World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseJoan Chase Hinton was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States in 1921 to Sebastian Hinton, a lawyer, and Carmelita Hinton (née Chase), an educator and the founder of The Putney School in Vermont, United States. She graduated from Putney, qualified for the 1940 Winter Olympics (which was cancelled due to Japan's invasion of China in 1937), and went on to study physics at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, graduating in 1942. In 1944, she earned a doctorate degree in physics from University of Wisconsin.

ww2dbaseHinton participated in the Manhattan Project under the supervision of physicist Enrico Fermi. Among other responsibilities, she calibrated neutron detectors at the Alamogordo Bombing Range (now the White Sands Missile Range) in New Mexico, United States. She witnessed the Operation Trinity atomic bomb test. After the destruction of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in 1945, she left the Manhattan Project and joined the effort to lobby the US government to internationalize nuclear power.

ww2dbaseInfluenced by her brother William Hinton, who had become enamored by Mao Zedong's brand of communism, Joan Hinton travelled to Shanghai, China in 1948. She worked for communist sympathizer Song Qingling (Wade-Giles romanization: Soong Ching-ling), the widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China. After the communist victory in the civil war in 1949, she moved to Yan'an in Shaanxi Province, China, the rural Chinese communist stronghold. She married American Erwin Engst, a Cornell University-educated agropastoral expert and an agricultural advisor to the Chinese communists. In Oct 1952, she attended the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference and denounced the American use of atomic bombs at the end of WW2; her defection to the communist Chinese was not known by the wider public until this event. Joan Hinton and Erwin Engst remained in China for the rest of their lives, working at dairy farms and translating English and Chinese documents. She continued to support Mao's policies despite the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the violent Cultural Revolution, and criticized the reformist Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. Hinton passed away in Beijing, China in 2010, seven years after her husband.

Joan Hinton Timeline