Henry C. Whittlesey: Recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross
- Beverley Eddy
- Jan 29
- 27 min read
Updated: Jan 31
Henry Whittlesey was born in Chongching (Chongqing), China, on August 10, 1906, to the missionary couple Roger B. Whittlesey and his English-born wife Anna (Withey).1 He died sometime after January 21, 1945, at an outpost to the south of Fowping, after having spent about a third of his short life in China.
His father, Roger, was a Presbyterian minister who had signed on to serve as part of the
China Inland Mission (CIM) in 1894 and begun twenty-five years of service in China in 1895. There he met and married his wife Anna, who gave birth to six children: two girls and four boys. Henry was the second youngest of these children.
The CIM had been founded by James Hudson Taylor in 1865 and espoused a number of principles that made it distinct from many other missionary movements. As Hudson Taylor had put it, “We wish to see churches and Christian Chinese presided over by pastors and officers of their own countrymen, worshipping the true God in the land of their fathers, in the costume of their fathers, in their own tongue wherein they were born, and in edifices of a thoroughly Chinese style of architecture.”2 His missionaries were not recruited on the basis of education or ordination, but on their spiritual qualifications. Single women were among those recruited to serve in the Chinese interior. The CIM missionaries were all required to become fluent speakers of Chinese, to adopt Chinese dress (with a pigtail for the men), and to worship in Chinese houses. They were not to seek or accept any financial assistance from the Chinese. And they made serving in unreached inland provinces a priority.
The Whittlesey children, then, spent their formative years in Chongching, an all-Chinese environment in southwest China. At the time, this area was remote; his brother recalled that it took four weeks to travel from there to Shanghai, first by houseboat through the gorges of the Yangtze River, then by steamer.3
Like his siblings, Henry spent his early years immersed in the local Chinese dialect. Then, when he was seven, he was sent to join his older siblings at the China Inland Mission School in Chefoo (Yantai) in the Shandong province in northern China. This English boarding school, established by James Hudson Taylor on grounds overlooking a “sleepy, sun-kissed bay” and housed in “rambling, ivy-covered, neo-Gothic buildings,” provided a Bible-oriented, English public school education up to Oxford Certificate level of first-year university study.4 Here the Whittlesey children joined the children of missionaries from all over China, as well as children of other foreign residents. And it was here that Henry, like his older brother Albert, became an accomplished soccer player.
Henry’s father completed his 25 years of active missionary work in 1920, and the family returned to America, where they settled in Philadelphia. Henry was 14 years old at the time of their return. Thanks to his studies at the CIM School in Chefoo, he had no trouble adapting to the American school system. Like Albert, he attended Lafayette College, graduating in 1928 with a Bachelor of Arts degree; at that time Lafayette did not offer a single subject major, but rather a general humanities major that was made up of languages (Greek, Latin, French) social sciences (government, history, economics), as well as math, chemistry, philosophy, English, Bible, Drama, and Graphics.
Henry’s graduation yearbook described him in the following manner: “Born with a winning personality, inspired with the desire to make friends and graft [labor], gifted with a full set of Pepsodent teeth and the happy expression that is the proper background for them, Henry has made more friends in college than any of his class mates.” It went on to write about his school activities, in order to show “what a wonderfully balanced person” he was: “As a soccer captain he led his team through the best season it has enjoyed for years. As a politician he is without peer. As a bowler he is only equalled and as a humorous writer he is,—but let that remain a question.” In addition, he was freshman class vice president, president of the Maroon Key Club (the junior honor society), and an active member of the debating squad; he served on the Freshman YMCA Cabinet, and was a member of the ROTC. He was also a member of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity, treasurer of Le Cercle Francais, member of the Lafayette Board, and staff member and photographic editor of the Melange class yearbook. At Commencement, Henry served as class “prophet,” making predictions as to the future of the members of his class.5
Henry was interested in journalism and in writing, and in 1932 he joined his fraternity brother John O. J. Shellenberger at the newly founded Easton Herald newspaper, where Shellenberger began work as editor. But in 1936 Henry turned from newspaper writing to the more lucrative field of advertising, by joining the advertising department of the Strawbridge and Clothier department store in Philadelphia, which, at that time, was beginning to add branch stores in the Philadelphia area. He soon worked his way up to advertising manager, a position that he held until the war. And he became advertising manager for the Keasbey & Mattison Company in Amber, Pennsylvania, a firm that produced asbestos-related building products.
