By Philip Chin

I deliberately decided not to name my father in this piece, because I felt he would have wanted his story, and the story of my family, while unique in itself, to be part of the greater story of what Chinese Americans faced in American history.

On July 4th, I received the Congressional Gold Medal that honored my late father’s World War II service at a ceremony held in San Francisco’s Chinatown. This special award is the highest civilian honor granted by the Congress of the United States. As I sat in the audience I listened to speech after speech talking about how the Chinese, about 20,000 of them, voluntarily fought for a country that didn’t want or accept them. A country that in fact only repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 out of fear that Japanese propaganda would use such evidence of America’s anti-Asian laws and sentiments to convince China to come to a separate peace.

I had very mixed feelings as I listened, as I knew so much of Chinese American history, and of my own family history, had been touched by American racism. All it took was seeing the numerous surgical masks among audience members to remind me of accusations of the “Chinese virus” and the physical and verbal attacks that have resulted since 2020.

I also remembered my father saying he was drafted and had no choice but to fight in the war. He had no hatred for the Germans. He said they were doing their jobs in shooting at him just like he was in bombing their cities. I suspect a lot of Chinese Americans of the time felt that way since their main concerns lay with their friends and relatives in China instead of with anything that was happening in Europe.

Nevertheless, the Chinese Americans contributed the highest percentage of their population, about 22% to military service of any other ethnic group in the US during WWII. Approximately 40% of those that wore American uniforms and took the same loyalty oaths as Americans weren’t actual American citizens because the Chinese Exclusion Act had explicitly banned all foreign born Chinese from naturalization to become American citizens.

My father’s family history with the United States dates back to the 1870s, just before passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This was why both my grandfather and father were born as Americans and my great-grandfather wasn’t deported. According to family lore, my great-grandfather worked as a railroad cook before moving into the restaurant/café business.

Around 1900, the family moved to Deadwood, South Dakota. Deadwood in those days was a boom town in the midst of a literal gold rush in the Black Hills, attracting hordes of miners looking to strike it rich from around the world, as well as the good and bad people looking to profit from those riches. Deadwood was where my grandfather grew up in an area and at a time when the Wild West and the Indian Wars were still a vibrant living memory among many locals. The town itself was even more crowded by the influx of immigrants seeking their American dream in the mines. In the US Census pages for 1900 that I saw at the National Archives, they came from such faraway places as Barbados, Zanzibar, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Ireland, China, and many other locations around the world. It must have been quite a wild place. Family lore even has it that the local Sioux Native Americans found the Chinese living in their midst so exotic and strange that they’d peer in through the windows at them.

I covered my grandfather’s adventures with the American immigration service in an earlier AACP newsletter article (June 2003) when he went back to China to get a wife in 1916. Despite being an American citizen born in San Francisco, he still had to register with the government under the terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act, be investigated by the Immigration Service, and prove he had the right to be allowed back into the US as a citizen before he was allowed to leave for China. After publishing that article, I received a copy of his draft registration card for World War I from Eileen French, a historian friend in South Dakota. On it, someone from the draft board had written that my grandfather claimed to have been in China when the draft registration requirement had been implemented when America entered World War I in April 1917, and hadn’t heard of the requirement or received his draft notice when he came back to the United States in July 1917, as evidenced by a steamship ticket he provided as evidence. They accepted his explanation and excused his failure to register but oddly failed to note why he’d waited until June 1918 to register, nearly a year after he returned from China. World War I ended that November.

The family had already moved to Chadron, Nebraska by 1918 when my grandfather faced the draft board. One short lived uncle was born and died there before the family moved back to San Francisco where my father was born. He remembered growing up in a very different time in San Francisco history, one in which movies only cost a nickel, gasoline a dime, and steak dinners a quarter, but also a time when Chinese rarely dared leave the confines of Chinatown because of the violent attacks that would be perpetrated outside the safety of Chinatown’s boundaries.

My father’s war service started after he was drafted in 1942 and he was assigned to the 490th Bombardment Group (Heavy) that flew B-24 bombers. He was trained as an aerial gunner at Mountain Home Airfield in Idaho before flying to England via Florida, Brazil, and North Africa in April 1944. My father said that when he was assigned to his first aircrew at Mountain Home, the pilot took one look at him and said flat out that he didn’t want no Chinese on his aircrew and had him immediately transferred to another crew.

