‘Gung-ho’ originates with U.S. Marines
Battle cry was thought to be a Chinese phrase
An ad appeared recently for a Montreal company that operates what it describes as a “content-driven website, with hundreds of videos submitted weekly and a network of more than 30 written-content contributors.” The company needed “an organized individual who is gung-ho about digital content — someone who is willing to play a large role in keeping the content cycle running smoothly.”
That expression “gung-ho” caught my eye. It means enthusiastic, passionate, even zealous, and it can be used in all manner of contexts.
In February, a columnist in the Toronto Star wrote that “Ottawa seems still gung-ho about inking a trade deal with China.” And in January the Gazette quoted a woman who works at the Chez Doris women’s shelter as saying, “I had a man who was gung-ho about renting an apartment to one of my clients. But when he found out she was Inuit, all of a sudden the place wasn’t available.”
I don’t know of any expression with as weird an origin and history as “gung-ho.” It entered the English language during the Second World War because of a small group of U.S. Marines, and it gained instant popularity, thanks to a violent and patriotic Hollywood movie entitled Gung Ho!
The movie, shot and released in 1943, depicted a small group of Americans outwitting and destroying Japanese forces on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. The plot was based on an actual raid the Marines had made on a Japanese-held atoll in August 1942.
I don’t know of any expression with as weird an origin and history as ‘gung-ho.’
“Gung-ho” was the battle cry of the Marine Raiders, as the American commandos were then called. It soon became their motto.
The Raiders’ leader, Lt.-Col. Evans Carlson, had introduced the phrase to the soldiers under his command. Carlson served in China in the late 1930s, and he believed “gung-ho” was a Chinese phrase meaning “Work together, work in harmony.” This suited his belief that American fighting forces should be less hierarchical in structure. He had been inspired by the resistance of the Chinese Communists to the Japanese invaders of their country.
“I was trying,” Carlson said, “to build up the same sort of working spirit I had seen in China where all the soldiers dedicated themselves to one idea and worked together to put that idea over.”
But Carlson got it wrong. In fact, “gung-ho” is a shortened version of “gōngyè hézuòshè” — the name for what in English would become known as Chinese Industrial Co-operatives.
A founder of that organization, Carlson’s friend Rewi Alley, was a New Zealand author and teacher who spent most of his adult life in China. When Carlson met him, Alley was already a member of the Communist Party — he was, you might say, a gung-ho Communist. Carlson himself was clearly, at least by American standards, on the political left.
All the more strange, then, that four decades after the first Gung Ho!, Hollywood released a very different movie with the same title (minus the exclamation point). The 1986 version of Gung Ho, starring Michael Keaton, was a comedy about the takeover of a failing American car factory by a big Japanese firm. The Chinese source of the original “gung-ho” had been forgotten, and if any traces of the Far East lingered in the phrase, they were now tied to a Japanese corporate insistence on hard work at all costs.
So when you read headlines that say “Big business gung-ho on Trump overhaul of U.S. economy,” or see a Maclean’s columnist discuss the pronunciation of “nuclear” by saying that “I think in a lot of people’s minds, the real problem with ‘nukular’ is an association with gungho, bomb ’em into the Stone Age-style thinking,” remember the origin of “gung-ho.” It was a phrase closely linked to Chinese communism.