At Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport Jane almost fell into the open arms of her pal Howard Palmer. Young Palmer had become famous in OSS circles for a stunt that had taken place a few months before the end of the war. The regent, Pridi Phanomyong, leader of the Free Thai, who risked his office every day by working with the OSS, had warned that Palmer, for his own safety, needed to be moved out of the house where he had set up his secret radio station. Arrangements were made to smuggle him to a new location, and he was put on the floor of an official Thai limousine, covered by a blanket. The move proved, in Howard’s words, “as secret as La Guardia going to fire.” Halfway across town, the limo got stuck behind a parade in honor of the Japanese emperor’s birthday, and when the driver honked to clear the road, the horn stuck. The honking continued as Howard, sweating in the back, pleaded with the Thai driver to stop politely entreating the horn to “shush” and pull out the goddamn wire. Finally, at an intersection, an irritated Japanese officer raised the hood and silenced the horn, and the car proceeded to its destination without further incident.
Howard had established a new OSS headquarters in an old palace on the outskirts of the city called Suan Kularb (Garden of Roses), a vast European-style chalet of stucco and stone, with a brightly colored tile roof, marble pillars and turrets, and all the fairy-tale trimmings. The palace was set back from the road in the middle of a large compound that showed signs of neglect, as did the bedraggled rose bushes lining the long graveled drive. Still, Jane had to hand it to Howard, he knew how to pick his hideouts. She was disappointed to learn she would not be staying in such majestic surroundings until she heard Alex MacDonald complaining that the OSS headquarters was as crowded as a college dormitory on homecoming weekend. Among the many lodgers were several agents from the Thai underground, as well as Ed Taylor, who had flown in from Rangoon in mid-August to oversee the evacuation of the American POWs. As a favor, they grudgingly agreed to make room for Ed Snow.
It turned out Howard had arranged for Jane to have an elegant pavilion all her own, a smaller, gingerbreadish affair in the Dusit district, the official part of town. Bangkok was full of palaces—winter and summer palaces, city and country palaces—all built by the old kings of Siam for their extended families. Pridi, courting favor with the Americans, had made some of these royal residences, complete with their large household staffs and chefs, available to the OSS. It helped that Palmer’s father had been dean of the Bangkok Christian College before the war and was an old friend of Pridi. Howard had clearly taken full advantage of the catering; he sheepishly admitted to having packed on fifteen pounds. Jane noticed he had taken to wearing floppy Chinese trousers to accommodate his new girth.
As soon as she was settled, Jane began making inquiries all over the Thai capital in an effort to locate the camp where Leo was being held. In the end, the Swedish consul general directed her to a Japanese internment camp on the outskirts of Bangkok. Once again, Jane found herself confronted by a mulish Japanese commander who refused to release his prisoner without the consent of the British authorities. “But I had Howard with me,” she recalled. “We put on our usual ‘we own the world act’ and succeeded in getting Leo out and only Howard knew he was my ex-husband.” Unlike the POWs she had helped evacuate in Batavia, Leo was in fairly good shape. He had been housed in an old villa with a small group of Dutch prisoners and had not suffered unduly. Although thinner and sprouting less hair than when she had last seen him, he had managed to triumph over his circumstances with his usual “stern self-discipline.” She had never doubted it for a minute. His first words upon seeing her were “Of all the millions of Americans, they had to send you!”
She took Leo back to her palace and let him get cleaned up. She found him some clothes to wear and even managed to wangle the use of a jeep. That was about all the succor she was prepared to offer her ex. They went for long drives, took in a few gaudy temples, and talked about their wartime experiences. He still thoroughly disapproved of her. Tiresomely earnest, he considered the OSS inept for employing someone with her radical views, and he made it clear he would have preferred being rescued by the military. The war had not mellowed Leo. Nothing would. His government made arrangements to evacuate him to the Netherlands. He was made a colonel in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and dispatched to Japan as a member of the Dutch delegation of the Far Eastern Commission. It was only much later that she learned that Leo was not a diplomat as he had always led her to believe. His dull-sounding desk job—head of the Japanese Section of the Bureau of East Asiatic Affairs of the Netherlands East Indies Government in Batavia—was actually a cover for a Dutch counterespionage organization. All the time they had been married, he had been secretly monitoring the subversive activities of Japanese and Chinese Communists in Java. Boring, balding old Leo was a spy.
