Inscribed "Capt. V.F. Meisling 27 Nov. 1943 (Chungking)"
Interesting circa 1940 wall map of China, published by the Shanghai World Geography Institute (上海世界輿地學社出版) and the Universal Publishing House (各半世界書局發行)
The map depicts China in the 1940s in a large format, with insets around the map showing capital cities and other places of importance.
Captain VJ Meisling (1903-1973)
VJ Meisling is almost certainly Captain/Major Vaughn Francis Meisling, a Danish-American War correspondent who documented the last days of Hong Kong before its fall to Japan in December 1941, before being taken prisoner by the Japanese. After his release in June 1942, Meisling would go on to serve in the US Army in China for the duration of the War.
Captain Vaughn Francis Meisling was an American war correspondent and military officer whose career was marked by his brave reporting during World War II. Meisling was born in Copenhagen, before emigrating to the United States in 1920. He worked at newspapers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Richmond, New Orleans, and San Francisco before going to China as part of the staff of the North China Daily News in Shanghai and joining the Associated Press in Beijing in 1940.
At the time of its capture by the Japanese, Meisling was in Hong Kong on behalf of the Associated Press on December 18, 1941, where he was captured and imprisoned (along with other foreigners) by the Japanese. Initially, Meisling and other correspondents and foreigners (non-Japanese prionsers) were housed at the Sun Wah Hotel and the Gloucester Hotel. A Japanese army intelligence officer attempted to coerce them into writing and signing articles that falsely claimed they were receiving good treatment. When these efforts proved futile, the men were transferred to the more oppressive environment of Stanley Prison.
Along with other correspondents like George Baxter and Richard Wilson of UP and Joseph W. Alsop Jr., Meisling was eventually included in a group of prisoners being repatriated and released in exchange for Japanese prisoners in the United States on June 29, 1942, leaving aboard the M.S. Gripsholm thereafter enlisting in the US Army on December 18, 1942, serving until November 5, 1946.
A report from Chungking on March 9, 1942, and later reported in Cairns (Australia), noted that:
STORIES OF PRIVATION: CHUNGKING, March 9.
Vaughan Meisling, the American Press correspondent, and two other Americans captured at Hong Kong, have been transferred to the Stanley Prison because they refused Japanese requests to sign statements that they are well treated. Recent arrivals from Hong Kong said that wretched conditions and privation prevail at the prisons, the daily fare being one bowl of rice and one bowl of watery soup dally. As a result of the Japanese refusal of medical supplies many prisoners are suffering from dysentery.
Meisling continued on in China. On August 8, 1944, an American Foreign Relations report noted that
General Yen informed Major Meisling that he had received information from one of his agents in Peking purporting to show that there had occurred in July 1944 a change in the Japanese official at- titude toward the Chinese Communists. According to this report, a Japanese headquarters at Peking had ordered that thenceforth the Chinese Communists should not be referred to as Communist bandits as theretofore but as members of the Yenan regime thus treating them, as to nomenclature, the same as adherents of the Chungking Government.
The Amerasia Papers reports include the Report by Maj. V.F. Meisling on China-Political, enclosing a digest by John S. Service of Chiang Kai-shek's book China's Destiny," dated March 25, 1944.