China Up and Down

By John T. Foster

China Up and Down is a personal account of one B-24 pilot, his World War II exploits, and his improbable return to China some twenty-four years after he first left. It is a thrilling story--as improbable as it may be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798885055482

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Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Foreword

Apologia

Chapter 1: Flashback: China Up and Down

Chapter 2: Beginnings

Chapter 3: I Didn't Want to Get Muddy

Chapter 4: I Become a Pilot—Sort Of, That Is

Chapter 5: Truck Driver Learning Time

Chapter 6: Heading Out

Chapter 7: Sojourn in India

Chapter 8: The 308th Bomb Group (Heavy)

Chapter 9: Hankow: First Trip

Chapter 10: Hankow: The Second Trip

Chapter 11: The Briefing

Chapter 12: The Second Flight to Hankow

Chapter 13: Brawling Time

Chapter 14: Vertical Departures

Chapter 15: Meanwhile…All Around Us (Other Planes, Other Stories)

Chapter 16: Where Indeed Were those Fighters!

Chapter 17: The Mystery of the 373rd

Chapter 18: The Walk

Chapter 19: Parading Through China

Chapter 20: Changsha Again

Chapter 21: Returned

Epilogue

About the Editor

About the Author

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China Up and Down

John T. Foster

Copyright © 2023 John T. Foster

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88505-547-5 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88505-548-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

Apologia

No life is really as important as one's own, and this preoccupation has, unfortunately, led to countless and often maudlin autobiographies. This will not be an autobiography, but instead a "remembrance of some things past" to determine whether some integrative process for my own purposes can result.

Such integration would help for my years have been fragmented and my experience episodic, and indeed, I have often looked backward on what has seemed a series of reincarnations in each of which there was some semblance of death and some following sense of rebirth. I have toyed with the structure of a novel in which the protagonist would die at each opportunity, with exploration at that stage of the consequences, if any, and then to follow in each new chapter with But he did not die, but went on…

Some of the episodes have been written down for family and friends…great books discussions and the group at Attica Prison…my fling as a weekly editor in Oklahoma (it was joyous, but I've never worked longer or harder)…my first work in management of an institution.

In all of this, however, China has been the most affecting. I was born into a family tradition. I have been there four times. What follows tells my story of China and, not incidentally, of an episode of war in China.

As for reincarnation, it is not my future wish. My years have been quite fulfilling enough. I would not have lived at any other time nor in any other way for I have been very, very lucky. Lucky to have lived in these years of miracles typified by skies, which in my childhood were largely the realm of birds that left no vapor trails and then became the realm of airplanes that did. Now our skies offer future generations a passage into infinity, and the air around us teems with communications of incredible variety.

I have been lucky to have experienced the superhuman stimulation that is the positive side of war and lucky to have survived. I have been lucky beyond belief in my loves and friends and family (those that went before have been important, others have been life itself).

Marcus Aurelius, as I recall it, said something like, You embarked, you made the voyage, now get out!

Well…before I get out…let's talk about China.

JTF

Keene, New Hampshire

May 1993

Chapter 1

Flashback: China Up and Down

All right. Face it. It was a beautiful day for flying.

The air at sixteen thousand feet was smooth. The small summer clouds were scattered way down below. All four props were in reasonably good sync. None of the dials were awry. The target was well up there ahead in the summer haze.

I looked again at the major's grim profile in the left seat and again wondered what the hell was eating the guy. And why all those trips to the relief tube? God, but he must have drained Kunming Lake last night! The swearing wasn't too surprising; everyone swears. But swearing at this B-24 that had just flown halfway round the world? And horsing the controls like this?

Of course, everyone had had angry instructors in flight school, and you finally figured them out: They simply cared too much. They had too often seen the bloody result of mistakes in the air. It wasn't so much that they cared about keeping you alive as caring about all the other consequences. And besides, I had already saved my neck thanks to at least one angry instructor. I could handle anger when I understood it.

