F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

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 location
of the U.S. embassy in China.
There, Stilwell and several other military officers were frequent
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 considerable
danger, to protect U.S. interests
under the new Japanese occupation.
After nearly a decade in the Foreign
Service, Davies began his first assignment
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 fortunately
for Davies, “did not invite familiarity.” His job also
involved contacts with Lauchlin Currie, a White House special
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 crystallized
Davies’ dissatisfaction and intensified his desire to
make a more direct contribution to the war effort.
General Joseph Stilwell’s
knowledge of China and
“cheerfully sardonic
attitude” impressed the
similarly inclined Davies.
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-theground
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 headquarters:
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 conditions
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 dangerous
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, unpredictable
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. on Monday, 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
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