Donald knew he would get nowhere with Chiang, so he raised the matter with Mayling, citing the wife of an official who was not named but who was clearly her sister Ayling. Mayling turned on him angrily. ‘You may criticise the government or anything in China,’ she said, ‘but there are some persons even you cannot criticise.’ Donald had always prodded, cajoled and goaded Mayling into action. With a heavy heart, he realised his days in China were drawing to an end.
On the night of 24 October Donald left Hankow with Chiang Kai-shek and Mayling just hours ahead of the advanced Japanese units. They spent six weeks visiting Nationalist positions along the Yangtze, passing through many undefended towns and villages that had been bombed for no reason other than the Japanese being intent on bringing the Chinese to their knees through a reign of aerial terror. ‘The Chinese people, however, are blessed with a patience and a philosophy that enable them to face colossal calamity,’ Donald wrote.
They are used to natural catastrophes which wipe out great sections of the population in one fell swoop. They have been used to civil wars for the past 20 years which have burned them out of house and home, so they understand that life is full of bitterness and sudden death. They have never before experienced the death that rains upon them from the heavens and blows them to fragments.40
As the Japanese marched further into the interior, they demanded that the Chinese provide ‘comfort women’ for their men. The authorities at Wenshui, 80 kilometres south-west of Taiyuan, Shensi, received such an order. ‘The brothels on Ho Chia Hsiang have only four prostitutes, minus those with disease,’ Donald wrote. ‘This number is far from sufficient. Instructions have therefore been issued by the Imperial Army requiring the number to be increased within three days. It has been decided that a certain number should be selected from among the women in the city, while each village must contribute one girl for prostitution.’
Hankow fell while the Chiangs were travelling. They reached Chungking in early December. Buzz Farmer and the Ministry of Information were there, along with a large number of foreign correspondents and members of the diplomatic corps. Most of the Russian squadrons transferred to the north-west to protect supplies reaching Chungking on the overland route from Russia.
But the new capital proved too small for Chiang and the dis- loyal Wang Ching-wei. On the second anniversary of the Sian Incident, Wang flew to Kunming and, making his way south to Hanoi, issued a public plea for China to start peace talks with Japan. The Japanese installed him at Nanking as the head of a puppet government to aid ‘China’s rebirth and mutual co-operation among Japan, Manchukuo and China’.
On Christmas Eve news came in that the Japanese had bought another 150,000 tons of American scrap iron, a Christmas present that would be delivered to the Chinese in the form of shrapnel. Sure enough, more than 200 people were killed in air raids on Chungking on Sunday, 15 January 1939.
‘Many of the victims were literally blown to pieces, the debris of the houses being splashed with blood and the gory fragments of what, a few moments before, were live people,’ Donald wrote. ‘The shocking thing about it is that the material from which these bombs are made mostly comes from the Democratic countries whose people are sympathetic with the Chinese.’
Donald had planned to leave China in 1935. A boat- building friend, Edward Cock, chief engineer of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company, had built a yacht to his speci- fications. He named it Mei Hwa. ‘Unhappily, I got tied up with the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang and the boat is still sitting on the water in Hong Kong,’ he reminisced.
Unusual in a yacht, I built in a large writing desk and I imagined I would get anchored in some congenial place, pound away at the typewriter until I got tired of it, then I would sail to some other locality and stay there as long as I liked it. However Madame Chiang proved to be such an earnest worker that I decided to stand by and see if we could not really do something with this country.
Donald was no quitter but he was fast reaching the conclusion that his mission to make Mayling the saviour of China was no longer viable. It was time to go sailing.
Thirty-six years after he had set foot in Hong Kong, Bill Donald made his first attempt in the summer of 1939 to break free of the emotional bonds that tied him to China. He flew from Chungking to Hong Kong. His plan was to load his yacht Mei Hwa on to a New Zealand-bound freighter and go sailing in the South Pacific.
