The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

assignment he had requested despite its being “a wretched place, with the Chinese cowering under Japanese occupation and the Japanese corrupted by conquest.” His next post, Hankow (now Wuhan), was at that time the temporary loca- tion of the U.S. embassy in China. There, Stilwell and several other military officers were fre- quent dinner guests at Davies’ spacious apartment. However, the largest contingent at his gatherings were journalists, a group to which Davies, who had initially aspired to be a reporter, felt particularly drawn. When the embassy moved on to the new Chinese capital at Chungking (now Chongqing) a few months later, Davies stayed behind, under conditions of con- siderable danger, to protect U.S. inter- ests under the new Japanese occupation. After nearly a decade in the Foreign Service, Davies began his first assign- ment in Washington on the China desk in October 1940. It quickly struck him that working in the State Department at that time had decided drawbacks. First, Davies’ supervisors did not inspire respect (one “possessed the virtues of a model head clerk,” the other was “not much more than a vigorous pedant”). Second, he was put off by the parochialism he encountered in the department. Arabists looked down on Asian specialists, while European specialists looked down on everybody else; within the Far Eastern Division, Japan hands and China hands viewed each other with mutual suspicion. Third, and most importantly, the White House’s lack of regard for the department had made it a backwater, to the point where Davies found working there “stupefying.” A fourth drawback, of which Davies was unaware at the time, was the risk of inadvertent exposure to Soviet agents. One of his colleagues in the Far Eastern Division was a “tweedy young man” named Alger Hiss, who, perhaps fortu- nately for Davies, “did not invite familiarity.” His job also involved contacts with Lauchlin Currie, a White House spe- cial assistant whom Roosevelt had put in charge of Lend Lease for China. Currie was first accused of Soviet ties in 1945, and KGB records released in the 1990s confirmed that he was indeed in close touch with Soviet agents, though whether he himself became an agent is a matter of dispute. Finally, in a bizarre coincidence, Duncan Lee, executive assistant to OSS chief William Donovan and perhaps the most highly placed Soviet agent ever in a U.S. intelligence agency, was the fellow passenger whose skill as a parachutist was noted by Davies in his autobiography. The Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor crys- tallized Davies’ dissatisfaction and intensified his desire to make a more direct contribution to the war effort. Fortuitously, three weeks later he had dinner with Stilwell, now a major general, who had been selected to command the invasion of North Africa. Eager to be as close to the action as possible, and to work for someone whom he respected, Davies suggested the possibility of joining Stilwell as an adviser. The idea was clearly to the general’s liking, even more so when his assignment was suddenly shifted, to his regret, to the command of a new China- Burma-India theater. With Davies, Stilwell acquired the services not only of a friend, but of an officer whose on-the- ground experience on both sides of the war in China exceeded that of anyone in U.S. government service. Dropping in on the Nagas As Stilwell’s political adviser, Davies divided his time between two headquar- ters: New Delhi, where the China- Burma-India theater command was located, and the Chinese capital at Chungking, where Stilwell served as chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek. While Chungking was subject to Japanese air raids and health con- ditions were extremely poor, by far the most dangerous part of the job was the airborne commute over the Himalayas via the “Hump.” With the Japanese having cut the Burma Road in March 1942, this was the only option to get supplies, and often passengers, to allied forces in China. Tellingly, the Air Force deemed the route “the most dan- gerous ever assigned to air transport.” During the second half of 1943 alone there were 155 crashes, a rate of nearly one a day. The risks came less from enemy air action than from a combination of rugged terrain, extreme altitude, unpre- dictable weather and severe shortages of spare parts and experienced, properly trained crews. Passengers were under no illusions regarding their safety. In his autobiography, Sevareid recalls thinking to himself shortly before boarding: “If I had any real moral courage, I would refuse to get aboard.” At about 8 a.m. onMonday, Aug. 2, 1943, the C-46 (a DC- 3 in civilian life) carrying 14 U.S. military personnel, two Chinese officers and four U.S. civilians, including Davies and Sevareid, took off from its base in Chabua, India. About one hour into the flight, while the plane was over the Patkai Mountains, a young corporal (“grinning broadly”) informed Sevareid that the plane’s left engine had gone out. The pilots turned back toward India, but issued no instructions to the passengers. As the crew began throwing passenger bags overboard in an attempt to gain altitude, Davies went to the cabin to try to get information, only to return shaking his head and telling Sevareid, “No goddamn organization here.” As the cabin J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 47 General Joseph Stilwell’s knowledge of China and “cheerfully sardonic attitude” impressed the similarly inclined Davies.