School of War - Ep 219: Stephen Platt on Mao's China and the Original Marine Raider

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Stephen Platt, professor of Chinese history at UMass Amherst and author of The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II, joins the show to discuss the incredible life of Evans Carlson. ▪️ Times     •      01:48 Introduction     •      02:50 American quirk     •      08:14 China      •      10:18 Soviet policy      •      14:01 Nicaragua            •      16:29 Edgar Snow          •      21:11 FDR     •      24:42 8th Route Army      •      31:52 Embargo        •      38:30 Raiders     •      42:40 Makin Island     •      46:30 Force multiplier         •      52:44 1946 Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Evans Carlson is not a widely recognized name in 2025, but I think once you get done hearing about his incredible career in the Marines, which involves serving his FDR's eyes and ears with Mao's communist army in the late 1930s, helping to found the Marine Raiders during World War II, earning three Navy crosses in combat, and amazing as it is to say, much, much more. I think you'll find that his obscurity is an injustice. Examining his life is also a way of learning about the long and complicated U.S. relationship with China in the 20th century and the dawn of America's modern special operations establishment. What a life. What a Marine. Let's get into it.

It is for a war. The experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in the ground. It will fight on the beaches. It will fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Stephen Platt.

He is the author most recently of The Raider, the untold story of a renegade Marine and the birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II. Stephen, you also teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of other books on China in the West, and I'm grateful to you for making the time today. Thanks for having me here. I was genuinely fascinated by your book, and my embarrassing confession with which I will begin our conversation is, I'm a Marine. I have many friends who served in Marsok, Me, the Raiders, and your book was the first I have heard of one, Evans Carlson, this fascinating figure,

like fascinating American, even more than fascinating Marine. Absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, his legacy is so unusual in the Marine Corps. I'm not surprised to hear that you hadn't heard of him before. Why don't we just sort of start at the start here? Because his life story, I mean, he himself is a fascinating quirky. Again, like this is sort of quintessentially, like he's quirky in my assertion, I don't know if you'll agree with this.

He's quirky in a quintessentially American way. Like you get quirky types all around the world, but he's quirky in a way that really Americans excel at being quirky at. And then his life is this extraordinary journey through U.S.-China relations and the story of the Marine Corps. How does this guy grow up? Like, how does he become the person who will become this defining figure

of this phase of Marine Corps history? Yeah, I mean, like you said, he is sort of definitively American quirky. I mean, he's got this sort of stereotypical New England upbringing. His father is a congregationalist minister. They move around to, you know, different small-town churches in Vermont and Connecticut and Massachusetts and stuff like that.

And he grows up reading Ralph Waldo Emerson. And if you know Emerson's essay on Selle, self-reliance, which is all about nonconformity. And saying, like, to be a true man, you need to follow your own conscience. You can't follow the expectations of others. And yeah, so he runs away from home for the first time when he's 12 years old, setting out, trying to find adventure, trying to, you know, make something for himself. You know, they're living in Massachusetts at that point.

He makes it all the way up to Portland, Maine, before having to come home. Sort of lives in a frustrating way at home for a little while longer. And then at 14, he leaves home, and that's it. He never comes back until he's an adult visiting his parents. I have no particular grudge against Emerson, but I did find myself really struck by one of the quotes from self-reliance that you include in the book, you know, implicitly is having a big effect on Carlson. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you and your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. That strikes me a sort of dangerous advice for a young man, not actually great advice in my personal opinion. Yeah, it all depends on like to what end it's put and, you know, what the actual framework around it is.

But I think, like, built into that quote, like, most ambitious people, if you look at them, like, there's a real strong ego at work there, that, like, people who do really big things in their lives often have, like, very strong self-conceptions. And, you know, they want to be the leader or they want to be the one who's remembered in the history books. And I think that's built into that quotation there, like, Carlson wanted to go and discover his genius, but he also wanted to sort of make his mark on the world in a way that nobody else has. It makes him a very difficult Marine officer to his superiors because they're always going off the boats.

Well, this is, of course, one of the core tensions of his life is this commitment to these idiosyncratic, you know, highly individualist, I suppose, individualist more than idiosyncratic views. On the one hand, but of course, while still a minor, he joins the Army. He really commits his life to military service. Yeah, 16 years old. He lies his way into the Army, the age of the age of the Army. of enlistment was 21, so he pretends he's 22 years old. And they ship him off to the Philippines and then Hawaii. He's going to wind up in World War I. But as far as his early military career,

like, you know, he's following the language of the recruitment posters. He wants adventure. He wants to be on the front lines. And there are no front lines for him. I mean, even when World War I finally comes around, he's in a training capacity in the United States, finally gets transferred to Europe just before the armistice. So he actually has a very boring time of it in the army. He leaves the army after World War I, comes back. He's working as a traveling canned fruit salesman out in Montana and Oregon. And, you know, by this point, he had risen to be a captain of artillery in the army by 1919 when he left.

His career after that is going nowhere. He's sort of married and just as quickly divorced. He has a son. He's almost never going to see. He just, he feels the same restlessness that drove him to run away from home when he was a kid. It's still driving him. He knows, like, in his heart that there's something waiting for him in the world and he just hasn't found it. So he joins the Marines, throws his entire Army career to the wind.

1922, he's in his late 20s, marches on into a Marine recruiting station in Oakland, California, and signs up as a buck private. I mean, been an officer. He made it to the officer ranks in World War I. Yeah, I mean, the joke in the Marines was like, you know, they walks into the recruiting office and the recruiter is like, all right, well, you were a captain in the Army. So I figure with a bit of work, we can probably make you a competent, you know, private in the Marine Corps. But it's the Marines where he's going to stay for the rest of his career. As you describe these scenes of him, you know, selling canned fruit, you know, out in the Northwest.

