Profiling ‘The Raider’: New book by UMass history professor Stephen Platt explores the life of a celebrated but unconventional Marine

Stephen Platt, who teaches 19th and 20th century Chinese history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, made a significant name for himself with his two last books.

“Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom,” an account of China’s bloody Taiping Rebellion in the mid 1800s, won the 2012 Cundill History Prize, a top award for history writing in English. And Platt’s 2018 book, “Imperial Twilight,” a study of the Opium War between China and western powers in the 1840s, won widespread plaudits. The Wall Street Journal, for one, called the book “masterly,” a source of “important reading not only for those interested in China’s history but also for anyone seeking to understand the explosive intersection between trade and politics today.”

But with his newest book, “The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II,” Platt has taken a new tack, profiling a celebrated U.S. Marine from the 1930s and 1940s who forged a surprisingly close connection with the Chinese Communist army, then adopted some of their techniques to form a unique Marine unit that operated behind Japanese lines during World War II — the precursor of today’s U.S. special forces.

Indeed, Evans Carlson became a household name during the war, gracing national magazine covers and winning major military awards, as well as the undying loyalty of the men he led. But his communist sympathies became a cudgel used against him in the post WWII era, and he would be largely forgotten by the Marines and the general public for decades following his death in 1947.

In “The Raider,” just published by Alfred A. Knopf, Platt offers the first full study of Carlson, who grew up in New England, left home at 14 to make it on his own, and served both in the Marines and the U.S. Army. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance, Carlson was something of an autodidact who learned Chinese, wrote books and newspaper articles, made numerous public speeches, and had a Zelig-like ability to make connections with major figures of his era, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He also was a man of unquestioned courage who spent months marching and living rough with Chinese Communist forces during the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, and he led U.S. Marines less than half his age – he was 46 at the time – in the jungles of Guadalcanal, sharing their hardships and privations. As one critic of his communist ties said of Carlson, “He may be red, but he’s not yellow.”

He’s also credited with coining a phrase that came to define the Marines: “Gung Ho,” based on a Chinese expression.

In a recent interview, Platt, of Florence, said that after finishing “Imperial Twilight,” he was thinking very broadly of writing a book about China in the 1930s, a time when a number of westerners, including writers and Christian missionaries, lived there and the country was grappling both with the early stages of a civil war and then attacks from Imperial Japan.

“It was a fascinating and colorful period,” said Platt, whose books have all examined the interplay of western politics and economic policies with China. “I hadn’t heard about [Carlson] before – he was kind of a footnote to that era. But the more I learned about him, the more interested I became.”

A vital part of his research came from meeting Carlson’s granddaughter, Karen Carlson Loving, and convincing her to share many of Carlson’s letters and other private papers with him, the better to complement archival materials on the celebrated Marine and offer a full portrait of his life.

The family had previously been hesitant to share that information, Platt said, because of the way Carlson was bad-mouthed at the end of his life by anti-communist voices in the U.S. “But I think I was able to convince [Loving] that I would be fair,” he noted. “I like to think I’ve done that.”

A man of many exploits

It makes for an engaging story. Carlson’s father was a Congregationalist minister who led parishes in Vermont and Massachusetts; the family was poor, but they prized education, and faith would also become an important part of Carlson’s life.

But Carlson, born in 1896, was also “terminally restless,” Platt says, and stubbornly independent, searching for something that would give his life meaning. After leaving home at 14 and working some different jobs, he joined the army at 16, lying about his age to get in. He would serve in various locations, including the Philippines and in France, the latter during World War I.

He left the army in 1919 to work as a canned fruit salesman for a few years in the U.S. West; he also was briefly married, a union that ended in divorce and produced a son, with whom he had almost no contact until his son became a Marine himself during World War II.

