The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

n Sept. 7, 1948, Secretary of State George C. Marshall awarded the Medal of Freedom to John Paton Davies Jr., a 40-year-old Foreign Service officer who had joined his friend George Kennan on State’s Policy Planning Staff one year earlier. The medal’s citation noted that it was being awarded for “excep- tional and meritorious service in China and India from March 1942 until December 1944.” One episode from August 1943 was singled out for special mention: “The passengers on the plane in which he was fly- ing en route from India to China were forced to bail out in territory inhabited only by savages. Mr. Davies’ resourceful- ness and leadership were in large measure responsible for the eventual rescue of the party. His conduct during this period was in the highest traditions of the Service.” In his autobiography, Dragon by the Tail (Norton, 1972), Davies devotes only a brief paragraph to the three-week ordeal that he endured, along with 18 others, including CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, following the crash of their C-46 aircraft in a remote area on the India-Burma border. Written with his characteristic nonchalance about physical danger, Davies mainly expresses his admiration for the abili- ty of an agent from the Office of Strategic Services (precur- sor to the CIA) to complete the jump without breaking the bottle of gin he was carrying. Fortunately for historians, Sevareid’s autobiography, Not So Wild a Dream (Knopf, 1946), contains an entire 50-page chapter about the events that occurred between Aug. 2, 1943, the day of the crash, and Aug. 23, when the survivors stumbled into the Indian border town of Mokokchung. His account of the dangers the group faced and Davies’ key role in helping them survive is valuable evidence of the extreme risks of service in Asia during World War II. More impor- tantly, this episode would make Sevareid a compelling wit- ness for the defense in the 1950s, when politically inspired accusations against Davies’ loyalty shifted to attacks on his character and suitability as a Foreign Service officer. Davies and Stilwell Born in China in 1908 to missionary parents, John Davies (he rarely used his middle name and was called Jack by his friends) entered the Foreign Service via examination in 1931. Following two brief consular assignments in Windsor, Ontario, and Kunming, China (which, coincidentally, would be the destination of his ill-fated flight a decade later), Davies arrived in Peking (now Beijing) in September 1933 to begin two years of Chinese-language training. Near the end of his stay there, he met the new military attaché, “a skinny little colonel” named Joseph Stilwell, whose knowledge of China (he had served there in the 1920s under George C. Marshall) and “cheerfully sardonic attitude” impressed the similarly inclined Davies. Between the fall of 1935 and May 1938, Davies served as vice consul in Mukden (now Shenyang), Manchuria, an O Bob Rackmales’ 32-year Foreign Service career (1963-1995) included assignments in Lagos, Zagreb, Mogadishu, Trieste, Rome, Kaduna, Belgrade and Washington, D.C. A member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Board of Directors of the Camden Conference on Foreign Relations, he teaches courses on U.S. diplomatic his- tory at Belfast (Maine) Senior College. FS H ERITAGE “G RACE U NDER P RESSURE :” J OHN P ATON D AVIES T WO THREATS A DECADE APART — ONE PHYSICAL , THE OTHER POLITICAL — SEVERELY TESTED C HINA HAND J OHN D AVIES . B Y B OB R ACKMALES 46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8