For some reason, I just keep picturing it. What's that Daniel Day Lewis movie? There will be blood. I feel like Daniel DeLuis should play him in the movie, but they actually did make a movie, right? They did. During the war, there's a war where he's a character. Yep, yep, yeah.

Gung Ho, 1943, doesn't stand up to the test of time. It's not a great World War II movie. But that was sort of part of the creation of Carlson as this sort of public media star. He was really larger than life during World War II. He's the guy who gives gung-ho to the English language. All right, so he's in the Marines, and here's where the story really kicks into the gear, where it will kind of stay in sustained fashion for the next, what, 20 years or so.

He gets sent to China with this storied unit, the Fourth Marines, which I guess will ultimately end up on Corregador, if I'm not mistaken. Luckily, he missed. In the Baton Death March. Exactly, yeah, he misses that. But he is there in 1927, having nurtured a sort of longtime dream in his youth of going to China. He's finally in China as a Marine. What does he encounter?

What is the China of this period like to Evans-Carles? I mean, when he arrives there in 1927, it's basically a civil war. So the government of the time, it was the Republic of China. They overthrew the last dynasty in 1911. But by the 1920s, the Republic had just broken down into warlordism. So China is this country of several hundred million people. broken into separate spheres of power with various warlords who control their own armies, you have provinces going to war against each other. And he gets there right in the middle of what's

called the Northern Expedition, which was a KMT army led by Chiang Kai Shek in an alliance with the communists, which was trying to reunify China by force, by conquering the warlords or forcing them into an alliance. And Carlson was sent to China just as the Northern Expedition was heading towards Shanghai, which is where most of the Americans in China lived. So his role when he arrives is to protect the Americans in Shanghai from Shanghai Shaq, which is really ironic when you consider that at the end of World War II, Chiang Kai Shack is America's man in China. But at the time Carlson gets there, Chiang Shack is viewed as being in the pocket of the Soviets. He's viewed as a red. So Carlson gets there. He's hoping that finally this is going to be the time that he

gets some action and there is no fighting in the international settlement where he's based. Let's linger on the complexities of some of this CCP KMT diplomacy and the dynamics between the two organizations. As you point out, I think to the average listener, it will seem strange that in the 1920s, it's the KMT that is viewed with skepticism by American officials for the reason you identified. But our man Carlson is also there at this strange moment where the KMT-CP United Front is going to essentially break down right in front of him, whether or not he's really able to notice it as a younger officer without Chinese. But this whole thing kind of implodes before his eyes. Like what goes on with that?

And what is actually Soviet policy towards the United Front? And what is their view of the KMT versus the CCP? That's a great question. I mean, the Soviet policy, what it boils down to is sure they'd like to see a communist government in China. far more than that, they want to secure buffer against Japan. And so more than anything, what Stalin is going to want is a unified, well-armed China that is at least sympathetic to the Soviet Union that can prevent the Japanese from invading them from their eastern borders. So when Carlson gets there in the 1920s, you know, KMT is descended from the revolutionaries

who overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1912. So they've been around for a while. They have an army. have a government bureaucracy. The communists were a really small party when they first started. And it was through the agency of Soviet advisors that the common term, or the other communist international, was able to orchestrate an alliance between the early communists in China and the KMT, or the nationalists, as they're also known. So during the northern expedition, the Soviets were supporting this unified Chinese army under the KMT and the CCP. In the middle of their war to take control of China again, this alliance just completely breaks down. Chenkai Sheck starts to feel increasingly threatened by the communists.

He sees that they have a much closer relationship to the Soviet advisors. He comes to the end of his rope with Soviet desire to shape China's domestic politics. And so really pretty soon after Carlson gets there, when the fighting seems to have settled down around Shanghai, Chiang Shaq launches this massive purge of the communists and, yeah, they're just assassinating people on the streets. This is what is going to be the beginning of the civil war between the communists and the KMT and China, which it's going to be off and on again. They're going to form an alliance again against the Japanese in the late 1930s.

But ultimately, like, this is the war that's going to shape China's future, far more so even than the invasion from Japan. And also ironically, you know, given where he will end up, you know, just to put a bumper sticker label on it, sort of as a communist sympathizer, it's how he, how he ends his days. At this point, Carlson, it's an incredible story, too. Yeah. Friends, best friends with Edgar Snow and it's wild. But at this point in the late 20s, he's very sympathetic to the KMT and very skeptical, right, of the CCP as things start to break down.

Is that fair? Yeah, I mean, you can't ask for sort of more dramatic character development than what Carlson went through in his career. Because, yeah, so, I mean, in the 1920s and 30s, he's staunchly anti-communist. He's writing intelligence reports about the Chinese communist, calling them notorious communist bandits predicting their imminent destruction by the KMT. He has a tour in Nicaragua where for a period of time, he's the chief of police in Managua, forming a secret police unit to root out communist subversives.

There's one letter home to his parents after his agents, after his agents, about 20 communist Nicaragua, where he tells them that he probably should have just had his men shoot them all on site because he doesn't trust the Nicaraguan authorities to deal with them harshly enough. And this is somebody who's going to end his life being widely viewed as a communist sympathizer. And really, I mean, he is one of the most sympathetic Americans towards the Chinese communist by the end. But it's a really incredible transformation he goes through. And we'll come to the sort of where the pivot starts. But just because you mentioned Nicaragua and I want to give a full account of like this guy's

humanity. I mean, he earns his, it was his first Navy cross in Nicaragua, right? I mean, he sees some pretty intense combat down there. Yeah, Nicaragua is the first place he actually gets to command troops on the ground against an armed enemy. So, and he loves it. This is what he's been waiting his whole career for. But yeah, when he's in Nicaragua, he's fighting the Sandinistas, like he's fighting Sandino himself and his guerrillas. And sort of two things happen there. One is that he He starts learning about guerrilla fighting for the first time, seeing how these Sandinistas move through the landscape, how they camp during the day and they move at night, the way that they're able to conduct ambushes.