As soon as Jimmy McHugh heard about Donald’s departure, he wrote to Mayling offering his services. On 16 June 1939 she replied in a letter from the Headquarters of the Generalissimo, Chungking. ‘Two days ago I received a wire from Mr Donald saying he was sailing for Surabaya [in the Dutch East Indies] and will, upon his arrival there, determine where he will go later. It seems that the boat for New Zealand on which he was expecting to sail had only one empty berth in a three-berth cabin, and as he felt that he could not bear to have anyone cooped up with him he decided not to take passage.’1
But Donald did not sail to Surabaya; the timing didn’t seem right or perhaps he felt he was running away. Much to McHugh’s chagrin, he returned to Chungking and resumed his old duties.
On the evening of Sunday 3 September Neville Chamberlain’s grim words announcing the outbreak of World War II were relayed to China over the BBC. In Australia, Bob Menzies – who had survived the ‘pig-iron’ crisis to become prime minister following the death of Joe Lyons – committed his country to war against Germany without the formality of a parliamentary vote.
By then, Chungking, which had endured Japanese bombing for more than a year, had established itself in the eyes of the world as the bastion of resistance against Japanese aggression, even if foreign diplomats fated to serve there were warned they ‘had best do it under a mosquito net’ to avoid catching malaria from the prevalent anopheles mosquito.2 After one air raid, Buzz Farmer encountered Bill Donald walking through the rubble. ‘I’ll be damned if the Japs have left a chemist shop standing in this city,’ he said. He had been attacked by hordes of mosquitoes and was looking for something to put on the bites.3
After a year in Chungking, Farmer was given leave. He made a roundabout journey through the beautiful lakeside city of Kunming to Hanoi and then took one boat to Hong Kong and another to Shanghai. He wanted to see his former colleagues on the North-China Daily News and perhaps enjoy the kudos of having been in Chungking. On a visit to the newspaper office, he found that many of his friends had left and there was a chronic shortage of staff. Charlie Tombs, the little Australian news editor, prevailed on him to help out for a few weeks.
Back on the news beat, Farmer discovered that Shanghai had become the scene of a vicious turf war. The Kempeitai (the Japanese Gestapo) and their collaborators controlled the densely populated Chinese districts and existed in an uneasy alliance with the gendarmes in Frenchtown. In the International Settlement, the Japanese continued to jostle for power in the Municipal Police Force, while gangs of ronin roamed the streets beating people up. Crime was out of control. ‘Assassins, kidnappers, plug-uglies and extortionists held Shanghai in a terrible grip,’ Buzz Farmer wrote. ‘Shanghai’s underworld, heavily armed and fiercely audacious, had declared war on the Settlement.’4
Bank raids and payroll heists were commonplace. One evening Farmer and Charlie Tombs attended a birthday party for a retired American army captain who ran a servicemen’s club opposite the China Press building. Four hours later at Ciro’s, Victor Sassoon’s nightclub on Bubbling Well Road, a police inspector told them the American had been killed while trying to prevent the escape of an armed gang who had raided the China Press office.
The gangsters fled to ‘the Badlands’, an area in once- salubrious western Shanghai where power rested in the hands of the Kempeitai and their puppet allies. Night after night, Farmer watched Wang Ching-wei’s dinner-jacketed lieutenants share ‘the gaming tables, the bars, the opium rooms and the gaudy prostitutes with the rank-and-file of Japan’s hireling
Chinese’.