It may well have been through his association with George Stockton Strawbridge and Francis Strawbridge Jr., grandsons of the co-founder of Strawbridge and Clothier, that Henry became acquainted with Martha Jane Barnard, daughter of a distinguished Philadelphia physician. Martha—who went by her middle name Jane—had a privileged upbringing, including study at a private girls’ school (the Agnes Irwin School in Rosemont, PA) and Westover School (a finishing school for women in Connecticut). A popular socialite, she had
had a debutante ball, spent summers at a family home in Eagles Mere, and enjoyed extended trips and cruises to Europe, the Mediterranean and Bermuda. At home in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square she proved her organizational skills by arranging numerous social and charitable events. She also served as a volunteer in pre-K and kindergarten classes.
On February 1st, 1940, the social pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Jane was hosting a crowd of friends at Skytop Lodge in the Poconos for a day of skiing, sledding, and tobogganing, followed by late afternoon tea and an evening dance. Henry was one of the five local men invited on this outing; this is the first time his name was linked with Jane’s in the social pages of the Philadelphia newspapers.
At any rate, Jane’s parents announced her engagement to Henry on August 2nd, and on September 30th the two were married at “Black Rocks,” the Barnard family home in Bryn Mawr. After a brief honeymoon, the newlyweds established a home in Gladwyne, not far from this family estate. Jane gave birth to two daughters: Julie, in November 1942, and Ruth in May 1944.
Henry and Jane’s lives were, like those of many Americans, upended by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As a former ROTC student, Henry was immediately called up in December for army service with the rank of second lieutenant.
He remained stateside during his first months of service, which allowed him frequent leaves at home and the chance to establish a firm and happy marriage with Jane. During this time they gave one another affectionate nicknames: he called her “Dubbins,” she called him “Hubs.” From his far-off station in China he would write to her four years later that, despite their separation, the first two years of marriage had given him “an awful lot of happiness,” creating a “foundation of understanding and character and permanence and trust and love”; this gave him the assurance that “from this foundation […] we can build in the future more love and more happiness and perhaps even more kids! And we will.”6
In his leisure time, Henry indulged in his passion for fishing and fly-tying.
Because of his knowledge of Chinese, it was not surprising that the Army would be
interested in training Henry for military intelligence work in the Pacific theater. First, though, he served the Counter Intelligence Corps as District Intelligence Officer in Philadelphia. Army intelligence was a much desired assignment, since it kept soldiers from serving full time in the infantry. Henry discovered this for himself when, in June 1942, the call went out for civilian enlistment in counterintelligence. Henry’s district office had prepared to accept applications from several hundred persons; instead, several thousand men applied and the application forms were gone within the first hour. 7
But army intelligence was still in its infancy. Only in June 1942 did the army open a center at Camp Ritchie dedicated solely to this purpose, and, in the following month, offer its first course to a small class of 36 officers. Henry was part of the much larger third class; it had an enrollment of 231 officers and 110 enlisted men and began its two-month course of study on November 2, 1942. The emphasis at Camp Ritchie was on training men for assignment to the European theater, with a specialization in the Interrogation of Prisoners of War. Henry was part of a minority, training for assignment to the China-Burma-India Theater, with a specialization in Photo Interpretation.
At Camp Ritchie Photo Interpreters acquired the ability to find camouflaged vehicles, detect troop size and movement, and identify hidden weaponry. They learned how to look at an aerial photograph and determine sight lines for troops on the ground. With pairs of photos taken a slight distance from one another, they used stereoscopic viewers to create three-dimensional images. Many specialists in this field even acquired the ability to work without viewers; they learned to refocus their eyes in order to create the desired three-dimensional effect when they were working in the field.
In addition to this specialty, Henry had intense classes in the interrogation of prisoners, the creation of maps, Morse Code, weather patterns, and the identification of all kinds of uniforms and badges.
After satisfactory completion of the Richie course work on December 23 and a promotion to First Lieutenant, Henry was not, as might be expected, immediately sent to the Pacific theater. Instead, he was sent to Yale University immediately after the Christmas holidays to join ten other army officers for a six-month intensive course in Chinese. It was necessary for Henry to move beyond the Chinese vocabulary he had acquired as a child, and, as an adult speaker of Chinese, make an intensive study of Chinese culture, acquire fluency in the written language, and learn military terminology. He completed his coursework on July 3rd, 1943, spent some leave time at home, then departed for duty abroad.
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He was sent on the circuitous, but safest route that had been adopted for officers stationed in the China-Burma-India Theater: flight from Miami, Florida to Natal, Brazil, flight from there to Accra, Ghana, and flights across the African continent to Karachi, which was then still part of India.
