Sunset in the East: A Memoir of North China, 1945-1947

Abstract

This memoir of a Marine's tour of duty in North China at the end of World War II is a fine example of what Ernest R. May has described as the ability of a person to perceive time as a stream, that is, to place experience in a continuum of past, present, and future. In fact, Henry Aplington II saw himself at the juncture of four different kinds of time: unchanging traditional China, the Sino-Japanese War winding down, the passing of Western imperialism in China, and the arriving Com munist revolution. His unpublished memoir, written in the mid-1980s for family, friends, and the Marine corps historical archives, presents in vivid detail the commingling of these various pasts and the radi cally new future pressing in on them. Coming from a soldiering family, Henry Aplington II was commis sioned in the Marines in 1940 after graduating from Princeton Univer sity. During World War II he fought in the Pacific, rising to battalion commander and participating in the invasions of Bougainville and Guam. In North China he served initially as assistant and then acting operations officer of the 1st Marine Division at Tianjin (Tientsin), then commander, 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment at Beidaiho (Peitaiho), and finally again at Tianjin. His career after the war was mostly in intelli gence and cryptography, his last tour being in Vietnam. After retire ment in 1967 he served five years in the National Security Agency. This shortened version is one-third the length of the original mem oir. It has been read by the author and approved by him. We have retained the old form of Chinese place names, as he knew them. —Waldo Heinrichs, San Diego State University