John Birch
Missionary to ChinaBorn to American missionaries in northern India in 1918, John Morrison Birch went to China in 1940 as an Independent Baptist missionary. Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Birch volunteered for the U.S. Army to fight the Japanese in China.
Put simply, John Birch was a devoted fundamentalist Baptist missionary who heroically served in World War II and was killed by Chinese Communists 10 days after the end of the war, when he was only 27. Communists that were supposedly WWII allies with the U.S.
Birch’s parents had been told that he was killed by a stray bullet, but only after accidentally seeing details of his death due to the carelessness of a young military officer; George and Ethel Birch knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and they didn’t even know that there had been an official investigation. For five years, Ethel traveled the country grilling those men who served with John, from fellow soldiers to commanding officers.
Finally, she wrote to California Senator William Knowland who finally was given access to John Birch’s file that was marked “Top Secret.” He was so moved by what he saw that he gave a speech on the floor of the Senate on September 5, 1950, berating the government for its cover-up, as the result of bringing John Birch’s death to light could have led to different relations with China and North Korea.
Nearly ten years after Birch’s death, John Birch Society Founder Robert Welch discovered that the death of Captain John Birch had been covered up after reading Knowland’s speech. Welch wrote and had published The Life of John Birch in 1954.
John Birch was a simple, but highly intelligent man, who worked hard to serve God, spread God’s word, and fought for the freedom to do so. During his service in the war, he longed for the day when he could once again work the land, raise a family and dutifully serve God, as seen in the prose he wrote four months before his death called “The War Weary Farmer.”
======================== [From the Internet. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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