Grassroots and Guerrillas

Kelly Hammond reviews Stephen R. Platt’s “The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II” alongside other new work about East Asia in World War II.

By Kelly HammondMay 30, 2025

• History

AWARD-WINNING HISTORIAN and masterful storyteller Stephen R. Platt offers, in his new book The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II, a biography of Evans Carlson, the marine who pioneered the controversial guerrilla tactics used in the island-hopping campaigns against the Japanese in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Carlson, it turns out, also had a long and deep interest in China. Platt uses key episodes in Carlson’s colorful life as an entry point for exploring the complexities, contingencies, and uncertainties of the often contentious and fraught relationships between the United States, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Carlson was a complicated man, and in many ways Platt’s new book is, however complicated, a redemption story. He was a bad husband to all his wives and an even worse father. Yet at the same time, Carlson was also a great friend and confidant to influential journalists engaged with China, such as Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley. He was a well-respected soldier and a savvy conversationalist who put people around him at their ease. He met Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. He also corresponded secretly with FDR for years, providing the president with privileged information about the situation in China.

Carlson’s eventful life story also provides readers with a view from the ground, showing how American intermediaries navigated between and around both the US and Chinese governments to position themselves in places that served their interests. For Platt, Carlson was “a bridge” between the United States and China, but his deep respect for the CCP—and its military commander Zhu De especially—ensured that his views were silenced and mostly forgotten after his death in 1947. After enlisting illegally in the army to serve in the Great War, Carlson bounced around. He joined the marines and arrived in China for the first time in 1927. There, he witnessed the complete “rupture” between the CCP and the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek in April 1927, a split that has never been reconciled.

By 1928, Carlson kept hearing about “notorious communist bandits” who either had escaped the White Terror in Shanghai or had—like Mao Zedong—been in the countryside organizing peasants when Chiang’s purge occurred. After a tour in Nicaragua, Carlson made it back to China in 1933 as an intelligence officer with the US Marines. In 1937, he witnessed the Japanese assault on Shanghai. After watching the KMT losses in Shanghai and listening to Edgar Snow talk about his time embedded with the communists, Carlson became obsessed with the idea of spending time at the communist base in Yan’an. As Platt makes clear, Carlson was not a believer in Marxism-Leninism and had a more pragmatic than ideological interest in Mao and revolutionary groups in general. He was a curious adventurer who wanted to see how the CCP was managing to keep the Japanese at bay while the KMT was suffering excruciating losses along the coast.

With permission from the KMT and a CCP-provided escort and translator, Carlson made his way deep into Japanese-occupied territories. He hit it off with Zhu De, the affable CCP “field commander and tactical guru” behind the organization’s successful guerrilla warfare campaigns. Like many people who met him, Carlson was taken by Zhu’s kindness and friendship. He admired the Eighth Route Army and the strong sense of camaraderie Zhu had created among his troops with almost no money. Upset that no one in the service would take his recommendations and positive reviews of Zhu’s tactics seriously, Carlson quit the marines and returned stateside. He only rejoined the service after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor changed everything for Carlson. He had long dreamed “of building an American counterpart to the Eighth Route Army,” and this dream “might have remained just the fantasy of a disaffected reserve officer if it hadn’t been for a series of fortuitous accidents in early 1942.” In this sentence, Platt is making two important interjections into the historiography of the Greater East Asia War. First, he is acknowledging that the Marine Raiders—precursors to American special-ops teams—were formed out of observations made by Carlson during his time embedded with the communists. Second, he demonstrates that none of this was preordained. At every step along the way, there were decisions and actions taken by individual humans—be they Chinese, Japanese, or Americans—that had an impact on the development and fate of the first Marine Raider Battalion.

Carlson received permission in February 1942 to create “two separate battalions of what would be, effectively, America’s first modern special operations forces.” Carlson’s tactics and strategies were deeply informed by the time he spent in the late 1930s embedded with the Eighth Route Army led by Zhu. These marines—the Raiders—were deployed against the Japanese army first on Makin Atoll. They fought again in battles like Tarawa, Guadalcanal, and eventually Okinawa.

As he trained these battalions, he developed an ethos based on the Chinese notion of working together (共和), romanized as “gung ho.” This ethos—derived directly from his talks and time with Zhu—was central to the sense of brotherhood and deep trust that was (and still is) essential to the training of small commando battalions. The Raiders’ first mission on Makin Atoll was a harrowing one, but it made Carlson a war hero, and the mission is famous in American military history as “the first submarine-based raid.”

As a longtime, outspoken supporter of the Eighth Route Army, Carlson often got into trouble with both KMT and American advisers. After his successes on Guadalcanal, Carlson expressed interest in taking the Raiders to China to link up with Zhu and the Eighth Route Army. This connection never materialized, and he was removed from command in March 1943.

Carlson ended his military career on a bitter note. After retirement, he tried to run for office in California but had to withdraw his candidacy after suffering a heart attack. As the geopolitical landscape in the Pacific shifted drastically in the postwar years, Carlson could only watch from the sidelines in Oregon, where he lived with his third wife. He died in 1947, before he would get the chance to see the CCP defeat the KMT and force their retreat to Taiwan. He also did not live to see US friends from his time in China suffer during the McCarthy era. The FBI had a large file on Carlson. It is partly because of his sympathies for the Eighth Route Army that his story was swept under the rug at a time of heightened Cold War tensions—no matter that Carlson was not a communist, just someone who liked good people, good ideas, and good military tactics.

This book is not just a biography; Platt’s newest work also contributes to several ongoing debates about US-China relations in the 20th century. For one, Platt claims that the “central conflict” in China’s recent past was not the war against Japan but the civil war between communists and nationalists, which did not end in 1949 after the communist victory on the mainland.

The Raider also complements new trends in the writing about the Greater East Asia War. Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949 is another recent book that shifts from high-level political maneuverings to present a fuller picture of both the war in China and the aftermath of the war. As editors Zach Fredman and Judd C. Kinzley point out, the years leading up to the 1949 establishment of the PRC were a “period of sustained interaction” between American and Chinese people, who engaged with one another in new and unprecedented ways. Like Platt, the authors in this new collection draw on sources from both sides of the Pacific, in English and Chinese. They, too, show how informal and ad hoc networks developed out of necessity and only coalesced into more formal, institutionalized relationships by the end of the Pacific War.

By looking “beyond the drama of high politics,” the contributors to Uneasy Allies highlight how a focus on “grassroots entanglements” presents new ways to understand the transpacific connections forged during the war. This also gives us fresh perspectives with which to view the US-PRC relationship during the Cold War. The Raider achieves a similar goal via a less conventionally academic though still scholarly approach; by demystifying Carlson’s life and exploits, the book gives readers a glimpse into the lasting but unacknowledged impact Zhu had on the US Marine Corps.

At the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I teach a popular survey course about World War II in the Pacific. Most American undergraduates come to this class with some vague knowledge of island-hopping campaigns, bookended by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of them do not know that China was—as historian Rana Mitter has called it—our “forgotten ally” in the war against the Axis.

It’s my job to piece together the complicated story of Japan’s growing aggression toward their neighbors around East Asia and their growing disillusionment with the post–World War I world order. Intertwined in this story of Japanese aggression is the knottier narrative of the ongoing tensions and fighting between and within the CCP and the KMT starting in the 1920s. Reading Platt’s new biography of Carlson, I was excited to finally find a book that tackles all these topics in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Sometimes biographies read more like hagiographies than they do stories of complex human beings who made difficult decisions over the courses of their lives and careers. But the depth and complexity of Platt’s book mirror the depth and complexity of the historical actors portrayed in its pages.