John Davies (archivist)

Transcription

Last year we opened the papers of John Paton Davies, a State Department official who’s the center of this story. The Davies papers had been donated to the Truman Library by Davies’ daughter. Davies himself passed away in 1999. The papers contained some interesting drawings that were kind of mysterious to us. And in the papers themselves we found the answers in an unpublished manuscript of Davies’. In August of 1943 in the midst of World War II John Paton Davies was getting ready to board a C-46 transport plane in India to fly supplies to our allies in China. Eric Sevareid, on his way to Chungking to do a series of radio reports for CBS… (This is Chungking.) …a Board of Economic Warfare official and I were the three civilian passengers. We took off with a reassuring roar. After about an hour one of the two engines quit. Davies reported to his wife shortly after this incident, he said, quote, I stood in the open door of that miserable Commando and decided, “Well, if nobody else is going to jump I’ll jump. Somebody has to break the ice.” So I wheeled out and dove. The others followed Davies out of the airplane. Of the 21 people aboard, 20 survived the jump. He was unhurt, he gathered his men. And almost immediately he was encountered by a group of the Nagas, a tribe of indigenous people in Burma. I saw in the bushes a parting of the branches and in the opening a face staring at me with intense curiosity. I smiled and nodded and other faces appeared in the bushes. And so of course they didn’t understand English. So what is there to do? In a small notebook I penciled a sketch of a locomotive with care and then made the sound “choo-choo, chuff-chuff.” The elder and company stared at my pictograph and my puffing face. Blank incomprehension. And then he tried to sketch a Union Jack for the British flag. No signs of comprehension among the Nagas, but significantly, no signs of hostility, either. Davies felt some fear, though, when one of the Nagas drew a slicing motion across his own neck. I thought I grasped what he was trying to tell me – a throat was to be cut. But whose? It turns out it was a sacrificial goat that the Nagas prepared for a feast. So, as it turned out, instead of decaptitating us, the savages adopted us. And so for about two weeks until their rescue Davies and his men lived in the midst of the Nagas. To come to China now can be quick and painless, or it can be very long and hard with a full complement of danger. I am afraid I did it the hard way, but don’t judge it by my example. It was in large part for his efforts in showing his leadership of this party that Davies was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1948, which is the highest civilian award. The fun and challenging part is piecing together the story that these documents tell. The human story.