Dad served as a tail and waist gunner on the B-24 bomber and then on the B-17 bomber when the group transitioned over to that type during their combat service at RAF Eye airfield in southeast England. Once he mentioned witnessing a plane developing engine failure on takeoff and crashing at the end of the runway. With tons of bombs on board, a full load of fuel, and machine-gun ammunition, there wasn’t enough left of the crewmen’s bodies to pick up with a spoon. It was a dangerous job being a bomber crewman in the 8th Air Force during World War II. Out of 158 missions, 40 bombers were lost from the 490th Bomb Group during World War II through accidents and combat. The 8th Air Force as a whole lost 4145 heavy bombers. Considering each plane carried an average of ten crewmembers, that added up to a lot of deaths, injuries, and prisoners of war.

Even leisure time wasn’t safe. He remembered taking leave and traveling to London and then being stuck on an overcrowded train halted on the tracks in the British capital when a German V1 flew overhead. The V1 was the early German version of the modern cruise missile. When the missile’s distinctive engine buzz stopped the passengers on the train began screaming in panic as everyone knew the missile was about to strike and it sounded like it was dropping right on their heads. It would take only seconds for gravity to bring the missile into impact with the ground and set off the ton of explosives each missile carried. One missile alone could destroy an entire city block, as many parts of London witnessed in 1944-45. Luckily the missile exploded about a half mile away and the train was unharmed.

I asked him about his experiences of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944. He said his squadron had the day off that day and only flew over Normandy on June 7th. With bomb bay doors open over the English Channel in preparation for bombarding the German beach defenses, he said someone in one of the other bombers prematurely started dropping their bombs into the water. The rest of the squadron, in a panic thinking that they’d somehow missed the attack order, all started dropping their bombs into the English Channel together, walking their bombs from the water into the Allied positions on the beaches. He never found out the results of that mistake in casualties or damage since nobody wanted to publicize such mistaken attacks because that would damage morale.

Most of all he remembered repeated attacks against the railway marshalling yards in Cologne, Germany and other German cities. Photos I’ve seen of the bomb damage near the marshaling yards in Cologne show miles of destroyed city buildings as far as the camera could see. Without the precision of a guided bomb that a single aircraft could drop today, World War II bombers had to mass drop an enormous number of bombs within the general area of a target and hope to have just a few hit and destroy the target. The inhabitants of a targeted city, and the buildings they lived in, even those miles away from the actual target, would be completely pulverized and destroyed in such attacks. World War II was an ugly war for many more reasons than just the Holocaust and other atrocities that have received far more publicity.

Dad was wounded in the leg by German flak in December 1944 and spent Christmas in a hospital in England where he got his Purple Heart. He said the hospital staff played Lord Haw Haw all the time over the loudspeakers in the hospital. Lord Haw Haw was the derisive nickname given to the aristocratic sounding English voice that appeared in German propaganda radio that was broadcast in hopes of lowering Allied morale. Playing German propaganda radio designed to lower their morale to wounded Americans in a hospital was a very odd choice of radio programs, but then it could have been for the comedy value that such broadcasts unintentionally may have had. German claims to still be winning the war when they were obviously losing by the beginning of 1945 must have seemed increasingly ridiculous, especially after their defeat in the Battle of the Bulge that ended in January.

Whatever the case, Dad finally finished the required number of combat missions and returned to the US, serving the rest of the war at a bomber training base in Texas. I asked him once which facilities he used while he was there, the whites or the coloreds. Segregation was an ugly fact of life in the South for many years even after World War II. He said he used the whites only facilities and nobody said a thing. Then he added quietly, “It’s another example of how stupid white people are.” Under the circumstances of the time, with segregation and openly expressed racism, many American minorities probably felt the same way about whites, but of course they would have never expressed such a sentiment publicly. The racism was just something they painfully learned and constantly experienced in their daily lives until it became fixed in their worldview. Racism and discrimination doesn’t increase the respect the victims have for the people that carry it out but fear, distrust, and contempt are the legacies left behind by it. One only has to look at the current state of race relations in America to see that poison at work.

An amusing note is that while my father’s discharge papers had three categories for Race on it – White, Negro, and Other – he was marked as White by the discharge officer. As far as the US Army Air Forces were concerned, despite all evidence to the contrary, my Chinese father was White!

