Saturday

9 December 2017

— sterling silver sunlight through pewter clouds.

 

Good Morning All,

Before today, I did not know a whole lot about John Birch, other than that he was a Captain in the U.S. army in China, that he was shot to death by  Chinese communist soldiers a few days after V-J Day, and that Robert H. W. Welch, the grape jelly guy, named his nutcase anti-communist organization after him, saying Birch was the first victim of the Cold War. (Welch, by the way, lived in Belmont, MA, the next town over from Arlington. He was instrumental in making sure there was no fluoride in our drinking water, thus insuring local dentists of a brisk business. Though on the plus side, Welch is also why we have that Dilly Dally glass out the cottage.)

Anyway, I decided to look up Mr. Birch to see if he—or anyone—deserved to have his name stolen for the purpose of identifying some group of wackos or another.

Turns out old John Morrison Birch  was a real piece of work. He was born 28 May 1918 to Presbyterian missionaries at Hill Station high up in the Indian Himalayas. He grew up in New Jersey and Georgia in the Fundamentalist Baptist tradition, which we may imagine included a fair amount of Bible thumping and folks rolling around in the dirt, frothing at the mouth, and speaking in tongues. He graduated magna-cum-laude from Baptist-affiliated Mercer U. in Georgia. One of his classmates said of him: “He was always an angry young man, always a zealot.” During his senior year, he joined a student group to investigate and identify professors guilty of heresy. (Shades of Senator McCarthy?)

At the age of twelve, he’d already decided to become a missionary. So why not the best? He went to J. Frank Norris’s Fundamentalist Baptist Bible Institute in Forth Worth, then a recognized center for major Fruit Loops, Hair-Pullers, and Zanies, completed the curriculum in a year, and in 1940 off he went to China, then occupied by the Japanese, where he quickly learned Chinese and set about bringing the peasants to Jesus. 

Meanwhile, after Jimmy Doolittle and his mates bomb Tokyo and do not have enough gas to get back to base, they bail out over China. Birch meets them by accident and helps smuggle them by river beyond Japanese lines in Zhejiang Province. When Doolittle gets back to base, he tells the leader of the Flying Tigers about Birch. The colonel says he could use a guy fluent in Chinese. He secretly signs Birch up as a lieutenant (eventually captain), and Birch sets up an extensive intelligence network supplying valuable info about Japanese troop movements.

Long story short, after V-J Day, it is determined some Japanese soldiers need to remain in parts of China to run things until replacements can be found. The Chinese communists are not keen on that idea. They want all the Japs out now. They run into Birch in some village, mistake him for collaborating with the remaining Japanese forces. They ask him to hand over his revolver. Birch refuses. Harsh words and insults follow. Birch ends up with a bullet in him and dies.

The U.S. Army awards Birch a Distinguished Service Award. Townsend, Massachusetts names a small street in his honor: John Birch Memorial Drive. (What, one wonders, must it be like owning a house on that drive.)

So, after all that, I still can’t decide whether Mr. Birch deserved to have his name stolen by Mr. Grape Jelly. Birch certainly strikes me as one of our more determined kooks, but a brave one, and he did, after all, help Doolittle and the boys.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps, one of which—if not both of which—should afford you a smile: