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  Thompson Document 01: An Introduction to the Henrietta Thompson Collection

  Henrietta Thompson

  A very brief introduction to the Henrietta Thompson collection.

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  Thompson Document 02: Introduction to Jack Belden

  Henrietta Thompson

  Jack Belden was an American war correspondent, famous for his reports on the Sino-Japanese War written in the late 1930s. In China, he often worked closely with General Joseph Stilwell. When, in 1942 Stilwell was sent to Burma and soon after decided that he would lead a group of civilians and soldiers who were escaping Burma on foot, Belden decided to follow him. In Retreat With Stilwell (1943) Belden gives his own version of the events of the Walkout. Belden’s best-known work, China Shakes the World, was published in 1949. When Henrietta Thompson contacted him in 1972, Belden was living in poverty in Paris, and was reluctant to grant her an interview. Their meeting was clearly of great personal importance to Thompson, as is made evident by her many attempts to recreate their meeting in her notes and marginalia. In Thompson's file labeled “treasures” the three onion-skin typed letters she received from Belden have been carefully maintained. The following passage is taken from the description of meeting Jack Belden in Paris in Thompson’s Master’s thesis:

  “When I arrived in the afternoon of the next day at his hotel in a modest quarter of Paris, I was effusively greeted at the door by a wonderful French concierge in the traditional stiff black dress of all French war windows. She told me how happy she was that someone had come to see M. Belden. He had no friends, she said, and he seemed so very triste. She took me to my room located discreetly one floor above his, then led me down to meet him in his room.

  The room was quite small, furnished with a narrow bed, a huge armoire, a desk, and one chair. After we had shaken hands, he offered me the bed to sit on, and took the chair himself. A huge French window was open to the street noises just below so that sometimes I could hardly hear what he said. When I explained that I was not there to make him bare his soul, as he had said in his letter, he became friendly…”

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  Thompson Document 03: Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Jack Belden

  Henrietta Thompson

  Henrietta Thompson's second letter to then-retired war correspondent Jack Belden (Henrietta had apparently received no answer to her first letter of inquiry). Belden had walked out of Burma with General Stilwell in 1942, and published Retreat with Stilwell in 1943. Thompson had obtained Belden’s address by sending a series of letters to his publisher, Harper & Row.

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  Thompson Document 04: Letter from Jack Belden to Henrietta Thompson

  Jack Belden

  This is the first letter Jack Belden wrote to Henrietta Thompson. Responding to Thompson's letter proposing that they meet to discuss the Walkout, Belden describes himself as “sympathetic to but not overly excited or approving of your [Thompson’s] project.” Nevertheless, Belden writes that he will be at his address "most of the time," and that Thompson may visit him there. The letter is undated, Thompson notes that she received it on October 3, 1971.

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  Thompson Document 05: Henrietta Thompson's Notes On Interviewing Jack Belden

  Henrietta Thompson

  Undated notes, written by Henrietta Thompson sometime after she interviewed Jack Belden in October 1972. Her attempts to put down the “essence” of Belden, and the prompt she assigns herself: “What do I know about Jack Belden now?” suggest that these notes were written not long after the interview, or at least were written in an effort to preserve her memories of the interview.

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  Thompson Document 06: Henrietta Thompson's Summary of Jack Belden's Activities Before the Walkout

  Henrietta Thompson

  Henrietta Thompson’s attempt to narrate a version of Jack Belden’s account in the third person. Her several thoughtful accounts of her interview with Belden seem to suggest the great importance Thompson attached to her meeting with the writer.

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  Thompson Document 07: A Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Jack Belden

  Henrietta Thompson

  A letter from Henrietta Thompson to Jack Belden dated Nov. 12, 1973. Thompson writes to Belden with characteristic warmth, mentioning a mutual acquaintance and a recent review of Belden’s China Shakes the World (1949).

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  Thompson Document 08: A Letter from Jack Belden to Henrietta Thompson

  Jack Belden

  A letter from Jack Belden to Henrietta Thompson. About the Walkout, Belden writes to Thompson: “The only way such a small affair could have significance is a from a human standpoint where it could be fictionalized into a symbol.” On the whole, Belden seems to wish to convey that he regards Thompson's project with ambivalence. As he does in all of the letters in this collection, Belden refers to his poverty, here he also mentions being badly treated by his publishers.

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  Thompson Document 09: A Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Jack Belden

  Henrietta Thompson

  A letter from Henrietta Thompson to Jack Belden following his letter of Dec. 1973. Here Thompson is asking for Belden’s version of an account she has heard, she says, “from a dozen or more people,” of American officers proposing to leave the nurses (most of whom were refugees) behind at the start of the walk out of Burma, and to escape without them. Unfortunately we do not have Belden’s response to this letter (if he wrote one), but in the “Addenda” Thompson provides a new version of this story, which may summarize Belden’s recollection of the event.

