John Birch (missionary)

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John Morrison Birch (born May 8, 1918 in Landour , India , † August 25, 1945 near Xi'an ) was an American missionary and employee of the armed forces intelligence service during World War II .

Life

Birch was born into a family of Baptist missionaries active in the Indian part of the Himalayas . The family returned to America when Birch was two years old. He was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition with his five younger siblings in New Jersey and Macon , Georgia , and studied theology at Mercer University in Macon. While in college, he decided to become a missionary and upon graduating in 1939, he enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth , Texas. After completing the two-year course in one year, he went to China, where he arrived in Shanghai in 1940 .

After half a year of language training, he was sent to Hangzhou to begin his missionary work. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was forced to go into hiding from the Japanese in rural Zhejiang , where he continued his work. In April 1942 he helped the crews who landed in China and had flown the Doolittle Raid against Japan. Whose leader James H. Doolittle mentioned him after a successful flight to Chongqing praised opposite Claire Chennault , commander of Flying Tigers , the Birch with the rank of 1st Lt. accepted into the Air Force . Birch became a member of the 14th Air Force established by Chennault in 1942 and later recruited by the OSS . In 1944, Captain Birch was inducted into the Legion of Merit .

Shortly after the end of the war, he was caught on a mission inland by a group of Communist soldiers and shot after refusing to be disarmed. His body was mutilated with bayonets and thrown on a heap of rubbish. As a result, parts of the American right declared him the first victim of the Cold War . The right-wing John Birch Society is named after him.

literature

  • Carolle J. Carter: Mission to Yenan: American Liaison with the Chinese Communists 1944-1947 , ISBN 0-8131-2015-2
  • James Hefley: The Secret File on John Birch , Hannibal Books, 1995, ISBN 0-929292-80-4
  • Robert HW Welch, Jr: The Life of John Birch, Western Islands, 1954, ISBN 978-0882791166

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Time Magazine : Who was John Birch? April 14, 1961, accessed February 12, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Birch, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Birch, John Morrison
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American missionary and employee of the armed forces intelligence
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Landour , India
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1945
Place of death at Xi'an