In India Henry went in for another period of training, a period that involved travel not only
around India, but also stints at sea and visits to China. And it was in India that Henry began composing Sidelights of the War—human interest journalistic pieces giving his observations of life in India and covering everything from the passage of food from the rations car to non-connected army cars on a long cross-country train ride, to a Thanksgiving Day dance, where the GIs taught their Indian dance partners how to do the jitterbug. In one piece he described the GIs who drove trucks on Indian roads crowded with pedestrians, rickshaws, and heavy-laden ox-carts: “It is,” he wrote, “through this slow moving, tangled, seemingly-inextricable maze that the GI driver slews his way—hand on horn, twisting, turning, gunning, braking—but never stopping except for a cow.[…] And always the seeming disaster is just ahead, but never an actual disaster behind.”8 Henry’s articles were characterized by their humor, often of the self-deprecating kind. In one he told of his frustration when trying to get the camp barber to cut his hair to military specifications; in another he described his futile attempt to cut across a Chinese farmer’s field on his return to camp, only to learn that the Chinese farms had elaborate irrigation systems: “You cannot stride through Chinese fields in a straight line as you would at home. Instead you must zig-zag using the embankments as footpaths. The fields are muddy and miry and progress directly through them impossible.”9
In one of these pieces Henry addressed the Chinese-American working relationship that he believed necessary for success in their war-time efforts, a relationship based on mutual respect. On October 10, 1943, Henry was aboard a cargo ship “somewhere in the Pacific,” where he and his fellow American army and naval officers participated in a shipboard celebration with their Chinese counterparts in honor of the “Double 10,” the tenth day of the tenth month, celebrating the 1911 Wuchang uprising that led to the founding of the Chinese Republic. Henry described all the efforts that went into creating a huge canvas back-drop for the celebration to be held on deck: this included finding 8x10 photos of both Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek in the various magazines aboard ship, painting a small American flag on the canvas to match the size of the Chinese one, and, using a postage stamp of the Republic’s founder Dr. Sun Yat Sen as source for painting a large portrait as centerpiece of the canvas. A squall hit during the ceremonies on deck, thoroughly soaking the participants and making it hard for the men to keep their footing on the pitching deck. But to Henry the event held great significance: “It was a simple ceremony. And a small thing when you think of the bigness of China and the bigness of America—this handful of men gathered on a pitching cargo-deck lost in the tremendous sweep of the Pacific Ocean. Yet its smallness, in a way, is like the smallness of a seed which belies the growth and power contained within it.” “The Chinese are deeply sensitive people,” he continued, “and the honor and respect we paid their country on this their day is something that will forever live in the hearts of this group of men.” After all, as it said in the will of the founder Dr. Sen, “‘China will work together with all those nations who treat her with equality and respect’—and here was real, living proof of the equality and respect their founder sought.”10
Henry spent Christmas in China, where he was assigned to the Air Ground Aid Section headquartered in Kunming. He participated in a multi-day celebration. First, on the 23rd, he was invited to a Chinese Rotary Club, a club that differed “not one whit from the one in Easton, Pa. or Carlisle or any other American town.”11 After a buffet dinner, songs, and speeches, a Chinese choir gave a concert of American Christmas songs. On the morning of the 24th, Henry was part of a small party that drove some 20 miles into the countryside to find pine boughs for each of the men in his detail. Later that day a party was held for all the GIs. “With all due respect to the General, the G.I.s were looking forward to his Christmas party for one reason and one reason only—FREE Beer!” Each of the GIs had been promised three cans of beer, the first cans of American beer that the men had tasted for more than a year. Once they had their beer, the men were treated to a number of Chinese side shows: Chinese sword fighting, juggling, boxing, and acrobatics. This was followed by the lighting of a Christmas tree and the singing of carols. “There were just a bunch of Americans looking nostalgically at that lighted tree, singing the well known carols we had learned as kids. […] There were a lot of us who were glad of the darkness then. This bunch is a fighting bunch—make no mistake! But the things each of us is out here fighting for were stuck so hard in the middle of each throat that it took a lot of swallows to get those lumps down.”12
That same day, Henry went to visit American friends at their Christian Inland Mission church. Here he was impressed by the great good spirits of the Chinese—both children and adults. As games were played, “they went from one game to another never losing their enthusiasm, the church always ringing with their laughter and their shouts.” And when Santa Claus appeared, “they greeted him with a prolonged outburst. These Chinese are,” he declared, “the most doggone enthusiastic people you ever knew.