Bangkok made for a lovely change from the chaotic and threatening atmosphere in Saigon. Jane was enjoying palace life. It was wonderful to indulge in a spell of luxury after so many weeks of hardship. “There was no shooting,” she recalled, “my war was over, my revolutions were over.” The palace Howard had put at her disposal was opulent, with gleaming polished floors, overstuffed Victorian furniture, and ancient Siamese objets d’art—every precious item stamped with the royal arms of Thailand. Knowing her proclivity for mischief, he had threatened her with court-martial if she tried “to swipe anything.” Jane could not resist taking one small memento but for Howard’s sake settled for some sheets of royal stationery.
Despite the heavy presence of British occupying troops, Bangkok was bursting with an uninhibited gaiety. Unlike the situation in Indonesia and Indochina, here the Free Thai government was in charge and had made speedy work of disarming the Japanese. The new government had been rewarded by the United States’ reestablishing relations and agreeing to vote for its admission into the United Nations. If only Britain’s demands for a settlement could be modified—among them monopoly rights to Thai oil and timber, rubber, and rice exports; control of shipping; and commercial aviation rights—there was hope the country could escape colonial, if not economic, bondage. The British bitterly insisted they only wanted their due: Thailand had aided and abetted the Japanese during the war and reparations were owed. Still, hopes seemed to be high. The streets were crowded with people chattering and laughing. Their good cheer was infectious. Jane ran into OSS colleagues and friends from all over the CBI. She caught up with Alex MacDonald, who was a member of the Thai mission, and exchanged news of Betty. Alex, who shared Jane’s sympathy for the anticolonial movement, agreed to talk to Ed Snow on background and helped him arrange interviews for his Saturday Evening Post article “Secrets from Siam.”
The tiny shops were filled with an array of luxury goods, the shelves crowded with things Jane had not seen since leaving the United States. Silk stockings, for example, were so plentiful the soldiers were using them to clean their guns. There was an astonishing amount of jewelry for sale, superb and quite cheap, and she would have “bought the place up” if she had had the money. Even Ed Snow was tempted. Buying anything turned out to be a challenge for Jane, for not only had she not been paid for several months, but the Japanese occupation yen she had been given for expenses, while still in circulation, was worthless. No self-respecting shopkeeper would touch the defeated currency, instead rattling off a long list of what was acceptable, everything from Dutch guilders and Indian rupees to francs, pounds, and the rare American dollars. Not to be cheated out of her first real shopping expedition in more than a year, Jane begged Ed to part with some cash and convinced Howard to extend her a small loan from the OSS reserves he kept in a safe in his office. She picked up some small treasures, a few rings and silver belts, but her best find was “a sixteenth-century, solid bronze head of Buddha, weighing fifteen pounds.”
Just before she left Java, OSS brass had advised her that the organization was being restructured into oblivion and would limp along as the Interim Research and Intelligence Division until its wartime function ended on the last
day of business in December 1945. The news had thrown her for a bit of a loop. Who exactly was she working for, or, more to the point, whose eyes would be perusing her eyes-only intelligence reports? Was it all going straight to the State Department, or would it be crossing other desks along the way? “We are all slightly confused as to where our stuff will eventually land,” Jane had radioed Lloyd George. In the meantime, there was a serious shortage of personnel in the intelligence sections. With Cora DuBois recalled home, there would be no one left in Kandy to receive their reports and translate them into a usable form. Jane had “slews of material” to pouch to Washington, but it was all in Malay or Dutch or French, and she was afraid it would never get read.
