The University of Michigan in China

He Yizhen: “Studying to Save the Country”

He Yizhen was born into a family tradition of radical scholarship. Her grandmother, Xie Changda, “was known in Suzhou for her feminist activism”—­she raised funds to establish a school for women and “founded the Unbinding Foot Society in 1902” (Ma 85). He Yizhen‘s father, He Cheng, participated in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing dynasty. In an interview with He Yizhen’s daughter, Ge Yunpei, for the documentary 25 Words, Ge summed up her grandfather’s values: “Although my grandfather went to a military college, he never thought of rescuing China by force,” she said. “Instead, he believed in natural science and believed that science and industry could rescue the country.”

He Cheng passed on this conviction to his eight children. He Yizhen, as the firstborn, was the first of her siblings to carry on this family legacy. She studied at the school in Suzhou that her grandmother had founded and then attended Jinling College, where Wu Yifang, herself a graduate of the University of Michigan, had just become China’s first female college president. He graduated in 1930 at just 20 years old and the following year made the decision to continue her studies abroad. The story goes that He’s “father gave her money and said ‘you can use this money to get married or you can study abroad,’” and the choice was not a difficult one. She studied first at Mount Holyoke College in the United States and then received a Barbour Fellowship to the University of Michigan’s PhD program in physics. When she graduated from U-M in 1937, He Yizhen became one of the first women in China to ever receive an advanced degree in physics.

It was during her years abroad that He Yizhen’s studies took on a political significance. In 1931, shortly after she arrived in the United States, the Mukden Incident occurred. A staged attack on a Japanese railway in Manchuria by fake Chinese “dissidents,” the Mukden Incident gave Japan an excuse to invade Manchuria. He Yizhen’s daughter recalled that when “she heard the news of the Mukden Incident . . . she was deeply shocked by the news, and from that time on her ideal of studying to save the country began to take form” (25 Words). This idea spread throughout He’s family. Her younger sister, He Zehui, followed in Yizhen’s footsteps, traveling to Germany to study ballistics.

He Yizhen returned home to teach. Yanjing University hired her to teach graduate courses in physics, and it was there that she met her husband, Ge Tingsui, a graduate student at Yanjing. They married in 1941 and moved back to the United States so that Ge could study at University of California, Berkeley. With Yizhen in the United States, Zehui in Germany, and the rest of their family in China, communication during the war years was difficult. The only possible communication was via the Red Cross, which had implemented a letter service for citizens of war-­torn countries. The only catch was that the letters could only be 25 words long, and they were censored for anything but personal content. One such letter from He Yizhen to her family survives. It reads:

He Yizhen (center) surrounded by her younger siblings. Courtesy of 25words .net.

He Yizhen (seated, far right) with her Barbour cohort, 1935. Barbour Scholarship for Oriental Women Committee Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Soon, however, all correspondence ceased. He Zehui wrote letter after letter from her school in Germany, writing to her sister about the garden she kept, increasingly anxious for a response. No reply came, not to Zehui or to the rest of the He family. It wasn’t until the war ended that they learned the truth: shortly after graduating, Yizhen’s husband, Ge Tingsui, had been hired on at the Manhattan Project to study radar technology. And even though no communication had been allowed to leave America’s top-­secret nuclear program, He Yizhen received all of her family’s letters and kept them the rest of her life (25 Words).

He Yizhen and her husband stayed in the United States for several years after the end of World War II, with Ge Tingsui transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to continue his research. Once the civil war in China had ended, however, they moved their family back to their homeland. He Yizhen found her expertise in spectroscopy in high demand in the new People’s Republic, and she helped found the Institute of Metal Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She worked to increase the production and quality of steel and iron, her scholarship joining the country’s push for rapid modernization and industrialization until she became “China’s pioneer in spectroscopy” (25 Words).

He Yizhen (left) with her younger sister, He Zehui, in 1937, the year of her graduation from the University of Michigan. Courtesy of 25words .net.

The Cultural Revolution interrupted He’s career. Like many other prominent intellectuals, she was forced into physical labor. As the documentary 25 Words puts it, “During the ultra-­leftist years, the eight He siblings suffered oppression and torment to varying degrees. Yet in their lifetimes, they never gave up their pursuits of science.”

Indeed, in the later years of her career, He returned to more theoretical research, studying amorphous physics and metallic glass and founding the Institute of Solid State Physics at the Chinese Academy of Science. In the 1980s and 1990s, she won several awards for her scientific contributions and passed away at the age of 98 in 2008.

