Harold Timperley was instrumental in setting up the safety zone and organised medical aid for hundreds of apprentices who worked without pay in Shanghai’s sweatshops, some of whom had been locked in by factory owners to prevent them running away. He urged Westerners to help refugees who were sleeping in alleyways of the settlement ‘with only a thin ragged cotton blanket as protection’.37
Timperley watched boy scouts and rickshaw pullers carry the wounded to hospital where the volunteer nursing staff included taxi dancers. ‘A large section of the population has been thrown out of employment,’ he wrote in the Guardian, ‘many farmers have been prevented from planting or harvesting their crops, thousands of businessmen have been ruined, officials, teachers and the like have suddenly been deprived of their livelihood.’38
Les Lawrance, the former Queensland speedway star, spent three weeks besieged in the telephone exchange while it was peppered with bullets by both sides. Bill O’Hara was made homeless when the Japanese destroyed his lovely house ‘for military reasons’. The very heart was being ripped out of Old Shanghai, leaving the foreign concessions as small, overcrowded oases in the middle of a vast wilderness.39
When the fighting started, Rewi Alley had been in London on long leave. He returned to find his house in Hongkew had been looted. His two adopted sons, Alan and Mike, now teenagers, informed him they wanted to join the Red Army to fight the Japanese. The youths had been in Nanking Road on Bloody Saturday and Alan was slightly wounded by flying shrapnel. Alley gave them permission to make the long, dangerous journey to Yenan like thousands of other volunteers to join Mao Tse-tung’s forces ‘for that was what I would have done’.40
From the rooftops of the International Settlement, Alley and his American friend Edgar Snow, who was covering the Battle of Shanghai for the London Daily Herald, watched the Japanese Army dismantling and burning the factories, mills and workshops of Pootung. He estimated that 600,000 displaced Chinese workers were dying in the city’s freezing streets at the rate of 10,000 a month. The price of a dance ticket and drinks at one of the big hotels, he noted sourly, could have saved the lives of a dozen men.41
By November, the Japanese had broken out of Shanghai into open country and were advancing rapidly up the Yangtze Valley to converge on Nanking.42 At 44, Claire Chennault had never flown a combat mission himself (an omission he was about to rectify) but he was a master tactician. Promoted to colonel by Mayling Soong, the Texan taught Chinese fighter pilots how to intercept unescorted Japanese bombers. They were so successful in shooting them down that the Japanese abandoned unescorted daylight bombing. The Chinese then shot down night bombers as well – seven out of 13 in one night – but the Japanese were fast learners. By September, they were escorting their bombers with strong fighter groups, which inflicted heavy losses on the Chinese.
Bill Donald watched the dogfights from his house in parkland east of the city. He churned out a constant stream of news stories about the Battle for Nanking on his Hermes Baby typewriter or dictated letters to a Chinese stenographer. His letters carried the letterhead ‘headquarters of the generalissimo’ and sometimes ran to 20 or 30 pages. His stories were cabled to many newspapers, including The Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘Eighteen Japanese bombers and pursuit planes arrived among the clouds over Nanking at 11 o’clock this evening,’ he wrote to both papers in late September.
With glasses, I counted them streaming in pairs, the steady droning of their engines suddenly punctuated by anti-aircraft detonations. While the American Ambassador and his staff fled, the British and French have refused to budge. The British Embassy staff took refuge in separate dugouts in order to avoid the possibility of one bomb killing them all. The dugout of Mr R. G. Howe, the British chargé d’affaires, was named ‘Journey’s End’.43
Back in Shanghai at 11 am on 3 December, the Japanese exercised their right as a partner in the city’s municipal government to stage a victory march through the International Settlement. Starting at Jessfield Park on the western outskirts, 3000 troops in well-worn field kit marched three abreast down Avenue Edward VII between the settlement and the French Concession, up Tibet Road and into Nanking Road.44
‘Dozens of ronin and Japanese civilians invaded the settlement from Hongkew,’ Buzz Farmer wrote. ‘They were madly excited. They carried little paper flags. They pushed to the forefront through throngs of sullen, silent Chinese.’45
Outside the Sun Sun department store a Chinese man threw a grenade which slightly wounded two Japanese soldiers, one Japanese civilian and a British police officer. The officer actually pushed a Japanese spectator away and stood between him and the bomb, thus protecting him from flying fragments. The Japanese column immediately halted and the troops deployed in case of further trouble. A Chinese policeman shot the grenade-thrower dead and the column then moved along The Bund and crossed Garden Bridge into Hongkew.
