Background
Morris (Moishe) Abraham Cohen was born to Orthodox Polish immigrants in the East End of London.
Morris (Moishe) Abraham Cohen was born to Orthodox Polish immigrants in the East End of London.
The young Cohen attended the Jews’ Free School, but because of his habitual fighting and petty thievery he was sent to a reform school at the age of ten. Upon his release, his parents sent him to Canada in the hope of keeping the teenager from a life of crime.
In Saskatchewan he tried his hand at ranching, peddling, and liquor smuggling. But Cohen soon achieved fame throughout western Canada as a crack shot and a gambler.
Always armed, Cohen once shot and wounded two cowboys after they called him a “dirty Jew.” Later when he served in China, correspondents named him Two-Gun because of the pistol braces he regularly wore. Cohen used his gambling sense to make a small fortune in real estate speculation in Edmonton, Alberta. In his business contacts Cohen befriended the city’s Chinese community. Learning their language, he devoted himself to working for Chinese rights during a period of intense anti-Asian sentiment. Cohen met Sun Yat-sen in 1910, when the Chinese revolutionary was in Canada to raise support for his party, the Kuomintang. He acted as Sun’s personal bodyguard and was later appointed secretary of the Kuomintang in western Canada.
At the outbreak of the World War I, Cohen enlisted in the Irish Guards, in which he headed a Chinese labor battalion in France. After the war Sun summoned Cohen to China and gave him command of the presidential bodyguard. On sev¬eral occasions Cohen reportedly saved Sun from an assassin’s bullet. Two-Gun was also put to work purchasing arms and recruiting officers for Sun’s army as well as organizing banking and customs services.
Chiang Kai-shek, who succeeded Sun upon his death in 1925, promoted Cohen to the rank of general. With no formal military training, he was given the monumental task of arming and training Chiang’s forces.
He was captured by the invading Japanese in 1941. During twenty-one months of internment he was brutally tortured and sentenced to death in 1944, and only narrowly escaped a Japanese firing squad. After the war Cohen attempted to reconcile the communists with their rivals on Taiwan. Although his efforts were futile, he was one of the few people to find a warm welcome in both Peking and Taipei. He returned to England and spent his last years in Manchester. Unlike most of China’s generals and warlords whom he knew so well, Two-Gun Cohen died peacefully.
The sharp-shooting general always let it be known that he was a proud and loyal Jew. He took an active role in B’nai B’rith in China and Canada and always explained his support for China by arguing that the Chinese were the only people who had never persecuted the Jews. He was also a supporter of Zionism and appeared on Zionist platforms during the struggle for the State of Israel.