Robert Ellsworth Brown: Hero of the Nanjing Massacre

By 1918, Robert Brown had already completed 10 years of higher education, first at Taylor University, then at the University of Illinois, and finally receiving his MD from the University of Michigan. He was 31 years old, and he must have chafed against the safety and inaction of so much schooling. In June 1918, just months after graduating, Brown set sail for China as a medical missionary with the Methodist Church. He threw himself into China during her most fractious period, as the civil war bled into the Japanese invasion and World War II. Robert Brown spent the next 25 years of his life crossing the length and breadth of China, from the malaria-­stricken Burma Road, to the Communist Party stronghold in Yan’an, to hospitals in the city of Wuhu in Anhui province. Always he seemed to travel toward danger rather than away, seeking the places he could be of most use.

Brown began his work at the Wuhu General Hospital on the banks of the Yangtze River in southeastern China. Here he provided general medical and surgical expertise before transferring to the Department of Public Health, Pediatrics, and Orthopedics. His first six years were interrupted only in the early 1920s by a brief return to Michigan, where he received another degree in public health. The extra degree paid off: in 1924, Brown was made the superintendent of Wuhu General, a position he kept for more than a decade. During his tenure, Brown did much to serve the hospital and the local community, including hosting famed aviator Charles Lindburgh and persuading him to fly much-­needed supplies into China.

But in 1937, Brown’s position in Wuhu—­just 100 kilometers south of Nanjing—­put him squarely in the path of the Japanese invasion. Rather than flee to Hong Kong, retreat farther into China’s interior, or return to America, Brown dove headlong into danger. He was “supposedly the first American to stay at his post during the Japanese occupation of Wuhu in the early months of the war” (Homer 7). What’s more, “on the days of shelling and street fighting” during the Nanjing Massacre at the end of 1937, Brown

Careless with his own safety, Robert Brown risked his life to shelter and serve thousands of Chinese citizens battered by rape and brutality.

A portrait of Robert Ellsworth Brown. Courtesy of General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church.

“Children’s ward. Dr. Liu and Dr. Brown. Wuhu General Hospital.” Courtesy of General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church.

Such efforts did not go unnoticed. He became “something of a hero,” and his “reputation in China was public property. . . . He was unofficially titled the best medical administrator in China” (Homer 7–­8). Soon Brown was called on to expand his efforts beyond aiding refugees and providing medical administration. Decorated and recognized by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-­shek himself, Brown was asked to attend to a new crisis that was developing along the Burma Road.

Built by many thousands of Burmese and Chinese laborers at the start of the war, the Burma Road stretched more than 700 miles from Lashio in Burma to the city of Kunming in China’s Yunnan province. The Burma Road was a critical supply line for the Chinese during the Sino-­Japanese War, as Burma, then a British colony, funneled much-­needed goods into China. While the Japanese army worked to disrupt the supply line through both diplomatic pressure on the British and military advances on Lashio, sickness and disease proved to be nearly an equal threat to the road’s success. Malaria, in particular, “made inroads among the Chinese workers,” especially in areas where the Burma Road dropped into humid valleys: in one village of 2,000 people, “90% of them were victims of malaria in one season” (Reid 1).

Brown, along with several other health experts, was called in to address the spread of malaria along the Burma Road. Together they analyzed survey data and established two malaria laboratories along the supply route. Brown explained the labs in an interview:

In addition to the laboratories, Brown supervised the construction of “a new hospital building at Loiwing” dedicated to the treatment of malaria and the training of Chinese medical staff in the proper care for malaria victims: “At Yuanfu (Kunming) and along the road there are now more than 80 doctors and nurses engaged in health and sanitation work; most of them are well-­trained young Chinese.” These individuals, Brown said, are the “real pioneers of the new and modern China” (Reid 3).

It was around this time that Robert Brown was joined in China by journalist Joy Homer, who was hired to document the conditions of life in China. Her travel memoirs, published in 1941 as Dawn Watch in China, give readers a sense of Brown’s character: “He was a broad-­shouldered, straight-­backed man, with the military carriage and lean blunt features of an army general, rather than a mission doctor” (Homer 5). They traveled together for some thousands of miles, with Brown tasked with coordinating and organizing Christian missions behind the lines and serving as Homer’s guide in China. Brown, she soon discovered, was known “throughout the country [as] Skipper” (8).

Homer’s account is rich with anecdotes: soon after they began their journey, Brown, arriving at a train station full of sick and injured refugees, turned the station into an “impromptu clinic,” bandaging and tending to as many wounded citizens as he could (Homer 26). Later, pausing for several days in the southern city of Guilin, they narrowly survived a Japanese air raid:

Luckily, the next bomb never came. They recovered and traveled on by train, car, and donkey farther up and farther into China’s interior until they arrived in Yan’an, then the primary stronghold of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), where they met with Mao Zedong. Mao, apparently, gave them a very polite answer as to why the CCP could not allow Christians into its ranks.