Because Santa arrived late to the party, Henry was compelled to provide entertainment by singing “an American song.” As he sang “Auld Lang Syne,” he tried “to cover the great lack of quality with tremendous volume.” But, true to form, the Chinese “clapped and yelled and stamped their feet.”13
Jane, Julie, and Ruth were never far from Henry’s mind. He sent them prints of Chinese boats and Chinese children. And he composed five children’s stories that were set in China. These lively tales provoked a sense of fun. In one, for example, he described a street artist who drew wonderful pictures “of strutting peacocks, goggle-eyed fish and fire-snorting dragons.” But he had to be careful to tuck his beard out of the way, for: “If he let it rest on the table he might, by mistake, draw the peacocks and fish and dragons right on his white beard! That would be oh! so funny, because whoever saw a long white beard with strutting peacocks, goggle-eyed fish and fire-snorting dragons drawn on it?”14
In spite of these delightful respites, the war was never far from anyone’s mind. There was some discomfort among the American command in China with the Nationalist leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and distrust over the intelligence he’d been providing about the strength and commitment of China’s Communist forces to the war effort. America could no longer rely on the self-serving reports submitted by each of the warring Chinese parties, and it was deemed necessary to reach out to both factions and gather intelligence on site. President Roosevelt was particularly interested in assessing the wartime strength of the Communist Chinese, who appeared to have strong support among the inhabitants in northern China. The decision was finally made to send a small group of Americans to Yenan, Shensi [Yan’an, Shaanxi], the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party, to conduct their own analysis of the situation.
There were several aspects of this mission, the most important being to shore up the unraveling war-time truce between Mao Tse-tung’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s National People’s Party. It was the mission’s aim that the two parties continue to put aside their differences and place their focus on defeating the occupying Japanese forces. The mission was formally known as the US Army Observer Group, but because the Americans had already begun referring to the land held by the rebel communist forces as “Dixie,” this name was now applied to the mission.
The mission’s diplomatic work would be carried out by John Service, a highly respected foreign service officer on General Joseph Sitwell’s staff. The other members of the mission would serve as intelligence officers, studying the training and combat efficiency of the communist forces, gathering information on enemy air fields and air defense in North China, and evaluating bomb damage and enemy operations. While studying the present contribution of the Communists to the war effort, they would put together an Order of Battle of Communist forces (including a complete list of Communist officials), gather naval intelligence, and study weather conditions, economics, and the potential contribution of the Communists to the overall war effort.15
This was the first official US government encounter with the Chinese Communists, and Henry was one of the men assigned to it. Lt. Col. A. R. Wichtrich, the head of the Air Ground Aid Section in Kunming, personally selected Henry and Master Sergeant Bob Clarke for this mission because they were “two excellent individuals who not only spoke several dialects of the Chinese language, but […] were familiar with the customs of the Chinese in north China.” In addition, Wichtrich was quite sure they “would not betray our allegiance to the Kuomintang (National People’s Party) and fall under the spell of communism.”16 It was Henry’s job to convince Mao Tse-tung that America’s sole interest was in rescuing downed airmen and in driving the Japanese out of China. He would then work with the Communists in setting up safe routes for rescuing American flyers.
Colonel David D. Barrett headed the mission, whose members arrived in two contingents of nine men each. Henry was in the first, which landed in Yenan on July 22, 1944. There an apparently smooth landing lurched to near disaster when the plane struck an old grave, the left propeller broke off its shaft and, still whirling, knifed into the pilot compartment, cutting a huge hole in the aluminum and coming perilously close to striking the pilot.
The Vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Chou En-lai came running up with other important Communist officials to greet the shaken men, and they were transported across the river to their quarters in some of the famous “Yenan caves” that housed the Communist leadership, as well as a university (with student housing), and a hospital. The “caves” assigned to the American officers were actually short 15-foot tunnels cut into the steep hillside and lined with blocks of hewn stone. The officers were housed in pairs in these tunnel rooms; these rooms were furnished with “a rough table, one or two plain wooden chairs, a trestle bed (planks set on saw horses) for each occupant, a stand for an enameled wash basin, and a rack for towels. […] At night, light was supplied by tallow candles.” There was no running water anywhere on the premises, but “the latrine, undoubtedly built with special care for the accommodation of fastidious foreigners, was located at an inconvenient distance from the living quarters.”17
The Communists were attentive and warmly affable hosts, who, in addition to providing free
housing and meals, served the mission officers as guides and informants, and provided regular entertainments, such as plays (lots of plays!), concerts, and dances. They also gave all American officers Zhongshan suits: these tunic suits were the quasi national dress in China and allowed the Americans to blend in better in an area where they were under danger of coming into contact with the Japanese. As the Mission members posed in these suits for a group picture their commander. Col. David Barrett remarked that “My own opinion was that we looked like a Welsh coalminers choir, but not a very good one.” 18
Henry found that the Communists were more than willing to assist him in his mission to help rescue downed American airmen. In fact, the local populations had already given—and continued to give—whole-hearted aid to those downed in Japanese-controlled territory. On September 9, in a report to Kunming headquarters, Henry described in great detail the services that local peasants and militia men had offered Lt. Joseph Paul Baglio, an American pilot who had bailed out over enemy-held territory on June 9. Baglio was the first US airman to pass through Yenan after being shot down behind enemy lines and rescued by Chinese Communist guerrillas. He had managed to reach Yenan on September 2, after having followed a torturous round-about route, an 85-day ordeal that he could never have survived without the considerable assistance given him by the rural populace and by Communist members of the 8th Route Army, which had mobile guerrilla bases scattered throughout the rural and remote areas of northern China. Whittlesey calculated that during those 85 days Lt. Baglio had been supplied with three suits of clothes, six pairs of socks, five pairs of cotton shoes, four shirts, four pairs of shorts, one horse which was killed, cigarettes, and a bedding roll complete with sheets and blankets. Nor, he wrote, “is there the slightest intimation on the part of the government here that we owe them anything. They feel it is part of their contribution to the war.” He found this, “ a pleasant contrast to some of the ridiculous and high demands made by certain Chinese generals [of the South] for expenses in connection with the saving of our fliers.”19 He suggested that, in lieu of payment, the Americans donate sulfa drugs and quinine and/or radio equipment to the Communist fighters; both would help any future fliers who might be forced to bail over enemy territory.
Colonel Barrett endorsed Henry’s report on Baglio, noting its value in reflecting the views of “an absolutely unprejudiced observer.” He said that Baglio’s observations of the 8th Route Army’s program of organizing the populace “probably constitutes as reliable information on this subject as can be obtained.” And he especially endorsed Henry’s observations that “everything was done for Baglio with absolutely no idea of claiming a reward, or even compensation for the expenses, which were considerable, of looking after him.”20
The Army approved Henry’s recommendations for setting up safe escape routes and creating formal radio communications between the Communists and the AGAS. They did not send the medications Henry had suggested.
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In order to complete its intelligence mission to north China, arrangements were made for some of the men to leave Yenan and travel through enemy-threatened territory in rural north China to Fowping, in the Chin Ch’a Chi (Jin-cha-ji) border region, from where they would go out on observation missions behind Japanese lines. The men were instructed to evaluate the “organization, arms and equipment of the [Chinese] Communist forces” and to bring back “anything you can find out about [Japanese] enemy strength, intentions, morale, equipment.”21 Major Wilbur J. Peterkin was put in charge of the six men selected for this difficult mission; Henry was one of them.
The distance from Yenan to Fowping was approximately 600 miles. The men traveled on horseback during the first part of the journey, before replacing the horses with mules. Their journey took them from one so-called Japanese resistance base to the next. The going was slow, Colonel Barrett noted that “the party did not travel much faster on mules than they would have on foot.”22 And the weather was frigid. “People wore goatskin trousers and coats with the hair inside,” Major Peterkin reported. “I saw several people riding their burros backwards in order not to face the wind.”23 In mid-October the men were issued padded overcoats and padded mittens. Often, to spare their mounts, they went by foot up the steepest hills and mountains. They crossed and re-crossed flooded rivers on the way; at one point, when they were ferrying across the Yellow River, they “were swept four miles downstream getting across a half-mile wide river.”24 At one point they lost two of their pack mules in a river’s quicksand. They passed through a number of destroyed and abandoned villages. They also observed villagers burying their food supplies and furniture in anticipation of a coming Japanese raid, and saw the people’s militia planting mines in and beside the trails into town. When in the Wu Tai mountain area they passed within a mile of Japanese manned blockhouses and could see the Japanese signaling with semaphores.
At each of the Japanese resistance bases the men toured the army camps, medical centers, schools and factories, and gathered reports on Chinese military training, equipment, and tactics. The Communists cooperated fully, demonstrating their use of mines, their manufacture of weapons, and their deployment of grenades. They were clearly proud of their guerrilla efforts in defeating the Japanese, but pointed out that, without the full support of the local population, they would lose most of their effectiveness. For entertainment, they often put on communist-themed patriotic and military plays for the Americans who, in turn, held speeches relating the Americans’ military goals, their contributions to the war effort, and their vision of a postwar world.
