Alan Raymond chose this inauspicious moment to return to Shanghai. He stepped ashore on The Bund on 3 July from the SS Husimi Maru. It was a time of grave uncertainty in China and few Western civilians were actually heading towards the fighting. But like the ship itself – which was once the steamer Hobart – Raymond had pinned his colours to the Japanese mast. He had run away from Australia to avoid the possibility of military service and having to fight in a war that was, in his opinion, of Britain’s making.
After 18 months in Hong Kong, Raymond had arrived back in Melbourne on 11 December 1939. Based on his experiences in China and Japan, he applied to become Australian trade commissioner in East Asia, the post currently held by Gordon Bowden in Shanghai. ‘I called on the Minister of Commerce and Mr Murphy the permanent Secretary of the Department to whom I submitted a report on various matters concerning the East,’ he wrote in his postwar statement. ‘I sought an appointment which would give me scope to use my experience in the Orient in the service of my country.’
While waiting for the department to make up its mind, Raymond moved to Sydney and rented a flat in Darlinghurst Road, Potts Point. He went surfing, courted a girl called Mavis (who married someone else and moved to Brisbane) and ‘made arrangements’ to go into a stockbroker’s office. This prompted a letter to Frank Cade, a respected journalist on the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial whom he had known in Hong Kong and whose name he had given as a reference. On 4 January 1940 he wrote to Cade, ‘I have included your honourable name so if one Ralph W. King should inquire of me kindly use the full power of your journalistic talents in a description of my unique and unrivalled abilities and reputation in Hong Kong (the better side of course).’
After a long wait, he received a letter of rejection from the department. In retaliation, he wrote a stinging article in The Bulletin on 22 May 1940 in which he attacked Australia’s trade representation in China and urged recognition of the fact that Japan had been ‘completely successful’ in her war against China, and that Chiang Kai-shek had no chance of regaining lost territory in northern China and the Yangtze basin.
Gordon Bowden pulled no punches in the letter he wrote to the Department of Commerce. ‘Raymond is a man of no standing whatever in the business community of Shanghai and on the moral and personal side he does not bear a good name,’ he said. He added that while it was perhaps a natural democratic tendency to accept men at face value, ‘in the case of Raymond it is a form of misrepresentation that might enable him to make arrangements with business houses or others in Australia which, in evidence of his past career, would be more likely to bring theirs or Australia’s name into discredit rather than achieve any good for them’.
But despite his record in Shanghai, Raymond was back to stay. It was evident he welcomed the Japanese presence and saw Shanghai as a place of opportunity. He later claimed in his postwar statement that he had been greatly disturbed by Australia’s involvement in the European war, ‘which I regarded as unwarranted and as a selfish action on the part of Britain’. He continued, ‘I did not wish to participate in such a war and decided to return to the Orient where I could live a quiet detached life. I remained strongly of the opinion that either our government acted precipitatedly [sic], unwisely or that we had been forced into the war in consequence of our national status in relation to Britain.’15
Bill Donald’s South Seas idyll began, ironically, in the calm waters of Tulagi in the Solomon Islands, soon to be the scene of horrendous fighting between the Japanese and United States Marines. From there, he headed for New Zealand via the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). In Auckland it was clear his heart was still in Chungking. ‘I am not going back to Australia,’ he said. ‘I left there 38 years ago and have never been back. With Australia’s politics as they are, I shall not go there.’ He criticised the Australian and New Zealand governments for trading with Japan and sending her materials that could be used against China. ‘If it had not been for the stand which China has made,’ he added, ‘Japan by now would have carried out her preparations of southward expansion. The Chinese feel very bitterly about the attitude of the democracies.’16
On 27 August 1940 a 28-year-old Australian femme fatale named Wynette Cecilia McDonald arrived in Shanghai in the Dutch steamer Tjibadak. She was travelling with a Swedish seaman-turned-Melbourne hairdresser named Henry Olof Lindquist. McDonald was the daughter of Ewan Cameron McDonald, a Melbourne botanist, and his wife Winifred Grace née Le Blanc. Known as Wyn, she was a willowy, dark-eyed beauty with a number of broken relationships behind her, including marriage to a man named Porter who had divorced her.