Brown with one of his patients. Courtesy of General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church.

When the two of them returned to Brown’s old stomping grounds in Wuhu, Homer got a firsthand look at how beloved he was by his former staff and employees:

Joy Homer painted a portrait of Brown in which he was both selfless and irascible, dauntlessly courageous and prone to good-­humored jibes. On one occasion, he teased Homer about the fact that she had come down with scarlet fever. On another occasion, Brown himself was the convalescent. Complications from a sinus surgery had laid him low:

Robert Brown left behind a legacy characterized by both a sense of adventure and an unflagging altruism that led him across the length and breadth of China. Brown followed in Judson Collins’s footsteps as a missionary from Michigan, and while we recognize now that “missionary” is a complicated calling, Brown seems to have elevated the good and diminished the bad aspects of the position: he was less concerned with evangelism and racial hierarchies and much more concerned with doing good wherever it needed to be done.

Robert Brown with his family. Courtesy of General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church.

When Joy Homer was at last taking her leave of China, Brown

In a tragic irony, Robert Brown survived decades of violent turmoil in China only to die of a heart attack several years after returning home to his family in California.

Harmon of Michigan: Football Star, Fighter Pilot

Tom Harmon was a legend and a national celebrity before he ever set foot in China. A Midwestern boy from a small city in Indiana, Harmon’s rise to fame, sacrifice in wartime, courage under fire, and return to the limelight reads like a stereotype of American heroism, the kind of story better suited to Hollywood than the annals of real history. And yet, here it is—­Tom Harmon’s experience at the University of Michigan and in China, stranger than fiction, blessed by opportunity, luck, and courage in the face of misfortune.

Harmon’s star began to rise as soon as he arrived at the University of Michigan. His first memories of the University are of the beauty of its campus:

Recruited for the football team out of high school, Harmon started his football career on the bench. He had a lot to learn, and while he showed promise as an athlete, Harmon still made crucial, game-­losing mistakes. After one especially embarrassing fumble, for Christmas Harmon’s family gave him a gift of a football with handles.

His family’s teasing surely helped Harmon maintain humility in the success that was soon to follow. By the time he was a sophomore, Harmon had become a star half-­back on the University of Michigan team, drawing national press for his performances during high-­pressure games against rival schools. “The newspaper boys were laying it on thicker than ever where I was concerned,” Harmon wrote. “I tried to tell them that they ought to spread the credit more evenly, for no guy can carry a ball far if the rest of the team isn’t in there clearing the way” (Harmon 24). These protests clearly didn’t work. He won the Heisman Trophy, was named the Associated Press Athlete of the Year, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, won the Maxwell Award, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine—­Harmon’s photogenic face probably didn’t hurt his celebrity status, although teammates and family routinely teased him about his large nose. In his memoir Pilots Also Pray, Harmon dismisses this overwhelming catalog of plaudits as “a few other trophies,” even as he goes on to describe being invited to meet US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the president’s birthday ball. In fact, Harmon almost refused the invitation out of fear that missing class would cause him to receive a failing grade, and he only accepted the invitation when a dean stepped in to give him permission.

Tom Harmon during his football days at U-M, 1940. Alumni Association Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Harmon’s celebrity status only increased after his graduation. To start, he played himself in a Hollywood film called Harmon of Michigan. He met actress Elyse Knox, whom he affectionately nicknamed “Butch,” and they soon became sweethearts. Harmon was in big demand as a public speaker and traveled across the country giving talks. He sent much of the proceeds back to his parents, eventually buying a house for them in Ann Arbor. In 1940, Harmon was drafted by the Chicago Bears, but he didn’t sign a contract in order to pursue a career in radio. He moved in with his parents and went to work as a radio announcer in Detroit.

World War II interrupted Harmon’s career ambitions. He enlisted in the air force just months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and, to his great excitement, was chosen to be a pilot. Boot camp got him back in shape after a year or two off the football field; in no time at all, Harmon had left behind the safety and celebrity of a career in the public eye in order to fly headfirst into combat.

