by John Birch Society, History.com and the Warfare History Network
John Birch was a devoted Christian missionary, and was born in India to missionary parents before moving to the US when he was 2 years old. He became a US military intelligence officer and heroically served in World War II. He was killed by Chinese Communists, who were supposedly US allies, on August 25, 1945, just 10 days after the end of WWII. Captain Birch was only 27 when he embarked on a peaceful Army mission and was shot and stabbed to death; there was a massive coverup by forces within the US government who did not want the American people to know the truth–the communists under Mao Tse-tung were not simply “agrarian reformers,” and they were not our allies.
Statement by G. Edward Griffin:
“I personally researched the facts relating to the legend of John Birch as reported in the book: The Life of John Birch by Robert Welch, and found it to be meticulously accurate. After spending a few days personally interviewing John Birch’s parents and, later, the woman he had hoped to marry, I became infused with great respect and admiration for this young man’s courage and integrity. We are obligated on this day and every day to honor him as a fine human being and a great American.”
Biography of John Birch, from the John Birch Society:
Capt. John Birch was a courageous Baptist missionary who went to China in 1940. When Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led the famous World War II bombing raid on Tokyo, John was brought to the survivors and he helped them to safety, then volunteered, creating an intelligence network that saved countless American lives.
He earned the rank of Captain in the 14th Air Force, as well as numerous commendations, including the Legion of Merit. Ten days after the war officially ended, Captain Birch was brutally killed by Chinese Communists. Mr. Welch discovered that the U.S. government had covered up Birch’s death and was so impressed by his ideals and his character that he requested permission of George and Ethel Birch (John’s parents) to place John’s name on the organization he was going to create. They agreed and immediately became Life members.
The Adventures of Captain John Birch
The John Birch Society’s namesake, Captain John Morrison Birch, made an influential difference in JBS Founder Robert Welch’s life. Most of John Birch’s heroic, meaningful life has gone unnoticed to the average eye, but as Welch discovered, this young man stood up for what he believed in and fought diligently for our country until he tragically died.
Mr. Welch worked on showcasing what Birch’s life signified: communism vs. capitalism, freedom vs. tyranny, and Americanism vs. globalism. We invite you to learn more in understanding his legacy.
Bio: John Birch
Put simply, John Birch was a devoted Christian missionary who heroically served in World War II and was killed by Chinese Communists 10 days after the end of the war, when he was only 27. Communists that were supposedly WWII allies with the U.S.
Birch’s parents had been told that he was killed by a stray bullet, but only after accidentally seeing details of his death due to the carelessness of a young military officer. George and Ethel Birch knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and they didn’t even know that there had been an official investigation. For five years, Ethel traveled the country grilling those men who served with John, from fellow soldiers to commanding officers.
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Finally, she wrote to California Senator William Knowland who finally was given access to John Birch’s file that was marked “Top Secret.” He was so moved by what he saw that he gave a speech on the floor of the Senate on September 5, 1950, berating the government for its cover-up, as the result of bringing John Birch’s death to light could have led to different relations with China and North Korea.
Nearly ten years after Birch’s death, JBS Founder Robert Welch discovered that the death of Captain John Birch had been covered up after reading Knowland’s speech. Welch wrote and had published The Life of John Birch in 1954.
John Birch was a simple, but highly intelligent man, who worked hard to serve God, spread God’s word, and fought for the freedom to do so. During his service in the war, he longed for the day when he could once again work the land, raise a family and dutifully serve God, as seen in the prose he wrote four months before his death called “The War Weary Farmer.”