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  Thompson Document 10: Henrietta Thompson's "Addenda" to Jack Belden File

  Henrietta Thompson

  Henrietta Thompson's notes on Jack Belden. These notes seem to be a combination of Thompson’s memories of meeting Belden and perhaps a summary of Belden's account of an argument that took place at the start of the Walkout; several of Thompson's interviewees mentioned this argument that revolved around the suggestion, by one or some of the Americans, that they leave some of the group behind in order to expedite their own escape from Burma.

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  Thompson Document 11: Introduction to Jack and Bridget Croft

  Jack Croft

  Jack Croft was a British Officer Cadet who studied at Maymyo Military School in Burma. In 1942, the British army was ordered to retreat, and troops attempted make their way north to China or northwest to India, often blocking the fleeing refugees in order to expedite their own escape. Croft was among a group of British officers who together with a group of American soldiers, General Joseph Stilwell, the Friends Ambulance Unit, Karen and Burmese nurses, and surgeon Gordon Seagrave, walked about two hundred miles from Burma to India in May 1942.

  By the time Henrietta Thompson corresponded with him, beginning in the early '70s, Croft was living in Australia with his wife, Bridget, whom he met in India.

  Thompson exchanged a few letters with Croft and sent him a copy of her history of the Walkout Walk a Little Faster, but she never met him, and was quite surprised when his widow wrote to her in 1996. She and Bridget Croft corresponded between 1996 and 1998, often discussing Croft’s account of her own life, which touches upon Jack’s experiences as part of the 1942 Walkout.

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  Thompson Document 12: A Letter from Jack Croft to Henrietta Thompson

  Jack Croft

  A response from Jack Croft to a letter from Henrietta Thompson. Croft was a British officer who had attended the Maymyo Military School in Burma, and in May 1942 walked out of Burma with General Stilwell. Here, Croft is evidently responding to a letter of inquiry from Thompson, who was attempting to discover more about various participants of the Walkout.

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  Thompson Document 13: A Letter from Bridget Croft to Henrietta Thompson

  Bridget Croft

  A letter from Jack Croft’s wife, Bridget Croft. Bridget asks Henrietta Thompson’s permission to use a few sections of Thompson’s Walk a Little Faster in her account of her childhood and of her experiences as a nurse in India in the 1940s, where she met Jack.

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  Thompson Document 14: A Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Bridget Croft

  Henrietta Thompson

  A letter from Henrietta Thompson to Bridget Croft. Thompson expresses surprise at hearing from Bridget Croft, the wife of a Walkout participant, Jack Croft, with whom she had a brief correspondence in 1973. Thompson warmly responds to Croft’s request for permission to quote sections of Thompson’s Walk a Little Faster, and asks to read Croft’s work when it is complete.

  Thompson briefly refers to a perplexity inconsistency; Bridget writes: “Jack died on the 26 November 1955,” and yet Thompson tells Bridget: “I enjoyed so much my correspondence with him in 1972-73 and that he was pleased to receive a copy of my book in 1980.” The date of Croft’s death is not mentioned in any of the subsequent letters between the two women.

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  Thompson Document 15: A Letter from Bridget Croft to Henrietta Thompson

  Bridget Croft

  A letter from Bridget Croft to Henrietta Thompson. Bridget promises to send Thompson a copy of her record of her life, which touches upon the experiences of her husband, Jack, who walked out of Burma with Stilwell in 1942.

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  Thompson Document 16: Letter from Bridget Croft to Henrietta Thompson and Two Selections from Croft's Manuscript

  Bridget Croft

  Two selections of the manuscript that Bridget Croft sent to Henrietta Thompson on Feb 16, 1997. The first page describes Croft’s childhood in Ireland. The second selection is Croft’s description of the “allied” retreat from Burma. She describes the “hot and tough” trek by the Stilwell group, quoting sections of Henrietta Thompson’s work, but she also describes the retreat of the British Army. She takes the position that “the retreat [of the British Army] was made more difficult by large numbers of refugees trying to escape from Burma.” She fails to mention that the refugee families fleeing their bombed cities were often pushed off the roads to make way for the retreating colonial army.

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  Thompson Document 17: Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Bridget Croft

  Henrietta Thompson

  A letter from Henrietta Thompson to Bridget Croft warmly praising Croft’s A Sense of Purpose, which she had just received, and expressing her hope that Croft will attempt to have it published. Thompson also includes the abstract from her thesis which details the process by which she found Jack Croft and began corresponding with him in 1973.

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  Thompson Document 18: Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Bridget Croft

  Henrietta Thompson

  A final letter from Henrietta Thompson to Bridget Croft. It seems that the telephone conversation that prompted this letter was not an entirely felicitous one, and that Henrietta’s recommendation that Croft publish A Sense of Purpose was perhaps mistaken for a promise that Thompson would act on Croft’s behalf to that end.