While Henry was in Chin Ch’a Chi a B-29 aircrew arrived with their guerrilla rescuers. Like the Dixie men, they had spent several weeks traveling from where they had been shot down over the Gulf of Chihli to base headquarters in Chin Ch’a Chi. Henry’s integrated rescue program was just starting to become fully functional. By using radio communication with Yenan, the guerrillas would be informed of safe routes, and all rescued airmen would be brought to Yenan for full debriefing before flying them out of the war zone.
And, on November 16 Henry learned that he had been promoted to Captain.
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It is unclear what the immediate motivation was, but on December 11 Henry went out on a reconnaissance mission related to the airmen rescue, taking only his guide and translator Li Shiao-t’ang with him. The weather had worsened; Henry now had to contend with deep snow and ice and a recurring pain in an old shoulder wound. His entire route took him straight through valleys dominated by Japanese blockhouses. Sometimes the Chinese provided escort troops; sometimes he and Li Shiao-t’ang had only a local guide.
Out in rural north China Henry’s 1944 Christmas was far different from the one that had preceded it. On the 24th, after visiting a hospital, he spent the evening in a dirt-floored hut where a woman was boiling a thick dow fu (tofu) soup. It “looked awful good,” he wrote. “Little kid, perhaps 3, sat on [the] k’ang (sleeping platform) holding his little brother, perhaps 1, and gently rocked him to sleep. We finally bought 3 bowls of dow fu and drank [it] down, it was delicious.” But Henry was also homesick; almost certainly the two children reminded him of Julie and Ruth, who were just about the same age. He had begun the day “writing under difficulties to Jane.” But, after being asked sympathetically by his Chinese guide about Christmas, Henry went off “in a torrent of explanation of Santa Claus, of carolers, of presents, of stockings, of Christmas cards, of what we did on [Christmas] Eve and on Xmas and I felt better. The room was black—just a flickering oil light lighting our faces.” His two companions “were very understanding.” And “then I finished [the] letter and went to bed.”
On Christmas morning, his guide greeted him with “Merry Christmas.” It was, Henry wrote, “very heartwarming. As I went out door of one tent the sun painted the cliff of the precipice rising 1000 ft. above us a fiery red. Sun still touched nothing else and it was a magnificent sight.” The highlight of the day was a bath “—1st time in 2 weeks and changed my undies.”
He plucked a small branch from a stunted pine as his “Christmas tree,” put it in his pocket, and lay it before him on the table at meal time.
Henry was driven to complete his travels and return to Yenan. This drive to get back to home headquarters made him impatient with the villagers who held him up for hours at a time with concerts, long meals, and entertainments. He also had gone far too long without the company of Americans, writing on January 19th: “This is not [the] way I like to travel at all and would damn near welcome a guerrilla area, as these Chinese here are laying it on far too thick. Nothing to do but stick it out—but I sure do miss the chance to have someone to talk to.” But that very night he made a decision: “I decided in bed that I was spoiling a good time by being in a hurry and decided to take a vacation when I reached Yenan so that delays along route wouldn’t matter. Decided to really enjoy the welcomes. Also decided to spend more time talking to people, not only to improve language but to get closer to them and understand them. This system worked fine—I lazed in bed, looked over the singing kids & M.P. in servicing and thoroughly enjoyed all welcomes [JAN 20] because I didn’t give a damn about hurrying.”
The next day, January 20, Henry put his plan into practice: “Stopped for lunch at little village and while we waited for food[,] kids crowded into court so I went out and talked to them. One lovely little girl of 9 was friendly and her pleated, quilted hat had no tassel, so I took a flower given at the morning reception and pinned it on her hat. Later I saw she was crying and believed that the kids had laughed at her. So I got candy and gave it to her. Then kids sang me 2 songs, I gave them Dinah back.” (“Dinah” was a popular song from the late 1920s with the verse “But if Dinah,/Ever wandered to China,/I would hop an ocean liner,/just to be with Dinah Lee.”) Henry went on: “Kid peeked in window and I crawled along K’ang (sleeping platform) and played hide and go seek and they loved it. Everywhere I have fun with the kids.” He and Li Shiao-t’ang left
the village: “Rode along Chiang River (Wei River in Shaanxi)—very easy ride. Beautiful day again. Lots of trees. People along route very polite—often 2 or 3 […] would stand beside road, doff caps and bow as I passed. Sometimes 3 or 4 hawks’ nest in tree. Mistletoe in profusion on poplar tree as well as on oak. […]”
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This idyll was not to last. This was, in fact, Henry’s last diary entry. Not long after this,
Henry learned that Chinese guerrillas had wrecked a Japanese train and taken mail from the train to an abandoned village nearby. Henry set out at once to gather whatever mail he considered important to the war effort. He and Li Shiao-t’ang arrived at dusk; they could not know that the Japanese were approaching the village, and that the guerrillas had left. Still, before the Japanese arrived and took him and Li Shiao-t’ang captive, Henry managed to retrieve some extremely valuable intelligence, including details of all the Japanese employments in North China.