I should like to find the existence of what my father called “Plain living and high thinking.” I want some fields and hills, woodlands and streams I can call my own. I want to spend my strength in making fields green, and the cattle fat, so that I may give sustenance to my loved ones, and aid to those neighbors who suffer misfortune; I do not want a life of monotonous paper-shuffling or of trafficking with money-mad traders. I only want enough of science to enable fruitful husbandry of the land with simple tools, a time for leisure, and the guarding of my family’s health. I do not care to be absorbed in the endless examining of force and space and matter, which I believe can only slowly lead to God. I do not want a hectic hurrying from place to place on whizzing machines or busy streets. I do not want an elbowing through crowds of impatient strangers who have time neither to think their own thoughts nor to know real friendship. I want to live slowly, to relax with my family before a glowing fireplace, to welcome the visits of my neighbors, to worship God, to enjoy a book, to lie on a shaded grassy bank and watch the clouds sail across the blue. I want to love a wife who prefers rural peace to urban excitement, one who would rather climb a hilltop to watch a sunset with me than to take a taxi to any Broadway play. I want a woman who is not afraid of bearing children, and who is able to rear them with a love for home and the soil, and the fear of God. I want of government only protection against the violence and injustices of evil or selfish men. I want to reach the sunset of life sound in body and mind, flanked by strong sons and grandsons, enjoying the friendship and respect of neighbors, surrounded by fertile fields and sleek cattle, and retaining my boyhood faith in Him who promised a life to come. Where can I find this world? Would its anachronism doom it to ridicule or loneliness? Is there yet a place for such simple ways in my own America or must I seek a vale in [Chinese] Turkestan where peaceful flocks still graze the quiet hills?
Robert Welch explained at the founding meeting of The John Birch Society why he had chosen John as the namesake for the organization. He said,
” …the young man I admire most of all those America has produced was a fundamentalist Baptist missionary named John Birch. My own obsession with this fight against the increasing forces of evil in the world, which … has caused me to give up business career and income and any prospect of ever having any peace or leisure again during my lifetime, is due in large part to my admiration for John Birch; to my feeling that I simply had to pick up and carry, to the utmost of my ability and energy, the torch of a humane righteousness which he was carrying so well and so faithfully when the Communists struck him down.”
Robert Welch discussed the idea with John’s parents, and they agreed to grant permission. They became Life Members of the Society.
John Birch, inspiration to conservatives, killed by Chinese communists
On August 25, 1945, John Birch, an American missionary to China before the war and a captain in the Army during the war, is killed by Chinese communists days after the surrender of Japan, for no apparent reason. His death would inspire a small but vocal group of conservative anticommunists.
After America had entered the war, Birch, a Baptist missionary already in China, was made a liaison between American and Chinese forces fighting the Japanese. But on August 25, Birch, commanding an American Special Services team, was ordered to halt by Chinese communist troops. A scuffle ensued, and according to his commanding officer, Gustave Krause, Birch argued violently with the communist officer trying to disarm him. The Chinese shot Birch and bayoneted him repeatedly. “Birch made the communist lieutenant lose face before his own men,” said Krause. “Militarily, John Birch brought about his own death.”
In the 1950s, Robert Welch would create a right-wing, anticommunist organization called the John Birch Society. For Welch, Birch was “the first casualty in the Third World War between communists and the ever-shrinking Free World.”
From Warfare History Network:
For God and Country: The Story of John Birch
In the 1960s the John Birch Society was well known to most Americans as a right-wing political organization noted for its anti-communism and conspiracy theories. Yet few knew anything at all about the man whose name the organization bore. Most assumed that John Birch founded the society, and even members of the organization knew only that the real John Birch was a missionary who became an intelligence agent in China and died at the hands of Chinese Communists in the closing days of World War II.
While his death as the “first American soldier killed in the war against communism” was considered heroic by adherents of the society’s principles, few knew that Captain John Morrison Birch not only was truly a hero, but that his actions in World War II rival those of the most swashbuckling Hollywood spymaster. Even fewer Christians realize that, even though Birch was an Army Air Forces intelligence officer, he was also a dedicated defender of the faith who continued to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in China even after he had undertaken a new mission serving his country.
John Birch was born on May 28, 1918, in India, where his parents were serving as missionaries. Two years later the family returned to the United States because of his father’s ill health, first settling in New Jersey, then moving to Georgia when John was in his early teens. When the family decided to return to the Birch farm near Macon, John and his younger brother went down and cleaned up an abandoned house for the family to live in and planted the fields, which gave him a strong bond with the land and an appreciation for the outdoors.
Born with keen intelligence, as a boy John was fascinated with airplanes and aeronautics. After the family moved to rural Georgia, he became interested in radios and designed and built his own set, using the cardboard centers from toilet paper rolls and copper wire to make coils. Raised in a devout Christian home, John was baptized into a Baptist church in New Jersey at the age of seven. His parents had left their Presbyterian church because they believed the denomination had become modernist, and they joined a nearby Baptist congregation. When he was 11, John decided to become a missionary after hearing one describe his adventures in South America. After graduating from high school, John enrolled at Mercer University, a Baptist school in Macon, from which he would graduate first in his class.
