“Welcome aboard, John. You may have been wondering what it was all about but you are now a member of the OSS. With any luck, you should be in West China within three months.”
A Colonel in Washington, D.C., 1945
Before Roderick ever set foot in China as a journalist, he arrived there as a spy — or at least, an attempted one. His wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services between 1943 and 1945 was, like much of his early career, the product of accident rather than design. It gave him no particular intelligence distinction, but it gave him something more useful: passage to China at precisely the moment the country’s future was being decided.
| 1936-1942 | Joined AP Portland a few months after graduated from Colby |
| 1942 | Associated Press sent him to Washington; drafted into the Army shortly after |
| 1942-1943 | Impaired left eye kept him from combat; stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia |
| 1943-1944 | Transferred to Yale under the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) to study Japanese; recruited by a visiting major for a “dangerous mission overseas” at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts—recruited by OSS |
| Spring 1945 | Commando training at Catalina Island, California |
| May 1945 | Arrived in Calcutta after a month at sea |
| June-July 1945 | Flew over the Himalayas to Kunming, China |
| August 15, 1945 | Japanese surrender; Roderick discharged after six weeks |
The defining feature of Roderick’s wartime service in China is its almost comic timing. He had been recruited, screened, trained in commando tactics on Catalina Island, briefed at Georgetown, shipped across the Pacific via Australia, ferried up the Hooghly River to Calcutta, sent by train to Assam, driven down the Burma Road, and finally flown over the Himalayas to Kunming — an extraordinary logistical undertaking spanning roughly two years of preparation. He arrived in the summer of 1945. Within weeks, the war was over.
The objective of the OSS, Roderick writes, was “to weed out any of us it found emotionally or psychologically unfit to spy, lie, or kill for the United States of America.” Roderick recognized almost immediately that he did not fit the profile — the work demanded a temperament he neither possessed nor wished to cultivate.
(Credit: Historic California Posts, Camps, Stations and Airfields website)
From Virginia, Roderick was sent to Catalina Island off the California coast, then owned by the Wrigley chewing gum company, for commando training. The school, he writes, “taught us the gentle art of killing enemy spies and sometimes those of our own discovered to be double agents.” Training included night landings from the sea, the use of plastic explosives, knife fighting, and a five-day survival hike in driving rain — during which Roderick and his fellow recruits cheated comprehensively, taking shelter in an abandoned farmhouse, slaughtering a goat, bribing Coast Guardsmen for boat rides, and staggering back to base smeared in mud.
When the war ended, the OSS invited Roderick to move with it to Shanghai. He refused without hesitation:
“I recognized that spying was necessary in a dangerous world, but the idea of working under cover, of hurting anyone, no matter how deserving—let alone skinning someone alive—repelled me. I thanked them and said no.”
John Roderick ’36