ARMED FORCES: Through the Looking Glass

• Share

If any one emotion dominated the mind of Master Sergeant Elmer C. Bender when he crawled out of his bunk on the morning of October 19, 1948, it was boredom. The sergeant, a debonair, dark-browed Marine Corps pilot, was at the U.S. Naval base at Tsingtao, China, and the Chinese, it was true, were having themselves some kind of a war only a few miles away. But it wasn't Sergeant Bender's war. He decided to get in a little flying time, asked a big, tousle-headed Navy chief electrician's mate named William C. Smith to go along for the ride.

The two got into a single-engined Stinson monoplane and buzzed off from an airstrip near Tsingtao. They vanished completely. The Navy sent out searching planes. In the months which followed, both the Navy and the State Department repeatedly asked the Chinese Communists for information about them. The Communists simply did not reply. But three weeks ago, after holding them captive for 19 months, the Chinese "People's Liberation Army" put the two men on a steamship bound for Hong Kong.

Steaks & Jabs. After that all sorts of improbable things began to happen to them. A U.S. destroyer boiled up alongside the steamship and took them off. A Navy plane flew them from Hong Kong to Pearl Harbor. On arrival they were hustled away to a hospital and supplied with steaks, ice cream, vitamin pills and new uniforms. Doctors tapped and jabbed them; intelligence officers quizzed them about the world revolution.

They were also bombarded by a steady hail of wealth, both real and potential. Smith drew $1,367 in back pay; Bender more than $3,000. They began getting dizzying offers (the Navy estimated that they might split $100,000) from publishers, magazines, radio and television companies. When they walked into a glare of newsreel lights at Pearl Harbor for a press conference, they acted as if they had gone through some 20th Century looking glass and into a world where everybody had gone completely, if delightfully, nuts.

Coonily resolved not to give away any verbal valuables, they discussed their experiences as reticently as poker players being questioned about a good hand. But it was soon obvious that Communist China too had been a kind of never-never land for them, a place full of benign Oriental maniacs with no respect for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

The People's Army had grabbed them almost as soon as they landed—ignominiously out of gas—on a beach near Tsingtao; to their amazement they were treated simultaneously as prisoners of war and as friends and possible converts. They were marched off to a distant village, but were neither jailed nor put to work. Their guards—soldiers, who "would have made a Marine top sergeant blow his top"—supplied them with rice, gave them fish and meat when it was available.

They were taken to Chinese plays and once saw a newsreel—of a May Day parade in Moscow. When the Communists celebrated a victory they even got native corn whisky. "Wow," said Bender. "We had some bourbon the other night and it tasted like water." But after months of escorted wandering about the village they became hopeless and depressed.