Unable to extend her pleasant interlude in Bangkok any longer, Jane packed her meager belongings—she had given away almost all her clothes to the female POWs—and made plans to return to Calcutta, where she would make arrangements for her transportation to the United States. Her last days were caught up in the social whirl of victory celebrations. Pridi gave a lavish dinner party featuring a full orchestra and the Royal Siamese Ballet. The Thais were generous hosts: the liquor flowed freely, the food was plentiful, and scores of waiters danced attendance. No one seemed to notice the absence of the prima ballerina, who, in a diva display worthy of Nijinsky, pulled a no-show at the last minute.
Jane felt rather detached from the festivities but could not hide her amusement at the ceremony in which the regent decorated General Stratemeyer with the Order of the White Elephant, Third Class. For some reason, the name of the award struck her as hilarious—“it was so fitting.” Suddenly she was laughing uncontrollably. The effort to choke back the mirth that came fountaining forth earned her a reproachful glance from Howard, “although he, too, was turning pink.” Then it was Howard’s turn to be honored. Jane watched with something akin to motherly pride as the general awarded him the Silver Star and the regent bestowed another medal, both of which she judged “richly deserved.” Still, she could not help thinking they were all white elephants now and there was nothing the Thai people—or, for that matter, most of the old empire’s inhabitants—wanted more than to see the back of them.
Waiting on the runway of the Bangkok airport after several failed attempts to gain sufficient altitude, Jane was doing the complex figuring on the odds of her surviving another run on one of the “war wearies.” It was a relatively short flight to Singapore, but the prospect did not look promising. After some debate, the crew decided to inspect the engines and discovered a dead raven in one of them. Sure it was a sign, Jane refused to get back on board. Howard had to “physically push” her onto the plane. Once she got to Calcutta, she put her foot down. She declined a priority flight to Washington and instead took the first troopship headed for New York. It would take a month, but at least she would make it home in one piece. Shortly after they set out, the ship’s captain, on hearing she was an artist, asked her to paint a large canvas to serve as a kind of banner when they pulled into New York harbor. The USS A. W. Greely would be one of the first ships returning from the China theater, and he wanted to make an entrance. She submitted a series of sketches, and inevitably he chose the one she liked least: “It showed a huge G.I. in a rickshaw pulled by an Asian in a conical hat. The G.I. had a cigar in his mouth and had his feet up. Around the rickshaw were little Japanese soldiers running in all directions, with the flag of the Rising Sun lying in tatters.”
For most of the thirty-day crossing, Jane worked on the enormous painting, which covered a six-hundred-square-foot stretch of canvas. When they reached New York harbor on December 6, the captain draped it triumphantly over the side of the ship. The phalanx of photographers on the dock captured it in all its glory, and it received more publicity than any other painting Jane had ever done. It made her “shudder” just to think of it.
A handful of friends were at Pier 88 to meet her. She could tell by their raised eyebrows and slightly dismayed expressions that she must look a sight. It was an icy mid-December morning, and she was dressed in her threadbare tropical uniform—a khaki shirt and skirt, tightly belted because it was now two sizes too large, WAC shoes, and no stockings. One of the Red Cross girls on the boat had lent her a sweater. As soon as she could, Jane telephoned her parents in San Francisco. When the exclamations of joy had subsided, her mother, who always had her priorities straight, asked, “Darling, do you have clothes?”
Over the next few days, Jane went on a shopping binge using her mother’s charge accounts at Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, and Henri Bendel. On December 11, armed with a new Mark Cross bag, she took the train to Washington. She reported to the old Q Building, where the remaining operational part of the OSS was still located. Much had changed since she had left for Ceylon. Most of “the heavy-duty thinkers” in the R & A divisions had been assigned to the State Department, while the so-called “thin rapiers of steel” in the operational units had been transferred to the War Department.
A wave of nostalgia hit her as she negotiated the familiar maze of corridors and peered into offices filled with cardboard boxes, and she stepped blindly into one long room only to find herself suddenly face to face with a group of her old colleagues: “No longer in khaki outfits with sleeves rolled up and with black sweat stains under the arms and on the backs, but in beautifully tailored winter uniforms. Each chest was displaying rows and rows of ribbons (‘fruit salad,’ as it was called then) and each shoulder was sporting a shiny new eagle of a full (or ‘chicken’) colonel.” Even Bob Koke, who had scarcely bothered with shoes when she first knew him on Kuta beach, was all spit and polish. She felt a great rush of affection for them—her “comrades-in-arms.” In the difficult, sometimes dangerous times over the past two years, they had been her blood brothers, her closest friends, “her family.” To cover up her unaccustomed sentimentality, she leaned against the door, folded her arms, and announced in a droll voice, “Well, well! As the Chinese say, the sky is black with chickens coming home to roost.”
