Wen Bon: A Naval Air Intelligence Officer Behind Japanese Lines in China in WWII

During the Second World War Byron Winborn was part of a covert military operation in an area of southeastern China overrun and nominally controlled by Japanese forces. As a Naval lieutenant attached to the Fourteenth Army Air Force, he and his colleagues in a Technical Air Intelligence unit scavenged behind the lines for wreckage from downed enemy aircraft, seeking valuable technical information which they reported back to their superiors in Washington. Winborn's memoir of these experiences is rendered in an informal and understated conversational style including near encounters with Japanese troops, confrontations with Chinese bandits and semi-comic negotiations with the local populace, along with thoughtful observations about the contrasting attitudes and life styles between the culture in which he found himself and that from which he had come. At the end of hostilities, "Wen Bon" as his Chinese associates addressed him, was ordered to Shanghai, where he and other veterans of southeastern China contributed their unconventional "can-do" talents to expediting traffic in a Naval Air Priorities Office, for a hectic finale to his singular tour of exotic duty.