12 Typed Letters Signed, to Major and Mrs. J.L. Knapp, Fort Knox, Kentucky. Total of 31pp, March 23 to Nov. 10, 1945, from Panama (1), France (2), Kunming, China (1), the China-Indochina border (5), Hanoi (2) and Haiphong (1). 10 with original mailing envelopes, most with censorship marks, signed by Gallagher as “General Officer’s Mail”.Panama: Headquarters, Mobile Force, New Orleans. March 23, 1945, 3pp.
Gallagher was a 48 year-old Brigadier General, a West Point graduate who had dutifully spent the first years of World War II as Commandant of Cadets at the Military Academy. Spring 1945 found him unhappily assigned to dull logistical jobs in Panama and France, begging in vain for a combat assignment. Finally, after VE Day, he was transferred to China as a senior American liaison officer with the “difficult” job of teaching “American methods” to Chinese officers “steeped in traditional methods of many hundreds of years.” Having been stationed in China before the War, he was only moderately “shocked” by the “dirt and poverty” and infant starvation he witnessed, “50 times as bad as anywhere in Europe”. Assigned to a Chinese Combat Command at the border of French Indochina, his “main job” was “getting along” with General Lu Han, his Chinese opposite number who commanded a vast army waiting to invade the Japanese-occupied French colony of Annam (Vietnam). Billeted in a simple stone building “with a toilet that really flushes”, Gallagher was excited to take “rugged” inspection trips by jeep and horseback down to the Indochina frontier, though suffering an accidental wound from a mortar fragment. He was wondering if the war in China might go on for years when he learned in August of Japan’s surrender, news which “came so suddenly over here it caught us all by surprise” and “found us all offensive-minded, with very little preparations having been made along peace lines”. With few Washington policy directives, “we had to pretty much stumble around in the dark to find out what we were working for exactly” now that the fighting had ended. On September 4, he left his border post to accompany Lu Han to Hanoi, capital of French Indochina, to oversee the 80,000 Chinese troops who streamed into Vietnam to “liberate” the country. Aware that he was living through a “a very interesting and history-making time”, Gallagher found little time to write to his friends after finding Hanoi in the hands of Vietnamese revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh, the veteran Communist who had just declared independence from French rule, appealing to the anti-colonial sentiments of the first American officers he met. Gallagher himself was soon entirely absorbed in the logistical “headache” of transporting thousands of Lu Han’s unwanted troops out of the port of Haiphong – the Chinese themselves having “as much idea for organization for such an operation as a bunch of children”. He had little sense of the revolutionary drama unfolding in Hanoi, casually writing his friends in late October, “Things have quieted down materially here the last few weeks, except for a flareup over the weekend when the Annamese revolutionaries started beating up Frenchmen again…” By November, when he finally left Vietnam, being “terribly fed up” with his Chinese counterparts and longing to “live in a comfortable house with a lot of servants and not too much work to do”, Gallagher had no inkling that he had witnessed the start of a bloody thirty-year war.