And he's really fascinated by this. Second is that he decides that the way to fight them is to use their own tactics against them. So he's actually like a very creative commander in the Guardia Nassinao. That was the Nicaraguan National Guard that had American officers and Nicaraguan soldiers. So he gets his first Navy cross for leading about a dozen Nicaragun soldiers into the mountains in pursuit of a guerrilla column that had about 80 or 90 guys in it. They track them through the night.

They launch a raid in the middle of the night with Thompson submachine guns. They're firing into this camp for 10 minutes continuously. As far as anyone knows, it's the first time that the Guardian National soldiers have fought voluntarily at night. They completely route the guerrilla column, capture all their weapons. And that's going to be the beginning, like, that's the watershed moment for him as a military commander, proving that he can lead reluctant men in the case of the Nicaraguans who are being led by an American or generally kind of testy about that.

And also just the creativity of it, the moving through the night, the attacking the grills in the middle of darkness, following them through the jungle. All of that, I mean, there are other, there obviously there are other Marine officers like like Merritt Edson and Chester Puller who are pulling off all kinds of similar things in Nicaragua. But Carlson's going to come out of this with a taste for guerrilla warfare that he's going to really hold tightly to. And it's going to come to its full flower when he's back in China. All right.

So it's 33, right? He's sent back to China. And this is where his, you know, appreciation for China and for the Chinese people and his attitudes towards the CCP, things sort of start to shift. And this incredible relationship is like a couple's relationship. between the Carlson's and the Snow's. Like, what's significant about this tour of David? I mean, Edgar Snow is going to be one of his closest friends for his whole life.

I mean, part of Carlson's character is that, you know, he actually really wants to be a writer. I mean, like, even when he was in the Army, he's sort of dreaming of being a literary star, but this is a guy who never finished high school. You know, he writes various, he writes some articles for the Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck and things like that. But Edgar Snow, who's a journalist, an American, journalist in China is his first real, like, published author, Fred, and he really admire

something for that. But, yeah, so we're like in the 1930s. Carlson is up in Beijing. He's with the legation guards guarding the U.S. diplomatic compound. And he and his wife and Edgar Snow and his wife, who's also a journalist, they're like tramping along the great wall on the weekends and visiting temples, talking about the big ideas of the world. But, like, flashing forward, I mean, Edgar Snow is famous for later, later, because, you know,

becoming the first foreign journalist to make it to the communist capital in China and interview the leaders. And he writes, he writes Red Star over China, which is, it's the single most famous book about China in the 20th century. And Carlson is going to reconnect with him in 1937, just at the start of World War II in Asia. And he's going to read Red Star over China in manuscript before it's even been published. And it's really Edgar Snow, who awakens him to the possibility that the communists in China aren't quite what he thought they were. He thought they hated foreigners. He thought they were just like violent bandits killing everyone in sight.

And Edgar Snow comes back from his visit saying, actually, they're quite friendly. They were happy to have me there. They seem quite open to an alliance with the U.S. Like, they're funny. Liberal Democrats want a multi-party democracy. Exactly. Well, Snow is, I mean, I don't know if you'll accept this characterization, Stephen.

But for those for whom Edward Snow is a new name, you know, He go, in Carlson's defense, Carlson dies in, what, 47? 47, yeah. So we'll just say, and again, these are my words, not yours. So, you know, respond how you like, of course. But, you know, the Chinese Communist Party's true major accomplishments and mass murder are still ahead of it in 1947. Snow lives past that point and is just a notorious apologist for the CCP. Oh, yeah.

Just notorious. Yeah. And actually, I mean, that isn't just your words. I've run about this in the book. that, I mean, there's a certain sense in which Carlson is lucky that he dies in 1947 before he can see what Mao's China really becomes after the Korean War. So he never has to sort of test his faith and his illusions against what happens in China, whereas his friend Edgar Snow, he goes back to China in 1960 in the middle of the Great

Leap Forward famine at a time when tens of millions of Chinese peasants are starving to death because of Mao's agricultural policies. And Snow comes back with this 800-page book talking about how there's no famine in China and how they're better off than they ever were before. So, yeah, I think it's fortunate for Carlson that he wasn't alive that long. And it's interesting when you look at these Americans who really fell for the Chinese communists in the 1930s and 40s, that they were different then from what they were going to become in the future.

Like, there were elements of their practices. There were glimmers. The public stuff, though, like, public platform was more democratic. During World War II, they put, you know, they put the killing of landlords on hold for a while while they were cooperating with the KMT. Pragmatists. I mean, a lot of sensible people, you know, came away a lot of, like U.S. diplomats and reporters, Joseph Stilwell, various people, like had generally positive views of the communists.

If you fast forward to the 1950s and 60s, that's where the test really comes. And some of those people are going to renounce the communists once they see. what's happening. Others like Edgar Chanel are just going to hold on tight to the end, which is, again, it's to his lasting disgrace. Okay, so because the story of Carlson's life isn't crazy enough yet, let's come to, he's in between China tours, I guess between what, the second and the third tour now, we're in the 30s. Yeah. And he gets assigned to guard duty in hot springs and befriends the president's son and gets on good terms with, with FDR. I love this portion of the story where he becomes FDR's eyes and ears because, as some listeners may remember, I'm

semi-obsessed with Herman Woke's fictionalization of World War II, Winds of War and Warren Remembrance in which one of the principal characters, Pug Henry, is employed by FDR in just this fashion. And I have to think that Woke must have had this case in mind, now having read your account of it, which I was totally unaware of. So, yeah, please, please. Yeah, I don't know who Woke had in mind, but it's a really similar situation. So, yeah, I mean, Carlson comes back.

