Photo By Lori Stewart | Chairman Mao Zedong and Col. David Barrett in Yan’an, 1944.... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
DIXIE MISSION ARRIVES IN YAN'AN
On 22 July 1944, the first contingent of the U.S. Army Observation Group, nicknamed the “Dixie Mission,” arrived in China. They were the first American personnel to establish relations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at its headquarters in Yan’an, Shaanxi Province in northwest China.
Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and, by 1937, controlled large parts of China, sparking the second Sino-Japanese War. By mid-1944, Japanese forces had pushed Chinese ground forces into several defensive pockets. This included Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and military forces in Chongqing in the south and Chairman Mao Zedong’s CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the rural areas of north and central China.
The U.S. and its allies were already fighting the Japanese throughout the Pacific and were determined not to deploy ground forces in China. However, the U.S. did have several intelligence organizations working there, such as the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the U.S. Forces in China G-2, Army officer Col. Joseph K. Dickey. American intelligence personnel had already established relations with Chiang, but little was known about the communist areas. With the reluctant approval of Chiang, the U.S. sent a U.S. Army Observation Group to establish relations with Mao and the CCP at Yan’an. Because the group would be traveling to what one of the members referred to as “rebel territory,” it was nicknamed the “Dixie Mission.”
On 22 July 1944, the first nine members of the Observation Group arrived in Yan’an, with a second nine-man contingent following on 7 August. Col. David D. Barrett, a 52-year-old intelligence officer with extensive service in China, was in overall command. The rest of the participants, all of whom were fluent in Mandarin Chinese, were a mix of highly qualified personnel from the State Department, Army, Navy, Office of War Information (OWI), and OSS.
The Dixie Mission had intertwined diplomatic and military objectives, and its activities were as complex as the political situation in China. The mission was to determine the level of political and military support the Allies could expect from the CCP, particularly if the U.S. needed to launch an attack against Japan from the Chinese mainland. The mission also intended to collect as much intelligence as possible, not only on the CCP’s military forces and capabilities but also on their knowledge about Japanese forces throughout China.
Colonel Barrett’s intelligence officer was 34-year-old Maj. Ray Cromley. Cromley was fluent in the Japanese language from the several years he spent as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Japan. Taken prisoner when the war in the Pacific began, he was repatriated to the United States in mid-1942 and joined the U.S. Army. Working with Cromley was China-born OSS Captain John G. Colling in command of four other OSS members. Initially, Major Cromley also had the assistance of two Japanese American Nisei translators/interpreters—T4g. Shoso Nomura and T4g. George I. Nakamura. Three more Nisei eventually joined the mission.
While the diplomats with the mission were unable to convince the Nationalist and Communist governments to unite against their common enemy, the military intelligence mission had more success through 1944. Cromley and his intelligence section found the communists to be approachable, accommodating, and willing and capable of assisting with the war against the Japanese. With the help of the PLA and some of the CCP’s 150 Japanese prisoners of war, including the head of the Japanese Communist Party who had taken refuge in Yan’an, they compiled order of battle on Japanese forces in China, details on the PLA’s organization and capabilities, locations of airfields, economic data, and weather conditions. Colonel Barrett also personally observed some of the PLA’s war games. The initial military analysis was the CCP would be a worthy American ally, both against the Japanese, if necessary, and in the postwar era.
The Dixie Mission remained in China until 11 March 1947, but relations soured after World War II ended and the country was thrown into civil war.
(NOTE: The Dixie Mission was rife with controversy and rivalry both during its time in China and afterwards. For a much more detailed treatment of the topic, see Sara Bush Castro’s 2016 dissertation, “Improvising Tradecraft: The Evolving U.S. Intelligence Regime and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1940s” at https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/hh63sw636, among other sources.)
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| Date Taken: | 07.19.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 07.19.2024 16:04 |
| Story ID: | 476652 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 65 |
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