China Outpost

In a lonely China outpost, TIME Correspondent Teddy White, waiting for a plane to take him back to his base, found English-speaking company and a place to loaf in a U.S. Army radio station. He also saw an unfamiliar side of service life, typed out his description on the spot.

It was about half past seven at night and the radios in the room were chatting blurrily as the scattered stations of the U.S. Army in China talked. Mickey, the boss of the station, was at the sets. His cronies lounged about the room--his helpers, Kelly and Dubuc; Doerksen, the Lockheed man who is lend-leased to the China Air Force, and Alex, the mournful, gregarious operator of the Russian station.

They are the only white men in the town and thoroughly isolated from their kind--but none so much as the boss. Mickey is a Navy man. He was a radioman, first class, on the Lexington two years ago when someone came around recruiting for the A.V.G.s. Mickey decided he would join Chennault.

Voice of Legend. His rasping, bellowing voice is part of the legend of the A.V.G. now. It sounded alarms and withdrawals all over China and Burma. And when the A.V.G. was disbanded it rose more raucously than ever before. Mickey put his back up against joining the Army. He had become indispensable, so the uproar he raised brought results. He was commissioned an ensign in the Navy, is still without an item of uniform except a Navy hat.

The radio net that Mickey dominates by sheer voice power is an entirely new web thrown over the superlative Chinese A.R.P. net in the last eight months. Never in the past four years has an undetected Jap raider slipped through that net into the hinterland. The Chinese posts are usually far away in hills, jungles and valleys. One man pumps current for the radio with his legs, another reports what the Japs are doing.

Voice of Warning. No one except the Chinese knows how many there are of these little primary posts. The secondary posts are all linked together by telephone lines. Here, at certain secret points like Mickey's, U.S. radio stations have been set up to tap the secondary and flash warning of raiders to American fighter posts in the hinterland.

Such posts are among the most unhappy, thankless and lonely in the U.S. Army. They are manned each by a few men who live in remote Chinese villages, seeing no one but Chinese for months on end, receiving mail sporadically, eating food that hopeful Chinese cooks believe to be done up American style.

Almost all the operators who man the net entered the Army around the time of Pearl Harbor, came out to China after six months in radio schools, became fast friends on shipboard. Now they keep contact with each other only over the air.

The Watchful Days. During the days, when raids are likely, or on moonlight nights when the Japs make a sortie, there is very little horseplay. Everybody is listening, receiving, decoding. Sometimes you hear one of the service planes making "the milk run" to one section of the network line.

"That's Nowack," the operators say to the men in the shack, or "that's Carlton. Ought to be around tomorrow." And they follow the plane's progress around the country because it is carrying supplies and mail.

Sometimes there is a raid on an American field, and the network for thousands of miles listens in on the battles as our pilots tangle with the Japs. When somebody falls sick at an outpost the Army may send a medical sergeant down to look turn over. Then the sergeant talks over the radio to the doctor at the base, giving the sick man's symptoms, and his friends at posts all over China listen solicitously.

The Wakeful Nights. But on dark nights when there is no danger of a raid the operators sit down at their stations after supper and chew the fat. The Army boys begin to ride Mickey and the Navy--they call him a "sea pig," or a "fugitive from an aircraft carrier" and Mickey yells back into the microphone with the rasping Navy talk. The Japs are listening in as a matter of course and the boys enjoy imagining how the Japanese will sweat out trying to decode military sense out of Mickey's slang.

Sometimes when they get tired of talking somebody 500 miles away says, "Mickey, how about giving us some music." Then Mickey hauls his victrola out and puts on some records and gives a program of ancient jazz.

When the night is well along, the main base will say, "All stations, all stations, you may secure, you may secure." And in tired voices from all over China come the calls: "R21 says goodnight"--"B-16 securing, take it easy, fellow"--"MN-12, will see you in the morning. A very good night to you all." And Brooklynese, Yankee twangs, Southern drawls all fade lonely away into the vastness of China's night. At each station someone collects the day's code work papers and puts a match to them. The papers curl and burn and when the last ash crumbles the day is over.

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