Lindquist, her current lover, had sold his hairdressing salon in Swanston Street, Melbourne, ‘because Australians suspect everybody who has any trace of a foreign accent and that there was a public movement to intern all foreigners’. The couple had travelled to northern Queensland and Western Australia hoping to make a fortune from minerals. They had no luck and had taken a ship from Darwin to Java with the intention of prospecting for gold. When that scheme failed and their funds ran out, they headed for Shanghai to find work.17
‘McDonald went to the secretary of the Municipal Council to look for employment,’ Gordon Bowden wrote in a report to Colonel H. E. Jones of the Australian Security Service in Canberra on 27 December 1940, ‘and he referred her to me as president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Shanghai.’ Bowden also met 39-year-old Lindquist whom he regarded as ‘a derelict’, although he thought McDonald ‘not without intelligence and a good deal of spirit’.18
He gave her a number of addresses where she could apply for work but she returned to his office a few days later saying she and Lindquist ‘had been staying at a boarding house called Chelsea House and that they were to be put on the street that afternoon, minus their baggage, as they were unable to pay their bill’.
Bowden, on behalf of the society, paid the bill of $108.87 and gave McDonald $20 spending money. He also found her accommodation at the YWCA International Hostel in Great Western Road, where the society guaranteed her board and lodging for one month at a cost of $116. Shortly afterwards, he learned McDonald had been given a job as a teacher by Mrs Ruby Taylor, the Australian proprietor of the Peter Pan School for infants. The job paid only $185 per month but Bowden noted that ‘she seemed by then to have begun to receive money from Australia and even to have bought clothes’.19
Like Alan Raymond, Wynette McDonald was violently anti-British. Bowden learned from the hostel manageress that she ‘expressed very strong views about the war and seemed very bitter against England’. He also learned that ‘she was twice reported to the British Intelligence Officer here for having spread reports regarding the alleged ill-treatment of interned Germans in the Netherlands East Indies’.
Furthermore, it was noted that she preferred the company of German and Japanese residents. To the Japanese, she was openly critical of the White Australia policy. She told Bowden on her second visit to his office that ‘a senior Japanese officer in the Shanghai Municipal Police had been very kind in help- ing her’.
Bowden decided to write to Colonel Jones after he learned from Ruby Taylor on 21 December 1940 that she had caught McDonald trying her hand at spying. ‘After she had been with me for about three months,’ Mrs Taylor related in a statement,
she stayed away from the school at the weekend. I had to take her class over and on looking through her desk found some documents which appeared to be in code. I contacted an official of the British Consulate and showed him these documents which he later told me contained a copy of the secret code used by the Royal Navy in Hong Kong.
As well as the coded message, there was a sheet of paper on which McDonald had been trying to decipher it. Bowden discussed the case with a British naval officer who deduced that Lindquist probably stole the message from the wireless operator of a Moller Line ship on which he had found work. ‘This suggests a deliberate – even if clumsy – attempt at spying,’ Bow
den wrote, ‘and lends colour to doubts that I have felt about them ever since I first heard their story.’20
Meanwhile, T. V. Soong had finally accepted a role in Chiang’s government. As a follow-up to Harold Timperley’s American visit, he was sent to Washington as his brother-in-law’s special envoy to negotiate a huge loan to finance China’s continuing resistance against Japan. In exchange for funds, T. V. explained to President Roosevelt and the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, at a meeting in the White House, China would keep 1,125,000 Japanese troops tied up in China indefinitely and force the Japanese Fleet to continue its blockade of China’s shores.21
As the United States armed forces were in the early stages of rearmament, Roosevelt saw the wisdom of T. V.’s proposal. He ordered Jesse H. Jones, the Federal loan administrator, to enter into negotiations with Soong for loans to stabilise China’s markets and purchase war materials.22
While the talks were in progress that September, the Japanese occupied the northern part of French Indochina to close down the rail link between Haiphong and Kunming along which supplies were ferried into China, bringing matters to a swift resolution in Washington. On 24 September Roosevelt ordered a complete embargo on the sale of all types of iron and steel to Japan and 24 hours later he announced a loan of US$85 million to Chiang Kai-shek through the Export–Import Bank.