Just randomly, the Marines assigned him to guard duty for the president at Warm Springs, Georgia, which is Roosevelt's sort of alternate White House down in Georgia where they had these warm spring, they had these hot springs that fed into pools and polio patients could float around it. So in the course of this, and it's mostly during holiday times while he's there, he strikes up a friendship with the president. Roosevelt starts, you know, he invites Carlson and his wife to come up to D.C. to have lunch at the White House. Carlson becomes especially good friends with Roosevelt's son, James Roosevelt, his oldest son, who is, you know, in the future going to be his executive officer when he forms his Marine Raiders unit.

So he, by 19th, summer of 1937, Carlson's getting ready to head back to China. This is going to be for his third tour. He's supposed to be just like a language student for this round. The Sino-Japanese War is just about to break out. and Roosevelt invites Carlson to come meet with him at the White House before he goes back to China. They have this meeting the morning before Carlson departs for the West Coast. And in this meeting, Roosevelt makes it clear that he wants to know what's really happening in China, especially like whether they can stand up to a Japanese invasion.

He needs a military observer, and he's decided that Evans Carlson is the guy that he trusts. So he tells him to report to him directly secretly by writing letters, to Missy Lehan, that's FDR's private secretary. So Carlson is going to start writing these letters, dear Miss Lehan, reporting on the situation in China, those are going to be passed to the president to read. And it's going to go on for years. There's two big folders of correspondence at the FDR library between them.

But it's this sort of secret line of, secret direct line of communication from one mid-career Marine officer directly to the president. You know, cutting an end run around the entire military chain of command. But by the time he gets back to China in the summer of 1937, and he's there just as the Battle of Shanghai is raging between the Japanese and Chinese armies. He now views his role as being FDR's eyes and ears on the ground in China. And he really takes this to heart. How is he as a writer?

He's a good writer, especially for somebody who didn't finish high school. I mean, he wrote a couple of books. and the main one is, you know, if you read it, it's kind of melodramatic. He's not like a gifted literary stylist, but he had a story to tell that nobody had ever had to tell before. I mean, it's really unique material. He writes a lot about his stuff in China. So he's a good matter-of-fact writer. He, you know, and I mean, to be honest, I mercifully left this out of the book, but in his personal papers,

I found some poetry that he wrote, and my God, it was awful. So, yeah, he was never meant to succeed as a literary figure. Well, if the poet part was weak, in full fairness to Evans Carlson, I don't think too many. Even worse, it was a love poem. Let's do him the favor if not. If the poet part was weak, we'll observe formally and for the record that there are not that many who could match him as a warrior. I mean, the most amazing stuff is still to come. So he's there in 37, Roosevelt has tasked him with being eyes and ears,

and here's where the real relationship with the communist start. Tell us about the Eighth Route Army, what that is, how he gets to them, what he learns there. All right. So the Eighth Route Army is the new name for China's Red Army. It had been the Red Army fighting against Chiang Kai Shek. At the end of 1936 and beginning of 1937, the communists and the KMT form a new United Front to fight against the Japanese. So temporarily they're going to stop fighting each other and they're going to fight the Japanese instead. And so the Eighth Rood Army is the name for Chinese Communist Army now that it's been sort of assimilated under the national military.

So this makes it possible for Carlson to do an aboveboard trip up there as an agent from the U.S. Naval Attachers Office. And he makes his way up to Shanxi province, to the field headquarters of Judah, who is the, he's the commander-in-chief of the Chinese Communist Army. Just for a little bit of background here, everybody knows Mao. knows Mao Zedong. Judah, not as much, but Judah is really the one who built the Red Army. He and he and Mao founded it together and they commanded it together. But whereas Mao was sort of head in the clouds, he was more of a sort of a strategic, big level philosophical thinker. Judah was, he was the field commander. He was the tactician. He was and he was the one who sort of came up with the Red Army's sort of doctrines of guerrilla warfare. So Carlson meets him,

spends a couple of weeks at his headquarters, basically falls in love with the man. He said that he's just never met a military commander who is so effective while also being so unassuming and humble. Carlson's used to Changkei Shaq, sort of strutting around with his epaulets and shouting at all of everyone around him. Judah, you know, doesn't wear any insignia. He's just this friendly, smiling guy. He likes to play basketball with his men.

And he isn't like any military commander that Carlson has ever met before. And yet he knows that this sort of unassuming stocky little guy has managed to lead the communists with absolutely inferior weapons and materials. They led them in their survival against Chiang Kai Shek's much larger and better equipped forces for years now. And he becomes really curious about what they could do against the Japanese. So after a couple of weeks with Zhu da at his headquarters, quarters, Carlson heads into the field. And ultimately, he's going to, he's going to spend several

months traveling through Japanese-occupied North China in the company of communist guerrilla patrols, studying how the communist forces fight, how they work with the peasants in the areas under their control, how they manage to maneuver around the Japanese. And this is, this is really the central experience of his life until World War II, that he comes out of this really as an evangelist of guerrilla warfare. He thinks this is the key to fighting the Japanese. So setting aside for the moment, the question of Judah's charisma, which was no doubt a real thing, you know, I did take away from this part of the story, you know, they had to be working and working Evans Carlson pretty hard in terms of what they wanted him to take away and what

they wanted him to report back. Oh, absolutely. No, no, no, no. I mean, they're not going to tell him anything that they're not pretty sure he wants to hear. The interesting part of the, though, is that they let him run pretty much freely through North China. He can visit the towns that he wants to visit. He can go the directions that he wants to go. He needs to find some sort of a patrol that's heading in the right direction because he needs bodyguards. But there's actually very little in the way of handling of him once he's out in the field. And I think it's because the communists, we're genuinely proud of what they were doing in the countryside at this point. and because, again, there was a shift of policy because of the second United Front

where the communists officially renounced for the time being, you know, like property redistribution and killing landlords and things like that. So, you know, the, I mean, his handlers, like on one of his trips, his handlers were just these, like, teenage guys, like writers and journalists and stuff, Chinese guys who were taking him along falling off their horses and stuff like that. Like, they don't seem to have expended a whole lot of resources. and trying to cook up an imaginary reality for him. At the same time, though, he was a very, he was very receptive to what he was seeing.