But this was different. After all, isn't the squadron commander supposed to be in that left-hand seat to show you how it's done in combat? To play role model for his fledgling first pilots? To make you show what you can do, and then sure, chew you out if or when you foul up? But this guy was doing the flying and railing at the world, not showing, not coaching, not even criticizing. I didn't have to have him smile, but couldn't he at least talk to me! Why he hadn't even made eye contact, and we'd been flying more than three hours already.

The major had always been described as ebullient, fiercely competitive, and self-confident. But this guy was inside himself; his anger bottled up, his occasional, always explosive commands like small bursts from a pressure kettle.

Flying off to your first encounter with war with an angry commander was fairly unsettling, particularly when you had all the usual fear of war's uncertainties. However, the four P-40s flying by a few moments ago and the collegial waves by those fighter pilots had been reassuring. Those were, after all, the real Flying Tigers and their reputation unassailed. And good as it was to have this B-24D's top, tail, and belly turret—ten fifty calibers all told—having these little friends fly alongside was a comfort. Particularly after that bad time of the other squadrons up here three days ago when the only fighters in the air seemed to have been those swarming Japanese fighters.

The P-40s moved on ahead of our seven B-24s and disappeared.

I strained to peer out and back, hoping the other squadron had caught up. Fourteen B-24s had not really been enough three days ago. But it was clear from the briefing that it was the best we could put up today. And of course, today we would have fighters! But only seven B-24s would turn out today.

It was August 24, 1943, and down below was central China. Off to the west somewhere was Changsha.

As I had called down to Navigator Harry Rosenburg up there in the nose, Harry, I know this course won't get us even close. But let me know when it's out there, so I can at least wave at it.

Of course, that was sentimental, but it was the best I could offer the city of my childhood. And that did seem too bad after being away sixteen years and flying twelve thousand miles to get here. But of course, as everyone said, there was a war on.

In the calm of this moment—the familiar thrumming of Belle Starr's four engines, the closeness of the other B-24s ahead and to the left, the muted interphone talk among the crew, and the curious withdrawal of the major into himself—I recognized my tension. A little like going on to a tennis-tournament court. But then of course, in tennis, only your ego was at stake. War would be somewhat different.

Yes, different. Different than childhood. Different than all the other travel. Different than all the flying that got us here. Life itself was a long trip, my twenty-four-year trip. And if adventures lay ahead, so the years behind had had their share.

And I had in truth been very lucky.

Chapter 2

Beginnings

To restless young women of the late 1800s—mission service in such faraway lands as China—offered not only Christian duty but also liberation from the strictures of Victorian society. Clara Hess, my grandmother, made the long boat trip on her own and by herself and only later married John Marshall Foster, my grandfather. My father was her second child, born at their mission at Swatow on the south China coast. One of five children. Most of them grew up in a home for missionary children in Vachon, Washington, seeing their parents roughly every two years when they would come back to the States on leave.

Returning as a small boy to the United States, Father first lived in the Puget Sound area in that home for missionary children, went to college at Colby in Maine, where his grandfather had taught Greek and Latin, then to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and to internship in Boston. That the famous Dr. Harvey Cushing had selected him to be his Cushing Fellow for the year ahead in 1917 was always a point of pride, but it was not to be. The Kaiser chose to go to war, Dr. Cushing went off to France, and Father enlisted and was assigned by the Army Medical Corps to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. There I was born around midnight of March 31, 1919, the fifth in the line of John Foster's.

The Kaiser's war ended, and Father won appointment to the clinical faculty of the relatively new Yale in China—a massive American effort to demonstrate, in the context of Christianity, both Western medical education and Western clinical practice. The site was Changsha, a city of several hundred thousand in Hunan Province, the rice bowl of China. After language school for my parents, we arrived in Changsha in 1920. I was barely eight months old.