Two major events occurred during Birch’s years at Mercer. The young man fell under the influence of J. Frank Norris, a legendary and controversial Baptist preacher from Fort Worth, Texas. During a service in Macon, Birch heard Norris tell about the accomplishments of two missionary families in China and how they were praying for a strong young man to come to China to work with them. During the invitation at the conclusion of the service, Birch went forward and told Norris that God was calling him to China and he would go. Shortly afterward, Birch became involved in a campus controversy when he and other members of the ministerial student body brought charges against members of the faculty for teaching things that were contrary to Baptist doctrine. An uproar resulted, and fellow students branded Birch as the vilest person on campus. He was threatened with expulsion but held true to his convictions and refused to go along with demands made by the college dean to cancel a planned city appearance by Norris. The controversy was settled when Norris inexplicably canceled the meeting.
True to his word, immediately after his graduation from Mercer, John Birch began the journey to China by enrolling at Norris’s Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute in Fort Worth. He completed the two-year seminary course in a year, and in the summer of 1940 set sail for Shanghai, along with another graduate named Oscar Wells. They arrived to find a country in disarray, with thousands of refugees from the country crowding the streets and disease and starvation on every corner. China was literally divided, with Japanese troops occupying much of the central coastal areas, Communists in the northern mountains, and Free China to the west. They were met by Fred Donnelson, who took the two new missionaries to his apartment, where they met the other members of the World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship team in China, which consisted of Donnelson and his wife, Effie, an elderly missionary affectionately known as Mother Sweet, and her partner in the mission field, Margaret Fitzgerald.
Birch and Wells enrolled in the Adventist Chinese Language School in Shanghai, where Birch’s zeal and intelligence allowed him quickly to gain a working knowledge of the language. He felt called to minister in the distant towns and villages away from Shanghai and the coast. Hangchow was the city that was on his mind, and he finally got the opportunity to visit it when J. Frank Norris’s associate, Beauchamp Vick of Detroit Baptist Temple came to China.
John was convinced this was where he should minister and he returned to Hangchow in early 1941. From then on, his ministry was in the inland regions of China as he ventured out from Hangchow to preach in the villages and towns in the surrounding no-man’s-land where Chinese guerrillas fought Japanese troops. In August, he was visited by his friend Oscar Wells, who was ministering in Shanghai, where he had met and become engaged to a young female missionary from the Reformed Church. Along with Pastor Du, the Chinese pastor in Hangchow, the two young men set off on a journey to Shangjao, a city in the mountains in Free China almost 200 miles away. Journeying by bicycle and on foot, they slipped through the Japanese lines then made their way westward until they were well into the mountains. As they left Japanese territory, they realized that the food was better and the people happier. When they reached Shangjao, they were directed to the Baptist church and were invited to conduct services that evening. The local Christians were eager to host the missionaries and told Birch that there were many places to the west where they could establish churches. He promised to come back.
Birch made friends with dozens of Chinese pastors during the next few months and established relationships that would later prove beneficial. Many Chinese Christians were involved in the guerrilla movement, while others were members of the Nationalist army. Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Madame Chiang, were both Christians, and Chiang had written a tract about his belief in Jesus Christ that was passed through the ranks of the army. Birch was more than welcome among the Nationalist troops, and he was encouraged to preach to them. But clouds of war were gathering, and American missionaries were told to get out of the country. Many decided that their place was in China, and even though they knew that if the United States entered the war they would be interned, the Donnelsons, Mother Sweet, the Wellses, and Birch all elected to stay.
In November, John was scheduled to take a language exam in Shanghai, so he journeyed through the Japanese lines to Hangchow and caught the train to the city. He finished the exams on a Friday and left the next day for Shangjao. He arrived in Hangchow and visited some Presbyterian missionaries, who encouraged him to spend the weekend. Birch felt he should be on his way and refused the offer; he told his friends that if he did not appear at breakfast with them the next morning, he would have already slipped through the lines on his way into Free China. The next day was Sunday, December 7, in China and Saturday in the United States. Had Birch accepted the invitation to remain in Hangchow for the weekend, he probably would have been interned by the Japanese. He got word of the attack on Pearl Harbor from Chinese soldiers he met on the road.
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