Vietnam gives local man highest honor

By Christoph Giebel

Northwest Asian Weekly

A medal for helping Ho Chi Minh? Hardly seems likely that an American would be the recipient of such an award, or that the medal would be named “For Peace and Friendship Among Nations.”

Yet that is exactly why Mac Shin, an 84-year-old Chinese American, recently received one of the highest recognitions the country of Vietnam can bestow on foreign nationals.

On May 10, in a private ceremony at New Star Restaurant in Seattle’s International District, Deputy Ambassador Nguyen Tien Minh of the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., conferred Shin with the “For Peace and Friendship Among Nations” Medal on behalf of Vietnam’s Union of Friendship Organizations.

Shin is hardly known in either the U.S. or Vietnam, despite being one of the few still alive who played an important part in historic months of spring and summer of 1945 that saw Vietnamese and Americans fighting side by side as World War II allies.

Until now, Shin was reluctant to share his story because of the passions that the name Ho Chi Minh evokes in the U.S.

During World War II, Japan stationed troops in French Indochina, which at that time included Vietnam and was governed by pro-Nazi Vichy French administrators. After France’s liberation in the summer of 1944, a number of Free French began covertly supplying Allied Headquarters in the Chinese city of Kunming with intelligence.

Shin, then a 21-year-old British subject from Hong Kong who had fled the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, was a radio operator for what was known as the GBT Group, a private intelligence gathering outfit of British and American civilians.

In March 1945, the Japanese staged a surprise coup against the French colonial administration in Indochina. With most Frenchmen imprisoned, the intelligence from within Indochina to Kunming suddenly dried up. Both the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, and GBT were now looking for reliable intelligence sources among anti-Japanese Vietnamese.

One such source was a Vietnamese nationalist leader by the name of “Hoo,” none other than Ho Chi Minh. As a communist, Ho and his organization, the Viet Minh, sought liberation for Vietnam from both French colonialism and Japanese occupation.

It was decided in Kunming to send two GBT operatives into northern Vietnam with Ho, in order to verify his claims about the Viet Minh.

One of the two agents chosen was a Chinese American named Frankie Tan. The other was Shin, entrusted with the mission’s radio communications set.

In April 1945, Ho, Shin and Tan set out on an arduous, dangerous trek through the jungle-covered, mountainous regions of northern Vietnam, eluding Japanese patrols and reaching the main Viet Minh guerrilla base in Tan Trao, a remote village some 50 miles north of Hanoi, about three weeks later.

Mac Shin describes this perilous trek of some 250 miles in vivid detail. Both he and Tan were clad in regional ethnic minority garb, taught some rudimentary Vietnamese and told to otherwise remain silent upon contact with locals to prevent detection.

Shin remembers being drawn to Ho, whom he knew only as “Ah Kung” (Chinese for “grandfather”). They communicated easily in English and Chinese, sometimes singing songs like “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Once in Tan Trao, Mac Shin resumed daily radio transmissions to Kunming. His liaison work with his Kunming counterpart, Charles Fenn, ensured regular air drops of supplies and materials. He reported on weather conditions, relayed intelligence on Japanese troop movements provided by scouts, and helped set up a system for the region’s population to aid, if necessary, downed U.S. pilots.

For several weeks, Tan and Shin remained the only Allied agents with the Viet Minh, preparing the groundwork for a much larger Allied-Viet Minh wartime collaboration. In mid-July 1945, the main OSS operation began, when a group of OSS officers, code-named “Deer Team,” parachuted into the Viet Minh base.

But the war’s end came suddenly, following the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945. Just three weeks into their mission, the Deer Team’s military training program was halted.

Shin eventually returned to Hong Kong and, in the mid-1950s, immigrated to Seattle, where he and his wife Rose have lived ever since.

Many Vietnamese and American participants in this brief moment of U.S.-Viet Minh collaboration look back at 1945 and see a lost opportunity.

However we may judge that, it is nevertheless clear that Shin played an essential role. In historical accounts, the Deer Team of Caucasian OSS officers has received the most attention, while Shin and the late Tan, who went on the initial, highly dangerous and uncertain mission that made the Deer Team’s arrival possible, are much less known.

The conferral of the Medal of Peace and Friendship Among Nations upon Shin is a deserved recognition of his activities of so long ago. Friendships forged and mutual understandings brought about in 1945 survived 50 years of division and helped lay the groundwork for the rapidly improving relations between Vietnam and the U.S. today.

In 1995 and 1997, GBT, Viet Minh and OSS veterans held enthusiastic reunions. In 2001, Shin was able to return to Vietnam, visiting Pac Bo and Tan Trao once more and meeting many of his Vietnamese friends.

Those still surviving are staying in touch on a regular basis and, undoubtedly, were with Shin in spirit on the day he received the Vietnamese Medal of Peace and Friendship Among Nations.

Christoph Giebel is associate professor of international studies & history at the University of Washington. He can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.