In Chiang Kai-shek’s account – in which Donald almost certainly had a hand – the Generalissimo wrote, ‘People have supposed Donald to be an engaged adviser of the government. The fact is that he is a private friend and a frequent guest at my house. I might also add that, although drawn into my circle, he has sternly refused any honours or the name of an adviser.’ Six months later Donald, described in The Times as ‘an unofficial adviser to General Chiang Kai-shek’, accepted the award of the Order of the Brilliant Jade with Blue Cravate.33
In a letter to his sister Florence Orr in Sydney, Donald ruminated on his life in China. ‘Somehow, without any effort, I have managed to hold the confidences of all political factions in China,’ he wrote.
Lots of people who know China ask me how, seeing that I never learned to speak the language, and all I can tell them is that I have none of the European superiority complex, treat confidences as confidences, play the game and keep smiling. I must have the intuitive understanding of the Chinese character. I tell them exactly what I think of them when they are wrong, which is much of the time, and never humbug them. That is all, except that I can never be bought by them, and this they respect.34
The indispensible Donald apart, Chiang Kai-shek employed a large number of foreign advisers to train his armed forces. The Chinese Army’s senior adviser was General Alexander von Falkenhausen, a World War I veteran and virulent anti-Nazi, while the tall, blond Aryan archetype Captain Walther Stennes, one-time commander of Hitler’s Brownshirts, was charged with moulding Chiang’s 3000-strong bodyguard into an elite force similar to the Prussian Guards.35 Falkenhausen tapped Donald on the chest with his swagger stick. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘if Japan attacks she will be defeated.’36
Chiang took the extraordinary step of putting Mayling in charge of the Chinese Air Force, with the title of secretary- general of the Chinese Aeronautical Affairs Commission. Her senior adviser was Wing Commander Garnet Malley, an outstanding Australian World War I fighter pilot who had been awarded the Military Cross and Air Force Cross for bravery. Born at Mosman on 2 November 1893, Malley had moved to China with his wife Phyllis in 1931 as air adviser to the Nationalist Government and, since 1936, to Chiang Kai-shek personally. His rank was an honorary one, bestowed by the RAAF at the request of the British Foreign Office after Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, who had replaced Sir Miles Lampson as British ambassador the previous year, insisted that he should be of equal rank to an Italian general on the Aeronautical Commission.37
China’s small air force was built around instructors and aircraft drawn from half a dozen Western nations of which the most prominent was Fascist Italy, conqueror of little Ethiopia. On a visit to Rome in 1934 H. H. Kung had agreed a deal with Mussolini under which Fiat fighters and Savoia-Marchetti bombers would be assembled at Nanchang. The planes were obsolete by the time they rolled off the production line: the fighters turned out to be firetraps in aerial combat while the ancient bombers could only be used as transports.38
The Fascist fraud was just one of Malley’s difficulties in modernising the Chinese Air Force. His main problem was corruption in the purchase of new planes and aviation equipment involving Kung’s wife Ayling Soong, a Chinese general and an American agent named A. L. Patterson. According to the memorandum of a 1937 conversation between the American ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson, and a member of his staff, ‘Wing Commander Garnet Malley was satisfied that Patterson had doubled, and in some cases trebled, the price of American aircraft sold to the Chinese Government over the list prices in the United States.
This was done to provide a larger ‘squeeze’ to Chinese officials handling the orders. Patterson had even gone so far as to have special catalogues printed in China showing the adjusted prices and purporting to be the American catalogues. Malley said that Madame Chiang had asked him to suggest means of stopping the ‘squeeze’.
In one instance Patterson ‘had sold to the Aviation Commission one hundred if not two hundred radio sets; not only was the price four times the right price, but the sets themselves were quite unsuitable for use on Chinese military planes, since it was impossible to alter wavelength.’