As soon as they learned of Henry’s capture, the guerrillas attacked the Japanese with all the resources available to them. They drove the Japanese back, but not before they had killed Henry and his translator. The guerrillas lost 20 men in their attempt to rescue Henry, only to
find that he had been shot in the back of the head and bayonetted in the back. They recovered his body, and sent it, along with his crucial intelligence papers and diaries, to the Americans.25 The mission passed the information, which included maps and microfilm, on to Henry’s commander Colonel A. R. Wichtrich in Kunming, and the colonel cabled the material on to the Pentagon. He also put in a recommendation that Henry be honored posthumously with a high-level service medal. Accordingly, Henry was awarded the nation’s second-highest military award, the Distinguished Service Cross, with a citation declaring that his “extraordinary heroism, personal bravery and zealous devotion to duty at the cost of his life” exemplified “the highest traditions of the military forces of the United States.”26 Henry was buried in Chengtu [Ch’eng-tu], and the Communists named their new mess hall in Yenan “Whittlesey Hall” in his honor.
Back at home, Jane was left alone to raise two small daughters, one of whom had been born after Henry had already departed for duty in Asia. They lived on Jane’s parents’ property in Bryn Mawr and she started a nursery school on the property before taking a job as kindergarten teacher at Montgomery Country Day School. When asked why she started a nursery school when her parents could have easily supported her, she replied that she would have been too consumed with sadness if she hadn't kept busy doing something she loved. Both daughters recall that their “mother’s love for Henry was always rock solid throughout her life. She kept his memories alive and recount[ed] Henry’s war adventures to her grandchildren as they grew up.” And she got Henry’s body returned to the United States and buried in Wayne Pennsylvania. She did not date or remarry for 40 years after his death. She was then retired, and living in Chester, Vermont when she began dating Arthur Bratton, also of Chester, who had made a career in interior design. They married in 1984 and remained married until her death in 1999.27 Following her wishes, her ashes were divided and spread next to a rock in her garden, at her parent’s gravesite, and on Henry’s grave.
Henry was the only member of the Dixie Mission and the only member of the Air Ground Aid Section in China to be killed in action.
Today the Dixie Mission can be viewed as a unique, failed opening for future American/Chinese diplomacy. It was doomed even before it ended. Back in the United States the Cold War had revved up, and fear of Communism had reached extraordinary heights. There was much suspicion aroused in the States by photos showing members of the Dixie Mission in their Zhongshan suits—suits that would become better known in the West as Mao suits. Some of the Mission’s leading figures were even punished for their service in Yenan. The Mission’s political analyst John Service had reported—quite accurately, as it turned out—that the widespread backing that the Communists had among huge swaths of the Chinese populace would most likely lead to the Nationalists’ defeat; because of this he urged Americans not to cut off contact with Mao’s forces. Washington politicians, who favored Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist party, took umbrage, and Service was fired from his position at the State Department. And the Dixie Mission commander, Colonel David Barrett, was denied his earned promotion to Brigadier General.
For nearly 22 years there were no diplomatic or communications ties between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. It was not until February 1972 that President Richard Nixon visited China in what was then touted as “the week that changed the world.” It would take another seven years before official diplomatic relations were normalized under President Jimmy Carter, thereby opening up substantive exchanges among scientists, academics, and businessmen. But one year before that, a planeload of 40 Americans landed in Yenan, China, to view the caves. They included nine of the original Dixie Mission members, five who had become involved in the mission somewhat later, eight Dixie wives, three sons, and several others who had been actively involved in China during World War II. John Service was there, Major (now Colonel) Peterkin was there. And so was Jane Whittlesey, come to see the country that Henry had loved so much.
