John Birch, Missionary, Army Intelligence Officer, and Martyr on the Political Right

When WWII broke out, US military intelligence looked for two types of Americans that had intimate knowledge of the topography and language of little-known terrain: plantation owners and Christian missionaries. Many of the former served as “coast watchers” on Pacific Islands like Guadalcanal.

John Birch was a Baptist missionary on mainland China. When Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing team had to crash land in the country, Birch went from wreckage to wreckage to save them. His knowledge of Chinese and his devout patriotism didn’t go unnoticed by the US military, who made him an Army Intelligence Officer.

Birch knew nothing of the John Birch Society that later bore his name, though he would have approved the conservative patriotism of that group. Birch was, in fact, the first American casualty of the Cold War, which started at the end of World War II. Birch was executed on August 25, 1945, by Mao’s Communist forces. As such, he will always be an exemplary martyr for those on the political right.

Read this site’s report on John Birch and the Jimmy Doolittle raid of April 18, 1942, including a photographic essay and a veteran’s firsthand account of that attack on Tokyo.