John Birch (missionary)

The John Birch Society (JBS), an American anti-communist organization, was named in his memory by Robert H. W. Welch Jr. in 1958. Welch considered Birch to be a martyr and the first casualty of the Cold War. Birch's parents joined the JBS as honorary life members.

Birch is mainly known today by the society that bears his name. The John Birch Society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana, during a two-day session on December 8 and 9, 1958, by a group of twelve led by Robert W. Welch Jr., a retired candy manufacturer and Conservative political activist from Belmont, Massachusetts. In 1954, Welch authored the first book about Birch titled The Life of John Birch: In the story of one American boy, the ordeal of his age. He organized the JBS to promote less government, more responsibility, and a better world. Welch named the new organization after Birch, saying that Birch was an unknown but dedicated anti-communist, and the first American casualty of the Cold War. Jimmy Doolittle, U.S. Army, Retired, who met Birch in China after Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, Japan, said in his 1994 autobiography: "[Birch] had no way of knowing that the John Birch Society, a highly vocal postwar anticommunist organization, would be named after him because its founders believed him to be the 'first casualty of World War III.' I feel sure he would not have approved."

In 1945, Birch, now a captain, was seconded to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S. wartime intelligence service in World War II. At first, he criticized the OSS, wanting only to work for Chennault. V-J Day, August 14, signaled the end of formal hostilities, but under terms of the Japanese surrender, the Japanese Army was ordered to continue occupying the areas it controlled until they could be surrendered to the Nationalist government, even in places where the Chinese Communist-led government had been the de facto state for a decade. This led to continued fighting as the Chinese communists sought to expel all Japanese imperial forces, which it perceived to include U.S. personnel, who were then openly collaborating with the remaining Japanese forces.

After the formal Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, OSS agents in China were ordered to northern China to take the surrender of Japanese commanders at their installations. The Chinese Communists, who controlled much of the mountainous area, were supposedly allies with the United States, but were not allowed to accept the surrender. Birch told a friend that he was not worried about going into Communist controlled territory, since he had worked with Communists many times and had little trouble with them.

U.S. Senator William F. Knowland attempted unsuccessfully to obtain posthumous awards for Birch, including the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart, but these were not approved on the grounds that the United States was not at war with the Communist Chinese in 1945. Captain Birch received the following military awards:

Birch served with the China Air Task Force under Chennault, which became the Fourteenth Air Force in March 1943. He operated alone or with Nationalist Chinese soldiers, and often risked his life in Japanese held territory. His activities included setting up intelligence networks of sympathetic Chinese, supplying Chennault with information on Japanese troop movements and shipping. He continued to hold Sunday church services for Chinese Christians. He set up radio intelligence networks, rescued downed American pilots, and had two emergency aircraft runways built. He received the Legion of Merit from Chennault on July 17, 1944.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, added patriotic anger to Birch's outrage at Japanese atroticities in China. He was also finding it harder and harder to survive in Shangrao, and his diet made it harder and harder to maintain his health, already weakened by disease. He may also have started to doubt the mission bureaucrats, who soured him on organized religion. On April 13, 1942, he wrote to the American Military Mission in China say that for both patriotic and practical reason he wanted to "jine the Army." He explained that he had been preaching behind Japanese lines for more than a year but was "finding it increasingly hard to do on an empty stomach (no word or funds from home since November)." He wanted to be a chaplain but would cheerfully ""tote' a rifle" or " whatever they tell me to do."

