19451776 Club
Ten days after Japan surrenders, Communist troops kill an American intelligence officer in Shandong
Bound, shot, and bayonetted, Captain John Birch becomes a name the American right will invoke for decades.
Japan had announced its surrender on August 15, 1945, but northern China remained a tangle of rival armies racing to claim Japanese territory before the other side could. On August 25, Captain John Birch, a U.S. Army Air Forces intelligence officer attached to the OSS, was traveling through Chinese Communist-controlled Shandong Province on a mission to seize Japanese documents and locate airfields for rescuing American prisoners of war. Communist soldiers stopped his party, disarmed him, then shot and bayonetted him. He was buried in China with full military honors, one of the first Americans to die in a Chinese civil war that continued for years afterward…
