Sara B. Castro, Mission to Mao: U.S. Intelligence and the Chinese Communists in World War II (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2024); Zach Fredman, The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China , 1941–1949 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Confucius says, “To have friends come from afar to visit, is that not, indeed, a joy?” Not always, as it turns out — at least when those friends are Americans coming to help in World War II. This is