The Nationalists hit back through Chiang Kai-shek’s Blue Shirts and the Green Gang, many of whose members were strongly anti-Japanese. ‘General’ Dai Li, Chiang’s secret service chief, co-ordinated resistance through the Juntong, an organisation so secret that it appeared on no official Nationalist list. Dai was a dark-haired, white-faced man with a mouthful of gold teeth. He described himself as Chiang’s ‘claws and teeth’ and had the privilege of being the only man allowed to enter the Generalissimo’s bedroom armed at any time of day or night.5
General Milton Miles of the United States Navy supplied Dai’s men with training and equipment for use against the Japanese. On first meeting Dai, he thought him ‘a pansy’ but soon changed his view: ‘he might have been a skunk and all those things – an assassin, a poisoner, a saboteur of the first water but I found out he was a great man [and] I liked him.’6
He also found out that Dai was using American resources to fight Chiang’s domestic enemies rather than tackle the Japanese Army. Dai split his operations into two ‘special operations units’ to assassinate prominent members of the Japanese community and Japanese collaborators. One squad, led by a former bomb-thrower, targeted pro-Japanese bank officials, newspaper publishers and judges.7 Whenever one of the assassins was arrested in the foreign concessions, he was handed over to Wang Ching-wei’s police and taken to their headquarters at 76 Jessfield Road in the centre of the Badlands. There, interrogation methods were so harsh that Juntong and other Nationalist agents broke within a few days. When the torturers had finished their grisly work, the prisoners were taken into a courtyard and shot.8
Few Westerners suffered more than Jean Armstrong, the Sydney journalist who had helped set up the Australian stall at the Shanghai fair with Rose Venn Brown back in Edward Little’s time as trade commissioner. Jean was now 47 and edited the Catholic Review from an apartment at 25 Rue du Consulate, Frenchtown. Given no protection by the supine French police, she was harassed by ronin over her Christian beliefs. When she refused to be intimidated, the Japanese ruffians beat her up, permanently injuring her hands.9
By 1940, the Year of the Dragon, China had been divided into three countries with ever-changing borders: Japan controlled much of the coastline and the north-east; Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists held the south-western inland and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists the remote north-west around Yenan.
In January Chiang Kai-shek asked Donald to fly to Rangoon to meet the left-wing British politician Sir Stafford Cripps and escort him up the railway line to Lashio and then over the Burma Road to Kunming in south-western China. Cripps was making an unofficial tour of India, China and Russia in the belief that these countries held the key to the future. Although he had no official status, Donald advised Chiang to meet him.
Donald flew to Kunming and was about to descend the Burma Road when Chiang received reports that Japanese agents were plotting to assassinate him en route. Forewarned, Donald waited for Cripps at Kunming and then flew back to Chungking with him in the middle of January.
Meanwhile, Harold Timperley was in the United States on a secret mission for Chiang Kai-shek after visiting Chungking and joining Hollington Tong’s Ministry of Information. In the autumn of 1939 he travelled to Paris and London to interest the French and British governments in negotiating treaties with China under which Chinese troops would be provided for the defence of Hong Kong and French Indochina. It was a bold move. In Paris, Timperley put the idea to the minister of colonies and it was favourably received, although he was told a final decision would depend very much on the attitude of the British Government.
In London Timperley ran into a brick wall. Since the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, Westminster was committed to a Far Eastern policy that involved the least risk of upsetting the Japanese, and the idea of allowing Chinese troops to join the Hong Kong garrison was considered wildly provocative. Bob Howe, now chief of the far eastern division of the Foreign Office, suggested that Timperley visit Washington and dispel the notion that, thanks to appeasement, the British were pro-Japanese and might ‘sell China down the river’.
At the State Department on 2 April 1940 Timperley met one of Howe’s counterparts, George Atcheson Jr, whom he had known in Nanking and who had escaped from that city in the ill-fated Panay. ‘Mr Timperley said that Mr Howe had told him that the British Government had given continuous emphatic assurances to the Chinese Government that the British had no idea of that kind and that any rumours or reports to the contrary were entirely without foundation,’ Atcheson wrote in a memorandum of conversation to his superiors. ‘The British Government was, of course, adopting a conciliatory attitude toward Japan because of the exigencies of the situation in Europe.’
During the meeting it dawned on Atcheson that the personable Australian with brushed-back greying hair and an engaging smile hadn’t crossed the Atlantic simply to pass on this fairly anodyne message but, when pressed, Timperley ‘did not seem disposed to furnish information as to the particular matters which had brought him to Washington’.10 As we shall see, Timperley’s visit was a precursor to a much bolder venture that would completely change China’s fortunes in the undeclared war with Japan.
