John Birch (missionary)

John Morrison Birch (May 28, 1918 – August 25, 1945) was a United States Army Air Forces military intelligence captain, OSS field agent in China during World War II, as well as former Baptist minister and missionary.

He was killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist soldiers during an assignment he was ordered on by the OSS, ten days after the war ended.

Birch was posthumously awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal.

In 1920, when he was two, the family left India and returned to the United States due to his father having malaria.

John Birch was the oldest of seven children.

In the States, his parents left the Presbyterian Church, and Birch was raised and baptized in the Fundamental Baptist tradition.

He lived in Vineland, New Jersey and Crystal Springs and Macon, Georgia.

He graduated from Gore High School at the head of his class in Chattooga County,

Georgia.

Afterwards, he enrolled at Georgia Baptist–affiliated Mercer University in Macon.

"He was always an angry young man, always a zealot", said a classmate many years later, saying that Birch "felt he was called to defend the faith, and he alone knew what it was."

In his senior year, he joined a group of students who opposed liberal tendencies at the university.

They brought charges of "heresy" against some professors, such as holding the theory of evolution, and the university held a day-long hearing in the chapel.

Defenders of the professors posted a sign on the door: "Do Not Enter: Spanish Inquisition in Progress".

The charges were dismissed, but the incident made Birch and the group unpopular on campus, and he later regretted the "teacher episode."

He graduated in 1939 magna cum laude with the highest grade point average in his class.

Birch decided to become a missionary when he was twelve years old.

After college, he enrolled in J. Frank Norris' Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute in Fort Worth, Texas.

Norris had visited Shanghai in 1939, two years after the Japanese invasion had started the Second Sino-Japanese War, and returned full of enthusiasm for “the marvelous opportunity to proclaim Gospel and win souls.” Birch, who was eager to finish his studies and had studied many of the topics before, completed the two-year curriculum in one year.

He graduated at the head of his class in June 1940 and prepared to join Shanghai mission of Norris' World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship (now the World Baptist Fellowship).

When Norris and some 150 members of the church gathered to send Birch and a friend off to China, Norris said they went “fully informed as to the dangers that await them, but they go like the Apostle Paul when he knew that it meant death at Jerusalem.” Birch left his family with the words “Goodbye, folks, If we don’t meet again on earth, we’ll meet in heaven.”

In July, Birch arrived in Shanghai, which was in Japanese administered territory, although Americans were considered neutral citizens.

While there, he began an intensive study of Mandarin Chinese.

A few months later, he was assigned to Hangzhou which was also occupied by the Japanese.

In October 1941, he left Hangzhou, going by a harrowing foot-trip, narrowly escaping Japanese fire, to run a mission station in Shangrao, in northwest Jiangxi.

The area was poor and isolated, but Birch reassured his parents that although malaria and dengue fever had "knocked me down a bit" (weighed 155 pounds), he was "coming back up," eating rice and vegetables with Chinese workers, and milk, besides.

His Chinese became good enough that he could preach a short sermon.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, added patriotic anger to Birch's outrage at Japanese atrocities in China.

He was also finding it harder and harder to survive in Shangrao, and his diet made it harder and harder to maintain his health, already weakened by disease.

He may also have started to doubt the mission bureaucrats, who soured him on organized religion.

On April 13, 1942, he wrote to the American Military Mission in China saying that for both patriotic and practical reasons he wanted to "jine the Army."

He explained that he had been preaching behind Japanese lines for more than a year but was "finding it increasingly hard to do on an empty stomach (no word or funds from home since November)."

He wanted to be a chaplain but would cheerfully "'tote' a rifle" or "whatever they tell me to do."

In April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his flight crew bailed out over China after the Tokyo raid, the first surprise attack on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Their B-25 bomber was the first aircraft of sixteen B-25s flown off the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) for the raid.

The John Birch Society (JBS), an American anti-communist organization, was named in his memory by Robert H. W. Welch Jr. in 1958.

Welch considered Birch to be a martyr and the first casualty of the Cold War.

Birch's parents joined the JBS as honorary life members.

Birch was born to Presbyterian missionaries in Landour, a hill station in the Himalayas now in the northern India state of Uttarakhand, at the time in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.

His parents, Ethel (Ellis) and George S. Birch who were college graduates, were on a three-year period missionary service in the country, working under Sam Higginbottom.