On August 25, 1945, a small group of American and Chinese soldiers under the command of John Birch, who had been promoted to captain, left a surrendered Japanese garrison and proceeded by railroad handcar toward the city of Hsuchow. About noon, they reached a section of track that was being torn up by Communist guerrillas. After a tense confrontation, Birch persuaded the Communists to allow his party to pass.
After another hour's travel, though, Birch and his party encountered a second band of Communists. This group was more hostile, but a member of Birch?s party, Lieutenant Tung of the Nationalist Chinese army, still attempted to negotiate an agreement with the Communists allowing Birch and his small team to pass. The negotiations failed, leading to the murder of Captain Birch, the attempted murder of Lt. Tung, and the capture of the remainder of Birch's party.

On what was thought to be his deathbed, an ailing Lt. Tung recounted to Lt. William T. Miller, a friend of Birch and a fellow intelligence agent in China, the tale of the Communist attack. After the Communists stated their intention to disarm the Americans, Birch refused, stating, "well so you want to disarm us. Presently the whole world has been liberated from the enemy and you people want to stop and disarm us." Birch then demanded to see the Communist leader responsible for the order to disarm the Americans and the Communist soldiers agreed, taking Tung and Birch with them. After repeatedly failing to be brought to the Communist commander, Birch, exasperated, grabbed a Communist soldier by the back of his collar and said: "you are worse than bandits." The Communist soldier did not respond and the group walked a little way further. Then someone called out: "Come over here, this is our responsible man."

Lt. Tung recalls:

This Communist then angrily commanded: "Load your guns and disarm him first," pointing to Capt. Birch. Realizing how seriously acute the situation was, I spoke up in desperation saying: "Wait a minute please, if you must disarm him I will get the gun for you lest a grave misunderstanding develop."

At this moment the Communist commander turned and pointed to me ordering, "shoot him first." In an instant I felt a terrible shock and fell to the ground, shot through the right thigh....
Though lying there on the street in a semi-faint, I heard another shot fired and a voice command, "bring him along."

To this I heard Capt. Birch's anguished reply, "I can't walk."

Tung passed out and never saw Captain Birch alive again. Later he was thrown into a ditch along with the dead body of John Birch and left to die. He was severely beaten, suffering from a broken nose and ruptured right eye, as well as from the severe bullet wound in his leg. Gruesome photos taken by Lt. William Miller show the mutilated body of John Birch, his hands bound behind his back as if he had been ????uted, his face destroyed by multiple bayonet thrusts. A second bullet may have passed through his skull from back to front.

Some have speculated that Birch, through a belligerent attitude, brought about his own death. A headline in the August 13, 1972 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer went so far as to state: "John Birch Aroused Chinese Reds Into Killing Him." Lt. General Charles B. Stone III, former commander of Birch's outfit, the 14th Air Force, which had replaced the C.A.T.F. on March 10, 1943 dismissed such allegations as spurious years before. In a November 21, 1961 letter to Newsweek, Stone defended Birch's handling of the situation: "What else should an American officer do in these circumstances?" Stone asked. "Perhaps any argument with an organized Communist group is useless, but this should not inhibit an American officer from making the attempt in performance of his duty."

The death of John Birch, the first American casualty of the Cold War, sent ripples through an American Establishment swooning over Mao Tse-tung and his Communist band of "agrarian reformers." Mao's forces could never have defeated Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists, the greatest force for civilization and liberalization that China had ever seen, if the Nationalists had not already been slated for extinction by socialist elites in the West. With the collusion of State Department subversives, Communists in East Asia had been able to consolidate their gains at war's end. Communist Russia, which had opportunistically declared war on Japan scant days before the Japanese surrender, turned over huge caches of seized Japanese weapons to the Chinese and Korean Communists. American military aid intended for Chiang Kai-shek was blocked by treasonous Leftists in Washington bent on hastening the Communist apocalypse in the Far East. In the context of such cynical deceit and viciously duplicitous American foreign policy, the murder of an innocent American at the hands of Communist thugs would be disastrous for America's media- and State Department-sponsored Mao love-fest.
Accordingly, the Insiders embarked upon a cover-up of the circumstances of John Birch's death. A 1948 letter from Major General Edward Witsell to John Birch's mother claimed that John Birch was killed "as the result of stray bullets fired by Communist forces." Consequently, the letter stated, he was not entitled to the Purple Heart "as he was not killed in action against an enemy of the United States or as a direct result of an act of such enemy." Mrs. Birch was not informed of the findings of a report compiled under the aegis of General Albert C. Wedemeyer that contained the testimony of Lt. Tung.

General Wedemeyer had also confronted Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai during a meeting on August 30, 1945, expressing extreme displeasure at the murder of Birch and the capture of his party. Mao and Chou, feigning concern, promised to investigate the matter and punish the guilty parties. However, the U.S. pressed the matter no further. The incident was not mentioned again, the relevant documents were classified, and the official Washington campaign of deception on behalf of the Chinese Communists continued.

Not until the early 1950s did the details of John Birch's death become public. On September 5, 1950, California Senator William Knowland angrily announced on the Senate floor that the circumstances of John Birch?s death had been deliberately covered up by pro-Communists in the United States government. Had the facts of the Birch incident been known at the time, he charged, Congress and the American people would never have permitted the betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese people. But by then the Communist takeover in China was a fait accompli.
John Birch's life was tragically short. The war-weary farmer never lived to see the "fields and hills, woodlands and streams I can call my own," or the wife and family he dreamed about. His death, nasty and brutish, came precisely as millions of other servicemen were enjoying reunions with loved ones and laying plans for a brighter future. He was for a time consigned to oblivion in order to serve the twisted interests of diabolically cynical political manipulators. Only the freedom-loving organization that Robert Welch named in his honor brought John Birch to public attention, kept alive the memory of his extraordinary courage and quiet heroism.
In many respects, John Birch is a far more typical hero than others we have profiled in these pages. Unlike the statesmen, the generals, the scholars, the writers, and others who have left their mark on our tragic century, he led a modest, self-sacrificing existence and died a martyr's death without public acclaim. It never occurred to him to do other than what was right; he was unencumbered by the moral ambiguities associated with power politics. He defined all of his hopes and ambitions in terms of serving his God, his family, and his fellow men. John Birch, in a word, belonged to that most heroic of all classes of human beings, the so-called common men and women who, in order to preserve our civilization, have fought, suffered, and died by the countless millions. Their bones lie interred at Normandy, in Treblinka, in the Soviet gulags, in the Cambodian killing fields, in the waters of the Florida Strait. Like John Birch, they all died in the hope that generations unborn would benefit from their sufferings and sacrifices, even if their names were lost to posterity. Captains and kings depart this fallen world lavished with acclaim, but we must suppose that the millions of common heroes like John Birch will, in some future, better time, receive the higher honor.