On 27 September Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin under which she recognised the leadership of Hitler and Mussolini in ‘the New Order in Europe’, while Germany and Italy supported Japan’s dominance in ‘Greater East Asia’.
Around this time, Ralph Shaw, an English reporter on the North-China Daily News, was walking in the public gardens on The Bund when a rotund figure in flowing saffron robes started haranguing him in heavily accented English. ‘I hate the British,’ he shouted. ‘You, young man, should be ashamed of your race. You will not win the war.’
The stranger then launched into a tirade against the perfidy of the British, their hypocrisy, dishonesty and inferiority to the Germans. ‘One day,’ he concluded, ‘I will walk in the ruins of London. I will see you a conquered race.’23 Shaw later learned that the man was Trebitsch Lincoln, the fraudster and former arms dealer who ran his own monastery in Shanghai. His anti-British prejudice stemmed not only from his treatment at the hands of British justice but also from the fate of his favourite son Natzl who was hanged for murder. Lincoln had dashed to Britain from China to see the young man before his execution but was not permitted to land. He returned to China a sworn enemy of the British people.24
Since the Japanese invasion in 1937 Lincoln had espoused the Japanese cause and when World War II broke out, he volunteered his services as a Nazi propagandist. Lincoln’s biographer, Bernard Wasserstein, described him as a ‘low-level German agent’. He would soon have a fanatical Australian disciple.
Trebitsch Lincoln’s anti-British ranting was music to the ears of Wynette McDonald. Now broke and jobless, she started attending his Shanghai monastery looking for a handout. She needed little encouragement to offer her services to the Germans. Either Lincoln or one of his acolytes suggested she see Baron Jesco von Puttkamer, a 38-year-old German aristocrat who ran the German Information Bureau from a penthouse suite at the Park Hotel.
Puttkamer worked closely with the Shanghai branch of the Nazi Party and reported to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. In a statement after the war, he said that McDonald and Olof Lindquist approached him with an extraordinary proposition: if the Nazis would provide a boat, they would fill it with pro-Nazi propaganda, such as books and leaflets, and sail back to Australia. They would smuggle the material ashore and distribute it to sympathisers in Australian cities. Puttkamer thought the plan ‘too fantastic’ and politely showed them the door.1
The Japanese were more receptive. According to an English-born resident of Shanghai, Georgina Fuller, proprietor of a hostel called the Clarendon Club who got to know McDonald well during the war, ‘McDonald and Lindquist handed over to the Japanese the records and photographs of their travels in Northern and North-eastern Australia. These documents, among other details, told of the nature of the bush and the obstacles to be met with.’
Hearing that Gordon Bowden had been making inquiries about her, McDonald sent him a letter threatening libel proceedings against anyone who made derogatory remarks about her. ‘These and other incidents in connection with her case,’ Bowden concluded, ‘led me to feel that she is not quite normal mentally.’
One of the arms dealers selling guns to Wang Ching-wei’s gangsters was an Australian, John Joseph Holland. The 35-year-old black sheep of a respectable West Australian family arrived in Shanghai in 1938 and ran up debts he was unable to pay from his earnings as a freelance journalist. At some point he linked up with ‘General’ One-Arm Sutton, former chief of staff of the Old Marshal in his battles with his rival warlord Wu Pei-fu.2
‘One-Arm’ Sutton – a.k.a. Francis Arthur Sutton, an Old Etonian and former British Army officer – was fond of Australians: he had formed a mixed company of miners consisting of Anzacs and British volunteers at Gallipoli to blow up Turkish positions. He had been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry after losing a hand while throwing enemy grenades back into their trenches.3
Sutton had found a willing apprentice in Holland, a dreamer and a schemer whose failed schemes included an attempt to buy a ship, the SS Karoola, and take Australians and New Zealanders on Anzac excursions to the Gallipoli battlefield.
