The Chinese Built a Shrine for This American Pilot

[TomSea]

The Chinese Built a Shrine for This American Pilot

He was the first American casualty against the Japanese, nine years before Pearl Harbor. Today he has a shrine dedicated to him in China.

Several times a week, school buses pull up in front of a single-level, pagoda-like building in Suzhou Industrial Park, a joint Chinese-Singaporean economic zone some 60 miles northwest of Shanghai. Built in the style of old China—its tiled and upturned roof supported by numerous red-painted columns—the pagoda looks decidedly out of place among the modern office blocks and manufacturing facilities that dominate the high-tech enclave on the banks of Lake Jinji.

As red-scarfed Young Pioneers pour from the buses they come face to face with a tall marble statue of the man whom the pagoda and the displays within it memorialize. The figure wears 1930s-style flying coveralls open at the neck, has a fur-collared coat draped over his left arm and in his right hand clutches a leather aviator’s helmet. The statue’s face is turned upward, looking into the sky with steely resolve.

The man whom the statue represents was obviously a pilot, and just as obviously a hero whom China wants its people to remember, honor and respect. What is also immediately obvious, however, is that the aviator was not Chinese. As odd as it may seem in this time of increasing economic and military rivalry between the United States and the world’s largest communist nation, the man whom the statue and pagoda commemorate was an American.

His name was Robert Short, and he died defending China against the Japanese nine years before Pearl Harbor.

Read More At: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/14/the-chinese-built-a-shrine-for-this-american-pilot.html

Lengthy story.

I often contemplate that war, Japan was extremely harsh on those countries in invading them. In turn, China was and continues to be harsh on its own populace.

[SZonian]

Props to the Chinese and the many other cultures/nations that continue to honor the sacrifices Americans and others have made on their behalf.

[ABX]

[TomSea]

It's interesting that the memorial was erected when the Chinese Nationalists (Chiang Kai-Shek) were in power and the Communists have allowed it to stand.

China went through real upheaval; probably most devastating were the famines likely caused by Government policies aside from Governmental oppression.