Julia Child and the OSS Kandy: surfing, 'psyops' and skinks - Part I

Vinod MOONESINGHE

Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born one hundred years ago, on August 15, 1912 in Pasadena. She died on August 13, 2004 in Montecito as world famous cookery book author, French chef and top-50 television star Julia Child.

Julia had a conventional childhood and, graduating from Smith College, became an advertising copywriter. In August, 1942, determined to do something for the war effort following the American entry into the Second World War, she began her war service as a Senior Typist for the Office of War Information (OWI), which later became the United States Information Service, in Washington DC.

Julia Child

The previous year, American President Franklin D Roosevelt had established the Office the Co-ordinator of Information under William Joseph ('Wild Bill') Donovan. In June 1942, it was split into two: the OWI and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which remained under Donovan. The OSS - the predecessor of today's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - was tasked with collecting and analysing strategic information and carrying out special operations behind the lines of America's enemies.

In December 1942 Julia was recruited to the OSS as a research assistant in the Secret Intelligence division, directly under Donovan. She proved excellent at cataloguing information and she was transferred to South East Asia, as head of Registry of the newly created Detachment 404, to processed all classified papers dealing with South East Asia

Following the creation, under Lord Louis Mountbatten, of the Joint Anglo-American South East Asia Command (SEAC) in August 1943, Donovan had created the new unit to organise all South East Asia operations. When, in April 1944, Supreme Commander Mountbatten, moved SEAC from Delhi to the King's Pavilion (now the President's House) in Kandy, Detachment 404 followed.

War room

The unit, which would eventually have 595 personnel on the island, had its headquarters in a planter's bungalow at Nandana Estate. It also had a logistics unit in Bambalapitiya and training camps at Galle (called 'Camp Buona Vista'), at Clodagh Estate, Rattota and at Trincomalee ('Camp Y').

Julia arrived in Colombo on April 25, 1944 and was in Kandy the next day. She was billeted with the other women at the Queens' Hotel, hard by the Temple of the Tooth - most of the men were housed in the Hotel Suisse across the Kandy Lake. Her office was a cadjan-thatched hut in the barbed-wire enclosed compound on Nandana estate.

Julia worked diligently but also found time for her madcap sense of humour. She typed at the bottom of one confidential official document sent to Washington, DC 'If you don't send this Registry some kind of a report or something, I shall fill the pouches with itching powder and virulent bacteriological diseases, and change all the numbers, as well as translate all the material into Sinhalese, and destroy the English version'.

It was here that she met the man who was to be her husband. Paul Cushing Child, who was 42 at the time, worked on cartography and maintained the war room. He had set up war rooms in both Delhi and in Kandy for Mountbatten, whom he hero-worshipped.

Language skills

Born in New Jersey, his father died while he was in his infancy and he was brought up by his mother in Boston. After graduation from Columbia College, he moved to Paris, where he became an artist.

He taught various subjects including photography, English, French and Judo in France, Italy and the USA. At Avon Old Farms School, for which he wrote the school song, he was teacher to folk singer Pete Seeger.

Like many officers of the OSS, he was to be absorbed into the state department after the war. He married Julia in 1946 and they went to France and Norway in pursuit of his diplomatic career. He was later to use his skills to aid his wife in her tele-cookery pursuits, designing 'Julia's Kitchen' for her television shows.

Paul Child was one of the many artists and intellectuals, as well as people with language skills and experience operational areas, whom the OSS recruited. It sometimes seemed that Julia was attending an intellectual salon rather than a wartime headquarters.

Short story

The OSS was a far more idealistic organisation than the later CIA, which was in many ways its antithesis. One of the many gripes of the mostly liberal or radical intellectuals had about working for SEAC was that the initials actually stood for 'Save England's Asiatic Colonies'.

Detachment 404 included artists, writers, psychologists, anthropologists and ornithologists, as well as missionaries with language skills. Julia of course, fell into none of these categories at the time, although she was to be more famous than any of them.

Julia's only real rival among the OSS personnel in Sri Lanka for later celebrity was John Dann MacDonald, a US Army major (later lieutenant colonel) who commanded the branch logistics establishment in Bambalapitiya. A drop-out from the Wharton School in Pennsylvania, he later obtained an MBA from Harvard.

He was bored with his work and, irked by the censorship of his letters, once wrote his wife a short story instead. His wife liked it so much that she typed it out and sent it to 'Story' magazine, which showcased many of America's finest authors. The magazine accepted the story, paying US $ 25 for it, and published it in their July-August 1946 issue as 'Interlude in India'.

He later gained fame as author of the Travis McGee crime novels, as well as several novels which were made into films: 'The Executioners', which was adapted as the screenplay of 'Cape Fear', 'Linda', 'Condominium' and 'Darker than Amber'.

Not so well known is the fact that he may have introduced surfing to Sri Lanka: according to the blogger 'Siyamabala': '... in later years he wrote and spoke so enthusiastically about the waves he rode there that the surfers among his fans were intrigued enough to bring their boards to Ceylon.'

An acquaintance of Julia's from Washington who arrived in Kandy was Fisher Howe.

A graduate from Harvard, Howe had been a thread salesman before joining the OSS, where he was an assistant to Donovan. In 1944 he was sent to Sri Lanka to inspect the Detachment 404 camps, but stayed on to command the OSS Maritime Unit in Trincomalee.

It was Howe's job to oversee operations in Sumatra, where his unit landed the mainly Communist Indonesian OSS agents. These were almost all betrayed to the authorities by the population, who supported Sukarno's nationalists, at that time collaborating with the Japanese.

After the war, Howe would be deputy director of State Department Intelligence and then executive secretary of the State Department. On retirement, he became assistant dean of School for Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University.