[Excerpts] ...

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One result was that the experienced British leaders of the camp, who in other circumstances would have had little use for such youths — and American youths, in particular — treated these men like emperors.

These usually impressive figures could be seen rushing about, doing silly little errands, compiling useless statistics, ever ready to accede to the slightest need or wish of the liberators.

Middle-aged bankers, who were in frequent contact with the heavenly court, could be heard retailing the wonders of their wisdom to the little groups of odd fellow internees who were not fortunate enough to deal with the newcomers directly.

It was, however, the women of the camp who most instinctively recognized their divine status.

Of all ages, whether from high society or low, married or single, proper or not so proper, all wanted nothing better from life than to adore. They followed the pleasantly surprised soldiers everywhere, staring at them in rapture, edging up to get a word from them, fighting for the chance to wait on them, and pushing their equally adoring children aside so as to be able slyly to touch or stroke them.

As always, it was wonderful to have gods in your midst—unless, like the writer and a few others, you lost a girl friend in the process!

With the paratroopers’ arrival, everything changed.

A Chinese delegation from Weihsien City showed up the next day to offer all the vegetables and grain we could use and substantially more meat than we had ever received. And this, after the Japanese had told us over and over that such items were unobtainable. As carts of food began to roll into camp, all rationing ceased.

From then on we were plagued by stomach upsets only because of the rich food. During that first week, we could not eat a full meal without vomiting — but valiantly we kept on trying.

The walls in effect came down as we found ourselves free to walk outside the camp and, within limits, to explore the villages and towns round about. Now, when the day’s work was done, one could go on a picnic by the river some two miles from camp, or take the three-mile hike to Weihsien City for a Chinese dinner.

It was amazing to me, however, to find how quickly one slips back into the old indifference. I can remember on my second trip to Weihsien City telling myself to wake up and enjoy myself.

This was stupendous, just what I had longed for! And yet, already I was taking it for granted and not feeling it at all.

So it was with most of these newly found good things.

We should have gloried in them for months, considering how we had longed for them for years. But somehow the second or third time around, they became as ordinary as if we’d had them all along.

When we had been hungry, our one thought had been for three square meals a day. Lacking sweets, we had dreamed of chocolate and candy.

Besieged with rumors, we had longed for news of the end of the war and of our release. Now we had all of these delights in abundance; yet we continually had to remind ourselves of this fact in order to appreciate them. We were not really any happier.

Our wants and desires had only become a little harder to satisfy. Instead of freedom we now wanted “home”; instead of enough to eat, we now dreamed of cocktails and seafood. Now that we had the necessities of life, we tended to take them for granted and look for the luxuries—such are the insatiable desires of the human animal.

Ironically, it is quite true that man does not live by bread alone; as soon as his craw is filled, his restless appetite will yearn for cake.

[excerpt]

About a week after our rescue, word flashed around camp that eleven more planes had been sighted on the horizon. This time they were coming from the opposite direction, the east. As they flew closer, it became obvious that these planes were no ordinary B-24’s but the famed B-29’s whose origin must then have been Guam or Saipan in the Pacific.

Magnificent and silvery as they circled far above us, they seemed almost to fill the sky.

To our amazement, these monsters also opened their bellies, and great cases of goods, literally tons of it, hurtled down all over the countryside around us. At once the men, greatly excited, ran out into the fields to bring these cases back into camp.

This job had to be done quickly if it was to be done at all.

When anything unusual happens in China, no matter how isolated or deserted the landscape might appear to be, in a few minutes’ time hundreds of Chinese will appear from goodness knows where. It is hard to conceive of a more unusual event for the farmers of Shantung than that fleet of B-29’s dropping cases of supplies in their fields.

As poor as they were, such a scattering of good things was not an opportunity to be missed.

Almost before we in camp had recovered from the shock of this bombardment, we found the fields already swarming with Chinese, understandably pocketing and lugging away as much as they could.

Naturally, we rushed out to salvage as much as we could.

[excerpt]

Soon after the first drop, the eleven planes circled around in a wide sweep.

Then to our mingled joy and horror, the big devils headed back toward us with their bellies open again.

The crucial difference was that the fields were now crowded with both Chinese and internees. Still the planes came on and emptied their lethal loads in approximately the same spots.

Amid shrieks from the farmers and, I must admit, a great deal of trembling and frantic running on the part of the rest of us, the great drums crashed to earth all around us. None of them came near me, but some missed four of my fellows by no more than fifteen feet.

I shall never forget the sinking feeling when I saw four double drums thunder to earth just behind a large crowd of Chinese.

Why no one was hit, I never knew.

[excerpt]

The B-29s were not the only Western artifact which the farmers had never seen before. Many of the goods in the cases were equally strange to them. One was eating happily the contents of a large tube when, spying an internee poring over the same broken drum, and wanting to show off his English, he pointed proudly to the word “cream” on the label. Unhappily, his vocabulary did not include the word “shaving” just above it.

Still another “rescued” a box of medicines. Before a nearby internee could stop him, he had downed in one gulp an entire bottle of vitamin pills.

When Knowles told this story in our dorm that night, Sas Sloan said from his double bed in the corner, “I wonder if that poor chap has stopped running yet!”

[excerpt]

There appeared to be little communication between the air force at Saipan and the army from West China who bossed us. For that reason, signals were always getting crossed.

Once the none too bright captain in charge of our morale, Captain Spofford—who will be described later—had, in preparation for a children’s party, spread a yellow parachute over the backstop of the soft ball diamond.

It was on this open space that all the women and children of the camp used to gather to watch breathlessly “the drops on Daddy,” as one child put it. Evidently, the pilot of a B-29 took this yellow marker to be the drop signal, and let go with a large load right on target. To the horror of those of us looking on helplessly from the fields, we saw twenty or so cases crash among the terrified mothers and children and ten more go singing through the roofs of several rooms.