However, a group of Japanese soldiers who had stayed behind threw a barbed-wire barricade across Nanking Road at the Sun Sun store and subjected Chinese pedestrians to brutal interrogation. They withdrew at 9 pm after a conference between the Municipal Police Commissioner Frederick W. Gerrard and a representative of Lieutenant-General Iwane Matsui, commander-in-chief of Japanese forces in the Central China Area.
The West Australian friends Colin McDonald of The Times and Harold Timperley of the Guardian travelled up the Yangtze to report on the battle. As the Chinese Army withdrew towards the Nationalist capital, they again applied Chiang Kai-shek’s rigorous scorched earth policy to whole towns and villages. Foreign military observers in Nanking were amazed by the extent of the Chinese destruction, most of which served no military purpose except to force the Japanese invaders to sleep in tents instead of buildings.
The fighting now constituted a direct threat to British interests north of the Yangtze Valley. Britain was a signatory to the Nine-Power Treaty that guaranteed China’s sovereignty but the British foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, refused to take any action to stop the Japanese advance. Neville Chamberlain, now prime minister, told his cabinet he ‘could not imagine anything more suicidal than to pick a quarrel with Japan at the present moment when the European situation had become so serious’.46
The West continued to sell weapons to both sides in the undeclared war. American and Australian scrap iron used in the production of weapons-grade steel flowed into Japanese foundries. Robert Menzies, Australia’s attorney-general and deputy leader of the United Australia Party, was branded ‘Pig Iron Bob’ by Australian unionists for breaking a strike of workers opposed to the export trade with Japan.
‘The Chinese are grateful to the Australian wharf labourers who refused to load pig-iron at Port Kembla,’ Bill Donald wrote to a friend. ‘Their gratitude goes, too, to all those in America and Great Britain who boycott Japanese products and protest against Japanese inhumanities.’
At dawn on 7 December Chiang Kai-chek, Mayling Chiang and Bill Donald flew from Nanking to Hankow, the new capital, in Chiang’s fast American-made Beechcraft plane. Before he left the doomed city, Donald handed the keys of his European sports car to his friend George Fitch, an American missionary who was staying behind as director of the Safety Zone, an area which the Japanese had agreed through their embassy in Peking to leave untouched.
Since arriving in Nanking on 8 November James McHugh, now a captain and assistant naval attaché at the American Embassy, had visited Donald every day at his residence to keep abreast of developments for his intelligence reports to the US ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson. ‘I have been regaled ever since my arrival in Nanking with stories of how the American aviation salesmen swindled China and brought about the collapse of the Chinese Air Force at the beginning of the present war,’ he wrote to Johnson.
W. D. Pawley [president and sole shareholder of the Inter- continent Aircraft Corporation of Miami, Florida] came in for the lion’s share of the blame because he had d
one the most business. Donald, in relating some of the details, once remarked that when he and Madame Chiang had taken over administration of the air force and had begun to trace some of the deals and the ‘squeeze’ which had been paid to various members of the Aviation Commission, they found that the trail led to the doors of the Central Trust, special purchasing division of the Ministry of Finance; that at this point Madame had gone to the Generalissimo and asked if he wanted the investigation to continue; and that he had emphatically approved that it should. When I inquired why they did not take action against those people who received the ‘squeeze’, I was told that everyone in the air force was guilty and that they needed their services to fight the war.47
Thanks to Donald, McHugh was able to spend time with Mayling, describing himself in one intelligence report as ‘the only foreigner not in the employ of the Government with this entrée’. She offered him a lift to Hankow in her big American Buick, which was transporting members of the Moral Endeavour Association who handled many of her personal affairs.48
‘If the Japanese continue their present rate of advance they will soon be at the gates of Nanking,’ Colin McDonald wrote in a dispatch to The Times on the day the Nationalist government abandoned the city.49 While Timperley remained in Nanking, McDonald boarded the United States gunboat Panay to accompany diplomats and civilians who were being evacuated upstream. These included George Atcheson Jr, second secretary in charge of the United States Embassy at Nanking, and A. L. Patterson, the dodgy aviation middleman.
