Remembering the seven heroes

[Randy W]

A lengthy, but very interesting story about English prisoners rescued from a Japanese internment camp in China, after the war had ended. In the SCMP

 

Remembering the seven heroes who liberated a Japanese internment camp in China

Legacy of war in Asia

 

Mary (fourth from left) and other children leave Weihsien. Photo: legacy of Mary Taylor Previte

Four of the seven Weihsien rescuers (from left) Raymond Hanchulak, Stanley Staiger, Japanese-American Tad Nagaki and Jim Moore.

Previte and Wang hug. Photo: China Daily

 

In late 1942, 10-year-old Mary and the school’s other 200 children were marched by Japanese soldiers to a small camp 5km away. Little did she and her siblings know that they wouldn’t see their parents again until the war ended.

 

. . .

 

Mary and other prisoners poured out of the gates, a human tidal wave rushing past gaping guards who had, thankfully, not fired on the parachutists. The seven men were quickly spotted in a field and hoisted onto inmates’ bony shoulders. As the camp’s Salvation Army band played a medley, including The Star Spangled Banner, Weihsien’s saviours were carried towards the gates. Staiger saluted; one musician slid to the ground and wept. Watch­ing the scene unfold, Wang couldn’t help but feel the emotion. “I saw the prisoners’ joy at being liberated; some of them cried a lot,” he says in an email. “It moved me to tears several times.”

Wang remembers a group of about 20 Japanese guards, loaded guns at the ready, as his team entered the camp. They had their weapons ready, too, but “the Japanese were overwhelmed,” he says. “They knew about the surrender. They didn’t dare shoot.” The liberation crew immediately headed for the commander’s office to negotiate the hand­over of power. “Both sides talked in a calm and distinguish­ed atmosphere,” says Wang. “We asked them to surrender and give up their weapons.” They did.

. . .

A retired CIA man when Previte found him in 1997, in Dallas, Texas, Moore had also been a pupil at Chefoo School, before Mary’s time. He was 25 and working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US when he heard his teach­ers and his friends and their siblings had been interned. Feeling a strong sense of duty he resigned, enlisted and was soon back in China, where he was hand-picked for the mission to liberate Weihsien.

After entering the camp, Moore sought out his emaciated former headmaster and, amid cheers and tears, the two men embraced. The student had liberated the headmaster, and from his home in Dallas, Moore helped Previte find the last two American soldiers on the plane, and she went to meet them.

 

. . .

 

But normality ended with the start of the Cultural Revolution, in 1966. Wang had fought bravely during the war, but he had done so alongside the Americans. Now he was suspected of stealing secrets for the US. It didn’t help that his older brother had fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang after Mao Zedong’s communists won the civil war.

Wang was locked up in Guiyang for almost three years, in a tiny room with up to 10 others, “the only one from my dan­wei”, he tells me, referring to his work unit. He was allowed out for just half an hour a day, ate poorly and was not per­mitted to see family or read books. He was in chains for a year. “My crime? Being an American spy,” he says by phone.

. . .

In 2016, following Previte’s visit and 71 years after the liberation, Wang finally received a medal for bravery from the Chinese government. China is no longer the China of the Cultural Revolution. Having fought alongside the Americans in the war is no longer considered a bad thing. As Wang says, “My distorted history was clarified thoroughly.”

 

[Randy W]

in the Philadelphia Inquirer - Published Nov. 24, 2019

 

Mary T. Previte, former N.J. Assemblywoman and concentration camp survivor, dies at 87

 

 

Mary Evelyn Taylor was born on Sept. 7, 1932, in Kaifeng, China, in the northern province of Henan, in the Yellow River Valley Her father, James Hudson Taylor II, was born in Glasgow, and her mother, Alice Elizabeth (Hayes) Taylor, was born in Pennsylvania. Both were Protestant missionaries.

. . .

Ms. Previte and the 1,400 others imprisoned at Weihsien were liberated on Aug. 17, 1945, by six Americans and a Chinese translator. She said once that she remembered them as “angels, falling from the sky.” She would spend most of the rest of her life tracking down those seven to thank them each personally.

 

In 2015, she finally found the final rescuer, Wang Cheng-Han, and the next year, she traveled to China to reunite with him.