An American Marine and the Chinese Communists in WWII
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About the talk:
In the late 1930s on a personal mission from FDR, US Marine officer Evans Carlson
traveled for several months on foot and horseback behind Japanese lines in occupied
North China in the company of Chinese communist guerrillas. He came out of the experience
as an apostle of guerrilla warfare, advocating direct US military cooperation with
Mao’s communists against the Japanese, and after Pearl Harbor he tried to bring his
lessons from China home by creating the first modern special forces unit in the US
military, a battalion of Marine Raiders he trained on the model of the Chinese communist
fighters. He would lead his Raiders to national fame in the Pacific, but would die
in 1947 in disgrace for his communist sympathies, simultaneously one of the most decorated
Marines of his era and also—in the words of the Baltimore Sun—as ”the black sheep
of the United States Marine Corps.” Based on the speaker’s new biography of Carlson,
The Raider, this talk will give a series of snapshots of Carlson’s life, as a parable
of the fraught alliance between the United States and China in WWII.
About the speaker:
Stephen R. Platt is a historian of China and the West whose books include Autumn in
the Heavenly Kingdom (Knopf, 2012), which won the Cundill History Prize, and Imperial
Twilight (Knopf, 2018), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. His newest
book is The Raider (Knopf, 2025). He is a professor of history at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
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