McDonald, a shy, retiring man, was born at Cottesloe in 1899 to John and Florence McDonald. His father and L. R. Menzies had discovered the Menzies goldfields north of Kalgoorlie in 1894. At 12, Colin was sent to Daniel Stewart’s College, Edinburgh, and began reporting for The Scotsman while still a pupil there.50
At 17, he returned to Perth and worked as a court reporter on The West Australian. In 1920, he moved to the China Mail in Hong Kong and then the South China Morning Post. He moved to Peking in 1931 and worked as a freelance reporter for The Times and other clients for six years before being appointed Times staff correspondent, the first since David Fraser. He travelled to London in 1937 to marry his Perth sweetheart Phyllis Margaret Allum, daughter of the superintendent of the Perth Mint, then returned to Peking with his bride after visiting relatives in Australia.
At 11 am on Sunday 12 December, McDonald was on board the Panay when she dropped anchor on a broad stretch of the Yangtze 45 kilometres above Nanking. On the way upriver she had been constantly shelled from the shore but was so far undamaged. As she was flying the Stars and Stripes and had two newly painted American flags on her top deck, nobody paid much attention when several aircraft appeared high overhead an hour and a half later. The weather was clear and sunny and the planes were identified as Japanese. ‘The first bomb, dropped at 1.38 pm, struck the main gun on the forward deck, snapped the mast in half, wrecked the bridge, and put the wireless out of action in the middle of a message,’ McDonald later wrote. ‘The force of the explosion broke the captain’s leg and blackened his face with powder.’51
McDonald was typing a dispatch in a makeshift pressroom, which had been set up in the sick bay. He dashed on deck and saw a red roundel like a large blood spot on the wings of the attacking planes as they launched ‘a deliberate and systematic attempt to destroy the gunboat and all on board’.
The Panay’s machine-gunners fought back. ‘I had a vivid picture of American sailors, stripped to the waist, grimly firing on the oncoming aeroplanes,’ McDonald wrote. ‘The chief boatswain’s mate, who was bathing when the bombing began, was out on deck naked directing the fire and afterwards manning the gun himself.’
Eric Mayell of British Movietone News filmed the attacks in which three American sailors were killed and 50 wounded. The gunboat was holed in several places and was settling on the riverbed by the starboard bow when the order to abandon ship was given at five past two. The 54 survivors packed into lifeboats and landed on a mudflat on the riverbank. Through the reeds, they watched the Japanese planes return to bomb two Standard Oil barges on the river. One of the survivors was an American diplomat. He recalled Colin McDonald as ‘a slight, gentle, thinnish fellow with spectacles’ who went without food and sleep, was one of the last to leave the ship and who offered to lie on a wounded man ashore to protect him from machine-gun bullets. McDonald also used his knowledge of Chinese to obtain help from local villagers. The survivors were finally rescued by the British gunboat HMS Ladybird and the Panay’s sister ship USS Oahu on 15 December and taken to Nanking and thence to Shanghai.
The Japanese Government regretted the ‘Panay incident’, offered its apologies, promised to punish the transgressors and paid an indemnity. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had no intention of going to war with Japan and saw to it that the faces of Japanese pilots, clearly visible in newsreel footage, were excised before transmission in the United States, rather than contradict the Japanese version that the pilots had been too far away to recognise the American flags.
McDonald later testified to the United States naval committee that he thought the attack was a deliberate act of aggression designed to test the extent of American support for China. He was one of the few non-American, non-military recipients of America’s highest award for bravery, the United States Congressional Medal of Honor.