The campus was large with a row of substantial faculty homes, a one-room school for faculty children, a handsome chapel, classroom and laboratory buildings, and across the broad Malo road, a substantial hospital and school of nursing. (In my mind's eye, I still can see the old woman beggar, a seeming bundle of old rags, huddled outside the Malo gate and her plaintive call, Hello… Goodbye.)

The preparation of Chinese doctors, the provision of medical care to the people, and the social life of the foreigners and their children made for a bustling community scene in those early years. I got a little sister, Anne, in 1923. But turmoil was only six years away when students, inspired by a young radical of the province named Mao Tse Tung (now known as Mao Zedong), stirred campus protests against the intrusion by foreigners. Under mounting threats, we were evacuated early in 1927.

Far worse turmoil was to come to Changsha and the nation in the decade ahead. Gen. Chiang Kai Shek would soon put down Mao's rebels but, only a few years later, was forced to fall back before the Japanese, who attacked in 1937. As the Japanese pushed through the northern half of China toward Changsha, the Chinese burned their own city. The Japanese did not arrive and, only later, succeeded in entering Changsha. Again falling back, this time, they did scorching of their own. By 1943, only some of the Yale campus residences were undamaged. Chapel and college buildings were rubble. The hospital had been burned but was functioning in spite of the soot and partial burning. The city at large had been devastated.

Of those first six years, my memories are much those of any childhood, colored only slightly by the strange world outside our mission walls. I remember rubbery legs after many weeks in the hospital with amoebic dysentery…and hospitalized another time for tonsillectomy, remember pleading to be let out for the July Fourth tricycle race (I won my argument, lost the race)… I remember the ponies we rode around the campus, and the day two older children came galloping back from outside the wall, terror stricken by a beheading underway… I remember Henry Branch's claim of a full suit of armor that, mysteriously, we never were to see… I remember Henry and David Meinhardt and Horace Harvey as my gang, and my dismay in later years as these childhood friends had all died young… I remember playing blind man's bluff at someone's birthday party and blindly butting my front tooth on someone's head (I lost the tooth and bled and cried a lot; about the other's head I do not know)… I remember Amah, my nanny… I remember the banana tree in the front yard that never grew bananas… I remember the rare snow (the latitude is that of lower Florida) that produced a white coating but, to our disappointment, proved not slippery and, on such rare cold days, remember going to our little school with an oven-heated, towel-wrapped brick to hold or sit upon for warmth…and yes, I remember exploratory sexuality associated mysteriously by us, who were six going on seven, with hot cross buns and can only assume in my aged memory some then-meaningful code.

Oh, yes, I remember the fire that ended a playful afternoon among grave mounds on the far side of campus from faculty row. We were playing with wooden guns from the student rack, when suddenly one of us cried out and pointed toward the row of homes behind their trees across the campus. Black smoke laced with bright flame had erupted from what seemed to be one of the houses, and that child with us began to cry. We all began running, and as we ran, the angle would change and what was first one's house aflame was now another's. As each of us in turn identified with disaster, so each of us in turn would scream. Then we saw it was none of ours but, indeed, just on the other side of the high wall that surrounded our mission campus.

Joining adults on the roof of my home and facing the holocaust of what had been a match factory, we soon heard the tinkling music of the fire brigade coming down the narrow city street. In the lead were the priests carrying the sacrificial paper house followed by the helmeted and rubber-coated but barefoot firemen in the rear. Their hoses were small and wrapped in cloth bandages that only partly suppressed the leaks. It was all very ceremonial, but the building, by now, had long since collapsed.

The brush with the beheading may have been a harbinger because the memories from 1925 on get grimmer. I remember the rising tide of fear as the anger in the student riots accelerated…and the anxious whispers among us children as rumors spread (one day, it was that all fathers were to be beheaded)…and how the palpable tension among the adults fed our imaginations…and finally, the hasty packing (I got very angry with Mother for not packing the stove-top waffle