Proceed to Peshawar. George J. Hill
a child, growing up on the border between India and Tibet, where he imagined that he was an “American Kim.”1 He saw that the journey became a real possibility when he was appointed as the U.S. military attaché to Kabul in the fall of 1941; he began to plan for the trip at that time. Two years later he drove the jeep that took the three Anglo-American officers from Peshawar over the Lowari Pass to Chitral, and then to Quetta, in Baluchistan.
Gordon Enders was born in the little town of Essex, Iowa, 7 May 1897. He was the second of the three children of E. Allen Enders, a circuit-riding Presbyterian minister, and his wife, a Swiss Huguenot named Frances-Marie Seibert. His older sister Miriam had been born in November 1895, and his younger brother Robert was born in September 1899. In about 1901 the father was accepted as a missionary, and the young family sailed to Bombay. His father began his work as a preacher while his mother raised the family and taught school at Etawah, near the Grand Trunk Road. In 1906 they moved to the village of Almora, about 250 miles to the north, near the border of India and Tibet. Their house was about eight miles outside the village, on the top of a seven thousand–foot mountain known as Simtolah, with the great peak of Nanda Devi in the background. Gordon lived in India in his formative years, from the age of four until he was fifteen.
As a baba (child) his first teacher was Jowar Singh, a high-caste Hindu hillman; from him he learned to hunt and to speak Hindustani. Kipling’s book Kim was published in 1901, and although he was young, Gordon read enough of it to recognize the experiences of the fictional Kim that were similar to his own. While he was recovering from a severe burn, he was taken into the household of Jowar’s father-in-law, a Tibetan named Chanti, who he learned was a spy for the Indian government. Enders became the chela (student or disciple) to Chanti, his guru. This relationship was similar to that of Kim, who was chela to his guru, a Buddhist monk. Chanti taught him the ways of the spies, the “Kim-men,” as Enders called them. Gordon’s imagination was vivid: “Before Chanti left Almora he took Jowaru and me along the Pilgrim’s Trail . . . [where a] bronzed priest of Nepal trudged unseeing through the human stream, a naked boy at his heels. They might have been Kim and his Lama.” He learned that although the Tibetans preferred to remain in isolation, they preferred Britain to Russia.2
Enders’ father died in 1910, and his mother accepted a post as matron of girls at Allahabad College, which was Chanti’s alma mater. Gordon returned to America in 1912 to begin preparation to enter college at the College of Wooster, in Ohio. He spent five years in Wooster—two years finishing high school, and three years in college. One of his housemates was William A. Eddy, who a quarter century later was “a Princeton professor [who] had lived through so many Armenian massacres in Asia Minor that he was always getting them mixed up.” Enders’ friend was already famous by 1935, when Enders wrote these words, and he went on to an even more memorable career in World War II.3
Enders had a remarkable career in World War I. He left college the year before he was to graduate, first serving as an ambulance driver for the French in Picardy and at Verdun, and then, after completing aviation school, as an aviator for the French and American air forces. It was a grim business. Forced down more than once—perhaps three times—he was so badly wounded at one time that he was declared dead. He awoke to find a Red Cross “gray lady” named Elizabeth Crump at his side. He fell in love with her, and they were married at the Hôtel de Ville in La Rochelle on 22 April 1919.4
He was in New York until 1920, but he planned to return to the Orient. While he was in New York, he wrote a two-page piece, “Prohibition in Old India,” that was published in the monthly journal Asia. The lead article in this issue of Asia was by Roy Chapman Andrews. It is unlikely that Enders could have known it, but Andrews had until recently been an undercover secret agent of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), a fact not revealed until 2003. Lowell Thomas was then an associate editor of Asia. Three years later Thomas became the first private American citizen to visit Afghanistan, about nineteen years before Enders became the first American diplomat to live there.5
Enders took the civil service examination for clerk to trade commissioner, under the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. He was sent to the American legation in Peking (now spelled Beijing), where he was an assistant to the commercial attaché until 1923. He then went into business, selling American cotton to Chinese and Japanese mill operators, and was the China manager for the Carnation Milk Company. He recalled spending at least nine months of each year traveling, and he returned to the United States on at least five occasions. His first book was coauthored with Edward Anthony, a professional writer, and published in 1935.6
Enders became aware of the disorganized nature of the Chinese government, and of the unwavering focus of Japan on the conquest of China. He sold twenty U.S. Corsair airplanes to Chiang Kai-shek, and then worked for him as technical aviation advisor for two years (1927–1929). In 1932 he met Chos’gyi Nyimo, Panchen Lama of Tashilhunpo, in Madame Chiang’s living room at the Chiangs’ summer home. The Panchen appointed Enders to the Upper House of the Tibetan National Assembly. This was apparently on the basis of his chela–guru relationship to Chanti, his unique skills as a pilot, and his Hindustani, Tibetan, and Chinese language skills, which were remarkable for a “foreign devil.” Enders’ “Passport to Heaven” is on the endpapers of his book, Foreign Devil, and he described his plan to fly gold out of Tibet for the Panchen Lama in a story published in 1936.7
When Enders returned to China in 1936, he found the Panchen Lama had just nominated the boy who would become the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Soon after, Japan invaded North China, and by the first week in September it was clear that Shanghai would fall. The Panchen slowly progressed back toward Lhasa; he died at the monastery of Jyekundo, close to Lhasa, on 30 November 1937. The plan to fly the gold from Tibet collapsed. Enders escaped at night via Nanking, and sailed for home.
After Enders’ return to the United States, he taught history at Purdue University from March 1937 until 29 April 1941, giving lectures there and elsewhere on his wide range of experiences. On 17 September 1941 he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, assigned to G-2 (Military Intelligence Division, or MID). He was superbly well qualified, and he probably had little trouble getting approval from the Army for appointment as a military attaché in the State Department. It appears that during the final weeks before he left for India, when he was en route to Afghanistan, he paid a visit to the British embassy. There he met the assistant military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Reginald “Rex” Benson, who had arrived in March 1941. Copies of Enders’ letters from India in November and December 1941 to his wife, Betty were forwarded by Betty Enders to Gordon’s niece Trudy Enders on 9 May 1942. Betty mentioned that she had heard that Gordon’s brother, Robert, who had been a professor at Swarthmore before the war, was in Washington at that time. Robert Enders later became a translator for the OSS.
The letters from India were typed by Enders over a period of several days. His wife sent excerpts to WBAA, the Purdue University radio station, but the letters have never previously been published. While en route to Delhi in late 1941, Enders wrote the following:
[Tuesday 18 November] Last night before taking the train I had dinner at the Farbos, an Italian-owned restaurant, which is considered the best in Calcutta. Its windows are covered for blackouts but it is gay and full of cooling fans inside. We saw dining two Indian sisters who are reputed to be the most beautiful in Hindustan. They had been done by famous portrait painters. I took the 9:03 train and had a very comfortable two-bunk compartment to myself, and the whole car is air-conditioned. A bearer brought coffee at 7:30. We breakfasted at 9:00—the food being wired for at headquarters was brought to the compartment on trays.
I am drinking in the Hindustan that I knew 30 years ago. The big changes so far have been turkeys. There are large flocks of them in the country tended by half-naked little boys. Of course, there are motor cars everywhere and they are new. The Grand Trunk Road is now paved, and there are Hindu, Mohammedan, and vegetarian restaurants at the big stations. But otherwise I see no marked differences.
Looking at the fields I’ve seen parrots, pigeons, and the big, blue cranes we call sahnus. The lentils, kaffir corn, sugar cane, and grain, the sisal and mustard are still there. The cattle are on the plains—at the kites and