Marine, pilot, spy, smuggler

WEYAUWEGA – In the days before Weyauwega’s high school graduation in 1946, 17-year-old Duwayne Redmann, gulped down pancakes and milk. He needed to put pounds on his skinny frame to meet the weight cutoff for the Marine Corps physical. The day after he received his diploma, he was sworn in at the Milwaukee office and was soon on a train to Parris Island.
“When he left Weyauwega he said, ‘I want to fly. I want to see the world and fly,’” said his son, Matt Redmann, who recently published his father’s memoirs. The 600-page book came out this year and is titled, “The Nathan Hale Boy’s Club.”
While in boot camp, he took some tests to gauge his aptitudes. He scored high. This attracted the attention of James Forrestal, the United States secretary of the Navy.
Under orders from President Truman, Forestall was to keep an eye on Russian expansion in Asia. They were allied with China and spreading their communist influence.
Forrestal was putting together a clandestine force that could support the Chinese nationalists during the civil war in their fight against the communists. He needed couriers and he needed people that could fly.

He was looking for a low-level soldier that could be used as a courier and someone who could be easily forgotten, someone who could slip under the radar.

Recruited
Redmann was tested more in boot camp and before he graduated, he went to Washington, D.C. and met Forrestal. He explained he needed pilots for the secretive Nathan Hale Boy’s Club.
Nathan Hale was a patriotic solider and spy for the Continental Army during the American Revolution.
Redmann was 17 years old, the son of a truck-driving father and a schoolteacher mother. Forrestal called them.

“Dad was still under 18 years old at this point. So Forrestal called my grandfather and grandmother in Weyauwega and got permission to extend his service agreement from two years to four years. Because he was going to go into flying and when the military makes a commitment for more training and invest money in a person, they want to get it back out of that person,” said Redmann.
He went to flight school in Cherry Point, North Carolina and earned his navigator wings in the winter of 1947. He also received private pilot training on the side. He mastered flying the Douglas R4D-8, a military transport plane.
After taking some qualifying flights around the Caribbean, he was sent to China.

Asian skies, undercover
“He flew over as an ensign. He was constantly in different garb, constantly referred to in different ways. When he was in China, they didn’t have any identification on the planes. They did a lot of camera work. There were two other guys, the pilot and the mechanic. They flew the China Lady—that’s what he called the plane and they flew it all over China and took tons of film for Forrestal. They ran guns, money and people in support of the nationalist army,” said Redmann.

He wasn’t in uniform for months at a time. He kept different log books for his flights. When asked, he said had 100 hours of official logged flight time. In reality, it was over 2,000 hours in top-secret flights.
He also was back in the states as courier, hand delivering intelligence to Forrestal.
Redmann left behind a girlfriend in Weyauwega. She was two years younger and they were able to meet after she graduated when he was back stateside. They met in California and got married in Tijuana.
When she later applied for spousal benefits, the U.S. Marine Corps replied back that their marriage was impossible because Redmann was never in the U.S. at that time. Everything was off the books.
It was much later when Redmann was back stateside in Cherry Point that they remarried again to be formally recognized as husband and wife.

Disbanded
Truman was reelected in 1948 and he ordered Forrestal to get the marines out of China and Redmann returned in the spring of 1949.
Forestall died in April of 1949 under mysterious circumstances that are still contested to this day.
Matt Redmann said an aide confided to his father that Forrrestal was executed. He was thrown out of his hospital window.
The Nathan Hale Boy’s Club was disbanded and all paperwork and evidence of their existence was destroyed.

Redmann continued to fly as a navigator in North Carolina and California. He reenlisted and finished with ten years of service in 1956.
He and his young family returned to Weyauwega and he bought a dairy farm on Evanswood Road and Redmann had an assortment of jobs throughout his life.
“He made a commitment to Forrestal when he joined that he would keep his activities in China secret for 50 years. He fulfilled that. That would be around 2006 and then he started putting things down on paper. But up until that time, he’d only hint about how he liked flying in China,” said Redmann.
Matt Redmann went to West Point and graduated in 1976. He contacted some old colleagues that were learned in military history. They looked into the Nathan Hal Boy’s Club and very little is known about it.
U.S. military involvement supporting the nationalists during the Chinese Civil War is well known from a big-picture foreign policy view. Redmann’s memoir may be the only boots-on-the-ground (and in the air) narrative in existence as it was derived from his logbooks.
“It’s very detailed: We flew from here to here. We were carrying guns or people. It details taking bricks of gold and giving it to this person and that person to support the nationalists,” said Redmann.
The book is available in hardcover, paperback and as an e-edition. It can be found wherever books are sold online.