page_title: Mission 204
section_title: Second Phase: February 1943
hierarchical_section_title: Mission 204 / Operations / Second Phase: February 1943
caption_attribution_description: English: Australian troops of the British Military Mission 204 march to the front in Jiangxi province - Australian War Memorial (AWM)
context_page_description: 204 Mission, also known as Tulip Force, was a British military mission to China organized in 1940-1941 that went into action soon after Pearl Harbor. It was an attempt to provide military assistance to the Chinese Nationalist Army in order to sustain Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The first phase achieved very little but a second more successful phase was conducted before withdrawal.
context_section_description: The Second phase was more successful, with British medical and demolition experts assigned to the Surprise troops. This phase   ran from February 1943 to February 1945, and operated under standard British Military command, as opposed to the first phase which operated under the SOE. Learning lessons from the unsuccessful first phase, the second phase worked quite well, with valid assistance to the Chinese guerrilla actions. However, with the major Japanese Operation Ichi-Go underway, the Mission 204 soldiers were pulled out of China, being flown out of the area by the USAAF whose bases at Guilin and Luizhou were the targets of the Japanese.
  From the Chinese perspective, the leader of the Chinese Surprise troops, General Li Mo'an, was very critical of the British effort.  In 1990, he said that the Commandos were in fact largely not soldiers, but mostly businessmen, priests and missionaries. He also stated that they forced their way into the locals' houses, harassed the local women, and were rowdy and disorderly. They also stole all the locals' possessions, were generally out of control, and treated all the Chinese as peasants, even those who were not. There is a view that he was directed to state this by the Chinese Communist party.
  Out of the 180 soldiers involved in the operations, only three did not return home: two British and  one Australian who died in the operation.
caption: Troops from Mission 204 march to the front in Jiangxi province
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