Meng Xiangeng

Meng Xiangeng was a Chinese serviceman who took part in the Second World War. He served in the 1st Tank Battalion of the Chinese Army in India. His surviving military identity document states that he enlisted in May 1944. In the identification photograph attached to the document, he is wearing a standard tank soldier's combat uniform. This photograph is a rare surviving original image of a Chinese tank soldier who served with the Chinese Army in India. His story is told by his son Meng Qingdan.

According to the public security files and original political review records preserved by our family, after Meng Xiangeng went to India, he was stationed at Ramgarh, where he received systematic U.S. Army training in armoured warfare. During later political reviews in China, he was forced to give written statements under the severe political climate of the time, when Britain and the United States were treated with hostility. Some of his statements were therefore necessarily indirect. Even so, they still record his military route in substantial detail: he flew over the Hump to India aboard a transport aircraft of the U.S. Army Fourteenth Air Force, was then assigned to a tank school run by the Americans, and studied tank driving, gunnery, and related military skills. After graduation, he was assigned to the Provisional 1st Tank Battalion at Ledo, India. He held the rank of corporal, served as an assistant tank driver, and took part in the campaign in northern Burma.

In the China-Burma-India Theater, the tank units of the Chinese Army in India, supplied with American weapons and trained according to standardized American tactics, were an important example of Allied multinational military cooperation. Less well known is the fact that their ability to train steadily and operate near the front also depended on basic support provided by the British logistical system.

Meng Xiangeng was the orphan of a Chinese soldier who died in the Second World War. Before joining the army, he had spent many years in the wartime Northwest Children's Home. Life there was extremely difficult, and he often lacked adequate food and clothing. During his lifetime, he often recalled his first arrival at the military camp in India. When he first ate the rations supplied through the British military system, he was so hungry and cold that he ate ravenously; after finally having enough food, he could not stop burping. It was this British logistical support that gave him food, shelter, and the physical strength needed for the harsh military training that followed.

During his life, Meng Xiangeng held British servicemen in very high regard. Many details from his military experience left him with a lifelong respect for what he remembered as their gentlemanly conduct and self-discipline. According to his oral recollections: "The British soldiers I encountered were gentlemanly, courteous, kind-hearted, generous, compassionate, faithful to their commitments, and grateful for kindness received. Even more rarely, they were honest and self-disciplined, and their words and actions followed clear rules."

He recalled that when he first arrived at the camp at Ramgarh, he felt alone, timid, and inferior. Whenever he met British officers or soldiers on the road, regardless of their rank, even if they were marching in haste and covered with dust, they would step aside, give a proper military salute, and speak slowly and politely. They never used their seniority in the garrison or their control over supplies to bully foreign soldiers. This deeply rooted courtesy left a profound impression on him.

He also remembered that camp supplies were centrally distributed through the British military. Grain, uniforms, meat, blankets, and pillows were all issued according to registered quotas. The British non-commissioned officers in charge of supplies had authority over the distribution of materials, yet they did not take public supplies for themselves. Leftover rations and canned food were counted, sealed, and recorded. Public and private property were clearly separated, and he never saw foreign troops' supplies being withheld or military materials being misappropriated.

In his memory, British military discipline was extremely strict and deeply internalized. When alcohol bans were in force in the camp, officers did not drink privately even during holidays. During leisure hours, all personnel remained properly dressed; they did not make trouble, harass local civilians, or bully the weak. Training, guard changes, joint duties, and the handover of supplies were all carried out on time once agreed.

In his later years, Meng Xiangeng often said: "Do not easily believe one-sided attempts to smear Britain and America. If the Chinese nation could absorb Britain's advanced ideas and humanistic traditions of discipline, integrity, trustworthiness, and kindness, the country's strength would grow greatly and the nation would make real progress. Throughout my time in India, the British Army treated Chinese officers and soldiers with generosity, fairness, trustworthiness, self-discipline, honesty, and integrity. I respected them for the rest of my life."

When my father described his interactions with British and American servicemen, he mentioned many English names. Unfortunately, I was too young at the time to remember the names of those British and American officers. What remains are only scattered but deeply imprinted details.

After the war, Meng Xiangeng returned to China and worked as a primary-level teacher. Unexpectedly, his personal experience of fighting alongside the Allies later became the source of his political persecution. Based on historical facts, he taught students about the wartime alliance between Britain, the United States, and China; American aid to China; the U.S. Army's training and equipping of the Chinese Army in India; and the British Army's role in logistical support. These truthful accounts were later characterized as the spreading of "pro-American and pro-Chiang Kai-shek" views. He was placed under investigation, subjected to strict political review, dismissed from public employment, and sent for labour reform.

After returning from labour reform, my father lived under the shadow of injustice through the 1960s and 1970s. In my memory, the evenings of those years always carried the smell of kerosene lamps and old wood. At that time, my father ate thin sorghum porridge and pickled vegetables every day. After meals, he often went to my second uncle's home to listen to shortwave radio broadcasts. This became one of the most secret and unforgettable memories of my childhood.

My second uncle had a disability in his legs, never married, and made a living repairing shoes. He had bought an old vacuum-tube radio as his companion. It was the most precious object in the household and was usually carefully covered with a piece of red velvet cloth. Whenever night fell, my father would quietly signal to me. We would tiptoe into the inner room of my second uncle's home, just across the wall, then close the door, lock it, and draw the curtains tightly, afraid that even the slightest light or sound might escape.

