BBC TO CHUNGKING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 298, 9 March 1945, Page 10

BBC TO CHUNGKING

Five Years With The Friends’ Ambulance Unit In Wayback China

66 OMEONE called while you were out," said the typist, "someone very handsome and exciting-looking. Is he a Pole?" "No, indeed," said I, "he’s’ just too awflly BBC." "He didn’t speak a bit like it," she insisted. "It was some foreign accent." "Welsh," I explained. "But Wilym Jenkins is a BBC singer, actor, and writer-when he’s at home. Only he has been in China-wayback China-since the war started." "Perhaps," she said doubtfully. "But that doesn’t account for his uniform." . * * %* "THE photographer, however, recognised — ‘" the uniform at once. "You fellows were just as useful to us in Africa as the Army itself," he commented. "You kept right up with us and got your . trucks to places where no one else seemed able to." ee "That’s because our men are all mechanics as well as medical hands," said Jenkins. "That goes for wherever our Units operate, from Finland or Yugoslavia to India or Abyssinia, and it makes for mobility. Any man in the Army," he explained to me while the shutter clicked, "can see at a glance that, despite the tropical khaki, I don’t belong to any of the Armed Forces of any nation. You see where -a rank badge would normally be, on my _ shoulder, there is a designation instead. But I’ve given up answering ‘Friends’ Ambulance Unit’ to civilians who ask what F.A.U. on my shoulder means. I found they always replied either, ‘O yes, French,’ or else, ‘Oh, I see, Friends of the Soviet Union.’ Nowadays I just say ‘Quaker Ambulance.’ " ~ The China Convoy "Were you ambulancing in China?" I asked, op tte

"Not precisely," said Jenkins, "I went out to explore the prospects in 1939 and my most ticklish early job was going down into Indo-China after the Japanese had arrived and getting a cargo of medical supplies up to Free China under their noses. It nearly failed at the end because the Chinese had blown up the frontier bridge and I had*to cut through the jungle to a place where we could build bamboo rafts and pole them over among the rapids. After that more volunteers and trucks arrived at the Chinese Government’s invitation, and we started the regular Burma Road service. About halt of our fellows are still on the transport. system, while the other half do / civilian or front-line medical work." "But how can you convoy with the Burma Road closed?"

"Well, all we ever carried were medical supplies. (Our personnel on all of the dozen or so fronts where the F.A.U. operates, I must make clear, hold the traditional Quaker position regarding peace and war.) These supplies still come-not nearly enough, but still as much as we can handle-over ‘the hump’ by air. Then we run them north and east. Our north route goes 2,000 miles nearly to Outer Mongolia. Our east route winds around nearly as far to cover territory and avoid the Japanese and ends up just behind the Pacific Coast opposite the Philippines. We drop goods off as we go along to be picked up by local government or mission trucks-where there are any. In turn these pass them on, to travel by pack ‘horses, or human backs, into the less

accessible places. So you can say the Convoy serves, ‘wholesale’ as it were, practically all Free China." "Cannibal" Trucks "But what fuel can you run your lorries on for these terrific distances?" "Obviously not imported petrol. Actually, most burn charcoal. And we use some bean oil, But fortunately our northern run ends near the Kansu oilfield and we come back loaded up. Though, mind you, more than a third of the load is needed just to bring the rest back. Keeping the trucks patched up is the worst trouble. Since it is impossible to bring any more in, we have to do it by ‘cannibalism.’ Of the 41 trucks we started off with, 14 have disappeared into the remaining 27 as spare parts. Roads are something new to China, of course, Often they are cut along the sides of terrific mountains and always they are simply foundations without surfacing. "But merely having kept our trucks screwed and wired together for six years means a lot to a country where transport always is the bottleneck. Even in peacetime, rice or oranges may be dirt cheap in one valley, while over the range just ten miles away-but ten miles straight up and straight down by footpaths only -you may find near-starvation. Again, just the mere example of our fellows’ scrupulous attention to little knocks and noises in their trucks is doing a job in itself. It is teaching some Chinese how to look after machinery." "An UNRRA Type of Work" "You spoke of another half of your men. What do they do?" (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) "Some do regular ambulance work along'the Burma front. Others are doing civilian health work-at Government request of course-in the backward corner of Yunnan, where women still have bound feet and a village headman may have several wives. But there is also an UNRRA type of work. It consists in shifting in to some town that has been knocked flat and building life there up from the bottom again. I am thinking of one place, for example, where a girl walked four days--one of those days under Japanese gunfire-to start a hospital, where she is to-day the only European in hundreds of square miles. When community life is got going again in such a place our team just hands over everything we have built up-build-ings, plant, supplies and organisationto the provincial authorities and move on to the next blitzed village." "And will this work carry on when UNRRA itself gets going?" "Tt will have to. Because the F.A.U. has been called up by the China Relief and Rehabilitation * Administration, through which UNRRA will work in China, to remain and to expand as a channel for supplies. You see, our men know the language. They don’t ask for special rations or conditions, but live on the Chinese level right among the Chinese themselves. And they have stood alongside them in the toughest places right through the war." Replacements Wanted "And how are they standing up to it?" "Our men you mean? Some are pretty well done in after five years in China without a break and must be pulled out soon. Mostly they came from Britain and America. But it is up to you Pacific countries to replace them. Capability and a solidly-based Christian outlook are what we require in volunteers. And from. an international point of view you can think of them as helping to cement good-neighbourly relations among Pacific nations-the sort of people the Chinese will listen to now and after the war." "Two things more, Mr. Jenkins, that we have to ask a visitor from China: First, what really is the political situation there? Second (of course), what do you think of us?"

"The political situation? Well, all I will say at the moment is that there are bigger dangers to Chinese unity and welfare from certain elements in the Kuomintang than from the Communists. Chiang Kai-shek has the difficult task of directing a social revolution in the middle of a desperate war. "As for New Zealand, the convenience of life and your spaciousness is what strikes me after inland China in wartime. I start walking to see someone, and then I realise there is a tram I could use, or a telephone. I look out of the train window and I see hundreds of miles between the rails and the fence that would be in use growing crops in China. I am invited to dinner, and there is milk, lots of it, with body in it, and food to spare and to waste-three times a day."