“UNITED CHINA RELIEF”: two men shake hands, with three US service insignia at lower right

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

Two standing figures fill the sheet. On the left a man in a wide conical hat, a loose jacket, cropped trousers and cloth shoes; on the right a taller man in a flying helmet with goggles pushed up and an earphone at the ear, wearing a jacket with a thick collar over a shirt with a winged badge above the pocket, and light trousers and boots. Their hands are clasped at the centre of the sheet. One of the airman's hands is raised to the side of his helmet; a raised arm at the right holds open a panel of his jacket toward the viewer, and on that panel is a United States flag with marks standing for Chinese characters across and below its lower stripes. Behind the figures low hills are cut in red. At the lower right an aircraft is drawn over the hills, seen from above, carrying a white star with a bar on either side on the wing; there is no ground line and no landing gear, and whether it is on the ground or in flight cannot be told from the cut, nor can its number of engines.

The lower right corner carries three devices printed as if laid on the paper: a disc bearing the numeral 5 with a comet whose head is a star charged with a small roundel and whose tail is three streamers, with one small star on the field beside the numeral; a disc bearing the numeral 13 above spread wings with a star below; and a dark rectangular panel bearing a rayed sun of the form of the Nationalist Chinese emblem beside a five-pointed star, with three tapering red bars hanging below it and unprinted paper between them. Other white marks on the first disc are irregular and cannot be told from gaps in the ink. Published descriptions of the Fifth Air Force emblem, the Thirteenth Air Force emblem and the China-Burma-India theatre shoulder sleeve insignia match these arrangements; for the Fifth Air Force emblem the numeral, the comet-head star charged with a roundel and the three streamers correspond, while the small stars its blazon sets on the field cannot be made out here. The sheet prints in two colours only, so the blazoned blue, yellow and red of the originals cannot be corroborated from the object, and the rays of the sun are not countable on this impression. The flag panel on the airman's jacket is identifiable as a blood chit, the cloth notice carried by Allied aircrew in the theatre — an identification from the form of the device, not a reading of it, since its characters are illegible here.

The Chinese and English texts address different readers. The Chinese lines tell the reader that the men shown are airmen of the allied nations, that they are friends, and that these markings are to be noted; the heading above them is the English name of an American fundraising organisation, set in the largest letters on the sheet, in English, above lines addressed to a Chinese reader in Chinese. The two men are drawn to different rules. The airman is given a specific uniform and a winged badge; the man beside him is identified by costume alone, the conical hat doing the work a name would do. The printed line 留神這些標記 [Take careful note of these markings] directs the reader to the markings, and the markings the sheet prints are the insignia of American formations.

This copy carries no publisher line, no printer, no date and no edition mark, and the archive located no example of this design in any institutional collection or catalogue during the research window. Every United China Relief item the archive did locate — the Library of Congress poster 'China shall have our help!' among them — is United States-facing, English-language fundraising material, not Chinese-language instruction for use in China. The heading is therefore a name printed on the sheet rather than an established issuing body, and the sheet's production, printing date and use are unestablished. Its condition — unfolded, unstained, square-cornered — is recorded here as seen, without inference about where it has been.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

All Chinese lines are set right-to-left in the period manner; they are given here in reading order.

[top, red display capitals:]
UNITED CHINA RELIEF

[second line, red, large characters:]
援助盟國飛行員 [Aid the airmen of the allied nations]

[third line, red, large characters:]
他們是你們的友人 [They are your friends]

[lower left, black, beneath the two figures:]
留神這些標記 [Take careful note of these markings]

[lower centre-right, numerals printed on two of the three devices:]
5
13

[on a panel of the airman's jacket, held open toward the viewer: a United States flag, with marks standing for Chinese characters running across and below the flag's lower stripes — not legible on this impression — [illegible]]

[no other text: no publisher, printer, artist, date, edition, copyright, series number, stamp, cancellation, pencil note or signature appears anywhere on the face; all four margins are blank]

Historical context

United China Relief was established in May 1941 as a federation of existing American China-aid committees — the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, the China Emergency Relief Committee, the American Committee for Chinese War Orphans, the Church Committee for China Relief, the American Committee for Chinese Industrial Cooperatives and the China Aid Council — to raise American money for Chinese civilian relief and to publicise China's resistance to Japan; its board included Pearl Buck, Henry Luce, Wendell Willkie and John D. Rockefeller III. The archive has verified this against the caption record of a photograph of a 1941–42 United China Relief billboard and could not fetch the Princeton finding aid for the organisation's records; the founding city is not established here. A blood chit is a cloth notice carried by aircrew identifying the wearer as a friendly flier and asking civilians to help him. The chit worn by the American Volunteer Group in China was issued by the Republic of China's Air Force Commission and carried the Chinese flag with Chinese text; the practice included payment of a reward for an authenticated rescue, so what the chit put to its finder was a request backed by money, not only an identification. The China-Burma-India theatre shoulder sleeve insignia — which the third device on this sheet matches in arrangement — combined the two national flags: a blue upper field bearing the Nationalist Chinese sun and a white American star, over red and white stripes below.

What is not known

• No date, publisher, printer, artist or edition mark appears anywhere on the face of the sheet. The date given is for the design and is inferred from the insignia; the date of this impression is unknown, and its clean, unfolded condition is consistent with a later or modern printing. The archive has not established that this sheet was printed during the war.
• The archive located no example of this design in any institutional collection or catalogue during the research window, and the sheet carries no imprint. The attribution to United China Relief rests only on the name printed at its head.
• The documented output of United China Relief that the archive located is United States-facing English-language fundraising material. Whether that organisation issued Chinese-language instructional sheets for use in China is an open question this object does not settle.
• Why a sheet addressed to Chinese readers should show the Fifth and Thirteenth Air Force emblems, and not the Fourteenth Air Force, which is the formation usually associated with the air war in China, is not established.
• The identifications of the three devices rest on published descriptions of those insignia matched against the printed image, not on a catalogued example of this sheet. The sheet is printed in two colours, so the colours of the originals cannot be checked against it, and the rays of the sun on the third device are not countable on this impression.
• The 25 March 1943 approval of the Fifth Air Force emblem was checked by the archive's verifier against the source listed; the editor did not fetch that page. The 29 June 1943 date for the star-and-bars wing insignia was fetched. The activation date of the Thirteenth Air Force, cited in an earlier draft, has been removed because no fetched page in this record carries it; the star-and-bars terminus carries the 1943 floor on its own.
• The flag-bearing panel on the airman's jacket is read as a blood chit from its form. Whether the panel is the back of the jacket, a lining or a lifted flap, and whether the patch is sewn or painted, cannot be determined from the cut; the characters on it are rendered as marks and are illegible, so no line count or text can be given.
• Whether the airman's raised hand is a salute or a gesture to his helmet is not determinable from the drawing.
• Neither figure is a portrait of an identified person; no occupation is stated for the man in the conical hat, and nothing on the sheet names an occupation, a place or an intended audience. The landscape is generic and China is named only in the English heading, so the geo entry records the country the sheet names, not a located place.
• Dimensions were not measured and the photograph contains no scale reference; the type given, Poster, records the format as a single printed pictorial sheet and does not settle whether the object is a wall poster, a handbill or a card.
• The printing process is not established. The relief character is described from surface evidence at photographic resolution through a plastic sleeve; woodcut, linocut and a photomechanical facsimile of a relief print cannot be told apart from a photograph.
• The verso was not photographed, so any pencil notes, stamps or dealer marks on the back are unrecorded.