And, I mean, I don't know if I made this point well enough in the book, but he was a very good military observer, and he was not a very good political observer. So he's going to come. That comes across. Okay, good. And frankly, what you just described about the kinds of handlers they assigned to him and how they give him this freedom, I hear that and I just hear, well, this is sophisticated and well done. Like, this is a really, seriously, that's my takeaway. Either way, he's, I mean,

he comes out of this, on the one hand, with a really accurate view of what the communists are starting to do in terms of organizing the peasants, in organizing sort of the masses, as it were. This is ultimately going to be the key to them winning the Civil War, is that is the support that they have from ordinary people. And he sees, you know, he sees the communist soldiers helping people plow their fields and helping them bring in harvest. He's interviewing people all along the way, including foreign missionaries who happen to live in these areas, who are telling him that, yeah, the communists, they're not stealing anything. They're paying for what they take. That this huge goodwill campaign towards the peasants of China. So he sees that at the same time, he comes

out of this privately being convinced that the communists aren't really communist and that they're actually Christian Democrats without realizing it. He's like firmly convinced of this. And so, you know, They're practicing brotherly love. They're working with the poor. So Carlson is one of legions of Westerners who have gone to China since the 19th century who explore, they try to learn the language, they travel, they believe that they've finally seen some deep and true insight about Chinese culture without realizing how much of that is actually their own imagination.

Yeah. It's like a particularly insidious kind of. of orientalism where it's actually like the projection of your own dreams. Yeah, I mean, the way I described it in one of my books, it's like, it's this feeling of sort of looking through this sort of dark and muddy window that separates you from another culture and congratulating yourself when you finally see familiar forms on the other side without realizing that you're actually only seeing your own reflection. So, I mean, this is one of the ironies of Carlson being sort of, you know, written off as a communist

sympathizer, is that he actually didn't think. they were communists. So yeah, he thought they were fundamentally democratic, and that is something that would have been sorely challenged if he had lived through the 1950s. So he meets Mao, he meets Deng Xiaoping all on this tour of duty, and he becomes, and here, you know, don't totally disagree with him. He becomes a passionate advocate for what will ultimately be become, ultimately become the embargo, right, which years later. It takes years for FDR and the Americans to come around this, but this becomes his big platform. partly as a consequence of this trip, right?

Yeah. So Carlson's sympathy for China, China writ large. I mean, he likes the communists. He also likes Chenkyshek, and he's a big supporter of the United Front. He thinks this is the key to them winning against Japan. But in the course of his travels in 1938, he just develops a deeper and deeper and more profound sympathy for the people of China, who are being invaded by the fascist Japanese,

who are unleashing one of the world's most modern and powerful, powerful armies against this agrarian population and this impoverished country. So his feeling of sympathy for the Chinese builds to the point that the Marines tell him to stop talking to reporters and stop telling Chinese audiences how much Americans sympathize with him. And he winds up quitting. So he resigns from the Marines so that he can sort of devote himself to China's cause. I mean, there's an echo here of the Americans who volunteered to fight.

in the Spanish Civil War in the Lincoln Brigade. There was no such thing for the Chinese communists, but he actually writes in a letter to Edgar Snow at the time that he resigns from the Marines. He's like, I would like throw everything to the wind and join the Eighth Route Army as an officer if they would have me. And so, but what he winds up doing with that is he comes back to the U.S. and he goes on a speaking tour trying to raise support for China. And as you said, trying to raise support for an embargo against selling war materials to Japan. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, not that his celebrity was on the level of Lindbergh, but he is a kind of anti-Linberg, isn't he? Are they around, it must be around similar age, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's very much an anti-Linberg. So he was the one trying to sort of cut through the isolationists.

And, you know, his platform wasn't that America should send in troops to China or anything like that. It was that the United States at least should not be selling aviation fuel and steel to the Japanese. And that ultimately succeeded. It wasn't him alone by any means. he was part of the Price Committee, but that embargo will eventually be established. Did he articulate many thoughts about the situation in Europe during this period? Like presumably, how did he deal with, given his sympathies and complicated attitudes towards

the Chinese Communist Party, how did he deal with the period of Soviet Nazi cooperation, where the American Communist Party, of course, went hard pacifists during, like, how does he navigate all, not that he's a communist, but how does he navigate all that? No, no, no, because he's certainly not a Soviet communist. So he actually kind of picks up the slack where, like, so before the Nazi Soviet pact, there were all these sort of American communist front peace organizations, you know, arguing, trying to like, I don't know, like denounce fascism and things like that. And as soon as you have that pact between the Soviets and the Nazis,

suddenly they're all told to shut up by the common term. And like, now their enemy is going to be not. the fascists, but the imperialists. And so they all go quiet around the time that Carlson is gearing up and joining this group called the Price Committee, which was a bipartisan group. It had Republicans and Democrats, and sort of leaned conservative. And its whole goal was to try to pass an embargo against Japan. So he's there making noise on behalf of China when the American communists have been told to stop complaining, basically, about fascism. It's always been a fascinating moment to me because, you know, American pro-war, pro-engagement

attitudes at the time, you know, are basically accurately, more or less associated with the left. And isolationism mostly basically accurately associated with the right. But then there's this interlude where a big portion of the left is essentially ordered by the Soviet Union, all but. I always think it is the great, you know, the Almanac singers, the ballad of October 16th, this great folk communist, you know, group and this great song that, exemplifies the period the lyrics for Anna. Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt.