The trouble started on a routine run toward an army base in South America, when his bomber blew a hydraulic line: “No hydraulics fluid meant no brakes.” Harmon and his crew managed to patch up the broken line on the fly, and luckily they had enough fluid to let them land safely. The next leg of their journey, however, was not so lucky. As the bomber crew flew across the coast of South America en route to Northern Africa, they ran headlong into a bank of black storm clouds over Devil’s Island. Harmon did his best to keep the plane up, avoiding the storm when he could, but just as they entered what seemed to be a break in the clouds, “all hell broke loose. It sounded as though a cannon had gone off. Lt. Wieting yelled: ‘The wing! It’s tearing off!’ I tried desperately to right the ship, but there wasn’t much I could do” (Harmon 65). The plane tipped into a nosedive. Harmon ordered his crew to eject, waiting until his men had gotten clear before ejecting himself.

Harmon registering for the draft, 1941. Athletic Department Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Harmon awoke to the pouring rain of the South American jungle, the wreck of his bomber still smoldering nearby. His parachute had lodged in a tree on the way down, and now Harmon found himself dangling some 40 feet off the ground. Knowing that too much momentum in the wrong direction could send him plunging to his death, Harmon gingerly swung himself back and forth until he reached the trunk. As he climbed down, the fire in the wreckage reached stores of ammunition, sending live bullets crackling through the underbrush.

Harmon reached solid ground, somehow uninjured, and began to take stock of the situation. Mindful of the exploding ammunition, he searched what was left of the plane for supplies and other survivors. Of the latter, he found only gruesome remains: “I saw an arm that had been torn off at the shoulder,” he wrote. “There was a propeller tattooed on it, so I knew it was Sgt. Goodwin’s left arm” (Harmon 67). While there was no sign of the rest of his crew, Harmon was able to salvage some equipment: a knife, a mosquito net, a compass, a flare gun, several cans of fresh water, and a chocolate bar that he had left tucked in a pants pocket. Remembering what he could of his navigation maps, Harmon used the compass to pick what he thought was the likeliest direction and started walking.

Harmon was to spend five excruciating days alone in the jungle. At night he slept with the mosquito net draped over his face, though with no way to keep the net propped up, the cloud of insects still managed to get through. He spent sleepless nights under the mosquito net, clutching his knife for fear of wild animals. During the day, Harmon trudged onward, up and down mountains, forcing his way through the underbrush. It was the swamps, however, that gave him the most trouble. More than one of them lay directly in his path and, too wide to circumnavigate, they forced Harmon to wade directly through. The mud sucked at his boots, nearly pulling them off his feet. The water soaked his clothes until he was mud-­spattered from head to foot. But worst of all was the lack of food and water. The thought of his candy bar and salvaged water rations kept Harmon going during the arduous first day of walking, but when he at last sat down to rest and opened his supplies, he found that the cans of water had sprung leaks and run empty and that his chocolate bar, carefully saved in his pocket, had been ground into a swampy mash and sprouted maggots.

He carried on like this for five days, each day less certain that the jungle would ever end, each day more weakened by thirst and exhaustion. On the fifth day, Harmon saw something in the foliage that brought him up short: a glass bottle. Reeling and delirious, almost unable to believe his luck, he found a trail in the jungle a short distance away. It led him to a small settlement, part of the larger French colony and the only settlement of its kind for many miles in any direction. Harmon, it seemed, had been saved by luck and providence. He was taken in and given food and a bath. The following day, he was taken upriver by canoe to a larger outpost, from which he was able to transfer to a US military base. In the end, Harmon was the only one of his bomber crew to survive the wreck.

A small thing like crashing a plane into the South American jungle didn’t stop Harmon for long. After a brief leave to visit his parents, he returned to active duty. He was to fly a P-38 Lightning, a plane nicknamed the “fork-­tailed devil” by pilots in the Luftwaffe. On the side of the plane christened “Butch II” after his girlfriend, Harmon commissioned a painting designed by Walt Disney himself, whom Harmon had befriended in Hollywood: a rendition of the cartoon character Peg-­leg Pete, wearing Harmon’s football jersey, crushing a swastika in one clawed hand. Harmon was assigned to the 449th Fighter Squadron and shipped to China. Their mission was to support Lieutenant General Claire Chennault, the commander of the famous Flying Tigers. Officially a part of the Chinese Air Force, the Flying Tigers were composed of volunteer pilots from the US Army, Navy, and Marines. And now they had a squadron of new P-38s to provide support for their older P-40 fighters.

Harmon’s first reaction to China, just like his first reaction to Ann Arbor, was to marvel at its beauty: “After we got across the mountains, China looked like make-­believe land for sure. Everything was green, the countryside smelled fresh” (Harmon 122). The 449th settled in to their new base, somewhat in awe of their Flying Tiger compatriots, many of whom were experienced, war-­tested pilots. They exchanged dogfighting strategies, discussed the capabilities and tactics of the Japanese Air Force, and held fierce debates about the relative merits of the P-38s versus the P-40s. The pressure on newer pilots and newer planes to perform well in the Asian theater was palpable to Harmon. “When we first came to China,” he wrote, “we knew that a great deal was expected of us. Everybody had heard what a great ship the P-38 was, and we were expected to set the world on fire with it” (132).