He returned to San Francisco to the family apartment on Clay Street in October or November 1945. According to family lore, when his father answered the door he turned as white as a sheet and exclaimed, “Are you my son or are you a ghost?” Evidently, when my father was wounded in December 1944, the War Department, instead of sending a Wounded in Action telegram, had mistakenly sent one of those dreaded, “We regret to inform you….” telegrams informing his father that his son had been killed in action. Evidently the family wasn’t much for keeping in touch as nobody had any idea that he was still alive until he scared everyone on the doorstep months after the war ended.

Two of my uncles also served in the US military during WWII, one in the Navy and one in the Army, but both held non-combat support roles far from any action. I can only imagine the relief the family must have felt that not only had the three serving sons survived the war, but grandmother and the fourth son had survived the Japanese occupation in China. The family had split apart in 1932, with my grandfather and three US born sons returning to the US from China and my grandmother remaining in China with the youngest son. My father didn’t see his mother from 1932 until well after the end of World War II when the family was finally reunited in China just before the Chinese Revolution in 1949 when they all returned to the US.

After Dad’s war service, he used the GI Bill to help complete his education - first to finish high school and then to get his degree in civil engineering. Dad was fortunate to find work with Caltrans, where he worked for over thirty years. He joined Caltrans at an opportune time as it was at the start of California’s highway construction boom during the 1950s and 60s.

When the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 destroyed the Cypress Structure in Oakland and made world news headlines with pictures of the collapsed upper deck pancaked on top of the lower deck, Dad mentioned that that had been his first design job for Caltrans when he joined. I’m always careful to note though that he wasn’t a structural engineer, responsible for insuring the highway wouldn’t collapse. He was the engineer that designed the curves and straightaways and where to put the on and off ramps.

He also mentioned working on highways in the Central Valley in the 1950s and the work crews uncovering Native American remains and artifacts. Such was the casual and disrespectful attitudes of that time that all such materials were simply tossed into the concrete fill making up the highway, never to be seen again. He rarely talked about his work there, especially the racism, merely noting some resentment that he often trained white engineers that were soon promoted above him. Discrimination against Asian Americans and other minorities was so common and pervasive back then, that there was little use complaining about it since nobody in power cared about such things.

He was an exemplar of the “Greatest Generation” as Tom Brokaw coined that phrase. They’d grown up with hardship during the Great Depression and fought through World War II. Mostly they just got on with life with minimal or no complaints afterwards because they grew up having few or no choices in the face of such worldwide catastrophes.

Dad rarely looked back at his wartime experiences. In fact, I think he actively tried to forget about it. It always took some prodding for him to talk about it. His medals were shoved into the back of a closet and were never brought out during his lifetime. He never joined any veteran’s group or had any contact with members of his bomb group or aircrew after the war. As far as he was concerned he did the job he was drafted to do and that was it, there was nothing else to say about it.

Part of my mixed feelings about the Congressional Gold Medal stem not only from the continued evidence that Chinese Americans are still regarded as perpetual foreigners by a lot of Americans, especially in the age of COVID, but also by the fact that my father probably wouldn’t have felt he deserved such an award for simply doing what he saw as his job. As far as I know, he was the only ethnic minority member in his entire bomber group, but they all faced the same dangers while flying the same missions. So was my father a hero among them as a Chinese American who did his job despite the racism and hardships he endured? That medal would certainly indicate that a grateful nation feels that way. Or was he just someone doing his job like everyone else was, as he probably would have said it? I suppose that is up to history to decide.

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To learn more about the Congressional Gold Medal for Chinese Americans’ service during World War II and to see photos and videos from completed ceremonies, check out the Chinese American WWII Veterans Recognition Project website.

At this website, you’ll also see a list of future ceremonies, a list of names of recipients, and other videos and resources (including a list of websites to find more records on Chinese Americans’ service during). Unfortunately, if your relative is not already listed, it’s too late to register them for this honor.

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For more information about Japanese American World War II veterans and the Congressional Gold Medal that Congress awarded them in 2010, go to the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s web page.

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For more information about Filipino American World War II veterans and the Congressional Gold Medal that Congress awarded them in 2016, go to the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project website.