According to this memo:
General Tzau had been mentioned for some time as the agent of Mrs H. H. Kung in collecting ‘squeeze’ on the purchase of airplanes. I inquired how it was that Mrs Chiang Kai-shek, Mrs Kung’s sister, could take any action which would, if carried to its conclusion, expose Mrs Kung’s alleged part in these transactions. [Malley] said that Mrs Chiang Kai-shek had given orders to sift the matter to the bottom and that the bribery in connection with air plane purchases had been the subject of a struggle between the two sisters for some time.39
Purchases made for the Chinese Air Force allegedly passed through an entity called the Central Trust, an arm of Dr Kung’s Ministry of Finance. The trust was controlled by Ayling Soong and it refused to give orders to any manufacturer not represented by Patterson.40 The result of all these machinations was that by the summer of 1937 China had 150 competent army pilots, 200 of poor ability and just 91 frontline military aircraft, mostly American fighters, for an outlay of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, Eleanor Hinder pursued her long-term aim of liberating the slave girls of China. Under the mui tsai contract labour system, poor country girls were purchased by members of the Green Gang and brought to Shanghai in batches of 30 or more. The prettiest were sent to work in Chinese-run brothels; the rest ended up as indentured labour in the factories.
After carefully studying a memorandum on the mui tsai system from Sir George Maxwell to the League of Nations in 1935, the Municipal Council appointed Eleanor ‘protector of the mui tsai’.41 She was careful in addressing the problem to note that a mui tsai could only be described as a slave for the period of her life in which she lived as a domestic servant with a family. When she reached puberty, she might be married or taken as a concubine and therefore become part of another family. If she were unlucky, she would be sold again as a prostitute.42
It was also important to acknowledge that not all mui tsai were mistreated – indeed, some were well cared for and became adopted daughters of the families for which they worked. In her writings on the subject, Eleanor used the term ‘slavery’ only in the League of Nations context that the mui tsai system contained ‘elements suggestive of slavery’.43 She declined to report to the Committee of Experts on Slavery in China but developed a broad study on the role of the authorities ‘in the protection of the mui tsai and other groups of young persons transferred into the control of others not near relations and exploited by them’.
Eleanor argued it made no sense to liberate slave girls unless the crippling problems of homelessness, kidnapping and the exploitation of child labour in Chinese cities were also solved. It was a valid and humane point; the important thing was that a start had been made in tackling the iniquitous system.
In June 1937 William Arthur Farmer, a young West Australian journalist known as ‘Buzz’, stepped ashore from the Ginsu Maru, a Japanese ship which had brought him from Perth for a holiday in Shanghai. Feeling destiny tugging at his sleeve, he decided to try his luck in Shanghai and took a job as a reporter on the North-China Daily News.
Farmer was from Perth where he had attended Basil Riley’s alma mater, Perth High School (later Hale). He played hockey for the Guildford Club and was the darling of the gossip columnists. ‘The entire social whirl of Perth,’ ‘Jennifer’ gushed in the Western Mail, ‘will be inordinately pleased to hear that Buzz Farmer, so immaculately himself, has at last got rid of that automotive eyesore of his and bought a real car!’44
Destiny was indeed at his sleeve. At 10 o’clock on the evening of 7 July 1937 Japanese officers claimed their troops were fired on by Chinese soldiers at the Black Moat Bridge, otherwise known as Marco Polo Bridge after the Venetian explorer who thought it one of the most beautiful in the world. The bridge was near the village of Lukouchiao (Luqouqiao), 3
2 kilometres west of Peking where a brigade of Japanese troops were garrisoned under the terms of the Boxer Protocol.45
At midnight the Japanese commander reported the shooting to the mayor of Peking, General Ching Teh-chun, and requested permission to search nearby Wanping for a missing Japanese soldier who was presumed to have been taken prisoner. As Wanping was an important railway junction on the main line to Hankow, Ching refused the request. To defuse a potentially explosive situation, however, he offered to send a joint commission into Wanping to make inquiries.
This appeared to be agreeable to the Japanese but while arrangements were being made eight truckloads of steel- helmeted Japanese troops tried to force their way into the fortified town. Serious fighting broke out and both sides rushed a battalion of reinforcements to the battlefield. At the same time, the missing man returned to his unit – embarrassingly, he had been enjoying himself at a local brothel.46
As Japan was preoccupied with the threat to her northern flank from Russia, it is doubtful she planned to start a full-scale war in North China. The Chinese, however, were unable to decipher Japanese intentions. Determined to resist any further aggression in North China, Chiang Kai-shek ordered four Nationalist divisions into the area.