We damn near believed what he said. He said, I hate war, and so does Eleanor. But we won't be safe till everybody's dead. This is from the left criticism of FDR during the period of Soviet Nazi daytime, which of course, come the summer of 41, all of a sudden the Communist Party is again per war. Yeah. I mean, it must have been head spinning to be on the American left during the night. Totally.

I mean, because you think of these people who joined, you know, the American League, against war in fascism, actually hating fascism. Right. And then suddenly the leaders of the group are telling them, we need to stop criticizing the fascists. Now we only hate the British. And, you know, like some of them go along and others become profoundly disillusioned.

But, yeah, I mean, one thing I will definitely say for Carlson is that he's very consistent in his views. Like, they evolve over time, but he listens to his own conscience. There is nobody exterior who's telling him what to think and when. Like, nobody's pulling his strings, and I admire that about him. Yeah, and I will say this, I mean, the impression I take away from our conversation and from reading your account of him is that his political naivete is just that.

That it is a function of his sort of naive humanism. Like he has a genuine humanism and a genuine belief in the, you know, the, the same brotherhood of mankind. Yeah. And that politics can be built on that. And, you know, the Chinese communists see that coming a mile away. Yeah. I mean, he's got a, it's, there's so many, when you do a biography and you really dig into somebody's character, like, people have so many internal contradictions. And one of his was, you know, by the peak of his career, he has this sort of, you know, this, this, this capacious, profound sympathy for humanity writ large.

And at the same time that he's completely neglectful to his own wife and son, you know, like the people who actually rely on him, he's quite cold towards, whereas, you know, he's devoting himself to. you know, the betterment of the world. And it's, you know, I mean, he's not alone in that kind of an attitude, but you do kind of wonder how they reconcile all these things. Certainly his humanitarianism is very fundamental to his vision for the Raiders during World War II. So we get an embargo and we get Pearl Harbor and we're in the war. You know, we've been talking for like, I mean, what a packed life up until this moment. But actually, the major phase of his accomplishment is just about to begin.

So he founds or is part of the founding of the Marine Raiders, Special Operations, in a modern sense. Talk about that. Talk about what it was like to become a raider in this little camp outside of San Diego with the figure of, was he Colonel at this point? Lieutenant Colonel Carlson looming over everything. Tell us what it was like. Sure. Yeah. So after Pearl Harbor, because of his connection to Roosevelt and again with Roosevelt's oldest son James as his executive officer, he got carte blanche to create a Marine Raider unit,

which was supposed to be, I mean, initially it was sort of supposed to be model on the British commandos, but Carlson's was modeled after the Chinese guerrillas, that he wanted to take everything that he had learned from the Eighth Route Army in China and try to transplant that into the U.S. Marine Corps. So he wanted to train his men the way that he saw the guerrillas operating in China. So for, you know, he's got thousands of volunteers. In the initial cut, he takes about 600 of them to this place, Jacques Farm, just outside kids, on the grounds of Camp Elliott in Southern California and puts them through what many of them describe as sort of the most soul-crushing, exhausting, you know, training any American troops

have ever been through. I mean, I imagine a lot of people say that about their own training. But, you know, he's got them doing these 50-mile overnight hikes. He's got them, like, training 13 hours a day to learn, learning, you know, all kinds of different weapons. They have to learn how to use Japanese weapons and how to break them down blindfold and put them back together, just in case on the battlefield, that's all they have access to. He's teaching them to cook for themselves.

There's not going to be any mess. They're going to be, like, cooking rice in their helmets on the march. But even more importantly, the ethos of this battalion, so this is the second Marine Raider battalion, they're going to be known as Carlson's Raiders. They're sort of the counterpart to Edson's Raiders who are being formed on the East Coast, which go a very different direction. But he wants his unit to be egalitarian as much as possible. And I mean, the way he puts it is like, I mean, he views this as a war between fascism and democracy that they're entering.

And he's like, if we're going to be going into the Pacific to fight on behalf of democracy, we better have democracy in our ranks. So to that end, they didn't wear insignia. He insisted that officers had to earn their position. They had to maintain authority by their actions and their character, not just by polling rank. They would have what he called gung-ho meetings where he and Roosevelt would lecture to the men about the politics, why the U.S. is involved in this war, what's been happening in the history of China and Europe, encouraging the enlisted men to speak up at these gung-ho meetings, question their officers, why did you tell us to do this? Why did you tell us to do that? And the goal here is to try to build

the most tightly knit unit he could possibly come up with, where they all rely on each other like a band of brothers, where they love their officers like sons love their fathers. And he thought, like that was the secret to Judah's success in China by instilling this in his troops. And so Carlson wanted to do that for his own. It goes to illustrate that probably one of the few contexts in which anything like communism kind of makes sense is small elite military units, very small. Yeah. The lot of organization pretty poisonous.

I think there's a reason why special forces today don't operate on like a full battalion size, you know, small team operation. I mean, you got pretty unwieldy when they were on Guadalcanal and there were over a thousand of them. Yeah. But, I mean, he pioneered the fire team. Having, yeah, breaking the squad down into groups of three men, he, I mean, this wasn't just Chinese inspired. Like, his vision really was to take, like, take the tactics and training and the camaraderie of the Chinese guerrillas, and especially, like, their will to endure and suffer.

And then combine that with the best material resources the U.S. could offer. So he just loaded them down with automatic weapons. Their first operation, they were being launched from submarines against the Japanese-held island in the Gilberts. So he kind of wanted like the industrial power of the U.S. with sort of the with the group ethos and the group spirit of the Chinese communists. And to be clear, this raid on the Gilberts, this is what, Macon Island. Yeah. This is a full year before we actually really go into the Gilberts in force.