The room was dim. My father sat beside the heated brick bed, completely focused. My second uncle would first turn the volume knob down to the lowest level, so low that one had to place an ear close to the speaker to hear the faint hiss of electricity. Then he would hold his breath and slowly turn the tuning knob, searching for a signal on the shortwave band.

The shortwave was filled with whistles, static, and deliberate interference. Suddenly, after a sharp burst of noise, a faint human voice would gradually become clear through the heavy interference. It might be the BBC, with an English voice from London, or it might be the opening music of Voice of America. At that moment, my father's tense shoulders would slowly relax, and a light I had never seen before would appear in his eyes.

Those voices carried information we could not normally hear: Second World War history, the Apollo moon landing, and international news very different from that broadcast by China's Central People's Radio. My father listened closely, trying to catch fragments about the outside world. I lay beside the corner of the table. Although I could not understand much of the foreign language, I could feel my father's deep longing for the real world.

Sometimes, after listening to the broadcasts, my father would take me into a quiet corner of the courtyard under cover of night. In a low voice, he would tell me what he had just heard, and also speak of the events he had personally experienced. He told me that during the Second World War, the British, the Americans, and the Chinese Army in India had fought as allies. The Allied forces had provided weapons, food, medicine, and communications equipment to the Chinese Army. He said that in the most brutal war, people from different nations, for the sake of justice and freedom, could help one another and shoulder burdens together.

These stories of Allied cooperation fell like seeds into my young heart. They were completely different from what I later read in schoolbooks and propaganda. They gradually helped me understand that true strength does not lie in shouted slogans, but in help given at moments of danger, in promises kept, and in respect for every human life.

Later, when I truly set foot on European soil, when I walked through the streets of Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome, when I browsed the website of the Burma Star Memorial Fund, and when I searched through yellowed Second World War records in archives in China and Taiwan, I would always remember that dim inner room in my second uncle's home, my father's focused profile, and the crackling radio. Those radio waves crossed mountains and oceans, and also crossed half a century of time, finally becoming in my heart a light that has never gone out.

On July 1, 1976, my father died with his injustice unresolved. As he was dying, he called me, then eleven years old, to his side. With tears in his eyes and in a weak but firm voice, he said to me: "What they called my spreading of pro-British and pro-American Allied history, American aid to China, the history of fighting alongside Britain and America, and pro-American views was not wrong. One day, someone will restore the truth."

He instructed me to be grateful to the British and American people, and not to easily believe the anti-American and anti-British language in textbooks, radio broadcasts, and newspapers. Remembering how he had benefited from the British-American alliance and from American aid to China, he said: "Your grandfather was an adjutant in the Nationalist 67th Army. He died in the Battle of Shanghai together with his army commander. It was the kindness of the Americans that gave me, an orphan of the Second World War, a path in life. When I was with the Chinese Army in India, British supplies allowed us to eat our fill, keep warm, and even eat American canned beef. That was a warm time I remembered all my life." He repeatedly told me that our family's gratitude to Britain and America, and our memory of the Allied cause, must be passed down from generation to generation.

After my father's death, he lay on a mourning bed made from wooden door planks, and his eyes remained open. Villagers gathered around the mourning hall and whispered: "His wish has not yet been fulfilled." Before the burial preparations, villagers called me to my father's body and told me to say to him: "Father, please rest assured. When I grow up, I will complete the task you entrusted to me." I knelt down in tears and softly repeated those words. Then I gently stroked my father's cold eyelids. After several attempts, his eyes, which had not closed before, slowly closed.

At present, I have preserved Meng Xiangeng's military identity document, public security political review files, persecution-related administrative documents, later rehabilitation records, and related corroborating materials. In subsequent efforts to trace his records, Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense found only the service file of his grandfather, Meng Zhaopu, a fallen Whampoa-trained officer, but found no military service record for Meng Xiangeng himself in the Chinese Army in India. After searching archival institutions in several parts of Asia, I have still been unable to locate his original wartime service file.

Given the extensive gaps in official historical records in mainland China and Taiwan, and in light of a reply from the U.S. Department of State stating that records related to the China-Burma-India Theater are held by the U.S. National Archives, this privately preserved set of family documents has a high degree of uniqueness and historical value. The files preserve the real wartime path of a Chinese armoured soldier: he went overseas, fought Japan in cooperation with the Allies, and after returning to China suffered injustice because he truthfully described the history of the Second World War. His personal experience is not only the story of an ordinary family, but also an indispensable part of the history of the Chinese Army in India, the campaign in northern Burma, and Allied cooperation during the Second World War.

His son, Meng Qingdan, has long worked to search for, collect, repair, and verify historical materials relating to China's resistance in the Second World War. He has devoted himself to organizing and preserving family records, restoring Meng Xiangeng's military history, and returning him to his proper place in history. If Meng Xiangeng's story can be included in the archives of the Burma Star Memorial Fund, this long-obscured tank soldier of the 1st Tank Battalion of the Chinese Army in India may be recorded alongside the Allied servicemen who served in Burma and the China-Burma-India Theater, and may be remembered permanently by future generations