In Peking the Chinese declared martial law and closed the city gates. In response, Japanese guards inside the city barricaded the Legation Quarter and set up machine-gun posts. Within a week, large numbers of Japanese troops had forced their way into Peking and fighting spread through the streets of the Tartar City.47
The Japanese public responded to these events with a show of patriotic fervour. Tokyo newspapers demanded a showdown to eliminate anti-Japanese propaganda in North China and the Japanese War Minister General Sugiyama declared that China ‘must be chastised for her insincerity’.48
Harold Timperley, the Guardian’s Australian correspondent, was staying at the Metropolitan Hotel in Nanking. On 15 July he wrote to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, seeking to enlist his support in a peacekeeping initiative. ‘The Chinese do not want to fight if they can possibly avoid it,’ he said.
First, the Central Government has not yet recovered fully from the shock administered by the Sian affair last December; secondly, unification of the provinces under Nanking’s rule is still incomplete, though well on the way; thirdly, the Central Government is busily engaged upon a large program of reconstruction which must perforce be interrupted and perhaps abandoned if war comes.49
Timperley urged Britain and the United States to intervene between the two belligerents ‘before the Japanese preparations are too far advanced for reconsideration to be made possible’. At present, it was still possible to pretend that the issue in North China was merely a local one ‘but the longer things are allowed to drift along the more difficult it will be to keep things on that basis’.
By early August, Timperley’s hopes had been dashed. All Japanese nationals had been evacuated from Hankow, Nanking and other points in the Yangtze Valley and South China, while Japanese bombers attacked Hangchow, Nanchang, Nanking, Soochow, Chinkiang, and the Shanghai–Nanking Railway. In between air raids, Timperley married Elizabeth Chambers, a young American from Des Moines who was working in Nanking. ‘Our married life this far,’ he wrote, ‘has been punctuated by Japanese bombs.’50
Chiang Kai-shek was ridiculed for his ‘wait and see’ policy and there were calls for his resignation. The Generalissimo announced in an interview, ‘I declare again that China does not seek war, but we will accept war if it is forced on us. We have reached the limit of our endurance.’
The situation at Shanghai rapidly deteriorated. On the evening of 9 August two members of the Japanese Naval Land- ing Party were shot dead when they attempted to enter the Chinese airfield at Hungjao on the outskirts of Shanghai; a Chinese sentry was also killed in the shooting. The Japanese consul, Okamoto, said the incident was of a ‘grave nature’ and had been reported to Tokyo for appropriate action. Japanese naval authorities at Shanghai announced they would be ‘compelled to adopt defence measures’. For the cost of just two lives, a situation had been created which would justify extending the war from North China to Shanghai. Thousands of Chinese in Hongkew and Chapei joined the columns of evacuees pouring into the International Settlement and the French Concession from country districts north of Shanghai.51
In desperation the mayor of the Chinese Municipality, O. K. Yui, appealed to the United States and Britain to prevent Japan using Little Tokyo as a base of military operations against China and thereby putting the entire city at risk. When Britain asked Japan to exclude Shanghai from the war zone, her commanders replied this was asking the impossible.
Hand-to-hand fighting broke out in Hongkew when Chinese troops attacked Japanese soldiers landing from warships. British police and American Marines were driven back across Garden Bridge and Hongkew became a no-go area for Westerners. At night, Buzz Farmer could hear Japanese tanks revving up in the back streets. The third Sino-Japanese War was on and the Japanese expected a quick victory. Instead, they would achieve something that had eluded politicians for the past 25 years: the unification of the Chinese people.