The pilots rotated on and off duty, each hoping and fearing that he would see action during his shift. One morning it was Harmon’s turn on deck: it was his job to help escort some bombers on a run to disrupt Japanese supply lines along the Yangtze River near Jiujiang—­the city where, decades earlier, Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu had first established their medical practice. This was a low-­level mission, a foray of opportunity. As Harmon wrote, the Japanese occupying force in the area had been given “quite a bit of rest,” and it was “high time to let them know we were still alive” (Harmon 159). Besides, intelligence had indicated that the Japanese camps in the area only had two planes available for quick deployment—­it should have been an easy run.

Harmon in his air force jacket, complete with Disney-designed insignia, 1942. Alumni Association Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Harmon as a lieutenant with his plane, “Little Butch II,” 1941. Athletic Department Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

But as they drew closer to Jiujiang, the pilots saw “that all the streets were cleared and that there was no sign of activity on the ground. The [Japanese] had been warned” (Harmon 162). Enemy fighters screamed up to challenge them, and soon Harmon realized that they were facing not 2 but 6 planes, and then 6 became 12. Badly outnumbered, the 449th Fighter Squadron did their best to fight back and regroup. Harmon described the first moments of the dogfight:

Despite the uneven odds, Harmon and his crew held their own. In the chaos, Harmon took down two, maybe three enemy fighters. Then it was time to disengage:

He avoided the shrapnel, but now the cramped, claustrophobic P-38 cockpit had caught fire. He stamped out the fire as best he could with gloved hands, but the gas line burned too fiercely. In a moment, Harmon’s plane was heading “in a ninety degree dive straight for the lake” (Harmon 164). With just seconds to spare, he kicked himself free of the plane and opened his parachute. Except—­Harmon had opened his parachute too soon: “My heart went right up into my throat. A man in a parachute is as helpless against a strafing plane as a duck on a string” (165). The best he could do was play dead and hope the Japanese held their fire. Harmon let his head loll. The parachute drifted down into the lake—­guiding the parachute to solid ground would have meant giving up the charade. Once in the water, Harmon hid under the parachute cloth until the circling planes flew elsewhere.

Only when the immediate threat had passed did Harmon realize how badly he had been burned: “It hurt, but I wasn’t going to let that bother me” (Harmon 165). Somehow, Harmon, wrapped in the remnants of his parachute, swam to shore. Soon guerrilla fighters with the Chinese Communist Party found him. Over the next month, they slowly nursed him back to health and made their way back to Harmon’s base camp. The pain of his wounds, so blithely dismissed in the adrenaline of the plane crash, came back with a vengeance: “In those days I went through the most physically painful experience of my life. The burns on my legs and face got infected and festering.” Limited medical care on the rural route back to safety meant that Harmon could only treat his burns with tea, using tannin to take some of the sting out. “My face was so badly burned that my eyes and lips were simply swollen shut,” he wrote. “Because my mouth was so badly burned, I could hardly eat for 17 days” (166). To make matters worse, Harmon came down with dysentery on the journey home.

Thirty-­two days after the fight over Jiujiang and some 40 pounds underweight, Harmon stumbled back into his base camp. A celebration was held to mourn those lost in the fight and to honor Harmon as a survivor. The camp cook baked him a cake with chocolate bars donated by the rest of the squadron—­it was, he wrote, the best thing he had ever tasted.

Tom Harmon of Michigan returned home a hero. He was awarded a Purple Heart, married his Hollywood sweetheart, played football in the NFL for several seasons before recognizing that his war injuries had marred his physical fitness, and eventually became a professional sports broadcaster. He died in 1990 at the age of 70, a hero and a survivor of World War II.

Fritz Crisler (right), U-M football coach, with Harmon’s parents and sister, reading the news that Harmon had survived being shot down in China, 1943. H. O. Crisler Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Tom Harmon with his wife, actress Elyse “Butch” Knox, 1951. Alumni Association Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Works Cited

• 25 Words. Directed by Shen Liu. 2011.
• Harmon, Tom. Pilots Also Pray. New York: Crowell, 1944. Print.
• Homer, Joy. Dawn Watch in China. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Print.
• Ma, Yuxin. Women Journalists and Feminism in China, 1898–­1937. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010. Print.
• Reid, W. W. “Interview with Robert Brown.” Robert Brown Collection, Bentley Historical Library, U of Michigan, 1940. Print.