Jane handed in her assessment of the situation in Indonesia—a fat document that she had labored over for many hours on the ship, writing and rewriting it until she was satisfied. She had always been given free rein in expressing her opinions about the military and political disarray she had witnessed, and she felt no need to hold back now, despite the wider distribution that her final report would probably receive. The long voyage had given her time to summarize the trend of developments and crystallize her thoughts about the lessons of the U.S. experience there. The Allied victory over Japan had not restored the prewar order in Indonesia or, for that matter, in most of Southeast Asia. Dutch rule was most likely doomed, and the French were under attack in Indochina. The Philippines and Burma were preparing for independence, and even India, with all its explosive potential, was on the road toward a similar goal. It spelled the end of European domination in that part of the world. “The Japanese had planted a time bomb in Southeast Asia, which was nationalism, through showing that the white man could be defeated by a yellow people,” Jane wrote. “All the troops, shipping, arms, and supplies would be unable to suppress the nationalist movements.” This thesis was supported by some thirty pages of research consisting of a chronology and her detailed analysis of day-to-day events. What she could have added, but did not, were these lines from a Kipling ballad: “Then, underneath the cold official word: / ‘This is not really half of what occurred.’” *
The minute her report landed on the desk at headquarters, it was stamped “Top Secret.” It struck her as laughable that anything so painfully obvious could be considered confidential.
She was asked to stay on in Washington for another day, as Under-secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted a chance to debrief her. Jane found Acheson to be “a gentleman of the old school”—conservative, European-oriented, but very competent. He listened to her attentively, questioned her closely, but did not argue. After spending several hours with him, she was asked to report to the State Department’s Abbot Low Moffat, head of the Divis
ion of Southeast Asian Affairs, an anti-colonialist who was a holdover from the Roosevelt/Donovan years. Also present was John F. Cady, a Burma analyst for OSS during the war who had been transferred to the Office of Intelligence Research for South Asia, and Richard Allen, representing North European Affairs. As by that time departmental personnel from the European side determined policy—the Russian threat had clear priority—while the old CBI hands were comparatively unimportant, Allen’s was the loudest voice in the room.
Jane again described the situation in Indonesia and Vietnam as it appeared to her and patiently answered their questions. It soon became clear that Allen had an issue with the whole idea of Indonesian independence and found it suspect. He argued that Indonesia could never be a unified nation (“there are about a thousand islands and they all speak a different language”) and was still very much a Dutch colony. Jane politely pointed out that she had traveled through all of the larger islands and that all the inhabitants spoke a lingua franca—Malay.
“Sukarno is a traitor and a Japanese collaborator,” Allen objected.
Jane tried to explain that it was not as black-and-white as that. It was not at all clear that Sukarno deserved to be classified simply as a puppet quisling of the Japanese. He had a long prewar record as a champion of Indonesian independence. It was true that the Japanese, once they saw that they could not win the war, had tried to turn the Indo-nesians—along with other colonial Southeast Asian peoples—against the Allies, including the United States. This shift in policy had changed the Japanese propaganda complexion. The Japanese had actively encouraged the anti-Dutch nationalist movement led by Sukarno, but their endeavors had met with relatively little success. Jane knew that some nationalist leaders in other countries—Dr. Ba Maw of Burma, for one—had collaborated with the Japanese more than they had any excuse for doing, but in her view Sukarno did not fit that mold. She firmly believed he was anti-Japanese at heart and that he had had no choice but to cooperate with the occupying Japanese army. “Sukarno has always been a nationalist, who has agitated against the Dutch his whole life,” Jane said heatedly. “To him, Dutch and Japanese overlord-ship is the same thing.”
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