The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 9 cludes several contemporaneous de- scriptions and telegrams related to the incident that led to his demise. Unfor- tunately, even though Engdahl was held in the same house as four other U.S. diplomats, none of them wit- nessed the event that caused his death. All, however, were adamant that the Japanese were not involved. According to the reports, on the night of May 13, 1942, Engdahl got up for water, which necessitated going downstairs. His fellow internees then heard him fall. They found him at the bot- tom of the stairs and, although he was unconscious, put him to bed. He died the next morning, from a skull fracture sustained in the fall. Fortunately for my research, one of the internees, John Bruins, had takenmeasurements of the stairs and described them in great detail. By the time I received Engdahl’s personnel file, I had already established contact with several amateur historians in the United States and Hong Kong, a few of whom had some information about him. Most of them also thought Engdahl had been murdered, most likely by being pushed down the stairs by an internment camp guard. None of these historians had seen the contemporaneous descrip- tions of his death by his fellow internees, however. Their belief was primarily based on a statement by renowned China hand John Service, who, as part of testimony before the Senate, had said that Engdahl had been “killed.” Un- fortunately, Service did not elaborate on this statement; but I now believe that he meant “killed in an accident.” Because the accounts of Engdahl’s death were written by his contemporaries in the United States during the war, I felt it unlikely that they would have avoided blaming the Japanese if they were, indeed, involved. Still, I wanted to see the stairs in question to judge for myself. Through my contacts with a historian based in the U.S., I learned from another internment camp survivor the exact location of the house where Engdahl and his fellow in- ternees had been held. It was at the St. Stephen’s College Preparatory School, very close to the Stanley Military Cemetery. Those who have visited Hong Kong will know that few buildings over 50 years old remain. Fortunately, it appeared from the school’s Web site that recent con- struction had not led to the razing of the original buildings. Armed with the description from Bruins and a tape measure, I felt confident I could find the stairs if they still existed. At the school, I learned that they were most likely in the house of the headmistress. After securing her permission, we went inside to see them. The measurements matched the Bruins description exactly. The stairs were quite steep, making it easy to see how Engdahl could have died from a fall. The upstairs area where Engdahl and his fellow internees slept was very small and could only be ac- cessed by the single set of stairs, so it would have been nearly impossible for anyone to sneak into the house with- out the internees knowing. I felt a sense of closure in visiting the house, confident that I now knew for sure that he had died in an accident. “In the Line of Duty” Although Engdahl almost certainly died in an accident, and Roberts and Waldron of disease, I still felt all three men merited nomination for the plaques. With many oth- ers listed on the memorial as having died from disease, I was certain that Roberts andWaldron also qualified. As for Engdahl, had it not been for his diplomatic service, he would not have been interned in Hong Kong. To me, that met the standard of “dying in the line of duty.” I was gratified when AFSA accepted all three nomina- tions, as that provided a concrete result for all of this re- search. (All three names were engraved on the plaques on Foreign Affairs Day, May 1, 2009.) I only wish I had undertaken this research 20 years earlier, as then I might have been able to speak with someone who had served with Engdahl. While I have learned a great deal from colleagues of Lee Engdahl and family members of her husband, none of them knew him personally. I still harbor the hope that I will eventually find someone with personal recollections of Russ, but with each passing year I know that becomes less and less likely. If I have learned anything from this process, it is that there are many Americans buried overseas whose stories have yet to be told. So there are very likely other U.S. diplomats who died in the line of duty but are not yet listed on the AFSAMemorial Plaques. I hope that employees at other posts will be inspired to undertake this type of re- search, so that we can commemorate the efforts of those who came before us. F O C U S Some very blunt and now-illegal statements appear in Engdahl’s employee evaluation reports.