In the meantime, Nanking had fallen to the Japanese on 13 December. Harold Timperley had begged Britain to protest, hoping that a strong line would deter the Japanese from its usual practice of slaughtering Chinese males of military age. But most British diplomats in Nanking had gone on summer holiday despite the growing crisis and Timperley accused the staff of ‘criminal negligence’.52
Timperley, McDonald and Tillman Durdin of the New York Times alerted the world to the Rape of Nanking in which up to 300,000 Chinese men, women and children were butchered. Timperley’s main sources were Percy Fitch, John Rabe and Miner Searle Bates, all members of the International Committee. This small group of foreigners witnessed many of the atrocities, including the rape and murder of Chinese women of all ages.
‘On Tuesday [14 December] the Japanese began a systematic searching out of anyone even remotely connected with the Chinese Army,’ Colin McDonald wrote in The Times.
They took suspects from the refugee camps and trapped many soldiers wandering in the streets. Soldiers who would willingly have surrendered were shot down as an example. No mercy was shown. The hope of the populace gave place to fear and a reign of terror.53
Shops were looted. Nurses at the American University Hospital were robbed. Young men were assembled in groups for execution. Babies were thrown in the air and impaled on bayonets. The streets were littered with bodies, including those of harmless old men. The atrocities were at their height when McDonald passed through the city the following day. They would go on for six weeks and include thousands of rapes and murders, leading to theories that the Japanese high command intended to terrorise the Chinese into submission.
‘Unfortunately,’ The Times lamented, ‘the Japanese Government has virtually no control over the fighting services, and the fighting services in their turn are powerless – and often reluctant – to control the ebullience of junior officers. Add to this a low standard of education among the officers; a fanatical patriotism fired by the intoxication of conquest; and the effects of propaganda directed against this country and (to a less extent) against the white races in general. It will readily be grasped how precarious is the self-control of a military machine thus composed and directed.’54
As well as wholesale rape and murder, the Japanese Army had also gone into business in opposition to the Green Gang. On the outskirts of Shanghai, Japanese officers were receiving $500 per day from each of 300 gambling houses, which also sold opium and were connected to brothels. ‘The whole Japanese Army is incurably honeycombed with criminal tendencies,’ Bill Donald wrote angrily to his friend Kenneth Cantlie in Eng
land. ‘Officers and men are money-minded like the pirates of old, and no method of accumulating wealth is too mean or too despicable.’55
By the end of 1937, the Chinese Air Force had virtually been destroyed. Garnet Malley and Claire Chennault put together an International Air Corps consisting of 86 European pilots, including two Australians and one New Zealander. Many of the mercenaries flew twin-engined Glenn Martin bombers under the command of American veteran Colonel Vincent Schmidt. The men were paid US$500 a month plus bonuses and operated effectively until the Glenn Martins were caught on the ground during a Japanese air raid and most of them were destroyed.
One of the Australians, John Whitehead of Sydney, was shot down when his bomber ran into a flight of Japanese fighters south-east of Hankow. His rear gunner was shot through the head and the plane riddled with bullets. Whitehead bailed out and was shot through the spine as he parachuted down. ‘They would have made me look like a sieve if I hadn’t gone limp and pretended to be dead,’ he said. Mayling Soong visited him in hospital and arranged for him to be flown to Hong Kong for specialist treatment.56
Just after Christmas, Shanghai Municipal Police handed a Chinese patriot who hurled a grenade into a boat full of Japanese troops on Soochow Creek over to the Japanese military authorities. The prisoner admitted he belonged to the ‘Dare or Die’ corps of Chinese soldiers pledged to terrorise Japanese forces in Shanghai. His fate can only be imagined.
By the New Year, Shanghai had reached the tipping point. Although members of the Shanghai Club and the Cercle Sportif Francais (to give the French Club its proper title) would take some time to realise it, the glory days under the colonial powers had passed forever. Gypsy violinists still played at Joe Farran’s, the White Russian taxi dancers at Del Monte still charged 20 cents a dance, Americans still drank their sodas at the Chocolate Shop in Nanking Road and Sid’s Syncopators still tootled at the tea dance in the ballroom of the Cathay Hotel; but the old magic had evaporated in the sulphurous air.
Shanghai Fury Page 35