Holland was five-feet seven-inches tall, with brown hair and a slight build. He had been born at Kanowna, Western Australia, on 5 July 1907 and educated at Christian Brothers College, New Norcia Catholic College and Perth High School. He worked as a jackeroo on the Wooleen Station on the Murchison River for three years and then on a stud farm, but after returning to Perth and arguing about money with his father, John Joseph Holland Sr, a respected Perth physician, he stowed away on a ship bound for Sydney.
In 1932 he married Doris Radeski – ‘an excellent type of woman’, according to a security report – at St Mary’s Cathedral. Within a matter of months, he had been convicted of forgery after stealing a cheque for £78 and passing it off at Anthony Horderns department store as his own. He served six months at Emu Plains Prison Farm.4 On his release, he moved to Brisbane with Doris but in 1937 abandoned her after she objected to him seeing other women.
Holland left Australia with the intention of becoming a war correspondent in Hong Kong. He got no further than Singapore, where he worked in the car trade. Doris joined him there in August 1940 in the hope of saving her marriage but after a few weeks her husband told her ‘he had lived too long with Chinese women to be associated with a European female’.5
He abandoned his wife once more and moved to Hong Kong where he got a job on the China Press, ran up debts including one of $340 to his landlord at Dina House and then, on 10 October 1938, disappeared. ‘Hong Kong has seen neither hide nor hair of John Holland since his fly-by-night,’ one of his former colleagues wrote to a friend in Melbourne on 18 August 1939. ‘Shall I ever forget it? Rumour hath it he deserted at the first port, Haiphong, but there is no confirmation. Rumour also had it that the ever-faithful Margaret [Holland’s girlfriend] was, as the Australian papers say, in a certain condition . . .’
Holland surfaced in Shanghai where he met ‘One-Arm’ Sutton. He came to the attention of the authorities in March 1941 when he attempted to sell seven bombers to the French vice-consul for service in Indochina. The French political police investigated Holland’s associates and reported that they included ‘a number of well-known swindlers’, one of whom had ‘special relations’ with the Japanese. The French concluded that Holland may well have been acting as an agent provocateur in a Japanese attempt to embarrass the French Government had it accepted his offer.6
Even for a conman like John Holland, Shanghai was in a different league for crime compared with Hong Kong or Sin
gapore. Kidnapping and murder grew naturally out of the struggle between the Nationalists in Chungking and the collaborators in Shanghai. Chiang Kai-shek maintained banks in the foreign concessions, while Wang Ching-wei’s regime issued its own currency through banks in the Chinese districts. The trouble escalated in early 1941, the Year of the Serpent, when Dai Li’s Juntong assassination squads launched bomb attacks against Wang’s banks and their employees.7
Wang’s gunmen retaliated. Posing as police officers, they entered the company dormitory of one of the pro-Chiang banks. The gunmen turned on the lights and opened fire into the beds. Five men were killed and six others left wounded among the blood-stained blankets. At 3 am that same night squads of puppet police and Japanese military police raided another pro-Chungking bank compound in the Badlands. They dragged 128 bank employees out of bed, locked them up at 76 Jessfield Road and announced that three hostages would be killed for the death of every collaborationist bank employee.8
When Juntong assassins hacked to death a senior accountant of the puppet Central Reserve Bank in the presence of his family, three senior accountants among the hostages were executed. That evening the remaining employees of Nationalist banks fled from their dormitories.9
In Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek’s strategic problems increased immeasurably when it was announced in Tokyo that Matsuoka, now Japan’s foreign minister, had negotiated a non-aggression treaty with Stalin. The five-year Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, signed in Moscow on 13 April 1941, secured Japan’s northern flank and would enable her to remove many divisions from Manchuria to take part in the conquest of China proper.
Meanwhile, Bill Donald and Ansie Lee had reached Tahiti in a sugar boat from Fiji, having sent Mei Hwa back to Hong Kong as deck cargo. ‘I came here because I fondly thought that this is the farthest spot from China where one might live in peace for a time, but alas and alack!’ he wrote to Herbie Elliston from Papeete on 3 June 1941. ‘Before I arrived here Madame Chang Kai-shek wrote me a letter asking me to fly back. I wired that I must have from four to six months’ notice to catch a steamer.’10
Shanghai Fury Page 39