James Munro Bertram (11 August 1910 – 24 August 1993) was a New Zealand Rhodes scholar, a journalist, writer, relief worker, prisoner of war and a university professor.Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in exile in the time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung (2003, Vintage) James McNeish]

Early life and influences Bertram was born in Auckland on 11 August 1910, son of Ivo Edgar Bertram, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Evelyn Susan Bruce. His great-grandparents on both sides had arrived in Wellington in the 1840s. He spent ten years of his childhood in Melbourne and Sydney, and attended church schools. He returned to New Zealand for secondary schooling at Waitaki Boys' High School, where he befriended Charles Brasch and Ian Milner (the son of headmaster Frank Milner). Between 1929 and 1931 he studied English literature at Auckland University College, where he met the third of his closest friends, J. A. W. Bennett. He edited a literary magazine, Phoenix, and with Bennett co-edited a Student Christian Movement magazine, Open Windows. In 1932 Bertram received a Diploma in Journalism and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Bertram was briefly a student volunteer special constable during the Queen Street riots of April 1932, to find that his sympathies for those from less-privileged backgrounds had grown."Of all our Varsity SPs (Special Constables), it was John Mulgan who first realized how incongruous our behaviour had been: signing up in a sort of conditioned reflex to keep the peace and prevent damage to property, when in fact we were wanted to crack the heads of angry and desperate men, many of whom had not had a square meal for months". Bertram, James, Capes of China Slide Away: A Memoir of Peace and War 1910-1980, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993, p. 48

Oxford Studying at New College, Oxford, he was awarded a first class honours degree in English in 1934 and a second class honours in Modern Languages (French and German) the following year. He was active in rugby and left-wing clubs including the University Labour Club and he initiated an Oxford Branch of the Independent Labour Party. During university vacations he visited Italy in 1933, the Soviet Union in 1934, Germany in 1935 where in Munich he witnessed a rally led by Hitler, and visited the Soviet Union for a second time in 1936.pp. 73-83, Bertram, James M., Capes of China Slide Away: A Memoir of Peace and War 1910-1980, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993.

Following Oxford Bertram was briefly an international correspondent with The Times in London but left after the editor Geoffrey Dawson refused to run his article predicting a sweeping victory for Labour in the New Zealand 1935 general election.pp.82-83, Capes of China Slide Away: A Memoir of Peace and War 1910-1980, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993. He then took a short-term teaching position at St. Paul's School, in Hammersmith before accepting an offer by the Rhodes Trust in late 1935 for a one-year travelling fellowship to Japan and China. He was twenty-five at the time.

Beiping In January 1936 Bertram arrived in BeipingFollowing the success of the Nationalists' Northern Expedition in 1928, Nanjing (Nanking) had been designated as the national capital. Consequently, Beijing's name was changed to Beiping (written in Western sources at the time as "Peiping"). During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Beiping fell to Japan on 29 July 1937 and was made the seat of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, a puppet state that ruled the ethnically Chinese portions of Japanese-occupied northern China. Source: Wikipedia with commissions from several British publications including The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman to write freelance articles on Asian issues.

In Beijing Bertram studied Chinese including at Yenching University where one of the men he shared a room with was Wang Rumei who was later to be better known under his Communist Party name of Huang Hua as the longest-serving foreign minister of the PRC after Zhou Enlai. Bertram's other roommate was Zhang Zhaolin (Chang Chao-lin) who was to become the editor of a Xi'an (Sian) daily newspaper under the control of Nationalist General Zhang Xueliang.p.96, Capes of China Slide Away: A Memoir of Peace and War 1910-1980, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993.

In Beijing Bertram also met American correspondent Edgar Snow, who had been teaching journalism at Yenching University, and his wife Peg Snow. Bertram later wrote that "Meeting the Snows was for me the real turning point in my discovery of modern China".p.95, Capes of China Slide Away: A Memoir of Peace and War 1910-1980, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993. Soon after Bertram's arrival in Beiping, Snow travelled to north-west China on a trip which was to produce in 1937 what Bertram described as the "classical scoop of modern Asian reporting, Red Star over China, which told the world the story of Mao Zedong, Zhu De and their associates".p.95, Capes of China Slide Away: A Memoir of Peace and War 1910-1980, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993. Snow introduced Bertram to key figures as Soong Ching-ling (the widow of Sun Yat-sen), New Zealander Rewi Alley, the Chinese writer Lu Xun, and the American revolutionary activist Agnes Smedley.