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  Thompson Document 19: Introduction to Ruby Thaw Johnson

  Ruby Johnson

  Ruby Johnson studied nursing at Gordon Seagrave’s hospital in Namhkan. When she was twenty years old, she and several other volunteers were chosen to work for Seagrave's mobile surgical unit. The nurses and surgeons worked closely with the Friends Ambulance Unit who brought the wounded soldiers, mostly Chinese, to the medical staff for treatment. During her interview with Henrietta Thompson, Johnson remembered:

  “we were working night and day, with very little rest. There was lots of bombing and we were constantly having to move everything back from the front as the Japanese advanced. I was often very afraid, and the more scared I was the more I prayed…You cannot imagine how ugly and terrible it was.”

  This and Johnson’s memories of the trek to India across the Uyu river and over the Naga Hills were quite illuminating for Henrietta Thompson as she was compiling her history of the Walkout.

  After the war, Johnson studied at the Margaret Hague Hospital in Jersey City on a Fulbright scholarship. When Thompson interviewed Johnson in 1971, Johnson was living with her husband and daughter in a suburb of Philadelphia. In her thesis, Thompson recalled: “I could not have chosen a more delightful person than Ruby for my first interview.” Thanks to Ruby Johnson's connections (and the help of fellow Walkout participant Tun Shein in Burma), Thompson was put in contact with a number of nurses who had participated in the Walkout, many of whom Thompson interviewed in Burma the following summer.

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  Thompson Document 20: A Letter from Ruby Johnson to Henrietta Thompson

  Ruby Johnson

  A letter from Ruby Johnson, a nurse who participated in the 1942 Walkout from Burma to India, to Henrietta Thompson. Johnson was the first of the Walkout participants Thompson interviewed, and Thompson particularly enjoyed this meeting and was indebted to Johnson not only for offering an account of her own experiences, but also for making Thompson aware of a number of nurses who had participated on the Walkout in Burma and also Hla Sein in the U.S. who initially resisted being interviewed about the Walkout. In this letter, Johnson mentions having recently seen Hla Sein, who was by then their mutual friend.

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  Thompson Document 21: A Letter from Ruby Johnson to Henrietta Thompson

  Ruby Johnson

  A letter from Ruby Johnson to Henrietta Thompson. It seems that Johnson is here responding to a request from Thompson that she send some Burmese phrases for Thompson to include in her Walk a Little Faster history of the Walkout.

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  Thompson Document 22: Introduction to Lulu and Tun Shein

  Tun Shein, Lulu Shein, and Henrietta Thompson

  Lulu began her training as a nurse around 1837, when she was about fifteen years old. She and a number of fellow nurses and Tun Shein, who later became her husband, worked for Gordon Seagrave’s mobile surgical unit in 1942, and participated in the Walkout in May of that year. During the Walkout, as she told Henrietta Thompson in 1972, Lulu and British conscientious objector Martin Davies had been a couple, and she did not explain how she came to be married to Tun Shein.

  Lulu's memories of the Walkout were mostly happy. She was forgiving toward the soldier who wanted to prevent the nurses from joining the Walkout (a number of Thompson's interviewees, including Jack Belden, refer to this incident). About him Lulu remembered: “We heard one time that one of the American officers didn’t think we nurses should be taken along on the trek out…Later in the mountains that officer got sick and one of the nurses took care of him. Later at Gauhati he send us all clothes and presents!”

  Tun Shein met Gordon Seagrave before the war; Tun Shein was delighted to find the unit after the seminary he had been attending had closed: “here was the chance to help that I had been looking for,” he remembered. “Dr. Seagrave and his nurses were doing the surgical work, the rest of us were running around doing this and that.” Tun Shein drove a truck, cooked, and generally helped with any administrative work the unit needed. About the Walkout, he remembered: “as far as the countryside, it only interested me for finding food and I didn’t have time to notice the beauty.”

  Tun Shein had been imprisoned for political dissidence, and still took precautions around the Burmese officials. For instance, Tun Shein had offered to meet Henrietta Thompson when she arrived in Rangoon in June 1972, but he did not appear in the customs shed. Instead, Thompson remembers after being searched by the authorities:

  “I gathered up my belongings, and to my astonishment there was a little note in my right hand. I had no idea how it got there and it scared me....It said, ‘Mrs. Thompson U Tun Shein. With Brown Jerkin & green checked shirt.’ Just then a smiling gentlemen accompanied by a boy came up to me and said, ‘Welcome! I am Tun Shein.’”

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  Thompson Document 23: Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Tun Shein and Lulu

  Henrietta Thompson

  A letter of introduction from Henrietta Thompson to two Walkout participants, Tun Shein and Lulu—who had since married and re-settled in Burma—proposing that she meet them in Burma in the summer of that year, 1972.

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  Thompson Document 24: Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Tun Shein

  Henrietta Thompson

  A letter from Henrietta Thompson to Tun Shein, in which Thompson discusses her upcoming visit to Burma. She mentions a number of Walkout participants in Burma whom she hopes to meet, and asks Tun Shein to help her by writing to them.

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  Thompson Document 25: Letter from Henrietta Thompson to Tun Shein and Lulu

  Henrietta Thompson

  A letter from Henrietta Thompson to Tun Shein and Lulu. Thompson thanks Tun Shein and Lulu for their hospitality and refers to a few details of her trip to Burma