Again, by some astounding miracle, no one was injured. Each time this sort of thing happened, one could not help saying, “This luck just can’t hold!” [excerpt]

When the next flock appeared, those of us in the countryside almost got ours.

We had now learned to wait on the edge of the fields while the vultures swooped twice. After two drops, they always turned east and fled home to Saipan. As usual, after the second run, we moved out to forage for the dropped supplies.

Suddenly we all looked up.

There, coming right at us was one lone plane that had turned back and was just about to open up for a final drop. It was too late to try to run anywhere so, for whatever reason, we all stretched out flat in the grain and cowered there waiting for the end to come.

Seven free boxes and many more gallon-sized tins came down. They fell with great earth-shaking thuds all around us—one of them about twenty feet from me. But none of us was hit.

When at last, shaking in every limb, I lifted my head, I saw with relief the great plane winging east. I also saw crouching near me and white as a sheet, a large Scot named John McCracken, a man whom I admired very greatly as one of the wisest and strongest in the camp.

I said to him, “That was the closest call of the whole damn war for me.

This is the last time I go out among the corn to forage for Spam!”

[excerpt]

The next morning was all that a practical joker’s soul might desire.

Sharp at six, the quiet air of the camp was rent by the blare of
“Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!”

As soon as I realized what was happening, I went out on the balcony of our dorm to enjoy the fun.

The camp was a chaos of furious inmates. After three years of rising at seven for roll call, in rain, sleet, or snow, on Sundays, Christmas, and weekdays alike, everyone had luxuriated in lazy risings since August 17. Everywhere I looked, angry people were rushing about. Enraged fathers poured out of the little rows of family rooms; elderly women in curlers, hurriedly putting on their bathrobes, stumbled from their dorms. Each of them charged out looking for blood!

Then, some of them, realizing they hadn’t the least idea where the music was coming from, began, each in a dazed and blind sort of way, to go off in different directions.

Some kicked the loudspeakers in helpless fury.

Still others stood there holding their heads and trying to think out calmly where the ultimate source of the blare might be.

Soon, stopping up their ears, all marched off to the section commandeered by the army. I laughed as I imagined the scene when that irate throng of bath-robed internees finally located the good-hearted G.I. in charge of the record player.

He said to me later with some awe,
“It was a strange experience to face so many really crazy people, all mad at you! My gosh, hadn’t I played the latest popular tune, one they hadn’t even had the chance to hear before? You know I honestly think all of you must be a little touched in the head by all your troubles. I hope you can get back to normal again all right.”

If this G.I. was troubled by our “strangeness”, Spofford was tortured by it.

His face took on a baffled, almost haunted look. No one appeared to want to cooperate with him on his many morale boosting schemes. As he said one night over some bourbon, very close to tears, he just couldn’t understand it.

People kept complaining about his loudspeaker. Sas Sloan had called out one night as Spofford walked by,
“Bring back the war—we want some peace!”

Another time somebody managed to cut the main line to the loudspeaker just outside Spofford’s door!

“My God,” he continued, shaking his head sadly, “anybody’d think we were your enemies! Why, when I read to them the United States Army lectures on world affairs, it is unbelievable but true that these foreigners called it propaganda! What makes it all so puzzling is that these same games, contests, and lectures went down so well with the kids in the service. You should have heard them cheer when I put a loudspeaker for popular music in their barracks! Why, for God’s sake, is everyone so upset? Folks keep telling me that Europeans—especially older ones—don’t really want the same things that American G.I.’s do.

If that’s true—and I still find it hard to believe—then people are a lot stranger than I thought, and I’m not even sure I understand them any more.



[excerpt]

We left the camp on September 25, 1945, and a strange, dreamlike, overwhelmingly exciting day it was. How could I say goodbye under such circumstances? I knew the parting was for good; that the world was too big and our lots too diverse for us ever to meet again; that even if we did meet through some chance encounter, the relationship we had enjoyed would have vanished with its context. Both context and relationship would be at best old memories rehearsed over a drink, but never relived in any depth or intensity. The farewells were too ultimate even to be sad.

Besides, those of us who were walking out the gate for the last time were looking eagerly ahead to the trucks that waited to carry us into the promising future, and not particularly heeding our disconsolate friends waving from the wall.

Many of these had little future and were now losing their one firm reality, the recent past of internment life.

Glancing back for a moment at those waving hands, the thought came to me that only when destiny gives us the great gift of an open future are we able fully to live, for intense life in the present is made up in large part of expectancy.

Whenever we are alive and excited, it is the future and not the past that enlivens the present moment.

As the army trucks lumbered across the plain to the city, we could see that past receding in proportion to the diminishing size of the camp compound; with each yard forward, we could feel an increment of freedom and with each mile the patterns of normal life seemed to flow back like refreshed blood into our veins. I felt gloriously alive when I walked into a comfortable railway coach, picked out my own seat next to a window, and watched the countryside flash by.

Here were towns and villages, animals and birds, people waving, and the delights of a changing landscape. Each one of us felt himself to be alive and real again.

We had left the bloodless life of camp and each had become once more a participating part of the interrelated system of things and people that make up our universe. Life is participation, I thought, and as it dies when that participation is cut off, so it lives again when the world is re-entered. I think the leisurely picnic lunch which we all enjoyed as the train rushed along through farmlands and villages to Tsingtao was the happiest and most completely carefree meal of my life.

Not even for a moment could we keep our eyes off the world of which we were now a part.

[further reading] ...
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/Gilkey/BOOK/Gilkey-BOOK(WEB).pdf

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