So actually, let's talk about this. Let's talk about the first big operation to make an island raid, which this is where things get legitimately cinematic and kind of crazy. What is the purpose of this operation and what are the raiders do? All right, so the purpose of this operation, so it's Admiral Nimitz and Omar Pfeiffer, who's the senior Marine on his staff, come up with a plan of sending the Marine Raiders into the Pacific as a diversionary attack at the same time that the Marines are invading Guadal Canal. So at the same time that you have a full-scale invasion of Guadalcanal Canel happening down in the Solomon Islands, they're going to drop two submarines' worth of

Marine Raiders onto little tiny Macon Island in the Gilbert Islands chain, this quiet, sleepy corner of the Pacific. But it represents the furthest eastward penetration of the Japanese into the Pacific. And the goal is to spring a surprise raid, annihilate the Japanese garrison, collect all of the information and intelligence they can get and come back. And really, I mean, part of the purpose of this and the way in which, the one way in which it's going to truly succeed is for propaganda value. It's a few months after the Doolittle raid.

And, you know, if you look at the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, you know, they fly a bunch of bombers over Japan, they drop their bombs, and they go and they crash land on the Chinese mainland. Nothing is accomplished strategically. In fact, it actually sets back the Chinese because then the Japanese mouth this huge campaign to reconquer all the areas that have airfields within range of Tokyo. But it's a huge boost for the American public and for the newspapers to have this raid. So Carlson's raid on Mackin Island was supposed to be like the ground, the ground war counterpart to the Doolittle raid.

So they've got two submarines, a little over 200 raiders is all they can pack in there. The plan is they're going to surface a couple miles off of this Pacific island in the middle of the night. The Marines are all going to climb out on deck and inflate their rubber boats, fire up their outward engines. The submarines will will quietly slip into the water below them. they motor on in, you know, they attack the Japanese garrison before they even know what's happening, kill them all, et cetera. I'll make people read the book to find out like what really happens, but everything goes down, like just about everything that could go wrong, went wrong on this raid. And it comes, for most of them, it comes to within a hair's breadth of disaster.

There's a surrender note written in the middle of this. There was a point when Carlson was pretty sure that the president's oldest son was about to get captured as a Japanese prisoner of war at the very beginning of the Pacific War. This is August of 1942. They're going to get on. Most of them are going to get away, but 30 of them are going to die on the raid. And of those, nine of them are Marines who accidentally got left behind, which is the most incredibly tragic part of this.

And when the Japanese come and retake the island, those nine Marines are going to be captured, and then a couple months later, they're all going to beheaded. It's amazing, actually, that as many make it away is, It was do get away. It was really by the skin of their teeth. So for the press and for the gung-ho movie, if you happen to watch the movie, like the version of it that makes it to the American public is, you know, they zoom on in there, kill all the Japanese, blow some stuff up and paddle back out to their submarines,

neat as you please. The reality was much darker than that. But they're going to redeem themselves. And when on Guadalcanal, they're going to have a month-long patrol there, which is much more like what Carlson had been training them for. Yeah, the raid actually, you know, well, I'll just repeat your point because it's precisely what was on my mind. This notion of replicating what he had witnessed the communists doing, tying down these large Japanese formations with smaller, less equipped, but sort of more motivated and more agile forces. This is precisely what he's able to do on Guadalcanau and serve as a real, I hate these sort of can't phrase, force multiplier.

So there's a real force multiplier to the major marine operations. happening on. Actually, it's actually an appropriate use of the use of the term. Yeah. I mean, the McEnraid, like, there was nothing about that that matched with the kind of training that Carlson had been giving his men. But Guadalcanal, you know, they were, they're essentially off the grid for a month behind Japanese lines on Guadalcanal. So tracing outside the marine perimeter at Henderson Field, attacking Japanese forces in the jungle, trying to find the artillery installations that have been hitting the airfield, trying to map out the trails that the Japanese were using. And, I mean, it's stunning operation. Again, like a month in the jungle with no tents or sanitation equipment,

eating pretty much nothing but rice and salt pork. Occasionally, if they could kill a few animals, they could eat those. But it's a real exercise and endurance. And they're going to come out of this, having killed something like 488 Japanese troops while losing only about 16 of their own. A lot of them are going to come out sick. They're going to have malaria and things like that. But in combat, they only lose 16. So as the war proceeds, though, the Raiders as an institution become sort of controversial. And tell us about their institutional fate and then take us through the end of Carlson's war, where he's pretty badly beat up on Saipan a couple years later, right?

Yeah. So the Raiders, I mean, so for Carlson, you know, he gets separated from his raiders just a few months after the, after the Guadalcanal operation. the higher-ups and the Marines are just sick of him. They don't like his whole gung-ho thing. They don't like how the press loves him so much. They don't like his liberal politics. And they especially don't like how he promotes equality between enlisted men and officers.

They don't want that spreading. They see that as a threat or discipline in the wider Marine Corps. Separately from that, so I mean, there's plenty of officers who have all kinds of reasons for hitting Carlson for that. Separately from that, the raiders, so first there's two battalions and there's going to be two more added to make a murder. a Raider regiment. They are an object of resentment from the rest of the Marine Corps because they're treated as elites when the Marines already considered themselves all elite, that they had tougher recruitment standards than the Army and the Navy. They were saying, like, why in the Marine Corps should there be a group separated out, given the best weapons? The Raider officers were able to

take the best men from other units. They got all kinds of fame in the press. And there were a lot of people who saw this is really damaging to a spriticor in the Marines. So ultimately, they're going to be dissolved. And the Raider name isn't going to come back again until, I think it's 2014, when the Marine Corps re-adops it as the name for today's Marine Special Forces. So they resurrect the Raider title. I know I asked you the double-barreled question about Carlson's future, but before we get to that, and forgive me if this is kind of off-piece for you, but what is the relationship between this debate over the Raiders and the Marines and then the origination and the better fortunes of the Rangers in the Army.