In April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his flight crew bailed out over China after the Tokyo raid, the first surprise attack on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Their B-25 bomber was the first aircraft of sixteen B-25s flown off the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) for the raid. After bombing Tokyo and out of fuel during their one-way flight, Doolittle and his four crewmembers bailed out over southeastern China in mountainous terrain as planned. They were rescued by Chinese civilians and smuggled by river safely out of Japanese lines by a sampan in Zhejiang Province by Birch who was informed of their being hidden in the riverboat. When Doolittle arrived in China's wartime capital, Chungking (Chongqing), he told Colonel Claire Chennault, commander of the Flying Tigers (First American Volunteer Group-AVG, of the Chinese Air Force), about Birch's help, Chennault said he needed a Chinese-speaking American who knew the country well. After later talks with Birch who helped in the urgent finding and recovery of most of the Doolittle Raiders in China, about his experiences in China, Chennault who was now a brigadier general, commissioned Birch as a second lieutenant at Chungking on July 5, 1942 to work as a field intelligence officer for him. Birch had first wanted to serve as a chaplain. The AVG was disbanded on July 4, and replaced by the 23rd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces; Birch became a member of the 23rd Fighter Group which took on the AVG's nickname "Flying Tigers" and the Curtiss P-40 Warhawks shark teeth nose art.

In July, Birch arrived in Shanghai, which was in Japanese administered territory, although Americans were considered neutral citizens. and began an intensive study of Mandarin Chinese. A few months later, he was assigned to Hangzhou which was also occupied by the Japanese. In October 1941, he left Hangzhou, going by a harrowing foot-trip, narrowly escaping Japanese fire, to run a mission station in Shangrao, in northwest Jiangsi. The area was poor and isolated, but Birch reassured his parents that although malaria and dengue fever had "knocked me down a bit" (weighed 155 pounds), he was "coming back up," eating rice and vegetables with Chinese workers, and milk, besides. His Chinese became good enough that he could preach a short sermon.

In the States, his parents left the Presbyterian Church, and Birch was raised and baptized in the Fundamental Baptist tradition. He lived in Vineland, New Jersey and Crystal Springs and Macon, Georgia. He graduated from Gore High School at the head of his class in Chattooga County, Georgia. Afterwards, he enrolled at Georgia Baptist–affiliated Mercer University in Macon. "He was always an angry young man, always a zealot", said a classmate many years later, saying that Birch "felt he was called to defend the faith, and he alone knew what it was." In his senior year, he joined a group of students who opposed liberal tendencies at the university. They brought charges of "heresy" against some professors, such as holding the theory of evolution, and the university held a day-long hearing in the chapel. Defenders of the professors posted a sign on the door: "Do Not Enter: Spanish Inquisition in Progress". The charges were dismissed, but the incident made Birch and the group unpopular on campus, and he later regretted the "teacher episode." He graduated in 1939 magna cum laude with the highest grade average in his class.

Birch decided to become a missionary when he was twelve years old. After college, he enrolled in J. Frank Norris' Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute in Fort Worth, Texas. Norris had visited Shanghai in 1939, two years after the Japanese invasion had started the Second Sino-Japanese War, and returned full of enthusiasm for “the marvelous opportunity to proclaim Gospel and win souls.” Birch, who was eager to finish his studies and had studied many of the topics before, completed the two-year curriculum in one year. He graduated at the head of his class in June 1940 and prepared to join Shanghai mission of Norris' World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship (now the World Baptist Fellowship). When Norris and some 150 members of the church gathered to send Birch and a friend off to China, Norris said they went “fully informed as to the dangers that await them, but they go like the Apostle Paul when he knew that it meant death at Jerusalem.” Birch left his family with the words “Goodbye, folks, If we don’t meet again on earth, we’ll meet in heaven.”

Birch was born to Presbyterian missionaries in Landour, a hill station in the Himalayas now in the northern India state of Uttarakhand, at the time in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. His parents, Ethel (Ellis) and George S. Birch who were college graduates, were on a three-year period missionary service in the country, working under Sam Higginbottom. In 1920, when he was two, the family left India and returned to the United States due to his father having malaria. John Birch was the oldest of seven children.

John Morrison Birch (May 28, 1918 – August 25, 1945) was a United States Army Air Forces military intelligence captain, OSS agent in China during World War II, as well as former Baptist minister and missionary. He was killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist soldiers during an assignment he was ordered on by the OSS, ten days after the war ended. Birch was posthumously awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal.