I've interviewed both grandfathers about their Second World War service. One more successfully than the other.

Do you know his dates/length of service? The unit he was in (army number? division? smaller units?)? His rank? These may seem like basic things but they are some of the easier questions for a veteran from a war 75+ years ago to answer, and also have the benefit that they can be checked against records (although admittedly I'm not sure how create Chinese Red Army records are from the Second World War).

Questions like this also help give a narrative framework for the interviewee to respond to. It's helpful to start small and personal and build out from there (Who were his commanding officers? Who were his buddies he served with?). I don't mean to be blunt and contradictory, but things like "what did you think of international relations" or "what sort of weapons did you use" are not really the most salient questions to a vet, and whether they saw any action is actually a difficult topic to broach. One needs to remember that lots of people serving in the military didn't see action, or if they did they saw lots and lots of boring downtime, or might be hesitant to talk about it, or might have a canned "war story" that they expect non-veterans want to hear.

Oral histories, especially so long after an event, can be tricky, and so it's helpful to try to get some info that can be corroborated against documents, but also try to get the personality and life story of the person being interviewed. Because what you really want to know is what is/was important to them.

You probably know this, but make sure your questions are open-ended enough so that answering them will trigger memories you wouldn’t know to ask about.

When I do genealogy interviews, I start with specific things I want to ask about, but instead of saying “when were you born?”, I say “tell me about yourself” and let them lead the way. I find I get much better information that way.

What part of China is he from, and is that where he spent the war? Depending on the answers to that I'll have questions.

Did he recall the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom featuring significantly in CCP propaganda, and what did/does he himself think of it? I know for one that Mao was incredibly keen on the Taiping and that they are publicly memorialised on the Monument to the People's Heroes at Tiananmen Square, but I'm curious how far down the chain the CCP were making use of the Taiping legacy and their claims to spiritual succession.

Thanks so much for doing this, by the way – my late great-grandfather was a KMT veteran who escaped to Hong Kong in the Civil War and I'm not sure he was ever asked about his experiences.