Is there sort of any interplay between those two stories? None that I've ever seen. I mean, the stuff about the Raiders, they don't talk about these other units that are out there operating. Like, I keep waiting for Carlson to meet, you know, for Merrill Marauders in the jungle somewhere. It just doesn't happen. Yeah, there are a lot of independent, you know,

like within the different services. There are different creations. Sort of like, these are all sort of the forebears of today's special forces. So back to Carlson. So Carlson is removed from command of his Raiders and just comes on pissed as hell. He's still treated as a war hero. He's still, again, he's still lauded in the press. He's actually on set when they make the movie, the Hollywood movie about him because he's home at that point.

But so he's dismally depressed that he can no longer command enlisted men because that's what he really wants to be doing. But if he can't do that, then he still wants to be as close to the front lines as he possibly can. So again, like the later part of his career is really interesting because the Marines won't let him command anymore. They make him an operations officer, a planning officer. And so he's helping to plan the amphibious invasions of like Quadulane and the Marianas Islands. And in the course of this, he keeps volunteering to be on the front line of these amphibious invasions. So like at Tarawa, he's right there on the beach in the same landing craft with David Chup,

who's the commander of the landing forces, you know, just behind the first way. of this just cataclysmic battle. I mean, at the end, you know, the Marine officers who were there saying, like, this is the bloodiest battle of the U.S. Marines have ever seen to this point. And Carlson, who at that point was 47 years old, a World War I veteran with a head of gray hair, is like traveling back and forth across the reef through small arms, fire, and shelling to carry information from shoot back to the flagships. He's just all over the place.

He's there in Saipan as well. And when he finally gets shot, and he makes it through all of these different wars without getting injured in any way, you know, pretty much about 30 years total in the military without any injuries. Finally, June of 1944, he is there on Saipan right at the front with an assault battalion. He's there with a radio man. They're relaying, he's relaying radio observations back to the command headquarters. The radio man gets shot by a machine gun. Carlson dives in to try to pull him out of the way and then he gets shot to. And it's, I mean, ultimately it's, I mean, it's so fitting for, he was a Marine officer who really disliked his fellow officers.

He thought they were hidebound and too traditional and they wouldn't follow in methods. And he adored the enlisted men. And it's just so sort of like poetically fitting that when he finally does get shot, it's because he's trying to rescue a private who's been wounded. I mean, right after there was a Marine Corps correspondent right after that who described Carlson as being the most beloved. officer in the Marine Corps to the enlisted men. Yeah. Yeah. I found the Danuma, everything that follows this to be kind of sad for me personally. His politics seem increasingly less nuanced. But he retires as a general, brigadier general. He runs for Senate, then he dies not long after the end of the war. And I have to say you can tell from the tenor of my questions that I agree with your view,

that his skills that political analysis had real limits. But man, what a Marine. What a Marine. What an incredible story. Yeah, I think if you just erased the last year of his life, he might have come out of this whole era with a different reputation. So like 1946, you know, the war has ended. He's been drafted to run for Senate, California. His stars rising high. There's this full-page color portrait of him in the Chicago Tribune.

All the newspapers love him. Washington Post calls him Lincoln-esque when he has a heart attack. And he's going to survive for a night. another year, but he's going to have a whole succession of heart attacks and strokes. And the weaker he gets and the less able he is to speak for himself, the more he starts being in some ways a puppet for like every progressive far-less communist front organization in the country that wants a liberal war hero as their figurehead starts writing at him to get him on board and he just goes down the rabbit hole. And by the end, he's the honorary chairman for all kinds

of organizations, you know, several of which are going to be out at his communist fronts. I don't think he was aware of that. He was just sort of living in his little cabin out in Oregon. I don't know what it is about crazy brave Marines, but we also have the case of Smedley Butler, two medals of honor, author of war as a racket. I always kind of admired him too. He's another like classic quirky Marine, not a communist, but certainly out there, certainly out there in his views by the end of his life.

Yeah, and they were connected. I mean, Carlson's first assignment in the Marines was as a horse officer for Smedley Butler who really took a liking to him. There was a one letter I found where he calls him, he writes to Carlson. He's like, you're right, you know, it calls him a hell of an officer. He's like, you always do the right thing. But it's, I mean, I had Smedley Butler in mind when I was, when I was writing about Carlson because, you know, Butler, you know, he leads his, his glorious career in the Marines. And then after his retirement, it's, I don't know if it's like a sharp left turn or if it's just an isolationist term. But yeah, he becomes a really strong critic of the U.S.

using the Marines as a means to sort of further U.S. business interests overseas. He writes war as a racket. He's very strongly against intervention when he's basically been leading all of these interventions in the past. But the Marines still love him and his names everywhere. And he's like honored in every way. Carlson took his left turn and there is nothing named after Carlson. You said you hadn't even heard of him. That he's still a black sheep. And I think the Cold War era was, the Red Scare era was less forgiving of a retired Marine going off in a different direction politically than maybe the 1930s were. Well, I have to say, Stephen, your book, it's really well written. And it's, you know, biography can be, not always, but it can be a way to learn about these incredibly complex issues that, you know, if you, you know, not that many people have the heart to buy a book on the, you know, collapse of the first United States.

front and then how, you know, of course, you're on School of War. We've covered it. We've devoted episodes to it. But in general, you know, that's that sort of drier material. So using the life of somebody as colorful and fascinating as Carlson as a lens through which to see the American presence in China and all the complicated dynamics swirling around that. You do it really artfully. I recommend the book to listeners. And I'm grateful to you for making the time to come on today. The book's called The Raider. And Stephen Platt, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much, Aaron. I really enjoyed this. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.