On 11 August 1937 the Japanese Third Fleet steamed up the Whangpoo and the cruiser Idzumo, Shanghai’s talisman of doom, tied up at Garden Point adjacent to the Japanese, British, American and Russian consulates in the heart of the International Settlement. There were now 27 warships anchored off The Bund and several thousand Japanese reinforcements were located on troopships downstream at Woosung. Japanese marines and ronin began roughing up Chinese citizens in Hongkew and Chapei.1
Gordon Bowden saw the cruiser – flagship of Vice Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa, Japanese commander-in-chief – as he drove along The Bund from his home in Frenchtown. Bowden had been Australia’s trade commissioner since 1935, the first to be appointed since the departure of the ill-fated Edward Little 11 years earlier. During his long association with Japan, he had learned a great deal about the Japanese and their ambitions to establish their country as the dominant power in East Asia, with Emperor Hirohito as supreme ruler.
Bowden alighted at no. 19, the vast, fortress-like, baroque building of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, and hurried past the two bronze lions, Stephen and Stitt, at the bank’s marbled entrance. Stephen was a ferocious beast, Stitt more affable – characteristics, it is said, of two of the bank’s former managers after whom they were named. Bowden would normally rub one of the lions’ paws in the Chinese manner for good joss but today he had no time for such rituals.2
He walked briskly to the trade commission’s office on an upper floor of the bank. There, he discussed the mounting crisis with his two aides, Norman Wootton and Arthur Nutt. Bowden’s son Ivor was at school in England but his wife and two daughters were in Shanghai and the other men also had families there.
On the morning of Thursday, 12 August, the American journalist Emily Hahn packed an evening dress in a hatbox, put her pet duckling Sweetie Pie into a basket and headed for Nanking. She anticipated spending a couple of nights dining and dancing with one of her beaux, a British naval officer whose first love was navigation.3
At North Station the administration building had been rebuilt into ten storeys of white ferro-concrete following the battle against the Dogmeat General a decade earlier. Troop trains were arriving every few minutes packed to the roof with Chinese soldiers from Nanking. Nevertheless, Emily boarded the 8 am express for the five-hour trip up the Yangtze Valley. One of her travelling companions was an Englishman who informed her he was taking some fresh lobster to the British Embassy ‘because they’re running short of such things’. It was going to be a jolly English weekend.
The train was an hour and a half late leaving Shanghai, a bad omen, according to the Englishman. ‘That,’ she wrote, ‘was the very last train to get through, but we had no way of knowing. Nobody said not to go.’ With Japanese bombers prowling up and down the railway corridor and many trai
ns involved in troop movements, progress was painfully slow. She wondered vaguely why so many soldiers were heading for Shanghai when the war was in North China.
The 320-kilometre journey to Nanking took 16 hours and it was after midnight before she arrived in the Nationalist capital and checked into her hotel. There was a sign on the wall which was far from reassuring: ‘Visitors are warned that air raids are expected at any time; please keep lights off and shutters closed.’
Back in Shanghai, Inspector Roy Fernandez ventured over Soochow Creek to rescue his wife’s father Robert Morgan and his second wife who lived in Kiang Wan, north of Hongkew. They were too scared to move through the Japanese lines, so Roy spent the night with them and in the morning pack- ed them and their pet bulldog Britannia into his car and drove them back to the International Settlement.4
In Nanking, Emily Hahn’s boyfriend informed her that the railway line had been cut at Soochow, the airport had been bombed and the Nationalists had mined the river below Chinkiang to prevent Japanese gunboats from attacking Nanking. She realised if she didn’t return to Shanghai immediately she could be cut off, perhaps for weeks. All through Friday the 13th she tried to find a train heading south but without luck until she heard a whisper that one would be going as far as Soochow in the morning.
That night Bill Donald was at a council-of-war meeting with Chiang Kai-shek and his commanders inside the Nanking Military Academy. A message was handed to the Generalissimo. He passed it to Mayling. ‘They’re shelling the Shanghai Civic Centre,’ she cried. ‘They’re killing our people.’
‘What will you do now?’ asked Claire Chennault, a leather-faced veteran of the United States Army Air Force who had been hired to train Chinese pilots. She brushed away her tears and declared, ‘We will fight.’
Shanghai Fury Page 33