U.S. Army Observer Group sent to Yan’an (Yenan), China, to establish a liaison with Chinese Communist forces. The Dixie Mission began in July 1944 when a nine-man U.S. Army team flew to the headquarters of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) at Yan’an in Shaanxi (Shensi) Province in north central China. Colonel David D. Barrett, a “China hand” who had studied the language and served as a military attaché to China, headed the mission, which would continue through 1947. It included officer and enlisted personnel from all three services as well as representatives of the U.S. State Department. Barrett’s mission was to collect information about Japanese and their “puppet” Chinese forces order of battle and operations. He was also to determine the extent of the Communist military effort in the war against Japan and to coordinate the search and rescue of downed Allied pilots in Communist-controlled areas.

A U.S. military mission to the Communists had first been suggested in mid-1943. Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell’s political adviser, John Paton Davies, believed strongly that U.S. advisers to Mao’s headquarters could make a difference by coordinating with Chinese Communists who were fighting the Japanese. Davies drew parallels to the effort of the Allies to assist the Partisans of Tito (Josip Broz) in Yugoslavia. Fearing that American supplies and equipment would be diverted to the Communists and that U.S. leadership might develop a more favorable view of the Chinese Communist movement and operations in the territories held by them, Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) strongly opposed the mission to Yan’an. For the next year, the United States continued to pressure Jiang to allow this mission to go forward, but not until after the June 1944 visit of U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace could sufficient pressure be exerted on Jiang to allow the liaison mission to begin.

Communist official representative to the national government at Chongqing (Chungking) Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), who saw potential in a future collaboration between the United States and the Red Army in the fight against the Japanese, supported an increase in American presence and the liaison effort. By August 1944, Barrett and a team that eventually numbered more than 20 people, including State Department officials John S. Service and Raymond P. Ludden, began to meet with the most senior political and military leadership of the Communist movement and to gather information about the Japanese and their allies as well as the Chinese Communists. The mission also provided the opportunity in November for Major General Patrick J. Hurley, in his capacity as a special emissary of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to begin an effort to get the two Chinese factions to focus their efforts on fighting the Japanese rather than each other. During the course of the mission, the Dixie group secured the rescue and return of more than 100 American pilots.

The mission served perhaps its most important function after the war as a bridge between the United States and the Chinese Communists. A mission headed by General George C. Marshall brought the two sides to the negotiating table in an effort to secure a solution to the infighting in China that had been going on for decades. The collapse of the Marshall mission in January 1947 led to the end of the observer mission.

References Barrett, David D. Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944. China Research Monograph Number Six. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Carter, Carolle J. Mission to Yenan: American Liaison to the Chinese Communists, 1944–1947. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Romanus, Charles F., and Riley Sunderland. Stilwell’s Command Problems. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985.