Xi'an Incident On 12 December 1936, in Beiping Bertram observed an anti-Japanese student demonstration of some five thousand students which he described in his article "The Twelfth of December".The Twelfth of December: Bertram, James M., Crisis in China: The Story of the Sian Mutiny, London: Macmillan and Co, 1937, pp. 1-13. It was later learnt that General Chiang Kai-shek had been seized earlier that day by the Northeastern Army troops loyal to General Zhang Xueliang in Xi'an until Chiang agreed to enter into a united front with the Communist forces against the Japanese. Bertram travelled to in a difficult eleven-day journey including crossing the frozen over Yellow River on foot to report on what later became known as the Xi'an Incident. He was the only foreign journalist to reach the city which was under blockade by the Kuomintang.p. xv, Crisis in China, the Story of the Sian Mutiny, London: UK, MacMillan and Co, 1937. Mail and telegraph communications being blocked, Bertram joined Agnes Smedley in providing radio reports on the situation in the rebel capital during his month-long stay. The Xi'an Incident is seen now as a turning point in modern Chinese history as it marked the formal end of the ten-year civil war between Nationalists and Communists and the beginning of an effective United Front of resistance to Japan.

On the basis of his Xi'an reports, Bertram's Rhodes travelling fellowship was renewed for a second year. Back in Beijing, together with Edgar Snow he founded an English-language journal 'Democracy' which was translated into Chinese and widely circulated. The material published in the journal formed the core of his book Crisis in China (1937) which he wrote in the home of Ida Pruitt.

In July 1937, shortly after arriving in Tokyo on his first visit, Japan launched the second phase of its invasion of China. Bertram hurriedly returned to Beijing just days before the Japanese captured the city. Together with Edgar Snow, they evacuated to Tianjin (Tientsin) with Zhou Enlai's wife Deng Yingchao disguised as Snow's household servant before finding their way back to Xi'an.

Yan'an and the North China Front In Xi'an Bertram received a radio message from Mao Zedong, inviting him to become the first official 'British' visitor to Yan'an.p.127, Capes of China Slide Away, A memoir of peace and war 1910-1980. Bertram, James M., Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993. Bertram spent nearly a month in Yan'an during which time he conducted an extensive series of interviews with Mao in his cave-dwelling during which Mao expounded the Japanese objectives and the strategies he believed that the Chinese should adopt to defeat the Japanese. "Interview with the British Journalist James Bertram" was cited in Mao's Collected Works."Interview with the British Journalist James Bertram", 25 October 1937. Collected Works, Vol II, p. 53.The British Journalist could refer to Bertram's correspondent status for three British publications. Also, a separate New Zealand citizenship was not established until 1 January 1949 by the British Nationality and New Zealand Citizenship Act 1948. Prior to this date, New Zealanders were British subjects and New Zealand had the same nationality legislation as the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries. Source: Wikipedia

From Yan'an Bertram set out for the Eighth Route Army headquarters in southern Shanxi (Shansi) and travelled for five months with the army in northern China. On the day that he crossed the Yellow River from Shaanxi (Shensi) back to Shanxi, this time by boat, Taiyuan the Shanxi capital fell to the Japanese. Most of his time was spent with the troops of General He Long(Ho Lung). Based on these experiences behind the front Bertram wrote a book North China Front (1939).North China Front. London: Macmillan and Co, 1939.

Relief work and Soong Ching-ling Bertram began to more actively support China's war against the Japanese, and carried out aid work with the China Defence League (CDL) under Soong Ching-ling. The CDL was a relief committee formed in Hong Kong to help maintain Norman Bethune and the International Peace Hospitals in China's northern war area. During this time Bertram gave fund-raising lectures in the US and led a convoy of supply trucks with petrol and medical supplies from Haiphong in Vietnam to Yan'an. Part-way through this journey England declared war on Germany. "Suddenly I remembered I was a New Zealander; I caught the first plane back, and came home.".Return to China p.8, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964. The first troop contingent being already fully enlisted, he was given permission to return to China and early in 1940 he arrived in Hong Kong to continue work on the organisation of medical relief with the CDL and also with the British Ministry of Information, spending his time between Hong Kong and the Chinese war time capital of Chongqing (Chungking).

Prisoner-of-war From January 1941 he also spent a few months as relief press attaché to the British ambassador in Chongqing, which involved bringing a British supply convoy over the Burma Road from Rangoon.Head of Chancery at the British Embassy was New Zealander Denis Allen who was later to head the British Foreign office. Capes of China. He returned to Hong Kong and played a role in assisting Soong Ching-ling and her sister Soong Ai-ling to evacuate to Chongqing hours before Hong Kong fell to the Japanese. Captured by the Japanese as a volunteer gunner in December 1941 he spent two years in Hong Kong as prisoner-of-war during which time he caught diphtheria. This was followed by two more difficult years as a prisoner-of-war in the Omori camp in Tokyo Bay spent doing forced labour in railyards and on the Tokyo docks. Bertram witnessed first hand the devastating effect of the bombing of the Tokyo-Yokohama area, and saw the coming of the victorious Allies by air and sea after the Japanese surrender in 1945. In later years, rather than talk of his experience as a Japanese prisoner-of-war, he would direct people to books by Sir Laurens van der Post saying 'they are true, in a way few other books about the Japanese are'. Bertram thought it unlikely that many of the 350,000 prisoners still held by the Japanese in 1945 would have survived had the war not been brought to a sudden end by the atomic bomb.John Thomson. 'Bertram, James Munro - Biography', from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 1 September 2010.

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