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The Journal of Military History 68.1 (2004) 283-284



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Journey to Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China. By Dan Pinck. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003. ISBN 1-59114-677-1. Photographs. Illustrations. Table. Pp. xii, 219. $26.95.

"China is never far from my thoughts," writes Dan Pinck in his memoir, Journey to Peking (p. 218). And no wonder. As a young man of nineteen, he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime by joining the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His assignment was to report on Japanese troop and shipping movements from behind the enemy lines in northern Guangdong (Kwangtung). He did so with the aid of a translator (Shum Hay), a radio operator, and twenty Chinese agents. He also worked with a guerrilla general as well as a Communist officer ("General Wu").

Although the memoir is, for the most part, a lighthearted and even surreal account—a good OSS officer needed suitcases full of Chinese money and condoms ("pro-kits")—beneath the surface there was fear. If he had been taken by the Japanese—there was a bounty on his head and hence he had an OSS "suicide pencil"—his fate would have had to have been added to the list of atrocities committed by the Japanese during the war. One of the few times his memoir stumbles in its determination to be humorous is when he reports on a young Chinese interpreter for the Americans who was buried alive by frontline Japanese troops. As the guerrilla general noted, if a prisoner could make it to the enemy's rear areas, he might survive.

In addition to a young man's adventures in wartime (an old story) and his survival of the war, the book offers bits and pieces about the OSS's work in China (the manic characters resembling those one might find in fiction), relations between Chinese and Americans in China during the war, and—accounting for his title—a wonderful description of Peking immediately following the war. In penning the latter, he echoes his fellow sojourner in postwar Peking, U.S. Marine E. B. Sledge, who also loved the old imperial city and the Chinese, while disdaining those of his countrymen who were oblivious to the beauty and history around them in their search for booze and whores (E. B. Sledge, China Marine [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002]). And yet, Pinck was not above humiliating Chinese prostitutes in an impoverished, starving, and disease-stricken Peking and driving in such a way that Chinese "flew out of my way like chickens" (p. 210).

In a reunion with Shum forty years later, Pinck's irreverent and satirical retelling of his war experiences encountered Chinese reality, when Shum asked Pinck's wife to tell her husband not to talk about the war in "such a relatively jocular manner." Death, famine, disease, and displacement were [End Page 283] the reality for Chinese in the war, and hence it was painful for them to talk about it at all, let alone in Pinck's "humorous" way.

In sum, Pinck's account is strong on experience and memory but weak on history (none of the blurbs on the jacket are from China historians). His attempts to give his experiences context are potted history from which the knowledgeable reader will learn little. But, ah, his prose! It is wonderfully evocative of northern Guangdong during the war and Peking afterwards. As a result, his story is a page-turner. Or, as Shum might have said of it, "Dull? Not know that word!"



Roger B. Jeans
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, Virginia

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