Jane wrote to her daughters: “This is the greatest experience imaginable. The Chinese are giving us a royal welcome in each place including speeches, toasts and feasts. The Dixie Mission made history with the Communists in Yenan. Henry is being honored there. Places we'll be going to are Canton, Kweilin, Chung King, Chengdu, Peking, [Sian] and Kunming.”28
The group was given a banquet and a tea at the Great Hall of the People, and were reunited with some of the Chinese Communists who had worked with the original men of the Dixie Mission. One of the members of the mission party reported that, when Jane met Madame Chu Teh (Kang Ke-ching)—whose husband had been Commander-in-Chief of the Communist forces—she said to her: “I think my husband used to dance with you.” Madame Chu Teh responded warmly, but unsmilingly, saying pointedly, “we were all friends then.” This sad acknowledgment of the Mission’s diplomatic failure was reinforced when Chou En-lai’s widow, Teng Ying-chao, gave the group a red rose, telling them that, in 1973, an airman’s widow had presented a rose to her husband in gratitude for his rescue during the war by Chinese Communist guerrillas. “I replanted the rose, she said, “I cared for it, and it flourished—this rose of Chinese-American friendship.” With this gift she implied: “May you, too, help it grow.”29
Henry would have approved. After all, he had written, when he and his fellow officers had helped the Chinese celebrate the founding of the Chinese Republic on board a storm-tossed cargo ship in the Pacific, that: “It is in small things like these that goodwill between nations finds its seed.”30
Beverley Driver Eddy January 2025
Bibliography
I am grateful to Henry Whittlesey’s two daughters, Julie W. Feeley and Ruth W. Schroeder for excerpts from Henry’s writing and diary, for information regarding their mother, and for photographs 4-7, 10, and 11.
Alfred Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China's Open Century: Survivor's Pact. London: Hodder and Stoughton (1984), 356. Cited from the Wikipedia article on the OMF International, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMF_International
“Albert W. Whittlesey; financier, civic activist,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 May, 1982, 12D.
Bruce, J. W. G. (1985). “Birds in the Fowler’s Nest,” Weihsien Paintings. p. 1. Retrieved 6 October 2021. Cited from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chefoo_School.
I am grateful to Elaine Stomber, Lafayette College Archivist, for information about Henry Whittlesey’s college years and for the 3rd photo in this essay.
Letter dated .September 17, 1944. Courtesy of Julie W. Feeley.
“Thousands Heed Army’s Call for Counter-Spy Jobs,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 June 1942, 4
Henry C. Whittlesey, “G.I. Drivers Abroad,” Sidelights of the War, ed. Ruth Schroeder, Ms., 1, 2.
Henry C. Whittlesey, “The Irrigating Chinese,” Ms., 1.
Henry C. Whittlesey, “China’s Independence Day Celebration,” Ms., 3.
Henry C. Whittlesey, “War Theatre Christmas: Rotary is International,” Ms.
Henry C. Whittlesey, “War Theatre Christmas: The General Gives a Party,” Ms., 1, 2.
Henry C. Whittlesey, “War Theatre Christmas: Chinese Christmas Eve Party,” Ms., 2.
Henry C. Whittlesey, “Lu Kung Ju’s Beard,” Ms., 1-2.
David D. Barrett, Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944, Berkeley, CA: Center for Chinese Studies, 1970, 28. I base my general observations of the mission on this report.
A. R. Wichtrich, MIS-X: Top Secret, England, USA, Scotland: Pentland Press 57. This book provides details of Whittlesey’s achievements in China.
Barrett, Dixie Mission, 29.
Barrett, Dixie Mission, text to photo inserted between pp. 32 and 33.
Cited in Colonel W. J. Peterkin, Inside China 1943-1945. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1992, 139. Picture 9 in this essay is also taken from this book.
Cited in Colonel W. J. Peterkin, Inside China 1943-1945, 141.
Colonel W. J. Peterkin, Inside China 1943-1945, 143.
Barrett, Dixie Mission, 43.
Peterkin, Inside China 1943-1945, 33.
Peterkin, Inside China 1943-1945, 30.
According to Lt. Colonel Wichtrich, head of Henry’s Air Ground Aid Section, Henry was able to get his valuable intelligence from a captured Japanese general. However, those at the scene never mentioned a captured Japanese general, and it seems unlikely that a Japanese general brought up under a strict code of national honor would so willingly have “spilled the beans” to an American captain. I find the account related by Colonel W. J. Peterkin, who was much closer to all parties involved in the Dixie Mission, to be the more reliable one, especially since he received his report directly from General Chu Teh, Commander of the 18th Group Army. See Peterkin, Inside China 1943-1945, 65.
This citation declares that Henry was accompanied by an unnamed photographer-guide. Colonel Peterkin clearly identifies the man accompanying him as Li Shiao-t’ang, Henry’s translator.
Correspondence with Julie Feeley, 28 Dec. 2024.
Correspondence with Julie Feeley, 9 Jan. 2025.
Donald K. Emmerson, “‘Dixie Mission II,’ or China Revisited,” The New York Times, 3 June 1978, 19.
Henry C. Whittlesey, “China’s Independence Day Celebration,” Ms. 3.
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