Morris Cohen (adventurer)

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Morris Abraham "Two-Gun" Cohen (1889 - 1970) was a Polish-born Jewish adventurer who became a bodyguard for the Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen and a general in the Chinese army.

According to a biography written by Charles Drage with Cohen's assistance, Morris Cohen was born in London to a family that just arrived from Poland.

However, Cohen was actually born into a poor Jewish family in Radzanów, Poland. Soon after his birth in 1887, the Cohens escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and emigrated to London's East End.

Cohen loved the theaters, the streets, the markets and the boxing arenas of the English capital more than he did Jewish day school, and in April 1900 he was arrested for picking pockets. A judge sent him to the Hayes Industrial School for wayward Jewish lads. When he was released in 1905, the Cohens shipped young Morris off to western Canada with the hope that the fresh air and open plains of the New World would reform his ways.

Cohen initially worked on a farm near Whitewood, Saskatchewan. He tilled the land, tended the livestock and learned to shoot a gun and play cards. He did that for a year, and then started wandering through the Western provinces, making a living as a carnival talker, gambler, grifter and successful real estate broker. Some of his activitites landed him in jail.

Cohen also became friendly with the Chinese exiles who had come to work on the Canadian transcontinental railroads. In Saskatoon he came to the aid of a Chinese restaurant owner who was being robbed. Cohen knocked out the thief and tossed him out into the street. Such an act was unheard of the time, as few white men ever came to the aid of the Chinese.

The Chinese welcomed Cohen and eventually invited him to join the Tongmenghui, Sun Yat-sen's anti-Manchu organization. Cohen begun to advocate for the Chinese.

Cohen fought with the Canadian Railway Troops in Europe during World War I where part of his job involved supervising Chinese laborers. In 1922 he headed to China to help close a railway deal for Sun Yat-sen with Northern Construction and JW Stewart Ltd. Once there, he asked Sun for a job as a bodyguard.

In Shanghai and Canton Cohen trained Sun's small armed forces to box and shoot, and told people that he was an aide-de-camp and an acting colonel in Sun Yat-sen's army. His lack of Chinese — he spoke a pidgin form of Cantonese at best — was thankfully not a problem since Sun, his wife Soong Qingling and many of their associates were western educated and spoke English. Cohen's colleagues started calling him Ma Kun, and he soon became one of Sun's main protectors, shadowing the Chinese leader to conferences and war zones. After one battle where he was knicked by a bullet, Cohen started carrying a second gun. The western community began calling the gun-toting aide "Two-Gun Cohen."

Sun died in 1925, and Cohen went to work for a series of Southern Chinese Kuomintang leaders, from Sun's son, Sun Fo, and the banker TV Soong, to such warlords as Li Jishen and Chen Jitang. He was also acquainted with Chiang Kai-shek, whom he knew from when Chiang was commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy. His dealing with Chiang, though, were minimal since Cohen worked for leaders who were generally opposed to Chiang. Cohen ran security for his bosses and acquired weapons and gunboats. Eventually he earned the rank of acting general, though he never lead any troop.

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Cohen eagerly joined the fight. He rounded up weapons for the Chinese and even did intelligence work for the British. Cohen was in Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked in December 1941. He placed Soong Qingling and her sister Ailing onto one of the last planes out of the British colonies.

Cohen stayed behind to fight, and when Hong Kong fell later that month, the Japanese tossed him into Stanley Prison Camp. There the Japanese badly beat him and he languished in Stanley until he was part of a rare prisoner exchange in late 1943.

Cohen sailed back to Canada, settled in Montreal and married Judith Clark, who ran a successful women's boutique. He made regular visits back to China with the hope of establishing work or business ties. Mostly, though, Cohen saw old friends, sat in hotel lobbies and spun out tales—many of them tall—of his exploits. It was his own myth making, together with the desire of others to fabricate yarns about him, that has resulted in much of the misinformation about Cohen, from the claim that he had a hand in the making of modern China, to such outlandish ones like him having an affair with Soong Qingling and a wife in Canada back in the 1920s. After the 1949 Communist takeover, Cohen was one of the few people who was able to move between Taiwan and mainland China. His prolonged absences took a toll on his marriage, and he and Judith divorced in 1956.

Cohen then settled with one of his sisters in Salford, England. He maintained good relations with both Taiwanese and Communist Party of China leaders, and soon was able to arrange consulting jobs with Vickers (planes), Rolls Royce (engines) and Decca Radar. His last visit to China was during the start of the Cultural Revolution as an honored guest of Zhou Enlai.

Morris Cohen died 1970 in Salford. He is buried in Blakeley Jewish Cemetery in Manchester.

[edit] Books about Cohen

• Charles Drage (written with Cohen's help)- Two-Gun Cohen
• Daniel S. Levy - Two-Gun Cohen: A Biography (1997)