may be another chapter, but we will never give up."
Comments
Post a Comment