Back at the Headquarters of the Generalissimo, Bill Donald lost no opportunity to inject his anti-Nazi views into the speeches he wrote for Chiang Kai-shek. According to Donald’s biographer, Chiang sent one speech back with a curt note: ‘I’m not at war with Germany.’ Donald even more curtly replied, ‘I am.’
It was the perfect exit line. The Chinese Government had failed to adopt an uncompromising anti-Axis policy, he told his friend Harold Hochschild, and he no longer wanted to continue as adviser to Chiang Kai-shek.11 The date was May 1940. He was now ready to make the break. He said a brief goodbye to Mayling and flew to Hong Kong where the Mei Hwa was loaded on to the deck of a southbound freighter. He was not alone. His travelling companion was 18-year-old Ansie Lee, daughter of a Hong Kong merchant who was an old friend of his. She would be his secretary on a voyage to the South Seas while he bashed out his memoirs on his Hermes Baby typewriter.
Back in Chungking, Claire Chennault was in the process of forming his famous 200-strong American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers after the tiger-shark snouts painted on the noses of their aircraft. He was furious over the manner of Donald’s departure. ‘It was a tragedy for all China in 1940 when Donald’s attempt to rout reactionaries from their high places in the Kuomintang government failed, and he was banished from the place behind the Generalissimo’s chair,’ he wrote in his memoir, Way of the Fighter.
Donald readily grasped the decisive significance of airpower in modern warfare. He became one of my strongest supporters, because he felt the urgent need to build a strong Chinese Air Force while there was still time. It was Donald who introduced me to the inner circles of the Chinese Government where the intricate wheels within wheels revolved. It was Donald who, through ready access to the Generalissimo, carried my problems directly to the supreme authority.
Chennault saw Donald as an implacable foe of Chinese kickbacks and inefficiency. He had been defeated, he thought, because reforming the Chiang regime was like wrestling a sponge-rubber statue that yielded easily but resumed its original shape as soon as pressure relaxed.12 Whether Donald was ‘banished’ from Chungking or left of his own accord remains debatable: it was probably a bit of both. Chiang Kai-shek must have grown tired of his endless lectures on corruption. Indeed, Archie Clark Kerr, who spent a lot of time with Chiang on his frequent visits to Chungking, described his fellow Australian as ‘a garrulous old man’.
Jimmy McHugh was also critical of Donald, even though he owed his intimate contact with the Nationalist leaders almost entirely to his goodwill. ‘Don was a newspaperman through and through,’ he wrote, ‘but he was also a fierce protagonist of China and almost a fanatic about China’s potential and future. He was always giving Chinese advice about what they should be doing for t
heir country. He was blunt to the point of being rude at times.’
But Donald was a far more complex character than that. During his visit to Chungking in March 1939, Harold Timperley had discussed the Donald enigma with McHugh. According to McHugh’s record of that conversation:
Timp characterised Don as (1) a genuine and loyal supporter of China, (2) a loyal and most potent supporter of British interests and (3) as the victim of a very human desire for power. Under the latter he confirmed [Cyril] Rogers’ characterisation of Don as a megalomaniac – dogmatic and self-centred, jealous of his position and power and unwilling to share it with others. His sincerity of purpose, unselfishness, self-sacrifice, honesty and integrity, however, remained unquestioned.13
Indeed, Timperley received a letter from Donald on 14 July 1937 which backed up his ‘very human desire for power’. After complaining about various difficulties he was having with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, Donald added, ‘but the lack of foresight, and so on, is what has always confronted me all my life with these people and still does. That is why I just took hold of the Revolution (1911) and ran things myself at that time.’14
In July 1940 the Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoye, demanded that Britain withdraw her garrison from Shanghai and shut down the Burma Road to prevent America’s Lend-Lease supplies reaching China. Faced with the prospect of a Nazi invasion across the Channel following the collapse of France, Churchill agreed to the troop withdrawal and to a three-month closure of the Burma Road during the wet season. His agreement to Japanese demands earned him Chiang Kai-shek’s undying enmity.
Shanghai Fury Page 38