Then, in 1922 at age 26, Carlson enlisted in the Marines, where he found his calling when he was posted to Shanghai in China in 1927. Though he initially harbored the kind of prejudice many westerners had for Asians, Platt says, Carlson was willing to reconsider his beliefs, and he also wanted to learn more about the Chinese, including their language.

“His experience in China made him more sympathetic to the Chinese, and he developed a deeper and more profound understanding of their culture,” said Platt. “He was also an incredibly charming guy who developed connections with a wide range of people.”

One of those people was FDR, who Carlson got to know when he served for a time as executive officer of a Marine guard for the president at Roosevelt’s vacation retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. When Carlson was posted back to China in 1937, Roosevelt enlisted him as a secret source to give him “the unvarnished truth,” as Platt writes, on China by having him write personal letters to him via FDR’s secretary, Marguerite LeHand.

China was in turmoil at that time, reeling first from civil war between the country’s Nationalist government and its Communist opponents and then from Japanese invasion in 1937. The two Chinese factions put aside their differences for a time to fight the Japanese, but it was always a difficult relationship.

Carlson embedded as an intelligence officer with the Communist forces for months, marching thousands of miles with them behind Japanese lines and coming to admire their guerrilla tactics, their egalitarian structure, and their outreach to poor rural Chinese. He was convinced, Platt notes, that they had more in common with “Christian Democrats” and typically referred to them as the “so-called Chinese communists.”

During his time with them, Carlson formed a close relationship with the Communist Army commander, Zhu De, and he also met future political leaders such as Mao Zedong.

When the U.S. and Japan went to war in December 1941, Platt notes, Carlson, now a major, was enlisted to form a special force of Marines who could raid behind Japanese lines. He based the unit’s makeup on the Chinese communist guerrillas, including creating a democratic command structure and team-building approach in which officers worked closely with enlisted men, casting aside the usual top-down military hierarchy.

“He wanted his men to be equal and to have a real understanding and appreciation of what they were fighting for – not just to defeat the enemy but to build a better, more equitable world,” said Platt.

Carlson and his men achieved success and fame in 1942 by raiding one Japanese-held territory, Makin Island, and then fighting behind enemy lines on Guadalcanal, aiding the American victory there by killing a reported 488 Japanese while losing just 16 of their own men in combat. A Hollywood film, “Gung Ho!” about their exploits debuted in 1944.

But a backlash was brewing. Some Marine leaders resented the publicity Carlson had garnered, and his egalitarian ideas about military structure, as well as his liberal politics, were anathema to many of the brass.

“Eventually the Marines didn’t want to touch him with a ten-foot pole,” said Platt.

Carlson was badly wounded in 1944 during the invasion of Saipan when, serving as an observer for the operation, he was shot while trying to drag another wounded Marine to safety.

He would never completely recover from his wounds, Platt notes, and once out of the Marines, he faced increasing backlash for his past advocacy of the Chinese communists and his criticism of U.S. support of the Nationalist Chinese government; he thought the U.S. should be neutral in the country’s renewed civil war. Red-baiting U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy denounced him as part of an American “conspiracy” to undermine the Chinese Nationalists, who lost the war in 1949.

Platt also notes that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had compiled a file on Carlson because of his alleged communist sympathies, despite the fact he was a decorated war hero who retired as a brigadier general.

And Carlson was likely fortunate, Platt writes, that he died “with [his] ideals about the Chinese Communists intact.” He didn’t live to see Chinese troops fight alongside the North Koreans against U.S. forces in the Korean War, nor to witness the millions of Chinese who died or had their lives destroyed in the 1950s and 1960s because of Chairman Mao’s “ideological whims.”

But Carlson was never a communist, Platt says. “He was a patriot to his roots, who gave his life in service to a vision of freedom, democracy and equality he had grown up on in New England.”

Stephen Platt will discuss “The Raider” June 5 at 7 p.m. in an online event for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College. You can register at https://berkshireolli.org/event-6162274

Steve Pfarrer, a former arts writer for the Gazette, lives in Northampton.